Books Part I

One of those chain-letter style posts going around on Bluesky has people posting, one after another, books that have been especially significant to them, and I thought *hey, I'd like to do that*, but just for my own edification, and also I don't want it to just dissolve into the Bluesky history, so *this* is the place for it. Also, here I can write a short comment on each. Also, I guess I don't care if anyone ever reads any of it (I don't think anyone reads anything I write here, though.. if you are reading this, then ok!)

Books that have expanded or altered my worldview, that I can think of (and in the order that I thought of them). Some are old, some are new; some I read long ago, some recently. Seems a solid spread.

1. The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan)

• Read this in my 2nd/1st year of college (my 2nd year, but my first at UT, i.e. the first year of my second attempt at college). I can credit this book with finalizing my transition from a half-religious, magic-minded pop-science enthusiast to a solid scientific mindset about the world. Thank you Carl Sagan!

2. Asimov on Numbers (Asimov)

• My grandmother gave me this when I was in middle school, I can't say what age - 12 or 13 maybe? I read it over and over and over. It's a collection of magazine essays Asimov wrote on math topics - each goes over some interesting math stuff along with some historical explanation. Why are there leap years? What is a number series? What are imaginary numbers? Stuff like that. This book is the foundation (Asimov joke) of my mathematical mind, such as it is.

3. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong)

• Around 6th grade, I somewhere acquired a Nintendo game: "Shingen the Ruler", which I enjoyed for hours and hours and hours. One of those map-strategy games, based on the pre-Togukawa civil wars in medieval Japan (I had seen a repeat of the Shogun miniseries on TV in 4th or 5th grade, I remember, so I was primed for this stuff). Looking for more, I found KOEI's "Romance of the Three Kingdoms". What was this about? Who were all these people? How do I pronounce these names!? I quickly learned this game was based on a book. How do I get this book? I went to the Kingston Springs library and asked the librarian to find it - it was loaned in 2 volumes from a library in Memphis. I read it all (even though the names were all in Wade-Giles, not modern Pinyin, format). My grandmother got me a stack of language manuals so I could try to learn some Chinese, which did at least teach me to pronounce all those names. Changed my life in many ways, I gotta say. 

4. The Histories (Tacitus)

• With my first IPad, back around 2012 or whenever, came my first experience with e-books. I found that you could read all these public domain books for free - I read Plato's republic, Livy's histories (I had read some Herodotus and Plutarch already so I was primed) - random Aristotle, this and that. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring. But Tacitus's "The Histories" was solidly amazing. The story of the short civil war that ensued after the Roman emperor Nero died, covering just over a year of history. Full of thoughtful commentary, complex heroes and villains, twisted politics, horrific battles. Awesome! Tacitus observes these events (they happened in his lifetime) with as much objectivity as he can, but I remember being struck by how modern his thinking was - which made me realize, for the first time in that particular way, that *of course he was, he's a human being, we are all "modern"* - it's just that he was a great writer and was able to transmit his thoughts with such clarity across that 1900 year gap. I had never had that feeling of connection with the author of these classical texts, and I got it with Tacitus...

5. Shi Ji (Sima Qian)

• Which then leads me to Sima Qian and the Shi Ji. This is a lot, and I had to read it in sections over a few years, borrowed from the Boston public library. Sima Qian was also an excellent writer, who both reported events and commented on them (in his particularly conservative, judgmental fashion). Not only do you learn all these fascinating stories (told Plutarch-style, which is also a standard Chinese style, as biographies of individuals, which intersect and interweave as you go from one to the next), you feel a real connection with this persecuted scholar who is convinced that this, his life's work, even though it has caused him *immense* suffering (he was tortured and *castrated* for some of his work), will be worth it because, he believes, it will be remembered and appreciated by future generations. Suffice to say, dude was correct. Probably the greatest history book ever written.

6. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)

• Idunno, I hate British-style silly names ("Dumbledore", "Rincewind", and yeah "Slartibartfast"), and I don't really enjoy reading satire or silly stuff. But I've read the Hitchhiker's Guide a dozen times. It's one of those things you can just pick up and open to a random page and go. It helps that there's space travel and robots and all kinds of mind-bending weirdness. I don't need to explain this one, everyone has read it, haven't they?

7. The Fall, or Dodge in Hell (Stephenson)

• The most recent on my list, maybe (this or Death's End, below)? I read a review of this book in Nature magazine, I think - the description of the 'road trip' sequence clinched it for me, I had to read it. This book is two things: First, Stephenson's plausible (to me) picture of the near future of the USA (and civilization in general, I guess), in a stable state of AI misinformation-suffused collapse significantly modified the way I think about the world today and where it's going. And second, it's a very unique sci-fi story about life after death for machine-simulated consciousnesses based in brain scans, which is great fun and very thoughtfully done (I actually wrote more about it here).

8. The Origin of Species (Darwin)

• Like, of course Darwin is famous for being maybe the greatest scientist of all time, being the one that explained one of the most important natural facts there is. But a good part of his fame must also come from the fact that he was a great writer: Origin of Species, Descent of Man, and other books by Darwin are all great reads. The big and small ideas are clearly explained, and you come to see exactly how he arrives at his conclusions, as he describes a vast array of biological facts and phenomena. Like, yeah, Darwin is great.

9. The Road (McCarthy)

• Only Cormac McCarthy book I've read, just a couple of years ago. Gosh what an ordeal. I don't need to explain anything, but this is a harrowing, soul-crushing story that somehow ends both in catastrophe and with some impossible hope. Never read anything like it. I finished the last pages in tears, with my 1-year old son bouncing his diapered butt on my face.

10. The Stranger (Camus)

• One of those books everyone has heard of but not many have read - I assume. It was true for me, at least, and I just read it this past summer as I was turning 45. Before that I read a book of his short stories, 'The Exile and the Kingdom', which I want to reread - I need a copy of my own. And afterwards I read 'The Myth of Sisyphus', which was what I was actually working towards (long story). The Stranger of the title is, somehow, one of the most recognizable literary characters I've ever come across. Like, I really felt him, like I could be the Stranger. Does everyone who reads it have that experience? Or maybe I am also some kind of Stranger? Would explain a lot. 

You know, this is actually getting to be a lot. And yes I recognize that it is quite a sausage fest. I'm going to save entries 11-20 (already decided, and just deleted from below, but happening to contain no fewer than two women, but yes quite a blind spot revealed here) and do those in the next post. Take a breather.

Saturday Hallucinocis?

 Sat down to dinner, for me primarily a bowl of noodles made by my father-in-law. I reach into the bowl with the chopsticks and pull out some noodles and I stop - do the noodles have a textile-grid pattern impressed into their surface? How did he do that? No - no, there's no such texture there, the noodle's surface is smooth..

I blink - again, I see a screen texture there, as though on the surface of the noodles, but when I look for the features supporting that pattern - local changes in brightness, depth, something - it's not there, what I see is consistent with a smooth noodle surface, and the feeling of seeing a fine grid pattern vanish.

I look away, thinking this is an afterimage - is it from the thin bamboo blinds on the windows, with the sun setting outside? No, it's not the right pattern.. is there a cloth nearby, with the grid pattern? Nothing I can find. I haven't looked at a screen..

It repeats a few more times. Also during dinner, looking at some sliced sandwich pickles (from leftover barbecue lunch) - sliced with that wavy sinusoidal corrugated pattern - I get a weird feeling that the pickles don't actually have that texture, that they are flat and the sinusoidal pattern is a shadow. It was a confusing percept.

Anyways - I think what was happening here was another case of what I have named gardener's hallucinosis, though I had not been gardening. But there are a couple of related factors: with the gardening episode, I had been outside all day - gardening - with a minor alcoholic drink (a beer) in the afternoon. Today, I had been outside all day - hiking and at a festival - with a beer in the afternoon.

Also, this morning I awoke early, about 6am, with the worst headache I've had in ages. I took an ibuprofen, which usually does the trick, and tried to sleep again for half an hour but it had no obvious effect. Then I gave up and went downstairs, took a tylenol and drank a pot of coffee. That fixed the headache for the most part, though I did have (and still have, now, 14 hrs later) a sore ophthalmic nerve above my right eye (always a sure sign of migraine for me).

At the time of the gardening episode, I don't think I recorded any significant headaches, though in retrospect I know I had often been waking up - when we lived in that yellow house - in the middle of the night, seeing Kluver-webs in front of my eyes. So maybe I was in a sub-migraineal state?

**

Thoughts about the phenomenon. It was interesting how the grid-impression vanished when I investigated it. It definitely felt there in a spatial sense, I felt it as a grid of lines, much like a fine window screen, there on the surface of the noodles. But when I "gave it a second thought", looking for evidence for what I thought I was seeing, the percept reverted to the veridical. The weirdness here, I suppose, was some kind of stable state of unwarranted activity in extrastriate cortex, but when I directed attention to cortex where the input for detection of such feature elements should have been, it was enough to "correct" the unwarranted activity. Which, weirdly enough, then snuck back into the unwarranted state once I stopped attending.

Should also note that while with the gardening episode I had been intensively visually investigating the features that I later hallucinated, in this case I can't think of why I was seeing the particular patterns I was seeing. It is possible that I had glanced at some pattern and just failed to figure it out in the moment. But it wasn't a repetitive, intensive 'training' like with the gardener's hallucinosis.

**

Migraine post!

How Long Ago It Feels

 Still on this? 2024 is the year of posts on memory, I guess.

When I was a kid in the 80s, going on rides across town with my parents, the radio was typically tuned to an ‘Oldies’ station, playing songs from the 50s and 60s - stuff ranging from Chuck Berry to Buffalo Springfield. I understood that this was music from when my parents were kids, and I knew enough to know what years were what, and what happened when, what was older or more recent. It was a feeling as much as a knowing - Purple Haze just sounds not-so-long-ago as A Hard Day’s Night, right? And Rockin’ Robin sounds older than any of them.

Even being, I don’t know, ten years old, I knew a basic historical outline of that time period, of the decades just prior to my existence. The presidents, the faces and names you came to recognize - the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War. Then the seventies, and the physical artifacts of that time that were all around: the cars, the clothes, the style and coloration of things that were old but not really old.

What I’m getting at is this: even back then, a kid, I was forming an outline of the recent past, and that involved a combination of knowing and feeling how long ago those things were. Forget the knowings for now - it’s trivial to say that something that happened in 1972 was longer ago than something that happened in 1978 - that 1965 was longer ago than both, that 1952 - the year my parents came into existence - was even longer back. But the feelings were in proper register. Thinking of 1952, about some artifact from that time, felt - it feels - further back than thinking of 1965. And so-on.

Those feelings are something I’ve been thinking about lately. As we get older we all are sometimes surprised at reminders at how much time has passed. In the last few days I’ve been reminded that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, a time I recall with some clarity - a few moments, people, associated with that event. Wow! It doesn’t feel like thirty years ago, does it? How time has flown!

But that’s getting close to what’s been bothering me. When I was a kid in the late 80s, thinking of the time when my parents were my age or younger, I would have a feeling of “long ago” that corresponded to thirty years in the past. That’s what thirty years ago felt like then. Honestly, it felt like distant, ancient history - pre-history, something I could only hear about or read about in books. But 1994, thirty years ago now, doesn’t feel distant in the same way. I’m aware of all that’s happened since - quite a lot, two thirds of my relatively full and varied life of changing places and people. But thirty years ago today certainly doesn’t feel like thirty years ago then.

I’ve had these kinds of ruminations lately, like we all do. Nothing special about it. But something more has occurred to me: I have the feeling that thirty years ago then feels quite similar, in fact, to sixty years ago now. The fifties feel about as long ago now as, I suspect, they did when I was younger. The feeling hasn’t updated. Those feelings of the past aren’t really about intervals extending into history. They’re feelings associated with clusters of landmarks. What the 50s, or the 30s, or the 1880s, or the 12th century, or whatever, insofar as they feel like a long time ago, or a very long time ago, feel like when I think about them, doesn’t really have to do with how long ago they were. It has to do with those periods specifically.

Then I start to think, is there really any feeling of “some time ago”? Is there anything left to consider, once I subtract out that cluster of landmarks?

So this line of thinking has actually led me to a new - to me - explanation of this illusion of time flying. It’s not that time-having-passed feels different in some way. It’s not that thirty years having passed up to today feels somehow like ten years having passed up to 1994. It’s more that I am, perhaps, not really sensitive to the interval itself - instead there is just the set of things I know about that time, the time long ago or proximal times, and thinking about that set, or of items in the set, has its own certain content, which varies relatively smoothly if I slide my window of reflection gradually back or forth. If there's anything like the feeling of an interval of passed time, of such a long interval (not the milliseconds and seconds and minutes that the psychologists study), it's really just the comparison of the feelings of now with the feelings of then.

It explains, in some ways, another phenomenon that rears its head once in a while, and which was the topic of the previous post. Sometimes in ruminating over some memory, it can almost feel as though I was just there. It was a decade ago, but if I think of it in a certain way, it could have been a moment ago. What I’m doing there, maybe, is just forgetting what now is, and becoming absorbed in then. There is, there is never, really any feeling of the time elapsed, of the distance in times.