Remixes

My public and personal library nibbling, my bookstore standing-reading, used to make me feel uneasy, undisciplined and unfulfilled. Not so lately. Split is the new short. and reading book chapters feels like a good balance between substance and stub. Here 5 interesting ones read recently:

Chapter 11 of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, for honest, useful advice for living at “the pinnacle of human possibility”.

Also from Nudist (and partially available on Wired), chapter 7, for an inspiring, charming portrait of Danny Hillis at crossroads.

Just watched Obama’s start speech. It was long. At parts founding-father-ish, stodgy, bombastic, God-alluding, and over-collectivistic. Talk about modern immigration was absent (or was I looking for it too hard?). The remarkable thing, though, was how good it was. Great even, at parts. Astoundingly evenhanded.

Wittgenstein’s words-as-threads quote is one of my favorite pieces of thought ever. Turns out there’s loads more from where that come from.

Ah, long time since I’d been so delighted by so wonderful a metaphor!

Daniel Edward’s The Birth of Sean Preston sculpture homage to Britney Spears,
modern fertility goddess (another fascinating metaphor)

The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.

Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:

I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.

Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.

Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content (think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.