The How of Happiness

by Sonja Lyubomirsky

-Bought this at a book sale, read it off and on before bed. It's like one of those books full of laboratory research on psychology students that is generalized into advice about how to change your life for the better. It's not the most inspirational book, but it's definitely full of things to do. I guess it tries to be comprehensive. The large quantity of activities and suggestions in the book ironically seemed depressingly overwhelming to me. I guess it would be a good reference book to have around and pull out every once in a while. Things like: be grateful, savor the pleasures of life, spend quality time with your loved ones, have goals, don't work too hard, meditate, etc.

Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
by Gregory Chaitin

World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down
by Christian McEwen
- Gave up on this after 150 or so pages. I certainly sympathize and identify with the subject of the book, but the writing and organization of the material wasn't working for me. Too straightforward, passionless, superficial...the examples too obvious -- kids don't go out enough, we don't write letters anymore, that Thoreau was something else, huh? etc. "Hey, maybe try meditating?" Check out this poem. Maybe I'm too familiar with the subject and the standard moves. This book might be more valuable to someone newer to dealing with "hurry sickness" or lack of inspiration.

Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940−1980

by Jacques Barzun

ed. by Bea Friedland

-A weird book, with weird selections and a lot of typos. If you can make it through all the Berlioz in the front half of the book, (I couldn’t, but seeing such a deeply devoted fan is always heartwarming) and if you can forgive the ranting in the second half of “Liberalism and the Religion of Art,” where among other head-scratchers anti-fluoridation gets a cameo, there’s some stuff I found helpful.

“[Esthetics] is at once too personal and too social for abstract thought to seize upon any regularities. If the example of history and the historians is invoked — for here too one faces a chaos of facts and beliefs — it is of no avail, for historians succeed in creating order through detachment, which the very nature of art forbids. A philosophy of art on these terms would be but a catalogue of techniques and devices, and even these would be misrepresented, for they have no independent meaning, only a functional one as triggers of meaning.  

Fortunately “philosophy” can be understood in at least two senses. It can denote a system, a theory strictly so-called, that is: the most complete and most general view of a subject. It can also mean philosophizing. Not being a philosopher in the first and strict sense, I have taken the liberty, all my life, to philosophize in the second sense — to try to think straight about the subjects that have interested me. What can philosophizing about the arts do for us? The answer I would propose here is not a series of conclusions, even tentative ones, but rather a series of topics or issues about which straight thinking might, in addition to the pleasure of the thing, do some good. What good? Well, such good as this: clearing up the confused vocabulary of criticism for educated minds, and gradually building up a set of commonsense maxims — guidelines — by which sincere people who wish to converse about art could avoid the fumbling and stumbling now caused by what they have been taught — the “ideas” or fashionable cant — thus inducing a wider tolerance through showing how the casual or formal creeds of art-lovers are linked to temperaments and visions of the world.  

These endeavors, if they were achieved, would liberate many good souls from the oppression of having to admire what they don’t admire and having to repudiate what they secretly love — a net increase in the freedom and happiness of mankind.”

I dunno that a “catalogue of techniques and devices” would necessarily be such a bad idea, though. Ever since I got into William James (thanks to Barzun), it always seemed to me that the “Varieties of ____” approach is a good one. And making distinctions among the varieties of a thing always seemed more practical as a way forward, intellectually, than taking a step back and saying, look, it's all connected.

But in another essay, on the topic of “Cultural History,” Barzun says:

“...the periods of culture have troublesome historical names — Renaissance, Baroque, Puritan, Classical Romantic, and the like — which cover multitudinous manifestations of spirit. In using these names to denote men or periods, one cannot avoid trying to disentangle appearance from reality and prejudice from fact. But there is danger to truth in wanting things too clear; in wanting to make the names cover absolutely homogeneous ideas or persons. I for one see no use and great harm in those refined distinctions that profess to sort out eighteen kinds of Romanticism, or Humanism, or Pragmatism. I doubt whether the maker of such distinctions could himself respect them in an extended narrative; and supposing that he could I fail to see what he would accomplish as a historian — unless it were to reduce the battle of ideas to a regulated ballet. To put intellectual order in place of the intelligible disorder of history is to apply the geometrical spirit to a subject that calls for the spirit of finesse.”

Maybe the problem for Barzun is that the catalogue-making tendency reminds him of the system-making tendency, and both remind him of his enemy, the mechanical (see "Toward a Fateful Serenity")? I have a lot of the "geometrical spirit" in me, I admit, but I'm not a mystic whacko about it or anything.

I don't remember if I posted about it, but months ago I tried reading 

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

which you'd think would be right up my alley...a Calvino-esque parade of various possible afterlives. I did not like it, however. I could barely get through it, which is pretty bad for such a short book. I skipped around. I found many of the "thought experiments" pseudo-profound and predictably unpredictable...if that makes sense. I was unmoved by the attempts at deepness and heaviness and ultimately annoyed. Maybe it's one of those things where it's too close to something I would want to do, so I am extra demanding and mentally re-writing it into "my" book. And it does have a few good moments, too, sure.

Anyways, I just saw an article in the New Yorker about the author, who is a neuroscientist and Guggenheim recipient. Seems like an interesting guy, and I'm going to try to learn more about his work. The book did in fact feel to me like how a scientific mind would try to write playfully. I wish I could put into words what writers like Calvino or Borges are able to do (even in translation) that "Sum" can't pull off, but I just don't have the time to sort that out right now. 

In the NYer article Brian Eno makes an appearance--he liked this book and struck up an email conversation with Eagleman. Sigh! 

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things
by Barry Glassner
-A run-through of the big media panics of the past few decades, and what's the deal.  Turns out people don't check the facts, believe what they want to hear, love a scary story, and distract themselves from looking directly at the real problems because it's too uncomfortable.  Pro-gun conservatives come out looking particularly bad.  Actually, conservatives in general come out looking pretty bad in this book, though I wouldn't say the book as a political agenda.  I suppose it makes sense; the conservative attitude tends to be fearful.  (I speak from past experience.  And certainly not every fear is misplaced)  The second group that comes out looking foolish and dangerous are, of course, journalists.  Their environment selects for stories of outrage and danger...  The hero is the skeptic--patient, thorough, sensible.

Educating the Reflective Practitioner
by Donald A Schon.

"In a climate of mystery and mastery, undiscussability and indescribability reinforce each other.  We keep ourselves unaware of what we already know because we habitually stay away from situations where we are called on to describe it.  We describe it poorly because we get so little practice, which reinforces our disposition to keep it undiscussable."

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

Whole Earth Discipline
by Stewart Brand
-Pragmatic and optimistic and terrifying, and well-written, I thought.  Sometimes when I'm searching around for a big abstract category of people to blame, I'll think, "engineers are the ones to blame!"  Brand says he thinks like an engineer, like a problem solver, and that engineering will save us.  We'll see.  Seems like someone really has get to the people in charge, who make the rules, and change their minds. 

Generation Ecstasy
by Simon Reynolds
-I have to say, I really didn't read all that much of this.  But I really liked the parts I did read (esp. the Intro!).  I like Reynolds' writing very much (and it's not just me--he's quite widely respected) and like his critical approach more than I like the music.  More at his several blogs. When I read his series on "the nuum and its discontents" I wished there was a equivalent comics critic.

The Way Through Doors
by Jesse Ball
-Couldn't get into this. I love meta-, but here there's too much archness/cuteness for me. Maybe there's some smartness to be found in the rest of the book.  Not my style.

33 1/3 Series:
Aja
Daydream Nation
-DNation not recommended, crazy writing.  Aja for chord nerds only, and session musician imdb-ing.

The Uses of Argument
by Stephen E. Toulmin
(skimmed)

Cat Speak
by Bash Dibra
(skimmed, not recommended)

Melville's Letters in Norton Moby-Dick
and The Indispensible Melville
ed. Jay Leyda

Adventures of Tintin Volume 3
(read it all, finally.)

365 Days: A Diary
by Julie Doucet
(read it all! great drawings.)

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
by Ken Jennings
Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking
by Eric Lax

Bursting the Limits of Time
by Martin J. S. Rudwick
(History of development of geology as discipline and its slow-dawning "discovery" of the age of the earth. Very highly recommended for anyone interested in evolution/creation or geology or the Enlightenment.)

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
by Mark Sedgwick

The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism
by Ronald L. Numbers