EP#21: Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks

*Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, 1989.

August/September 2025

This is, I believe, volume 21 in the Essay’s Project; we are in the process of reading all of Oliver Sacks works. We’ve read much of his work in haphazard order, but after finishing his Letters, we decided to read those books we haven’t read in the order of publication. So far that has been Migraine, A Leg to Stand On, [skipping Awakenings which we’d already read], The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and now Seeing Voices.

About the book, briefly

This describes Sacks jouney towards understanding Deafness, something he had been hitherto ignorant of. This book — really three separate essays — was written about three years into his inquiry, so, as Sacks notes, he is not writing from a position of expertise. Nevertheless, the book gives a very interesting history of how the Deaf were treated and how their circumstances evolved from being treated as mentally deficient people to non-disabled people who, though they could not hear, used Sign to express themselves, reason, and to develop a unique culture. There is also an account of ASL as a language, and its impact on cognition in those who learn it. It’s a good book, although I think there are probably now better books if what you are interested in is understanding how ASL works.

Preface

Sacks writes that he knew nothing of the Deaf before 1986. It appears that the particular incident that started him on his journey was a request to review the book When the Mind Hears, by Harlan Lane. The request, from Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, was accompanied by a note: “You have never really thought about languge; this book will force you to.” Sacks writes (in the first section of the book) that he opened the book with “indifference which soon turned to incredulity.” Over time the review expanded to an essay (the first in this volume) when it appeared in the New York Review of Books in March of 1986. He writes that then Stan Horowitz of the University of California Press immediately responded to the essay and encourage him to turn it into a book. How things unfolded from there is not clear, though he visited Gallaudet later that year. It is clear that, over the three years he worked on the book, he was in dialog with leading researchers, including Ursula Bellugi, Bob Johnson of Gallaudet, and Jerome Brunner.

No Time to Spare, Ursula Le Guin

July-August, 2025

No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters, Ursula K. Le Guinn, 2017

About the Book

This is a book of essays – originally written for Le Guin’s blog – that was published in 2017. The essays were written, as best I can tell, from 2010 to approximately 2015, when Le Guinn was in her 80’s.

They are not organized chronologically, but instead in four sections separated by interludes of essays about or inspired by her cat, Pard. The four sections are “Going Over 80,” “The Lit Biz,” “Trying to Make Sense of It,” and “Rewards.” The essays are written in a casual voice, and are more notable for their ideas than their word-crafting.

I found the book engaging, and am happy to have read it. I say a bit my favorite essays – there are over three dozen in the book — and * my favorites of the favorites.

Favorites

The Diminished Thing

“What to make of diminished thing?” (Robert Frost’s Ovenbird). Le Guin discusses old age – she is in her 80’s at this point – and argues against the notion of ‘You are only as old as you think you are,’ and the tendency of younger people to deny that their elders are old. Le Guin disagrees: “To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, erase my life – me. …So it is that old men come to learn the invisibility that women learned 20 or 30 years earlier.”

Le Guin also writes about respect:

“…the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by reducing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where understanding and affection can grow.”

–ibid., p. 15

Le Guin’s answer to the ovenbird’s question is “a lot.” At least if one is fortunate. And, she adds, don’t dimmish old age by trying to deny it.

Would You Please Fucking Stop

A funny rant against the tendency to use only variants of “fuck” and “shit” for emphasis.

* Having My Cake

(1600 words)

…A great essay, and one that I believe will, for me at least, repay study, since I am trying to learn how to write interesting short essays.

She begins admitting that for a long time she didn’t understand the proverb about not being able to have your cake and eating it too. How can you eat a cake you don’t have, she asks? She also notes that this proverb, and others like it, are used to test whether people are mentally ill, and wonders about her sanity. But then she slowly realizes that “have” is really being used to mean “keep,” and decides it’s a good proverb, though she back tracks a bit, analyzing the language and why it might be found confusing. This translates into a more general medication on language, and her writerly fascination with it. And then she ponders the parallels between her fascination with words, and artists’ fascination with the materials with which they work, though she is uncertain about the degree to which they hold. But finally, at the very end, she brings it back to cake:

“Words are my matter, my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarven wood. Words are my magical anti-proverbial cake: I eat it, and I still have it.”

ibid., p.52

Papa H

Nothing much to say about this essay, but that it was an enjoyable mediation of The Illiad and The Odyssey as exemplars, or perhaps archetypes, of the two basic fantasy stories: The War; and The Journey.

The Narrative Gift as Moral Conundrum

A mildly interesting essay, but I loved her comments on the difference between story and plot:

I have a high opinion of story. I see it as the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story.

Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.

Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) …

ibid., p. 75

Rehearsal

A very short essay on drama and stagecraft inspired by watching a rehearsal of a play based on The Left Hand of Darkness. “People you thought you’d made up, imagined, invented, are there, not” Performing a play is, Le Guin argues, essentially an act of ritual or magic: “They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical) … Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space.“

*Without Egg

(1100 words)

A description of an incident, during a visit to Vienna in the early 1950’s, where Le Guin distressed a waiter by saying that she didn’t want an egg with her breakfast. Her reflections on why this was disturbing are interesting, but where the essay shines is in her beautifully detailed description of how she goes about eating a soft boiled egg. She describes the egg, the egg cup, the spoon, the opening of the egg, and the process of eating it.

First Contact

An essay on an encounter with a rattlesnake, and the process of humanely transporting it elsewhere.

This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate – to just get away – or to kill in self-defense.

–ibid., p. 199

Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert

These are really notes, as the title says, rather than an essay. But I find it a nice example of how, perhaps, I might take notes during my travels. Le Guin’s notes, while not a narrative, have a bit more structure and connectivity than mine typically do. They capture images, and often there is enough to infer some of the activities going on.

Some nice writing:

the cool shadowed air between the eastern and western rimrock
the warm towers of air
the old tall poplars holding darkness
I sit in windy shadow
The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sail boats over grass
behind the ridge that darkens as brightness grows

On Solitude*, Michel de Montaigne

* On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne (Penguin Books, 1991, trans. M. A. Screech)

This is the first time I have read Montaigne, a little surprising since he is the originator of the essay form. I am not sure whether I will appreciate him…

Later: Montaigne’s essays are just not engaging me. But I am struck by the way he is engages in dialog with scholars and others who have come before. I don’t really resonate with the topics and language in play, but it would be interesting for me to try to do something similar with people who have influenced me.

E1: On Solitude

This eponymous essay Is written from the vantage point of a man in the “tail-end of life,” and explores the virtues of solitude. I was struck by how much, and how widely, he quotes from the classical literature. Hoarce, Seneca, Cicero, Erasamus, Socrates. The general theme is about the advisability and wisdom of withdrawing from public life, and the vices attendant in that and in the majority of people. Instead, he advocates turning inward, and cultivating one’s own happiness and virtue in a what seems to me a stoic fashion. This essay did not, in general speak to me, though there were a couple of quotes I liked.

“We have lived quite enough for others; let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being”

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train.

–ibid. On Solitude, p. 9

On Books

TBD

On the Power of the Imagination

TBD

On Sadness

TBD

On Constancy

TBD

On Fear

TBD

How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up

TBD

On Conscience

TBD

On Anger

TBD

On Virtue

TBD

On Sleep

TBD

On the Length of Life

TBD

How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

TBD

# # #

EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks

* The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. 1984

The 20th volume in the Essays Project (co-reading with CT) gets us back to essays. Here we are continuing our side quest to read all of OS’s work. This is Sack’s fourth book, and its excellence is consistent with my belief that Sack’s somehow found his muse — at least for writing for general audiences — while writing A Leg to Stand On, his previous book. Hat, so far, seems to be about various forms of agnosia — the loss of knowledge or awareness of things. So far this includes face and object recognition, awareness of limbs (or the entire body), and portions of the visual field. Looking ahead, I now see that only the first section is on “Losses,” so there will clearly be a much wider variety of ‘neurographies.’

The Book

Preface to the Original Edition (1985)

There is also a 2013 Preface, but I find little of note, though if you are reading the book it is worth a quick perusal.

Sacks begins the 1985 Preface by reflecting on his epigraphs, which has to do with his practicing medicine as a physician also involving getting a view of the larger context of his patients’ troubles — he sees himself as as much as naturalist as a physician. He also says, interestingly, that: “animals get diseases; only man falls radically into illness.” In my view, this reflects his view that some (all?, almost all?) diseases have an ontological component. I love the comment in one of his letters: “What is so instructive about disease, like disaster, is that it shakes the foundations of everything.” He also discusses the value of broad accounts, even stories, and laments the modern tendency to eliminate or minimize the subject of ‘case histories:’ “To restore the human subject at its center — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale….” (p. xviii) He also brings in myths and fables with their hero’s and archetypes — “travelers to unimaginable lands, lands of which we should otherwise have no idea or conception.“

Co-Intelligence*, Ethan Mollick

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by Ethan Mollick. 2024

About the Book

I read this for my book club. It’s a well-written book, relatively hype-free, and very much worth reading for those who don’t know much about AI. I felt it was a bit verbose, but that might be appropriate for the more general audience he is trying to reach. I did not learn a lot from the book, but then I’ve been following the discourse on LLMs for a long time, and have also been getting Mollick’s newsletter in my in-box, so this is neither surprising nor a mark against the book.

But now I’ve gone through my various marginalia and underlining, and feel that I got more out of the book than I had realized when I wrote the previous paragraph. A few of the high-water marks for me:

The fourth ‘rule’ – assume this is the worst AI you will ever use – is a good reminder. We are used to software improving at a glacial pace, but that may not be true of LLMs. [C3]
I appreciated the confirmation of my belief that an AI cannot track the reasons for its responses, and that any explanation of a response is a hallucination. [C5]
It made me think more (in [C9]) about the consequences of the erasure of digital groundtruth by generative AI, and how that will undermine public confidence in ‘facts’ as presented online. Perhaps everyone will retreat into their own filter bubbles; or perhaps there will be a turn towards traditional curated media (though the phenomenon of Fox news makes this seem unlikely).
An interesting argument is that the speed of innovation has been dropping 50% every 13 years), presumably because one must know more and more to make progress. Perhaps AI can provide a remedy here.

That said, I didn’t think Mollick did a great job of delving into the potential of AIs to enable people to educate themselves. There is much to be said about the pros and cons of using AI in this way (e.g., AIs creating study guides, problem sets, etc.) Little of this is discussed.

Chapter by Chapter Notes

C!: Creating Alien Minds

A brief history of AI, particularly the way it is used in business; a slightly more in-depth history of the rise of LLM’s and generative AI.
An introduction to the Transformer architectures with its ‘attention mechanism’ and the resulting LLM’s
An interesting note on whether LLM’s violate copyright or not, since the LLM does not contain text, just weight-vectors.
A mention of RLHF — Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. This is how LLM’s are ‘taught’ to avoid certain topics.
Some good examples of how slightly changing prompts can significantly change the response of the LLM.

C2: Aligning the Alien

Discussion of various ways in which AI can have detrimental impacts
More discussion of RLHF and guardrails, and how guardrails have been circumvented.

C3: Four Rules for Co-Intelligence

Didn’t learn anything here, but mainly because I’ve been experimenting myself and following Mollick’s newsletter. He also had a not unreasonable piece of advice: “Become the world expert in how to use AI to do a task you know well.“

For the record, the four rules are:

Always invite AI to the table
Be the human in the loop
Treat AI Like a Person (but tell it what kind of person it is)
Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use

This is not bad advice. I particularly like the last rule.

C4: AI as a Person

A discussion of how AIs can appear to be sentient. Possibly a useful for those who have never interacted with an LLM, but otherwise I don’t think the chapter did much in the way of making useful points. Not sure that there are useful points to make here.

C5: AI as a Creative

Returns to the point that LLMs don’t store text, they only store weights. So in a sense they don’t know anything.
Nor can they actually give a real account of why they gave a particular answer, though of course they can generate a plausible explanation. This seems like an important thing for people to understand.
LLMs are trained on text. The training does not take quality into account; it does not even distinguish between fiction or non-fiction. All it is doing is learning weights.
We are back on the topic of hallucination, a term I very much dislike. But it does make a good point, which hadn’t sunk in for me: “Anything that requires exact recall is likely to result in a hallucination.”
And this is a nice quote:

It [an AI] is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the Al will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. The system has no way of explaining its decisions, or even knowing what those decisions were. Instead, it is (you guessed it) merely generating text that it thinks will make you happy in response to your query. LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Instead, they will give you ananswer, expressing confidence.

—Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence, p 96

A lot of talk about creativity, which did not interest me.
Cites studies (his own? and colleagues?) that show that using AI greatly decreases the time to perform creative tasks. …I agree this is likely.
Makes the interesting point that ‘ceremonial tasks,’ such as writing recommendation letters, are likely to be rendered meaningless, or at least greatly reduced in value, as the letter no longer necessarily represents a significant time investment.

C6: AI as a Coworker

Distinguished between jobs and tasks — AI may radically change the way job-related tasks are carry out, but may not necessarily eliminate the job.
Argues that the systems within which a job takes place play a crucial role in shaping the job — but I don’t think the argument is taken very far re implications….
Discusses different types of tasks: delegated tasks, and automated tasks. And different types of workers: Centaurs (with a clear strategic separation of tasks) and cyborgs (a more blended approach).

C7: AI as a Tutor

Talks about using AI in education. Uses example of introduction of calculators in classrooms to think about this. I suspect some readers will find this very useful.
Talks about flipped lectures and how AI might be used in the classroom.
A rather disappointing chapter: I think there is huge potential in individuals using AI to educate themselves, and a lot to be said about the pros and cons of using AI in this way. There is also the prospect of AIs creating study guides, problem sets, etc. None of this is discussed.

C8: AI as a Coach

Begins with a favorite point of mine about the danger of AI eliminating the on-ramps to expertise — it can do the tasks that were formerly assigned to interns, and eliminate the possibility of apprenticeship.
Offers the prospect of AI’s as coaches that will help novices and journeymen do the difficult reflective practice that builds expertise. Interesting, but he is just making all this up, as far as I can tell.
Cites a study of his own that claims that the quality of the middle manager explains 20% of the revenue that a video game eventually produces. This would be a very difficult study to operationalize, and I’m a bit skeptical. But hard to say since I don’t understand how video game companies work, or the role middle managers play in them.

C9: AI as our Future

This chapter offers four scenarios on the future of AI (==LLMs)

1. As Good as it Gets.
AI will not improve significantly from here on out, either because of technical limitations (running out of text to train on), or because of regulatory intervention. He argues that this isn’t a very likely future, but it is what most people and organizations are planning for. I agree that regulation is unlikely; less sure about the certainty of significant improvement.
- Makes the point (not sure why it is relevant to this scenario) that the erasure of digital groundtruth will undermine public confidence in ‘facts’ as presented online. Perhaps everyone will retreat into their own filter bubbles; or perhaps there will be a turn towards traditional curated media (though Fox news makes this seem unlikely).
2. Slow Growth.
The exponential growth in AI capability will slow to 10%-20% a year. He cites various reasons for this, from cost of training, to technical limits for large LLMs (apparently LeCun, chief AI person at Meta has argued this), and my own favorite, not-enough-high-quality text. In this scenario, tasks will change more than jobs, and more jobs will be created than destroyed.
- In my view it may be that LLM’s have ‘used up’ the supply of high quality information, and trying to train LLMs on broader swaths of material will introduce ‘semantic pollution.’
- Mollick also talks about the decline in the ‘speed of innovation’ (dropping by 50% every 13 years), and the fact that most major scientific contributions are made by scientists over 40 (whereas the opposite used to be the case). You must know more to make progress, and that slows progress. He suggest that perhaps AI can help here.
3. Exponential Growth. In this scenario the speed of AI growth continues. AI-assisted hacking, targeted marketing, AI-assisted law enforcement (and military, which, interestingly, he does not address) proliferate, and government policies/regulations can not keep up. But maybe AI and robotics eliminate the need for a lot of human work, and things like basic income, shortened workweek, and so forth usher in a post-scarcity economy.
- He also comments on AIs becoming better and more interesting companions than other humans, and the possibilities of a decrease in loneliness, but a rise in new forms of social isolation.
4. The Machine God. AI becomes sentient. There is not a lot to say here. Could be horrible, could be wonderful.

Afterword: AI as Us

Brief essay on how AI has grown out of our knowledge, includes our own biases, etc, etc. Not very interesting.

# # #

A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks

June 2024

The 19th volume we’ve read in the increasingly poorly named Essay Project, this being (another) book that does not contain essays. But we’ve become fascinated by O.S. from reading his two autobiographies and the edited collection of his letters, and just can’t stop.

About the Book

This is the third book that Sacks published (1984), following Migraine and Awakenings. To me this is the book where he found his narrative voice, or at least the voice that has proved so engaging to non-medical readers. It is a breakthrough in his writing style. And it is a gripping narrative, with lucid and beautiful writing. Gone are the clinical passages and case histories that were interspersed throughout his first two books. It will be interesting to see if his subsequent ‘neurographies’ continue in this more narrative and engaging voice.

Migraine*, Oliver Sacks

*Migraine (Revised and expanded), Oliver Sacks, 1992

This is the 18th volume in the “Essays Project.” While the Essays Project has focused mainly on essays, we became intrigued with Oliver Sacks and are taking something of a detour to read his complete work, essays or not.

[[More to come…]]

Front Matter

There are prefaces to the original edition, and, to this, the 1992 edition. There is also a forward by William Gooddy, a migraine specialist whom Sacks praises in his prefaces. There is also a historical introduction, which summarizes over 2,000 years of medical writing on migraine; I will pass on summarizing this.

The following, from the ’92 Preface, is Sacks’ comment on the aims of the book; I think his thoughts on why humans may need to be ill, for a brief time, will be very interesting.

Migraine, of course, is not just a description, but a meditation on the nature of health and illness, and how, occasionally, human beings may need, for a brief time, to be ill; a meditation on the unity of mind and body, on migraine as an exemplar of our psychophysical transparency; and a meditation, finally, on migraine as a biological reaction, analogous to that which many animals show.

–Oliver Sacks, Migraine, xv

How to Do Nothing…, Jenny Odell

*How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell, 2019

I found this book to be quite a disappointment. For the most part, it is not about the attention economy; nor does it say much about how to resist it. It is really just a lament about the state of late-capitalist-resource-extrative-modernism. And while there is certainly much to lament, I don’t really find much in the way of strategies on how to resist the various forces that are having such negative effects on the environment and world.

The book seems very undisciplined — or perhaps self-indulgent — to me. It meanders from polemical to anecdotal. In the smaller potion of the book that did seem to be about the attention economy, I was bemused by the author’s inclination to delve back into history (quoting Seneca for example), but not recognizing that the ability to reach so far back to find apropos material suggests that the malaise that she is investigating seems to have been present, at least in the west, for centuries.

A bit cynically, I wonder if the publisher insisted she tack on the ‘Attention Economy’ bit of the title to garner attention and thus up sales. To my eye the book is more about mindfulness and focus, and while I actually am in sympathy with many of the ‘lessons,’ I can’t say I learned anything. Mostly, when the book turns to the entrancement of people by Twitter or Facebook or some other form of broadcast media, I want to say, ‘Come on, just get a grip. Show a little character and self-discipline by recognizing that you don’t like the way this slice of the media is effecting you, and do something different.

And speaking of the media, it seems to me that much of what Odell inveighs against not digital media in general, but broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook. It is a failure of analysis to fail to differentiate among media (digital or otherwise) that work in different ways, and shape discourse in different ways.

Later in the book she takes on the notion of western ‘progress’ — which she somehow ties to the attention economy — and the damage that technodeterminism and extractive capitalism have done to environment. And it has done damage, but she does not offer any convincing or compelling remedies, other that to suggest a label — “manifest dismantling” — for the various efforts to mitigate or reverse eco-system damage that have been in play for decades.

I could go on, but it feels like too much work to try to distill crisp arguments from her prose and then critique them.

# # #

ILSG-25: Hawai’i Volcanoes Trip Report

These are my cleaned-up day by day notes from a 13 day geology field trip on the big island of Hawaii to explore the volcanic features of the island.

Day 1 (1/24): Sturgeon Lake; Pahoehoe; Hydrothermal Alteration

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

(with a a little bit on the sequel, Parable of the Talents)

May 2025

I read this book for the Elle Cordova SF book club; it is number 3 in the sequence. I was familiar with some of Butler’s earlier work, the Xenogenesis stories, which I liked, and at some point had read Parable of the Sower, which I did not care for.

To step back a moment: Octavia Butler is justly lauded for her impact on late 20th century and later science fiction. Though by no means the first black author to make a name in the genre (Samual Delany is, I think, the progenitor), she is among the first to really foreground themes related to black experience — characters experiencing racism, dominance/repression, resistance/survival, and (loss of) bodily autonomy. As I write this, I balk, because I am by no means a scholar of SF, and so I should preface the foregoing with “In my limited experience.”

In re-reading Sower, I found myself recapitulating my initial unfavorable reactions. The first being, ‘I don’t think this is really science fiction.’ [Clearly SF writers disagreed with me, as this novel was awarded a Nebula.] Still, it seems like a straight-forward post-apocalyptic novel — I was going to write, “in the vein of Cormac McCartney’s The Road — but on pausing to look it up, I find that this pre-dates Road by at least a decade. I didn’t care for The Road, either, so at least I am consistent here. In both cases, we don’t have much in the way of science happening, just an extrapolation of current trends that are leading / have lead to the breakdown to the climate, environment and society, and protagonists living off scavenged food amid a world filled with violent and destructive bands. Sower does give its protagonist, an odd disability/delusion called hyperempathy caused by a mother’s use of a drug during pregnancy, but, although complicating life for the protagonist, this problem does not seem to me to fundamentally shape the story.

My second unfavorable reaction has to do with the unrelentingly grim world of the book. The closest the book gets to hopefulness are a few periods of stability in the midst of a long, seemingly inevitable decline, which the protagonist tries, inadequately, to prepare for. Of course, this is perhaps a realistic portrayal of the challenges we face, but it does not make it a fun read (except, perhaps, in contrast to its sequel Parable of the Talents, which is grimmer.

It is true that the book suggests that kindness and inclusiveness is at least a middle-term effective strategy, and that people can overcome interpersonal obstacles to work together. It also posits an interesting belief system — essentially a new religion being constructed by the principal protagonist — that, it is argued, is more suited to the needs of the post-apocalyptic world,.

The belief system is called Earthseed, and its central tenant is that God is Change. It argues both the one can not resist change, but that one can, in small ways, shape the change. The evolution and spread of this religion is described in the second book, “Parable of the Talents.” Talents is, as noted, even less of a pleasant read than Sower, but it does provide closure for Sower in the establishment of Earthseed as a widespread belief, though that occurs quite rapidly in the last few chapters.

The book is thoughtful and well-written, but I’m still not convinced that it should be called science fiction…

# # #

I Robot, Isaac Asimov

It is possible I read this over five decades ago, but if so, I don’t recall any of the stories. I know I read some ‘three laws’ stories, but that may have been in some other book/collection, possibly Caves of Steel. I read this because it was a pick for Elle Cordova’s SF Book Club, even though this one was picked and discussed before I joined. But, I was curious as to how I’d experience this very old story (circa 1950), and probably a little motivated by the ‘collect-the-whole-set’ phenomenon, as I picked up the book club on its second book.

Though I don’t remember any of these stories in particular, Asimov’s three-laws stories are sort of a one-trick pony: there is some kind of mystery or inexplicable event involving a robot, and the resolution turns on realizing that the three laws are not being interpreted or executed as intended, and thus the problem is that the robots are being too literal. Thus, in one story, a robot lies to various humans in the story because it is telepathic and knows what they want to hear, and so it can’t tell them the truth because that would ‘harm’ them. So, they are all essentially puzzle-stories.

Asimov’s characters are not terribly well developed. It feels as though he has carefully chosen a stereotype for each, and few physical or behavioral features of each character as a synecdote for their individuality. We’ve got the hot-headed, angry red-headed Irish engineer, and his cool and more reflective partner. And of course, Susan Calvin, the brilliant but plain woman who has repressed everything but her mind to make it in the world of science. But kudos to Asimov for creating a central female character in the 1950’s, and making her as well developed (which is to say, not very) as any of the male characters.

If these stories are from the golden age of science fiction, they are also from the golden age of smoking — it is astonishing, to 21’st century eyes, to see how many people smoke, even on space ships. It is also interesting — and characteristic of the time of writing — to find that unions have played a significant role in keeping robots off of earth and out of the workforce, as have religious movements.

I wondered reading these stories would whet my appetite for more of Asimov’s robot books, but the answer is no. Although, it could be interesting to read some of the other books where more modern writers — David Brin being one — filled in some of the gaps in Asimov’s world.

# # #

The Catalyst: RNA…*, Thomas Cech

*The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets, Thomas R. Cech, 2024. Cech won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 (with Sidney Altman) for the discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA, which means that in addition to carrying genetic information, RNA could also act on other molecules.

Reading this with the inaccurately-named “26-minute book club” in the Spring of 2025.

When the Moon Hits your Eye, John Scalzi

A new SF novel by John Scalzi. The premise is that all of a sudden, with no warning or explanation, the moon turns into cheese. This has various ramifications, and the novel — which hasn’t much of a plot — is how various people react to this event, and its consequences.

I did not care for it. In fact, it is by far my least favorite Scalzi. I will be surprised if many people do, though of course Red Shirts won a Hugo even though I didn’t like it.

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The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin

* The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin, 1969. 50th Anniversary Edition.

w/EC-SF-bookclub: I am trying out this online book club run by the delightful musician-science-literary nerd Elle Cordova. You can find out about the club here, as well as back her many creative activities.

My Thoughts on the Book

I am happy to have re-read this, after, I would guess, about five decades. I did not remember a lot about it, and the heart of what I remembered was wrong: I had remembered Genly Ai and Estraven having become lovers, if somewhat unwillingly driven to it by the pressures of Keemer and isolation. But they did not, though they did achieve a certain degree of understanding through forced intimacy. I did recall, of course, the hermaphroditism and short period of sexual dimorphism for a few days every month, and I recalled, but with few specifics, that it was clear that it changed how the culture worked.

EP #17: When I was a Child…, Marilynne Robinson

When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson, 2012. This is book #17 in the Essay Project, a series of reading I am doing with CT. It marks a return to literary essays after an epistolary detour into the letters of Olive Sacks, and only a temporary return as we have plans to finish the rest of Sacks’ work…

My Thoughts on the Book

I must say, having just read the Preface and the first essay, I am beginning with a rather unfavorable impression. However, I will hope that her initial writing, which seems to me to quite polemical, will give way to more measured and approachable topics.

Later: After the discussing the first three essays, my reading partner and I decided that we would try to cherry-pick the essays, to see if we could find material we liked better. I proposed we read the title essay, and CT, after skimming the rest of the book, proposed we also read the final two. These are discussed below, but the bottom line is that while I can say that I enjoyed the title essay, the other two did not really grab me. I think, unless CT had a far different experience, we will stop after our next discussion, having read six of the ten essays.

The Disordered Mind…, Eric R. Kandel

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell us about Ourselves, Eric R. Kandel, 2018.

Kandel is an eminent neuroscientist, known for his work on the low-level mechanisms of learning and memory as demonstrated in Aplysia. He’s won a host of prizes, including the Nobel for this work. Interestingly, as an undergraduate he majored in humanities, and afterwards became a psychiatrist, before migrating into neuroscience. Now in his 90’s, he is writing about larger themes, and addressing himself to more general audiences.

Writing after having read four chapters: The book is interesting, but I wish it went into more detail. Though it is also possible that the detail is not available — i.e. we still not shockingly little about mental disorders.

The Innocence of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton

March 2025

I only discovered G. K. Chesterton a few years ago, through his essays which are generally excellent, and some which I would call brilliant. More recently I’ve dipped into his fiction. The Man Who was Thursday was superb, both surreal and funny, and laden with the striking descriptions — of landscapes, settings, people — of which Chesterton is a master. After that, just last month, I tried a second piece of fiction, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I wrote a brief review of that, and, as I said, I did not care for that at all — it was clearly produced by the same author, but there the surreal became simply absurd, and the humor farce. Suspension of disbelief failed.

Still, having liked so much of his writing, and having found so little recent fiction satisfying, I wanted to try again, and so turned to his Father Brown stories about a Priest-Detective. The friend who had initially brought GKC to my attention recommended the story, The Blue Cross, as his favorite, and sent me a link to this volume on Project Guttenberg. The Blue Cross was indeed excellent, and so I proceeded through the rest of the volume.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G. K. Chesterton

A couple of years ago I read Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday. I love it. The writing was beautiful in parts, and the story a blend of the absurd and surreal — it was funny, although I did catch on to what was happening pretty quickly. But still, it was quite delightful, and that was not dampened by the Chestertonian moral/religious overlay.

All that is to say that I picked up The Napoleon of Notting Hill with anticipation. Written circa 1903, the story was set in a future London — 1984 — where almost nothing had changed in terms of class, society or technology, with the exception that instead of having a hereditary monarchy, a monarch was selected at random. The story is about the selection of a new monarch who is deeply unserious, and for his own amusement decrees that the various neighborhoods of London should function as independent nations, with their own heraldry and uniformed guards (which the new King designed), and their own traditions and customs. All this is intended to restore some of the ‘romance’ of medieval times, and, to the King’s delight, soon results in armed battles between the neighborhoods — Notting Hill, in a surprise, becoming ascendant.

Anyway, that’s the starting point of the book, but I have to say it didn’t engage me much. Whereas ‘Thursday’ was funny and surreal, this was absurd and unbelievable. It took about 3/4 of the book (it’s short) for me to become at all engaged, and then it was more a matter of curiosity about how Chesterton would wrap it up, rather than caring about the characters or story. Towards the end Chesterton does make a case for his preference for romance and semi-feudal systems vis a vis modernity, but it was mainly interesting as reinforcing my understanding of Chesterton’s view of the world.

Too bad. …But I do intend to give a couple of his ‘Father Brown’ books — about his priest-detective, a try.

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Basaltic Volcanoes, G. Walker

January 2025

I am told this is a classic papper. Here are some notes / excerpts:

“Basaltic magma is derived by incongruent partial melting of mantle peridotite, favoured in tectonic settings (e.g. hotspots and rifts) where mantle rock rises adiabatically to relatively shallow levels, or in subduction-zone settings where volatiles decrease the melting temperature of mantle rock.”
Important magma parameters (pretty uniform for basaltic volcanos)
- Magma density relative to lithosphere density — helps deter- mine the positions of magma chambers and intrusions;
- Viscosity and yield strength determine the geometry and structures of lava flows and intrusions;
- Gas content + viscosity + rheology controls the explosive violence of eruptions by determining the ease with which gases escape from magmas.
Parameters responsible for diversity: magma-supply rate and involvement of non- magmatic water.
”Basaltic systems have a source in the mantle from which magma ascends, mainly because of its positive buoyancy but sometimes aided by tectonic forces, toward the surface. They have one or more conduits by which the magma ascends. Polygenetic volcano systems generally possess a high-level magma chamber, situated at a neutral buoyancy level, which stores magma and modulates its delivery to the volcano and to sub-volcanic intrusions. Deep storage reservoirs may also exist.”
Types of volcanos
- Shield volcanos
- Stratovolcanos
- Central Volanos.
- Monogenetic volcanoes. These consist of clusters of scattered and mostly small (> 2 km3) volcanoes, each generated by a single eruption. Most commonly a volcano con- sists of a cinder cone associated with outflows of aa lava, but some are lava shields of scutulum- type (e.g. Rangitoto Island, Auckland, and Xitle in M…, and many that occur near the coast or close to lakes are phreatomagmatic tuff-rings or maars.
- Flood basalt fields consist of monogenetic volcanoes erupted from widely scattered vents, but their lava flows cover wider areas, overlap or are superposed to form parallel-stratified successions, and have much greater volumes. Giant flood-basalt fields are distributed through geological time at average intervals of 32 Ma (Rampino & Stothers 1988), and each one formed at the time of inception of a hotspot, on arrival of an ascending mantle plume at the asthenosphere/litho- sphere boundary.
Volcano Collapse due to instable foundations, layers of pyroclastic or hydrothermally-altered material, intrusive dykes, local updomings in central volcanoes, severe marine erosion.
Polygenetic vs. monogenetic. “In the polygenetic volcano systems, magma batches ascend sufficiently frequently along the same conduit that the conduit walls are maintained in a hot condition and provide magma with a thermally and mechanically very favour- able pathway toward the surface. In the monogenetic and flood basalt systems magma batches ascend at such long time inter- vals that the pathway taken by one batch has effectivelycooled by the time that the next batch is ready to ascend.”
Fissures / Rift systems. ‘Most basaltic eruptions occur from fissures, and virtually all basaltic volcano systems have eruptive fissures. Fissures are opened very easily by the hydraulic jacking action of magma, and are the ‘natural’ underground conveyance for low- viscosity magma (Emerman & Marrett 1990). They commonly extend for tens of kilometres and are typically concentrated into rift zones. Magma solidified in fissures forms dykes. Dykes have a high survival potential, and in deeply eroded areas may be virtually all that survives of the volcanic system.
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