w/KC: Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980

January 2023

The Book: Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980

Prelude

Written in 1980, this book challenged what was then the conventional view of metaphor – in psychology, linguistics and philosophy – as a sort of minor, poetical flourish that had little to no role in the how people understand language. In sharp contrast, MWLB argued metaphor is central to not only the way humans understand language, but how they conceptualize and experience the world. The suggest that most metaphor is systematic, in that there are root metaphors which structure the way abstract topics are conceptualized. L&J distinguish among three types of metaphoriic systems: Structural (ARGUMENT IS WAR); Orientational (MORE IS UP); and Ontological (IDEAS ARE OBJECTS). They also not that metonymy, while it is referential rather than metaphorical, is systematic in the same way metaphor is.

w/CS: Alien Oceans: : The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, Kevin Peter Hand

25 October 2022 and on…

CS and I are reading Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, by Kevin Peter Hand. These are my chapter by chapter notes. We are now through chapter 7, and are enjoying it. It does not assume much science background, and thus spends a lot of time explaining things that we are familiar with (e.g. why water’s hydrogen bonds cause water ice to be lower density than liquid water). But it does a very good job of it, and those with background can skim; this would be a great book for a child or teen interested in science.

w/KC: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake

October – November 2022

These are chapter-by-chapter notes (with occasional quotes) on Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures, by M. Sheldrake. I’m reading this book with KC, a chapter or two at a time, and adding notes for each chapter as I go. Having now finished it, my one line review is that it has some fascinating stuff in it, but it is a lot more focused on cool stuff than on giving a detailed account of the science.

w/CS: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday- Introduction

Tuesday 15 March 2022

LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.

This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.

Zen and the Art: Short review

Thursday 15 August 2019

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’m happy to have read it again. I’m surprised at how well it read a second time.

One thing that surprised me was how much I remembered. Not just the core ideas, or the revelation about who Phaedrus was, or the interplay between Chris and his father, but quite a few of the scenes. The descriptions of coming over a rise, and the landscape opening up.

I liked the interplay between the descriptions traveling through the landscape, and the conceptual work — the Chataqua — that was being done. It was not too tight, not lockstep, but every now and then there were correspondences that resonated. The transition from the midwest, where the landscape was ordered out of value, to the west, where the untidyness of the land reflected its loss of value. The high country with its clarity and deliniation, with the abstraction of ideas about quality. The parallel for riding upwards through the valley and coming to the source of the river, and the upward path to the root of the ideas.

Prelude

Chapter 1

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance