March 2023
This is volume #25 in the Essays Project that CT and I are doing. It is the last volume of Sacks we have not yet read; we will also read Insomniac City by Bill Hayes, his partner in his final years, just for completeness. Then it is back to essays by other authors.
Continue reading Hallucinations, Oliver SacksViews: 2
February 2026
Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does, Philip Ball, 2016
My pick for the first round of reading for the club for 2026. I’m obsessed with patterns, and this book has 250 beautiful photos. Whether it will go deep enough to teach me some new things is another question, but even if not it should be a pleasant read.
… it does make many patterns variations on a theme, and reflects the fact that they often arise from broadly similar processes-ones in which some driving force, be it gravity or heat or evolution, prevents the system from ever settling into a steady, unchanging state; in which various influences interact with each other, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes competing; in which patterns and forms might switch abruptly to a new shape and appearance when the driving force exceeds some threshold value; in which small events can have big consequences and what goes on here can influence what transpires at a distant point there; and in which accidents may get frozen into place and determine what unfolds thereafter.
—ibid.,
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October 2025
Reading this with NS & DO, a subset of the 26 minute book group. As I begin, I find myself a little hesitant about a biography written about someone 400+ years ago, where there is presumably a scarcity of 1st hand accounts. But certainly his very detailed notebooks will help…
Later: And the notes do, indeed, help, although the undated nature of the notes, and the fact that they have been remixed over the ensuing centuries makes them less effective as a chronological record. Still, I’m learning a lot about Leonardo, his approach to life and innovation, and his accomplishments.
The introduction offers a general description of Leonardo as a man who blended art and science and who, in fact, probably did not distinguish. It suggests that we have much to learn from Leonardo in that “Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition,” in contrast to those who seem to have prodigious cognitive powers. Certainly, he left profuse documentation of his curiosity and his reliance on observation and analysis of the natural world to fuel his creativity and inventiveness. Leonardo: “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.“
The rest of the introduction discusses sources — three early accounts — and offers some suppositions about Leonardo’s personality.
Continue reading Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter IsaacsonViews: 12
October-November 2025
After 1177 B.C. – The Survival of Civilizations, 2024 [check]. Reading for book group.
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October 2025
I’m reading this book chapter by chapter with CJS.The topic is the emergence of cultural anthropology via the work of Franz Boas and his students, who included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Nealel Hurdson. The work described here laid the foundation for the belief that all humans are fundamentally equal in their abilities, and that much of what had been thought to be innate was culturally constructed.
This chapter is really a preface. It begins with a vignette of Margaret Mead arriving in Samoa, but then segues to the general aim of the book.
A little over a century ago, any educated person knew that the world worked in certain obvious ways. Humans were individuals, but each was also representative of a specific type, itself the summation of a distinct set of racial, national, and sexual characteristics.
Each type was fated to be more or less intelligent, idle, rule-bound, or warlike. Politics properly belonged to men, while women, when they were admitted to public life, were thought to be most productive in charitable organizations, missionary work, and the instruction of children. Immigrants tended to dilute a country’s natural vigor and breed political extremism. Animals deserved kindness, and backward peoples, a few rungs above animals, were owed our help but not our respect. Criminals were born to a life beyond the law but might be reformed. Sapphists and sodomites chose their depravities but were probably irredeemable. It was an age of improvement: an era that had moved beyond justifying slavery, that had begun to shake off the strictures of class, and that might eventually do away with empires.
—ibid., p 4
The claim of the book is that the work of Boas and his students was critical to overturning these understandings. Boas and his students invented (and named) cultural anthropology and developed the theory of cultural relativity. Their work challenged heretofore accepted ideas that people fell into natural categories that differed in their abilities and predilections. It did this via a scientific examination of cultures…
Continue reading Gods of the Upper Air, Charles KingViews: 61
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekara, 2023
This is an acclaimed science fiction book that has gathered both critical and popular praise. I read it a couple of years ago — I try to read the ‘best of the year’ books in SF – and it didn’t engage me, although I did manage to finish it. I am now reading it a second time, as part of a Science Fiction and Fantasy course I’m taking at the U, and am going to try harder to appreciate it; or at least to understand what others appreciate in it. And perhaps also reflect on aspects of it that prevent me from appreciating it.
At this point I’ve just started the re-read it. I am noticing some very nice turns of phrase. I also notice that the protagonist begins as, in a sense, an abused child who is being trained to do terrible things by a mother who sees him only as a tool. I’m not really noticing much in the way of love or affection or humor among any of the characters.
Continue reading The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra ChandrasekaraViews: 7
* 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.
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
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July/August 2025
Reading this with the Read/Write book group.
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* 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.’
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.“
Continue reading EP#20: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver SacksViews: 108
*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…]]
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.
Continue reading Migraine*, Oliver SacksMigraine, 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
Views: 3
January 2025
I am told this is a classic papper. Here are some notes / excerpts:
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Snow Crystals: A Case Study of Spontaneous Structure Formation, Kenneth Libbrecht, 2022
This is Libbrecht’s magnum opus, at least on snow; this goes deep into the science. …and I love that he has ordered the references by date, so you can see the history of the science leading up to Libbrecht’s work.
Notes still in progress…
Continue reading Snow Crystals, Kenneth LibbrechtViews: 12
by Guy Deutscher
October 2024
This is an excellent book; interesting well-documented science, and some beautiful and erudite writing as well. The basic argument — that grammar determines what must be specified, rather than what can be specified, and in that manner instills certain habits of mind that effect how people see the world — seems correct, if not quite living up to the subtitle of the book: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.
Perhaps the most interesting and fun part of the book was to be introduced to languages that work very differently from English: The Mates language (in Peru) that requires speakers to specify whether the fact they report is based on personal observation, indirect evidence, or hearsay; and the Australian language that has no egocentric prepositions, but requires all positional information to be reported in terms of the cardinal directions, thus requiring their speakers to always be oriented.
This book was a pleasure to read. I plan to seek out other work by this writer.
On whether languages reflect the characteristics of their speakers, he writes:
Many a dinner table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character of different languages and their speakers. And yet should these lofty observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining room to the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a soufflé of airy anecdote-at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and absurd.
— p. 2
The basic argument of the book is this:
The effects that have emerged from recent research, however, are far more down to earth. They are to do with the habits of mind that language can instill on the ground level of thought: on memory, attention, perception, and associations. And while these effects may be less wild than those flaunted in the past, we shall see that some of them are no less striking for all that.
I think it is correct, but that the subtitle of the book – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – is a bit of an exaggeration.
C1: Naming the Rainbow
This chapter reprises now-unknown work by William Gladstone (now remembered as an English prime minister) on Homer and his writings, and focuses in on particular on one chapter in Gladstone’s monumental 3,000 page work: a chapter on Homer’s use of color terms.
Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.
Gladstone notes that Homer uses color terms in odd ways — the famous “wine dark sea” (really “wine-looking” sea) being just one example.
Mostly Homer, as well as other Greek authors of the period, use color very little in their descriptions: mostly they use black or white; terms for colors are used infrequently and inconsistently. For example, the only other use of “wine-looking” is to describe the color of oxen.
Gladstone’s fourth point is the vast predominance of the “most crude and elemental forms of color”-black and white-over every other. He counts that Homer uses the adjective melas (black) about 170 times in the poems, and this does not even include instances of the corresponding verb “to grow black,” as when the sea is described as “black-ening beneath the ripple of the West Wind that is newly risen.” Words meaning “white” appear around 100 times. In contrast to this abun-dance, the word eruthros (red) appears thirteen times, xanthos (yellow) is hardly found ten times, ioeis (violet) six times, and other colors even less often.
This chapter describes the origin, rise and fall of linguistic relativity. Sapir is depicted as respectable but making over-stated claims; Whorf comes across as a charlatan, for example, making claims to have deeply studied Hopi, when he only had access to a single informant in New York – and making broad claims that are entirely wrong (e.g. that the Hopi language does not have a future tense).
Deutscher traces the origin of linguistic relativity to Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1799, whose “linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” Deutscher encountered the Basque language, and found that it was radically different from the languages linguists tended to study. He then sought out other ‘more exotic’ languages, which he found by going to the Vatican library and studying the notes of Jesuit missionaries to South and Central America: “…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135 Although Humboldt’s ideas led to linguistic relativity, it should be noted that he had a much more nuanced and correct view: In principle, any language may express any idea; the real differences among languages are not what they are able to express but in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.” But this view was not carried forward, and instead: “The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a process of rapid fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober. ”
All that said, Deutscher argues it is a mistake to dismiss the idea that language has no influence over thought. But rather than taking the strong case the language constrains thought, he instead argues the habits of language may lead to habits of mind. In the case of the influence of language, and refers to the idea that Boas introduces and that Jakobson crystalized into a maxim: “Languages differ in what they must convey, and not in what they may convey.”
“…has still the power to disturb our hearts.” [Sapir, referring to Homer, Ovid, etc.] p. 129
“[His] linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrennes.” p. 134
“…Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shown from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.” p. 135
Views: 11
Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.
This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:
“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”
She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:
To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.
And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…
Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?
Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:
“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“
“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “
“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “
“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”
“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”
TBD –The first chapter is brilliant, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book, but have gotten distracted! But I shall return.
Views: 161
*EP#15: The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata (Graywolf Press, 2016)
Favorites are indicated by ** – there is only one: Blood Burning Moon.
* indicates those that I found something notable in, though I was not keen on them
(*) indicates something previouly read that I still like.
Frankly, I did not care for most of the essays (or, really, most were not essays, but presumably informed or influenced American essayists) in this volume.
This is the 15th volume CT and I have taken up in our essay reading project. Here we return to the type of book we began with — the broadly historical anthology. This differs from previous anthologies we’ve read in that it appears that the editor introduces each piece, something we’ve wished for in the past, especially when we’ve been mystified by why an essay was selected.
Later: Now that we’re farther into it, I’m a little less keen on it. A lot of the material in here are not actually essays: there are short stories, one sermon, a book chapter or two, and some very long pieces (Mark Twain’s A Letter from Earth), none of which strike me as essays. I had hoped for essays, or at least short essay-like pieces… and there are some, but quite a lot is other material. Although his initial introductions were pretty good at situating selections, as the book moves on the introductions are less about the selections, per se, and instead his sort of personal arc through American History. He is also quite fond of experimental work — work that, while it might have raised questions at the time, or contributed to discourse among the literati, is difficult to imagine anyone reading for pleasure or even enlightenment.
Continue reading EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*Views: 9
February 2024…
This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.
Continue reading LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. WillardViews: 10
November 2023
The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanely Robinson. 2022.
* I was reading this for other reasons, but nevertheless it fits well into my project to read essays that focus on landscape and natural history.
TL;DR: I love this book. But it is not for everyone. On the other hand, it is organized in such a way that readers interested in particular topics — geology, history, etc. – could skip through the book attending to one or a few themes that interest them. It has great pictures, too.
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I’m a big fan of KSR, and think it likely that I’ve read everything he’s written, although it is possible that that omits a few early science fiction novels that were retroactively published after he became better known. I like the complex characters he develops, the intensely developed worlds he portrays, and especially his attention to geology, climate, economics, politics, and the role of large institutions – themes that are uncommon in much science fiction. Also unusual is that he sometimes ventures beyond the borders of SF, as with his novel Years of Rice and Salt, and especially with this book, which is multi-threaded work the interweaves memoir, geology, natural history and history.
Continue reading LS*–The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley RobinsonViews: 9
I just returned from a weekend up on the North Shore. K and I went up and stayed at Cove Point Lodge, while I took a 3-day course on North Shore Geology, focusing on the Beaver Bay area. The course was taught by Jim Miller, a retired Minnesota Geological Survey person, and an emeritus professor from UMD: he was a great person to teach the course, both because he was a good and enthusiastic instructor, and because he has spent his career focused on the northern Minnesota in general, and the North Shore in particular. Many of the geological maps of the north shore include his name as cartographer.
This is a laundry list of what I learned — however, there are problems with the images which I have yet to fix.
Continue reading What is this Rock, 3: Course NotesViews: 15
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
While I had intended to report on the trip in this blog, it turned out, since I was writing on my phone, to be easier to do a series of daily posts to Facebook. So this is the last bit on Iceland here, at least for the moment. I plan to edit and expand the FB posts, and will eventually post them here, or in a another of my blogs.
*Much of this is adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Reykjanes_Peninsula
The Reykjanes Peninsula is the continuation of the submarine Reykjanes Ridge, a segement of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. It reaches from the Esja volcano in the north to hengill in the east and Reykhanesta in the west. It originated 6-7 Ma in a rift-jump, after the Snæfellsnes-Skagi rift had drifted to the west out of range of the presumed location of the mantle plume.
Continue reading Iceland 2020, Day 1: Reykjanes PlansViews: 2
Monday, 25 July 2022
As I’ve aged I find that I fare less well on less sleep; or perhaps, I never fared well on less sleep, but when young was too inexperienced to notice my own deficits. Regardless, I scheduled my trip to have a ‘recovery day,’ so that I wouldn’t be dragging on the first day of the tour. Additional benefits are decreased stress — I was unconcerned the cascading delays of the day before would cause any disruption in my schedule – and a chance to wander about Reykjavik.
Continue reading Iceland 2022, Day 0: Recovery Day in ReykjavikViews: 13
