(What is RSS?)I seem to be doing this without intending to do so. I’ve finished Technology of Orgasm and The Seven Prinicples for Making Marriage Work in the past two weeks. I today began Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy. If I’m not careful, I may actually finish this goal without intending explicitly to begin it.
This is a monster of a task. There’s no way I could successfully pursue this while also pursuing yoga as thoroughly as I have. I’ll revisit this goal. Devotion to yoga showed me that I have to sacrifice some things if a particular level of success is necessary. Devotion to this task will show me what it’s like to sacrifice things for school. Eight weeks is not a long time in school terms, but it is long enough for the unexpected to come into play and time enough for motivation to waver. I think I’ll try this after Poly Big Fun.
But it was a good failure. All sorts of lovely things happened last week, so I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t complete my reading for the week. It highlights that I’ve made a commitment here and that a social life has a real opportunity cost. I’m glad I’ve greatly decreased the amount of aimless pursuit of random girls in my life. I’ll see what else I can pare out of my life.
cmt2779 copied three science fiction stories for me to read. Each one made me cry. This is the order in which I read them.
Clifford D. Simak – Desertion
Christy’d mentioned this story afore, but that didn’t make it lose any effectiveness. What is pretty sad is apparently Lopers are short-sighted and forget about the meaning that ethics provides to one’s existence. Or, perhaps all six men we’re pretty selfish to begin with. Still, the way Simak describes the Loper’s experience of Jupiter is enthralling.
Gregory Benford – Exposures
This was the most painful (in a good way) of the stories. The way that Benford makes the most amazing astronomical discovery in history subservient to existential themes is something that gets me hard at this point in my life.
Harry Harrison (who is far more imaginative than his pen name suggests) – The Streets of Ashkelon
A much more believable and effective exploration of one facet of Dostoyevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. In this story (unlike in Desertion), the character doesn’t forget morality: he’s cursed with the inability to do the math. You wait until the ship is gone to shoot the motherfscker. Someone’s gonna have to explain the title to me. It’s all Biblical and shit. :)
This is the first Vonnegut book I’ve read. I expected a thoroughly enjoyable experience, as everyone loves Vonnegut. I wish I’d gotten it.
Halfway through the book, I was left wondering when the book would pick up. A few pages later, there was a point (during Unk and Boaz’s stint on Mercury) that made me cry, because it seemed for a few moments that I was getting into something substantial, something that would really speak to me. A few pages later, it was gone.
A cover review claims that not only does Vonnegut dare to ask the most important question, he dares also to answer it. It seems that he took a corner of what existentialism had to offer, dumbed it down a bit, and put a cute plot behind it.
I can’t help to think that, since so many other sophisticated readers love this book, that I am simply missing what is wonderful about the book. There are some things that I’m not missing. It has a little bit of Vonnegut’s (as I understand) characteristic [I’ll teach you to pay attention to literary devices like foreshadowing!], a bit of [I’ve given you enough hints for you to figure this out on your own, but I would now like to bore you by stating matter-of-factly exactly what I’ve encouraged you to figure out.], and a few recognisable science-fiction ideas—some certainly borrowed, but likely some original, which might’ve been compelling if only I hadn’t come across more interesting works that derive from the ideas first (Star Control’s Ur-Quan and Dnyarri myth is a far more moving take on Unk’s learning to cope with the pain of the antenna). The novel did not twist in any exciting ways; the ending came from a mile away and without payoff. That’s Vonnegut’s style, as I understand it. I just wish there were any novel ideas here that I could take as a reward for Vonnegut intentionally paring away that which is moving (and thereby dangerous) about fiction.
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning came out the same year as The Sirens of Titan and was infinitely more compelling, moving, informative, and challenging in espousing the exact same ideas. I suppose I should be glad that there is another work of fiction espousing existentialist ideas. Perhaps it is that I grew up in this sort of philosophical antediluvian state, one in which I never accepted western religion that existentialism needs us to reject, that makes this novel so unmoving to me: God never existed for him to need to die. Give me Beckett, give me Camus. Over The Sirens of Titan, give me the struggles of the naïvely godless any day.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is one of the most moving pieces of fiction I have read. The emotion slips on me; the book doesn’t seem sad at all, but the story is raw, and it erodes away my composure. Before too long, before I understand why, I’m crying.
I enjoy texts that play with the boundary of fiction and non-fiction, especially in autobiography. Woman Warrior plays with genre a bit more than this does, but the way Tim O’Brien addresses the reader, explains what and why he’s doing what he’s doing, at the same time building one trust and destroying another, is thoroughly effective, with lacrimal results.
I can see myself returning to this book over and over. This is truly one of the best things I have read.
Games People Play is both meaningful and practical, which easily makes it one of the better self-help books. It teaches a diagnostic ability to identify a game, a bestiary of common games and their antitheses, and highlights the benefits (if briefly, then only perhaps because it is obvius) of game-free living.
Berne is candid, jocular, and insightful. I needed to remind myself that Dr. Berne was writing in the 1960s as an experienced therapist, and thus the observations he remarked as a particular game being played primarily by a particular sex, and his predilections toward consigning women to being housewives in his description of games, are mere artefacts of experience without indicating inherent sexism in his ideas. His use of Freudian psychosexual terminology was also disheartening. At times, though, Berne’s command of language is delightful (several times I had to look up words which are not to be found on dictionary.com), and I can forgive his use of (now) irrelevant Freudian terminology as a price to pay for the wealth of knowledge in the book.
The book was not extremely moving for me (as some non-fiction truly is!), but I did cry a couple times whilst reading about Consulting Room Games, not because I realised I was playing these games, but because the antitheses were telling: they were moves that might well jar me out of my own game-playing behaviour.
The first part of Laing’s book has a number of messages for those like me with dependent personalities. We’re clearly not the target audience of the book, but in addition to the authorial meaning, which isn’t too hard to grasp for me, being familiar with schizophrenia, the medical institution, and the application of the latter to the former, there are some lovely tidbits of commentary about our society, some lovely gems of phenomenology, and some fun games for thinking. It’s not the most well written book, nor the most consistent. However, Laing’s breadth, his ability to engage in different sorts of writing, and well, is quite nice.
The father of logotherapy wrote the most meaningful book possible for me to read at that time. I think reading this book was my first step into adulthood—about ten years late. Anyone who thinks that existentialism is a bleak philosophy, and prescribes to said bleakness, ought read this.
