Ouch. But Wallace tried. Really, really tried. I miss him so much.
Slothrop Reads
We could plant a house, we could build a tree, I don't even care, we could read all three.
Pay attention to words. Pay attention to sentences. Pay attention to paragraphs. Show don’t tell isn’t always true. Read Chekov. That about sums it up. B-
What are koans? How to approach them? This delightful book of wisdom and storytelling turns what I assumed to be ancient riddles into modern day parables that tickle and transform basic assumptions about how the world operates and the ways we can live a fuller life of creative virtuosity. A
The premise is that the world, if we observe it scientifically, is groundless and constantly changing. Likewise, our minds, if we observe them through meditative practices, is also groundless and ever-changing. And the two––the world and our minds––are intertwined; one doesn’t predate the other. If you take these premises seriously, like the authors of this book, you will experience a pretty much paradigm busting shift in the way you perceive, or begin to stop perceiving, a “Self.” Which is how people learn to be happy in a permanent, non-event specific way. An important move and one which western philosophy has yet to embrace, insisting as it does on some kind of postion from which to pontificate. A-
A useful historical overview of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, what its core principles were and how they were adapted over thousands of years, how it differs from Confucianism and Daoism (it sits in the middle, neither rigid in its boundaries nor entirely passive and porous). My greatest insights arose from the author’s insistence that Buddhism is not something you read about, or something you master, but something you perform. Masters, in other words, can perform with attentive virtuosity all the time. Goobers like myself can only do it occasionally, and usually when the room is very still and quiet.
The big lesson: To approach Buddhism as a theory and the Buddha as a concept is analogous to treating them like hitching posts for donkeys. A-
It’s a great book that can take something you know intimately and make you rethink the whole thing. Especially something as fundamental and simple as putting one foot in front of the other. That’s because the majority of these characters––and they’re characters in every sense of the word-–are batshit crazy. So if you’re interested in seeing how we evolved as runners, how we fucked it up by wearing shoes, and how we fuck it up even more by failing to find joy in everything, even 100 mile races into the arms of the beast named Exhaustion, then this book is for you. A-
All about the Appalachian Trail, its hikers, its bears, its endlessness and endless beauty as told by a fat man and his terrific sense of humor. Similar to running, hiking is pointless if you think of it as accomplishing something. B+
The skeleton of the narrative is about a young freelance journalist who trips and falls into the world of memory training and memory competition. But as stupid fun as that is––a self-deprecating normal person doing truly geek-intensive things is staggeringly amusing, turns out––and as many memory techniques as I learned, the joy of the book is in all the ruminations about memory, intelligence, education, expertise, commitment, and what it means to live as a function of our memory. The last book that truly changed my awareness, i.e. what I deemed worthy of attention, was The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a way much less content specific than Ominvore’s, but just as prickly to my conscience, I feel fortunate to have read this book and its reminder that “how we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory.” A
Golly Gee, how I wish I had read this when I was 20. A
The book in which you learn about Diogenes the Cynic, who ain’t gonna take none of your lip, sucka. B+
