Your Mind on Reading

Socrates feared that reading would undermine interactive dialogue. ... reading is different from talking.

Reading changed the nature of education completely, from the Socratic method of face-to-face dialogues to lectures supplemented with large amounts of reading. I think most of us feel that reading characterizes education now even more than classroom experience, at least after the early elementary grades. It's funny that Socrates feared that reading would ruin things. Nowadays, we're afraid that people will stop reading. I wonder what the next educational paradigm will be? And how we will work it into education, alongside lectures and assigned reading.

When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object — something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat. A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those significant shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been “recycled” for reading. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes,” he writes. “They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.”

An alphabet in the shape of trees, fruits, etc., and people who read instead of swinging in trees and foraging for food. We read for excitement. We read recipes. As children, we draw triangular A- or M-shaped mountains and round O-suns shining on T- or Y-shaped trees. It's intriguing.

Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, reviewed at the NY Times.

Books to Live Without?

"Is a gentleman’s library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?" -- Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Well, um. This article at the NY Times blogs has a few philosophies of weeding through books, and one holdout who refuses to get rid of any (Joshua Ferris, whose latest, The Unnamed, is on my to-read shelf), but vanity? Books I've read work as mnemonics for me. Not sure I'd remember them as well if I didn't keep them. The co-owner of The Strand in New York says honestly that it's a matter of how much space you have, and if you haven't got it, to send your books to him.

So do I need to get rid of some books or can I just get a bigger house? I have culled through books in the past before moves. It's never pleasant. I seldom miss what I toss, tho I have replaced a few discards.

And I do have a fantasy of a permanent residence with lots of storage space.

Are the English Human, Lesbian Horse Stories

and my personal favorite, Ductigami. At Abebooks, Literary Oddities.

The Collective Conscious, or, Mind-Blowing Massive Math

In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math's highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.

In two blog posts he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett Theorem. He encouraged the thousands of readers of his blog to jump in and start proving. Mathematics is a process of generating vast quantities of ideas and rejecting the majority that don't work; maybe, Gowers reasoned, the participation of so many people would speed the sifting.

Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

By now we're used to the idea that gigantic aggregates of human brains — especially when allowed to communicate nearly instantaneously via the Internet — can carry out fantastically difficult cognitive tasks, like writing an encyclopedia or mapping a social network. But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds: writing a novel, choosing a spouse, creating a new mathematical theorem. The Polymath experiment suggests this prejudice may need to be rethought. In the near future, we might talk not only about the wisdom of crowds but also of their genius.

From the NY Times Year in Ideas.

But bear in mind that this crowd consisted of at least one other Fields medalist in addition to Gowers. I'm not sure I ever had the prejudice that mathematical theorems were as privately arrived at as spousal choices, but this sounds amazing, anyway, the connection of (eventually) all our minds.

Department of Dinosaurishness

Did crotchety old penmanship aficionados claim that the typewriter destroyed writing? So why do crotchety old typewriter users think that ebooks and the computer will?

For that matter, we should all be chiseling words into stone. Then, we'd be sure only to say what we mean. None of this papery, verbose stuff.

At the Guardian.

Pissy Moods Are Good for Your Writing

Research shows that irritable moods spur creativity. But, don't get too depressed.

Kindle for PC

Does everyone know you can get a free download from Amazon to read Kindle books on your PC. You don't have to have a Kindle.

I just found out...tempting, and interesting that publishers make the same money from e-books as from hardcovers. I still like paperbacks, tho.

*Sits on hands, does not press download key...yet*

Also interesting is this multimedia reader, Blio.

E-books = the future?

Thanks to Nathan Bransford (see sidebar) for this link to predictions about the future of e-books.

I agree that the prices for e-readers will most likely come way down, but $99 (his breakthrough price point) is still a bit high for me with e-books costing almost as much as paperbacks. Maybe if e-tailers run a program of, buy 10 e-books, get a free reader? Kind of like convenience stores around here do with gallons of milk. Otherwise, I'll be bidding on ebay, hoping to win an e-reader for, oh, $19.99.

Cormac McCarthy's typewriter goes for $254k

And it doesn't even work that well any more, five million words later.

Recycle those old phone booths

I think this is a great idea, altho in my town, we have a lot of options: the library, the library used book sales, where people often buy and then re-donate books, and the laundromat across the street from the library, which is also an informal book and periodicals exchange locale.

Still, I like the idea of book kiosks scattered about. Forget what you were driving to the mall for? Pull over and read a quick story or chapter, then on your way.

The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments

I was browsing this in the local bookstore. It's actually fragments of a novel. It's printed with a facsimile of Nabokov's writing on index cards you can tear out, and type underneath of the same text. Which amounts to, although it looks like a big book, it's mostly white space because of the heavy stock and the format. I wonder if they think we are going to put the cards in order ourselves, play with his story?

The idea of being able to move pieces of writing around is appealing, that's why we have word processors. I can't see using index cards, tho. Wouldn't typed pages do just as well? Unless you were committed to writing the whole thing by hand and making your edits by hand on the cards. It'd work if you had a spouse who did all your typing, like Vera.

Upshot: I think the notes-for-book-in-cards is a weird concept. A marketing idea that has no use. Fluff. Anti-Nabokovian. What's next? A novel on Post-its? That's the way we'll be seeing Twitter novels, no doubt. I don't think the facsimile/type idea is a bad one, but tear-out cards, really.

Did the word processor make the typing wife obsolete? Discuss.
Bonus points if you tore out the pages of Hopscotch and rearranged the text as Cortazar suggested.

Bookshelf staircase: I want one

From Book Bench.

What Should I Read Next?

I typed that into Google a little while ago, because, well, I was wondering, and found these sites: What Should I Read Next and Which Book. The sliders at Whichbook are fun, and both sites really do work, that is, come up with likely suggestions. Even if the books at Whichbook are often by U.K. writers who are not (yet) as available in the U.S.

And, here is an idea I'd like to see catch on, personal book consultants:

It’s called a Reading Spa and for £55 a person gets an hour of undivided attention from one of their extremely nice and knowledgeable booksellers. You sit and have tea and cake and talk about what you like, what you don’t like; they talk about what’s come out recently, what’s selling well. Based on this, they then go away and come back with a pile of books. £40 of that £55 goes towards these books, plus of course any extra you want to spend.

At the Penguin blog.

John Daido Loori, roshi

1931-2009

"Zen is not Japanese and it's not Chinese.... It didn't come from Asia; it has always been here. It is a way of using your mind and living your life and doing it with other people. Unfortunately nobody can supply a rule book to go by because what it is about can't be spoken of, and that which can be spoken of is not it. So we need to go deep in ourselves to find the foundation of it. Zen is a practice that has to do with liberation, not some kind of easy certainty. The wisdom of that liberation not only affects our lives but all those whom we come in contact with, all that we know, and all that we do."

Photo from Zen Mountain Monastery photo archive. Quote from Shambhala Sun archives.