Books this year: a book diary

Behold, friends! Behold the best book I’ve read since this blog has been up. If you are ever strapped for cash, I will pay you $20 to read this book. I may be able to pay you more. Talk to me.

If stoicism can give you the rationale for a bold life without anger, this book shows you how to get there.

The author of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an anarchist, though he never talks about it explicitly. A mind-job holy shit anarchist thinker of the sexiest kind. He thinks that when civilization picked up and power and coercion and oppression got started, our culture, education, and language all got hijacked to serve the purposes of the oppressors.

“Should” and “have to” don’t exist. Anger only exists as a confusion having to do with “should.” When we get all non-interpretive and anti-platonic, the atomic structure under all human emotion is want and need. People who say things like “he’s lazy” should bite the bullet, quit appealing to universal standards, realize that there is no objective laziness (or not an objectively demonstrable one), and take responsibility for their own emotions. “I want him to do more work so I can do less, because I need more free time to be happy.”

Ok, that one was easy. Everything has to do with an emotional need. Sure. It gets worse. By the time I was done with this book, I could trace the roots of my disgust for any irritating person to an awful insecurity caused by a terrible need. I almost navel-gazed myself out of functional humanity. But it was AWESOME.

Quoting Gandhi, Chuang Tzu, Teilhard de Chardin, and other people who made me do double takes, Rosenberg paints a picture to an unchained de-brainwashed non-slave way of being where the purpose of life is play. Spiritual anarchism. I’m going to take this trek. Please come with me.

Oh, and here’s Rosenberg:

I learned of Eagleman from his TED Talk, which really impressed me. He’s a really good looking, young, charming, smart neuroscientist and author who advances the cause of a belief system he calls “possibilianism.” Possibilianism is an orientation towards God and other mysteries that emphasizes not making any commitments more narrow that the actual possibility space, and being ok with simultaneously entertaining rival theories as to what’s going on at any given time. This strikes me as really humble and honest and fun, and I like it.

Sum is forty of the handsome neuroscientist’s two-to-three page short stories about the afterlife. They are all conflicting what-ifs. I suppose they’re all possible, in the way that it’s possible that I’m actually a hallucinating space giraffe, but Eagleman doesn’t try to by Vinge and make things so plausible it gives you chills. He tries to be Márquez or Borges and make you smile at the twists.

I was surprised though, at how narrowly within the possibility space Eagleman constrained his imagination when writing Sum. The same themes (good themes, I’m not hating) keep presenting themselves: the makers didn’t get what they wanted out of creation, or if they did it has nothing to do with us; the changing relationships between lovers; gods who are bored, or sad; the awe and wonder of naivety and being wrong, and the bittersweetness of advancement past those stages. I feel like Eagleman accidentally let me get to know him, and I know what keeps him up at night, what he pines for, and sighs about. He’s a good guy.

And I love this story:

Once upon a time I lived in San Antonio. The tide of anarchy was riding. The CEC was being taken down by a web forum, and reddit was pumping Ron Paul. I saw the most hilariously stupid book I had ever seen on a clearance rack. Flipping through it, I found gems like the author’s complaint that mashup culture would put true art out of business, so that we’d lose things like the completely non-derivative works of Bob Dylan. I was in love. I bought the stupid book. And when I had some time off of work, four years later, I read it.

Andrew Keen, the author, is a silicon valley insider because he had a failed business once that nobody ever heard of. Craigslist is bad because it provides the service that newspaper classifieds once provided, but for free, and this means that people lose jobs. YouTube is bad because the quality of entertainment on YouTube sucks, but even so everyone will be compelled to choose it over high-quality entertainment, and real art will die. The poor poor record labels will be killed by online music. Porn is gross. Etc, etc. There is no very cogent thesis. The internet is just bad. And we need gatekeepers. People like the author, I would assume, to tell us what to like and buy.

The author literally looks like this:

 And he writes like a person who looks like that. Excellent book.

Rаndаll Terry hаs аsked me to write а blurb to use in the promotion of his forthcoming book. Rаndаll Terry is аn interesting guy. If you were to reаd his Wikipediа аrticle, you might come to believe the mаn wаs dаngerous аnd insаne. He is. Whаt you will not leаrn from Rаndаll’s аrticle (which is аbsolutely full of of lies, аnd I need to fix) is thаt he’s аlso something of а living sаint, аnd а true believer in the best sense of the phrаse. (Once а lаdy аt аn аbortion clinic where Rаndаll’s group wаs protesting sаid “If you cаre so much, why don’t you rаise the kid аnd pаy for everything.” He got аdoption pаpers post-hаste. In this wаy he аcquired three of his children. He аlso hаs а glowing letter of encourаgement from Mother Teresа. If I hаd а letter from Mother Teresа, I would totаlly submit it аs one of my three letters of rec every time I аpplied for а job.)

Drаgon Slаyers is bаsicаlly Rаndаll’s аpologiа for his personаlity disorder. A Drаgon Slаyer is someone like Rаndаll: someone who аctuаlly enjoys being аngry. Someone thаt’s аngry thаt not enough people аre аngry. Someone who аctuаlly loves being hаted. Someone who usuаlly hаd dаddy issues like Rаndаll’s, аnd now wаnts to go down in kаmikаze flаmes, crucified upside-down (”ok, now form а gаuntlet аnd punch me in the stomаch!”), usuаlly for а good cаuse.

Thаt Rаndаll reckons honestly with the pаthologicаl origins of his weirdness mаkes this book sort of аwesome. I need to write one аbout people like me.

Drаgon Fuckers.

———

Concerned public: don’t worry, I replaced all the “a”s in this post with a Cyrillic letter that looks exactly like an “a.” Google searches for “Rаndаll Terry” won’t find this. 

I came to this book because I wanted to learn about status and working people over. I’ve been contemplating existence and essence and true natures and invisible forces all my life. I’m proud of that. Wouldn’t trade it for anything. But at the end of the day, if you can’t talk to people, get respect, and get your way in the world, your big important philosophical ideas won’t change anything. I need muscles, and skills, and money. And a gun.

So. About status. Johnstone says that basically all human interaction is about status competitions. People who try to do improv acting without knowing this aren’t convincing. Once you frame everything in terms of tacit status battles, though, your character comes alive. I lose status battles. I cede ground to devils and imbeciles because I think it’s the right thing to do. This chapter taught me a little bit about how to play the game, and I’m going to start doing it, for my survival.

So when I finished the early section titled “status”, I thought the rest of the book was going to be a waste of my time. Instead, it blew up my soul. Impro is a Taoist manual on creativity, education, and the subconscious. Education ruins us. Adults are atrophied children. Tapping into our true creative selves, abused as we are, sometimes requires the use of magic, hypnosis, trance. Johnstone’s students are taught that masks have powers, and do “mask work,” which is this bizarre kind of improv training based on Indonesian and Haitian rituals. Students become posessed. They can do things they couldn’t before. They don’t have to act characters, because they are the characters. Of course the masks are just pieces of wood, but so long as students believe in the masks, they can be unabashed, subconscious flowing, creative, free. Sometimes afterwords they remember nothing.

Amazing book. It has shown me a place that I would like to be able to get to, creatively. In other words, come over to my house and let’s paint each other’s faces and do freaky stuff.

Lihan Li sort of reminds me of Nathan. He has a trolling sense of humor. You laugh because the joke was so fucking stupid, and not because it was funny.

Lihan’s poems are like retarded YouTube comments, except that every third poem or so has something actually beautiful and profound in it.

The shifts are jarring.

Also, this book taught me to bee myself.

Yes, Ken is blogging a very obviously self-published cheesy-looking book on sex. He is doing this because Patri Friedman tweeted about it, and Patri Friedman is a god.

The Married Man Sex Life Primer, or MMSLP, looks at marriage and sex in a game theoretic, pick-up artist way, through the lens of evolutionary psychology. There are some very interesting ideas.

The author proposes that the motivations that we consciously ascribe to our sexual actions are largely false, and that we’re really mostly governed by immutable subconscious forces which we rationalize. We can’t make ourselves want someone sexually anymore than we can make ourselves hungry. The result is that if your spouse has a higher sex rank than you, her paleocortical “Body Agenda” dictates that she shouldn’t loan the uterus out to your genes for nine months, during which time she might get a chance to reproduce with someone with a higher sex rank. After a little laundering in conscious rationalization, this comes out as “I have a headache,” or “I’m tired.”

What is sex rank? It’s your doability score on a scale of one to ten. A man’s sex rank is derived via super-complicated multivariate subconscious equation, taking into account physical stature, brawn, leadership, courage and risk-taking, wealth, intelligence, social status, and a whole lot of other stuff that’s convenient when you’re a social and carnivorous species locked in a genetic arms race against snakes.  A woman’s sex rank has to do with youth and beauty.

The author proposes that if a couple’s sex ranks fall out of step with each other to the tune of two or more points on a scale of one to ten, the marriage will head towards sexlessness. Sexlessness being clinically defined as once a month or worse.

The concept of the “fitness test” was probably the most fascinating thing in the book. Female spiders will make their potential mates go through an elaborate dance to prove that their genes are worth fusing with. Female humans have their own subconsciously employed fitness test, the author says, that they use to ping a prospective mate’s social standing. It’s this:

“Hey, will you do all the chores tonight?”

“Sure!”

{next night}

“Will you do all the chores tonight while I flatulate and eat cheetoes?”

“Of course honey!” 

{next night}  

“Will you do all the chores, and wipe my ass, and feed me cheetoes? How come you never bring me flowers? You should bring them without having to be asked, just because you love me.”

“Coming right up! Hey, can we have sex?”

“I have a headache.”

A man’s submission, particularly to absurd requests, is an indicator of his low value, dog pack-wise. (And Ken became enlightened, and all of American modern marriages began to make sense.) The solution? Slap that bitch. Turn things around. Will it piss her off? Sure. Oh, she’ll hate it. And become more physically responsive, for completely unrelated reasons.

I do have some criticisms of this book. It veers off-topic because the author wants to impress you with every cute thing he’s ever said or every cool sex move he’s ever tried. It also seems to be written to save people whose sex lives are failing, and has less information for people who are winning the game and just want to win harder.

I have been inspired to try to up my sex rank, though. Hopefully, this will ultimately bring me two points above Megan, completely de-stabilize my marriage, and ensure that I never have sex again.

I was recently at a bar with a guy who in a sense “does philosophy” professionally. A lot of folks working in the Bay Area salad bar of would-be world changing “institutes” style themselves as “rationalists.” I tend to like these people. Anyhow, after about the third beer, I let slip the fact that I’m not a rationalist. “Then what are you?”, he asked.”

“A happy-ist.”

A Guide to the Good Life is a dry history of Stoicism followed by nuts-and-bolts manual on Stoic happiness. It’s not poetically or inspiringly written. It’s doctrinally neutral. It’s just about mind-hacks to make you happy. These range from simple Alchoholics Anonymous-type observations that make you say “fffffuuuuu, I mean of course it’s true, but are there actually people who don’t know that?” to shit that will probably change my life.

As a practicing happy-ist—hitherto very much a hedonist—attachment and a certain obsession with fame and approval have been real motherbitches to me, making my highs higher, and my lows desolate. I think this book may have the goods to cure me of that, if I’m brave enough to take the medicine.

In 2010 I learned that although I don’t have any problems reading books, I tend to avoid writing blog posts about them. You would think a good solution to that would be to stop being so lazy, but that’s just not me. In the spirit of my laziness, the first book I’ve read in 2011 is one that I already wrote a post about in 2010. Not only am I not going to write about it again, I’m also too lazy to look up the link to the previous post. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting year.

One of my failed New Year’s resolutions for 2009 was to learn the Factor programming language. I feel like I’m a smart guy, programming-wise, but nobody would know it because all I use is the easy stuff. It’s like trying to be a bad-ass street racer with a 15 year old Oldsmobile. In 2010 I decided to do one better than Factor, and learn its archaic and more machiney grandparent, FORTH.

The author of Starting FORTH  is famous for its sequel, Thinking FORTH. It’s sort of a Hobbit/Lord of the Rings affair, where the first one is cutesy and easy, and the second shatters people’s worlds and has become a household word.

Starting FORTH was a game-changer for me, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn programming (though if you’re not so concerned with writing fast artificial intelligences from scratch, and you actually want a job, Learn To Program is an extraordinary way to learn Ruby as a first language.) The book is illustrated with cartoons and explanations of such insulting simplicity that I would be shocked if anyone I know could read it and not get a grip on the language.

The language itself is very close to the machine level, so that you create your Khet program by swapping, duplicating, adding, and removing integers from the stack. There’s something mysterious and holy about that to me, and I think there always will be. Something about the way that an unthinking pattern of ones and zeros, magnetically recorded onto a tape, can become intelligent, and maybe even conscious, points for me to the mysteries of information theory, and the logos, and God.