Night Radio by Kim Young
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Her poetry is startling. In any collection there is often a repertoire of stock images particular to a poet. Young is able to step from that and still make poetry that is different from the last.
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Night Radio
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this amazing book, Roger Penrose looks for a very fundamental issue.
He is looking for a single metric to describe everything.
This is not a unit of reality, however, although this is how he poses the issue.
The problem with selecting a metric, as he shows us over and over, lies in how different metrics arise from localizations on various manifolds. As these metrics are extended beyond the localization, the very structure of these metrics will threaten to buckle. In many instances, the metrics (and their attendant relationships) will no longer be applicable. What this means, in the Kantian (and Badiouian sense) is that these relationships’s applicability will become “undecidable”. In some extreme cases, the relationships may even break down. For instance, black holes are a problem because the expressed relationships that emerge from physics experiments prove to be untenable in black holes (and the big bang) as these relationships decohere and infinities and zeros pop out everywhere.
This search for a metric leads Penrose to reject string theory as a viable relationship form. Each dimension is an extension of the 3 + 1 dimensions of space and time. For instance, gravity is a dimension, weak force is a dimension. Each dimension is an independent mathematical vector of a different “inertial” influence. Additionally, the mathematics of string theory, as well as other theories, proves to be too illusionary. As with post-structural critiques of modernism, Penrose points out that the consistency of string theory relies on theoretical supplements/signs that are attached onto the positions of various types in order to maintain coherency. For instance, superpartners, which have no physical correlative. In other words, the mathematical proliferation of dimensions as well as its immanent affects proves to be unweldly to Penrose because the coherence of the relationships are maintained by theoretical enforcement rather than any direct correlation of math and physical experimentation.
If Penrose was familiar with Badiou, Kant and Derrida, he would be able to recognize that the undecideability of supersymmetry and string theory result from these theoretical supplements. The supplements provide the missing pieces to cohere the theory, so physical experiments prove to be incomplete in their testing. As Penrose points out, string theorists in failing to find superpartners can always push the calibration of their theory to include these partners, just at higher energy levels, which can always lie beyond the ability of technology to generate.
In this sense, it seems to me that string theory and supersymmetry are antinomies of the Kantian variety. Penrose falls fault to this when he theorizes that Quantum Field Theory can be modified (rather than the Einstein’s general relativity) by changing the cut off metric. This is in line with all his discussions to “renormalize” the math so as to remove the variance accumulated by extending localized relations from beyond the area of origin on the manifold. We can always enforce a consistency of a given domain in two ways.
1. To provide a “superpartner” to supplement the terms, to keep phenomenon visible to one another within the domain, as a motion of immanence, as Derrida suggests.
Or.
2. To encapsulate a domain by limiting its identity to its other. From there, we can radically reduce the other to zero, thereby hiding the limitations of a domain, as with Moffe & Laulau with their Hegemony or as with Badiou with a basic atomic “cut” to center the domain as with Being and Event II.
Both of these strategies amount to the same kind of forced coherency by mapping a domain rigidly.
Penrose does offer his own favorite solution; his Twistor theory, which removes the need for extra dimensions beyond 3 + 1. Additionally, he considers this theory by collapsing all the different vector differences held cosmically in string theory into immanent relations that are founded on the very “knots” of space, so that the pre-space twistors contain the information that wider “vibrations” are meant to express. Both theories are incompatible in this regard because of their huge difference in scale.
And while Penrose admits that twistor theory adds nothing physically; that it’s just another way of viewing a situation mathematically, he also realizes the need for us to see things differently than we have.
It is this adherence to a particular view that causes all the problems in the first place. If you look at how these different views are constructed, you’ll see the mathematicians switch from one domain to another through various class equivalences whenever it suits them. When they need to express vectors they will jump to a manifold model, or a more generic (abstract) deformation of an algebra. In other words, we lack enough views. So we supplement the one we have in an attempt to normalize them.
Curiousier still is Penrose’s tiny discussion of consciousness in which he attempts to “renormalize” consciousness in terms of objective reduction. He theorizes that the waveform reduction that collapses due to quantum gravity may be at the seat of consciousness’s ability to complexly surject different sensory views into coherency. This suggestion is of the same kind as his forced synthesis of twistor theory. The satisfaction of trying to find a single metric, a single complex knot of relations that cannot be unraveled but contains all the “moves” is like a physicist trapped on a chess board recognizing the orthogonal formation of board, or as in Futurama the Professor discovering the smallest unit that constitutes the universe is the pixel.
In a real way, Penrose seeks to calibrate physics to the mathematical domain. He doesn’t want beautiful math that doesn’t apply, that is in excess of physics. This is why he creates that chart twice, in which the mathematical is the Truth of which the entirety of the physical is mapped; although mentality is generated from the physical and mathematical/Truth is generated from that.
The Platonic ideologue he insists on lies on the equivalence of function, on the purity of the sameness of process from point to point of the same type. Never-mind that the subatomic particles we find today are largely generated from artificial means. Penrose would assume as sameness of process that forces a universalization, but that is the way metaphysics and science both work, to equate different phenomenon as being identical based on narrow definitions of rational equivalence. This may work in some areas, but as we see, all relations are born locally, within a limited scope. Their extension cosmically creates the basis for which we start to see a degradation of relation qua variance (pollution, or various forces of form-fitting). After all, we can have no irrationality without first being able to posit a rational sheet of complete consistency.
Nonetheless, although this is a lengthy book it is still beautifully written. I wonder who Penrose’s audience is, for he approaches much mathematical complexity in such a short time, talking about basic principles like polynomials and trigonometry before jumping into Lagrangian manifolds and so on. Still, if you hunger for complexity and abstraction, here it is. Much of his explanations of very complex concepts are very clear, although at times we could use more handholding. His pictures are also very interesting and complement his point nicely.
Well worth the effort to read.
Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp by C.D. Payne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
At first I didn’t like this book. It’s loud and ridiculous. Human natures and exaggerated, especially the narrator’s. But even still, it took me about 150 pages before I understood. This is a mixture of National Lampoon and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or as a book, maybe Bruno and Boots. I look at this like an 80’s teen movie in which a teen is ridiculous, overly manipulative and yet able to pull it off. His schemes blow up in his face. Only there’s no moral here. This is pure entertainment. There’s nothing to be gained. No moral. Just the desire for ranchy teenage sex. The craziness this goes is a little too far, exaggerated. But that’s part of the fun. In a way, I dislike the ending. It wraps too cleanly, the triumph of manipulative borderline sociopathy! If only freedom was gained so easily.
The only thing missing is the hardest part; that Nick Twisp learns his lesson; and in a way he does. He transforms himself; he could no longer be himself. He sheds his mortal skin yet remains in essence himself.
Good to read. But somehow I missed the initial set-up, that this was to be an extended jaunt, though the final moment is a Republican utopia, in which the private life remains beholden as private, even while public life may be criminal, entrepreneurial and otherwise distorted. Very 80s conservative.
Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory
Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory by Howard Lasnik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I used to really enjoy universal grammar.
I thought it a very meaningful activity when I was in grad school. Now, it’s a little over a decade later. I find this work insular, and pedantic. Academic. Really, functional categorization is used to overlay what words are. According to these categorizations, we then expect certain syntactic regularities to follow. This is what is universal about all humans, so Chomsky’s work goes.
This is problematic though, because there is no predictive qualities about this grammar, only the consistency of whatever rational assumptions/rules we have decided. Tests often yield a messiness that needs to be calibrated for, so new rules are made and realigned.
What is the point of finding UG? What is the point of having a perfect generative syntax? Artificial intelligence? Political alignment that we are no different from each other? Easier learning of different languages? It’s unclear. But this rationalism is an outgrowth that originates from the excesses of scientisim.
There are plenty of very intelligent people who participate in these kinds of studies. The attempt to create a rational mirror to language really only highlights how irrational we really are. The adaptation of specific contexts is what determines rational consistency. Any particular organization as a generative binding can provide this consistency. This seems to me to be very telling of the kind of spontaneous and creative creatures we are.
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A collection of interesting essays by David Foster Wallace. Congruent with his position as a postmodernist, he explores these points of view by turning them around on themselves. At times kind of cynical but also ironic, Wallace is most successful when he is able to resolve this difference by finding an internal consistency. The last essay for example, “Host” he is able to resolve the issues of radio shock-jocks in the 90s working for Republican agendas and big business by focusing on the DJ himself. Likewise as with his following the McCain campaign trail. I suppose that is the only ending note, as it provides the only structural stability in his quest to detour the subject matter via a differentiation of point of view.
There is much to recommend here. We see a sensitive author in seek of stable subject matter. In essence, questioning the phenomenon here, by changing views and “considering” various different ways of seeing the lobster, be it historical, personal, biological, economic and so on. His writing is easy to read, interesting and funny, at times, though it can be annoyingly tongue in cheek, as when he makes up words. Still, that’s okay. Wallace seems more playful than he is in search of the Truth and that seems okay, as ultimately he recognizes this is up to whoever (the reader, the author, depends) anyway.
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here we have the exemplary stories of the use of submarines in the cold war as spying devices for the soviets. Undergriding this story is a celebration of American rationality and ingenuity in the face of bureaucracies and their financial vehicles in attempting to control cost. There is also no small celebration of the key heros in this story as they attempt to do what is right for the American people.
It’s interesting this was matched by the Soviet’s ability to infiltrate American society and get their own spy ring, collecting American secrets through good ‘ole fashioned spying than as Americans had with their tech.
This book does some good at separating the seamanship from the politics, as it tries to tell the Soviet side and relate it to the American side. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, we see a struggle of the Navy on both sides to keep their budgets by justifying it through each other’s armaments.
I suppose if we take the lesson seriously, it would be that institutional inertia counts more for technological innovation than political needs. Often though, as with intelligence agencies and the military the three are intertwined although we may seek to find one “running the show” more than the other two. Strangely, this book, in taking the military’s point of view for the individuals who risk their lives as uncelebrated heros for the intelligence community, would also point out much of the interference of the navy came from the intelligence community’s attempts to ask for the impossible. Not understanding tech and its current situation limits tech as much as it grows it.
There is no real sense of progress that can be found as production is neutral to progress even as progress relies on production.
All in all, an entertaining book to read, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was able to be more patriotic. But in a way the America and USSR of the cold war era is a different world/America than the one I know now. Information wars today are played out in a different field than one of submarines tapping phone lines. It’s much more likely this tapping would be done through internet servers than anything else. One day we will get a book on hackers working for the government.
That would be a very interesting read, much more than this, although the glimpse into this disappearing world has also been of great interest.
God Emperor of Dune
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After the first three books of Dune, I was unsure of what else Herbert could do. In a way, this is a new beginning, one that is able to adequately build from the first three and yet usher in the end of a given line. Herbert is brilliant as he grasps the very beginnings of the series and is able to draw a line to this fourth installment so that its conclusion shifts the first three texts and makes room for this fourth.
The dialogue as always, as is his political and social thoughts, magnificent in their brevity. Stunning in their conciseness. Herbert proves himself a statesmen in his understanding of the human animal.
Like the other books, the mysteries of the future guide the grievances of the past. In this however, Leto II in his 3000 year reign, finds the presence of the future to be very much on his thoughts as it shapes his actions. I found puzzling his easy acceptance of the present, his readiness to die, and also his generous understanding of the troubles of the future. In this, Leto II seems too willing to allow the horrid creature he has become to mismatch the humans around him. He builds himself up to hide the monstrosity he has become. This seems like a blindspot, but I am sure that Herbert will find a way to patch this in the next book.
In a way, with each text, Herbert is able to outline the increased requirement for clarity of purpose, one that exceeds a general lifespan. In a way, the demand he outlines for his characters, in this case, shown by the mechanizations of Leto II on his descendants, lies in educating them about the nature of their own rational being by subjecting them to the rigor of discovering who they are and how they can exist with their place in humankind.
Herbert has thus designed a mythic-o fascist state for the Empire of Leto II, one that exceeds terrestrial bounds by keeping humans savage, ignorant and calibrated for continual furtherance of the species. In this case, the militarization of women, not only as a force of socialization but also as breeders. For his own end, Leto II has kept his family as a nobility to be educated as administrators to keep humankind on the narrow path of continuance.
Perhaps not ironically, this aristocracy of a split humanity in which we have the keepers who service the ignorant commoners so the commoners can remain ignorant and live their lives in human perpetuance mirrors our current situation now, as we have administrators who form a government in bureaucratic perpetuance and the worker bees who continually struggle to maintain their slippery hold in the economy as workers stratified along technologically driven lines of production.
Herbert again has highlighted in stasis what it means for us to be an organized people. This horrific vision of Leto II is intuitively against our sense of humankind as a people reaching self enlightenment. In this vision, only a few are able to see the trap of being one of the nobility is one that is tied to a servicing of a mob that is too ready to believe in the stupid myths of their own service, when in fact they are the ones that have the ability for change. This dialectic reversal is the fear (and hope) that has driven politics of the 19th century founding both fascism and marxism kinds of revolution in the early 20th century. So far, Herbert has traced our development into this 4th text into the stagnation of today, in which production and abundance rules as the imagery by which we are all enslaved.
The Stranger
The Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
One of the remarks of existentialism has do with how we conduct ourselves for ourselves among others who would rather we behave differently for them.
Camus here writes about an alienated man, one who is unable to come to know himself but for whom others, and their desires for how life should be, cannot fully pull him in either.
This man is a stranger to himself as he is a stranger to others. He reserves meaning for his own actions and he cannot answer in a socially acceptable way for himself or others for his own existence and his own actions. In being so selfish, he finds peace and happiness to realize himself, even as he is to be executed.
He does not own his actions. But he does minimally behave in others’ worlds. Spoken another way, he is a torsion in their localized existence and as such, must be eliminated. He is a subjectivity, one who becomes self aware for himself in himself. In a kind of highschool (Ernest Hemmingway kind of sense), Camus suggests this to be the greatest crime of all.
Taoist Sexual Meditation: Connecting Love, Energy and Spirit
Taoist Sexual Meditation: Connecting Love, Energy and Spirit by Bruce Frantzis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Taoism is founded on flow. It’s origins are mysterious but the bookish librarian Lao Tzu attained an understanding of flow after working for an Imperial household. In his retirement, he sought to exit civilization. A gatekeeper bade Lao Tzu to write down what he knew. Those writings became the Tao Te Ching. While there is evidence that Taoism is much older than that; that fragments of the Chuang Tzu were available before, Taoism has always been about the flow of life energy. It is no mistake that a human understanding of flow would be split into two energies that are sexualized; yin and yang. Female and male. Taoism gave rise to a host of other practices, from medicine, martial arts, meditation, feng shui, architecture, astrology and so on. All of it connected through these energies. So it’s no mistake that there would be a sexual component to Taoist practice which emphasizes the intermix of energy.
A huge part of Taoist mastery of its technology involves the focus and release of various kinds of energy, so that we can flow with effortless will to a changing and tempestuous context. It seems that enlightenment would be the awakening of meta-energic abilities. In a sense, much of meditation and its machinic practice is like the calibration of various machines to emphasize technical aspects — such as a bit parity check or testing each part of a muscle for its strength and dexterity. Being able to move effortlessly across a given field is analogous to mastery of a musical instrument — so that the practitioner can run across the scales and play various patterns inside outside and upside down. Only in this area, it’s moving energy: releasing and collecting it, focusing and patterning it from yourself to your partner and back. Once the field can be made smooth and awareness is gained though the technology of these techniques is one then ready for a higher plane of existence.
While at first grasp, this may appear to be a matter of various bodily poses, massages and internal awarenesses of focus, this book also talks about how these energies and their attendant blockages are bound karmatically, expressed in energy. The two for Taoism are the same. What we do, what we strive to do and how we effect others largely requires that even out and free up the flow between ourselves and others around us. Not to disturb others as nodes of flow but to compliment them. To interact with them at a mutually beneficial level, the most foundational of which would be this energetic state in which people can interact in terms of energy. The root of this would be at the most intimate, sexual practice — although spoken of in the tradition of Taoist China.
While much of the book is on specific practice and poses, in a way these techniques are beyond the scope of what a book form media can do. Actual practice requires a teacher. So this is a very basic text, much of which is designed in its brief 500 pages, to introduce us to the philosophy of how to contextual what we are doing and why we ought to do it. The how is mentioned but it is less expressible in a book form. Bruce Frantzis is clear and precise. I suppose it’s important to write a book to distribute knowledge but given that much of what he talks about is praxis that requires the guidance of a teacher, I wonder if the purpose of this book is to signal to others to get students more than it is to write a book that could in any way ever be complete unto itself.
Chester Alan Arthur (The American Presidents, #21)
Chester Alan Arthur by Zachary Karabell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In a way, Arthur had not very much to fight for or against as the Gilded Age was in full swing. Yet he rose to the occasion. It makes sense that as a party man who kept to himself, was likeable and caused no controversy, that history should forget him. Yet it is because he had those characteristics that he was chosen as a placeholder for vice-president. When Garfield was assassinated, we did not know what kind of President Arthur would be — as he was a nonentity. Yet he proved to be the correct president for the times, one with a moral backbone. It is because he had that moral backbone however, that others in power sought to utilize him as their right hand man. He did not serve Conkling, as he went for VP without Conkling. And he did not serve the Republican party. He served America, thinking that America was best served by the Republicans. As president, he stood against corruption, although he rose through corruption. In that sense, he most likely was not introspective as a man, but merely did the best he could in the time that he had. Any presidential candidate seeking to reform or further their interests, to take a stand for something, would have had a hard time getting to Presidential office. The following president, Grover Cleveland made it his mark to stand against corruption. And for that, Arthur proved to be ahead of his time.
This author credits Arthur as being the president to help transform our American government from a rewards system for party goers to a bureaucracy that can administrate policy; in a sense, laying the groundwork for technocrats and the perpetuation of the economic administration as a different layer of government from politics qua corruption.
This of course, will lead to business corrupting administration, but that’s an entirely different topic.
