Hilm

I seem to highlight fewer stuff from this book than the earlier two books, but the last essay, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem points out how Popper and Bayes are connected:

Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules.

This is probably the first book that I read that has an asexual main character, which I really like, although my impression of the character is kind of a laminated cardboard: he's stiff and aloof. Maybe it's too stereotypical?

The other main character, Arthur is a demisexual. His character is more fleshed out with a backstory and everything, but it bothers me that he who had been a very capable organizer became practically useless in organizing a funeral right after Martin showed.

But this was still a very enjoyable read–a really quick one too.

This is a very readable, well-researched study on the Batak land. I learned three different things for my various levels of interest:

- general interest: chapter 6 is especially Illuminating as it deals with the ‘encroachment' into the Batak land by the Padri and shortly after, the missionaries, who bring with them the colonial might. As an Indonesian I know Sisingamaraja is a national hero but I had never learned why he was one. What was his motive of fighting against the Dutch, and was it really just the Dutch or Christianity? The author noted that it may not be easy for Batak scholars to accept that Sisingamaraja also fought against Christianity, given that modern day Batak population are Christians themselves.

(On a related note, the plight of early day Batak Christians would lend their story well to a Shusaku Endo's Silence style of religious persecution story.)

- academic interest: the Batak mission built schools, but it was often hard to convince people to send their children to school. There's one note about how the missionaries in the early days had to hold a feast with a water buffalo slaughter before the local chiefs deigned to send just four boys to be educated in their school.


- personal interest: I learned about the Batak creation myth.. which sadly lacks dragons. It does revolve around marriages, which befits the book's really major theme: gender relations. (And this is how I learned about “magigi” and “mahilolong”.) if my academic interest had been on gender/marriages in Indonesian culture this book is definitely an invaluable resource.

Giving up at page 106, I wasn't engaged with the mystery—the death of an Iranian filmmaker. Maybe if I had been more familiar with Iran history a lot of the background info dump would have felt richer in texture, but otherwise it felt so heavy and the excerpts of the letters in every other chapters didn't manage to raise the intrigue for me.

It has some genuinely good points, but it's too preachy for my liking. The use of expletives wind down past the first chapter, but I don't know if that made it better or worse.

I read:
- For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business by Seymour Krim
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- Split at the Root by Adrianne Rich

I read Krim's essay because I thought reading about other people reflecting on their own failures would uplift me. But Seymour Krim, “At 51, ... I've published several serious books. I teach at a so-called respected university.” He taught at Columbia and Iowa. In this day and age, getting a[n academic] job? And thinking of himself as a failure? This turns out to be just another woe-is-me that I had little patience for.

James Baldwin's essay was interesting, because it was so angry. Mainly to his father, “On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.”

I had never read Baldwin before, but I've heard of the praises others heaped on his work [Adrienne Rich, a dozen pages later: “In the 1950s, I had read all kinds of things, but it was James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir who had described the world–though differently–in terms that made the most sense to me.”], so my expectation was high. Too high.

Adrienne Rich's essay stayed in my mind for days. The subtitle was, “An Essay on Jewish Identity.” She began, “For about fifteen minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary. These are stories I have never tried to tell before.” I'd like to write an essay like this.

“In a long poem written in 1960, I described myself as ‘Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, Yankee nor Rebel.' I was still trying to have it both ways: to be neither/nor, trying to live with my Jewish husband in the predominantly gentile Yankee academic world of Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Knowing we shared a city this made me more intrigued. She went to Harvard, married a man who later became an economics professor at the university.

“I was married in 1953, in the Hillel House at Harvard, under a portrait of Albert Einstein. My parents refused to come. I was marrying a Jew, of the ‘wrong kind' from an Orthodox Eastern European background. My father saw this marriage as my having fallen prey to the Jewish family, Eastern European division. Like many women I knew in the fifties, living under a then-unquestioned heterosexual imperative, I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family.”

“By the time I left my marriage, after seventeen years and three children, I had become identified with the women's liberation movement. The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs and her first full-fledged act was to fall in love with a Jewish woman.”

“Some time during the early months of that relationship, I dreamed that I was arguing feminist politics with my lover. I had been, more or less, a Jewish heterosexual woman; but what did it mean to be a Jewish lesbian? ... `Can a Woman Be a Jew?' I saw Judaism, simply, as yet another strand of partriarchy; if asked to choose I might have said: I am a woman, not a Jew. (But, I always added mentally, if Jews had to wear yellow stars again, I too would wear one. As if I would have the choice to wear it or not.)”

“I would have liked, in this essay, to bring together the meanings of anti-Semitism and racism as I have experienced them and as I believe they intersect in the world beyond my life. But I'm not able to do this yet. Nothing has trained me for this. My ignorance can be dangerous to me, and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”

“This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning, for me. It's a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged.”

The book is available at: https://archive.org/details/PhillipLopateTheArtOfThePersonalEssay/

Favorit saya, 1-3: Jamu Sakti (Okto Baringbing & Mogri), T-Rex Gak Bisa Terbang (K. Jati) dan Rixa (Haryadhi). I think I'll buy the next installment just to read the next chapter of Jamu Sakti. T-Rex Gak Bisa Terbang ini kocak: cerita kemampuan lihat masa depan dengan membaca kentang goreng. Tapi cuma one shot. Rixa, dengan latar backstory di Planetarium TIM ini udah jelas lah winning points from me.

DNF at p79 or so because I wasn't feeling it. Maybe I'll come back to it if/when I reread Vicious.

3.5 stars, rounded up. Crisply written but doesn't tell me anything new (and another reviewer here has mentioned the “neutral” tone of the book does it disservice to the message). The gig workers profiled were quite interesting. I finished it in an afternoon.

My favorite bit from this book:

“Describe the strength of that belief.”
“Strong as iron,” I said. “Strong as oak.”
“Iron rusts. Oak burns.”

I read the first three articles:
- The Old House at Home
- Mazie
- Hit on the Head with a Cow

My takeaway is that McSorley's, which is the focus of the first article seems like an interesting place to visit the next time I'm in New York. A quick search on YouTube suggests that the place still exists and open for business.

The writing itself is characteristics of a New Yorker article. It reads tightly, about the people of New York from the time it was written. Ordinary people, local weirdos. Barkeepers, their customs, movie theater workers, homeless folks. No one a biographer would devote years of their lives for.

But I don't deeply care about them, I don't live in New York and surely they're all dead now. The world in the 1930s is very different with the present day, nearly a century later. (The structure of the world could feel the same, but the trappings today are entirely modern.) So I wonder, why am I reading this book? (Also, as the foreword noted, some people who knew the people profiled here thought that these were inaccurate characterization of these individuals, and they were entitled to their opinions.)

Anyway this made me think about Humans of New York (on Instagram? Facebook?) and how HoNY feels very much like a direct kin of this book.

Favorite short story in this collection: Working Woman by Olivia Ho and Life Under Glass by Nghi Vo.

The one story set in alt-Indonesia is interesting (I did not expect a Malin Kundang retelling/remix) with a diverse cast (a Papuan leading an Indonesian airship!) but this made me wonder why present-day borders should even persist in a steampunk alternate history.

Yawla ngapain gw bela-belain namatin buku ini sih. Capek bacanya kebanyakan deskripsi berbunga-bunga.

Reshelved at 34% because I don't enjoy reading stubborn men (Sebastian) unable and unwilling to communicate. Reading other reviews suggests the payoff for sticking it out isn't great, too.

In short, not the lack of education or poverty. Also, not really about religion. Krueger argued for a bit that the lack of civil liberties was a cause of terrorism.

From the Q&A:
Q: I think Indonesia presents an interesting case worth studying. When the Asian economic miracle was going full steam, Indonesia had a kind of Islam which would be called cultural Islam, rather like the situation in Turkey. You would be hard pressed to find fundamentalism in Indonesia before, say, 1994. But when the Asian economic miracle occurred, most of the wealthy left the country, the education system collapsed, and the madrasahs that teach extremist Islam moved in from Yemen. From 1995 onward, Indonesia experienced a rise in fundamentalism. This would support your argument that it is the content of education that is so important. I think Indonesia would be an ideal research vehicle for you because it provides “before” and “after” cases.

A: I appreciate the suggestion. In the second lecture I discuss the world more generally. I could have mentioned earlier that the Palestinians are particularly well educated, but that much of their education tends to be skewed toward religious studies (e.g., Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2002). This, I think, emphasizes that it is the content of education that is relevant.

This book is bad. So bad it ignited a Read Rage so bright, it could have illuminated the entire area of London:

- It opens with an entitled high schooler, demanding a meeting with a faculty. Later we learn that he had a crush on one of the university students, and he wished for her to time-travel in flash time that will allow him to catch up with her in age and surely then she'll want to date him. Interspersed liberally with adolescent lovesick woes of you-are-not-seeing-someone-else-aren't-you-what-does-the-uncultured-american-have-over-me-whose-love-for-you-is-pure.

- People running around in Oxford 2060 trying to catch a person or another for some signatures that they need for forms that they need to file. Haven't they got emails? instant messages? sms? cell phones? So much for being in the future.

- I worked in a research center, and the work could be frantic at times when we need to prepare arrangements to go to the field in some rural villages: booking flights, reserving lodgings, packing clothes. It was necessary, but writing the minutiae of preparation would make for a dull read. Blackout is a dull read.

- The fieldwork is thoroughly unscientific. The historians, clearly ill-trained, would have produced zero primary materials. I imagine the best that they would produce are secondary materials in the form of recollections and commentaries, but no one could check if the inferences and conclusions that they draw (say, on commonpeople's heroism) were intellectually sound because these historians generate no primary source that other researchers can independently verify. This is something they could have done with further iteration of something like a Google glass/Snap glass that records audio and video for later review. But this leads us to..

- Shoddy ethics. The people that they interacted with (“contemps”/contemporaries) had no idea they were being observed as part of a study. There was no way they could consent to the inclusion, and the I can't imagine the deception can be ethically justified.

- The historians are so condescendingly full of themselves just because they came from the future and knew when and where certain events will happen. Even worse, it makes for a really infuriating reading because:

contemps [normal conversation]: XYZ will happen on date XXYY. I believe in the actions of people involved with XYZ.
historian [internal monologue]: poor contemps not knowing what will happen. XYZ will not happen until date XXYY+ZZ. I read it in my preparation research from newspaper article.
contemps [normal conversation, continue to patter on XYZ]
historian [internal monologue continues].

It reads as if the contemps were conversing with a mute that can only think internally. I could tolerate it if this were some Mexican/Indonesian soap opera—but was I wrong to expect something that garners such high praises (Nebula and Hugo) to be a little better than the novelization of soap operas?

And don't get me started about the clueless ambling and endless fretting for the retrieval team. The characters had no initiative and things just happen to them—such empty characters. It does not help that the main conflict of the book (will they be able to go back to the future?) did not really begin until page 200.

It was this that made me knock off one star—I could have given it two stars if this book were a shorter, or that there was some resolution at the end of the first book. I suffered through Blackout and I sure as hell would rather claw my eyes out than having to go through another 500-pages or so of All Clear just to find out what happens to the characters. Who cares if these historians perish in 1940s? Not me.

Largely an okay read, but I am annoyed that the only bi character ends up being the killer.