Dominic
This book reads like a smoky, late night dorm room conversation on “how culture is just a myth” or some similarly thought provoking topic. Not that culture isn't a myth, but explaining this in a history book requires a more rigorous explanation than Sapiens offers in its breezy narrative.
It's a fun read but demands the reader take breathtaking leaps in the causal chain to move through 200,000 years of history and anthropology in 400 pages. Stepping us from A to Z means making sure B, C, J, O, and X are all accurate and scientifically sound. This book doesn't do that. Sapiens asks us to imagine what early farmers were thinking and extrapolate theories of why the current social order is shaped the way it is. It asks us to cherry pick single examples from civilizations thousands of years ago to explain all of Homo Sapien motivation. Worse yet, the author intersperses ethical judgement throughout, leaving me to wonder how much of the research is motivated by his own worldview.
If you are along for Harari's ride then I can imagine the view is fantastic. If you want to make a stop along the way and ask a few questions, there's no time.
A great treatise on philosophical materialism and evolutionary psychology, Wilson attempts to settle some existential questions with biology. Also interesting was the call for a dialogue or collaboration between the humanities and the sciences - what physicist Sean Carroll calls “poetic naturalism”. The sciences need the stories and meaning-making of the humanities and the humanities need empirical evidence.
Setting out to define what is Islam, and what it means to be Islamic, is an act of interpretation. It is the history of meaning, of revelation, of text, pretext, and context. Ahmed does a great (albeit scholarly) job of describing this process. How do muslims parse the paradox of seeking Truth and following Law? How can Islam contradict itself while remaining cohesive?
He uses Islamic wine-drinking to illustrate these points and trace distinctions between the many aspects of Islam. Is it Islamic to drink wine? I'm not sure now. I would ask: Is it Vegetarian to eat fish? There is both a law (or at least literal definition) as well as ethos and culture associated with both. Is civil disobedience American? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Can you be an Atheist and truly appreciate Sufi poetry? The aesthetics and revelation are intertwined yet distinct.
As with all cultures and systems of thinking it is a swirling interplay of upholding perceived values, literalism, tradition, and identity. He claims to not fall into the tautology of “Islam is what muslims do/Muslims do what is Islamic” but I'm not so sure at times. It's hard to exhaustively delineate all of this contradiction without some amount of self-reference.
And of course almost all of this hangs on the hook of supernaturalism. I would argue after reading this tome that Islam is not philosophically materialist. A common thread that runs through the religion of Islam, the culture of Islam, the Law of Islam, and views of Islam is a recognition of transcendence. Ali A. Rizvi, author of ‘Atheist Muslim' might disagree, but ‘What Is Islam' seems to make a strong case.
I come back to this book from time to time whenever I get interested in sound art, but it's never as juicy as I think it should be. I don't mind dense theory, but Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts is too vague and too opaque to hold my interest for long. There are very good chapters such as “The Parameters of All Sound”, which touches on inaudible Fluxus work, but others have little to do with auditory phenomena at all. Paint dripping on canvas? Language virus? I don't think so. There's the obligatory discussions of Cage, Black Mountain College, musique concrète, futurism, and experimental soundtracks, but little to do with actual Sound Art from artists coming out of a visual arts tradition who collage and arrange audio as their primary medium. Too much Wagner and not enough Whitehead for my taste.
I have to give this 4 stars only because of the dystopian future my 19 month-old apparently finds on the final page. Spoiler alert: after several pages of various cars and trucks making car and truck sounds (driven by people), the denouement of the series is a sleek, self-driving car asking “where you'd like to go today”. My son, after spending a solid 3 minutes pretending daddy is driving mama in a taxi and a monster truck is jumping amazing piles of dirt, is disturbed by the cold lack of humanity presented by the “car of the future”. I'm prepared to accept that my performance of the car's voice is a contributing factor to his malaise, but I suspect there is more here. Ultimately, it is the awkward juxtaposition of engine sounds with the final spoken word that is uncanny. It must be like reading a book about various interesting people and then finally encountering a robot that is programmed to be a father but yet is just a talking lawn mower. I sympathize with his refusal to engage with the “car of the future”, even though I am fascinated with it. After all, the taxi, the jalopy, the monster truck, the police car, the race car... none of these vehicles demand to know where you are going. As the title states: Cars. Go. The “car of the future” does not “Go”. It only asks where you would ‘like' to go, but does not actually take you there.
I read this book years ago, but for whatever reason I'm seeing it pop up on a daily basis right now. Maybe it was featured on some prominent TV show or something. Anyway, it's a good excuse to tell the world why I didn't really like it. I don't mean other people shouldn't like it, only that I found this book roughly in the same category as The Secret or literally anything by Deepak Chopra.
Her advice has all of the efficacy of these New Age or self-help gurus. That is to say, it's pages of empty platitudes with not nearly enough meaty tips for actually decluttering. It would be like writing a book on changing careers and simply rephrasing “follow your passion” over and over. Or perhaps a diet book that tells you only to eat things that are green. I mean, yeah, that would probably work for enlightened beings on a different plane of spiritual awareness, but not for most of us.
If you are like me, you aren't a hoarder and have no actual problem letting go of legitimate clutter. However clutter happens and you need real strategies for mitigating the mild chaos it produces. You need helpful tips for how to not let a drawer full of dead pens and batteries accumulate. You want solid advice for container and shelving solutions or how best to manage recycling. You want to know helpful tactics for telling your spouse the thing they want to keep doesn't actually spark joy in your life.
This book is just not that. It is for people who strive to live in an empty room save for a single desk with a favorite pen and moleskine notebook full of things they want to throw out next. This is the kind of book that helps you for exactly one week and then it's right back to junk mail piling up on the coffee table the moment life becomes more hectic than the state of transcendence you were in while reading the book.
Decluttering is about regular trips to Goodwill, the recycling center, and the landfill. It's about having a place for everything, whether it sparks joy or not. It's about spending 15 minutes a day cleaning up rather than waiting to do a massive Spring cleaning that never comes. Much like getting in shape, it's about consistency and not freaking when there is a setback. This book offers little of that and offers far too much weird animism and advice for folks who already have their shit together.
Waited for weeks to get it at the library. Checked it out first day. Forgot it at The Mill. Remember leaving it on the bar. Enjoy the free discard, Mill person. I am the 2nd bad man.