Quantum brains

Recently finished The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, an Oxford physicist. According to Penrose, the action of the brain is fundamentally different from and cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the working of a deterministic computer. The argument is one I have some sympathy for, though I'm not sure Penrose makes his case completely convincing. Even so, the book is a fascinating trip through issues of computability, determinism, and the mind-body problem that I hadn't considered before.

Most physical laws are deterministic, which means that given the state of a system at one time you can, at least in principle, predict its state for the entire future. But at the quantum level things are a little bit more tricky and certain things (the position of an electron, say) are observed to behave probabilistically. Though most physicists and biologists would argue that quantum effects are not important at the level of human brains, Penrose disagrees and sees this as an opening for the presence of conciousness and free will.

Now may be as good a time as any to reveal that I've started my own blog. I hope no one's offended; it has a different kind of feel from the Crawdad Hole, and I will continue to post here from time to time as I have things to say that seem to fit better here than there.

Hello & Riding the Iron Rooster Review

Greetings to everyone from the newest member of this group. I'm honored to count myself one of the posters to this page. In the spirit of Tree of Valinor's book mandate, I'll begin with a short review of a book I almost finished over Christmas vacation, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux. The fact that I didn't finish it should tell you something. It's a little dated, being over 10 years old, and I found Mr. Theroux's condescending attitude towards his fellow travelers annoying. Whether it was the fat ingorant Americans he began the tour with or the strange, spitting Chinese he spent most of his train time in the company of, it seems like Mr. Theroux had nothing but criticism. In fact, I can't remember a single person he gave an overall positive impression of.

To be fair, travelling is stressful, and sharing a sleeping car with a constantly spitting, loud-talking companion would not be a picnic. And who hasn't had wicked thoughts about people on the bus or in the next cubicle? So we'll give Mr. Theroux points for being honest, and points for writing vivid descriptions of people and places. I will never forget his description of the cold in Harbin. He made me feel it. And any book in which the author spends the majority of his time on steam-driven trains can't be a total loss. Still, in the end, Mr. Theroux's lack of sympathy for his fellow travelers turned me off and allowed me to put the book down before the end. I probably will never pick it back up.

Joseph Loconte has advice for the religious left and the religious right.

New year, new blog posts

Happy new year.

The most recent book I read was a collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray. It has a powerful emotional voice, and interesting believable characters, but nothing really happens in any of the stories, that is to say, the plots are less than gripping. All the stories seemed the same; if I had read only one of them I probably would have really liked it, but as a collection it was a little disappointing.

The other book I want to mention from 2005 is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Definitely a bit more lowbrow than what's typically discussed on this blog, but in terms of reading pleasure it's the best book I've read in a while. It has a real story, a fun story, even if it's not a candidate for the National Book Award.

The Hero and the Crown

Plenty of girls like fantasy novels. “Eowyn” is not in the Social Security Administration's top 1,000 names for any year, so I can't verify this, but I imagine it's rapidly increasing in popularity. And they beefed up Arwen for the Lord of the Rings movies to make another female hero for little girls and young women.

I wonder how I would have related to Aerin of Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown if I had read it earlier in life. I think I would have liked her a lot. She's clumsy, antisocial, bookish—and one of those women who suddenly everyone notices is beautiful.

Why does she have to be beautiful? Do all heroines have to be beautiful? It seems like the author has to play the Miss America game—giving her female character a skill and a talent and a philanthropic interest so that we can tell ourselves we admire her for more than just what we can perceive as she struts across the stage.

It's true that just beauty isn't enough to make us love a character. I like Aerin much more for her stubborn persistence and her endearing awkwardness than for her beauty. I want her to be different from other women. I want her to be the best dragon-killer in the country. I want her to effortlessly slay every foe in her path. But I still want her to be beautiful. I want all the men to desire her in the way that men desire women. I want her to have everything.

So why do I resent the fact that the author felt obliged to make her beautiful? Why do I feel slightly like Robin McKinley has sold out?

One of the few fantasy-type books I've read that has a non-beautiful main character is Till We Have Faces. But that book is different in many other ways. We don't admire the main character for much besides beauty, either. She's not really a hero. She's disturbingly like us. It's a great book. But it's in a different, more psychologically complex genre, I suppose.

I suppose Robin McKinley is not trying to upset the tradition, not trying to make a point about beauty. A book in the classic fantasy genre, if it is to have good female characters, requires them to compete not only with other women but with all men. Aerin's strength and ingenuity set her apart from the other women, and her beauty sets her apart from men.

Blog ground rules

I should be packing. But I thought of a rule that could potentially motivate people to contribute again. Here it is:

You can post about anything. But if you read a book, you have to post about it. It doesn't have to be an elaborate analysis or a book report. It can be as simple as "I just read The Truest Pleasure. So there."

The thing is, you have to post about every book, no matter how embarrassing. To be more than fair, since this happened before I instituted the rule, I recently read Five Paths to the Love of Your Life. Not because I wanted to. It was for mercenary motives. But still, this should make you feel better about whatever you're reading.

How does this sound? Is anyone out there?

Retraction of irritable rant

Eats, Shoots and Leaves has won me over. First of all, I had to get over the author's peevishness (see freethepeeves.com for an admirable campaign against grammatical peevishness). Then I slowly realized that she wasn't offering a systematic philosophy of punctuation. Her main purpose was to entertain, and she was doing a magnificent job of it. "If there is one lesson to be learned from this book," she writes (p. 125), "it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation." What makes her readers love her - no matter what they think of the serial (Oxford) comma - is simply that she cares about these things, and she's very, very funny.

Atkins

Today I drove by a Carl's Jr. and did a double take when I saw that their sign said "Agnus Dei."

Sometimes there is a good reason for a double take. The sign really advertised an "Angus Diet."

Irritable rant about grammar

I have started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am already annoyed with it. There are a lot of people who think that the English language needs to be protected from the people who use it, and they're just wrong. I loathe the slimy and manipulative way she snuggles up to the reader and implies that we are all part of this elite layer of society that understands what no one else understands. It is ironic that she wrote her book for what she thought was such a narrow audience and then it became a mad success. Everyone likes to think they're included in this mysterious secret tribe of sneering grammarians. I'm very curious what she's going to actually do in the book, because the introduction is not promising. I know I should wait until I've finished it before I comment.

self-disclosure

I doubt anyone will feel like reading this whole article (and it's a behemoth of an article), but it is really interesting. It deals with a lot of things I've been thinking about, like the inadequacy of obituaries, and things that I've talked about with some of you, like the audiences we write for, the desire to be known, and the fear of being known. Plus it is enormously relevant to blogging. So here it is.

Mothers and souls

My comment about the kids' souls wasn't so much a condemnation of their actions as a sort of motherly surge of anxiety. It just seemed to me that they were having to face a ton of more disturbing things, and they seemed so young. Part of it was their more mature clothes. You know the thing parents always say, "They grow up too soon!" I don't know where that is coming from in my case, but I just want to protect them. Not that that would do them any good. So it was a strictly emotional comment, not a moralistic one.

To respond to the moralistic critiques, though, I would say that Harry's breaking of the rules is not necessarily laudable but certainly understandable. I think realistic characters are good. I don't know what kind of fiction these conservative fathers read. Probably none.

About the ineffectiveness of the adults, I think that's true to a certain extent. There are seemingly a lot of bumbling adults. But I think a lot of it only results from the kids' refusal to be helped. Dumbledore is just what Harry needs - a powerful person he can trust - but Harry avoids him. He's always afraid to tell him the truth. It is the classic stiff-necked Israelite scenario.

Sirius is an example of an adult with some serious flaws and insecurities. Lupin has some problems, but I think his power is understated. So is Dumbledore's. Understatement is one of the things I most admire about the books. J.K. Rowling is able to let misunderstandings remain for a long time before she corrects them.

Many cities

He left me crying late one Sunday night, outside of Boulder.
He said he had to find himself, out on the road.
- Jo Dee Messina, "Stand Beside Me"

Last time I saw her it was getting colder
But that was years ago.
Last I heard she had moved to Boulder
But where she's now I don't know.
- Garth Brooks, "What She's Doing Now"

The next challenge is to find or write songs that include the names of all the cities I will spend a night in before July is over. They are:

Eugene, Oregon; Chicago; London; Addis Ababa; Mekelle, Ethiopia; and Philadelphia.

Bonus points for including cities where I have a layover: Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam.

Good luck.

Life of Pi

I finished Life of Pi several weeks ago and am just now getting around to responding to popular demand and posting my thoughts about it.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and was glad I read it. The basic setup is that the main character, Pi, and his family are moving from India to Canada and are taking their zoo animals with them; Pi's father is a zookeeper. The ship they travel on sinks in the Pacific, and Pi is left on a lifeboat with zoo animals as his only companions. The book gets a lot of mileage out of the sheer novelty of this. It surprised me how many times it can be funny to see nautical terms and zoo animals in the same sentence, like, "That was a cramped space; between the broad back of the zebra and the sides of the buoyancy tanks that went all around the boat beneath the benches, there wasn't much room left for a hyena."

Martel also tries to get some comic mileage out of having Pi be (or claim to be) Christian, Hindu, and Muslim at the same time. This is occasionally, but only occasionally very funny, and unlike the zoo animals, it doesn't have any real relation to the plot itself. While having a hyena on a lifeboat actually influences the events that take place, having a Hindu aboard apparently does not.

My only complaint is about the ending, which was very disappointing, in that some of the magic of the rest of the book disappears.

Textual explication

Here is the document I mentioned last week, published for the first time ever, at your very own Crawdad Hole:

Textual explication of "The Lion" by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl's "The Lion" is a short lyric poem in iambic pentameter couplets. The length of the poem, four lines longer than a sonnet, expresses Dahl's theme of overturning tradition, subverting the conventional, and escaping quotidian norms.

The poem is addressed to the reader, an unconventional device in adult literature but a perfectly acceptable one to the child reader. This is heavily ironic, since the child to whom the reader expects the poem to speak will be the type of reader most likely to be deeply disturbed by the grim and crushing end.

To overturn or subvert tradition, a writer must first establish the tradition which he or she expects to undermine, and this is glibly done in the modest, unthreatening first couplet. In fact, the conciseness and precision of expression are perfectly worthy of the 17th century's notion of wit. The idea expressed is not new, and is put simply in keeping with its import.

Repetition of the word "tender" in lines 2 and 4 is the first subversive element of the text, hardly noticeable upon a first reading yet influencing the entire mood of the poem. The reader is put in a vulnerable, innocent state of mind, aided as well by the conventional and unassuming couplet noted above.

Lines 5-9 amass culinary references, evoking [change of writer]what are most likely pleasant dining experiences in the mind of the impressionable young child, and setting up the reader to expect a pleasant ending, most likely ending with lion and speaker joining one another in pleasant repast. The fact that the lion refuses the first four scrumptious suggestions is no major impediment; four more suggestions await in lines 11-15. [change of writer] In these lines, though, the character of the inquiry changes. Less food items are proposed in a line, and eliciting information from the lion about its favorite meal becomes more difficult. Also at this point, the speaker is becoming nervous; there are the first direct hints of the shattering ending. Flattery like "lion dear," "lovely steak," and "entice" conjure a mental image of the speaker, in belated recognition, backing away from the lion.

[change of writer] The ominous change from present to past tense in line 15 comes as a bitter shock to the innocent reader. The backing away came too late; the trap is set. Line 14 is the last we hear from the child; it is significant that "rabbit" and "hare," two small, quiet, gentle animals, are offered as the lion's choice of cuisine: Dahl obviously associates the child with the rabbit.

In the final lines, the lion speaks, and we find that we have been subtly prepared for his pronouncement by the depth of imagery which has gone before. Tragic, yet, as all true tragedy, inevitable.

Azkaban

I've never been to a movie before where the audience clapped when the previews ended and it started playing. The audience was really into it. It was quite a pleasure to watch.

The main thing that struck me about the movie was that everything - both characters and cinematography (I hate people who use the word "cinematography," but it really seems to fit here, and I must admit it is pleasurable to join the masses in using the word without any qualifications to speak on the subject) had seemed to take a great leap in maturity. Each little witch or wizard who showed up was fascinatingly different. It reminded me of those 7/11 documentaries or whatever they're called (what are they called?), where they go back and interview the same people every seven years and show what's happened to them. I was annoyed with how stick-thin Hermione was. The kids weren't wearing their school uniforms as much, more of a eurogrunge attire, and some of the scenes were altered in color to produce an artistic effect. It wasn't just the kids who had changed but the whole aesthetic of the movies. I would have to watch the previous ones again, but it seemed to me like there was much more focus on the landscape, the changing seasons. There were visual comments about time everywhere you looked. Of course it's an important element of the plot, but it goes beyond that. Draco Malfoy and the goons had drastically reduced roles; Harry was usually around adults doing very serious things. Hogwarts seemed different from the previous movies. I find myself less worried about all the magic and wizardry that the characters must master, and more worried about the states of their souls as they start becoming adults.