I’m no fan of eBooks; I do still enjoy reading printed text on a physical slab of dried wood pulp. But it’s comments like the one above that almost inspire me to throw all of my book onto a 451-degree bonfire, shell out the $400 for Amazon’s new Kindle device, and rebuild my library out of zeroes and ones.

What, honestly, is the ontological difference between drops of ink on paper and “pixels” on a screen? It is an aesthetic difference, to be sure, but nothing prevents either from being “read, understood, etc.”. Those things “we still call words” are words if they are produced on a press, displayed on a screen, or scrawled in sand along a beach. They mean exactly the same thing regardless of medium or form.

Now, certainly, form can contribute to meaning. A sculpture is entirely different from a photograph of a sculpture. But for the letter-writer, is the only way to truly understand Madame Bovary, then, to read Flaubert’s original hand-written manuscript? Or would a first edition printed book suffice? What about a modern Penguin paperback? Those are all forms of “text”, but they each have different weights and sizes, use different typefaces, and have different cover art. I infer from her screed that those physical attributes are somehow important to understanding the meaning of the work. Or are all those variations minor and insignificant provided the text of the book is not “turned into pixels”?

Again, I like books. I think books are great. But Assistant Professors who commit egregious epistemic fallacies in prestigious popular magazines really get my dander up!

When I was in sixth grade, my best friend, Ed, discovered a strange book on the shelves of our school’s library — Fungus the Bogeyman.

Fungus is a graphic novel (aka comic book) by Raymond Briggs that depicts the life and existential angst of a Bogeyman named Fungus, who dwells beneath the earth in Bogeydom with his wife, Mildew, and his son, Mould. Bogeys prefer dank, wet, filthy things and their main job is venturing to the surface to scare humans via making things go “bump” in the night, rattling doorknobs, or popping out from behind trees. Left to themselves, however, they are quiet, gentle creatures with a rich culture and history that the book describes in vivid detail.

Ed and I poured over the book and its detailed drawings and humorous descriptions of Bogey life. We could scarcely believe that a school library would stock such a book as it appeared to have very little educational value and was chock full of disgusting grossness and frank topics such as Bogey anatomy (the females have three breasts) and their various unsanitary habits.

But underlying the book’s attempts to make the reader squeamish, there is a touching story of one Bogey’s attempt to make sense of his life.

I bought a copy of my own a few years ago, and showed it to Ray a while ago but it was way too advanced for him. We recently started reading it together again, however, and he loves it. He doesn’t seem at all bothered by the scenes showing a Bogeyman creeping into people’s houses; he takes it all in stride. He’s even taken to pretending to being a Bogey and likes to make scary noises and tries to frighten me and Amy.

I didn’t appreciate this back in sixth grade, but in re-reading the book to my child I am pleased by the total and complete lack of any supernatural or religious content. Here we are dealing with a Bogey on the verge of losing his way in life, who is seeking the answers to the great answers of where he came from, why he does what he does, and what does it all mean. Given the rich and detailed mythology Briggs builds for his Bogeys, it would have been easy to construct a theology for them that would neatly wrap everything up, but he does not do so. Fungus seeks answers not via believing in imaginary sky-fathers or the promise of a glorious life after death, but in the simple pleasures of poetry, a good glass of slime, and the enjoyment of poking sleeping humans with his Bogey-stick. And, importantly, he does not find concrete answers in the end … not because he’s looking in the wrong places, but because concrete answers are not easy to come by and may not even exist.

In looking stuff up for this post, I learned that there was a live-action movie version of Fungus the Bogeyman made a few years ago, The reviews I’ve seen are lukewarm at best, but I stuck it in my Netflix queue anyway.

Yesterday, I arrived at the Dean’s office a few minutes early for a meeting so I ducked into an empty cubicle to inhale some lunch. I found the pictured stack of books on the cubicle’s desk.

(click for a larger version)

For those photographically-challenged amongst you, the titles of the books I found were:

Chairing the Academic Department
The Academic Chairperson’s Handbook
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

What the hell kind of College are they running, anyway!?

Coincidently, one of the topics at the meeting I was going to concerned training new academic department chairs. I mentioned the pile of research I had spied in the cubicle, which drew a big laugh. I then suggested that perhaps basing our mission on, say, Brave New World instead would be more effective. The room was in stitches. I owned that audience.

Later, I recalled that the drug from Brave new World was called “soma,” which was also the last name of our former Acting Dean. If only that had occurred to me at the meeting I could have scored a legendary comedic triple play. Oh well.

I just got done reading two books that involved doppelgängers — The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim and The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. In the former, the doubles are separated for the whole novel except for the first chapter; in the latter, they are engaged in a master/slave relationship throughout the work.

As a narrative trope, the doppelgänger is a great way to represent personal or internal conflict, or to represent contradictions inherent in a social strata. Think of The Prince and the Pauper, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, and any number of other tales involving identity swapping and confusion. I thoroughly enjoyed The Great Impersonation. It is a rare novel that keeps the reader engaged even though the denouement is projected well ahead of time. The doppelgänger conceit is played out fairly straightforwardly and mostly to benefit the story, not an overarching theme. I can’t say that I liked The White Castle, however. I really liked Pamuk’s My Name is Red, but this novel was just … well, slow. Almost completely still, in fact. It felt flat and was surprisingly repetitive. The master/slave dichotomy has been done much better.

I’ve only ever had two possible “celebrity doppelgängers” identified for me — famous people that others seem to think look like me. This revelation requires an extreme suppression of my ego, but here are the actors who — others have claimed — could play my “double” in the film version of my life:

Continue reading "Doppelgängers" »

In finishing up Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (also see Sam Harris' The End of Faith) I’ll admit I experienced a bit of a disappointment when he took on pragmatism — the philosophical school that got me through, and thankfully out of, my wacky graduate program.

Pragmatism has always offered itself as an alternative to the realist/idealist dyad, and tends to reject the concept that there is a transcendental truth somewhere outside of our ability to perceive the world. Harris concludes that this notion is dangerous in that it can lead to moral relativism and, thus, could lend credence to religious claims that only belief in something “higher” can guarantee moral behavior.

The pragmatist’s basic premise is that, try as we might, the currency of our ideas cannot be placed on the gold standard of correspondence with reality as it is. To call a statement “true” is merely to praise it for how it function in some area of discourse; it is not to say anything about how it relates to the universe at large.

He even ominously — and at the risk of adding a new branch to Godwin’s Law — invokes Osama bin Laden in stating that the terrorist leader’s “favorite philosopher” Sayyid Qutb feels that pragmatism would lead to the “death of American civilization.”

But Harris misrepresents pragmatism, which, I would argue, is actually in support of his — and atheism’s — agenda.

Continue reading "Lingua Pragmatica" »

I was both annoyed and pleased that Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith had almost 300 holds on it in our Seattle Public Library system when I added myself to the list over six months ago. I didn’t really want to wait so long to read it, especially since it’s over three years old now, but I was happy that so many others were still interested in it.

Last week, I finally got my notice that it was available, and I’ve been mostly pleased with it so far. I’ve enjoyed reading Harris’ essays and debates on the web. Harris is less condescending that Richard Dawkins, but no less sharply critical about both the absurdity of religion and the myriad problems that it causes in every society in which it exerts a significant hold on the masses (which is to say nearly all societies).

Harris’ central argument builds upon the issues I wrote about a couple weeks in relation to the “COEXIST” bumper sticker. Religions are inherently intolerant of each other, Harris argues, and religious moderation is a myth.

Continue reading "Sam Harris’ The End of Faith" »

The modest bookshelves of my childhood home supported various copies of every Sherlock Holmes publication my father could lay his hands on. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes oeuvre, and continued for many years to insist (ironically) that the detective not only had lived but was alive and well (if ancient) in Dover, England, keeping bees.

Despite that almost constant exposure to Holmes-related literature and memorabilia, I never read many of the stories myself. I primarily became familiar with the character through TV and by listening to my father’s recording of the old radio programs. Recently, while deciding what books to take on our brief excursion to Orcas Island, I grabbed The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes from the shelf of our local library.

My experience reading all 40 or so stories in the collection over the span of a few days was not unlike how I felt after watching a marathon session of The Sopranos on DVD: I was exhausted and concluded that the episodes are clearly meant to be consumed with a significant break in between.

That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy them, but only that the formula became rather tiresomely repetitive when taken altogether, and I found myself skimming. It would have been a different experience if I were a Victorian-era gentleman who had to wait a month for the next issue of The Strand in order to get more Holmes action, and I’m sure that Conan Doyle was mindful of that when he wrote the stories.

One significant trope jumped out at me, however, that I was unprepared for and that I might not have picked up on had I not read them all in such a short period of time.

Continue reading "The Adventure of Reading Sherlock Holmes" »

Amy’s making allowing me to read the Harry Potter books the Out-laws sent her a few months ago. I skipped the first two since I had already seen the movies; I just finished the fourth one. I’m actually enjoying the experience, and am looking forward to the fifth book (The Order of the Phoenix) since there hasn’t been a movie yet and I don’t even know the basic plot (and what the hell is up with Snape anyway!).

On this topic, here’s an amusing bit I found the other day: Titles of Harry Potter Fanfics We’d Rather Not Read. My favorites:

Harry Potter and the Uneventful Year When No One Tried to Kill Him

Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Girl Writing this Fanfic

Harry Potter and the Uncomforatble Oversexualization of Minors

Harry Potter and the Things You Have to do to Get By in Prison

Harry Potter the Geopolitical Realities of the Post-Nuclear Age

Harry Potter and Whoever Alan Rickman’s Character is are Totally Doing It

Harry Potter and the Insidious Compact Disc Root Kit Installation

My old friend Janet just wrote me to tell me that her book on African art has finally been published. Sure enough, it’s right there on Amazon.

Art And Architecture In Postcolonial Africa (Amazon sales rank #224,993)

Congratulations, Janet!

I got to wondering how many other people I know have books out there:

• Me! (Well, it’s not my book; but my essay is in it.) Contemporary Irish Cinema (Amazon sales rank #758,754)
• Holly! (Again, not her book but her essay’s in it.) The Best American Essays 2005 (Amazon sales rank #12,046)

And that’s it. I mean, I’ve known professors who have published books that they’ve then made me buy for their class, but I’m not counting those.

On the self-promotion front, there’s Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, for which I compiled the index; Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, in which I am thanked in the credits; and, finally, These “Colored” United States, of which I am practically the co-author (but that’s a [bitter] blog post for another time).

Despite what my “I’m Reading” sidebar says (as of today), I am reading The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand. (Hey Amazon: Update your web services interfaces already!)

Every now and then, my thoughts tend to drift to wondering about what our world would be like if the field of science (or any academic pursuit, really) hadn’t been hampered and stifled by religious dogmatism. Think, for one, how long the concept of heliocentrism languished in the prison of ignorance and superstition wrought by the medieval Catholic church. Even now — for example, in stem cell research — dogmatism fueled by ignorance is standing in the way of possible medical progress.

The Metaphysical Club tells a similar story, but in the field of philosophy. I am hardly qualified to comment authoritatively on philosophy or the history of American thought. I took some philosophy in college and graduate school, and I’ve read a great deal of the works of C. S. Peirce, who figures prominently in the book (though I can say now that I did not fully comprehend him). But, Menard does a really good job of describing the historical tension between philosophy and religion and in placing the work of Kant, Hegel, and others in that context. I can’t help but stretch the time line to the present day and think about how that tension is still being played out in the academic and political arenas.

Continue reading "The God Problem in American Philosophy" »

I’ve read 28 of Time magazine’s Best 100 books.

I love “Best of” lists. People complain about them all the time, but if you just don’t them too seriously they are a good source for reading/viewing suggestions. I had previously been using the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list from 2003. I made a Palm-sized version of it for my PDA so that whenever I was at the library and couldn’t think of anything to get, I’d have it handy. I ended up reading a lot of good books that way, ones I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

Observations from the Time list:

• Two of the books — Possession and Snow Crash — I started but quit about a quarter of the way through because I found them irritating


• They included The Watchmen, a comic book graphic novel that I’ve been trying to get Amy to read [Amy: see, it’s not just me who thinks it’s really good]


• All the King’s Men is on there, which Amy has been trying to get me to read. Sounds like it’s time to strike a reading deal.


• There’s no Joseph Conrad or James Joyce?!

It looks like they also have a 100 Best Movies list, which I’ll have to post about another time.