The dance of nature

Posted on September 6, 2019 by smellincoffee

So to be crystal clear: everything out there is influencing the evolution of everything else. The bacteria and viruses and parasites that cause disease in us have affected our evolution as we have adapted in ways to cope with their effects. In response they have evolved in turn, and keep on doing so. All kinds of environmental factors have affected our evolution, from shifting weather patterns to changing food supplies—even dietary preferences that are largely cultural. It’s as if the whole world is engaged in an intricate, multilevel dance, where we’re all partners, sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always affecting one another’s movements—a global, evolutionary Macarena.

 

From Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity.

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Of Romans, manly saints, and the beginning of the end

Posted on September 4, 2019 by smellincoffee

I spent much of August crawling through the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I was very careful, in making my list, that I specified “Volume I”: I  had little interest in trying the several thousand pages of that history and have…sadly…..less interest now.  The problem is not in the writing – Gibbon’s prose deserves its praise – but in the subject.  If someone remotely pleasant or admirable appears, they are quickly dispatched, thrust across the river Styx before the reader has properly made their acquaintance. For the most part the subjects here are rotten specimens of humanity, and I did not enjoy reading about them.   Naturally in this first volume, we don’t get around to Gibbon’s analysis – the condemnation of lead pipes and unmanly religion —   but already an obvious factor appears: the  disappearance of civil government, which was replaced by the armed might of the Praetorian guard.

I followed this up with The Catholic Gentleman, which I purchased largely to support the author, Sam Guzman.  I’ve followed Guzman’s blog of the same name with varying regularity over the years, as his topics of interest often intersect my own: virtue, traditional music, and whiskey.   The book is chiefly about the former, however.   As the name suggests, it blends aspects of books on being a gentleman – thoughts about manners and dress —  with Catholic spirituality. There are thus chapters on prayer, on being a servant-leader as a father,  and on combating personal vice – particularly pervasive addictions like pornography.   Guzman provides a fairly well rounded guide to a masculinity inspired by virtue, though obviously it’s going to be mostly of interest to Christians and particularly Catholics.

Given how slowly I crawled through Gibbon, I can’t say I’m particularly excited to try The Histories, which is another great long chronicle of facts, this time knit together with less artful prose.  On the other hand I’m very close to finishing The Federalist Papers – 15  essays away! —  which I’ve been chewing on since  late June.   If you’re keeping score at  home, that means assuming I complete the Final Boss Level of my reading challenge – two enormous Russians back to back —  I’ll be done with the Classics Club come 2020.     But nevermind that, I have to hit Herodotus and the Russians first,  as well as Hugo. It’s going to be an interesting experience,.

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Stoic advice on overcoming anger

Posted on August 31, 2019 by smellincoffee

In the last couple of weeks I’ve  read a few books on nonviolence communication and  conflict management (How To Be Your Own Bodyguard; Verbal Judo (re-read); and How to Survive Aggressive People).    Tonight, in a similar vein,  I encountered a post from Medium.com that recapped reflections from Stoic authors on how to address anger — that most crippling of human emotions, which leads to the ruin of relationships and nations alike.  Medium  isn’t merely recycling one-liners from the books, either, as one of their contributing authors (Donald Robertson, How To Think Like a Roman Emperor) is a practicing Stoic who  has also done more formal work on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which has stoic links.   The entire article is worth reading, but I wanted to share a couple of them which are especially salient, or which are not often enough expressed.   Medium has a more extensive article available here.

1.Recognize it is your opinion that is making you angry.

We often think it is the other person’s action that is making us angry. But, in fact, it is our opinion of their actions that is making us angry. Suppose someone calls you an idiot. Instead of becoming angry you can just ignore him: “After all it is his opinion. I am not an idiot because he thinks I am one. If he thinks I am an elephant I am not going to be an elephant and I am not going to be upset. Why should I get upset because he thinks I am an idiot?” If you are angry because you are stood up, remember it is your opinion that you should not be stood up that’s making you angry. You can get rid of your anger simply by changing your mind about things — ”It’s no big deal if I am stood up”.

2. Recognize anger has consequences.

The first flush of anger feels good. When we vent our anger, we feel elated and righteous. But what we fail to recognize is that anger has consequences. It can damage our reputation. But our anger can have legal, moral or material consequences. Before you express your anger, take a moment to understand the consequences of expressing it.

11.Recognize that you have the power to endure.
We get angry because we can’t ‘stand it anymore’. But you have the resources to cope with the situation without getting angry. Think of your internal resources such as endurance and patience. Use them. You don’t have to act helpless and be pushed around either by what others have done or by your own anger.

16. Develop a contrary habit.

Anger can become a habit. Once you are angry it gets easier to get angry the next time. How do you get out of the habit of anger (or avoid it becoming a habit)? Epictetus has some good advice here: Develop a contrary habit. For example, laughter is a contrary habit because you cannot laugh and be angry at the same time. So, whenever you are angry, find something funny in the situation and smile about it. Or you can simply laugh at your own self-importance expressed as anger.

 

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Shutting Out the Sun

Posted on August 29, 2019 by smellincoffee

Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
© 2006 Michael Zielenziger
352 pages

Shutting Out the Sun introduces itself with what readers will assume is its subject: the plight of an increasing number of young people who, for whatever reason, choose to withdraw into their bedrooms and cease to communicate with the outside world, ignoring even their parents.  These persons, called hikkikimori,  are merely part of Shutting Out the Sun, however, and readers who venture forward expecting a study of them will find that most of the time they are out of sight, mentioned a few times after the first chapter but never examined in  fine detail.  The true subject of Shutting Out the Sun is Japan,  which in 2006 was still mired in economic stagnation and rapidly being overshadowed by India and China.    Japan is a country in a profound cultural crisis,  writes Michael Zielenziger, and if it does not adapt to the realities of 21st century globalization, it faces the danger of becoming a hikkikimori nation: one  so withdrawn from economic and diplomatic activity it may as well not exist.  

In the 1980s, Japan’s economic prowess was such that  many in the west feared its future influence.   People drove Japanese cars, their kids were obsessed with Japanese video games, and their homes were increasingly filled with goods from Sony. And then…in 1989…the future fell to pieces, at least for Japan, and it entered a recession that was still going in 2006 when Zielenziger published Shutting Out the Sun.   But it wasn’t just the economy that was struggling. Japan’’s entire society was stagnating, argues Zielenziger; the same factors that had undermined its economic growth were also  driving its young people to isolate themselves from the world,  and skyrocketing Japan’s suicide rates.   

The root of the probem, Zielenziger believes, is that Japan never really embraced liberal democracy;   its prewar order simply adopted democracy as the new way that traditional authority asserted itself. Democracy was imposed from on high, from the American military authorities and Japan’s own leaders.  Democracy was never conceived as a challenge to existing order, the way it was in America, England,  and France;   and the bones of democracy like a widespread belief in human rights distinct from government never developed.    Elements of Japanese culture which had previously bound the nation together – immense social pressure towards conformity, for instance —  continued. This time,  the Japanese people were marshalled to rebuild Japan and flourish economically.  

The urgent need to recover economically produced a distortion in Japanese culture, however;  Japanese men became obsessed with work,  developing a ‘salaryman’ approach that meant they were out of the home for the majority of the day:   they worked long hours, then socialized with their business partners late into the evening, retiring home only to sleep.   The intense pressure to succeed drove many men to drink in excess,  and their  constant absence from the home didn’t do their marriages any favors.   Zielenziger goes so far as to suggest that for the Japanese salaryman, his traditional fealty to his family has been displaced, and is now centered on his firm.  

Kids were likewise pressured to succeed, and to conform; many of the hikkimori introduced in the opening relate tales of persistence bullying enabled by authority figures who assumed verbal and physical abuse meant that the kid in question  had done something to disrupt the group.   As Japan connected to the outside world through television and the internet, however,  kids who were abused were also tortured by the fact that there were other societies out there where things weren’t like this – where  people weren’t obsessed with academic excellence all the time, where there was room in life for leisure.   The intense pressure from their peers and family, however, meant that young Japanese who wanted something different were constantly suppressed in their efforts to find it. Unable to conform and unable to stand and resist, many chose to flee – into their rooms, or  if they were old enough, into neighboring countries like Thailand or South Korea.  Even those who wanted to conform often found they couldn’t:  how could they succeed as Japan entered a recession that went on for a decade? 

That recession was largely caused by Japan’s culture of conformity, Zielenziger suggests:   Japan focused so much on itself that it did not watch the world around it, and those who wanted to try new ideas were generally suppressed. Because Japan’s status quo was so successful – growing GDP, little crime, no underclass —  any perceived challenges to it, like a poor-performing company or a new firm that threatened to disrupt things – were actively mitigated.  Firms that would have gone bankrupt for failing to adapt in the western world were instead propped up, and up and comers suppressed by the government.  So change-resistant was Japan, writes Zielenziger , that even in the early 2000s many businesses were still circulating interoffice memos by paper and only grudgingly tolerating the entrance of computers into their offices.   Email was dismissed as unprofessional.  

Zielenziger finds Korea as useful counter-example;   westerners  who first visited Korea as missionaries and doctors were not driven away;  they stayed and their interactions with Korea changed it.  Korea grew in response to its interactions with the outside world,  and despite his secular Jewish status, Zielenziger finds Korea’s embrace of Christianity particularly interesting, contending that it promoted a view of people as individual persons, not merely members of a collective, and that it further set limits to the state by defining it as something separate, instead of conflating it and society.   Korea’s democracy grew from below, instead of being imposed from above by a military hierarchy. While he does not suggest that Japan should convert to protestant Christianity,  he does wonder if Japan would have gone another way had it had more substantial interaction with the western world rather than merely taking its tools to use on behalf of a chiefly feudal order.  

As the length of this review suggests, Shutting Out the Sun  offers a lot to consider.   The problem in evaluating it, for me, is that I know very little about modern Japanese culture, either from personal experience or from other reading, so  I don’t know if this is insightful  or completely off the mark. I do know it makes for disturbing reading, between the kids walling themselves off from the world, the parents drinking or killing themselves from prolonged misery, and  the looming hints that Japan is actively dying  and no one can shake the stupor.

 

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The Education of Henry Adams

Posted on August 23, 2019 by smellincoffee

The Education of Henry Adams
© 1918 Henry Adams
324 pages

 

Who is Henry Adams, and why would anyone read about his education?    Personally, I discovered this book through a personal interest in his family; Henry’s great-grandfather was John Adams, and his grandfather was John Quincy.    Even his father, Charles Frances, played an important role in public life as the United States’ ambassador to England, a difficult post during the War between the States.  This is quite the legacy, and The Education makes it clear how heavily that family heritage sat on Henry’s shoulders. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, during his life, he was most known as an historian and political journalist.  But An Education isn’t about historical methods or interview skills; Adams’  meaning of education has little to do with school at all.  These are more the reflections of an extremely thoughtful man whose impressions turn more and more to gloom as the 19th century runs its course and the world begins a new chapter.

When I say An Education has little do with school,  it helps that the subject absolutely hated school. He hated it as a boy, when he’d much rather be outside playing or inside reading;   he found it useless as a teenager, even after enrolling at prestigious Harvard; and  when he traveled abroad and dabbled in classes at a German university, that too he found wanting.   It probably didn’t help that he generally found himself wanting;  unlike his grandfathers who had a pivotal role to play in the creation and establishing of the early Republic,   Adams saw no place for himself. He was more a child of the 18th century, or even the 17th,  deeply stepped in literature and law, and the world was quickly changing to favor new learning — that of railroads, dynamos, and finance.   Adams’ situation in his younger life will fascinate many readers; as a boy, he does his Latin exercises in the same room that the Free Soilers and nascent Republicans are discussing politics;   later still, the teenaged Henry accompanies his father to England, where he serves as a diplomatic aide. Throughout his life, he’s ever a member of Washington society, regularly rubbing shoulders with presidents and senators — and he’s never shy to express opinions on them.

Adams, despite the burden of responsibility he felt as part of his upbringing in the young Republic’s most accomplished family,  and the  growing pessimism as he looked to the future more dominated by factories and empire,   is often funny. I don’t know if he intended to be, but what else can a reader do but chuckle when he declares plantation masters as good for nothing but “bad temper, bad manners, poker, and treason“?  In his travels abroad, he spends considerable time in England, Germany, and Italy, but France is snubbed. Enthusiastically snubbed. He wanted absolutely no French influence on his education, and “To save himself the trouble of drawing up a long list of all that he disliked, he disapproved of the whole, once for all, and shut them figuratively out of his life. France was not serious, and he was not serious in going there.””   Considering how romanticized France and especially Paris are,   Adams’ thoroughgoing scorn of the same is almost refreshing.

Although The Education of Henry Adams isn’t for everyone, if you have an interest in the 19th century,  American or European, the reflections here bear investigating.  Here is a life that began in the early Republic, its subject literally being taken by the hand to school by John Quincy Adams, and by the end of the book, the 20th century is underway with Theodore Roosevelt at the helm.  Adams’ experience during the war — the slow disintegration of order, and the horror of realizing his friends from Boston and Virginia were now killing one another with hate in their eyes —  is especially somber to read.  Abroad, too, Adams’ experience sees Germany quicken from a disorganized, lovely mess into the German Empire,  while Italy is still struggling to be born as a nation.   I couldn’t help but be sad when I realized Adams died in 1918 — he’d lived to see the worst war then imaginable turn the beautiful places he so frequently haunted in Europe into fields of death; the dynamo he viewed with fearful wonder would be the western world’s first attempt at suicide.

Related:
“Looking Back at an Education“, review of same at The Frugal Chariot

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How to Survive Aggressive People

Posted on August 22, 2019 by smellincoffee

Surviving Aggressive People: Practical Violence Prevention Skills for the Workplace and the Street
© 2014 Shawn Smith
268 pages

Most of us have encountered aggressive people in our lives, and if we work with the public we probably do so on a daily basis. How can concerned readers prepare themselves for future instances of the same?   Shawn T. Smith is a psychologist with a background in counseling and corrections, and previously who served as a member of the Guardian Angels in Denver, a citizen-driven neighborhood security organization.  In Surviving Aggressive People,  he offers readers an analysis of the two main groups of aggressive behavior they can expect  to encounter, and offers separate  advice for each.

Smith sees aggressive behavior as being either desperate or deliberate (“expert” is the word he uses).  Desperate aggression is usually context or incident driven: a person who feels cornered resorts to lashing out in an adrenaline-induced reaction.   Expert aggression, on the other hand, is planned, and has a defined goal in mind – whether that be robbery, rape, or the simple ego boost of pushing someone else around.  Both types of aggressive behavior have warning signs, and in expert/deliberate behavior,  these can be quite elaborate: human predators, like their counterparts throughout the animal kingdom, have ‘rituals’ that precede the violence.

In both types of aggression, the primary goal from Smith’s perspective is escape – and not simply escape from a situation that one is already in, but avoiding them altogether by paying attention to warning signs.  Throughout Surviving Aggressive People,  Shawn beats the drum: pay. attention.to.your.instincts.  Trust your gut.  Intuition, he argues, is not irrational;  it’s merely your subconscious processing the environment on its own, the primal brain at work beneath the conscious.

Responding to desperate aggression mostly involves communicating with them, talking with them in a deliberate way to find out what they need.    Expert aggression is more varied, but Shawn advises readers to be aware of the most common tactics  — information overload, sympathy  etc and to assert themselves from the beginning, challenging the aggressive whent they are still beginning their approach.  Most predators will back of and look for easier prey if they are regarded with open, challenging eyes,  pointed questions, or resistance straight from the gate. If they’re persistent, at the very least an outright challenge keeps them from closing and attacking in an ambush.  Shawn wraps up the book by reviewing the main points, and then discussing the merits of some martial arts styles – -though he cautions the reader, in using them or any kind of weapon, that they must practice constantly and be aware of the style’s or the weapon’s limitations. (Pepper spray, for instance can literally backfire if it’s used against the wind…so exercise caution.)

How to Survive Aggressive People strikes me as a useful resource, although it does not include information on dealing with people who are mentally unstable owing to substance abuse.   I was introduced to the book a few years ago via an interview with the author on The Art of Manliness;  you may view a transcript here which might give you a more comprehensive review of the contents.

Related:
Verbal Judo: The Art of Persuasion, George Thompson

Guardian Angels:
http://guardianangels.org/

 

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Graphic novels from NASA (!)

Posted on August 17, 2019 by smellincoffee

From Science 2.0:

“In 2010, to celebrate 50 years of Exobiology and Astrobiology research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) they commissioned a graphic history of the people and events that have shaped the science of nascent Exobiology and Astrobiology research.

Of course, how we came to be is not a new field, for as long as mankind was able to take a break from grinding out life we’ve wondered how it all came to be.

They were well-received and they have continued to produce them and now they have out #7, Prebiotic Chemistry and the Origin of Life, which moves from telescopes to microscopes in order to see how prebiotic chemistry works and learn more about how life on Earth arose from chemical precursors, which is essential in determining whether or not life could originate on other worlds. 

Our own Professor Dave Deamer (well, not ours, U.C. Santa Cruz pays his bills, but if you are a scientist here you’re family) has written extensively on this fascinating subject and you can read his work here.

But if you also want a very elegant and informative graphical book, give NASA a try. If you liked the Avengers movies, yeah, it’s like that. It isn’t, but that’s okay, you will enjoy it.”

 

 

 

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Um….

Posted on August 17, 2019 by smellincoffee

 

So….I’m sampling different translations of The Brothers Karamazov in preparation for December’s  classics reading, and apparently it’s a wacky comedy!    This cover appears as the Kindle edition for the Peavers/Volohonsky translation, which is the one I’m most leaning towards.

 

 

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The Sky’s the Limit

Posted on August 16, 2019 by smellincoffee

Star Trek TNG:  The Sky’s the Limit
© 2007 various
400 pages

The original Star Trek struggled in ratings, especially after being shifted to a late-evening slot of doom in its third season, and was canceled prematurely in 1969.    It proved to be rather more difficult to kill than that, however,  flourishing in syndication and leading to persistent demands for a return, or at least a movie.   Surprisingly, The Motion Picture didn’t  smother interest in more, and in the 1980s Star Trek and the Enterprise returned with a new show.  Although it struggled in the beginning, hindered by manskirts and characters who weren’t quite sure who they were, it would be The Next Generation  that built the behemoth that was late-90s Star Trek.    Surely its 20th anniversary was worth celebrating! 

The Sky’s the Limit brings more to the table than Constellations,  spanning the entire TNG run from before its first season until after Nemesis, when Picard is  struggling with the question of what advice he might give to Captain Riker, now leaving the Enterprise for his own command.   As with Constellations, there are a variety of authors and genres,and most of the characters have their moment in the spotlight, even more minor ones like Barclay and Tasha Yar.  Unlike Constellations, here stories are closely mapped to episodes and movies;  the Barcley story, for instance, happens while the Enterprise is off doing something else, leaving him and Ro Laren to assist Lwaxana Troi (Hazard pay, anyone?).     Another  story is a direct sequel to “Darmok”, as the Enterprise continues to establish a means of reliable communication with a people who seem to speak only in literary references.  That one goes into the complexities of language-building and is penned by Christopher L. Bennett, who contributed to all four anniversary anthologies.    The collection is replete with fascinating stories, like one that puts Riker on his death bed, or another that follows Wesley in an alternate history where he tried to avoid his destiny — not to mention Picard’s Dominion War encounter with Gul Madred, the sinister figure so expertly played by David Warner.

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What We Left Behind

Posted on August 15, 2019 by smellincoffee

A few months back I caught wind of the fan-funded What We Left Behind: A Look Back at Deep Space Nine, and naturally  I preordered.  I watched (and loved) it tonight, and though it has nothing to do with books,  Star Trek is no stranger here, so I wanted to share the news of it with those who might be interested.   The documentary is a reunion show, of both actors and writers, as well as a review of the show’s unique history,  sharing all the new ground it broke that the other shows never dared near.  The writers’ reunion offers the bonus of a day-long brainstorming session in which five of the lead writers brainstormed the first episode of a speculative Season Eight,  one set twenty years after the end of the seventh season in which so many of the crew go their separate ways following the end of the Dominion War.

As a Niner of longstanding,  I was absolutely joystruck to see “my people” back on the screen.   The actors have all had careers after the show, of course, and I’ll watch a show just to see them show up, but it’s not the same as seeing them with their former coworkers, sharing stories of the old days.   Deep Space Nine was utterly unique, perhaps in part because the setting was ‘stationary’, if you’ll forgive the pun:  instead of having new stories and actors presented week by week, the writers had to create stories by fully exploring the characters and scenes at hand. It brought serialized storytelling to Star Trek, and was alone in doing so! TNG was episodic, and VOY and ENT stagnated in the same long after serial television had taken off in  protracted dramas like The Sopranos. Stories in DS9 didn’t happen and stop in one episode:  they’d weave in and out throughout whole seasons. The result was far and away the most completely human characters in all of Star Trek, as background characters would grow and grow  to comprise major parts. The  biggest example of this, of course, would be Glinn Damar — who, from being button-pusher in the pack, would become another recurring actor’s sidekick,  and further mature until by the end of seven he was the leader of a planetary resistance.

 

Nostalgia aside, What We Left Behind astounds from a production point of view.  I thrilled to see bits of DS9 in high-definition: unlike TOS and TNG, DS9 has never gotten that treatment.    I also LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED the fact that it opens with Max frickin” Grodénchik singing, and closes with him joined by Armin Shimmerman (!!),   Casey Biggs (!!),   and JEFFREY COMBS (!!!)*  doing another song.  And in between there was so much wonderful-ness. The actors, writers, and (viewer) were all in tears throughout.

Definitely recommended.

 

(They played Rom, Quark, Damar, and Weyoun/Brunt, respectively.)

 

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