When I was junior in high school our English class got into a debate about why we read the books we read, i.e. why did we read weird books like The Awakening (Kate Chopin), rather than regular books like Sphere (Michael Crichton)? As a result, we were, in fact, assigned to read Sphere for English class, for the purpose of an assignment called "What is Literature?"

As I recall, I wrote an essay that essentially came to the conclusion that any English teacher would wish for: that yes, there is a difference between fiction and literature, that The Awakening is literature and Sphere is not. I don't know if I believed what I was writing even then (or if I was being a goody-two-shoes), but if I did, I think my understanding was incomplete.

The reason that this came to mind is that I was re-reading a couple of the Harry Potter books recently, and thinking about their theme regarding how what we expect to see make us unable to see what's really there. This theme is played out on many levels, but in a number of cases, Harry and the other young wizards and witches see what's happening more quickly than the adults do because they go in with fewer preconceptions. (Some of the reason for this theme is, I suspect, plot devices to make Our Heroes more successful, but I think a great deal of it is legitimately what might happen in such situations.) Yet then again there are situations where this lack of preconceptions leads them astray.

The scene that first made me think about this is the scene where (and please stop reading now if you have somehow not read Harry Potter yet, but expect to someday, and are trying to avoid spoilers of any kind) Scabbers' true identity is revealed. Harry and Ron see the wrong thing because they have been told Sirius Black is a nefarious murderer, and furthermore, they both think Scabbers is just a rat (Ron more so than Harry). The scene continues with Lupin and then Snape entering, each seeing, at first, only what he expects to see, and Snape continuing to see only what he expects long past the time when the others have changed their viewpoints. I could bring up lots of other examples, but I've never liked writing literary analysis, so I'll leave that for the interested reader.

The point is, Harry Potter not only this theme but quite a number of such themes, any one of which I could easily have written a paper on that is at least as good and as substantive as any paper I wrote when I was in high school or college, on arguably far more 'literary' books, most of which I never want to reread, certainly not as many times as I've re-read most of the Harry Potter books.

But some people will certainly argue that Harry Potter is excellent children's literature and quite sophisticated, and therefore there is still a hard, or at least semi-hard, divide between fiction and literature, it's just that the line is a little farther over than most English teachers want to draw it.

But I can make the same argument, to a lesser extent, about the Baby-Sitters Club books. I used to read them when I was a kid, and I learned a lot from them, not just random facts to impress my parents with (they considered the books fairly devoid of value and so the fact that I learned anything from the books at all was a surprise to them) but also various important things. The books cover things like dealing with a chronic disease or disability, racial prejudice, how to understand and work with young children, sibling rivalry, friendships, romantic relationships, parental divorce and remarriage, and lots of other things. They cover them at a level that a kid can understand -- but so does Harry Potter. What is the difference between these books as far as the 'literature' divide is concerned? It's not wholly clear.

I guess in the end I don't have much evidence to conclude that any book is devoid of all value (though I have my suspicions about Harlequin romances and R.L. Stine books), so drawing an arbitrary line in the sand that divides literature from everything else looks pretty pointless. It seems like much more of a continuum to me, and that's the essay I'd write if I were writing it today.

Of course, now I'll end up finding out that that's the essay I wrote back then too, and wonder why I made all this fuss about the issue.

A few weeks back, I was looking for books at the library and happened to pick up Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. As soon as I started it I realized it was the perfect book for me to pick up. It focuses on Addams's early life and intellectual and moral development, including her path to and choice of her life's work in 1889 (when she was 29), and her continued development as an active citizen after that. It's hard for me to express how meaningful my experience of reading the book has been, and I think will continue to be. It carries the strong message that by continued persistence in thought and action, we can do great things, and that stumbling in the process sometimes does not mean the process is over or will have no good result.

There were two observations that her biographer made about her approach to thinking and life that particularly struck a chord in me.

...the non-resistant philosophy she had tred to practice at Hull House consisted of "selecting the good in the neighborhood and refraining from railing at the bad."

The sustained moral practice to which she was aspiring was enigmatic: to live out her beliefs firmly and at the same time find the humility needed to avoid the pitfall of self-righteousness.

Hull Hous was in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago, which was a terribly poor place, in which the streets couldn't be seen for piles of garbage, because the representative of the ward gave the garbage contracts to friends and didn't check up on them. It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that she didn't rail against such conditions. But she did do something about them, and her action was probably all the better conceived for the fact that she assessed the situation accurately and patiently rather than angrily, and moved forward with a plan to abate it.

I have a tendency to rail against the bad, and based on my experience I can't say it's ultimately very productive. I think this quotation particularly resonated with me in the context of one of my 101 in 1001 goals - #41, which is about changing my reaction to people cycling on the sidewalk. It's a minor annoyance compared to walking in garbage-strewn streets every day, yet I can't witness the situation without getting angry (and sometimes railing). Addams avoided railing where she could, yet continued to be active in working to eradicate the bad things around her. I admire the philosophy that she operated under -- a philosophy which took her not only from her background as a woman of privilege to a civic reform leader at Hull House, but from there to labor reform, peace activism and lobbying for women's suffrage.

As Addams took steps in the 1890s that led her more deeply into the complicated, sometimes murky woods of democracy, she repeatedly tried to analyze and understand her often perplexing, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes deeply disturbing experiences. Aided by books, innumerable conversations, and her own writing, she studied those experiences not for an hour or an afternoon but for weeks and months and years, walking around them to see them from all sides, writing and revising her thought about them, and generally behaving more like an intellectual bulldog than a genteel lady who wore her learing lightly. It was this persistent rethinking, and not only the experiences, that produced her profoundest insights and taught her the most about her class, her gender, herself.

This paragraph makes clear that Addams' education was essential to her success, both by giving her ideas to work with, and by teaching her to think deeply. I feel like I got the same kind of good education, but so far I haven't taken it to the kind of deep level she got to. And she didn't get there by magic, but by persistent thinking and reassessing. I feel like I haven't often tried to apply that kind of deep persistence, because I'm used to succeeding "enough" without needing to put forth that much effort. But it's the kind of persistence required to do anything that's truly difficult, and a lot of worthwhile things are truly difficult.

I'd like to do something worthwhile, like Jane Addams did. And I think, and hope, that recalling her example will be inspiring to me in trying to do that. What "that" is, I don't know yet. Luckily, her story also shows that uncertainty and stumbling don't preclude a positive result.

I'd seen the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities mentioned before, but this sketch of the author, Jane Jacobs, made me really sit up and take notice. It sounds like she's given a huge amount of thought to problems that have only begun to interest and perplex me. I must read this book soon.

Speaking of things that perplex me, why doesn't Amazon tell you on a page for a book whether you have it on your Wish List? If they did, I wouldn't have wasted time trying to add it again.

I've finally managed to read all the books I purchased or was gifted with recently, and I've also finally managed to join the Menlo Park library. (Such excellent timing!) As such, I need book recommendations!

[If you don't know my taste in books, here's a rough outline: I don't like horror (or romance or westerns or actually most "genre" books), and I like mystery only if very clever and fun (e.g. No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency). I do like science fiction and fantasy. I like children's books (e.g. E. Nesbit and Harry Potter), science nonfiction, political/social/historical nonfiction or biography if it has a good story or is about a subject or person that interests me (see my interests list if you're that motivated!), and quality fiction and literary fiction. If it has something to do with language, biology, food, California, New Mexico, Britain, or India, that's a good bet.]

Bring it on! If you have a long list, feel free to email it to me instead of commenting, but also feel free to comment with it.

I'm reading a book that I got from enshanam called Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. At first I wasn't sure I would like it, but I got used to his style and I really got into the fascinating overview of the progress in mathematics over the centuries. I knew a little about math history, but it's a great overview and I've learned a lot.

Yesterday morning I was reading it on my way to work, and I came across the following on p. 92:

"His [Helmholtz's] conclusion was that only experience can tell us where the laws of arithmetic do apply. We cannot be sure a priori that they do apply in any given situation...Many examples may be adduced to show that the naive application of arithmetic would lead to nonsense."

The problems here start with the fact that he hasn't defined what the "laws of arithmetic" are (I deduce from the examples that he means things like the transitive property, the commutative property, and the way addition works for various kinds of numbers), nor what their naive application would be as opposed to their non-naive application. While it seems clear that our observations tell us how to apply arithmetic in various circumstances (i.e. I agree with his general premise), his wording and his examples are poorly chosen, and serve as an excellent demonstration of why you have to be careful in your definition of a problem and selection of illustrative examples. Below I present and explain some of the examples I think are poor.

1) Equality is subject to experience. While Tone A may sound equal to Tone B, and Tone C also sound equal to B, Tone A may not sound equal to Tone C.
He actually uses the phrase "seem to be" rather than "sound". This, and a like example about colors, are poor examples because what this fact really tells us is not that transitivity of equality doesn't apply. It tells us that our perception doesn't distinguish between every different thing on the continuum. (There are two reasons for this. Tones may sound the same when presented separately, but be distinguishable when played simultaneously, because of the beating phenomenon that arises when two tones close in pitch are played together. Or the interval between Tone A and Tone C may be just barely large enough that we perceive it, whereas between each and Tone B we can't, because the difference really is too small for us to perceive.) But it is true that if Tone A is equal in pitch to Tone B, then it is equal in pitch to tone C. That's what equality for tones means (leaving aside timbre for now). Our experience is necessary, but it's necessary to tell us how to apply transitive equality, not that it's false.

2) Mixing water at 40 degrees and water at 50 degrees doesn't lead to water at 90 degrees.
Here it appears that "naive application" means "always add two measurements together to get their total". Yet again, this is a great example of a case where we do need experience to tell us what operations to carry out. We have to think about the physical meaning of a temperature measurement -- namely that it's a state, not a quantity -- and decide what should really happen to two things in different states when they're mixed. But why is "naive application" interpreted to mean this particular thing? Taking an average of two measurements requires only one more step, and is completely in line with the way arithmetic functions and what properties it has. It would be just as bad to always average as to always add. So why is one somehow the more true meaning of "naive application"?

3) Sound frequencies don't combine additively. Adding sounds of 100 cycles per second and 200 cycles per second doesn't give a sound of 300 cycles per second, it gives one of 100 cycles per second.
This example starts out bad, because the idea of "adding sounds" is kind of weird to begin with, and before you can even get to the first part, you have to ask what it means to add sounds. It happens to mean that you combine their amplitudes at every given time-point. And it's not true that the resulting sound "has a frequency" of 100 cycles per second. It generally does sound like it does, to us, but in fact the sound has both frequencies. It just so happens that we tend to hear octaves (frequency-doubling intervals) as being the same, and for a sound that's not a pure tone, the octave above is one of the harmonics, so it blends right in, leaving us to think it's not even there. But if you add sounds of 100 Hz and 130 Hz, the resulting sound definitely doesn't have a frequency of 100. So what are the rules for sound frequency addition? Well, they're weird, and I agree that regular addition doesn't apply to them in a simple way. But he makes the point with a bad example that doesn't generalize.

4) Mixing one volume of oxygen and two of hydrogen doesn't give three volumes of water, and similar examples of mixing one each of water and alcohol to get less than two times the volume.
This is very similar to the first example: choice of the wrong domain to apply the "simple addition" arithmetic to. We know from research that the addition in chemical reaction applies to atoms, and in chemical mixing it may apply to atoms or molecules. So again, good premise, but not a very good example, because it's so clear that simple addtion does apply when used in the correct domain.

5) Fraction addition differs in different applications. Batting averages have to be computed by adding the numerators and the denominators separately, while normal fractions addition involves finding the LCM of the denominators, etc.
His example states that if a batter goes to bat 4 times in one game and gets 3 hits, and 3 times in another game and gets 2 hits, why isn't his batting average 17/12 (the sum of 2/3 and 3/4)?
Actually, in this case the question is really "Are we using fraction addition at all?" And the answer is, we're not. In the case of 2/3 + 3/4, we're looking at 2/3 of one whole plus 3/4 of another (eg two partially-eaten pies). In the case of the batting average, we're looking at 3+4 = 7 times that something happened (the batter went to bat) and 2+ 3 = 5 times that something happened within those 7. So we're really doing normal addition (naive application) on two things, which we then form into a fraction, because one of them is a subset of the other. Not adding the numerators and denominators of two fractions.

The last example is his stab at showing that there could be multiple arithmetics, even multiple ones with applicability in the world. That's not a very controversial assertion in math now -- which is basically the point of the book -- but if I were back in the 19th century, even assuming that baseball can be replaced by some other game or appropriate thing, that example wouldn't convince me at all. It would only convince me that I wasn't dealing with fractions at all, as I suggested above.

I recently read My Life in France, Julia Child's memoir of her years in France and her training in French cooking. One thing that it made me realize about my cooking is that my use of herbs, spices, and aromatics like ginger and garlic is excessive. I'd always thought that I did well to use lots of fresh herbs and spices, and that putting all that stuff in gave things flavor. This is true, but it can nevertheless be overdone, because things already have flavor. When I'm cooking zucchini, I almost always add garlic and Italian spices, which makes a nice taste, certainly. But it mostly tastes of garlic and Italian spices, and not the zucchini I made it with. Ideally, a dish is a showcase for its ingredients and their artful combination, rather than the ingredients just being a substrate for spicing. This is actually the same problem that I do have with a dish having too much heat -- if all you can taste is "my mouth is burning", then there's no point in whatever else is there. I just didn't realize I was doing it with a lot of things I was making, like side dishes and soup, where they always have garlic or ginger or dill or rosemary or something in them. On the other hand, I'm very basic with broccoli and mashed potatoes -- they just get a tad of vinegar and milk+salt+pepper respectively. And I love both those things.

So tonight I wanted to use up some summer squash from my farmer's market trip a fortnight ago -- amazingly, they were still nice and crisp. I figured I would try this approach of making things taste like themselves -- with some judicious seasoning and added touches. I sauted the squash with salt and pepper, first uncovered over medium heat, then covered over low heat, to get a bit of sweetness out (like when you cook onion very slowly. I added a tiny bit of maple syrup (about 1 tsp) to counteract the slight bitterness that squash has (which is the reason I don't like it as much as zucchini), but nothing else went into the pot. I had to resist a desire to add random things like lime or get out some garlic. But I also didn't want to serve it completely plain, because that is a bit boring, and I don't absolutely love squash. I happened to also have some very lightly spicy medium-size peppers (chili-shaped, not bell) and some fresh basil. So I diced up a bit of pepper and did a chiffonade of basil (chiffonading things is my new favorite cooking technique) and added it just at the end, to mix in. The result was really nice, a showcase for each ingredient and their combination, just like I was hoping. Kind of a revelation.

I do highly recommend the book for anyone interested in cooking. I was really fascinated and inspired by her tales and it really gave me a deep appreciation for what she did for American cooking. She was very methodical about testing and explaining recipes, and very persistent in looking for the best results that could be had with mechanisms available to real American cooks (at that time, mostly housewives).

Answers behind the cut. If you haven't guessed, try that first.

( answers )

It's interesting that proportionally more of my favorite books are kid/young adult books than the collection of books I currently own would suggest.

Did anyone else pick a non-fiction book for their list?

Following Shari, meme of first lines from favorite books, you guess the book (and any missing personal names). I'm just settling for books I like a lot, that I have around to check the first sentences of. No Googling or Amazoning. I'll post the answers in a few days.

( Lines )

Drinking blood orange juice from farmer's market blood oranges, eating radish salad, and reading David Foster Wallace (thoughtfully given to me by incidentist)...does life get any better?

An offhand line in a footnone in DFW's essay about Kafka (which took me a while to get around to because I haven't read Kafka and at first assumed that this meant I wouldn't understand or enjoy the essay -- this turns out to be false because his essays are never really about their ostensible subject matter) talks about how American entertainment serves the function of escape, and cites fantasy as an example of this.

As a reader of fantasy, I'm used to people making this classification of fantasy reading as escapism, and of course it's not entirely wrong. The magic and the mind-reading powers and the sword-fighting are fun. But it's not all fantasy is, when it's good. The thing about fantasy is that because it's so far from our particulars, it can be very enlightening about universals, about archetypes and morals and human foibles and strengths. It can provide good role models. I don't think it's a coincidence that the best, most persistent children's stories -- Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Peter and the Wolf -- are often essentially fantasy. Why do we think it's acceptable and morally informative to feed our (highly impressionable) children's minds fantasy, but denigrate thinking teens' and adults' desires to read same?

Fantasy as a genre is no more or less escapism than any other fiction genre, and I'm a little tired of the bad rap it usually gets.

I just don't understand the High Fidelity thing. I read the book, and I'm watching the movie now, and in both of them, the main character is a complete prat, immature, no focus, not even that cute, obsessed with shit that doesn't matter. Okay, there are some funny moments, but they're way outweighed by the narcissism and misplaced self-pity.

ETA: On a completely other note, how great an error message is this:

Flickr is having a massage. Please visit the Flickr Blog if you'd like to look at some photos.

"But the mean annual gazelle does tend to get systematically worse." --Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

I thought I'd like this book more than I actually do, but I do like that line. The idea of a mean annual gazelle makes me think of the idea of an ANSI standard location for ketchup in a refrigerator. I think the concepts appeal to me in the same way: semi-real, semi-figurative and distinctly bizarre in some way.

The reasons, I think, that I don't like the book as much as I expected are
1) It doesn't cover (or hasn't yet covered, 2/3 of the way through) much ground that I'm unfamiliar with
and
2) The writing isn't as good as I was led to believe by people raving about it.

The writing is okay, but it's a little convoluted at times, with long sentences and not a lot of punctuation to break up the rhythm. (The punctuation is fine technically, just not helpful in creating highly digestible writing chunks.) The first isn't surprising at all considering I took an evolutionary biology course at Rice, but the point of reading this was to see how he approaches it more than to learn things. I just hoped there would be more stuff to learn, too.

The approach is not unlike mediocre philosophical writing (mine, for example -- I'm not a good philosophy writer), which isn't surprising since a layman's book about evolution is in many ways a philosophical book. He sets up an argument, which frequently has some obvious flaws or oversimplifications, goes through it, covers some of the major omissions after going through it, and ends up at the end in a rather hurried way. He also, in the chaper I'm currently reading, sets up the punctuated equilibrium argument as a straw man and implies rather mean things about people who support the argument. Straw man and ad hominem in just one chapter!

On the whole, I'd far rather read The Beak of the Finch. It doesn't give you a complete overview of the theory and arguments against it, but it's much more informative and concrete.

Here's another terrific gem from Amazon's nonsensical recommendations (you may recall my previous experience of being recommended a work by Various):

I was looking at the book No Logo by Naomi Klein after reading a passing reference to culture jamming. After the description of the book, and before the list of other books that people viewing No Logo viewed was the following:

Customers interested in No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs may also be interested in:
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I find it pretty ironic that a book called No Logo would generate sponsored links that ask if you need a logo. Even the most basic keyword advertising should be able to avoid that quandary by taking into account the impact of the word "no".

I just felt the need to refer to my opposition to something as 'curmudgeonly', and was amused to realize that in my mind a curmudgeon is canonically, almost requisitely, male, white-haired, and old.

I have music and book recommendations, thanks to Carlos:

Musical: Avenue Q. Who wouldn't love a puppet musical with lines like "There's a fine, fine line/ between love and a waste of time" and "Sucks to be us/ but not when we're together" and songs called "What do you do with a BA in English?" No, seriously, who wouldn't? It's marvelous.
Book: A Short History of Nearly Everything. Both Amazons (com and co.uk) are selling it for cheap right now, and it's quite excellent and more entertaining than I expected, stuffed full of really amusing anecdotes in a bed of informativeness about life and Earth.

Republic of Tea Orange Ginger Mint Tea is freaking tasty. I had some at Amy's on Saturday, and bought some on sale at Cost Plus World Market in Houston, only to come home and discover that Republic of Tea stuff is also on sale here. But I had fun buying it. And drinking two cups of it tonight. I love tea. Apparently Republic of Tea also sells Lemon Wintergreen and Ginsing Peppermint. Mmm?

I also love Half-Price Books, where I also bought things that probably could have been purchased in Albuquerque: a cookbook for semi-vegetarians (people like me, who eat mostly vegetarian but also eat chicken and fish sometimes) and Learning XML. It's not the second edition, but it cost $10, which is preferable to being the second edition. Especially considering the second edition is not yet released.

I do not love mosquitoes. While in Houston, I acquired quite a number of bites, largely from being too stupid to suck it up and put on some damn repellent. I got three bites on the top of my right big toe, several on the top of that foot, and one -- wait for it -- on the BOTTOM of my FOOT.

Yes, that's right. The mosquito flew into my sandal, landed on the bottom of my foot, and successfully bit me. Grrrrrr. The bites on the top of the toe are where they really hurt if you start scratching, and the bottom one starts to itch whenever I walk. am obviously loved by mosquitoes, but they are not loved by me.

But actually, as long as I don't have West Nile virus, I think I can cope. : )

On the way home from work, we were talking about alphabets for some reason, and decided that the following would be hilarious names for people:

Elemenope -- pronounced like Penelope.
Ella Minnow Pee -- Pee is kind of a horrible last name, but it's otherwise amusing.
El Emenope -- some kind of Middle Eastern name.
Hota Ka -- some kind of Asian name.

The first three are (perhaps obviously) based on l-m-n-o-p, and the last one is based on the letters "j" and "k" in the Spanish alphabet.

This isn't as funny in re-telling as it was in coming up with.

Also, at work today I found the phrase "buy or beware industry" used to describe the herbal supplements industry. This confused me until I realized the doctor had probably said "buyer beware" and the transcriptionist hadn't recognized the phrase. It's especially funny because the intended meaning is approximately "buy and beware."

Today after a discussion of CD prices my dad reported that he is tired of hearing the recording industry whine about all its problems instead of trying to actually make good, reasonably priced products. Preach it, yo.

At the same Barnes & Noble where I bought overpriced CDs, I bought Pamie's book. It's a great read so far.