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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3421 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm reading some Sherlock Holmes stories. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel impressed that these stories were ever written at all.

I'm reading The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann, an interesting read about nautical life in the 18th century.

I’m not reading anything (of substance) that I haven’t reported on previously, so I guess I’ll ask you to elaborate.

What do you find so unusual about Holmes?

It's just the entire thing, it's all just a large enterprise, and to what end? I guess with all that's been going on with AI (tired subject by now, but), the idea of putting effort into things like evidence standards, law, morality, intrigue, culture, has seemed a little surreal despite myself. And yet the work might be important.

It always seems like people in the past were moved by something that mattered to them. Perhaps I'm wondering what that might have been. I've always been interested, but now it's become a little more personal, and questions of salience have taken on a Promethean quality- the attempt to steal fire.

I don't mean that there's an overt seriousness, just that there's a quasi-superstitious feeling that there's something waiting at the end of the ride (or the read), if I can just pay the minimum necessary fee of discipline and thoughtfulness.

There's probably a lot of confusions in my mind as to what historical greatness really is, so this will likely be a jumble. I apologize if none of this seems to cohere:

I suppose I've landed on the side of those who feel that suffering is in some sense an illusion, and that a state of health and wisdom is in some sense normal. It's the whole "people are fundamentally good" thing, where problems are said to be caused more by a poorly organized environment than by innate problems of the original sin variety. In other words, yes, you can suffer horribly, but when you're back into everyday life, there's probably a way to shake yourself off and carry on as if nothing truly debilitating happened.

The way I see it, the reason that "black box" solutions like AI are popping up is because we're on the cusp of more explicit solutions. I don't think the future is everyone augmenting themselves with ChatGPT, I think the future is us finding a way of spreading knowledge by human hands alone which can compete with ChatGPT in its ability to bring forward implicit knowledge to those who would otherwise take years to learn it. It's probably not even that complicated.

I've rejected the Jungian style of imagination-as-history, where our thoughts stretch back through the ages. It's something more immediate- the feelings of complexity which arise from stories often originate from (universal) structures already existing in the mind, rather than some evolutionary buildup seeking release. So I think what I'm looking for isn't so much an understanding of lost possibility, so much as the state of mind which generates possibility, in the hopes that the stories were intended to be read in such states of mind, and that the message can be heard once I attain it. And I feel as if it can be found in the idea of "character," or in its most reduced form, one's actions. I suppose in this sense I've been studying more the desire to do great works than the great works themselves. The stories seem to be dripping with motive force, and I need to know what that is. Maybe a structure of mind is waiting to be discovered.

I suppose it boils down to a pseudo-gnostic theory that, yes, the goal is to liberate oneself from one's fallen state, but it's probably unusually easy and even normal to do so. One just needs the right knowledge, and nothing will seem so difficult anymore. So the question becomes "what is discipline and thoughtfulness?" and I have a feeling that the price of wisdom is far lower than any of us realizes. The difficulty is in getting it exactly right.

I'm reading A.J. Cronin's first novel, Hatter's Castle. The story of how he wrote this novel has stuck with me forever. From wikipedia:

"In 1930 Cronin was diagnosed with a chronic duodenal ulcer and told to take six months' complete rest in the country on a milk diet. At Dalchenna Farm by Loch Fyne he was finally able to indulge a lifelong desire to write a novel, having previously "written nothing but prescriptions and scientific papers." From Dalchenna Farm he travelled to Dumbarton to research the background of his first novel, using files from Dumbarton Library, which still has a letter from him requesting advice. He composed Hatter's Castle in the span of three months and quickly had it accepted by Gollancz, the only publisher to which he submitted it, apparently after his wife had randomly stuck a pin in a list of publishers. It was an immediate success and launched Cronin's career as a prolific author. He never returned to medicine."

Man I wish I could do that myself. And this coming year, I'll be the same age that Cronin was in 1930. So anything is possible I guess. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if I have an ulcer forming.

Anyway. I'm a big Cronin fan. Writing in 1930, he wrote like it was 1870 - he really comes off as quite ridiculous if you compare him with contemporaries like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, he's much closer to someone like Wilkie Collins - but you can get into the flow of his prose after a while. He was quite good at his very dated style. (And he did get much more modern later in his career.) The Judas Tree, Keys of the Kingdom, The Citadel, all are thrilling, moving, well-plotted books. And furthermore: while Cronin's novels share a ton of elements with each other - there's always a doctor, there are always Scots, there are usually Dickensian parental figures who you want to sock in the face the entire time - he does not recycle endings. Some end with pure tragedy, some end up with happiness for all involved. So this does make reading Hatter's Castle very exciting. The titular hatter, James Brodie, is one of the most unrelentingly evil people I've encountered in several years, so I'm looking forward to Cronin telling me how he got that way, and hopefully to seeing him get his richly deserved comeuppance at some point. But the terrible thing is, Cronin being Cronin, Brodie might win. If nothing else you know he's at least gonna take some of the nice characters down with him.

The same as last week, Reverend Insanity.

Given that I usually devour thousand page books in a day or three, the fact that I'm still reading this monstrosity is a testament to how long Xianxia works can be.

And I'm not complaining! I'm quite rational in assessing sunk costs and ditching a long novel if it no longer keeps my interest.

While RI is technically incomplete due to the CCP yelling at the author, the fact that I'm 1000+ chapters in probably attests to it being worth reading.

I usually devour thousand page books in a day or three

This is impressive by its own right.

I read pretty fast, the last app I used estimated at about 450 wpm averaged over all the books I'd read in it!

Did fast reading come naturally, or did you acquire from years of reading?

I was an absolute bookworm since I learned to read, but I only realized that I was outpacing everyone else later on in school, so it's hard to tell either way.

You read on your phone?

Yes, I'm completely comfortable reading at length on a phone screen, and prefer it to tabs for laptops, except when it comes to textbooks.

I haven't noticed any eye strain either, I'm just as comfortable as with a dead tree book, and my phone is way more convenient.

I read House of Leaves after seeing it recommended so many times. I cannot recommend it honestly, because I don't think I understood it. However I liked the experience of reading it, because I like solving puzzles and I enjoy books that are interactive which this one definitely is. It rewards the work you put into it and you really have to be alert and pay attention as motifs and words are repeated.

No spoilers but this book has so many layers that you can keep peeling back one after another after another but never get to a core. It's unreliable narrators all the way down nested within each other. The, I guess what you'd call the main narrative, a house with a mysterious pocket dimension, is certainly compelling and creepy. There is a lot of pretentious academic analysis and digressions, which I got the sense the author was poking fun at that sort of thing so I felt free to skim or skip large chunks of that. Whatever its purpose, it did bog down the narrative because it was just everywhere and I would have enjoyed it more without that element.

The most unrealistic element that I keep coming back to - there's a story supposedly written by a blind man praising at great length the visual cinematography of a film that he could not have possibly experienced firsthand. The blindness is only mentioned once or twice but that fact colored my reading of the rest of the book. I don't do drugs but if I did, I feel like a drug trip would feel like this book.

I read it after falling for the hype. I thought the notion of a house that is irresolvably slightly larger on the inside than the oustide was an original surreal idea. The rest of it was just a haunted house story wrapped in layer upon layer of meta. That might be thrilling if the reader isn't familiar with meta-reference but if you are it begins to feel over indulgent.

There's a good enough short horror/surreal story at the core, but it's not quite as big and clever on the inside as it looks on the outside.

I read it back in high school during the mid-aughts. I remember liking The Navidson Record, but not particularly caring for the Zampanò and Johnny Truant elements of the story. I was too impatient at the time to fully investigate the footnotes.

I found the story structure more interesting in theory than in execution. It felt like a critique or deconstruction of something I was unfamiliar with.

It was okay. Kinda gimmicky. I think The Navidson Record is a nice little horror story.

I dropped the book halfway through, it was far too insufferably into sniffing it's own butt crack to be worth the slog. And it wasn't even particularly scary, which might have salvaged the more pretentious parts.

I'm slowly plowing through Foucault. Dude like his metaphor, but that panopticon shit sure seems prescient. Explains a lot of normal mind shit I never got on account of the 'tism. VERY sad he didn't finish his sex book; I bet it would have been interesting as fuck.

I recently enjoyed reading Romance of the Rails and American Nightmare, two books by Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner. They provide interesting overviews of the history of transportation and housing (respectively) in the United States.

A quote from Romance of the Rails:

The second blow to urban rail transit was a shift in the nature of work. In 1920, nearly 40 percent of all American jobs were in manufacturing, and there were just 1.3 service jobs for every manufacturing job. The number of manufacturing jobs continued to grow through 1980, but that growth was vastly outpaced by the growth in service jobs, so, by then, there were three service jobs for every manufacturing job. While manufacturing jobs were concentrated, most service jobs were diffused across urban areas. I call this the nanocentric city, because, to the extent that jobs had centers at all, there would be uncountable numbers of such centers in major urban areas. "Nanocentric" also sounds a bit like "noncentric", meaning there is no one center.

Just as urban planners were beginning to recognize the demise of the monocentric city, the service economy was leaving the polycentric city in the dust. Transit did a poor job of serving the polycentric city, with buses working better than rails. Transit is even less suited to serving a nanocentric urban area, especially a growing region whose job locations and patterns shift almost daily.

That's very interesting, I always see reasoning that the shift was due to corporate and government intervention shifting users toward cars.

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