Susan Orlean, in her latest bestseller, The Library Book, describes her fond memory of the piles and piles of library books of her childhood; those stacks of checked-out books forming totem poles of the narratives she had visited. I was quite taken by this description, as I too loved those towers of stacked books from my childhood. And this year, my year of reading formed three titteringly tall totem pole towers! The Tower of el Quixote. The Tower of Thomas Bernhard. And the Tower of what I came to call "the way" of the octopus.
(There was also a small tower devoted to time travel).
2018 Top Read: Don Quixote
Best in Fiction: Don Quixote
Biggest Surprise Discovery: Thomas Bernhard (An addiction!)
Most Thought-Provoking and World Changing: Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble
Best Science: Allen Everett and Thomas Roman’s Time Travel and Warp Drives; Allen Everett, Thomas Roman's Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space
Biggest letdown: Bug Music and Cricket Radio; Library of Ice
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The First Tower: Don Quixote and Spanish history
A Novel to Cross a Desert With
The first tower was built in spring. It was a narrative totem pole that followed my journey in the footsteps of Don Quixote. What a wonderful thing to reach middle age and know there are countless classics left to read and enjoy. The great el Quixote became the sun around which everything else revolved-- el Escorial and Philip II; Charles V and the two Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand (and in the same breath as the two of them: the Spanish Inquisition and this poignant cookbook, A Drizzle of Honey). There was also Isabella's two sister queens...
Battles were Lepanto (Great reads: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (Roger Crowley) and The Battle of Lepanto (Nanami Shiono) and the Ottoman Siege (post coming). Enemy at the Gate and the Vienna Wood.
My favorite book about Cervantes was by María Antonia Garcés. Evoking Freud, Garcés explores the way trauma can be bypassed in the mind; not experienced directly and instead registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is very compelling. I love her! I love Spain! I love Spanish! I love el Quixote. Very good news to find a new something to fall in love with.
The Quixote also brought Spanish food and Spanish art into my life.
Art was Bosch. I am still writing about that, but one book that stood out wonderfully was Cees Nooteboom's A Dark Premonition: Journeys to Hieronymus Bosch
This is a book I wish I could have written ~~ To see a masterpiece at 21 and then go back and see it again at 82. How has the painting changed? How has the viewer changed? Is it even the same man? Can we moderns access the picture in the way Philip II did? Have our eyes changed so much?
Art was also Velasquez. Thoughts put in this post: Being Alone With Las Meninas (Forgetting Michel Foucault)
Finally, from Ilan Stavans's book on the Quixote, this on Quijotismo
In its full splendor, El Quijote not only has given birth to an adjective but also has become a doctrine, an ideology dictating the way people ought to live their lives. What exceptionalism and the American Dream are to the United States (more about that later), this ideology—Quijotismo—is to Spain and its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its central tenet is the implicit concept of rebellion: paraphrasing Montaigne, to sacrifice one's life for a dream is to know the truth. -- Ilan Stavans
**Here is my Don Quixote Diary which includes stories from my class at Caltech with Nico.**
The Second Tower: Thomas Bernhard and Vienna at the Turn of the Century
Thomas Bernhard came into my life as I was walking across the grounds of a mental hospital in August. Located on top of a wooded hill (Ah, the Vienna Woods!), the Kirche am Steinhof is part of what is a sprawling psychiatric hospital--one of the largest in Europe. Completed in 1907, it is also the location of what is considered one of the most important Art Nouveau churches in the world. And it was here that a dear friend of mine went on a first date with a man with whom she fell madly in love many years ago. I thought it was an awfully unusual spot for a first date. But my friend assured me: it had been perfect--and more, that they were still going strong even now, decades later. I had never been on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital before. The guard inquired if we wanted to see the church: Kirche? We nodded, and he pointed up the hill. There were maybe a dozen old buildings, each set within its own grove of trees, dotting the extensive grounds. The church was visible through the shade trees lining the gravel path up the hill. It's golden dome--recently renovated-- was gleaming in the brilliant sunlight, and I could easily understand why the locals called it: limoniberg (the lemon hill). A cheerful place --but then later I found out it also had a terrible history. This happened during the Nazi years, when Steinhof Hospital became the staging point for the death camps. A heartbreaking history of hospital beds emptied of children and adults deemed "untreatable" because of their ethnicity or for any so-called anti-social tendencies; this was where the now disgraced Dr. Hans Asperger did some of his dirty work. I had no idea about this dark history as I walked along the tree-lined path that sunny August day. All I was thinking was what a perfect setting for a novel the place would make. And sure enough, I would later learn, it had been just that; for this picturesque and strange place was the backdrop for my favorite novel by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982), is set over several months in 1967, when the hospital was comprised of two units: the pulmonary disease clinic and the sprawling psychiatric institution.
Wittgenstein's Nephew bowled me over completely--and it led to several other novels by Bernhard: Old Masters, Old Masters Graphic Novel, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yes, Correction, and Goethe Dies. It also led to Gita Honngeger incredible biography: Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian. This then led to a fantastic biography of the Wittgensteins by Evelyn Waugh's grandson, called the House of Wittgenstein; as well as Kandel's Age of Insight and Carl Schorske's classic, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna.
For me, the best part about this narrative journey was being able to be reacquainted to the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I had briefly studied Wittgenstein as part of my undergraduate degree in philosophy but I confess I had mainly forgotten him. So, the narrative totem pole ended with several books on Wittgenstein's philosophy, as well as philosophical connections to Heidegger. I am still finishing this tower up and need to catch up on my reviews! I also have a long post on Bernhard and Vienna.
A Small Tower: Time Travel
This summer, between trips to Spain and Austria, I read several books on time travel, culminating in what I jokingly referred to as my "masterpiece post of the year" at 3 Quarks: Time Travel with Galileo. (I do think it was my best pst of the year there).
Great reads on time travel are listed here, along with a poem I love by Jack Gilbert. My hands down favorite book on the subject was Allen Everett and Thomas Roman’s Time Travel and Warp Drives; Allen Everett, Thomas Roman's Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space.
The Third Tower: The Way of the Octopus (Do Octopuses Have Souls?)
Beginning with Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, I set out on what ended up being my largest and most teetering tower of the year, one about how consciousness. Actually, the journey ended up being new ways of looking at complex webs of life on all scales, and about how our ego driven consciousness has isolated us from the rich, complex, and sustaining web of life into which we were born.
We do not understand what consciousness is, or where it is located, and one could argue it is in fact not located anywhere and is instead a product of a complex web of connections, and has diverse forms working over vast scales of complexity, time and space. We share it with animals that are similar to us, and with beings that seem completely foreign (octopuses, cockroaches, trees), i.e. we all share this nature. Humanity is becoming more and more estranged from its natural roots and context, removing ourselves from and destroying these complex webs of interdependency and connection in the service of utility and efficiency and the predominance of the individual ego. We do this at the peril of ourselves and the entire world. Books are below.
I ran out of time... so this journey will spill over into 2019--as will Thomas Bernhard and Vienna.
Looking Forward
Today on Facebook, my friend Steven asked everyone what books they plan to re-read in 2019. I thought this was a great question since I agree with him that re-reading also deserves attention! Speaking for myself, I would really like to re-read my favorite book of 2017, Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom. I would also like to re-read the beginning and then finish Fuentes' Terra Nostra (this is both in connection to finishing a post on Bosch and also in preparation to seeing the murals at Orvieto). Before that, though, I do want to finish my essay on animal consciousness and the other one on Vienna and Thomas Bernhard... and then I plan to read up on Venice, as well as on counter-tenors and Handel in anticipation of a return to Salzburg, this time for the Whitsun Music Festival. I've stated a music diary and here is my Report from Salzburg.
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Way of the Octopus
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Sy Montgomery's Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Christof Koch's Consciousness: Conversations of a Romantic Reductionist
Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? & I Am A Strange Loop
Peter Wohllenben's The Hidden Life of Trees
Deborah Gordon's Ants at Work
Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
Union of Concerned Scientist's Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's Mushroom at the End of the World
Timothy Morten's Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology
Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
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Also recommend Sean Carroll's podcast with David Chalmers (who is working on a new book on the subject) on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation
And Paul Stamets (who has a new book coming out called Fantastic Fungi) video Fantastic Fungi
New Atlantis/Understanding Heidegger on Technology
New Atlantis: Do Elephants Have Souls?
Documentary Film: Soil! The Movie
Film: Salt of the Earth
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