Sunday Morning Book Thread 12-08-2013: The Son of Narcissus [OregonMuse]

Story Time

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the award-winning AoSHQ's prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Hubris

On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and delivered an oration to them. And the people were shouting, "The voice of a god, and not of a man!" Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.

(Acts 12:21-23)

I just love happy endings, don't you?

Politics As Story

If you haven't yet read the landlord's article from a couple of days ago, The MacGuffinization of American Politics, kindly do so at once. If you're like me, you will have two reactions. The first will be "wow, that's brilliant" and the second will be "wow, that's depressing".

This is actually not a brilliant new insight from ace, but rather further development of an idea he has discussed a number of times in the past: beneath the obvious bias of media coverage of Obama (and liberals in general), there is a subtler bias at work, namely, that the news coverage is written and produced in such a way that Obama, or the liberal politician, or whatever aspect of the progressive agenda they're covering, is always presented as the side they want you to root for, the side you're supposed to want to win.

And thus politics becomes narrative.

On the one hand, this is an insightful observation. On the other, it really should be obvious: we're just doing what human beings always do, namely, tell stories to each other. We always overlay a narrative on top of events in order to better understand them. This struck me as I was watching the intro to the Auburn v. Missouri football game yesterday. The narrator was explaining how the two teams got here, what they had to do to play in a championship game, and it just sounded like they were setting up backstories for each team, and, unlike how the MSM promotes one and only one political narrative, in this contest, you could choose the narrative you liked best and that was the team you root for. It certainly wouldn't do for CBS to, say, talk up Auburn and trash Missouri. Why would they want to, they're not AuburnTV. They'd lose tons of viewers. If you suggested they do this, they'd think you were nuts, and they'd be right.

But they do this with politics ALL THE DAMN TIME. And it never occurs to them how outrageous this is.

And doesn't the WWE do this sort of thing, too, adding backstories? At any given wrestling match, isn't there always something else going on, some personal conflict or dispute between the performers that is calculated to make the actual outcome more significant than it would be otherwise?

I've touched on this topic in a previous book thread:

I don't think there's ever been a civilization that didn't have storytelling in one form or another. It seems that human beings are just wired that way and stories exert a powerful effect on the human psyche. There's something very compelling to us about hearing a good story.

And what's interesting is that the story doesn't have to be true in order for us to feel the effects of its power.

We just love to tell stories. It's why we write books.

The Reagan biography President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime by Lou Cannon is along these lines, positing Reagan as lead character in a story, a movie in this case. I remember rolling my eyes when this bio came out, but in the MacGuffin thread, moronette rockmom says it's actually a pretty good book.

Although I think I'd prefer just reading his diaries and letting the man speak for himself

The Most Admired Man

Best Fantasy

From one of Gabe's morning news threads, I picked up The 12 Greatest Fantasy Books Of The Year, according to Buzzfeed. I have read precisely 0 of them. But a couple look interesting enough that I may check them out: The Tattered Banner, by Duncan M. Hamilton and The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker.

Popular Education

I've always been a fan of those education-disguised-as-entertainment videos you can watch on Youtube. I stumbled upon this one a couple of days ago, a popular lecture by Walter Lewin, an MIT physics prof (and a bit of a showman), who, among other things, demonstrates that the period of a pendulum is the same regardless of its amplitude. Don't worry if you don't understand any of that, I didn't, either when the prof first brought it up, but it all gets explained. Mrs. Muse, who knows nothing about physics, watched it with me and she enjoyed it very much.

The Youtube lecture is about an hour long. Also, Prof. Lewin has written a book, For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge Of Time - A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics, where he (presumably) covers a lot of the same material seen in this lecture.

I am reminded of the actress Danica McKellar, who also happens to be a prodigious math talent, and incidentally, a lot prettier than Prof. Lewin. She has devoted herself to making the mathematics that she loves accessible to young girls, and towards that end, she's written a number of books, such as Kiss My Math and Math Doesn't Suck.

Yeah, maybe that's not quite the same thing, but I would like to see a lot more of this, meaning, people who know what they're talking about who can explain the complex concepts of their field in such a way that us non-specialists can understand.

True knowledge is a good thing. The more of it that's spread around, the better.

Name This Book

OK, so I have a book bleg. The book is a memoir of an Eastern European (maybe Russian?) immigrant in New York City in the late 19th or early 20th century. One of the story from it I remember is that a group of his friends are picking flowers in a public park (which is an infraction) and one of them see the beat cop approaching, hands the guy his load of picked flowers on the pretense that he has to tie his shoe, and runs away, leaving him holding the bag. So he gets written up for a ticket and all of his friends advise him to just pay it and forget it. Better than to lose a day's pay. Well, he doesn't want to say he did something wrong when he didn't, so he goes to court to plead his case, and the resulting courtroom scene is pretty funny. I think most of the stories in the collection are light, humorous, and touching.

And naturally, I have forgotten the title. Anybody recognize this one?

Regular Expression Bleg

The Movable Type Personal Publishing System, which I use to write these posts, allows me to search for text in previous posts. I can search for 'foo' or 'bar' or 'foobar' or whatever. I can do regular expression searches. I can enter 'foo|bar' which will return articles containing the text string 'foo' or the text string 'bar'. Which is great, but I want to do an 'and' search. That is, I want to search for articles containing the text string 'foo' and the text string 'bar' and it doesn't matter what order they're in. How do I do it?

I don't grasp the inner logic of regular expressions well enough to understand why there isn't a simple 'and' symbol, such as '&' or '&&'.

___________

So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as I keep saying, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:07 AM

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