Florence in 2015 - still reading after all those years

I will be 52 this year, and I have a distinct feeling that time is accelerating.

To be honest I am reading a lot less than I used to. This is in part a result of my spending less time on the train, which is when I usually read. These days, about half of my two hour daily commute (1 hour each way) is spent walking, which is nice but not good for reading.

Anyway, as a new year begins I am reading:
- Le côté de Guermantes which is probably going to take some time to finish. That's what I read on my iPhone, when I can't find a seat on the train, which is thankfully rare. Plus, to be honest I find all these dîners en ville (dinner in town?) rather boring. I have been reading Proust for several years, finding it in turns wonderful or slightly boring, and I don't expect to finish this year.
- The Bible, trying to follow dchaikin and at the moment not succeeding. I am stuck in the middle of Psalms right now.
- Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites de Chine
- La philosophie

I have never been any good at setting myself goals, and I gave up trying long ago. So I have no idea where my reading will take me this year. Maybe, as the last book in the above list suggests, I will go through one of my philosophical phases? I think this may have been triggered by Poquette's reading of Plato. The book I am reading now is from the "Que sais-je" encyclopedic collection. I have only started reading it today but so far it looks interesting. While searching for it, I found a few other books that I may read if my attention doesn't wander elsewhere...

Well, I am honored to be named in your introduction! I hope your turn to philosophy and Plato will be as satisfying for you as it has been for me so far. I'll look forward to your comments as we go along.

You mentioned that your commute has changed so you don't read as much on the train. I had a similar experience. When I retired and was not going out and about as much, I completely stopped listening to audio books which had been the mainstay of my commuter existence because I have trouble reading while in motion. It makes me dizzy, so audiobooks were the perfect solution. I think I've listened to only one since I retired! Funny how life circumstances affect how we experience reading.

I can commiserate about your lack of train reading time, as I do most of my reading on the subway. Looking forward to following your reading again this year.

I used to love reading on trains and on commutes but now I'm too distracted by the hustle and bustle of other commuters. Plus I love to look out the window and observe things and people. I wish more did as such since I feel many are forgetting to just stop and enjoy their surrounding and are stuck in their phones and sheets of paper in front of their face. A sunrise and sunset is always different but people think they've seen it all already. Unfortunate.

But I do want to read more books too. A conundrum.

I want to send you vibes of energy to get through the psalms and not be drained. But then Proust at his dullest has a lot more appeal than the Psalms. So, I'll just send you a cheer - to good reading in 2015!

Thank you everyone for your comments!

lilisin, there is nothing to see out the window on these underground trains. Not even ads! So I'm not missing much except for people-watching.

dchaikin, I saw that you are planning to start Ecclesiastes, and I have a strong urge to just drop Psalms, and maybe even skip Proverbs.

Oh, and >2 Poquette: I bought an annotated edition of Gorgias (that kind of thing is not always easy to find in e-book format) but haven't even loaded it on my iPad yet...

> You've managed to entice me into my first book purchase of the year: Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des Jésuites de Chine. China and Jesuits, what better? I looked for it in English, was unable to find it. Then, wound up in the spirit of the New Year, I thought "Why not try it in French?", only to be stymied by the prices on various websites until I realized, "It's in French... I can get it in Canada!" Mission accomplished and good intentions about book buying stymied.

Looking forward to your reading.

>8 SassyLassy: Wow, that's exciting and a little intimidating! I hope you enjoy your reading. I read the introduction and a few letters already. I think it's the kind of book that you can read over a relatively long period, just one or two letters at a time. It's been interesting already, especially the introduction describing the context in France. I didn't know (or forgot?) that the Jesuits' company had been dissolved in the 18th century. I suppose it was reinstated later though, I think there are still Jesuits today. My father was educated in a Jesuit boarding school, and I don't think he enjoyed it.

>9 FlorenceArt: Intimidating is right, but it will be a good way to dive in and resurrect some French, especially if I read one or two letters at a time as you suggest.

The Jesuits weren't completely dissolved and the ban on their order in Europe was revoked in the nineteenth century. The current Pope is a Jesuit. Jesuit schools usually have very high standards of education, but I believe the process can be intimidating.

My first book finished in 2015 is La philosophie by André Comte-Sponville. I loved this book and gave it 5 stars.

Que sais-je is a venerable encyclopedic collection published by PUF (Presses universitaires de France). Each of these small 128 pages volumes is like an article in an encyclopedia, purporting to give an overview of all current knowledge on the subject of the book. Of course, on such a broad and rich subject as philosophy, it can only be a summary. But I think the book succeeds in explaining what philosophy is, and why we should care. It's very clearly laid out in two parts: first a short history of philosophy, and then a presentation of its main areas of study: metaphysics, science, morals, politics, anthropology.

I learned a few anecdotal facts (metaphysics was the volume in Aristotle's works that came after -meta- physics) and even a few names I had never heard before (Pyrrho, whose name was for centuries a synonym for skeptic).

One thing that intrigues me is the assertion that you can admire a philosopher without agreeing with him, and that in fact "An error of Descartes' is worth more than a schoolchild's truth" (Alain). I wish the author had expanded on that thought a bit more, but what I take away from it is that the value of philosophy is more in the questions it asks, and the way it tries to answer them, than in any specific answer a philosopher can come up with. In fact, by definition, philosophy deals with questions that cannot have a definitive or certain answer. Although many philosophers have tried to provide these. Which may show that the author leans more on the side of the skeptics (who think that nothing can be known absolutely) rather than the dogmatics (who think that there are absolute truths that can be known by humans). And that's fine, because so do I.

This is not the first time I have tried to read about philosophy. So far I haven't been very successful. One thing I was hoping to obtain from this book was a reading plan of some sort, but there isn't one. The author does, in the course of the book, hint at which philosophers he considers the greatest, and although the list is pretty much what you would expect, there are some names he seems to insist more on, and many are French (of course, since the author is also French, but hey, so am I). Unfortunately I didn't highlight them systematically. I may have to re-read this book. In fact, I should probably re-read it. It's the nature of Que sais-je that they are short and packed with knowledge. You could highlight practically every word in each volume.

I think I already mentioned that I bought an annotated edition of Gorgias by Plato. So I guess that should be my next read. But Comte-Sponville seems to insist much more on Aristotle, whose works I have never (unlike Plato's) attempted to read.

Also, while reviewing my LT books, I found out that I already read Gorgias. And even reviewed it. Re-reading my review, I finally got a hint of why I just can't see what's so great about Plato. It's the same problem I have with the Bible, and that I would very likely have with Aristotle too. They are just too foreign and far away for me to connect. I can't get past the way these authors have of tackling abstract ideas by references to material things, symbols, sayings that were a part of their daily life but mean nothing to me. I just can't make sense of what they are saying and get stuck wondering at stupid analogies and ways of thinking that appear silly to me.

So I'm not really sure I should try to read Gorgias again. And even worse, if I can't get this idea that you can read a philosopher without agreeing with him, it's likely I will run into similar problems with any of the classic philosophers I try to read. So, what to do? Just read about them rather than read them? Or just keep trying?

I think my problem is that I have been trying to read philosophers searching for answers. What I should be searching for is questions. Or, I don't know, something else that isn't answers.

This is getting really confusing, but that's probably the whole idea...

>11 FlorenceArt: This is getting really confusing, but that's probably the whole idea...   I think you've hit on it. So much to say about your post but the questions in philosophy are key, it seems to me. It also may be that philosophy simply isn't your thing. Reading about it certainly cannot hurt.

I feel your pain. I have less trouble with the ancients because I think I understand that they were trying to organize and understand knowledge in their own minds and figure out how things and ideas relate to each other at a time when people didn't know as much as we do today. It's when we get to the 19th century that I throw up my hands in horror.

The PUF collection sounds interesting. I wonder whether my French would be good enough to tackle La philosophie.

>11 FlorenceArt: a lot to think about here. Something interesting about asking questions from a subject that mainly provides questions. It's like you are going through the motions of doing philosophy in order to understand what it is.

I will get an Ecclesiastes thread up once i finish my notes on Proverbs. I haven't started reading it yet, but will try (again) tomorrow.

>11 FlorenceArt: I think you have hit on something in your thoughts about philosophy. Reading philosophy to find out the sort of questions asked rather than the answers provided is a good approach. I rather think that there are no answers because our knowledge base keeps changing, perhaps that is why we can appreciate the ancients because we know their knowledge was limited and so we can more easily understand what they were saying. I also struggle with philosophy, but I keep trying.

I've never studied or read philosophy, but I enjoyed reading your review and your thoughts.

Thanks for the review!
Petit traité des grandes vertus by the same author has been in my wishlist for sometime, maybe this will prompt me to buy and read it this year, as reading more nonfiction is one of my goals.

I think I had a similar problem as yours concerning the mistakes of philosophers when I tried to read Spinoza (L'éthique). At some point he tried to prove logically the existence of god but his logic seemed completely inconsistent (I am a scientist) and that made the book worthless in my opinion. I was later told that Spinoza was brilliant at his time because he was the first to have tried to reason logically about ideas such as god, and that this was more important than whether he was right or wrong in his proofs. That someone redeems the book in my eye, but then I think I'd have been much better reading about Spinoza that reading his actual work.

Just finished the article on Plato in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Perfect for my purpose, as it stubbornly refuses to answer any of the questions it raises. I may get the hang of this yet. I'm looking for another book on Plato, or more generally antique philosophers, that will provide me with more questions. There is a Que Sais-Je on Plato but I'm not sure it's what I am looking for. The SEP article has a bibliography with some promising titles, but I haven't found what I was looking for yet.

There are a lot of books on Plato, as can be expected. After reading several excerpts, I bought Plato: a Guide for the Perplexed. In addition to the cute title (which is obviously that of a series), this book seems to be the closest to what I want. Not a predigested explanation on how to understand Plato, but advice on how to read him. At least that's what I hope to find in this book.

In the meantime I started getting frustrated reading so much about Plato and not reading him, so I started Gorgias, since that's what I bought. So far it's going better than last time.

Thinking back, there are two main things that put me off Plato. The first is the dialogue form.

The first time I tried to read him, as a young adult, I was shocked by the impression of dishonesty that it gave me. My father had told me about "maïeutique" (can't find an English translation but Google says it's called the Socratic method. My father called it the art of birthing -accoucher- ideas through questions) and now I realize that this applied to Socrates, not Plato. But I had vague and probably high expectations that were squashed when I saw hapless interlocutors serving various versions of "Yes" to Socrates' "questions". Much later, when I read three dialogues (Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno), I found that Socrates' questions were not only a tool to manipulate his interlocutor into agreeing with his theories, but also occasionally to drive them to confusion and ridicule. This increased my sense of indignation and rejection at the profound dishonesty of this use of dialogue.

Now, after reading the SEP article, I am willing to accept that this interpretation is incorrect, and that at least in some cases, Socrates (and maybe even Plato?), may be honestly looking for answers to his questions.

Also, critics mention the dialogue form and its dramatic or comic aspects as something that makes Plato easier to read than other, drier authors. I think the effect on me was the reverse. When I read non-fiction, I expect to read a structured argumentation, not a rambling discussion. The humor and dramatic tension between some of the characters (Plato and Gorgias at the beginning of Gorgias) completely escaped me. Also, in books as in real life I am not very good at reading people, and that didn't help either I suppose.

So, now I am reading in a different perspective and trying to enjoy these non-philosophical aspects of the dialogue.

The second thing that threw me off is what I perceived as incorrect reasoning based on dubious analogies. I hope my various guidebooks will help me negotiate through that when I come to it. And I'll try to remember Comte-Sponville's warning that some errors can be more fruitful than truths, and that "Une erreur de Descartes vaut plus qu'une vérité d'écolier" (Alain, who apparently was a great teacher of philosophy that I should probably read some day).

>18 FlorenceArt: This increased my sense of indignation and rejection at the profound dishonesty of this use of dialogue.

Interesting that you see Socrates' technique as dishonest. My impression has always been that this was Plato's sense of humor at work, and is part of what makes Plato so delightful to me. He used this technique to show certain know-it-all individuals — primarily the Sophists — that they did not, in fact, know everything.

That Plato managed to turn all of Socrates' interlocutors into yes men is unfortunate. This was very noticeable in the Republic, but it was a way of driving the conversation forward. There were many times that I wanted to interrupt and object and ask a different question! But that's part of the magic behind the Socratic method. In a classroom it elicits lively debate. Admittedly, when one is reading alone, it is quite different.

Last night I read some more of Gorgias. At times I wanted to scream at Gorgias for walking blithely in Socrates' traps. And I even found myself arguing aloud with Socrates. I don't remember doing that last time. In fact I'm not so sure now that I actually read Gorgias. It was the second dialogue in the book I borrowed, and I may have stopped at the first.

Anyway, this is fun.

>19 Poquette: Interesting that you see Socrates' technique as dishonest.

Well, I'm trying to grow out of that since all the commentators seem to agree that the dialogue form in Plato is not a gimmick but something that was important, essential even, to Plato's views on practicing philosophy. Also, I learned that he didn't always have all the answers. At least some of the dialogues leave some central questions unanswered.

One thing that I am starting to notice is that I react to the ideas that Platos' Socrates takes for granted (e.g. knowing the difference between what is just and unjust makes you a just man. Socrates and Gorgias agree on that). I happen to strongly disagree with those ideas, and I feel rather smug that he didn't follow his own precepts and accepts these without question. But of course there are ideas that I accept without question and that would probably horrify or puzzle Plato. It's just that 2000 years separate us, and our preconceived ideas don't overlap. But it's impossible to question everything.

This great stuff on your efforts to read and battles with Plato. Hoping i can leave some encouragement, because i enjoyed your posts.

Thanks Dan! I find that I am not very good at writing reviews, but when I am reading a book that makes me think, I have this urge to discuss it, or at least express these thoughts as they arise.

>21 FlorenceArt: It's just that 2000 years separate us, and our preconceived ideas don't overlap.

Isn't that the truth! Part of what is enjoyable to me about Plato is seeing how ideas are explored in an attempt to clarify not just what is ethical or just or moral, etc., as the case may be, but why this is so.

I am glad you are sharing your own thoughts with us as you go along. You are making me want to read Gorgias sooner rather than later.

Yesterday was a high culture day. I needed some distraction from this week's events. I went to the Centre Pompidou and found that I had just missed the Duchamp exhibition, which I didn't want to see that much. So instead I visited the Koons exhibition, which I wanted to see even less. I saw what I expected to see: nothing much. The thing about conceptual art is that you don't need to bother going to a museum to see it. The art is in the concept, the object itself is not that important. This was especially true here. But Koons' genius is that he manages to make conceptual art that also happens to be cute and shiny and immediately recognizable because based on popular icons. No wonder he's so successful. His works are a godsend for the nouveaux riches who want to show they have culture, but are just as flabbergasted as we are by contemporary art. Oh and Poquette, the statue of Michael Jackson with Bubbles was there too. It was probably the only works that evoked a response in me, of mild disgust. The rest, as I mentioned, is cute and shiny and not disagreeable to look at. I didn't spend much time in the exhibition and this left me some time to see the Robert Delaunay (very small, unless I missed something) exhibition, and a room of the permanent exhibition (which is renewed every two years I think) dedicated to artists (or one artist? I didn't read the labels) from Lebanon. Also another conceptual work by Latifa Echakhch. Nothing very exciting, although I liked the Lebanese room.

After that I went to see a dance show by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin, which was nice. I have a subscription to the Théâtre de la ville with a friend, and in order to see the classics (this season, two beautiful shows by William Forsythe) we have to buy tickets to spectacles by relative unknowns. Last year (September to June) all the new (to us) artists we saw were great, but this year has been disappointing. Guerin's show was much more enjoyable than what we have seen so far.

As for books, I took a break from philosophy by re-re-re-re-re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and made some progress in Gorgias. I also read the introduction to the dialogue, which stresses the similarities between Plato's times and ours. This was a time of political crisis (after Athens lost the war with Sparta) but also of cultural turmoil. Learned Athenians had read Herodotus and found that moral rules were not the same everywhere. They were not absolute values but dependent on culture. That was apparently a great shock. This and the fact that, in a direct democracy where all decisions are made in an assembly of all the citizens, eloquence is the shortest way to power because you don't have time to explain, but you must convince very quickly, explains the success of the sophists, against whom this dialogue is aimed.

And now I realize why I bought Gorgias specifically (apart from the fact that I was looking for an e-book with notes, and there aren't that many available). It's because this dialogue was cited in L'empire du moindre mal that I read last year. So, Callicles (an imaginary character) is to Gorgias (a historical sophist) what the Tea Party movement is to the founding fathers of liberalism (remember that I include economic liberalism along with political and social liberalism in my definition).

This is getting better and better. I intended to post more about the sophists. Maybe later.

I had the opposite reaction as I really enjoyed the Koons show but didn't enjoy the duChamp exhibit. I thought it was poorly organized and didn't have a logical structure or timeline to it. You were just bombarded with canvases and your eyes couldn't focus on his actual works.

I highly recommend the Hokusai exhibit and the Nikki de Saint-Phalle exhibit at the Grand Palais though.

>25 FlorenceArt: I enjoyed your discussion of the Koons exhibit and you are so right about conceptual art. Ho hum.

You are raising my curiosity about Gorgias. Must read it soon!

>26 lilisin: Yes, Hokusai and Nikki de Saint Phalle were great (but in the case of Hokusai, probably not worth the 2.5 hour wait. For Saint Phalle I bought advance tickets but I suppose the wait was a bit shorter.)

>27 Poquette: Glad I'm making you curious!

One thing I forgot to mention from the introduction: this is an early dialogue in Plato's career, but unlike others, it gives definite answers to questions. In other early dialogues the key questions are left open.

I studiously avoided the Koons exhibit when it was in New York, although it was the sensation of last year.

I have been very tired lately, and don't feel like starting anything heavy (apart from Gorgias which I'm still enjoying). Also I seem to have difficulties with novels. So I thought I should try reading some short stories.

Last night, after reading Rebecca's review of the latest book by Edith Pearlman, I looked for her books on Kobo and found this instead, which I bought: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. I started reading a few pages of it, and I'm afraid it will be pretty bad for my wishlist. For once, I don't think I've ever read anything by O. Henry, whose life was briefly sketched in the introduction. Next, there was a dedication to Mary McCarthy. Then I skipped the editor's intro and starting reading the first story by Deborah Eisenberg.

Oh, and last night I also read a story by Beatrix Potter: The Tailor of Gloucester, which was a nice and easy read, except for the fact that I don't know how to pronounce Gloucester. Nasty things, those British city names ending in -cester, you never know what to make of them.

The Pompidou Centre does have an amazing book shop. (Sorry Centre Pompidou)

Yes, it does, doesn't it? I try to avoid it!

We can only apologise for our random pronunciation - that's what happens when you have a melting pot of language from all sorts of places (and French features in there too...) -cester usually indicates a roman (or pre-roman) fort or military camp. -cester gets compressed to -ster (with a single exception) so if in doubt, shorten it. In that case the middle of the word sort of vanishes. Glos-ter would be more how I'd write it if trying to describe how to say it (and that's probably done badly certainly no expert on phonetics!).

>33 Helenliz: Thank you for the explanation! I'll know how to pronounce it now.

P.S. What is the exception? I'm dying to know!

34> Cirencester (useless random fact) Nope, no idea why, but it's the only cester that is properly pronounced as 2 syllables.

Thank you, that's an important thing to know.

>33 Helenliz: The kind of things you can learn around here :)

>33 Helenliz: >34 FlorenceArt: Then there's Beauchamp Street in London. Visiting from Canada and so pronouncing it as a French word, I was surprised that no one could direct me to it as I knew I was in the vicinity. My London dwelling sister later told me it is pronounced Beech am

Too bad I wasn't looking for Gloucester; I have no problem with that one.

I world never have guessed how to pronounce Beauchamp Street! Good to know if I ever need to find it, though knowing me I'd spend hours looking for it rather than ask someone.

Now that I know how to pronounce Gloucester, I noticed that the tailor of glos-ter has a much nicer and rhythmic sound than the tailor of glo-ces-ter, or even glue-ces-ter, as I was tempted to pronounce it.

Enjoyed reading about your day of culture. Koons can be fun to look at - and at least he isn't Damien Hirst? I haven't heard of Guerin or Forsythe before - what were the shows like? (Actually, I thought Forsythe sounded familiar, it turns out our local ballet company is doing a William Forsythe show, and that was what I was thinking of. Not familiar with him, but I'll probably try to go.)

I am enjoying the lesson on how to pronounce British names. I loved Beatrix Potter when I was young, and I always thought it was Glow-Chester. I think I learned the correct pronunciation in high school when we read King Lear.

Sorry, it was William Forsythe, I don't know why I wrote John, I corrected my post. And yes, do try to see that show, he is great.

I don't know, I liked some of Damien Hirst's works (the butterflies).

>38 SassyLassy: Inquiring minds want to know: how do you pronounce Beauchamp Street?????

>42 rebeccanyc: Dear Inquiring Mind, if you're asking about my pronunciation of the street, it is along the lines of Bow (the kind you put on a present) Shawmp, which looks terrible spelled out like that, but I've never been good at those symbols the dictionary provides. My French works in Québec and northwestern France. The further south you get, the less intelligible I seem to be! People from France say that Canadian French sounds like ducks, particularly in words like "quoi", which has quite a nasal sound here. Acadian French spoken in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and the French spoken out west are different again. Interestingly, my French Canadian dictionary and my French French dictionary give the same symbols for pronunciation of that particular word.

>43 SassyLassy: Sorry, I didn't mean how you pronounce it because I would have pronounced it in a French way too -- I meant how is it pronounced in London, but I just went back to your original post and saw you mentioned that, so now I'm feeling doubly foolish that I didn't notice that the first time!

I think a lot of people here in England who aren't familiar with London or those unusual surnames would make the same mistake about Beauchamp Street. I think it stems from a time in the past when people here might have wanted to hide their French ancestry. Although while that one is strange, nothing will ever baffle me more than Featherstonhaugh being pronounced Fanshaw.

Currently I am:

- Enjoying the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. I just finished the 5th one. So far my favorite, I think, is the first one, Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg. I was a bit disappointed by Alice Munro's Leaving Maverley. It was a good story, but that's not what I expect from a short: a neat little story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I prefer the kind that just hang in the air and leave you wondering or musing. A long time ago, a friend told me he loved reading short stories because of "the three little dots at the end".

- Getting annoyed at Proust for prattling endlessly about the nobility. He reminds me of that magazine my grandmother used to read, "Point de vue Images du monde", with news from all the "têtes couronnées" (kings and queens and their relatives).

- Getting near the end of Gorgias and trying to write a few meaningful notes about it.

- Wondering what I should start next. L'acacia has been on my TBR list for some time and I keep deciding I'll read it next, and then buying something else instead. This time it might be Outline by Rachel Cusk. The contrasted reviews on this author intrigue me, and I like the idea of the book: a woman seen through the eyes of several people she has met and talked to. LibraryThing thinks I will like it. I still haven't decided whether I trust their predictions.

I still haven't decided whether to trust LT's prediction or not. Tell us how it was if you do read the book.
What cracks me up with the prediction is when the site think I "will probably like" the book, with a "prediction confidence: very high", so it is very confident that I will probably like the book...

In the beginning the predictions were completely off. I remember a book that I had read and loved (and even rated on LT) and it told me I wouldn't like it! But since then I have tried to complete my LT libraries to better reflect my readings, and it should be a bit more reliable, but probably not 100%.

It's an appealing thought to imagine that predictions will become better and better as we read more. :) I'm going to try and finish my current book rather than hang in here. ;)

I just finished reading Gorgias, and again I find myself getting angry at Plato and at the authors of the notes. Although I now understand him a bit better, I still can't agree with him.

Plato is defending endangered moral values. His contemporaries, because of political crises and the discovery that their specific values are not universal, have come to doubt them. The sophists are a manifestation of this crisis, as they try to fill that terrifying void left where moral values used to be. What they are trying to fill it with is discourse. That's not so different from Plato. But the sophists are not trying to discover or rediscover universal truths, because they don't think there are any. Instead, they aim to convince others and shape the world by language. Plato, on the other hand, wants to use language to discover the truth. Or so he tells us. In fact what he is really doing is manipulating language to reveal what he himself has already decided to be true. He is not so very different from sophists in his method. Both are trying to convince using language and a purely formal logic based on deeply flawed premises.

Yes, Callicles and the sophists use fallacious arguments, but so does Plato. Yes, I agree with Plato's morals and I disagree with Callicles's cynicism. But I don't think moral values come out the better from a discussion where lies and lazy logic are used to defend them. No, doing the right thing does not automatically make us happy. We can try to make happiness coincide with a just life and to a limited degree that might work, but only through our work, not through some automatic reward mechanism. We should do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because we hope to gain from it.

But the two main questions Plato doesn't bother trying to answer are: what does it mean to live a just life, and how can I approach that goal despite my own weaknesses and the unjustness of the world? To the first one, we do get an answer I guess, but it's completely unsatisfactory: the knowledge of what is just and unjust is within us, all we have to do is dig it up through dialogue. If two free Athenian men can agree on something in an honest discussion, then it's a universal truth. Um, right. To the second question, Socrates's answer seems to be: just keep nagging people until they get so angry they kill you, and you'll die with a clear conscience. Plato didn't follow that line, at least in his life, and I don't know what his answer is.

Plato asks an essential question: how should we best spend our alloted time in life? And I agree, in theory, with some of his assertions, but I cannot agree with how he sets about to "prove" them. I'm not even sure that proof should be what to look for to back up moral values.

And yet, 2400 years after Plato, are we any closer to answers? And how many people since Socrates have died because we could not agree on them?

I hadn't heard of Outline before, but I agree that the premise sounds really intriguing. I have read a couple of her books before, The Bradshaw Variations which I loved, and Arlington Park which I thought was OK but can't remember much about. And LT thinks I will like it but with a low prediction confidence! I think I'll need to see for myself.

>51 wandering_star: I had heard about Arlington Park before Outline, but I didn't feel drawn to it as I am not a housewife myself and the reviews were mixed. But I think I will try Outline some day.

>50 FlorenceArt: I wish I had read Gorgias so I would be able to respond to your comments, which are intriguing.

>53 Poquette: I'm sorry for not giving you a better idea of the content of the book. I'm not as good as you are, in fact my reviews suck, when they exist at all. I did try to take notes and write something more useful, but the language is an obstacle.

>54 FlorenceArt: the language is an obstacle

I completely understand. Your notes were very good, I just don't want to risk making a bigger fool of myself than necessary by commenting on something I have not yet read. I will try to squeeze it into my reading sooner rather than later.

Just counted my books for 2014. I read 44 (at least according to my LT records), of which 16 by Georgette Heyer!!!

>46 FlorenceArt: "It was a good story, but that's not what I expect from a short: a neat little story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I prefer the kind that just hang in the air and leave you wondering or musing."

Yes, yes, yes. Me too, that exactly.

>50 FlorenceArt: " To the second question, Socrates's answer seems to be: just keep nagging people until they get so angry they kill you, and you'll die with a clear conscience."

I got a kick out of that. Very interesting post on Plato.

I see Heyer's name a lot, but the significance hasn't registered with me. in my confused thougts i have somehow put somewhere along the lines of Trollope, who i also haven't read.

Georgette Heyer wrote "regency romance" in the 1950's or thereabouts (that's how I see her anyway, but considering the number of books she wrote, she must have been active a lot longer). Her books are mostly fluff, which explains how I could read so many of them in so short a time. I love her dialogues, though they are very far from Plato. I don't know if she wrote for Hollywood, but the best of them brought to my mind those wonderful comedies with Cary Grant and/or Katharine Hepburn. Like Bringing up Baby for instance.

I'm not finished with Plato yet, as I am still reading the notes from Gorgias. They help by developing the ideas that are discussed in the dialogue and restating them in a language that I can better understand and relate to.

I see better now why Callicles was cited in L'empire du moindre mal as the personification of liberal ideas pushed to their limits. For him, the rightful order of things is that the strong have power over the weak. Laws were invented by the weak to defend themselves from the strong and artificially keep the power to themselves. (To which Socrates replies, but if a crowd is stronger than an individual and it is just that power should belong to the strong, then it is just that power should belong to the crowd. Take that, Tea Party!).

For Callicles, pleasure lies in satisfying desire, and the stronger the desire, the higher the pleasure is. Power is the ability to fulfil all your desires, which leads to happiness. Socrates easily demonstrates the problem with that: if desire is the source of happiness, then a man with a skin disease who wants to scratch himself constantly and experiences a brief pleasure when he does, is happier than a healthy mean. Generally speaking, desire engenders frustration and more desire. If you keep trying to satisfy your desires, you end up being a slave to them. Power is the ability to master all your desires.

Although I agree with Plato here, I'd like to point out that according to my limited knowledge, his opinion on this was shared by many philosophers of his era. I'm sure that Epicurus and the stoics, for instance, had different takes on this, but the basic idea that seeking pleasure and fulfillment of desire is a misguided way to look for happiness seems to have been almost a cliché at the time, at least among philosophers.

And this is what we have to learn from them. This is where the opposition between Plato and Callicles is so relevant for us.

I have to admit that my hatred of Plato is not based only on rational motives. The snob in me feels compelled to despise what everyone admires. And I am also revolted by the injustice that so many works from him have reached us, when most of his contemporaries are known only through second or third hand quotes, because he was co-opted as a kind of proto-christian and his books were considered worth preserving when others were recycled to copy Christian texts.

Still, I feel that Plato's reputation may be partly based on misunderstandings. History has given sophists a bad name and identified them with faulty reasonings. But Plato's reasoning is just as bad. He is good at pointing out his opponent's contradictions by taking their arguments and pushing them to the point of absurdity. His own arguments they cannot refute so easily, because they are based on premises that are at least nominally accepted by all learned men of the time.

For instance, if you take the following argument:

Premise 1: nothing is as disgraceful (ugly) as committing injustice
Premise 2: something can only be ugly for one or both of two reasons: (a) it gives us pain or displeasure, or (b) it is bad for us (as it produces unwanted consequences and makes us unhappy)
Premise 3: committing an unjust act does not give us pain
Conclusion: committing an unjust act makes the perpetrator unhappy

(Please note that this unhappiness is not the result of guilt, but the mechanical and inevitable result of committing a disgraceful act.)

Premise 1 is hard to reject openly, no matter how many unjust acts you commit every day. Nobody wants to appear as devoid of moral values. And like most people, Plato's interlocutors are probably sincerely convinced of this.

Premise 2 seems extremely shaky to me, but everyone seems to accept it. Why? It seems to me that both Socrates and his interlocutors take for granted that all the meanings of a given word are interchangeable. When they say that something beautiful is necessary pleasing or useful, they assume this is true of beauty in the esthetical sense and in the moral sense (I'm not sure you can use the word beautiful in a moral sense in English, but in French it makes sense. I have no idea about Greek.) Also, they take everything as absolute. It does not seem to occur to any of them that one thing can be good for one person and bad for another, that the meaning of "bad" to the victim and to the perpetrator, as far as the direct consequences on each of them are concerned, is completely different. If something is bad, it's bad.

Premise 3 seems unquestionable, and so we are driven to the conclusion, which follows logically from the premises that everybody agreed on. The argument is impeccable as far as pure logic is concerned, but it leads us to an absurd conclusion.

In my world, 2400 years later, when that happens, the first thing you should do is take a hard look at your premises to see where they might not be 100% true. And it's very difficult for me to accept that nobody is thinking of doing that. All Polos (the second interlocutor) and Callicles can come up with is to complain that Socrates is confusing them and muddling up the issue (yes he is), but they can't figure out where the problem is apparently.

Plato was probably aware that his logic was faulty, and so maybe we do agree after all that pure logic is maybe not the right way to tackle moral questions. Still, it's just dishonest to use logic to confuse and ridicule your opponents on the one hand, and to give the appearance of rationality to your own irrational beliefs on the other. But I guess that's Plato's version of Socratic irony.

I've marked your posts on Gorgias to come back to when I've read it, but I'm relieved to see I'm not the only one who finds fault with the logic of Plato's arguments.

>59 FlorenceArt: and >60 StevenTX: I may be totally wrong about this, but I think it is unfair to label Plato as dishonest or to dismiss his arguments as faulty because it is my impression that 2400 years ago, the philosophers were grappling with the notion of ideas per se and knowledge per se, how to organize them and how to think about them in the context of the world or universe as they understood them at the time. For example, people who believe there are only four elements — air, water, earth and fire — are operating at a tremendous disadvantage! Especially when looked upon with 20/20 hindsight.

In the context of a society that had its sense of community and morality from Homer, which is filled with all kinds of questionably immoral behavior on the part of the gods and heroes, Plato in the Republic suggested that Homer and Hesiod should be kept out of an ideal state because they were essentially immoral.

Before Plato, none of the philosophers who have come down to us wrote anything but aphorisms or epigrams. Plato practically invented the kind of discourse he reported in his dialogues, which from what I have read of Plato recently, was seldom if ever dogmatic. I view Plato's Q and A as a way — primitive though it may be to us 2400 years later — of advancing the conversation. Interestingly, we are still engaged in that same effort!

For example, in the Republic, it is conventional to say that Plato "wanted" to keep the poets and artists out of his proposed just state. What nobody ever mentions is that Plato via Socrates clearly states several times in the Republic that this so-called ideal state was developed for the sake of argument — to define what a just state and a just person were — and he clearly knew and understood that such a place could never be realized, nor would it be desirable! The exclusion of the poets and artists from the proposed ideal state were incidental to the larger issues of morality and justice.

I have not read Gorgias and am dying to do so, but your description tells me that the issue of what is just is also treated there. My sense is that the ideas are under consideration, they are being explored.

Except for the Republic, I have not read much Plato since I was a teenager. The Phaedo was the first thing I read, and I am sure the loftier ideas explored there went over my childish head, but I never got the impression then or in the course of reading the Republic that Plato was being didactic.

So . . . that's where my confusion lies regarding your comments, Florence. I do believe that some leeway should be given to Plato considering what he was trying to do: namely, to understand and define principles of right living. But my impression is that he wasn't dictating, he was engaged in exploration. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I have ordered a copy of Gorgias that was translated by Robin Waterfield who also translated my edition of the Republic and will read it as soon as possible. You have really pushed my curiosity buttons! ;-)

Please pardon this rather long response!

I am enjoying this discussion about Plato.

>61 Poquette: Thank you for your reply Suzanne. You're right of course. I am being unfair to Plato, but I'm still working on this, don't worry. I am still reading the notes that came with Gorgias, and again finding more food for thought in them than I did in the actual text. I came across a comment on democracy and tyranny that impressed me particularly and referred not to Gorgias, but to The Republic. So, maybe while you read one, I will read the other :-)

But first I will finish the notes from Gorgias, then probably Plato: a Guide for the Perplexed, since I bought it. And also the SEP article on The Republic.

I'm not sure I can find a French e-book edition of The Republic with good quality notes, so maybe I can try reading the translation you read?

And here are two quotes from Book I of The Republic that illustrate why I want to read it:

"Tyranny springs from democracy much as democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from excess; the one from excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom."

"At last the citizens become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of laws, written or unwritten; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is the glorious beginning of things out of which tyranny springs."

Translated by Benjamin Jowett (Project Gutenberg edition)

Of course he was talking about the downfall of Athenian democracy, but it's scary how well it describes the state of our own.

I found out a long time ago that it was not good for me to buy too many books at the same time: the longer a book stayed in the TBR pile, the less likely I was to read it. With paper books it was easy to restrain myself, but less so with e-books. My invisible TBR pile has been growing steadily, and while it's in no danger of toppling, it's probably not a good thing either...

Bought today:
The Republic (or course!) in a digital edition that seems decent of the most widely available ran station, that of Victor Cousin (in the public domain of course, so pretty old. I hope that won't be too much of a problem). The publisher that made the Gorgias edition I read doesn't have a complete edition of The Republic, only chapters I and VII. So I'll be on my own except for Cousin's notes, which are included in the edition of The Republic I just bought. At least I hope so!

High Water Mark by David Shumate. I saw a quote of one of his poem on a forum, looked for his books, downloaded a sample, and there you are. I don't think I have read any poetry since I was a teenager, except for a few random quotes here and there (mostly in the métro, as part of an ongoing project by the RATP to promote poetry, which I think is a great idea). These are very short prose poems, almost like mini shot stories, which is probably why they appealed to me. Anyway, we'll see.

Last year was the centenary of the beginning of World War I, but also the 70th (did I get the number right?) anniversary of the liberation of France. And this year is the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. This probably explains why there are so many documentaries on TV about the holocaust. Some of them Télérama (the intellectual's TV guide) insists I should see. And although Télérama and I often disagree on what a good documentary is, I recorded some of them based on their recommendations.

Tonight I watched one on the execution of Adolf Eichman in Jerusalem on 31st May 1961 and the questions it raised. So many questions without good answers.

What kind of justice is served by killing one man for the murder of 6 millions?

Can a murderer be judged by his victims? The whole point of justice is that retribution is taken out of private hands and carried out instead by the impersonal hand of State and its representatives, thereby cutting off the endless cycle of retribution. (From a judicial point of view, the Eichman trial was a mockery. Most of the testimonials for the accusation had nothing to do with Eichmann, and the defense was not allowed to present any witnesses. Of course, who cares, he deserved to die anyway. I wonder what kind of witnesses he could have brought to the stand.)

One of the interviewees argued that the trial was important and worth it, because for the first time it gave a stand to the victims (the survivors who were living in silence) to testify.

Other interviewees said that this trial brought the remembrance of persecution and mass murder to the heart of the national identity of Israel, and that still weighs heavily, especially on the peace process (when there is any, which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment).

Hugo Bergman, when asked on national radio for his comments on the execution, summed it up by saying that there are two sides to the remembrance issue: one is Amalek's way (which I'm sure I should remember from the Bible read but, as with most of the things I read, I forgot), which is to say basically «never forget what they did to us», and keep the cycle of retribution going. The other is "remember that you were a victim, and show compassion to victims". In that instance, Amalek won.

A most disturbing and thought-provoking documentary. For once I guess I agree with Télérama.

And this reminds me that I have one of Hannah Arendt's books in my TBR list: The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Next in my "to be watched" list is "Did they really not know?" on the responsibility of the French in the deportation of French Jews.

Thanks for the commentary.

Did they really not know? would probably interest me very much. Do you remember when it aired and on which channel? Maybe I can still catch it on replay.

Chlorine, it was on "Toute l'histoire" on 25 January. I had to pay a 7€ subscription to Free so that I could see it!

>63 FlorenceArt: maybe while you read one, I will read the other

Good idea. My Gorgias, it turns out, will not be here anytime soon. I ordered a used copy through Amazon from one of their outside vendors, and it is apparently being sent via horse and buggy: scheduled arrival date February 20th!! Ugh!

Thanks for that link to the SEP article. I keep forgetting about that Stanford resource. Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed sounds intriguing as well.

To be continued . . .

>69 Poquette: Good, that will give me time to catch up! I think The Republic is much longer than Gorgias, and I haven't even finished reading the notes from the latter.

Finally settled on a destination for my upcoming holiday, which starts one week from now. I'm going to Amsterdam from 12 to 15 February. The rest of the time I'll stay home and catch up on Parisian exhibitions. I also need to work on an artistic project I'm working on (my first live performance!).

Florence: I'm not subscribed to Toute l'histoire, too bad. Let us know what you think when you see it.

Amsterdam seems like a very good choice for a holiday, I hope you enjoy it! :) And good luck for the artistic project (what kind of live performance will it be?)

Thank you! I have booked the hotel and the train, and loaded the Lonely Planet guide on my iPad :-D

The performance will be something similar to what I do with video, except it will be in real time: I will draw on my computer and the image will be projected on screen.

Amsterdam is lovely; I hope you enjoy it!

I now have my ticket to the Rembrandt exhibition for Friday the 13th!

Here's the article that made me want to visit it:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/07/rembrandt-late-works/

And I also remember an earlier article in the New York Times, but I'm too lazy to look it up. I don't think it was about this exhibition, but it was about Rembrandt's life and works at the end of his life.

>75 FlorenceArt: Sounds like a lovely exhibition! Have you been to the Rijksmuseum before? I went there a year and a half ago and it was quite a place.

>76 ursula: I went once, as a student, that must have been at least 25 years ago. I remember a lot of paintings with cows. I also remember being swept off my feet by the Van Gogh museum.

>77 FlorenceArt: I regret not getting to the Van Gogh museum, as I hear it's amazing. But we only had 2 days in Amsterdam and didn't want to spend the whole time at museums, so choices had to be made. One day hopefully I'll get to see it though!

The Goldfinch by Carl Fabritius is at the Rijksmuseum. It would be a literary experience to visit that painting.

>79 RidgewayGirl: Oh! I thought it was in Den Haag and I regretted missing it. I was looking for a book to read in relation to Amsterdam and The Goldfinch did come up, along with books about Rembrandt and Spinoza. All of those sound tempting. I couldn't find a biography of Rembrandt available as an e-book though, except Rembrandt's Portrait which is only available at Amazon. The Goldfinch I already have, so this could be an opportunity to start reading it. On Spinoza, I found a book in French on Jews in Amsterdam at the time of Spinoza, and that sounds very interesting too: Être juif à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza. I'm not sure I'm ready to read Spinoza himself!

Edit: it looks like the same author wrote two different books, Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza and Être juif à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza (no touchstone). The first one has very good reviews, the other doesn't have any but seems more closely related to Spinoza. Not sure which one to get, if any.

The Goldfinch is in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, unfortunately, so I won't get to see it.

I've been exploring the Rijksmuseum's collection on line. The site is amazing.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection

I have been thinking of going to Amsterdam for a couple of years now ever since the opening of the new museum.

It is bad enough reading all the wonderful reviews on LT that add books to my wishlist, but now it seems I am adding cities that I must visit as well.

>82 baswood: I had that exact same thought after reading The White Guard. Now I really really want to go to Kiev in addition to all the other wonderful places I "must" visit.

>80 FlorenceArt: Not exactly about Amsterdam and Spinoza, but you might consider The Courtier and The Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World. There is also an older biography of him by Stuart Hampshire. Then there is Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity which I haven't read yet but do plan on reading. It certainly had interesting reviews.

>83 SassyLassy: Thanks for the suggestions. Both Betraying Spinoza and The Courtier and the Heretic look really interesting.

Sorry, I even checked that the Goldfinch was there by putting "fabritius Rijksmuseum" and it came right up. So much for not clicking through and double-checking. Who would have thought there were inaccuracies on-line?

Forgot to mention that to my surprise, I finished Le côté de Guermantes yesterday. It's a bit of a relief and I will wait a bit before I start on the next volume, Sodome et Gomorrhe. I hope it won't have so many boring dinners and discussions of rank and genealogy.

Also, I am reading L'acacia by Claude Simon. Not very fast because I have to wait until I'm ready before I take a deep breath and start a new chapter. Usually I read only a few pages at a time, but that doesn't seem possible here. I have only read two chapters so far, and each one felt like one crazy sentence. But unlike Proust's sentences who are slow and stately and stop to graze the grass on the side of the road or to gaze pensively at the landscape, Simon's sentences sucks you in and send you screaming as if in a theme park ride, hanging on to the handrails as the car jumps and bumps forward and takes crazy curves, before its spits you out dizzy and breathless at the end. I'm enjoying the ride but this is not a read for just any time I have a bit of time on my hands.

>86 FlorenceArt: Sodom and Gomorrah has much different subject matter! I can't say there aren't any dinner parties and such, since those are things that interest Proust quite a lot, but mostly he is focused on other topics entirely in that one.

>88 ursula: Thanks, that's good to know! I am a bit curious about this book and also a bit reluctant to start it due to the title. I don't like the word Gomorrhe, I think it's ugly for some reason, plus of course there's all the associations of guilt, revenge, punishment... those are not happy words. Especially not in the time of Proust I suppose.

Congrats on finishing what I know, in translations, as The Guermantes Way. I never was able to get myself to start it. I stopped after books two. Sigh...

Well Dan, I couldn't really press you to try it, but there were good moments: Françoise coming to terms with a new apartment after the family moved, the night at the opera. Unfortunately that's all I can remember now, and those were both in the beginning, and the rest of the book rather dragged on. My favorite so far has been A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur.

But unlike Proust's sentences who are slow and stately and stop to graze the grass on the side of the road or to gaze pensively at the landscape, Simon's sentences sucks you in and send you screaming as if in a theme park ride, hanging on to the handrails as the car jumps and bumps forward and takes crazy curves, before its spits you out dizzy and breathless at the end.

Enjoyed your descriptions.

Looking forward to your reviews from Amsterdam!

>92 DieFledermaus: Thank you!

On the first day of my holidays, I tried to visit the new Fondation Vuitton... and gave up. I could have waited in line in the sun (at least an hour, maybe more I think), except for the young couple bickering constantly at my back. I left before ruining my afternoon completely, and possibly theirs. I am not very tolerant toward my fellow humans, I'm afraid. Luckily I had a fall back plan, so the day was not wasted. I went to the Louvre to see the Rembrandts. And also a few other Flemish paintings, including ex-Rembrandts: quite a few paintings attributed to him were later demoted and are now considered to be the works of his pupils and/or assistants. He had quite a lot of them, and some were very good.

Before that, I visited the exhibition on Rhodes, and after the museum bookshop, which was rather a let down. There used to be a very large shop with a huge choice of books and also reproductions and other goodies. That was a long time ago. I supposed they split it into several shops, but the one I visited was not very exciting. I did buy one book though, not on Rembrandt or Flemish paintings as I had hoped, but a great big book of the Hokusai Manga. I'm very happy with it but I wonder where I will put it.

After that I was ready to fall from exhaustion and dehydration and repaired to a salon de thé, and then went back home. Now I'm about to watch a documentary on Berlin's Neues Museum and Pergamon Museum.

>94 FlorenceArt:
Sounds like a great day. The Fondation Vuitton is really just a beautiful building. Every angle is photogenic and the views when the sun starts to set is really beautiful. Only the first exhibit, I thought, was interesting (the dark rooms with mirrors, you'll see eventually) but I'm sure more and more beautiful galleries will happen over time.

We bought the Hokusai expo book but unfortunately it didn't have my favorites in it.

Oh yes, it was a very good day! I took a ticket online to visit the Fondation Vuitton on Monday. There is an exhibition by Olafur Eliasson that has been getting very good reviews. I liked the building from the outside although it reminded me of a dirigible crashing to the ground. My mother told me the inside is wonderful too.

The Hokusai Manga is very different from your usual exhibition catalogue. It's a selection of 300 plates from the original series, which had 14 volumes and close to 4000 plates. The presentation is very graphic with some of the drawings repeated and enlarged in a beautiful red color. The effect is beautiful. But there is no explanation of what the plates represent (most of the time it's obvious, but some commentary would have been nice). And the introduction, which I only started reading, is barely legible. This may be due to the fact that it's a French translation of the English translation of the Japanese original (which is also printed in the book, but I don't think my Japanese would be up to reading it, and frankly I'm too lazy to try). But it doesn't really matter, it's a beautiful and often funny book.

>96 FlorenceArt:

Olafur Eliasson! Yes, that's the one! It's wonderful. I could sit in the rooms for hours just staring at the world he has created. A wonderful feeling.

I saw the Hokusai Manga book at Librairie Gallimard but I just couldn't buy such a heavy book at the time. But on a related note, it's hard being in Japan and walking past ukiyo-e stores. I want to buy everything.

Enjoy your break, Flo.

>91 FlorenceArt: i'm afraid i'll have to start over again with Swan's Way. Anyway, the section on Combray in Swan's Way was my favorite part of the books...possibly my best reading experience ever, so i want to re-read it. I don't imagine it will have the same effect the next time.

I have been trying to take advantage of my vacation to actually read some of the articles in my to-read list. One of them took me a few months to get to despite several attempts: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?.

The article is not that hard to read. There is a demonstration with some formulas I didn't try to understand, but the argument itself is pretty easy to grasp in terms of common sense.

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

One thing that I found interesting is my reaction to this paper. I simply cannot bring myself to take this argument seriously, or even, it turns out, to discuss it coherently. How strange.

OK. I am happy to report that after thinking about it for several days (after I finally managed to finish reading the article above), I have found a counter argument:

WHAT ABOUT THE SOFTWARE?

This guy discusses the possibility that a post-human (and I have a minor problem with that word too, but I'll let it at that for now) civilization would be able and likely to run "ancestor simulations" (the simulated universe we could be living in. Including ourselves) only as a question of hardware constraints. Which could probably make it doable within a few centuries or even before that. But at no point does he discuss the development. Can you imagine being project manager for the development of a software that would simulate us? I'm not even talking about the development itself, that should be pretty easy once you've written the specs. Right. And then let's skip all the way to the testing. That should be fun. And I'm not even thinking about maintenance and user support.

So there. I guess I can go back to thinking about something else. We are not living in a simulation. Unless...

I need to find the number of the support hotline, I think there are a few bugs they'd like to know about.

Intriguing to think of a post-human world as a reality and not just some science fiction construct. It is mindboggling, to say the least!

Mindboggling is the word, yes. The idea that statistically, any living being is much more likely to be simulated than to be real. Supposing that a physical post human civilization is likely to run several simulations. And also the fact of thinking about it statistically, which means that time becomes irrelevant in the argument, because if we are in a simulation, we are not only not what we think we are, but also we aren't when we think we are. Which leads to thinking of all possible post human civilization as all somehow existing at the same time, at least that's the image the statistical description evokes for me.

Also, how does technology make us "post" human? And what level of technology does it take, exactly, to do that? Why didn't we become post human when we invented agriculture, or the printing press, or harnessed nuclear energy? What is the meaning of post human, anyway? The article doesn't define it. It always annoys me when a non-fiction work discusses a central concept without first defining it. I suppose that's something we inherited from Plato: the convention that before discussing something, we must agree on a definition of it.

Supposing that a physical post human civilization is likely to run several simulations.

Simulations presuppose a model, and I would have to say that the model is flawed! haha This suggests that existence is an even crueler joke than we have been led to believe. I object! Where can we go to complain about this?

I suppose that's something we inherited from Plato: the convention that before discussing something, we must agree on a definition of it.

I am not an expert on the history of logic, but I don't think we can blame it on Plato necessarily. I don't know whether you remember your Euclidian geometry, but to begin the study of geometry, certain axioms were postulated that were presented as self-evident upon which further proofs were produced on the basis of logical steps. Any effort to advance knowledge or understanding usually has to start with some mutually agreeable points of departure on the basis of which the inquiry can proceed. Euclid came after Plato, but I don't think Plato was the first logician, although I don't know where the process began. I was thinking about this the other night in connection with our mutual interest in Plato, and it occurred to me then that his process of question and answer is attempting to move forward logically, much like the steps in proving a theorem in geometry.

At any rate, if the article you reference does not define "post human" it is hard to know what the postulates are. It does make for an interesting thought experiment, however, as the many intriguing questions you raise indicate.

I watched the documentary "Ils ne savaient pas ?" This week.

76000 Jews were sent to camps from France. Not one single train was stopped.

From 1941-42, at least the head of the Resistance in London knew about the plan to exterminate Jews. But nobody was very much interested in saving them. Even alerting to the problem was dangerous, because it could hurt the image of the Resistance, who Vichy said was in the hands of Jews. Information was sent to the network in France but nothing much was done. Of course, it has to be said that stopping a train to save the people in it would have been a lot more complex than blowing it up, and then there is the question of what to do with those people afterward. It's a whole different organization and the resistance didn't have that.

As for ordinary people, they could have known but were not that interested, or couldn't believe the enormity of it. They had their own problems and this was just another of the grievances against the German occupation. We are not so different today. Not so long ago, when France was under shock because of the murder of a few people, we didn't care that much that Boko Haram was killing thousands at the same time in Nigeria. (Actually I'm not even sure it was Nigeria.)

There is a quote in the documentary from the journal of Helène Berr, a young Jew who was living in Paris at the time and who eventually died in a concentration camp. A neighbor calls in with the news that a woman of their acquaintance was sent to a camp with her children. "So now they are deporting women and children?" Berr's mother replies: "That's what we have been telling you for a year, and you wouldn't believe us!"

As long as it happens to someone you don't know, it's not real. Even the French Jews thought at first that they would be protected because they were French, and indeed a large majority of the deported were foreign refugees from Eastern Europe. They made up about 1/2 of the Jewish population in France at the time, but 2/3 of the deportees.

I think the reality of concentration camps took a long time to be known, because it was so difficult to believe, and it was drowned in the general destruction and death of the war. In all, 55 to 60 million people died because of the war. Even after the liberation, when concentration camps were mentioned it was only because of heroes of the resistance who had been deported there. And of course we needed them badly, those heroes, to make up for the fact that most of the French population was just trying to survive and go about their daily business during the occupation, while a small minority was actively collaborating.

The movie "Nuit et brouillard" by Alain Resnais was originally supposed to be about the deported resistants. In fact the word Jew does not appear even once in the movie, even though the images used were of Jews. I should probably see that movie.

(Edited for spelling)

Interesting thoughts. I know of at least one French Jewish girl who was saved when nuns took her into a convent and kept her secret throughout the war. I'm sure there were others who were saved under similar or other circumstances. And it wasn't just in France that the French attacks were all that was in the headlines and the Boko Haram attacks were in the back pages, if covered at all.

Yes, of course. My mother told us how one day, in the religious institution she was in in Paris, the mother superior gathered them to inform them that some of the pupils would have new names from now on. Non Jewish names of course.

I spent the whole day at the Rijksmuseum, from 9 to 4:30. Well, OK, it closes at 5, but that was a full day enough for me. I missed the Asian wing and probably a few other things. The Rembrandt exhibition was wonderful. My feet hurt.

There were some beautiful pieces of Delft China in the museum (and also some in those wonderful interior paintings by Vermeer and de Hooch), most with China inspired motifs. Which was a nice coincidence, because yesterday I read the letter about porcelain manufacturing in the Lettres curieuses et édifiantes des jésuites de Chine. And I use the word manufacturing on purpose. Production was optimized by splitting the process into many extremely specialized steps. The Jesuit mentions a piece that reportedly had gone through the hands of 70 workers. And I suspect that working conditions were little better than what they were in 19th century European factories... or today's Chinese factories.

There were a few cities in China dedicated solely to porcelain production. I think a lot of their work was for export, sometimes on order from European merchants who tried to get pieces done according to their designs, sometimes unsuccessfully when their requirements were incompatible with the manufacturing process. At the time, porcelain could not be produced in Europe. This became possible only after kaolin deposits were discovered in 1768 in the Limoges area.

I would love to visit the Rijksmuseum, I'm glad you got to spend an entire day there. No wonder your feet are sore! Were the floors marble? Those are the worst when what one is doing is walking slowly and then standing still for stretches.

That is definitely a full day. We spent about 6 hours there, and we were all exhausted!

Museums are exhausting, and it's rare that I spend so much time in one, but it was worth it. I didn't notice the floors, I think there might have been wood in some places though. I still have to visit the Van Gogh and Stedelijk museums, but I think they are smaller.

>104 FlorenceArt: this is a very interesting post. Not sure one could stop a train loaded with people you don't want to kill, but you think blowing up tracks would be within the realm of the Resistance. A Train in Winter opens with a really nice history for the French Resistance. One conclusion seems to be that one of France's greatest WWII crimes were sophisticated French-run counter measures against the Resistance itself.

ETA - enjoying your posts on the musuem visits.

Still trying to reduce the "pile" of articles in my to-read list (actually it's an Evernote notebook). Today I finished La fin de la politique ?. I don't think the article has an English version although there is an English abstract at the beginning.

I don't remember how I found this article, but I know I was intrigued by the title, because that's a question that has been worrying me for years. And the article does contain some interesting thoughts, although it was difficult for me to get to the ideas behind the scholarly talk.

After the riots of 2005 in the Paris suburbs, one of the participants said (while interviewed by the author I suppose):

« non ce n’était pas de la politique, on voulait juste dire quelque chose à l’État »
"no it wasn't political, we just wanted to send a message to the state"

For someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, such a contradiction would be comical if it wasn't so scary. But I think it expresses not only the feelings of these young people in the suburbs, but a general trend that, as I said, I find very scary. Politics are no longer the processes by which we, the people, empower representatives to run things. They are a world of power (and abuse thereof) and corruption, disconnected from and hostile to us. And the way to fix things is no longer to replace the people on top. But what is it? We need something to replace that system, but what? There is a general rejection of politics and any kind of authority, but not to replace it with a better authority. A time of riots that never really change anything, not a time of revolutions that would replace an old and deprecated order with a new and (hopefully, at least for a while) better one.

I wouldn't pretend to understand everything the author tried to convey. As I said the language is a bit confusing. But one thing stood up for me: the changed relation to time. A revolution can only happen if you have some confidence in what the future can bring, and it also refers to the past (the word revolution itself suggests a circular return to a previous situation perceived as better). But in our world, the present it all we have, between a past that is mostly a cause for shame and a future that is mostly a cause for fear. Rioters are not trying to change the world or to take power because they have no image of a possible future.

So if I understand correctly, the author is trying to say that what we need is a future. Not in the form of a utopia, of a bright and perfect future, but in the form of... to be honest I'm not sure what, but that's the issue we have to face. And, again if I understand correctly, the anthropologist's role may be more than that of an observer here. Or rather, as observer they take an active part in shaping what they observe, and they should not shirk from that responsibility.

I'm afraid I am not being very clear, and that's because I am not very clear on what this article is about. But it was still an interesting read. It has a large bibliography at the end, but I am a bit afraid that it will consist mostly of more scholarly works I will only half understand. Some titles stood out though:

- The Future as Cultural Fact : Essays on the Global Condition, by Arjun Appadurai
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- Apologie pour l'histoire by Marc Bloch
- Politics in the Ancient World by Moses Finley (translated to French as L'invention de la politique)

Politics are no longer the processes by which we, the people, empower representatives to run things. They are a world of power (and abuse thereof) and corruption, disconnected from and hostile to us. And the way to fix things is no longer to replace the people on top.

I think it was Churchill who said that democracy was the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried, or something to that effect. We in the US are facing similar problems of corruption in the highest places. There is nothing wrong with democracy; the problem is with the character of the people we elect. Lying has become an indoor sport. No solutions are possible unless the values of the electorate change, and in turn the people we elect. Don't hold your breath.

Invisible Cities is a book I really, really liked, but not everyone would. It is an example of postmodern OULIPO. A lot of literary game playing is involved. If you like that kind of thing, give it a try.

By the way, my copy of Gorgias arrived early and I have been reading the introduction. Full speed ahead . . .

What is the quote? The desire to wield power should be an exclusion form every having power to wield? I think there is something in that. Anyone who wants to be a politician should be immediately debarred.

I'd like to set the minimum age limit for being an MP up from where it currently is. We have people who went from school to college to university to parliament and have never done a day of work in their life. I think the most effective politicians are those of a past age, who had held a job before moving into political life. There's a whole generation of them dying now, they served their country, they worked hard and then entered public life to make a difference. And that works on both sides of the political divide. I may not always agree with their politics, but at least they had the courage of their convictions and could speak with authority.

I guess I didn't express myself very clearly. I wasn't complaining about politicians and corruption. The problem is that democracy is no longer working, because we don't believe in it. I'm pretty sure that government have always been corrupt and ineffective, in varying degrees. But for a few centuries we had a system that was more or less working, because most people shared a belief in the way it was working. Because there was a belief that even if things were not perfect, there was always a way to make them better, even if not everybody agreed on which way that was. Now more and more people don't even bother, because they know it's not getting any better no matter who they vote for. Democracy only works if we believe in it, and we have stopped doing so. Democracy as we know it is dead. We need to find something to replace it, and personally I'd rather it not be a theocracy or some kind of new fascist regime. I rather liked democracy myself, mind you, but it's dead.

Well, I hope we don't reach that point in the US. Democracy is still the last best hope.

Still working on that backlog of articles.

Your Brain on Metaphors

Lately in the poetry thread, we were wondering about what's in a word. It would seem that we understand all words through references to our bodily experience, even the most abstract concepts.

This was a much easier and quicker read than the previous article. I enjoyed the part where people are asked what they visualize when they hear the expression "kick the bucket".

Thanks for the commentary on I'll ne savaient pas ? Florence.

>105 rebeccanyc:: it was not only religious institutions that hid Jews at the time. My grandmother, then a young woman, found an add for a job as a preceptor for two girls in the unoccupied part of France (she was still in Paris at the time) . She called the woman who posted the ad and they agreed that she got the job. When my grandmother hinted that her situation was problematic and maybe the other woman would be in trouble for having her under her roof, she exclaimed: All the more reason for you to come!

>118 chlorine: That's a wonderful story, chlorine.

What I Mean by Mexico by James Fenton (NYRB blog)

Now I want to visit Mexico. And find out what else this guy James Fenton wrote.

>120 FlorenceArt: I have a book by him on my TBR: All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. More that that I do not know.

Funny how recently I have been spending less time reading, but also reading more books at the same time. So of course it takes me ages to finish one. So of course I get impatient, and start yet another one.

Currently reading:
Sodome et Gomorrhe (Marcel Proust)
L'acacia (Claude Simon)
Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des Jésuites de Chine
The Republic (Plato)
Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed (Gerald Press)
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013
High Water Mark (David Shumate)
Blood of Dragons (Robin Hobb)

Ridiculous, isn't it? And I didn't even mention the Bible read...

One for each day of the week (plus one...or two).

>121 SassyLassy: I looked him up, he is a poet and essayist I think. I wishlisted Leonardo's Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists.

>123 dchaikin: Yes :-)

Actually 3 of these books contain short stories or essays, so I just read one once in a while. But that still leaves 3 novels and 2 non-fiction books. Too much. And I keep adding to my wishlist!

This is one of his poems which has stuck in my mind since I have read it:

‘Nothing’ by James Fenton

I take a jewel from a junk-shop tray
And wish I had a love to buy it for.
Nothing I choose will make you turn my way.
Nothing I give will make you love me more.

I know that I’ve embarrassed you too long
And I’m ashamed to linger at your door.
Whatever I embark on will be wrong.
Nothing I do will make you love me more.

I cannot work. I cannot read or write.
How can I frame a letter to implore.
Eloquence is a lie. The truth is trite.
Nothing I say will make you love me more.

So I replace the jewel in the tray
And laughingly pretend I’m far too poor.
Nothing I give, nothing I do or say,
Nothing I am will make you love me more.

Enjoyed that Wanderer

Thanks for the poem.

>125 wandering_star: Thanks for the poem. Beautiful.

I think I might drop Blood of Dragons. I have been almost forcing myself to follow this series, and I never warmed to it. And that would give me more time to finish the other books.

Hey, I finally finished a book! Well, I read the last story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. That's not the end of the book, there are still essays from members of the jury on their favorite story. I don't know if I will read those. Instead I might reread the first story, which I loved but I wonder if it was just because it was the first one, and how I will feel about it after reading the rest of them.

After reading a few stories, I was already starting to forget them (I tend to forget books at an alarming speed, most of the time when I finish a novel I have already forgotten the beginning), so I started a log with a rating for each story and a short note to help me remember, and possibly draw from this a list of authors or magazines I'd like to read more of.

Ratings go from 1 (three stories I didn't bother to finish) to 5. Interestingly, three of the stories were initially published in the New Yorker magazine, and those are among the weakest: two of them I didn't finish, and the third I gave a rating of two, which was especially disappointing because this story is by Alice Munro, who won the Nobel prize recently (last year?). I had never read anything by her before, and her name was one of the reasons I bought this book. The story in her story (if you see what I mean) was good and should have been really moving, but it was told in an incredibly flat and boring way. Unfortunately, after reading a comment in an LT review of another book, I suspect that this is how Munro usually writes.

So I learned at least two things from this book: I won't subscribe to the New Yorker (at least not for their short stories - I remember reading a few essays on their web site that I liked much better) and I won't buy any book by Alice Munro, although if I come across her work elsewhere I will certainly read it, in the hope it might change my mind about her.

For what it's worth, here is the list of the stories with my ratings:

Your Duck Is My Duck - Deborah Eisenberg - Fence - 5
Sugarcane - Derek Palacio - The Kenyon Review - 4
The Summer People - Kelly Link - Tin House - 3
Leaving Maverley - Alice Munro - The New Yorker - 2
White Carnations - Polly Rosenwaike - Prairie Schooner - 3
Sail - Tash Aw - A Public Space -1
Anecdotes - Ann Beattie - Granta - 4
Lay My Head - L. Annette Binder - Fairy Tale Review - 5
He Knew - Donald Antrim - The New Yorker - 1
The Visitor - Asako Serizawa - The Antioch Review - 4
Where Do You Go? - Samar Farah Fitzgerald - New England Review - 3
Aphrodisiac - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - The New Yorker - 1
Two Opinions - Joan Silber - Epoch - 3
They Find the Drowned - Melinda Moustakis - Hobart: another literary journal - 5
The Mexican - George McCormick - Epoch - 4
Tiger - Nalini Jones - One Story - 3
Pérou - Lily Tuck - Epoch - 4
Sinkhole - Jamie Quatro - Ploughshares - 3
The History of Girls - Ayşe Papatya Bucak - Witness - 4
The Particles - Andrea Barrett - Tin House - 5

I used to read prize story collections but gave up. Sounds like I didn't miss too much not reading this one.

>130 rebeccanyc: Well, I don't know how it compares to others, this is my first, but I don't regret reading it. It's been a while since I read any short story, and I felt this was a good way to reintroduce myself to them. I did feel conflicted toward a lot of the stories though, and rating them was difficult. Some were disturbing or weird, some had a great story but indifferent writing, some (those I didn't finish) had a boring story and uninteresting writing. A few were really beautiful, and many were thought-provoking. All were sad, two of them almost unbearably so.

I will go look for another collection of short stories, but this time maybe one with a selection from a wider range of works. I already have a few in my wishlist I think, but suggestions are welcome.

>129 FlorenceArt: Ordinarily I quite like short stories. I have not tried any of those annual collections. I have read a lot of annual essay collections and I find that there are usually only three or four essays that are memorable. This is entirely a function of personal taste, so I try not to lay too much blame on the authors. It sounds as though the short story collection is similar, although you did give a 4 or 5 to ten of the stories. So maybe the average is a bit higher there.

>131 FlorenceArt: I wish I could recommend another collection of short stories. I tend to read the collected stories of a particular writer — in fact, I have three on my list to read this year. We'll see how it goes.

>132 Poquette: Funny, I was just trying to write a post about why I like or don't like certain authors. I agree it has a lot to do with personal taste, and mine are a bit eccentric maybe, and certainly a bit tyrannical, and won't let me enjoy some books that others love.

I have a few single author collections in my wishlist, but for now I think I'd like to read one more book with various authors, just for the fun of variety and of discovering new names.

So I tried to read some of Ted Chiang's short stories that are available online. I had already read Exhalation and had not been very impressed, but wandering_star gave a review of one of his books and several people commented to say that he was awesome, so I gave him another try.

My reaction was similar to the one I had to Alice Munro: what, this is supposed to be great writing? To me if feels flat, boring, impersonal. At first I blamed the language, but I don't think that's it. There is nothing wrong with the language these two authors use, even if it's not especially exciting. I've read many authors with much more flawed or uninspiring prose and yet enjoyed them in some way.

In fact, the problem may be exactly that flawlessness of Munro's and Chiang's writing. It's all too perfect, too squeaky clean. Everything is laid out very clearly before me, nothing is left in the shadows. They don't make the mistake of lesser writers to state the obvious. Only what is necessary to make everything crystal clear, and not one word more, in precise and carefully crafted language.

It's certainly admirable as far as workmanship goes, but it leaves me out. A wall of perfection is before me. I can admire it I guess, now that I see it (or so I think), but not relate to it, because that would require some gaps for me to fill in with my own experience and perception, some ambiguities, some shadows.

On the other hand, maybe I'm completely wrong about my reasons for disliking these works. And probably there is a lot that I'm missing about them too. But that's life, I guess. Some things you can see, some things you can't.

>134 FlorenceArt:

Everyone has different tastes. I like Chiang because of the ideas and the fact that he does not get boggled into language games. Some other writers I like for the language.

You tried, you did not like it - that's how it is sometimes. :)

>134 FlorenceArt: A wall of perfection is before me. I can admire it I guess, now that I see it (or so I think), but not relate to it, because that would require some gaps for me to fill in with my own experience and perception, some ambiguities, some shadows : yes, that's it! Perfection can be a hindrance sometimes.

Last night I finished La patience de Maigret, a quick read and not the best Maigret I have read.

I think I have finally abandoned Blood of Dragons, which I feel silly about since it's the last installment in a series I almost forced myself to read from the beginning. There are too many characters and I can't keep track of all of them, and for some reason I have never really felt a strong attachment to any of them. Robin Hobb has started a new series with Fool's Assassin but should I give that one a try? Not sure.

I have also picked up Love and Hydrogen again and am trying to remember where I left off because I switched reader apps in the meantime and lost the information. I'm not sure why I stopped reading this. I didn't like all of the stories, but some were very good. I suppose it was just temporary weariness after reading too many stories by the same author, there are quite a few in the book.

>129 FlorenceArt: I'm glad you added the magazines where these stories originated. It's an interesting list. Reminds me I want to look into Tin House.

Not sure about the problem of clean writing. Could it be just a state of mind? Your at a place where a story needs a certain something to grab you? Just saying becuase that is my normal state, although that certain something is fluid and always elusive when i try to identify it.

>138 dchaikin: I tried to look up some of the magazines, but none of them seem to have electronic versions. A shame. Epoch looks like a magazine I'd enjoy reading, and they only have 4 issues a year which seems reasonable. But it's paper only! The New Yorker has an iPad app, but considering the ratings I gave their stories, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to subscribe :-)

I may be wrong of course, but I think the need for ambiguity is something very strong for me and influences a lot whether or not I enjoy a book. I became aware of this about 10 years ago, and the fact that I am very aware of it has reinforced the effect. I tend to reject a book very quickly if I detect a tendency of the author to over tell things, or even worse to tell me what I should think or feel. This can be a hindrance to enjoy otherwise good books.

But in the stories I was discussing, there is nothing as obvious or exaggerated as that. So maybe I am relating my general not-liking feeling, that I couldn't really explain at first, to this specific thing that I am aware of, and maybe too obsessed about. Who knows?

"I tried to look up some of the magazines, but none of them seem to have electronic versions."

I would be less surprised if they didn't have print versions! Some are online for sure. I know Granta is available online. ... oh, I looked up Tin House: http://www.tinhouse.com/magazine/current-issue.html You probably need to subscribe to access the articles.

>139 FlorenceArt: I think the need for ambiguity is something very strong for me

Someone has said that a high tolerance for ambiguity is the sure sign of a truly artistic temperament.

This proves that you are a genuine artist! ;-)

>140 dchaikin: Yes, Granta is online and it looks like the whole magazine is available, or at least there is a lot of content on the site. By electronic version I meant something like an e-book mirroring the paper version, but there is a lot to read on the website already. I subscribed to the RSS feed and we'll see how much I actually read.

>141 Poquette: Thank you! :-)

As if I didn't have enough to read already, yesterday I bought two new books:

Lettres de Vincent Van Gogh à son frère Théo, in an edition called "carnet rouge" (not sure what the touchstone will link to). According to the introduction, which I skimmed before buying the book, it's a selection that focuses only on van Gogh's views on art. The introduction says that there is no complete edition of his letters because there are too many. I have seen several mentions of his letters over the years, but what decided me is that it was mentioned in a documentary series I am watching about art historians. Unfortunately I am not sure who mentioned the letters (each episode is an interview of one art historian on his personal experience with art). I think it was Victor Stoichita. This is a great series and my wishlist has been growing thanks to it.

The biography of Marie-Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, also in the "carnet rouge" collection.

I think you'll enjoy the Van Gogh letters. I read some English version of those letters many years ago, at the time the big Van Gogh exhibit was making its way around the world. I think it was in the seventies. Anyway, as I remember the letters are very touching and revealing of Vincent's plight.

Been exploring a little on the Granta site. Read two stories so far, both by Indian writers. I think the focus of the current issue is India, and it looks full of interesting stuff, so I'll have to explore some more.

Performance Art: I zeroed on this one because of the title, and I'm still not sure what to think about it. The writing annoyed me a little and the situations made me uneasy. That one is full of questions, something I am supposed to like in a short story. I think I would rate it as "interesting", which is appropriately ambiguous.

Sticky Fingers: lively and fun, I liked it.

... and I just found a story by Alice Munro. I think I will read that next.

Night

Read a couple of articles from my to-read list.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Freedom Fighter
An interesting article, but it didn't give me a wish to run and read Sartre. I don't think I ever went further than the required reading at school. I might have made a half-hearted attempt at reading L'être et le néant but I don't think it went very far. I may or may not have read Nausea, and maybe I should (re)read it, but I'm not tempted by his philosophical works after reading this.

The Fixer
Another Granta article, this time an essay. A very interesting view of small-town life in India.

I really like the idea of your personal taste being tyrannical!

>134 FlorenceArt: - I definitely like the Ted Chiang stories for the ideas and the way in which those ideas are approached, not the quality of the writing. I don't remember anything at all about the writing, which is probably good - it means it wasn't annoying or clumsy, and for books where the ideas are more important I don't expect a beautiful prose style.

Haven't read Alice Munro for some time but as far as I remember, the enjoyment here is about the way the stories unfold rather than the style of the writing itself?

>149 wandering_star: Exactly! And I guess stories or ideas are not enough for me, not in literary fiction. I have less lofty expectations in the case of recreational fiction, but I can still be put off by the writing style. And I don't care all that much about the story, really. I can enjoy them, again mostly in recreational fiction, but I can live without them. I once amazed a brother in law when he found out I could abandon a book in the middle, and not especially care about how it ended.

Ideas are a bit different, but basically I don't like it when fiction is used to defend ideas. That's one reason I still don't like Plato. Chiang doesn't so much defend ideas, I think, as ask question, which is better. Still, this is one case where my taste is definitely tyrannical. No matter how intriguing these ideas and questions are, I still feel fiction is not the place for them.

Well, I'm glad that I decided to read more Alice Munro stories, because I liked Night a LOT more than I liked Leaving Maverley. It has everything a good short story should have. It doesn't try to cram a whole lifetime in a few pages, as Leaving Maverley did, but instead tells of a tiny moment in a lifetime, suggests much more than it tells, and leaves enough blanks for me to fill in, or not.

So I guess I need to find a third story, since so far it's a tie: one boring, one great.

Alice Munro country is not all that far from where I live now. So much of what she writes is from that area. That's not the part of the world I'm from and while I have a lot of difficulty with some of her characters, her presentation of them, especially in dialogue, is spot on. "Who do you think you are?" can have so many meanings, but in that part of the world, it would be delivered uninflected, with the same emphasis on each word (note all one syllable), and just enough scorn to make you either never ever want to step out of line, or else resolve to leave as soon as humanly possible and never come back.

Her insight is amazing.

Othello Sucks

Wasn't sure what to make of this at first, but it turns out it's hilarious. And very well written.

And what a title!

I read another of Alice Munro's stories in Granta: In Sight of the Lake (I think you have to be a subscriber to read it). It's very sad, cruel even, but beautiful. So Munro is back on my wishlist again.

I think I will abandon And Only to Deceive that I tried as a light reading. The writing is not awful but uninspiring, and I don't feel any connection to or even respect for the heroine at all, she shows a complete lack of judgement and keeps building the most harebrained theories based on the tiniest shred of evidence. Of course I'm being unfair to her, since I have the advantage of knowing the rules, and I knew from the start who was the goodie and the baddie of her two suitors.

And that may be the real reason this book annoys me. I do expect this kind of book to follow the general rules of romance, but in this case it feels to me that there is absolutely not a thread of originality, and the plot manages to be both far-fetched and utterly predictable.

Anyway, looks like there is a free spot in my "reading now" list now...

Finished High Water Mark, a collection of prose poems by David Shumate. More like very very short stories. I have read the word flash fiction, apparently it's a thing now? Anyway, I enjoyed those a lot and intend to buy another book by him. They are sad and humorous both, and yes, poetic.

Started Heroides by Ovid, which I'm enjoying, but I think I need a dictionary of Greek and Roman mythology since I downloaded a free edition without any notes. Or at least an Internet connection to access Wikipedia (I am writing this on a train - 3G does not work on TGVs). The book is a collection of letters written by abandoned heroines to their fickle lovers. The first letter was from Penelope to Ulysses, I had no trouble following that, but the next one is from Phyllis to Demophon, and I need more help with that story. But the writing is surprisingly easy to follow, for such an ancient work and despite the fact that the French translation I'm reading is from 1838.

On the train I also finished Velázquez en son temps, an e-book in the form of an iPad app, which for once is very well done. The chapter on the Meninas is fascinating. It shows some of the numerous interpretations the painting has inspired, with text excerpts and animations. The book is almost more interesting than the exhibition, which I saw yesterday. I don't know if the app has an English version.

>153 FlorenceArt: - That is a very eye-catching title!

And glad you found some Munro stories that you liked.

>154 rebeccanyc: and >157 DieFledermaus: Yes, I guess the title is why I read this one among all the unread stories in Granta.

Enjoying Heroides, both the book itself and the fact that it keeps sending me on tangents. I bought a dictionary of mythology, no, wait, I bought TWO dictionaries of mythology! Plus two different versions of the Iliad as translated to French by Leconte de Lisle in 1850. The first edition has obviously never been fully proofed by a human, and the publisher used the search and replace function with very ungrammatical results. The second one seems better and it has notes which I haven't sampled yet, but the formatting is a bit annoying. It's so frustrating that all these classics are so often only available as ebooks in 19th century translations, and with very poorly formatted or even proofread versions.

Anyway. The two dictionaries I bought are Dictionnaire de la mythologie gréco-romaine by Annie Colognat (I deleted the touchstone because it leads to another book with the same title), which includes excerpts from texts relating incidents of the lives of heroes and gods and has already been very useful as a reference while reading Ovid. The second one is Dictionnaire amoureux des dieux et des déesses (no touchstone) which came up in my searches and sounded intriguing. Its scope is broader that just Greek and Roman mythologies, and the book is written by a woman who claims to "love all gods equally, even only gods" (j’aime tous les dieux, même les uniques). I only read the introduction so far, but I love her enthusiasm.

Clement's Dictionnaire is my radar. I'll be interested to know what you think of it. I liked her novel La sultane years ago but haven't read any of her books since.

I haven't read any of her books, though her name is vaguely familiar. I'm not sure when I will read the dictionary though, because right now I seem to have embarked on a classic mythology binge.

Reading Heroides makes me realize how approximative and jumbled my knowledge of mythology is, and each new letter seems to send me on a new tangent. The latest one is from Phaedra to Theseus. Did you know, that Theseus is a fascinatingly complex character? Not only did he slay countless monsters and villains, seduce and abandon innumerable women (including Ariadne, whose sister Phaedra he married), but in his free time he also founded the Athenian democracy! Wow. Unfortunately he was too busy to spend much time with his wife, who fell in love with his son by the queen of Amazons, Hippolitus.

And if you're French and hear the name Phèdre, this inevitably evokes Racine's play ("La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé"). So I went in search of a readable e-edition of the play, and was lucky to find one, with a lot of notes, forewords, afterwords, a lexicon and even a genealogy of the characters. So far I've only read one short note on the verses and how they were supposed to be recited, but I will come back to the notes after I read the play. They should help with Racine, who is difficult to read now because his writing followed all sorts of complex and strict rules which are completely foreign to us now.

Granta, again: an interview of Leslee Udwin.

"Leslee Udwin is a filmmaker, who produced and directed India’s Daughter, a documentary about the case of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh, who was gang raped and murdered in Delhi in 2012. The film, part of the BBC’s Storyville series and scheduled to air on channels internationally in March, was banned for broadcast in India."

Just finished Phèdre. It was really beautiful. I read a couple of Racine's play in the last few years (Britannicus, Athalie) but they didn't have that effect on me. The poetry is powerful and the characters are very human.

Finished the notes in the Garnier-Flammarion edition of Phèdre this morning on the train. Very interesting insights on the place of the work in Racine's career (after that play he stopped writing tragedies and distanced himself from this disreputable world and his affairs with actresses, married a respectable woman and took a job as the king's historiographer), his views on tragedy (Racine was educated by Jansenists and read Greek authors in the text, and his strategy to distance himself from his elder Corneille, who had established himself as a modern master of tragedy and had more of a Roman and heroic culture, was to go back to the Greek classics, at least in theory. He refers a lot to Aristotle's view that tragedy should evoke in the spectator two main emotions: fear and compassion toward characters who are not quite guilty, but not fully innocent either.), the many previous versions of Phaedra that inspired him (mostly Euripide's and Seneca's, but also several 17th Century French versions), and the difficulties of re-interpreting a Greek tragedy where mortals are manipulated by gods, and make it more compatible with 17th Century Christian morals, where humans are responsible for their actions even if they are victims of their passions.

And I was so happy to have found a good edition of French language classics with notes, that I went a bit wild and bought 5 Garnier Flammarion e-books:

Théâtre complet (all the plays) by Eschyle
Because I couldn't find Euripides's Hippolytus

Intrigue du mariage de M. le duc de Berry by Saint-Simon
Because I have always wanted to try reading Saint-Simon but his memoirs are a bit intimidating. This, according to the description, is a self-contained story within the memoirs relating to the court intrigues lead by Saint-Simon himself to marry the third grand-son of Louis XIV to his (Saint-Simon's) profit. The description makes it sound great, I hope it's not misleading.

Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Because Rebecca mentioned Balzac in her thread and I thought I should probably read one of his books, and this is the start of an important trilogy that continues with Les illusions perdues and Grandeur et décadence des courtisanes. I thought I had read it in school, but maybe it was only excerpts, and anyway I don't remember anything except that I hated it.

Horace by Pierre Corneille
Because I felt that after Racine, I had to try a little Corneille. From things I heard in my youth, I had retained a vague impression that Racine was considered a better author, but I should judge by myself. I don't think I've read anything by Corneille except Le Cid.

La Philosophie dans le boudoir by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
Because I haven't forgotten my intention to "get" Sade and why so many French intellectuals are raving about him, because this book may (or may not, my notes are a little confusing) be recommended by experts to start reading Sade, and because I did indeed find this an easy read when I read a few pages of it before being distracted and moving to something else, not least because of the fact that all the characters seem to be eager and willing to give or receive sexual education, so I have good hope that there will be no talk of rape or murder or torture in this one.

A beautiful little prose poem (or very very short story) from Granta. But don't click on the link if you are bothered by explicit sexual content.

Item Girls

>165 FlorenceArt: If you like a bit of fantasy, I'd recommend to read Balzac's La peau de chagrin : there's a description of an antique dealer's shop I could rave about for hours! The comparison with Buffon's work and geological strata is a masterpiece.
I recently read that Corneille has been "declassified" as a classical writer and became a Baroque one - my, my... I do need to keep abreast of this little niceties.

La peau de chagrin is a book I've been meaning to read for ages... also Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, because it's about art. But I never got around to either of them.

And oh, is Corneille Baroque now? Wow. I look forward to reading the notes from the Garnier-Flammarion more than the play itself. Maybe they will explain all this.

>167 h-mb: >168 FlorenceArt: I've read both of those in English translation. Both are strange, but I agree with h-mb about the description of the antique dealer's shop.

>163 FlorenceArt: Just getting caught up on your thread, what interesting reading you've been doing! It also reminded me that I have a copy of Ted Hughes' version of Phedre, which I've been meaning to read. I'm looking forward to your comments on all your new acquisitions.

Phew I finally caught up with your thread! :)
I hate Balzac, and am very curious to see what you think.

Concerning plays: first my bookclub was on last thursday, and everyone who read La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu was very pleased by it. So don't fret from it because of my advice that it's less good than Electre (though Electre might be a better choice if you're reading Eschyle! ;)
and second I've downloaded a free edition of Iphigénie and the verses in the first page kind of swept me off my feet! So I'll probably see if I can find a decent edition of that (I'll look for a Garnier-Flammarion ebook).

I'm also looking forwards to see what you think of the Corneille !

Apparently today is the day to catchup with you Flo. Catching up too, and inspired by your reading. Mythology should be part of 2016 for me. That's the plan. A break from the OT for Homer, and greak mythology and more if i'm up for it (plato even, who knows). I have Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which comes up on various classics list, so i will probably start there.

>161 FlorenceArt: - at my in-laws i found an old book called The Quest for Theseus by Anne G. Ward. I don't know anything about it, but what an promising title (and this is LT, so we all need more titles, of course. That's why we are here, right?)

>166 FlorenceArt: thanks for posting this link. Something to think about today.

Thanks for the James Fenton poem Florence - I have been working my way through his Introduction to English Poetry for some time. I haven't read his own poetry but I've sometimes heard it on the radio and liked it very much. I'm off the read that nyrblog.

I also liked 166.

You're interesting me in Racine and mythology of course - just this weekend i am after learning more of Ilius who founded Ilium and especially about his name as I think the etymology may be linked to the sun (having just read of Medea from Colchis claiming to be the sun's granddaughter).

>169 rebeccanyc: Thanks! I will read Le père Goriot first anyway, but I added La peau de chagrin to my wishlist.

>170 reva8: Thanks for stopping by! I'm having fun with all this.

>171 chlorine: Aha, another wishlist candidate! I did think of Iphigénie while reading the notes to Phèdre. Both plays have many antecedents in Greek, Roman and French literature I'm sure.

>172 dchaikin: >173 tonikat: Glad you guys like the poem in >166 FlorenceArt:. I don't know why but it stayed with me.

>173 tonikat: I never heard about Ilius. Interesting. Genealogies are a little hard to keep up with, but ultimately everyone seems to be a descendant of one god or another. And sometimes the heredity is a heavy load to bear. It looks like Phèdre is (at least partially) suffering because of her mother's sin with the bull.

With a friend, I have a subscription to the Théâtre de la ville and we see about 8 or 10 dance shows every year. This season has been very disappointing, except for the two shows of works by William Forsythe.

But last night we saw What the Body Does Not Remember.

Wow.

The video in the link above does not really do justice to it I think, and it's very different from what I saw (we had seats near the top because we got to the theatre late and the seats were not reserved. Plus the couple before us kept moving and blocking our view. Grrr.), but it gives an idea of the frenzy, violence and beauty of it. My friend, who saw the first version of it, says this one is much tamer.

Great video

Just catching up after a week away. Sounds like your reading of Heroides is very fruitful indeed. Getting all that Greek mythology straight is a major effort in itself. You are making me want to get to Heroides sooner rather than later!

>165 FlorenceArt: That's an enviable selection of books you have acquired. Good to know about the Garnier Flammarion e-books. For future reference.

Your thread is becoming an important reference source!

I took a day off today and went to the Palais de Tokyo. Like last time it was a bit overwhelming. I was used to a rather small space, but since they opened up the basement, which is an incredible space and frankly an exhibition by itself, it has become much larger. There were four exhibitions, and two of them were really more like several mini-exhibitions. I didn't really try to keep track of who the artists were but the overall impression was great. And there was this absolutely incredible work by Jerry Gretzinger, a map of an imaginary world made of of almost 3000 A4 sheets. Immersive and fascinating.

Back home I watched a documentary on Art Spiegelman. I really must read Maus some day!

The idea of taking a day off today was to take care of some boring business and see this exhibition, so that I can dedicate the rest of the weekend to my own artistic endeavors. We'll see...

The exhibition on the art of the Plains Indians is now showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This NYRB article made me regret I missed it at the Quai Branly last year, and taught me many things I didn't know (which I admit wasn't difficult, since I know next to nothing about Native Americans).

I am definitely planning on going to that exhibit and I enjoyed the NYRB article.

>165 FlorenceArt:

I have good hope that there will be no talk of rape or murder or torture in this one.

I regret to inform you that your hope is misplaced... :)

Ah. OK. Well, I guess it was a rather unreasonable hope, given this is Sade after all...

Great video of The Body Does Not Remember -- enjoying your cultural excursions.

>182 FlorenceArt:

Sorry! :)

Less so than most, but one pretty appalling sequence towards the end. YMMV.

>164 FlorenceArt: - I really need to read Phedre - that's one of those plays that is mentioned everywhere. I think that was the one that the narrator goes to in Swann's Way(?)

>178 FlorenceArt: - Sounds like a lot of fun and the Gretzinger is definitely impressive!

>164 FlorenceArt: >185 DieFledermaus: Yes, you're right about Swann's Way! The name of the play hadn't registered because I focused on la Berma. I was wondering what she would sound like to us 21st century spectators. Probably pompous and unnatural. Also probably closer to how an actress would have played it in Racine's time. Legend has it that he wrote the play for la Champmeslé, who was his mistress at the time.

A bit of light reading in-between because I am feeling rather tired at the moment.

Men at Arms was a slightly disappointing re-read. My expectations were probably too high based on fond memories. It's still a good Pratchett, and the watch books are my favorites.

The Reluctant Widow: yes, another Heyer! It had everything I like and don't like in her books: witty dialogues, tongue-in-cheek humor, a feisty heroine who ends up submitting completely to the hero who always knows best, and an even more annoying and perfect hero than usual who manages to seduce everyone into entering into his wild schemes, but they are not wild after all because he knows everything, and of course he gets the heroine in the end. Fun :-)

I have been neglecting Plato lately, but I feel a bit guilty about that, plus I'd like to know where he's going with his thought experiment of rebuilding a Greek city-state from scratch in The Republic, so I started again from the beginning of that part. But I soon grew extremely frustrated with my translation. I am sure there are several good French translations of this book, but not one of them is available as an ebook!!! So I gave up and bought the English translation by Robin Waterfield, because that's the one Poquette read. And what a difference that makes, it's a completely different text to the Victor Cousin translation, which I'm sure was very good in the 19th century but just won't do today. I hope that will help me make a new start with the book.

Crossing my fingers and hoping you will like Robin Waterfield and what he contributes to understanding Plato.

Highly recommended article: Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?

I thought doubting science was part of science...guess i better read the article.

We are such a weird race that can reason and still be completely unreasonable...but I only skimmed the article.

(One silly line jumped out at me: "Our science has made us the dominant organisms" huh?)

>190 FlorenceArt: Thanks for the link. As an old psychologist, I'm biaised but... really! believing humans act and think rationally is a no-go for me. I don't write that to deny the scientific method but I'm not surprised by Liz Neeley's question to her climate change skeptic father: “Do you believe them or me?”. The matter isn't about rational reasoning but about "us and them" ; we think with our emotions as much as our brains.

I found this quote a few days ago on the web:

"Socrates had it wrong: man is merely an animal capable of occasional bouts of rationality, and maybe his rational moments are not his most creative."
S.BLINKHORN, 1989, Nature, 20 iv

That made me laugh, thank you.

>194 FlorenceArt: : )

Just finished Grim Fandango, a cult video game that I only learned about recently, and that was rereleased, among other platforms, on iOS. I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm mentioning it here because it did have a real story. OK, bad excuse probably, but anyway I did enjoy it.

Also just watched a documentary called "Why are women smaller than men", and do you know, it had NEVER occurred to me before to ask that question? Turns out, in a natural selection perspective, we should be taller than men, because what with narrower hips and bigger brain, a small woman has a much bigger chance of complications (and death) at childbirth than a tall one.

So, what happened? Restricted access to food is what likely happened. Even though women (at least women of fertile age) need more meat than men do, in fact they have less access to it in most (all?) cultures. Because, you know, men need to be strong so that they can hunt. While women, who only spend their day gathering food and water and carrying it home along with their children, don't. Right.

Also, do you know how it was decided that Lucy was a female? Innocently I thought that it was because of the shape of her pelvis, or something similar. In fact, Lucy is a female because she is small! That's how we know. According to this National Geographic article, later discoveries have found that males of her species were larger than females. That's not how it was told in the documentary though. And anyway I get the impression that it was decided she was a female before that was confirmed by those later discoveries.

So, basically, we're smaller because it was decided that we would be smaller. OK, maybe not quite that simple, but.

Wow!

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing that.

Interestingly, when I googled "Why are women smaller than men", the search autofill proposals that came up were all about women's BRAINS being smaller (which, apparently, they are, but that's another topic). I did manage to find this link though, in case anybody is intested in the details of the theory (although it's a very short article, so maybe it's too early to call it a theory).

ETA: oops, link: http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1832/version/1

And another take on the question, also very short but explores other possible reasons:

http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-evolutionary-reason-for-why-women-are-shorter-...

Who's Afraid of African Democracy? (NYRB)

An interesting article, and a possible addition to the wishlist: Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.

On my drive home yesterday Bill Bryson told me about Lucy and how the only reason given for thinking she is female is her size. Interesting.

Not sure I understand why size considerations for childbirth would have any bearing on men/women size relationships. Seems like women/newborn size relationships would be the important factor there.

>197 FlorenceArt: Grim Fandango!!!! I loved that game when it came out. In fact, so much that a couple of years ago at an estate sale I saw a copy of it and bought it immediately. It ran slow on my computer, but my husband and I started playing through it anyway (he'd never heard of it, which is a travesty). We didn't get through it (yet) on that attempt, but we are planning to try again. I had heard it was going to be re-released, but haven't investigated it at all yet.

>203 dchaikin: You're right, the birth issue has no bearing on the men/women size ratio, but it does mean that there is an evolutionary pressure toward taller women, which is not fully realized in actual women's sizes. A woman under 150 cm has a high risk of a difficult birth, which outside of our privileged countries means a high risk of death for mother and child. But on the other hand, a woman over 150 cm needs more food to survive and be healthy (and bear healthy children).

>204 ursula: I was sad when I finished the game! The story was great. I did need some help from the intahwebz to solve some of the puzzles, but that didn't spoil the pleasure. From what I read, the game is pretty much exactly the same as the original (including some interface quirks) except that it will run on modern machines. The musical score was redone, and I suppose the graphics have a better definition.

Trying to finish some books before I start yet another one...

La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu was very good but a bit depressing, which is why I took a while to finish it. Spoiler: the war does happen. I loved the dialogs, they were funny at the beginning, and then as I said it got a bit depressing as the war got closer and closer. I liked how the characters were very modern and yet perfectly in line with their ancient models.

Le marché de l'art contemporain was interesting though rather dry and a bit technical. I learned some interesting things but it's not a book that I would recommend to my mother, contrary to Le paradigme de l'art contemporain, which I believe she liked as much as I did.

I picked up Invisible Cities at the library last weekend and started reading it. Enjoying it so far. Unfortunately none of Calvino's books seem to be available as e-books in French translation.

Cordelia's Honor is dragging a bit. It's actually an omnibus composed of two books. Shards of Honor was good, but Barrayar has a much slower pace and a lot of introspection, and frankly the writing isn't good enough for that kind of thing. Bujold's writing is rather bland, but at least it doesn't get in the way of the story, and I like the characters. But I probably should have waited longer to start reading the second book.

Sorry you thought La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, but glad you thought it was good.

Invisible cities sounds fascinating, wishlisted!

The Greatest Story Ever Written

I enjoyed this humorous and slightly scary piece of meta-fiction.

I am reading a very disturbing book, Psychology Gone Wrong. Although I cannot recommend it as a book (it is extremely badly written and I have some doubts as to its objectivity), it raises some grave questions.

I am more than ready to believe the main thesis of the book, which is that psychotherapy not only does not work but can even do some serious harm. My father, who used to be a surgeon, always held all forms of psychotherapy, and especially psychoanalysis, in utter contempt, and I have always been puzzled that so many people accept Freud's outrageously sexist theories without question. I feel highly insulted by the suggestion that I should feel incomplete or castrated because I don't have a penis.

So I have to be careful and try to check the authors' affirmations: just because I'm ready to believe what they say doesn't mean it's true. My trust in their believability was seriously harmed from the beginning, not only by the author's bad English (which of course is not a good reason), but more seriously by the vehemence of their accusations, and even dark hints at a conspiracy of silence and even some people willing to go to great lengths to silence them. I'm not sure what they mean exactly by "some fragments of this book are literally written by life" but it sounds a little too ominous and dramatic for my taste.

The first chapter of the book is about eugenics. Since I was a bit suspicious as explained above, I took pains to cross-check the main assertions of the book. What I found led me to believe that they are cherry-picking their evidence a bit for the sake of their demonstration. This chapter and my short research raised a lot of questions, but not necessarily the ones they were trying to raise.

Cyril Burt was an English educational psychologist who spent most of his life researching intelligence and its inheritable character. In particular he determined that IQ was largely inherited, and that it tended to be higher in upper classes. Obviously this is a politically fraught statement, and already in his lifetime his conclusions were attacked. But it's only after his death that it became clear that some of the results from his studies were faked. Now his defenders and detractors only differ on whether only the last results were faked, or everything. But it's obvious that he was guilty of grave breaches of scientific ethics. (He was unfortunately, and that is one of the scary themes of the book, neither the first nor the last scientist to commit such sins.)

From this, the authors move on to the horrors of eugenics, describing how a series of laws passed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century allowed forced sterilization of people deemed intellectually inferior, sometimes without even their knowledge. I wasn't aware that such laws were still in force in some states until the 1970s or maybe even later. That part was really scary.

There are so many questions raised by this chapter that I'm not sure I can mention them all and keep the length of this post within reason. And for many of them I have no clear answer.

Cyril Burt faked some of his result. This is bad, very bad. But does it mean that his intuition was wrong? His defenders, such as J. Philippe Rushton (another highly controversial figure), point out that his results were similar to other studies. And it's worth noting that the reasons Burt was attacked so violently were not scientific at all, they were purely political. True or false, his theories were not acceptable, for reasons I can in part sympathize with. On the other hand, it seems that Burt's defenders also have their own dark political agenda, which I cannot agree with.

And yet, the implications of the authors of the book bother me. They seem to make no difference between the fact that Burt committed scientifically unethical acts, the fact that his theories may have been false, and the fact that they may have been used to caution inhuman acts such as forced sterilization. I think this is a very confused and dangerous reasoning. Does it mean that if Burt's theories were right, it would be okay to sterilize people against their will? Why do we have to attack these theories on a scientific level, when the problem we have is clearly the political uses that have been made of them?

Of course, it's very difficult to separate the political and scientific aspects of a subject like this one. Maybe even impossible. But should it be that way? Shouldn't we at least try?

There is an interesting parallel, that the book fails to make, between these theories (Burt's successors, like J. Philippe Rushton, have abandoned the class angle and moved on to race. Rushton says that "blacks" have a lower IQ than "whites", who have a lower IQ than "yellows".) and the differences between the brains of men and women, which the media so much like. These latter differences are usually real but very small, smaller than the differences between individuals. I suspect that Rushton's race differences are probably in the same ballpark. What I find interesting is that I had never heard of Rushton's or similar theories before, while there practically isn't a month when we aren't served with another rehash of these "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" stories. I guess they are more politically acceptable. In fact it's disturbing how many people so desperately want to believe them.

Incidentally, the silence of the book's authors on these gender differences is not very surprising in light of later chapters, where "feminists" are charged for being responsible for several disasters of psychotherapy.

That's enough of my ramblings for now. I will have to post more on this book, but I probably won't spend as much time commenting on the other chapters (bet you were worried, eh?).

Very interesting post. Have you read Stephen Jay Gould's The mismeasure of Man? It's about how scientists have tried (often with an agenda) to quantify intelligence, and how IQ is not a meaningful indicator. He also talks about frauds that some scientists have made, and how their preconceptions have biased the work and results of others.

I haven't read The Mismeasure of Man but I have seen it mentioned in my research. In fact I have downloaded an article from Rushton that claims to denounce Gould's errors in this book. I have always been extremely skeptical about IQ. What does it measure really? Which of course leads to the question: what is intelligence anyway? I should add this book to my wishlist.

Waiting for more ..............

Also waiting for more . . . I read The Mismeasure of Man decades ago, so needless to say I don't remember it, but Gould is a lively writer, who I always thought was as as factual as he could be, although he definitely had a point of view.

And I would say IQ is what is measured by IQ tests, which may have nothing at all to do with intelligence.

>209 FlorenceArt: really enjoyed this review. Fascinating stuff.

Thanks for the comments. I'm still working on the next installment of my comments on Psychology Gone Wrong.

In the meantime I have started rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which I read so long ago (and in French) that I have almost no recollection of it.

And watched this movie, a hilarious take on all that 80's action movies I used to love: http://www.kungfury.com/

Today is the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. I only learned of this a few days ago. 18th June is mostly known as the date of "l'appel du 18 juin" broadcast on the radio by de Gaulle from London in 1940.

Anyway, I don't know that much about Napoleon. Which should be easy to remedy. One specialist quoted by le Monde estimates that since his death (5 May 1821), on average one book per day has been published about him in the world. He is the most famous Frenchman.

One specialist quoted by le Monde estimates that since his death (5 May 1821), on average one book per day has been published about him in the world. He is the most famous Frenchman.

Wow! That's sort of hard to believe. How many books would that be . . .
Off to grab a calculator.

>216 FlorenceArt:: don't attempt to read all books about him then! ;)

>209 FlorenceArt: - The book sounds really bad, but your comments were insightful - agree with your thoughts on Freud.

>216 FlorenceArt: - Heh, that's an interesting statistic.

>218 chlorine: Yes, this sounds like good advice!

>219 DieFledermaus: Thank you!

Today I went to the library and dropped Invisible Cities into the return box. I should have gotten there yesterday (when they were open) and renewed the loan, but I had more urgent things to do on the other side of town. I haven't finished the book, and I may pick it up again some day, but I'm not in a hurry. I had more or less the same reaction to this book as I had to Borges: it didn't do much for me. I can see there is probably a very delicate and elaborate construction there, but there is nothing I can connect to. I think I need people in my books. Also it probably doesn't help that I have to read both authors in translation, so possibly I am missing out on the beauty of the language itself. Whatever the reasons, I guess my review of this book can be summed up as: meh.

To my surprise, it seems I have just reached the end of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, first book of the trilogy of five by Douglas Adams. It is very short! And fun. This was a re-read, but it's been so long since I read it first that practically the only things I remembered were those that are endlessly quoted on the Internet. At least the parts where I hang out anyway.

Double post.

Oops.

I received the two back issues of Europe that I bought from the Amazon marketplace. I was expecting magazines, but they are in book format.

Littératures de l'Inde is the 2001 issue that I found when I was searching for French translations of Indian authors.
Sade - Le Grand guignol is the one I found while looking at their catalog. As the title suggest, it is about Sade, who I still intend to understand more about some day, and also about the Grand Guignol, of which I know very little about except that it was a sort of puppet theater (not even sure about that to be honest) showing crime and/or horror stories I think.

Unfortunately, since I ordered those I have also been buying other books. I think I need to start controlling my impulses better. It's just too easy to buy e-books, and my TBR is building up.

Anyway, I've been buying books about the French Revolution. This was prompted by the Waterloo anniversary, I'd like to brush up on very old (and mostly tainted by Marxist ideology) knowledge from my school days.

Histoires de la Révolution et de l'Empire
Penser la Révolution française
Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine, tome 1 : La chute de la monarchie, 1787-1792

>220 FlorenceArt: So sorry you didn't care for Invisible Cities, which I read in English, also a translation. Something about Calvino's fanciful descriptions of the cities made me want to pick up pen and ink and try to draw them. Of course, his postmodern approach isn't for everyone. But I thought it might strike your fancy. This is par for the course for us, isn't it? ;-)

Suzanne, we do seem to have made a habit of it! I think we have very different approaches to literature, yours is more intellectual and mine is more emotional. Maybe.

Psychology Gone Wrong, part II

The most convincing part of the book so far (I haven't finished reading it yet) is part II, which throws a very disturbing light on psychological research.

Freud himself and many of his followers used typical pseudo-scientific methods: you decide on a conclusion and then find arguments, preferably non falsifiable, to back it. For instance, if the patient agrees with the therapist, it proves the therapist is right. If the patient disagrees, it proves the patient is in denial and that the therapist is right. Oh, and by the way, how many patient cases do you think Freud's Oedipus complex is based on? Zero. I'm not kidding. He based it on some observation(s?) on himself, that's it.

However, in the recent past efforts have been made to apply scientific methods to evaluate theories and therapies in the domain of psychology. Unfortunately, there are two deep flaws at the base of this edifice that is being built. One is lack of replication, and the other is the aversion to null results.

Scientific research is validated by replication. Results of one study or experiment very often mean nothing. Only if these results are replicated by other, independent research, can we start to accept it. Unfortunately, scientific journals in the field of psychology tend to refuse to publish replication studies. So all it takes to establish a theory is to publish one study that backs it. If it is sufficiently sensational, it will be widely published in the general media (and probably distorted in the process) and accepted by the public as scientifically established, and that's it. Nobody will bother trying to find out whether there is any truth to it, because it's a known fact that journals will not publish such studies. And scientists need to publish to survive.

Another thing that scientific journals tend to reject is studies which yielded no statistically significant results. Of course, it would seem that such studies are not very useful, and in themselves they aren't, but they can be as a failed replication attempt of a previous study. Also, if they were published, they could be used in meta-analyses (an analysis of the result of several studies) and contribute to general understanding. This means that meta analyses are based on incomplete data. It also means that once scientists set out to do a study, they have a very strong motivation to yield positive results, and will be tempted to massage data until they indeed get something, and get published. That may be even more dangerous than the simple suppression of unsatisfying results.

These issues exist in all scientific fields, but are especially acute in psychology and social studies. This, added to the irresponsible appetite of the media for juicy theories, probably means that most popular theories are undead theories, unproved but never disproved.

I find this very scary. Despite my reluctance toward psychoanalytical theories, and the kind of popular psychology found in American movies and TV series, over time I have let myself be convinced, by the sheer power of repetition, of many of those ideas that we all take for granted. But all this may be based on nothing. Very reassuring.

I highly recommend reading the article I linked to above, which is a much more reliable description of the problem than my vague and probably inaccurate rendering.

>227 FlorenceArt: very convincing argument, but some areas do not lend themselves to scientific research, especially where the human mind is involved. You might put forward the same argument for any religion or even something perhaps a little more measurable like economics or human resources. etc.

I too am deeply suspicious of most psychology theories, especially those based on Freud and Jung, but that is only me and if other people believe them and even if a whole industry is based on those beliefs, who am I to say that they are wrong.

Great post FlorenceArt.

Very interesting. I agree with Barry that some areas don't lend themselves to scientific research, and I would include much of psychology with that.

> 224 I read Penser la Révolution in the early 80s and thought the reflexivity on History was very interesting. This isn't my favorite historical period and I don't know how well the book stands nowadays but I'm sure it still is worth reading.

>228 baswood:, >229 rebeccanyc:
You can do scientific research in psychology, as you can in social studies and economics. It's a bit more difficult than just inventing theories, but I think it's worth it. How do you think they discovered the drugs that actually improve the life of patients with grave psychological disorders such as bipolar disorder? Drugs that psychoanalysts often disapprove of and make their patients stop taking.

As to baswood's question "who am I to judge", all I know is that I am not competent to judge myself, but I can rely on professionals with a medical training to do it. And I also think that when you consider the very high risks of psychotherapy, which include divorce, dependence, reduced self esteem and self reliance and even suicide, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for proof of its benefits.

>230 h-mb:
Thanks! To be honest, I've been buying way too many books lately and I'm not sure I will read this one. I think I will start with La chute de la monarchie, it sounds like the best introduction.

>226 FlorenceArt: I was all ready to agree with you about intellectual versus emotional until I read your very excellent commentary about psychological research!!!

>227 FlorenceArt: etc. — I agree that psych research is fraught with many difficulties. And I agree with Barry that many psych theories are flawed. It is all such a fascinating area, one that certainly has an open-endedness about it that shows there is much, much more to be discovered. Very interesting discussion!

> 231 There's a comment about it on the site of EHESS : http://40ans.ehess.fr/2015/06/20/959/

>232 Poquette: Well, for non-fiction I try to keep my emotional side in check! :-)

>233 h-mb: Thanks. Very interesting site!

I made a decision to stop buying new books at least until I have finished a few of the ones I am theoretically reading, and possibly even read a few from my dangerously growing TBR. We'll see how long that lasts.

Of course, that doesn't count if the book is free, right? I received a mail from the University of Chicago Press about their free e-book of the month, Doña Barbara, which I had never heard about but will download anyway. I still haven't read the last few of these freebies I downloaded. In fact I can only remember reading one of them, ever. But I have a few of them on my TBR (meaning I do intend to read them, some day).

In the meantime I have started another Georgette Heyer that I bought a few weeks ago: Bath Tangle.

In the non-fiction category, I am slowly making my way through La revanche des émotions, a book on contemporary art that focuses on the trend away from intellectual or conceptual art toward "empathic" art. I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying. Not a very exciting read but interesting idea nonetheless. I will have to renew my library loan to finish this.

Oh, and about Psychology Gone Wrong, I may not finish it but instead move on to one of the books I added to my wishlist because they were cited several times and sounded interesting:

Against Therapy
Manufacturing Victims

Also, this one beckoned at me while looking at the previous two on LT:
The Manufacture of Madness

Also, the book mentioned Popper as one of the first authors to question the status of psychoanalysis as science or pseudo-science, and by a happy coincidence I happen to have one of his books on my TBR:
Conjectures and Refutations

And another book that has been in my TBR for ages because it's on paper and I can't bring myself to read this kind of book without the help of annotations, highlighting and web searches:
The Social Construction of What?
OK, that one is only remotely connected to the subject of psychology, but I think there may be a chapter on mental disorders.

And finally, a few blogs I found on the subject:
http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/
And on the more general subject of pseudo-science:
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/
And in French:
http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/

Interesting commentary on psychology. Before my library took it back, I was listening to Thinking Fast and Slow where Daniel Kahneman covers many very interesting studies he conducted. It shows some of the creative ways we can study psychology, scientifically. (Unfortunately the book is vey dry)

Dan, it's great to be creative when doing research, provided the creative hunches are confronted with reality in a scientific way, which unfortunately is not always the case.

Psychology is an oddball science and practice. A lot of room for false confidence and, to use a psychological phrase, confirmation bias. But there is also a lot a good information and and applications. Unfortunately it sometimes seems the main beneficiaries are advertisers and politicians.

Hi Florence - Against Therapy is a very powerful read. I've never read it all, have only read parts. the chapter on Freud and I think maybe one on early cases was really quite upsetting. I've always been curious to read Masson's earlier sanskrit research.

Wittgenstein saw psychology as a pseudo science, a view I find very helpful when faced with some of the certainties offered by some. A bit like that trick of imagining people naked when you feel intimidated by them.

Dan, right now I'm in a "OMG it was all lies!" phase, and I'm tempted to believe that maybe politicians and advertisers are just as taken in as we are. But the thing is, psychology like social and economic sciences has a rather frightening capacity to influence reality. So if enough politicians and advertisers believe something to be true, it becomes so.

Tony, I get the impression that most of psychology was, and some still is, pseudo-science. It's true that the little I have read of Freud's cases is extremely upsetting. Like the case of "Dora", the girl who was clearly hysterical because she was shocked and disgusted when a friend of her father tried to kiss her against her will.

I just skimmed the Wikipedia entry on Wittgenstein. He sounds fascinating, but I'm a little intimidated and have never tried to read him.

>235 FlorenceArt: I made a decision to stop buying new books at least until I have finished a few of the ones I am theoretically reading, and possibly even read a few from my dangerously growing TBR. We'll see how long that lasts.

I hope for your sake that it lasts longer than my attempt to read mostly from my TBR this year! I've already acquired more than 40 books this year, although some were gifts, and I've read at best 20 from the TBR.

>241 FlorenceArt: - I'v read a lot more abut Wittgenstein than I have read him, unfortunately, I must read him. I think for him the whole of psychology is pseudo science. Those cases early in Masson's book are upsetting, the girl whose father gets her into treatment that took over a hundred doctors I believe before one could believe the first could have been corrupt. Sadly i think these flaws in professionals can persist in new ways and with new blindnesses.

>242 rebeccanyc: Oh, I'm not that ambitious! What I'd like mostly is to stop adding to the TBR by buying books I know I won't start reading immediately. I never used to do that with paper books. Well, I did buy several books when I went to a bookstore, but not too many as I had noticed that when I bought too many at the same time, they tended to sit on the shelves unread. And since it was before the Internet, and I rarely read the books section of newspapers, I didn't have a wishlist and I just browsed the books and picked up the ones that appealed.

>244 FlorenceArt: That's how I used to buy books -- by browsing in bookstores and picking up the ones that appeal. And I still mostly buy books that way, but of course succumb to buying online when I learn about books on LT that I can't find in the stores I frequent. But I'm trying to discipline my buying and not get a book that I can't see myself reading in the near future.

Bath Tangle: lots of fun as always. But I really have to stop reading that sexist drivel!

L'acacia: not sure what to say about this. It was a bumpy ride. I felt sometimes that the exhilarating and dizzying prose was at odds with the horrifying story. It was more difficult to read than Le jardin des plantes, the only other book by Claude Simon I have read, which presented the point of view of a much older author on the same events, so I guess it was more distantiated.
And I'd like to know why the default touchstone for l'acacia is a book by Christian Jacq, a once popular writer of historical novels of dubious quality.

Also, it feels nice to finish some books for a change. I think I'll have to watch myself more closely in the future. It's too easy, when the reading starts to get a bit difficult, to just set that book aside and start another.

I think I'll try to finish the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites de Chine next. And maybe the Heroides. Although those are short stories, so I feel it's OK to take my time between one story and the next.

And I finished the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites de Chine this morning on the train. I bought this book more or less at random while browsing the virtual shelves of an e-book store, and it turned out to be much more interesting than I thought. The short introductions (to the book, then to each letter) pointed out the wide impact some of these letters had in Europe. The Jesuit's descriptions of how things worked in China were used politically, and of course they wrote them knowing this. Some of the letters seem to be more about what the Jesuits wanted the Chinese Emperor to be, and not so much about what he really was. Others were more realistic in their description.

All in all, a very interesting book hinting at the complex interactions between the political situations in Europe and China and the links established by the Jesuits. And interesting descriptions of China as seen by these Europeans who often spent a large chunk of their life there and had a very curious and open mind. Which turned against them as they were accused of being too tolerant, and that was an excuse for dissolving the Company.

A Jesuit's view of China sounds fascinating.