107 Education, research, and related topics of philosophy
108 Kinds of persons in philosophy
109 Historical treatment of philosophy
Ahhhhhh… Sam Cooke. Melodically justifying ignorance since 1960. But those of us who don’t know much about philosophy are in luck: Dewey’s got us covered. Having conquered the first 100 Dewey points, we now enter the mind-melting glass case of cognition dedicated to Philosophy and Psychology. This first 10-spot focuses on philosophy, its theories and important historical figures. If you’re like me, you’re now having flashbacks to that Philosophy 101 course you took freshman year that was very stimulating but also made your brain hurt after every session and where you learned how to extend two pages’ worth of substantive arguments into 10 pages of grade-A high-falutin’ BS. (Or was that just me?)
Anyway, I really am fascinated by philosophy, even if I’m not cut out to study it hardcore. (I’m also noticing that it’s a super annoying word to type, at least for hunt-and-pecker like me. For the last time, hands, it’s not philospohy!) A lot of the books in my library were dedicated to making philosophy accessible to laypeople, which is good because it’s often not. Still, it is everywhere, even when it’s not evident. Just ask the Philosoraptor.
The Dew3:
Plato and A Platypus Walk Into A Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
By Thomas Cathcart
Dewey: 102 CAT
Random Sentence: “Curiously, Camus looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart.”
The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer
Edited by William Irwin et al.
Dewey: 100 SIM
Random Sentence: “Can Nietzche’s rejection of traditional morality justify Bart’s bad behavior?”
Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life
By Roger Pol-Droit
Dewey: 100 DRO
Random Sentence: “Do not step out of that shower jet’s narrow circle.”
We made it to the end of our first 100 of Dewey! #WeDeweyedIt! And if it wasn’t totally evident by now that the Dewey Decimal Classification is about books, allow it to remind you one more time with this 10-spot dedicated to the things of books themselves: manuscripts, incunabula, and the kind of rare books only super-booksellers dare deal with. My closest encounter with this material happened in a Preservation & Conservation class in library school, wherein we learned about the history of paper, bookbinding, and conservation techniques, and also got to make a few books from scratch (one of which I won in a lottery at the end of the course – still a life highlight). To cap the course we had to write a research paper on any topic course-related; I chose to write a brief history of incunabula (early books) and titled the paper Dream of the 1490s: Gutenberg and the Birth of the Printed Book, a title fans of Portlandia and books will be able to appreciate.
With the exception of the lacuna of despair that was the 040s, this section (in my library at least) has had the slimmest of pickings. The highlight would probably be the legendary Book of Kells (about which a delightful movie was made). Anyone else find something cool in the 090s?
The Dew2:
The Book of Kells
By Bernard Meehan
Dewey: 096.1 MEE
Random Sentence: “According to Pliny, the chief characteristic of the panther was that its sweet breath attracted and stunned other animals.”
Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds
By Melissa Katsoulis
Dewey: 098.3 KAT
Random Sentence: “Abraham Lincoln is famous for many things, but being a great and passionate lover is not one of them.”
085 Collections in Italian, Romanian & related languages
086 Collections in Spanish & Portuguese
087 Collections in Slavic languages
088 Collections in Scandinavian languages
089 Collections in other languages
In case you don’t remember (or have tried to forget) (a) payphones, (b) the “comedian” Carrot Top, or (3) the AT&T “Collect” commercials featuring Carrot Top and payphones, let me enlighten you. (Warning: this video might give you unwanted flashbacks to Carrot Top and the early 2000s.) For some tragicomedic reason that’s the first thing I thought of when coming upon this section of Dewey, dedicated to “collections” in all their vague, aggregated glory. But true to their nature, this collection of collections brings together a diverse array of topics into one accessible place. Most of these books I’d still consider bathroom reading rather than weighty nightstand material, though I guess that will depend on how things are going in the bathroom.
The Dew3:
My Bad: The Apology Anthology Edited By Paul Slanksy Dewey: 081 MY Random Sentence: “I did take some lives and I’m very sorry for that.” -David Berkowitz
‘Found’: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World By Davy Rothbart Dewey: 081 FOU Random Sentence: “DID YOU JUST SEE THE BACKSTREET BOYS?”
Best-Loved Chinese Proverbs By Theodora Lau Dewey: 089.951 LAU Random Sentence: “Don’t try to scoop the moon from the bottom of the sea.”
076 Newspapers in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands
077 Newspapers in eastern Europe; in Russia
078 Newspapers in Scandinavia
079 Newspapers in other geographic areas
Extra! Extra! Get your papes heeya, Jack Kelly. We continue along the general theme of writing, books, and cultural institutions with The Newspaper in all its storied, soon-to-be-antiquated glory. While I was disappointed not to find a comprehensive history of that classic 1992 Disney musical/bad-accent-party Newsies, I found a lot of books on journalism or by journalists, along with (diving back into meta-ness) a lot on writing and publishing and the challenges therein, which actually seem to be good resources for aspiring authors. Once again, the books in my library were limited almost exclusively to two digits (070 and 071); apparently Scandinavian newspapers don’t fit within the the collection purview of a Midwestern public library.
As a writer myself, I struggle with how much writing about writing I should read. On the one hand it’s helpful to learn how other seemingly successful writers struggle through the quotidian difficulties of the writing life. On the other hand, it’s easy to get bogged down in reading about writing and not actually get your own writing done. It’s the same thing with the modern trends of “lifehacking” and productivity: so many new apps and web tools make promises of increased productivity and streamlined life, but when I focus so much on the tools themselves I get fixated on the tool instead of the product it’s supposed to help create.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it.
The Dew3:
What Kind of Loser Indie Publishers? And How Can I Be One, Too? By Pamela Fagan Dewey: 070.593 HUT Random Sentence: “Did you just throw up a little in your mouth?”
Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life By Michael Greenberg Dewey: 070.92 GRE Random Sentence: “Purged of empathy, I joined in the protective cynicism of the courthouse employees.”
Red Blood & Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West By David Dary Dewey: 071 DAR Random Sentence: “That’s just the way with juries – they think it no more wrong to shoot an editor than a Jack-rabbit.”
066 Organizations in Iberian Peninsula & adjacent islands
067 Organizations in eastern Europe; in Russia
068 Organizations in other geographic areas
069 Museum science
It’s becoming evident that the first 100 of Dewey is tailored for folks who already love the library and its humanities brethren. Like the “first fruits” of library science, the best stuff (at least according to people like me who geek out about books, libraries, museums, and other districts of Nerddom) comes first, before every other discipline, as an intellectual offering to St. Dewey.
Museums aren’t the only subject of the 060s, but they are the most interesting since books about Iberian organizations apparently don’t circ well. (There were a lot of books on the so-called Robert’s Rules, a reference authority for parliamentary and meeting procedures, but forgive me for not raving about the riveting world of legislative order.)
Does your library have any other interesting books in the 060s? I’ve already admitted by bias toward museums and the like, but is there anything here for non-history geeks? If not, take heart that once we get out of the 100s we won’t find hardcore history until Dewey’s end. Until then:
The Dew3:
The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum, The Smithsonian
By Nina Burleigh
Dewey: 069.09753 BUR
Random Sentence: “Perhaps Adams’s preference for looking at the skies was motivated by his hopelessness at what he witnessed on the earth.”
Cabinets of Curiosities
By Peter Mauriès
Dewey: 069 MAU
Random Sentence: “From the monsters of folklore and mythology to the freaks of real life was no very long step.”
The Secret Museum
By Molly Oldfield
Dewey: 069.5 OLD
Random Sentence: “It might seem a bit of a weird thing for him to have done, that is, if you’ve read his novels but don’t know much about butterfly mating.”
055 Serials in Italian, Romanian & related languages
056 Serials in Spanish & Portuguese
057 Serials in Slavic languages
058 Serials in Scandinavian languages
059 Serials in other languages
Journalism, the saying goes, is the first draft of history. It takes the first stab at what’s going on the in the world, with the assumption that future historians will take that draft and make corrections, additions, and judgements with the benefit of distance. With this in mind, bringing all those “first drafts” together into one publication (like the examples below do) creates a different and unique dynamic, where an overarching story emerges out of a series of first drafts–a whole that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It’s fun to walk through the whole history of something and see how certain events were experienced at the time compared to how they are interpreted today.
The Dew3:
Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine
Edited by Travis Kurowski
Dewey: 051 PAP
Random Sentence: “In those days, in Iowa City, twenty-five dollars bought a hell of a lot of beer.”
Time: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Influential Magazine
Edited by Norberto Angeletti
Dewey: 051.09 ANG
Random Sentence: “This was a fascinating, maddening, challenging, and ultimately expanding experience.”
The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines
By Peter Haining
Dewey: 051.09 HAI
Random Sentence: “It was pretty young girls that evildoers invariably had it in for.”
This is the first and only unassigned ten-spot in all of Dewey. It used to be the home of Biographies, but most libraries separate biographies into their own section, leaving this vacant lot to the weeds. Of course, on the shelves the 030s and 050s will flow together seamlessly, but in our minds and hearts we all know and carry on the memory of the ancient denizens of the 040s.
035 Encyclopedias in Italian, Romanian & related languages
036 Encyclopedias in Spanish & Portuguese
037 Encyclopedias in Slavic languages
038 Encyclopedias in Scandinavian languages
039 Encyclopedias in other languages
You want facts? They got your facts right here. Perhaps this section should be renamed “Bathroom Reading” as there are encyclopedias and fact books galore, including the perennial favorite Guinness Book of World Records and multivolume and multicolored World Book. Once the behemoths of research, this type of printed books seems to be either dead or dying as a primary resource for in-depth study. I feel like a dinosaur for remembering having the set at home and actually using it for school assignments. Despite their diminished status, I’ve come to see them as a great place for serendipity to reign. Open up to a random page and you’ll find something interesting or informative or even delightful.
Just imagine how differently Breaking Bad would have ended if Walter White had stocked his bathroom with encyclopedias instead of a personalized book of poetry. I’m not saying encyclopedias are better than poetry, but I guess I kind of am. Perhaps I’ll change my tune (or my verse?) when I get to the 800s.
The Dew3:
The Best of the Old Farmer’s Almanac: The First 200 Years Edited by Judson Hale Dewey: 031.02 BES Random Sentence: “It’s one thing to be an expert gardener but quite another to win blue ribbons for your efforts at the county fair.”
Mental_floss Presents: Be Amazing Edited by Maggie Koerth Dewey: 031.02 KOE Random Sentence: “The good news: Teleportation is possible.”
The New York Times Presents Smarter By Sunday: 52 Weekends of Essential Knowledge for the Curious Mind Dewey: 031.02 NEW Random Sentence: “The particles that produce the weak force are called W and Z.”
024 No longer used—formerly Regulations for readers
025 Library operations
026 Libraries for specific subjects
027 General libraries
028 Reading & use of other information media
029 No longer used—formerly Literary methods
We’re getting meta up in here. I suppose it’s fitting that the section on libraries should be towards the beginning. Imagine how much this section has changed from Melvil Dewey’s time until now. I wonder how blown his mind would be by the Internet and online catalogs. It’s something we modern users take for granted. I’m old enough to remember using card catalogs, but kids these days (*shakes fist at sky*) don’t have a clue. Whether that’s good or not is debatable, I suppose, but so long as they’re using the library I’d call that a victory.
Speaking of victory, this section is the first thus far that has books I’ve already read, two of which are below. Yeah reading!
The Dew3:
Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
by Avi Steinberg
Dewey: 027.665 STE
Random Sentence: “For these reasons, the library has always been run by a strongman.”
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
by Alan Jacobs
Dewey: 028.8 JAC
Random Sentence: “Fortuity happens, but serendipity can be cultivated.”
My Ideal Bookshelf
edited by Thessaly La Force
Dewey: 028.9 MY
Random Sentence: “I picked all of these books because I think you should always judge a book by its cover–or its spine, in this case.” -Oliver Jeffers
014 Bibliographies of anonymous & pseudonymous works
015 Bibliographies of works from specific places
016 Bibliographies of works on specific subjects
017 General subject catalogs
018 Catalogs arranged by author, date, etc.
019 Dictionary catalogs
Ohhhhh yeaaahhhh… Pure, unadulterated book crack. This is where things start to get good. Book lovers don’t have to go far to get their fix in Dewey. Bibliographies of all stripes serenade perusers of the stacks like the Sirens in The Odyssey, each its own rabbit hole of bookish delight. Be careful not to linger for too long here, though, as there’s so much more to see. (Although, if you’re already overwhelmed by the panoply of book choices before you, then perhaps a curated bibliography is a good place to start your reading adventures.)
The Dew3:
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason by Nancy Pearl Dewey: 011.73 PEA Random Sentence: “Ah, the lure of the open road, or the open water, or simply the great unknown.”
A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam Dewey: 011.73 BEA Random Sentence: “Make no mistake: This was no charitable act of cultural enrichment.”
Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities by Russell Ash Dewey: 016.082 ASH Random Featured Book: Romance of the Gas Industry by Oscar Norman
We’re really doing it, buddies! Teach Me How To Dewey (aka the Dewey Domination System, aka Operation Climb Mountain Dewey) is in effect, library card at the ready to check out some sweet books, and maybe a movie or two if we’re feeling lucky. Generally, each post that explores a new Dewey ten-spot will have an overview of the section along with some commentary from the Dewer (that’s the Dewey doer) and 3 featured books (Dew3? Book Drops of Dewey?). These books won’t necessarily be the best of their bunch, but rather representative or quirky titles the average patron otherwise wouldn’t have discovered. Shall we begin?
The Rundown:
000 Generalities
000 Computer science, knowledge & general works
001 Knowledge
002 The book (i.e. Meta writings about books)
003 Systems
004 Data processing & computer science
005 Computer programming, programs & data
006 Special computer methods
007 [Unassigned]
008 [Unassigned]
009 [Unassigned]
There I was, all excited to begin the great Dewey quest when, after an intriguing start in the “generalities” section, I got deluged by shelf after shelf of booktorials on “information systems” and Microsoft Word 2003 and other software guides that were already obsolete like three months after publication. If someone was starting at zero with Dewey and work their way up (like, say, a first-time library patron browsing for books or a librarian blogging about super cool things like classification systems), they probably wouldn’t be hooked yet. The section on “the book” is probably popular among librarians and bibliophiles, but even that didn’t have enough in my library’s stacks for me to linger.
And yet, in the very first leg of the journey we have already encountered the mythical Unassigned areas. I like to think of them as the Elephant’s Graveyard of Dewey. (The Librarian King GIF in 3… 2…) So mysterious yet full of power and portent. What book bones lay there? Will any new subsection dare enter that haunted terrain?
Oh, I just can’t wait for 010.
The Dew3:
Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us–and How to Know When Not to Trust Them by David Freedman Dewey: 001 FRE Random Sentence: “Okay, so lousy research can slip past peer review into journals.”
Aliens Among Us by Ruth Montgomery Dewey: 001.94 MON Random Sentence: “Their fleet is smaller than the Ashtar group, but equally dedicated to helping earthlings.”
The Smithsonian Book of Books by Michael Olmert Dewey: 002 OLM Random Sentence: “Such men often became moralistic, platitudinous bores.”
Ready for the Snapchat summary of Dewey? Here it goes:
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) organizes library material in a numerical hierarchy by field of study. Each one has its own 100-level placement, called a class:
000 – General works, Computer science and Information
100 – Philosophy and psychology
200 – Religion
300 – Social sciences
400 – Language
500 – Science
600 – Technology
700 – Arts & recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History & geography
Each class has its own 10 subdivisions, which have their own subsections, which become more specific the deeper they go. So a book with a Dewey number of 300 will be more general than one with 301.355. Books are organized on the shelf in numerical order, with books with the same Dewey number organized alphabetically by author. (It’s a lot easier to understand when you see it on the shelves, so go visit your local library!)
A book’s Dewey number has two components: its class number (i.e. a number that designates its place on the shelves) and three letters, which usually are the first three of the author’s last name.
So in my library, David McCullough’s Truman has a Dewey number of 973.918 MCC, which got that because it’s in:
900 History & geography
– 970 General history of North America
– – 973 General history of North America; United States
The numbers after the decimal point identify the material more and more specifically by geography, subject, language, etc. And because David McCullough was the author, MCC is tagged onto the end.
That’s basically it. How an item gets cataloged fully – with subject headings, physical description, and all that extra info most non-library folks don’t care about – is both an art and a science, and one best left to professional catalogers because they actually enjoy doing it. But going forward, we’ll be just fine with the basic knowledge of what a Dewey number is and why it’s important for libraries.
“It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.”
Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle:
“If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of ‘the answer.’ This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”
N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:
“My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”
A passage early on in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own popped out when I first read it and stuck with me as I watched Darren Aronofsky’s remarkable Noah.
Elie’s book chronicles the intersecting lives and spiritual journeys of four influential Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. I’m still working my way through it, but from the get-go I was hooked by Elie’s weaving narrative of literature, faith, and pilgrimage in the lives of these four exceptional figures. The passage that stood out to me described a moment in Dorothy Day’s bohemian days in New York City as a young socialist and hard partier. She was returning home at dawn from another booze-soaked bacchanalia when she felt inspired to stop at St. Joseph’s Church for the 5 a.m. Mass:
She knelt in a pew near the back and collected her thoughts. She was twenty-one years old. All her life she had been haunted by God. God was behind her. God loomed before her. Now she felt hounded toward Him, as though toward home; now she longed for an end to the wavering life in which she was caught. …
For the time being, she began to pray. “Perhaps I asked even then, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’” Perhaps she told herself, kneeling there, that “I would have to stop to think, to question my own position: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him, O Lord?’ What were we here for, what were we doing, what was the meaning of our lives?”
I wonder now if Aronofsky read this book while working on Noah, because the same thoughts that haunted Day also haunt Aronofsky’s Noah. Except the God that Dorothy Day sought and implored and felt haunted by was not the same God that Noah knew. God is known in the film as The Creator, the celestial deity that everyone in this ancient time knew to be the creator of the world and everything in it. The Creator is everywhere and is in everything. (“God was behind her. God loomed before her.”) And this Creator haunts Noah: with dreams of a great flood; with preternatural visions showing the weight of sin on the world; and with an overwhelming mandate from above to carry out justice on the wicked.
How Noah and his family deal with this is one of the key threads of this film, a miracle of a movie. I call it a miracle not to discount the massive amount of creative work put in by Aronofsky and his team to get it on the screen, nor to minimize the miraculous works from scripture depicted in the film; it’s a miracle because it’s good.
Again, I’m not discrediting Aronofky’s directorial prowess. The opposite, in fact. Christian movies (rather, movies made by Christians with explicit Christian messages marketed chiefly to Christian audiences) just aren’t that good. They too often focus on the transmitting the message (or The Message) instead of making good art. But great films can do both well without sacrificing either. Films like Noah and The Tree of Life and Short Term 12 and Ikiru and Into Great Silence and Winter Light and so many others aren’t worried about whether viewers “get” the message. They are art. They are beautifully created, and they are OK with asking questions and not hearing back about them. They ought to haunt you as they are haunted, by something deeper and bigger than themselves.
I’m grateful to Aronofsky for rendering this story for the screen with such theological savvy and care for craft. Noah isn’t perfect, but neither was Noah. Yet the Creator used him anyway. And why that is haunts me.
I collect cool words. It started with Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: words like calumny, bugbear, abstemious, and postprandial popped out as I read that great history of Prohibition a few years ago, and I wanted to remember them, so I wrote them down. I’ve done that with my reading ever since, including with The Word Exchange, a new novel from Alena Graedon (out on April 8).
Fitting for a novel about dictionaries and language, Graedon was dropping cool words all over the place. I was racking up words I wanted to look up later and try to remember for future reference. But then something weird happened.
The Word Exchange is about the near-future, when the printed word and the things that house it (libraries, bookstores, magazines) have become obsolete thanks to the Meme, an iPhone-esque device that anticipates its user’s needs and intuitively delivers information. The Meme has become so thoroughly integrated into everyday life that users no longer need to remember word definitions; the Meme knows them and can retrieve them immediately. Because everyone is so dependent on their Meme for almost everything, including basic word definitions, they trust implicitly whatever the Meme tells them.
But something foul is afoot with Synchronic, the company that manufactures the Memes. For one, it has started buying words and creating new ones for their online marketplace called the Word Exchange. By creating their own repository from which the Memes pull their data, Synchronic’s users become locked in to the company’s proprietary language, which continues to expand with new user-created words that mysteriously (or not so mysteriously) begin taking the place of known words. In other words (ha!), Synchronic’s Meme isn’t freely delivering word definitions from the public domain; it’s selling an inferior product when its users could get better stuff for free. But in the Meme’s seamless digital ecosystem, quicker is easier than better.
Synchronic’s newest device, the Nautilus, takes the next logical step: it’s an electro-biological headpiece that integrates with the user’s brain on the cellular level, allowing for direct and instantaneous communication with the Internet. It would also further meld Synchronic’s manufactured language with its users’ own speech patterns. But that becomes a problem: a new epidemic, dubbed “word flu,” starts infecting Meme and Nautilus users’ speech with artificially manufactured words and wreaking havoc on their bodies.
And this is where the weird began for me. I had written down about a dozen cool words I wanted to remember, like amanuensis, ouroboros, ken, and variegated. Then I ran into a new word I was about to write down when I recognized that it wasn’t real. It was a Synchronic™ word, so to speak—a word created and sold by this secretive company that had snuck into the vocabulary of someone infected with the word flu. Until this moment, I had been an outside observer of the novel’s narrative, watching the characters navigate the shadowy goings-on in this vaguely dystopian near-future. But then I suddenly had a linguistic object lesson that made the novel much more present and prescient.
As a word-themed dystopian thriller, The Word Exchange is right up my (dark) alley. Graedon has a knack for description, though I ironically was most put off by the technical side of her writing style, i.e. an over-reliance on the em dash. Incredibly pedantic, I know, but such is the life of an armchair grammarian. Perhaps this and other choices were conscious and character-driven; if so, very well then. By the look of her Facebook page, Graedon has taken on a kind of skeptical techno-prophetess role to promote the book and guide the discussion around its highly relevant and pressing themes. She can certainly count me as a supporter in that regard.
I don’t know whether it’s due to some paucity in my education, a natural curiosity, or a sort of intellectual masochism (or all three), but I’ve occasionally sought out books about topics that often don’t agree with my brain yet still fascinate me. Being free from the shackles of syllabus reading (however instructional and edifying it often was) has allowed me to dabble in whatever topics I want, leading me down educational pathways I rarely dared to traverse before. I’m thinking specifically about math, science, and the other non-writing disciplines I failed to grasp or hone throughout my structured education.
The Joy of x by Steven Strogatz, a mathematician, is my most recent addition to this “continuing education” subgenre of my reading, and a delightful one. Dubbed “a guided tour of math,” this collection of bite-sized surveys paints key mathematical domains like Numbers, Shapes, and Data in broad strokes, simplified enough for English majors like me to understand them yet dense enough to require complete attention and critical thinking. I view Jennifer Ouellette’s splendid Black Bodies and Quantum Catsin the same league: right-brained books written for left-brainers, gateway drugs to some deeper, weirder stuff that should only be handled by professionals.
And I’m happy to leave that stuff to people like Strogatz (or his counterpart in astrophysics: Neil deGrasse Tyson), who are adept at communicating the importance and often invisible influence of the heady material they study to laypeople like me. The more books like The Joy of x and Black Bodies that are out there on library shelves and bookstores and talk shows, the more likely their subject matter gets the sympathy and support it needs. Though I came from the humanities, I also want STEM to get all the love it needs.
I’d like to thank two like-minded quotes for not leaving my conscience alone. I’m not thankful in the happy Thanksgiving sense—more like how someone keeps fighting an argument, if only with himself, though he already knows he’s toast. Fine, I give in, but I’m not happy about it.
The first is from John Wesley’s “Sermon 50” on the use of money:
That wherein you are placed, if you follow it in earnest, will leave you no leisure for silly, unprofitable diversions. You have always something better to do, something that will profit you, more or less. And “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Do it as soon as possible: No delay! No putting off from day to day, or from hour to hour! Never leave anything till to-morrow, which you can do to-day. And do it as well as possible. Do not sleep or yawn over it: Put your whole strength to the work. Spare no pains. Let nothing be done by halves, or in a slight and careless manner. Let nothing in your business be left undone if it can be done by labour or patience.
The second is from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis:
Do not lose heart, then, my brother, in pursuing your spiritual life. There is yet time, and your hour is not past. Why delay your purpose? Arise! Begin at once and say: “Now is the time to act, now is the time to fight, now is the proper time to amend.” When you are troubled and afflicted, that is the time to gain merit. You must pass through water and fire before coming to rest.
These dudes must have had some intense New Year’s resolutions.
Standard operating procedure for making year-end culture lists says to rank your ten favorite films/albums/books, but I’ve recently soured against this convention. Choosing a pre-determined number of “the best” among many great works, as all award shows do, is great entertainment but entirely arbitrary. So this time around, I decided to institute my own arbitrary yet entertaining convention of naming the best 13 films, albums, and books from 2013 I encountered last year.
This omnilist honors the fact that consuming art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I don’t wait to watch a movie until I finish reading a book, or until I’ve listened all the way through an album. These things happen concurrently, swirling around my head and heart together like cultural stew. With that in mind, I heard, saw, and read a lot in 2013, but these are the ingredients (divided by form and alphabetized) that came together the best in 2013.
Books
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield I followed Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut and ISS commander, on Twitter during his mission last year. In addition to the beautiful ISS-view photos of cities he’d frequently post, Hadfield made several short videos documenting how quotidian tasks like cutting fingernails and using the toilet are accomplished in zero gravity. Likewise, his memoir brought his life as a pilot and astronaut down to earth, describing the lessons on leadership, work, and sacrifices he’s learned both on this earth and outside of it. Entertaining, informative, and very insightful, this book shows that Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn’t the only Space Publicist out there.
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Dreher I heard about this book after I started reading Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative. At times memoir, biography, history, and cultural commentary, Little Way documents Dreher’s struggle to come to peace with the small Louisiana hometown he fled, and his saintly sister Ruthie, a schoolteacher who happily stayed put. When Ruthie gets terminal cancer, Dreher sees how the town he couldn’t wait to leave rally around his sister and her family, leading him on his own emotionally-fraught journey home. Dreher writes honestly, lovingly, and critically of his sister while pondering the true meaning of home.
The Ocean at the End of the Laneby Neil Gaiman This was the first book I read in my nine-novel November marathon, and it ended up being one of my favorites. It also initiated me into the Gaiman oeuvre, something I’m keen on exploring more after reading this novel. The prose’s lean style allowed the fantastical elements of the story to interplay nicely with the more grounded parts, like the boy’s interactions with his father and the new woman in his life. I often forget how life could seem more terrifying as a child, but I forget just as often that we undervalue the strength that kids have to overcome that terror.
Unapologeticby Francis Spufford I found this very much of a feather with N.D. Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, another whirlwind theology book I read this year. While I also enjoy the earnest, intellectual theological writings of C.S. Lewis and the like, books like this one breathe much-needed fresh air into the faith-based discourse that can often come off as stuffy and anticultural. This is a book of and for the heart. Spufford isn’t asking if we can believe the reality of God; he’s asking if we can feel it. The Message translation of the Bible set out to rewrite the scriptures in contemporary language to keep its message “current and fresh and understandable,” but I think Unapologetic does this far better.
12 Years A Slave It’s hard to avoid the trap of talking about a film like this in award-season terms, judging its quality and worth by its viability as an award contender. This film is and will be an award-winner, but that descriptor in itself doesn’t say much about the tense, focused interpretation of Solomon Northup by Chiwetel Ejiofor, or Michael Fassbender’s typically immersive and impressive performance as a strident slaveowner. Two decades before the Civil War, Northup fought against the dehumanizing institution of slavery as an unwilling combatant, a Northern free man in a Southern slave’s shoes. If Abraham Lincoln became the biggest political lever of the Civil War, then Northup was the fulcrum. This film duly honors the pressure and pain Northup endured serving as the metaphorical fulcrum of the struggle against slavery’s destructive regime.
Before Midnight When I saw this with Jenny in Chicago this summer, we got to the showing a few minutes early and walked into the theater. The movie was already playing, which I found odd since I knew we were a bit early. But we sat down and watched what we soon figured out was the very last scene. Lightbulb: we were in the wrong screening room. We went to the correct room and watched it from the beginning, but I found this snafu altogether fitting: seeing the end of this film at the beginning echoed the start of the whole Before trilogy, which found Jesse trying to convince Celine, despite all the odds and circumstances, to take a chance on him. Kudos to Richard Linklater & Co for making this beautifully wrenching and wrenchingly beautiful series happen.
Gravity Though another (very fine) 2013 film already has this title, Gravity could have just as easily been named The Spectacular Now. For all its fireworks and heart-pounding brinksmanship and wide-eyed views of Earth and outer space, Gravity never departs from the now, the relentlessly present moment Sandra Bullock and George Clooney’s astronauts are experiencing. Director Alfonso Cuarón grabs hold of us right away and says, Betterhold on… and we do, barely.But the spectacle of the ensuing ninety minutes, for me, wasn’t just a nonstop roller-coaster (which it pretty much was), but a series of beautiful images like the one at top: Bullock’s capsule, accompanied by flaming space debris, catapulting toward Earth like a chariot of fire.
Her In a year full of thoughtful, challenging films, this one has inspired the most post-viewing contemplation. It’s a kind of Rorschach test for the digital age: when you see this story of a broken, unsocial man who is befriended by, then falls in love with, a highly intelligent and customized operating system, do you think it’s a dream or a nightmare? Does this futuristic fable portend the end of human interaction, or does it show technology’s restorative promise? That the similarities between Her‘s near-future setting and the present day are so many—the constant connection to mobile devices, the self-imposed social isolation—suggests that we don’t have to wait for the future to answer that question.
Like Someone In Love I don’t watch horror films because I don’t want to be haunted. Little did I know that Abbas Kiarostami’s follow-up to Certified Copy would be as haunting as anything I’ve seen in a while. There’s nothing paranormal in this Tokyo drama, but rather a fraught, mysterious air that permeates the simple story of an elderly widower connecting with a prostitute in unexpected ways. Like This Is Martin Bonner (below), the restraint Kiaronstami shows tightens everything on screen like a vice. No shot or line of dialogue is wasted. (This was released in 2012 but not in the U.S. until 2013).
Short Term 12 If Her is for the brain, then Short Term 12 is for the heart. This portrait of the staff and patrons of a short-term foster care facility for at-risk teens focuses on Brie Larson’s Grace, but moves around the facility’s sphere, capturing connections between Grace and the kids, and between the kids themselves. When Grace’s own troubled past starts hijacking her attempts to guide the teens through their own crises, her tough shell starts to crack. In addition to having young actors who can actually act, this movie sympathizes with the risk opening up requires.
This Is Martin Bonner “I’m inclined to believe that director Chad Hartigan is some kind of superman when it comes to restraint.” That was critic Jeffrey Overstreet (who has been a particularly passionate supporter of this film) on This Is Martin Bonner, which follows a pastor and a prisoner on their interweaving paths through life. Overstreet rightly praises the film’s restraint, which other faith-based films often lack. But the faith in This Is Martin Bonner isn’t didactic or caricatured; it’s real, which means it’s messy and imperfect but infused with love. This is currently available on Netflix, so see it while you can.
TV
House of Cards Like any good work of art, House of Cards rewards repeated viewings. Knowing the full trajectory of the first season allowed me, when rewatching it, to see all of Frank Underwood’s gears turning as his master plan progressed. It’s also a visual feast, taking the noir aesthetic from the David Fincher-directed pilot and propelling us further into the dark underworld of politics and power-wielding. Not sure if I have Valentine’s Day plans yet, but I hope season 2 will be part of them.
Music
Lucius EP by Lucius & Days Are Gone by Haim (I’m cheating here by listing two separate albums in one slot: my omnilist, my rules.) Wedding receptions are pretty much the only place I full-on dance. But when listening to Lucius and Haim, I can’t help myself. How can you not move and sing along to the Michael Jackson-flavored “Falling”? Or to Lucius’ “Turn It Around”? If women-powered dance rock groups is becoming a trend, consider this guy on the bandwagon.
