Book Review-The Bookseller’s Tale By Martin Latham

I love serendipity. I happened upon The Bookseller’s Tale by chance. At first the title did not elicit great interest, even though I fancied myself a bookstore junkie. The first chapter, Comfort Books, drew me into its seductive orbit.  By the time I finished reading all thirteen chapters, and I took my time enjoying the prose as well as marvel at all the gossipy details and informative anecdotes, I was fully and happily enthralled by the book. This is a book that I will keep around in my box of already read books to consult occasionally renew the feelings of adventure and history.

Martin Latham is an actual bookseller, he manages Waterstone’s Canterbury store.  He writes as someone who has the solid and unique knowledge of his trade, while also having the curiosity to assiduously dig deeply into the history of books, book selling, libraries, book sellers, the famous and infamous bookstores, book collections, book collectors, and everything that is peripherally related to books. Indeed, this could be a bookselling encyclopedia, except that the prose is much too good to be a sterile accounting of books and bookselling.

The salient chapters — at least to me — are the ones covering both ends of the spectrum of book ownership and the book trade. Starting with small: the book peddlers in history, the bouquinistes from the left bank of Paris, and the numerous stores from around the world. While ranging to the very large: the massive libraries, unimaginably diverse book collections, and the imaginative and resourceful people who built these collections book by book. Ultimately, it is the stories from each of the subjects that nourished my imagination and curiosity. We humans are, after all, suckers for a great story, and Latham has a backlog of great book stories that fits into each of the subjects of his chapters.

A chapter that I did not expect to draw my intense interest is the chapter on medieval marginalia. The stories of the marginalia of ancient books and the scholars who study marginalia to gauge reader’s feelings and thought as they read the material was surprisingly inspirational. It also selfishly assuaged my own guilt at making margin notes in my own books. I am not Pierre Fermat by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope that my notes may someday inspire others. Or not. Either way, I feel much better about my own scribblings in my books.

Even though books are a ubiquitous part of my life, I have never stopped to question how books came into being, how the book trade became what it is.  Latham gave me a history that elicited forehead pounding moments followed by my own excited: “So THAT is how that happened.” The things that I learned from just reading one book about books and booksellers is astounding.

I have, however, thought about independent booksellers around the world, their lot in society and the ebb and flow of their fortunes. I had assumed that there would always be used book stalls because there had always been used book stalls. It is a part of my DNA as my father was an inveterate used book peruser and buyer. He would bring me, when I was knee high to a bug, with him to rummage through the book stalls surrounding the universities and market stalls in Taipei searching for books, all kinds of books. These were my first happy memories of time spent with my father, so I have a very romantic notion of used books, tiny used book stalls, the smells of the pages permeating the air in those stalls, and everything goes along with the used book browsing experience. Latham nicely and comfortably recreated that experience on paper for me; he took me to places around the world that I had never been and placed me into an unknown happy place, firmly ensconced in a place that I had never been before. It is amazing what abundant memories, a vivid imagination, a well-honed curiosity,  and reading well crafted writing can take one on a sensory experience that seems so real.

When the large online purveyors of books started to dominate the book selling market, even though I was one of the first to dip my toes into the eCommerce bookseller’s sites, I became alarmed by the prospects of buying all my books from the nameless and faceless websites because I live in a city that does not have a large independent bookstore presence. The alarm became pangs of pain when I read of the failures of many of the brick-and-mortar independents; thankfully those pangs have become cautious optimism as I learned of the revival of the brick-and-mortar independents and I learned about people like James Daunt, who Latham refers to, who had stepped in as the CEO of Barnes and Nobles to hopefully revive the fortunes of one of my beloved independents: The Tattered Cover in Denver.

Which brings me to the last and probably my favorite chapter. It is aptly titled Bookshops. This is where Latham write his own narrative, how his fate and happenstance brought him to this point in his life and career, as well as the wisdom and lessons that he had accrued throughout his life as a bookseller. It was a scintillating read, and it made me optimistic about the independent bookstores, actually about all brick-and-mortar bookstores in general, as long as there are people like Latham who are operating these bookstores.

I had learned that there are two other books that delve into book selling and the bookseller calling. Since I read Latham’s book first, the other two books will need to be exceptional in order to meet the standards set by The Bookseller’s Tale.

This book made me very happy.

Book Review-Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China By Fuchsia Dunlop

I bought this book right around the time of its publication in 2008. I then schlepped it around in moving boxes as I moved over the years. This became one of the happy moments in my bibliophilic life when I rediscovered this book in one of those boxes in my basement and complimented myself on just how good my taste in potential reading material was sixteen years ago.

What had possessed me to first, buy this book; and second, to not read it for such a long time? The answer to the first question is that it was rare for Chinese cuisine, let alone Sichuan cuisine, to be the focus of an English language book. As I delved into reading the book, I realized that the book had multiple layers, which made my decision to buy it all the more fortuitous. The book interleaves a travelogue of China during the initial broader opening of the country to western visitors, a cultural exploration of China at that time coming from the point of view of a young English woman’s perspective, and a heart felt memoir of her own adventures in life in addition to the food lore, recipes, and recipes. The second question is harder to answer as I had come across the book amongst my boxes many times in the intervening years. I believe there is a certain hubris involved in my thought process to avoid diving wholeheartedly into the book. Hubris stemming from my pride in my Chinese cultural heritage intertwined with  my chauvinist feelings against learning about China and its food from a big-nose, or a foreign devil. There was a certain shame in that because even though I was culturally Chinese, I also spent most of my life being acculturated to the west, I had always felt inadequate about the depth and breadth of my understanding of my culture, particularly since I fancied myself a foodie. I had started reading about the Chinese diaspora throughout the world and their contributions in spreading and evolving the Chinese cuisine a few years ago, mainly Cheouk Kwan’s Have You Eaten Yet? (Kwan, 2023) (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/07/book-review-have-you-eaten-yet-by-cheuk.html).   I decided to jump in with both feet after reading Kwan’s book as his book showed the influence of Chinese cuisine on wherever the cuisine to have landed, as well as how those lands had influenced Chinese cuisine.

So here is my apology to Fuchsia Dunlop, for not having read this enjoyable and thoroughly captivating memoir, Chinese cuisine resource, travelogue, and personal exploration until now. I allowed my own prejudices to get in the way.

Even though the book’s layout is relatively simple, each chapter has multiple layers of nuances. First and foremost is the cultural accounting of Chinese cuisine, how it came to be the way it is, the folklore surrounding each region’s cuisine, and the reasons for each regions’ cuisine to be unique and differentiated from the other regions. As with all good anthropologists, Dunlop dove bravely into the China of the 1990’s, an exciting and turbulent time to be in China. Her being a woman and foreigner where foreign women were a rare sight made her travels around the country that much more impressive. Her forays into the countryside and places where she is often the first foreigner to visit in many years were not only bold but also be termed personally courageous.

The core of the book is her description of the food, but not only the description but how the food is prepared and how her experience in overcoming the language difference, the unfamiliar cooking techniques, utensils, and the massive mismatch of food traditions between her cultural background and China’s helped her telling the story. She tells a nuanced story of how she set her mind to overcome the differences and accomplish the feat of making the Chinese cuisine that she is documenting  approachable for the western reader.

As I followed her narrative, my previous hubris gave way to happy acceptance that she knew much more than I did and more importantly, that her knowledge of being Chinese is in many cases, far deeper than my own knowledge. Even though my cultural pride took a beating from this acceptance, I was happily learning about my cultural heritage and the food traditions that I had taken for granted as a part of my cultural identity.

As with any sensitive and sharp-eyed writer, she also observed the cultural changes that was happening at that time, as China began to open herself up to welcome the west, she identified the potential fractures within the well-preserved façade of China as a communist society versus what she knew was to come. Her observations of her Chinese friends in China also opened a window into what those friends were experiencing and feeling.

Finally, she bravely exposed her own vulnerabilities by examining her own feeling about being a brave eater in China and what that meant and how her intrepidness conflicted with her personal value systems and how she was able to deal with the juxtaposition of conflicting values.

Each chapter ends with a recipe culled from her notes that were collected during her travels and research. Even though I was quite familiar with most of these dishes, I still learned from them: about how to prepare the ingredients and how to actually make the dishes.

The overlaying of the different parts of Dunlop’s tales made the reading experience multifaceted and variegated, as the narrative kept me deeply interested.  My mind was kept busy while absorbing all the different layers and threads.

After having thoroughly enjoyed my trek into my own food culture through the eyes and voice of Fuchsia Dunlop, I can truthfully state that I have been happily educated by this English woman.

As a show of how much I enjoyed the book, I just started Fuchsia Dunlop latest book Invitation to a Banquet, which came out in 2023. I won’t be waiting 16 years to finish this book

Book Review-A Philosophy of Walking By Fréderic Gros

I find myself reading more books of essays than fiction these days. It is perhaps because of my brain’s adaptation to reading in the era of social media: reading 180-character snippets has made  my attention span shorter and my having less patience. It could be also that I am becoming less accepting of the novel form. Regardless, I am finding satisfaction if not outright joy in reading well-written and concise essay collections. This is one of the books that fell on my lap during my excursions into the essay form.

Another book that I have used for my critical reading purposes is by Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2024/01/book-review-history-of-reading-by.html) Manguel’s book was more extensive and more catholic in its scope.

This book by Gros is a philosophical treatise on walking, which is clearly stated in the title. Fréderic Gros is a French philosopher, an erudite philosophical explorer. In this case, he was also ably assisted by his translator John Howe, as I thoroughly enjoyed Howe’s translation of Gros’ thoughts. This was a fact that needs to be recognized because I so enjoyed reading the 25 essays because of the fluent translations of the original essays. The book was not only accessible, it held my attention, filled me with wonderment, and elicited critical questions as my mind wandered with the essays.

The book is laid out to explore and intellectually investigate walking, something that most of us take for granted. Those of us who are not cursed by physical ailments that prevent us from walking understand the feelings and mechanics of walking intrinsically, which could have made the author’s exploration of the topic seem redundant. Yet Gros was able to make the reader discover the joys of walking for the first time in our lives, such is the fluency of his words and cogency of his explorations. He adroitly explores the wonders behind the different kinds of feelings that we get from walking, the feeling of slowness, the solitude of taking a walk, the silences that surrounds us during a walk, the simple pleasures of a stroll, the sensual pleasures of walking in a public garden, and the role of an urban flâneur, and the importance of the pilgrimages, amongst many other topics.

Interspersed amongst the explorations of many different kinds of walking are chapters devoted to people from history who are known for their walking habits. Philosophers like Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Thoreau, Nerval, Kant, and Gandhi. Each of the essay on these philosophers gives concise histories of each philosopher and relates how their philosophical treatises are affected by their walking habit.

I was familiar particularly with Nietzsche, Kant, Thoreau, and Gandhi and the roles that their walking played in their philosophical works, yet Gros was able to expand my understanding of these philosophers. The author could have expended considerable amount of pages on each of those philosophers I mentioned, and it is very much to his credit that he did not overextend his discourses on the obvious subjects because his circumspection in that regard served his purpose of integrating the practice of walking into those philosopher’s philosophical work. He could have expounded on the histories of the philosophers and then digressed into their philosophies in general; but his prudence and economy of explanation allowed the readers to focus on walking.

This was a book that I read in those moments when I am in the mood for a short respite from deliberate bouts of concentration while I am reading non-fiction or if I needed to rest my imagination from too much thought perturbations from reading long and convoluted novels; as rewarding much as those reads are, sometimes a break is needed to refresh my mind. The essays in this book are immensely enjoyable and are of a length that will allow my mind to relax as I am able to focus on something other than complex and dense material. I would like to think that creating this kind of reading habit and spacing the shorter essays in-between heavier readings is also helping me re-learn how to read deeply for short periods of time, which will return me to being able to read and think deeply for longer periods of time. Regardless of whether my method meets its intended purpose, I am enjoying the exercise. 

 

 

Book Review-A History of Reading By Alberto Manguel

I was encouraged to jump into this book on the history of reading after having read Alberto Manguel’s short book Packing My Library (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/03/book-review-packing-my-library-by.html), on his elegy to his library in France, it was the library that he had wanted for all of his life but one that he had to give it up for unspecified reason. This book on the history of reading had also been cited by Maryanne Wolf in her book Proust and the Squid (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/10/book-review-proust-and-squid-by.html) as a source of her research on reading. It was a serendipitous discovery for me as I would not have consciously sought out a history of reading.

The book comprises of 22 essays, with ten essays collected under the section titled Acts of Reading, and ten essays collected under the section titled Powers of the Reader. A leading section and essay titled The Last Page  led off the book and an ending section and essay titled  Endpaper Pages. What happened between The Last Page and Endpaper Pages was sheer reading pleasure about reading.

Manguel is erudite and a thorough researcher, more importantly, he is an excellent storyteller, never straying too far into pedantisms yet also digging into the granularities deep enough to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. The subject of the book may seem to be a topic that could be a snoozer; I must admit that I am one of the select many who find the subject more than a little interesting, but I am the kind of geek that this book was written for. \

Where else does one find out that it was the norm in the time of St. Augustine for readers read loudly and in public, whereas our habits are that such that reading is done silently. Or having the history of language, writing, and reading explained in an erudite and clear fashion. Or having the neurological theories of how humans developed the ability to create and  decipher written language and develop the ability to suss out the different meaning that are imbued in the words, albeit his explanations are not at the levels of neuroscientific depth as a textbook but it is clear and delivered in a concise manner.

Far be it for me to recite the content of the book in a book review, because the surprise to the reader comes from the unexpectedness of the topic and the histories in the form of the stories woven into the essays are not only informational but completely entertaining.

Manguel writes with the rigorousness and discipline of a literary scholar that he is. He has also selected the subject of each essay with foresight and structure that gives the reader sufficient guidance to accumulate the facts through the stories and references that he cited. The book is an interesting conglomeration of genres: as a serious history book and as an informative tome to be read for pleasure.

It is my habit to set aside time at the end of the day for relaxing reading. The books that I read are usually some mindless fictions, mostly mysteries, so that my mind can be relaxed in order to prepare for sleep; or a book of essays that are short enough to be consumed pre-slumber while also interesting enough to give my mind a gentle workout, to exhaust it enough to make it welcome the advancing sandman. This book fits the bill on many occasions. I did not read it with a set of expectations, I read it as a source of pleasure and  knowledge. The essays consistently drew in my interest, and I gained knowledge with every essay.

I would suggest reading this book with the same easy and unhurried approach. The beauty of this subject is that I plan on returning to the book as a reference on the history of language in general as well as a handy book of essays, to be re-read and enjoyed.

I so enjoyed this book that I had sought our other books written by Alberto Manguel before I had finished this one so that I can have the books in my possession so that I can reach for them when the mood strikes.

 

The State of the Pete 2024

 

pwung@earthlink.net http://PolymathToBe.blogspot.com,

https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/

Twitter:@Phaedrus1 and @PolymathToBe

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Equanimity: Evenness of mind or temper; calmness or firmness, especially under conditions adapted to excite great emotion; a state of resistance to elation, depression, anger, etc.

Curiosity: A desire to know or learn. An object that arouses interest, as by being novel or extraordinary.

Polymathy: Learning in many fields; encyclopedic knowledge.

無為 Wu-Wei: "inexertion", "inaction", or "effortless action"

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion

Failure is the information you need to get to where you are going. Rick Rubin

Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading. Maryanne Wolf

The longer you do something: See it with first time eyes, Feel it with first time passion.. Joe Maddon

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman

 December 2023

This tradition of the State of the Pete letter started during my gradual school years. I was writing holiday cards as I was waiting for my simulations to run, and it has evolved into these overly long and verbose tomes. My friends have told me they liked it; far be it for me to disappoint them, so I have continued the tradition. It has grown to be more than just a letter of update; it has evolved into a snapshot of my convoluted thoughts over the year. This exercise has become the means for me to integrate my disjoint thoughts and summarize the year, as most humans are wont to do at the end of the year.

My dearest friends,

I hope that this letter finds you and your family hale, healthy, and prosperous.

My mother and I are doing well, considering that just last year at this time, I had just brought her home from the rehab home due to a health scare; in contrast, life is grand this year for the Wung’s. Mom turned 98 in August, and we celebrated at home with some take out from our favorite Chinese restaurant and a fabulous cake from a Taiwanese bakery. Mom is still leery about going out in public and since she is not moving as well as she used to, she would rather stay at home. She spends her days watching TV, some Chinese soap operas, the daily stock market reports, an occasional sporting event, and various and sundry other programs. I am sure that sports programming is temporary diversions when nothing else is on. 

Our daily routines are not very exciting, although at 98 years of age, not exciting is comforting. Our conversations involve the weather, bowel movements (or lack thereof), where to set the furnace/air conditioning temperature, all of my screwups during the day, and how horrible my cooking is, even though she will still eat it.

On the days that I teach at University of Dayton, I get to my coffee shop early to drink coffee, kibbitz, read and write until I prepare for my class at 11. Otherwise, I start the day at home reading and writing. On the days that I teach virtually, which is in the afternoons, I sleep in a bit, although that is difficult given the trials and tribulations of my inability to sleep continuously. I read, write, and prep for class. Mom usually must wait to have dinner on those days as I can’t start cooking until after my class is finished.

I am teaching at both the University of Dayton and Marquette University. I teach live at Dayton, one class a semester. Virtually at Marquette, one class in the Fall and two classes in the Spring. This has been a good challenge for me. Last Fall I had to dust off my 30-year-old protective relaying knowledge for Marquette. This past Spring, I had to dust off my power electronic knowledge, the memories of power electronics had not been buried as long ago as the protective relaying knowledge, but long enough for me to struggle with remembering what I didn’t master long ago. Fortunately, the professor who had taught the class previously was very generous with his help and his notes. In addition, the graduate student who taught the lab section and graded homework helped boost the quality of the instruction by taking charge of those things that he was responsible for and catching my faux pas before I broadcasted it to the class. As a bonus, I learned about switched mode power supplies, a topic that was not even covered in my textbooks when I took power electronics from Bill Sayle.

The students managed to survive my version of the Flipped classroom, I think it made the classes more interesting, and it forced them to think and learn; while also learning to back their opinions with facts, a shocking revelation for many of them. Most of the students adapted, many had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the pedagogy, but they seemed none the worse for wear at the end of the semester, the open wounds having healed. The expanded conversations with students made me aware of just how poorly the general knowledge of electric power systems has been disseminated in the mass media. The amount of misconceptions and mythologies that has been assumed to be the general truth was staggering and is rather alarming in what portends for our energy future. I do enjoy blowing my students’ minds with the facts. It is all very challenging as a teacher once I overcame the sense of doom from my initial interaction with my students.

I am still working for the IEEE Industry Application Society as the gatekeeper for the publications portal, as well as handling the paper submission process for the IAS Annual Meeting, along with various other activities involving the publications department of IAS.

Even though I was not able to attend any of the usual conferences, my friends helped me put together and present a series of panel sessions in the IEEE Energy Conversion Conference and Exposition on the topic of the Future of Electric Machine Design, focusing on the enabling technologies of Advanced Computation, Advanced Manufacturing, and Advanced Materials. My friends honored me by taking a nascent idea and made it their own. They organized and assembled panels of experts to explore the impact of the enabling technologies on new applications necessitating new electric machines and new design processes to tackle those new machines. By all accounts, the sessions were well attended, so I am thinking about continuing the series. The beauty of not working under the daily responsibilities and stress of putting out designs is the freedom to extend ideas without constraints.

My volleyball coaching was again curtailed this year because I could not leave mom alone at home overnight. I went to some club practices occasionally to work with certain teams and players, which turned out to be quite challenging and rewarding. It is rewarding to see a player’s eyes light up when they get it, regardless of whether the process is gradual or sudden. This is why I coach and teach: that moment of enlightenment. I also gave private lessons to a few players, not as much as my other friends do but enough to pique my interest. I had stayed away from private lessons previously because I had always viewed volleyball coaching as a group activity, focusing on the individual techniques seemed to be antithetical. The revelation was that most teams are so limited in practice time that most coaches had to sacrifice the individual work in deference to team practices. I was so inspired that I even wrote a blog post on it. (https://thecuriouspolymath.substack.com/p/volleyball-coaching-life-private)

I rarely get excited about medical devices, especially ones that I use on myself, but I am completely convinced that this device is changing how I am dealing with my diabetes. I started using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) in October, I had been poking my fingers four times a day. For those who are familiar with sampling theory, the general effect of that kind of sampling is aliasing; the four times a day regimen led me to draw some bad conclusions leading me to make bad decisions. The first month after I started using the CGM, I checked 40-45 times a day, I am now down to 30-35 times a day. The app draws smooth curves with my blood glucose readings, allowing me to see what my body is doing on its own and also in response to what I eat and drink. I can now control my dosages and anticipate when my hormones are acting up. This is the first time in my life that I am looking forward to seeing my doctor in January, just to see where my A1C is residing. For those of my friends who are diabetic, please get your physician to prescribe the CGM.

What The Hell is Pete Doing With all His Time?

This is the section about the things that happen when I get bored; as I am always bored, this is long-ish. I try to be more abstemious, but I don’t always succeed.

Since I spend most of my time at home or teaching, I read and write to fulfill my mission to becoming a Curious Polymath. It started out as a sardonic poke at myself, a haughty name for what I enjoy doing: ask questions, learn, organize what I learned, and leverage that knowledge into something useful. The words curious and polymath are both aspirational and inspirational, a way to put it out there so that I can continue to explore the journey of knowledge.

Blog Sites

I have started another blog site on Substack. Partly because I was curious about the platform and partly because I was a little frustrated with my old blog site. I have not migrated any of the material from Blogspot to Substack for the moment, I am just keeping everything I had written in the old site. Although I am going to continue posting my book reviews on the old blog site. I am playing it by ear. This State of Pete will be in the old blog site, but I am thinking about putting some of the chunks of the letter into Substack, I haven’t decided yet.

About the blog itself, perhaps it is because I have quoted Joan Didion so often that I have convinced myself this is a worthy exercise in organizing my thoughts. Writing about ideas forces me to organize my thoughts and put my reasoning in a logical framework so that I can proceed towards some semblance of clarity when I ask myself what I actually believe in. No doubt, there is a vanity factor influencing my initial desire to write a blog. The mental exercise of writing is the addiction and the motivation.

The ideas usually come during my morning showers and my visit to the throne room. I know, TMI. There is something to be said for being occupied mentally for ideas to flow forth.

I doodled around with a logo for Substack. I figured it would be entertaining, and it was. I am not very good at creating graphics, so I made it very simple, just something that reflected my purpose in writing. The reason I chose a fox as the center of the logo comes from the Greek Poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Perfect, since a polymath is a generalist.

My Reading Habits

My reading habits have evolved quite a bit over the last few years. There was a time when I would limit myself by reading two books at once, a non-fiction book and a fiction book. The perfect storm of COVID and my extended leisure time gave me more time to read.

Right now, I have maybe a dozen books going at the same time. This all evolved organically, as I was reading about many different topics, and I was having a hard time concentrating on one book for an extended period of time. I realized that this was probably due to my social media dabbling and the way all media formats had changed, which affected my ability to read as I had read in the past. I became alarmed by this unwelcome development in my cognitive ability, so I naturally read up on the malaise. It was while reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Maryanne Wolf’s books on how our reading habits are affect by what we read that I realized that my social media habits affected the way I read, and why I had evolved to be easily distracted. The bottom line is that neuroplasticity can both help and hurt our ability to learn and think.

My solution, and it has worked for me so far, is to read many books in short bursts, I became a parallel reader. I conceived of this method after learning about the interleaving method from Cognitive Load Theory(CLT). (Lovell 2020) Something I dipped into for answers about how to be more effective as a teacher and a coach. The thrust of the theory is that the cognitive model for humans involve both a temporary short-term working memory and a long-term permanent memory. The best way to retain information in long term memory is to constantly retrieve the same information from the long-term memory and putting the information in the short-term memory, this is to form a strong neural pathway between the short-term working and long term permanent memory. The consistent and constant cycle of retrieval from and storage back into long-term memory makes the knowledge permanent by strengthening the neural pathways.

One of the strategies is to practice interleaving, which is to constantly retrieve knowledge cyclically from different subjects to increase the number of retrievals per subject. My strategy involved switching books once I observe energy wane or I became distracted. The switching between subjects came naturally as it fit well into my social media addled reading habits, so that as my reading fell into a rut, I switched to another book without feeling guilty. By reading several different books, usually 2 or 3,  interleaved with short periods of rest periods between switching, I switch back to the original book. In the end, I read the same amount of books in each specific reading period, I read sections and chapters rather than multiple chapters from the same book in one sitting, it takes longer for me to finish multiple books in parallel because I am interspersing my reading of a specific book with readings of other books, yet I am also reading the same amount of pages.

I am sure this too will evolve over time, but it is working so far. I need to be more mindful of how many books I add into by active reading list from my TBR list. My ambition far exceeds my ability to juggle subjects.

The Biggest Reading Topic

Ironically, I started to apply my reading strategy as I became interested in the cognitive sciences. The interest started a few years ago as an attempt to learn about learning: how to best reach students and players. True to my engineering mind frame, I started with a systematic approach and started reading books on brain anatomy, trying to deterministically associate brain function with physical parts of the brain, which as I now know, is almost impossible. I was foundering using this approach and I was frustrated by the lack of definitive and mechanistic assignments of functions and if-then logic to cognition. I was trying to make the structure of the science fit my preconceived model for a more mechanistic framework. I just got more confused.

It was at this time that I started to read about reading, based on five books that now define my foundational beliefs regarding reading, writing, the origins of language, and how to best leverage my readings; the books were summaries of the research work. If the titles should sound familiar, it is because I started on them last year. The five are:

·       How To Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Mortimer J. Adler 1972). A book that I wished I had taken seriously as a young person, as I had bought this copy of the book right after I finished gradual school. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/08/book-review-how-to-read-book-classic.html) I had taken up the habit of summarizing those books that I felt were important so that I can consult my notes instead of digging through the books when I needed to refer back to what I had read. Adler’s chapters on analytical reading changed the way I took notes and I became more effective in my note taking.

·       Sönke Ahern’s How to Take Smart Notes (Ahern 2017), which is ostensibly about the Zettelkasten (Slip-Box) method is also a great reference on effective note taking.

·       Maryanne Wolf is a psychology researcher in the areas of learning and dyslexia. She had made a splash in the book world with two books, even though she has written others. The first one traces the history of how we developed language, both oral and written, how out cognitive abilities developed to accommodate these new inventions and how dyslexics manage these cognitive skills differently. The book is titled Proust and the Squid. (Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain 2008). (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/10/book-review-proust-and-squid-by.html)

·       Her second book Reader, Come Home  (Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World 2018) is about how the neuroplasticity that gave us the ability to create language — which allowed our neural connections adapt to the invention of reading and writing — is changing how we read and think, sometimes to our detriment. How the ease with which we had adapted to reading in small chunks and 180-character snippets is compromising our ability to read and think deeply and being thorough. It is after reading Maryanne Wolf that I got the courage or the lack of common sense to attempt to read multiple books in parallel.

·       Finally, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (Manguel 1997) traces some of the more esoteric reading habits that had been a part of our reading history. Manguel was the director of the Argentinian National Library. His forte is writing on the act, art, and pleasure of reading. He also tells great stories about reading.

As I was trying to integrate these five sources synoptically, Adler’s chapters on synoptical reading came in handily, although it made my life even more complicated as I was trying to juggle everything I was reading in my mind. However, the note taking lessons paid off and I was able to wrangle the concepts. Even though I have not completely integrated the Zetterlkasten method.

Serendipitously, I had become interested in the relationship between music theory and mathematics. Seeing John Coltrane’s sketch of the ubiquitous Circle of Fifth diagram got me interested in the mathematical relationships portrayed in the Circle of Fifth diagram. There was a mythology that grew up around Coltrane’s version which had different emphasis  than the Circle of Fifth that all musicians use. Since I my music theory background is non-existent, even after years being the obedient Chinese son, I dove into understanding the diagram with no scaffolding.

I had many questions: Why is it called the circle of fifth? What was the mathematical relationship between the notes? How did the western scales come into being? Again, my stubborn adherence to the mechanistic view of the world made me believe that music follows strict mathematical relationships — they kind of do and kind of don’t — I didn’t know that. I bought several books that had mathematics and music in the description to dig deeper. My stubbornness kept frustrating me and preventing me from understanding the ideas. Coincidentally, a couple of those books also delved into the neural mechanisms associated with music and what makes music so mesmerizing to listeners. Eventually, I found a book by the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin: This is Your Brain on Music (Levitin 2007) which put it all together: the mathematical relationships existing in music and a deep dive into the neurological theories that explains why we like the music that we like, the linkage existing between music theory and what make the theory work in the human conception of consonance and dissonance. I had also found other books, but they are a little more technical, so I am saving them for after I get more conversant with the topic.

It didn’t take long for me to draw the parallel between what I am reading about music with what I am reading about reading. The parts of the brain that are used for language processing are also used in appreciating and playing music. The good news is that by making this connection I can do what I am supposed to do as a human: draw analogies and make connections between different topics so that I am combining the two subjects. I am still extremely far from understanding it all, but I am enjoying the process. As a side note, Levitin is an excellent writer, and he had the unique experience of having worked in the music business before he studied to be a neuroscientist. He drops some really big names, both in the neurosciences and in modern rock music, to make it even more exciting.

So now I am in over my head learning about neurosciences, language and reading, and the cross section between mathematics, music, and how the brain works. Go big or go home!

I just saw this quote and it kind of speaks to where I am right now. It is from Bertrand Russell: “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recedes, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”  I don’t think I deliberately tried to become more interested in broader subjects, I do know that my interests have grown broader in my old age; subjects that I have little or no prior knowledge of.

Commonplace Books

As a part of my plan to get more traction with my readings — and as a part of implementing Adler advice on analytical reading — I had started keeping a series of notebooks on certain subjects. I had been keeping notes on my readings for many years — a habit from my gradual school days — but I was not very efficient nor effective with my personal note taking, I had a bad habit of recopying those book segments that I felt was important and definitive but when I wanted to aggregate and integrate the knowledge, I was not able to effectively combine them, as I didn’t know what I really thought, because I was just mimicking the authors in my notes. The perspective changed considerably as I learned to employ what Adler and Ahern preached, which was to summarize what I thought the readings said and then put my thoughts about what I read in the notes, simple and profound difference, I am kicking myself for not having done that my entire life, I may have been more effective in my doctoral studies, but what is the fun in that perspective?

The idea of the Commonplace Book is not new, as many historical figures kept commonplace books, I just didn’t know about it. If you were to dip into the intraweb, it seems that everybody and their uncle are giving out advice about how to keep Commonplace books on blogs or videos. I have not seen all of them — my brain was pounding from those select few that I had chosen to watch or read. The most useful YouTube channel that I had discovered in this regard comes from Vashik Armenikus, a fellow dork from London who reads much more than I. I found his advice on the Commonplace book very helpful. His choice of reading subjects and his ways of categorizing his readings were also very helpful. While I don’t need any help in finding more reading material, I cribbed a number of his book recommendations as well; he had become a dealer feeding my reading habits. (https://www.youtube.com/@VashikArmenikus)

I chose blank notebooks in different colors that include a blank table of content at the front, which is handy for organizing the notes by page number. Instead of keeping one Commonplace Book for everything I read, I have a central Commonplace book where I track the daily readings and summaries to pivot around, and I use different books for specific subjects, I blame the latter practice on that damned engineering mindset. This process too, will evolve, I am sure. Yes, I know I am Type A.

Fiction Books

As a part of my reading practice, I also read multiple fiction books in parallel. There are those that I read at a leisurely and pleasurable pace, giving myself time to contemplate and ruminate, much like my non-fiction book reading habit. Most of those books are literature books that are challenging. For example, I am presently reading The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse for the fourth or fifth time. It is one of the books that I credit with changing the trajectory of my thinking, I reread to see if my perceptions of the book had changed. It has in this instance.

Concurrently, I am reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco for the first time. This book had sat in my TBR stack for many years. It proved to be quite a challenge, confirming to my suspicions; it is dense and takes mental energy to read; it is also stretching my non-existent knowledge of the Catholic church history; so, I am also using a reader’s guide to the book in parallel. Umberto Eco is someone who I revered as a writer and philosopher for a long time, while I had read Foucault’s Pendulum as a gradual student, I had never read the book that made him famous.

I had heard that Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner is brilliant, and it is living up to the plaudits. I am enjoying the excellent writing, and savoring the book slowly, even though it is rather short. There are quite a few that are awaiting me which fit into this category. Surprisingly, I don’t find it difficult to keep track of the numerous plots, reading them in parallel allows me to rest in between books.

The other fiction books that I read are mystery books that I read to entertain myself, to give myself a break from heavy reading. I have a short list of authors that I follow consistently as I do not read all the books in the mystery genre, I have wasted too much time reading stories that fail to gain traction, and I don’t have that much time to waste.

Since Peter Robinson passed away recently. I finished his last Inspector Banks book in October, I sadly said goodbye to Peter Robinson and his characters. Since I have lost a favorite author, I am shopping for new ones. I am reading the first Michael Connelly book, The Black Echo.  I like the writing so far.  He came highly recommended.

Essays

I started reading books of essays a while ago. In part because essays are informative, relatively short, and if I choose carefully, very intellectually challenging. There is a stack of books of essays sitting around my reading chair that I can pick up to read when the thought of reading fiction books doesn’t appeal to me. This is by way of partially explaining why it takes me such a long time to get through fiction books.

Artificial Intelligence

An unexpected tangential interest grew out of my readings in the neurosciences through the causal inferencing topic, I had started reading on causal inferencing last year, but quickly got bogged down in the details. I am still struggling through causal inferencing, but the obsession with reading, mathematics, and music took time away from my studies of causal inferencing. My interest in causal inferencing also put me in the sphere of artificial intelligence as causal inferencing is a tool that is essential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The difference between AGI and AI is immense, but as ChatGPT debut blew up this year the differences, in the layman’s mind were obscured. My go to reference on AI is Gary Marcus’ Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust (Gary Marcus 2006), which I read last year. Marcus had become a pivotal voice speaking out in the wilderness that the AI that ChatGPT employs is not AGI, i.e. the emperor has no clothes, I will explain further on in the next paragraph. Another good reference is written by Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Mathematica software company. His article explains how LLMs work and why they work so well. (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/)

The Large Language Model (LLM) that is in ChatGPT and all the AI platforms that Google, Amazon etc. are employing are essentially massive curve fitting algorithms that are dependent on the training data that is available and are used for that purpose. The same admonition that I had learned in undergrad computer programming still applies: garbage in, garbage out. There is nothing magical in the LLM models which would imbue the system with reasoning, logic, or the ability to make decisions while faced with limited or non-existent data, there is nothing inherent in the algorithm that magically teaches the machines to think and reason as a human. Just because we wish that LLM can make decisions does not mean that it will make decisions, it cannot. LLMs are great at interpolating but they are not so good when extrapolating, this is what differentiates AGI from AI.

There are significant examples of eager developers that employ not-ready-for-prime-time versions of AI and release them prematurely. These companies are essentially releasing beta versions of their code. The first one that comes to mind is Tesla’s autonomous pilot option. There have been fatalities involving the Tesla vehicles, and the fact that Tesla agreed to recalling over 2 million Tesla vehicles to change that autonomous vehicle option signals just how big a problem Tesla had unleashed on the unsuspecting customers and general public. Cruise, the autonomous taxi service company owned by GM halted operations in Arizona and California because information leaked out that Cruise was using human employees to remotely steer every Cruise vehicle on average of every two and a half minute because these taxis were not street safe under the autonomous mode, they had to intervene, even as the vehicles were operating in “predictable” circumstances.

ChatGPT’s release was ostensibly to be to help OpenAI, the company who created ChatGPT, to test their system, in other words, it was a massive beta test. But after the novelty of the software tickled the  consumers fancy, the users decided that the sparkly thing was the real deal. Please understand that I think what the LLM platforms are very impressive and the speed with which it can interpolate the data is amazing, but it has a fatal flaw: it does not reason, at all; and it cannot hope to learn to reason without data, it was never intended to do so.

If this product launch happened in the traditional manufacturing context, OpenAI would have been sued for deliberately releasing a faulty product, i.e. giving the customers a product that is many times wrong.. In the high technology world, that is a de rigueur occurrence because it is easy to fix code and because the fail-early-and-fail-often mantra manifests itself as failed code rather than failed hardware which does not usually kill people. Whereas, in the cases of applying AI algorithm to autonomous vehicles could very well kill people.

One argument that I had heard is that there are more fatalities from accidents stemming from bad driver judgements per year than fatalities from accidents due to AI failures from autonomous vehicles. The problem with this argument is that it employs misplaced frame of reference on the data and lacks understanding about statistics. The data set for human driven cars are orders of magnitude greater than that of the autonomous cars; the sample spaces are orders of magnitudes apart. The question is about how many accidents out of total samples for both instances rather than straight accident numbers.

There are other examples of this kind of overreach and overextrapolation in the tech world, motivated and skewed by the oft idolized and idealized entrepreneurial spirit that is embodied by the fail-early-and-fail-often mantra. This mindset has also bred a contempt for constraints, standards, and rules because the adherents of fail-early-and-fail-often view any constraints, standard, or design and manufacturing processes as a deterrent to innovation. In the real product world, there is a reason for having standardized processes to design and manufacture; having the standards and processes ensures safety and the standards also evolves best practices to prevent known pitfalls. A manufacturer should not be playing Russian roulette with paying customers. One tragic and avoidable example of this hubris is the Titan submersible. OceanGate, the company that designed, built, and operated the submersible was warned time and again by others in the deep-sea diving community about the untested technologies that they employed, but their founder, Stockton Rush, being the Mavericky entrepreneur that he, and other “innovators” fancies him to be, ignored all the warnings and went ahead with the design. In his hubris, he pointed to the number of times it had successfully deployed while carrying paying customers to the wreckage of the Titanic. We all know how that ended. To be fair, Rush and his deep-sea diving expert signed up for the risks. He knew he was taking unnecessary chances, but what of the three passengers that perished with him? Did they really understand the risks before signing the waiver?

One of the most egregious practitioners of hubris, self-worship, and poster child for the Dunning Kruger effect is no less the owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. At one time, Twitter was a useful social media option. I have used the channel to keep pace with experts in many domains, people doing active research in mathematics, statistics, neurosciences, physics, renewable energy, electric power, as well as some of my favorite authors were active on Twitter. It was a rush to directly ask questions of the leading experts and authors. But alas, most of the have left Twitter because of how toxic the environment has become, with trolls populating the Twitterscape. It is one way to blow 44 billion dollars in one fell swoop.

I still maintain my identities on Twitter, but I don’t go there very often. Threads promised to be a good alternative, but it isn’t. I get the same amount of spam from profiles touting naked photos on Threads as I do on Instagram and Twitter, and none of the experts have migrated over.

The Stuff That I Teach and Geek Over

I discovered this video on the net as I was researching material for my classes. It is one of the clearest and coolest visual demonstrations of global warming is this animation from NASA demonstrating the temperature data spiral. The data runs from 1880-2022. The data is segregated into a clock face varying between January to December. The colors are normalized to the data between 1951-1980, those data are represented as white, whereas those data that are lower than the norm is blue and those higher than the norm are colored red. The most definitive animation happens at the end of the animation when the whole spiral is rotated and shown as a funnel.

(https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/300/video-climate-spiral-1880-2022/)

As befitting a genuine dork, I have a favorite chart. It is the estimated annual energy consumption for the US, this is the chart for 2022. The chart comes courtesy of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, they compile the data and produce the chart every year and for difference countries and sectors.

(https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png)

My students are always shocked when they try to calculate the energy conversion efficiency for various parts of the User segments. The calculation for conversion efficiency is for the total energy on the box minus the rejected energy (the grey band number) divided by the total energy. That is your homework.

Volleyball

These are exciting times for volleyball. University of Nebraska-Lincoln took a chance and hosted a spectacle at the football stadium on . A record 93,003 people watched four Nebraska teams play each other. The contest between UNL and UNO was never in doubt, but the event was a great event, to call attention to women’s college volleyball. Attendance records were broken all around the country, and for the first time ever, University of Texas and UNL played on a Sunday afternoon on network television for the national championship, drawing an average of 1.7 viewers, with the peak at 2.1 million. These are exciting times for the sport that I am devoted to. The popularity of the sport is on the rise, there is no doubt, the question now is two pronged: how can we sustain and surpass the previous landmark event, and how can we sustain the interest in women’s volleyball? A huge question that deserves significant thought and work. The impact of the transfer portal and the NIL is also being felt in the collegiate volleyball world, there had been announcements of successful players at top programs announcing their entrance into the transfer portal just a few days after the national collegiate championships. The result is that the rich got richer. Note that this is not football and basketball, this is women’s volleyball, I suppose this is the unintended consequences of  becoming successful, but I don’t have to like it.

There will be three professional women’s volleyball leagues operating in the US by 2025: one has been soldiering on since COVID, one league is scheduled to start playing in January of 2024, while the third will start playing in 2025. All three have vastly different business models, all three has recruited many respected people from the world of volleyball, respected coaches and well know players. The existing league plays a shortened one-month season. The second league has the traditional sports business model with some famous franchise owners from the sports and entertainment world. While the third league has the opaquest model, a model that involves associating (i.e. buying) large junior volleyball clubs. Will all three leagues survive? Who knows? Most fans don’t know the difference between the three, which is part of the worry — that the market will end up being saturated and there won’t be any truly discernable difference between the three leagues. I just hope we don’t F___ this up.

Sports in General

Interesting times in the sporting world. The New York Times gutted their sports department after having bought The Athletic. Since I have an online subscription to the NYT, I get The Athletic by default, but it was still a sad comment on the state of the sporting press.

Georgia Tech just won their bowl game. It was something called the Gasparilla Bowl, against a 6-6 UCF. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but WTF is the Gasparilla bowl? At least Tech finished the season with a winning record, by just one game, the bowl game. Illinois didn’t even make it to six wins, the less said about that the better. Illini and Georgia Tech basketball weren’t anything to write home about either. Georgia Tech volleyball went far but then ran into Nebraska in the third round of the tournament, who went through Tech like a hot knife through butter, although they did that to a lot of teams. Illinois volleyball didn’t make the dance. Both the Cardinals and the Blues had horrible seasons, so it was a pretty dismal baseball and hockey season, I read a lot of books. Craig Berube of the Blues just got fired, I wish Chief Berube all the good fortune in the world. He finally gave St. Louis a Stanley Cup. Mozeliak is going into the marketplace to buy some pitching, WTF was he doing last off-season? I was disappointed that this was how Wainright finished his career, but he also didn’t pitch well because of injuries.

Between the NIL and the transfer portal, the college sports scene has blown up into total chaos. I am happy for the players because the transactive relationship between the universities (management) and the players (labor) has reversed, although the chaos that ensued is not good for anyone. The NCAA has been exposed for what it is, a house of cards, unable to legislate or enforce, but we have known that for years.

The B1G is the conference of scandals and rumors. USC and UCLA, late of the Pac 12 is moving to the B1G. While the football and basketball crowd is excited, the non-revenue sports are looking at this with jaundiced eyes as the athletes for those sports are committed to traveling from coast to coast to compete. I am very sure they won’t be flying charters, and they will be racking up missed classes and academic deterrents as much as frequent flyer miles. Northwestern, Michigan, and Ohio State all had their days in the headlines. Northwestern opened the Fall with a resounding firing of the head football coach, as the Northwestern student newspaper ran an expose on the behind-the-scenes goings-on there. It soon exploded into a scandal enveloping all the Northwestern athletics. Michigan was accused and investigated by the NCAA regarding stealing signs. I am supposed to feel sorry for the NCAA? Or Harbaugh and Michigan? Really? Poor Ryan Day. People are calling for his firing because he wins, just not against Michigan or the SEC. Two words: John Cooper. Look him up.

Deep in the recesses of my emotional being, I harbor a very soft spot for the sports teams that I used to root for as a kid growing in Denver, mostly the Bronco and the Nuggets, as the Rockies was the name of the  hockey team at the time, and the Avalanche didn’t exist then. So it was with great delight that I watched the new Nuggets win the NBA championship. Part of the delight came from how the Nuggets played team ball. Jokic is a marvel and gave this fat dorky kid who grew up in Littleton a reason to celebrate fatness and dorkiness, it would have been nice to grow to seven feet though.

Gender equality is still in the dark ages globally. Witness the way the Spanish women’s world cup team was treated by their own National Governing Body and the president. They first won the World Cup despite their coach, having to navigate around his misogyny and abuse, and then to have the president of the NGB plant a kiss on the lips of the team’s hero at the trophy presentation. A president who hired the coach in the first place. The organization initially defended the president’s action. It took the Spanish government to finally oust him.

Music

Music has been and will always be important to me. Yet I have been a luddite as far as the music scene is at this moment. I am not really interested in any of the recent hits, but I am not so much of a luddite that I am unaware of Taylor Swift phenomenon. Her tour this year was massive and very eye opening, even bigger than Springsteen’s tour, of course the demographics are in her favor. I cannot tell you about any of her songs, but I have a large respect for her business acumen and courage because she has caused an enormous amount of chaos and heartache to the entertainment industry by sheer force of will, both in music and film. First, she upset Scooter Braun, the parasite that bought the rights to her catalog against her wishes by rerecording the albums on her own, thereby negating the appeal of the old catalog; then she distributed her concert film through the theaters thereby short circuiting the movie distributors. The latter move not only saved the theaters and herself  a fortune that went to the middlemen and control over her film, but it also forced the distributors to reschedule their release schedule around her film’s release. A bravura performance. You don’t have to be a Swiftie to admire her acumen.

Jann Wenner revealed himself as both a misogynist and a racist when he admitted in his book titled: The Masters, that he found no women or black people that met his criteria for being included in the book since they: “were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.” RRHOF finally kicked his ass off the board. Even though we knew that the RRHOF was a joke, this confirms it. Now it is up to that board to open up the hall to more diverse musical acts that are deserving to make up for their mistakes over the years. I suspect they won’t.

As one gets older, the litany of familiar people passing away grows. This year’s list would be raising alarms if I hadn’t grown inured from last year, and the year before that. The list below is a who’s who of my musical past. Some names resonate loudly while other names bring a wry smile of recognition and a silent remembrance of what they had done for me and my musical education through the years. David Crosby, Gordon Lightfoot, Jimmy Buffett, Sinead O’Connor, Randy Meisner, Astrud Gilberto, Tina Turner, Harry Belafonte, Gary Rossington, David Lindley, Wayne Shorter, Carla Bley, and Burt Bacharach.

Jeff Beck was the guitar hero-est of all guitar heroes. Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap was modelled on Beck. Of everything musical that he has been a party to, it is his solo work that was astounding. The tributes came as expected, but it was the depth of the heartfelt tributes and the diversity of musicians that was surprising. I was somber for many days, playing all my Jeff Beck records, as well as many of the collections that had him on guitar. Damn, he was an original, and to hear other guitarists talk about how he inspired them was very revealing, even though I know nothing about playing the guitar.

Robbie Robertson and The Band was seminal in music history. The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s paean to the time and the place in musical history became a rare classic film about rock music. My main interest in Robertson was when he released his eponymous album in 1987. The tune that grabbed my attention was American Roulette https://youtu.be/rlxD5GGZTeA?si=VCER0HC2LYNo2NUQ. Powerful stuff.

I have been indulging in music video watching hobby on YouTube for a few years. Some of them keep coming back on replay, partly because of the Google algorithm and partly because the tunes seem ethereal, enough so that I keep returning to them. These are the tunes that always elicit a feel and a nostalgia of a time and a place, even though I may never have actually been in that time or that place.

·       Allison Krauss and Jerry Douglass. Carolina on My Mind. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqDulYRi1dM) This one is relatively new as I was not cognizant of its existence. The performance was the perfect convergence of the song and music by James Taylor, the angelic voice of Allison Krauss, and Jerry Douglas’ exquisite playing.

·       For some reason, the song Shenandoah struck me. An old folk song based on a sea chanty, the lyrics and the melody gave the visceral experience of floating down the Shenandoah river, even though I have never done it in reality. Voces8 does an excellent version of it, as does various choirs, but Peter Hollens’ a Capella version is the definitive one for me. https://youtu.be/0NmKp5A8i3M?si=6v1zD0LGBGYWYJDJ

·       Rhiannon Giddens was unknown to me until a few months ago. The song Wayfaring Stranger is yet another traditional tune. The lyrics about a traveler out amongst the world and longing for home tugs at my emotions. The first time that I became enamored with the song was when I heard Charlie Haden sing the song in one of his solo albums. The eulogistic nature of Haden’s voice got me, and I thought it would be the definitive version for me. But once I became familiar with Rhiannon Gidden’s version, I fell in love with it. This video was filmed in an empty church in Ireland with Giddens playing a fretless banjo accompanied by an accordion. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Z4PAZX9Bs)

Some other musical YouTube Channels that have been entertaining are:

·       Choir! Choir! Choir! A bunch of people singing together, who knew it would be so good.

·       Playing for Change. Always great choice of tunes and international musicians playing together through the magic of video.

·       Leonid and Friends. A Russian band who made their name covering Chicago tunes with a horn section. Their version of Steely Dan’s My Old School is fantastic.

·       IMY2. Another cover band, but they do have their own original tunes. The singer is amazing, she can sing just about anything.

Otherwise, I am playing a lot of my old vinyl, my CD’s and the mix tapes from 30 years ago and listening to SiriusXM. This is what old people do to indulge in our music.

Usual End of the Year Ramblings

So much to say, so much vitriol to vent, so many positives to list. This section started out painfully, I junked the whole thing because I was getting too depressed and too bitter. Suffice it to say that I am extremely disappointed in many of my fellow Americans. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin "Those who would happily sacrifice the essential Liberty of their fellow citizens, to hang on to their own selfish sense of entitlement, deserve scorn and ridicule." Well, it was much more than a paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Roll of Shame

·       Kevin MacCarthy, prostrating himself in front of the orange clown and other bottom feeders 15 times just to get the position he so covets for all his career, forsaking any sense of honor, duty, responsibility, or self-respect, as well any semblance of belief in the Republic and the principles that nurtured the democracy,  only to lose that prize in nine months’ time. Does any Republican  have a spare backbone for Kevin to use? I didn’t think so.

·       Mike Johnson did the very thing that got McCarthy thrown out of the speaker’s seat: reached across the aisle to pass the spending bill. How pissed do you think McCarthy is? How precarious do you think Johnson’s position is?

·       The do-nothing Republican House passed only 27 laws in 2023. In contrast to 364 laws in 2021.

·       Tommy Turberville never served in the military, but he held up all military promotions, endangering our national security. The problem is that none of these cretins have any sense of decency, He sucked as a football coach too.

·       Jim Jordan has never, ever passed a law in his 16 years in the House. Oh, about that lawsuit from the Ohio State wrestlers Jim, did you protect a predator? Yes or no?

·       George Santos. Well, what can you say about George Santos that he hasn’t already claimed.

·       Lauren Boebert proves she is as classy as we suspected when she wanked off her date in a public theater, on camera.

·       The bought and paid for supreme court overturns affirmative action. I am ashamed of the role that Asian Americans played in bringing the lawsuit. Being butt boys for the white supremacists.

·       The spouse of a supreme court justice is an insurrectionist and is still an active traitor to the Republic.

·       There is no code of conduct for the members of the Supreme Court. WTF.

·       Mass shooting continues unabated as the GOP spews thoughts and prayers while cashing their NRA donation checks. ‘Murica!

·       After the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio, it was revealed that the skids were greased for the railway inspectors to overlook existing safety rules, anyone surprised?

·       Alex Murdaugh. Poster child for the failed legacy system in the deep south.

·       Bob Menendez is as dirty as the Republicans.

·       Henry Kissinger is now with his buddy Dick Nixon in hell. Suffering from his just deserts from all the innocent civilians he murdered.

·       Putin turns out to be the best recruiter for NATO.

The Bright Spots

·       As of January 1, 2024, neither Kevin McCarthy nor George Santos are in congress anymore.

·       Jack Smith tiene cojones.

·       New York AG Letitia James.

·       Judge Arthor Engoron.

·       Judge Tanya Chutkan.

·       Fox pays Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle the defamation lawsuit. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

·       Rudy declares bankruptcy. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving individual, unless it is the orange moron himself. The irony is that the orange moron hasn’t paid Rudy for the services rendered.

·       Sydney Powell, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, et. al. all doing star turns flipping on the orange moron, becoming witnesses for the prosecution. Atoning for their sedition.

·       There are some pissed off people about Dobbs. They will make the GOP pay.

·       In November’s Ohio Issue 1, restoring abortion rights in the Ohio state constitution, passed by a majority of 57%. Despite the Ohio GOP trying to limbo around it. It’s the MOFO constitution jagoffs.

·       In August’s Ohio Issue 1, the bottom feeders of the anti-women movement proposed changing the margin of amendment for the state constitution to over two-thirds because they knew what was coming in November. That issue crashed and burned. The anti-women side is 0 for 2.

·       Kudos to all those in Ohio who went 2 for 2 in those fights. But the biggest fight is yet to come.

·       Unemployment remained below 4% for 22 months for the first time since the late 1960s.

·       Economic growth accelerated to 4.9% at an annualized rate in the third quarter of 2023 while inflation cooled from 6.4% to 3.1% and the economy added more than 2.5 million jobs.

·       The S&P 500 ended this year up 24%. The Nasdaq composite index, which focuses on technology stocks, gained more than 40%.

·       UAW, WGA, SAG, and almost all unions made significant gains in contracts terms for their members. It is a shame that we still must fight corporations for a livable wage, but that is the American labor system.

·       As a non-Catholic, it is still good to see Pope Francis make the American Catholic bishops pay.

Finally

Thank you very much for reading my annual output. I hope that I was able to entertain you for a few moments. More importantly, I hope that I was able to inform you of the goings on in my mind. The letter is a compilation and condensation of the year that was. I strove to be concise, and by the length, I think I failed miserably, but it is what it is. In the end, it is you who will judge.

Thanks

Pete Wung, and Mom (Even though she doesn’t understand I write these things.)

Ten Things To Do Everyday (Inspired by the late Jim Valvano)

·       Learn something new.

·       Teach someone.

·       Be inspired.

·       Be vulnerable.

·       Be moved to tears.

·       Be kind and generous.

·       Experience beauty.

·       Experience the unfamiliar.

·       Experience the uncomfortable.

·       Love unconditionally.

 References

Ahern, Sonke. How To Take Smart Notes: Zettelkasten. North Charleston, South Carolina: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.

Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis. Rebooting AI Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. New York City: Pantheon Books, 2006.

Hart, Sarah. Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature. NYC: Flatiron Books, 2023.

Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession Paperback . NYC: PLume/Penguin, 2007.

Lovell, Oliver. Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory in Action. Melton: John Catt Educational Ltd, 2020.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. NYC: Penguin Books, 1997.

Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. NYC: Touchstone, 1972.

Pearl, Judea. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. New York City: Basic Books, 2018.

Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. NYC: Harper Perennial, 2008.

—. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. NYC: Harper Collins Books, 2018.