Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read this almost 30 years ago and I remember being impressed at the time. This time it was still engaging and the camp stories are amazing and the second half with the description of logotheraphy was interesting and bears consideration, but after all that I am not sure how he expects everybody to realize their self transcendence.

He does give an outline to find meaning in 3 possible ways

1.creating a work or doing a deed
2.by experiencing something or encountering someone
3.by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering

And from that, meaning naturally comes, not as the goal but as a byproduct. OK, sure, but there still seems to be something missing. Of course this was just an introduction but some of the examples seemed to just be finding clever mind tricks to accept the current situation as meaningful.

Maybe this quote hos the key, but I can't seems to figure out what it means.

"What is demanded of man is not to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms, logos is deeper than logic".

Still, well worth reading

View all my reviews

A Night at the Symphony

I didn't know I liked DVOŘÁK so much! Plus it was a treat to watch the organist dance around the pedals

The picture was taken BEFORE they told us we couldn't take pictures so I just got in under the wire.

Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
Marin Alsop, conductor
Mary Preston, organ
BARBER Toccata Festiva
ROUSE Concerto for String Orchestra
DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 9, From the New World

Finding A New Path

Last night Sensei wanted us to realize that Aikido should be approached from different angles. Meaning we shouldn't try to force our idea of a technique on an attack, rather when we sense resistance the idea is to change your approach. So much of the night we worked on feeling the force of the attack. Then he went on about changing out responses to attacks and how it was like Neuroplasticity. Or something like that.

The start of the process is to recognize what is happening in the attack and NOT respond in kind but find a different path (like the brain making new response paths in the brain). Here he used the example of how people shake your hand when meeting you. You can learn a lot from the energy in the handshake about how you will need to interact with them. Will they be aggressive or overly sensitive, and stuff like that.

The thing is we are wired to fight force with force, it is the most obvious way to respond. If somebody pushes you we thing the most logical thing is to push back. He wanted us to realize that part of the essence of Aikdo is that like Neuroplasticity, it means changing ways of thinking and doing (my paraphrase).

Along those lines in Sensei's closing remarks, the gem he gave us was that the very notion of an attack should be dealt with by changing your perspective.(letting your brain find a new path), meaning if you accept an attack as an “attack” we are wired to respond in kind. But if you accept the attack as a gift. The more force it has, the more you are given to work with, and in a kinder world you lovingly redirect him to neutrality. Then went on to say this is a way to view social conflict away from the dojo.

I really like the notion, but of course I think there some Aikido-ists that accept the “gift” but then use their new found weakness and apply their own violent attack.

End of the World!! Averted!!

The Last Days of Madame Rey: A Stephan Raszer Investigation by A.W. Hill

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I found a blog with this quote from the book and it grabbed me enough that I checked it out of the library on the way home that night.

"And what had the books taught him? There was this: something had gone wrong. Eons ago-not just in “real time” but in the clockwork of the human soul. Something violent and sacred. It could rightly be thought of as a crime, and though it was recounted in all the myths of our species, it was yet the best-kept secret in the Universe."

I enjoyed it. It was a pleasant read with enough at each step to make be want to find out what happen next. But the secret of the Universe was kind of a let down. There is also a thread about ancient people having tails and the genetic descendants of these more perfect predecessors can be identified by examining their tailbone. Odd, and I am a little unclear where us normal people fit into the cosmic battle Raszer get involved with.

And who are the bad guys in this book?

"I think what we’re looking at is a private international strike force... an Armageddon scenario bankrolled by the world’s most lethal venture capitalists."

Now THAT is bad.

Throw in a sex scene and some light but happy drug use and you’ve got yourself a story.

View all my reviews

An Examined Life

A few years ago (may 7 or 8 or even 10 years) I read some wacky collection of liberal Catholic sermons where one homily quoted a Life Magazine article about a small town in Ohio that swarmed to the countryside to flush out foxes and then they beat them to death.

Anyway it sounded so outrageous that I tried to track down the article. Way back then the Internet didn't help at all. Yahoo failed me! So I found the nearest library with Life Magazine on microfiche since the only clue I had from the sermon was that it was Life magazine in the 1940's.

I went to the Richardson, TX Public library and opened the appropriate Readers Guide an tracked it down. I paid my dollar or so to print it out and the afternoon was complete.

BUT, I neglected to print or write down the date of that issue and I've always wondered if I should go back to the library and find it again. But I never did.

Then, this morning I was looking for something that I don't remember and landed on Google Books and saw a link for Life Magazines. It turns out Google Books has most of Life magazine digitized and within a few minutes I found the issue I spent an afternoon investigating years earlier.

Of course I had to spend the next hour or more tracking down ways to hack Google Books so that I could download my find. It is harder than I would have thought, and Google won't let you print all the great stuff.

My point is that, Wow, all I had in school all I had for reports was the World Book Encyclopedia. But now that I think about it I could have gone to the library if I had put out some effort. As with most things, I had better student study habits AFTER I was out of school.

And for today's bonus here is an ad from 1944, and I have no idea what it means.

FYI, the issue in question was 13 MAR 1944

An Attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is "an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people".

I gather he intends it not to be a well laid out logical presentation of how Humanists, liberal humanism and the idea of progress,have it all wrong. But instead is a collection of witty observations from a philosophical Oscar Wilde. And many of them really are clever and disarming and probably a few are even true.

My only problem is that he has no problem painting the subject he is skewering in it's most unreasonable light. That and the fact that he has quotes but no attribution. (there is an full “recommended reading” section at the which we can only assume references all the quotes he had). Plus he never really says who these humanists are. Maybe if I was around upper crust academia I would know who these humanists are that have some an idealize view of the perfectibility of man. But I'm not so I don't know anybody who things humans are on the road to perfection by virtue of their positivistic approach to life. And from my casual fascination with protestant super religious types I really think he misses the point on their world view. He implies they are somehow at war with science, but actually they claim it as their own and accept all the technology with joy but deny anything that might intrude on their personal bibilcal stores. In fact they believe science proves the literal bible rather than challenges it. They may be crazy but that is what they believe.

It was refreshing to see him discount Kant an Heidegger with only a few paragraphs on each. I guess I don't have to worry about feeling bad that I never read that stuff. But he also dispatched any mystical religious figures with only a few sentences which saddened me a bit.

I guess my takeaway form the book is that any idea of progress is bunk and the more we accept that we really are machines, the less stressed out we will be. All in all I'm glad I read it and I may even read it again sometime soon .

View all my reviews

Paying For It

Paying for It by Chester Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting but passionless graphic memoir about being a “John”. Given his declaration of the failure of romantic love (at lease for him) I suppose it is natural that this who story is passionless. Chester Brown is a very analytical kind of guy, even when dealing with his...well, with his penis. Even at the end where he admits having feelings for and being (at least on his part) monogamous with a prostitute it is very thought out and clearly decided upon. I suspect, but don't know, that he is a libertarian of the Randian ilk since his thinking is what I think an “Objectivist” is like.

But there is really only one part that directly points to a libertarian world view , where he is discussing with Seth the morality of prostitution and mad thought balloons erupt over Chester's head as Seth presents some straw man argument against prostitution. Up to that time the graphically presented conversations for and against paying for sex were at a personal level and seemed more honest. I get it, you have to put up with your “liberal” friends and their faulty thinking.

So, I liked it. But 200 and some pages of very controlled drawings about how you came to know and use hookers is a strain. He is a different type of cartoonist (I hope he doesn't mind the term). I think of comic books, graphic novels and such as a medium of some exaggeration but with Brown it is the reverse. So maybe it is just me rebelling against what I see as going against the whole reason for telling stories in a ”comic book” format. I think all the frames are the same and the margins are so big it makes the graphic flow seem all the more distant. And the type is so small I feel like reading with a magnifying glass, although that might be because my eyesight is growing worse.

Thinking about the book I feel the visual story telling is better than I first thought, probably since the feel of the book is so analytical that you might miss that it is graphically told.

The thing is, I heard him interviewed and he told of as a teenager wanting to drawing superhero comics which I see as very expressive and often over top or even “cartoon-ish” in their expression. But this book has the feel of a an emotional star collapsing in on itself with all emotion and passion becoming more and more compressed and restrained. Then there are all the hand lettered footnotes about prostitution which I skipped. The felt like it was just him trying to justify his views and actions, but why bundle that with a bunch of drawings. But, that is just me.

Just after this I read Stitches by David Smalls, which is a wildly different book (review to follow) but I felt like he really used drawings as an integral part of the story telling. But, still..read this book.

View all my reviews