Forum / Broadening the fictional mind?

• 
  Carol Reid

  Feb 25, 05:38pm

  What do you read when you want to learn more about science, history, the world-at-large?

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 25, 05:43pm

  Diaries. I love diaries of ordinary people in times past. History is jaded by celebration of kings, generals, statesmen and pioneers. I want the common touch, the hard perspectives that you can find in a simple diary written by someone whose name is not famous, who has nothing to lose by telling the truth.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 25, 06:57pm

  I talk to people who know more than I do. Since I was brought up by a scientist to study science myself, then moved into business and from there back into the different science, I know many people like that. And because of the network, we have a fairly easy, fun time exchanging information.

  My second source of learned knowledge is the Internet itself, in connection with my own vast personal library (three rooms filled on all windowless sides with nothing but books from the floor-to-ceiling) and coupled with my freely roaming unconscious mind. These three work rather nicely in concert and when I go hunting with these fellows, I always return with something worthwhile.

  Lastly, if I were to name a single source, I would mention "A Cultural History of the Modern Age" by Egon Friedell (1878-1938, see http://amzn.to/Zvv8WG for the books and http://slate.me/ZvvpZN for a report by Clive James), an amazing universal mind, who also wrote a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. That this history ends in 1931 is meaningful in the context of Germany's cultural development and indicative for my own preference of old things over new things.

• 
  John Riley

  Feb 25, 08:16pm

  Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life " is a lot of fun. He wrote it after almost seventy years as an intellectual and teacher. Although it's opinionated, the width and depth of his knowledge makes it worth the effort to filter through it.

  http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Western-Cultural-Present/dp/0060928832

• 
  Carol Reid

  Feb 25, 11:22pm

  Thanks for the responses and suggestions!

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 26, 04:42pm

  Another way to do what you were asking is, of course, to write about what you don't know yet. Sounds paradoxical, but no more than teaching a subject when you want to know more about it. Which I'm doing all the time. really, there is a mass of information stored in the collective unconscious field we're all immersed in and it's there for us to pick in the creative mood and mode. I'm not kidding. Learning is largely a trance state.

• 
  strannikov

  Feb 26, 06:16pm

  People will doubtless quarrel or quibble, but two titles I don't find cited too often:

  THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM by Isaiah Berlin. Along with his essays on Hamann and Herder, Vico and Machiavelli, a fine substantive survey, quite informative for Americans otherwise lacking exposure to European intellectual history. For similar reasons I also vote for

  EROS AND MAGIC IN THE RENAISSANCE by Ioan P. Couliano. A dense work in the non-pejorative sense, any obscurity that remains deriving more from the subject(s) being tackled. Mildly corrective to the pioneering works of Frances Yates and helps enlarge the neglected aspects of early modern intellectual history Dame Frances was keen to address.

  Both works reward the critical reader abundantly.

• 
  John Riley

  Feb 26, 09:20pm

  Berlin's essay on Machiavelli is currently available at the NY Review of Books website.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Feb 26, 10:15pm

  I move around a lot, depending on what interests me. There's no one place I return to, except maybe for some philosophical texts that I find to be interesting, like Wittgenstein's Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations, and some other things on embodied cognition and/or cognitive linguistics. This because they're meta-texts in a way, bringing up problems of naming/ordering for example or other questions to do with assumptions that folk for some reason take seriously about representation. But even with this sort of piece, whether I go back to it and what I do with or through it varies with what I happen to be interested in.

  I like looking at the journal Environment & Planning D, which publishes a lot of UK work in geography. Trawling around there, I found out that plastic objects thrown into the ocean seem to congregate in a space about the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they carry on secret lives that make mariners uneasy who find themselves there. There are some other journals like Antipode that I like to look at when I remember to do it...

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:00pm

  I think one
  should narrow
  the mind to
  pre-existing
  essence.

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:12pm

  (thereby avoiding
  thick slabs of
  blah-blah)

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:15pm

  ((potentially
  resulting
  in one
  slice))

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:17pm

  (((of
  life)))

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:20pm

  ((((which is all
  we can eat
  in one sitting))))

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 26, 11:34pm

  ((((((but that's
  just me)))))

  ;-)

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 27, 12:05am

  ((((((being
  wrong
  again))))))

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 27, 12:06am

  (((((((I'm
  sure)))))))

• 
  Carol Reid

  Feb 27, 01:53am

  Hoping for a boomerang effect, reaching out, reaching in. All these responses are valuable to me.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 27, 01:54am

  If a narrow mind is your goal, run with it.

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 27, 02:21am

  "Hoping for a boomerang effect, reaching out, reaching in."

  That's good. It's all ENERGY (no matter how others respond...)

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 27, 02:27am

  ...if they respond in the negative, the insulting, the intentionally-deragatory-instead-of-the-true, you can wash it off and have a ball of pure energy to work with.

  For free.

• 
  Dolemite

  Feb 27, 03:40am

  (love you 2 james)

• 
  Jane Flett

  Feb 27, 09:57am

  "Trawling around there, I found out that plastic objects thrown into the ocean seem to congregate in a space about the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they carry on secret lives that make mariners uneasy who find themselves there."

  Stephen, this delights me!

  I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, which (for all its failings, not an expert, blah blah, books are obviously better) always opens up so many avenues.

  (This morning? Psychopomp in various ancient cultures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopomp)

  I would always like more books in my life though. I'm going to check these out, especially Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.

  Does anyone have any recommendations for books on Greek mythology or quantum mechanics?

• 
  Jamie Grefe

  Feb 27, 11:59am

  More focused on learning than what to read:

  I tend to read based on my trajectories, which often slide and slip depending on what floats to the forefront. If I'm writing a horror story or have some "horrific" idea for a piece, I'll re-read and bring some better minds into my own. I'll try to let what I've already read, become more a part of me with the hope that that little bit that's already "in" me may come through the writing in a way that I've never done. Sometimes I'll try to push it out, make it be there, sometimes to good effect, other times to huge failure like those eight months spent crafting a novella that is currently stuck in plot hell. But, when I frame my learning in this way (re-reading, crafting influences), coupled with as many good questions as I can possibly conjure, the results tend to be satisfying. That is, until some reader/learner better than myself comes along and slams the idea and asks that one question that I couldn't form, that one bit of newness to open up five more questions in myself that weren't there. I tend to learn in this way. I already have too much swimming around upstairs as it is, not all of it worth digging into, so trying to control these currents and directing them where I imagine they should go has become an always developing habit.

• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Feb 27, 12:14pm

  Serge: You will never achieve your one slice. Everything is layered in meaning and perspective, like Powers of Ten.

• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Feb 27, 12:21pm

  On the other hand, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 27, 01:26pm

  @Jane

  Quantum mechanics: go to the classical text by Erwin Schrödinger, WHAT IS LIFE? it is unparalleled and nothing in it is wrong. It does not contain developments post 1944 but none of these shook the foundations of QM. In fact, this text prepared molecular genetics.
  Link e.g. http://amzn.to/12aDeJv

  Greek mythology: again, the classical text by Robert Graves has not really been surpassed, The Greek Myths — link: http://amzn.to/12aDEQc — as for an interpretative text, you probably know Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces (http://amzn.to/12aDOa8)

• 
  David Ackley

  Feb 27, 02:52pm

  Fernand Braudel THE STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE (CIVILIZATION AND CAPITALISM Vol. 1). What James says he prefers, as do I, how ordinary people lived.

• 
  David Ackley

  Feb 27, 02:55pm

  Sorry, left out that its world history, 15th-18th centuries.

• 
  Jane Flett

  Feb 27, 07:08pm

  Thanks Marcus! Much appreciated.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 27, 08:13pm

  I've always enjoyed the odd details found in The Golden Bough written by James Frazer and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, both of which I refer to from time to time. It was in James' study that I first came across references to the amazing experiences of the Spanish conquistador, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, whose curious journey across Texas turned a worldly, educated European into a true believer and a passionate advocate for the welfare of native Americans under Spanish rule.

  The personal account of his capture, time spent with the Karankawa tribe, his escape and journey across Texas and New Mexico survives in a report to the crown, The Narrative of Cabeza De Vaca. It's available in translation and I highly recommend it. His story's on my list for a future work of fiction, a novella.

• 
  Sam Rasnake

  Feb 27, 09:30pm

  Marcus, what do you think of Graves' The White Goddess?

  Big yes to Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Feb 27, 09:37pm

  @Sam I never understood and always loved that book by Graves. Supposedly conceived as a dream it also reads like a dream and one must hand over all of one's senses to enjoy it. One of the few books that make me jealous of poets.

  Grateful for the suggestions here, too—ordered the book by Jacques Barzun (my treat for what has become the darkest winter in Berlin in 45 years...) already.

  Waiting (excitedly) for "Le Miserable C'est Moi: Memoirs of Serge Gainsbarre" now—supposedly, this book is forthcoming from Gallimard this spring and it is already hailed as the thinnest book ever published by a Frenchman.

• 
  Jane Flett

  Feb 28, 08:12am

  (Off topic, but Marcus, is that true about this winter? It is my first in Berlin and wow, it's been very indoors.)

• 
  David Ackley

  Feb 28, 03:23pm

  Here's an old one, a bit off the wall, but interesting, that I only recently came across: Eugen Herrigel's ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY. What I was taken by was the Zen practise of any art-flower arranging, poetry, calligraphy and drawing, among others-and how it differs from western practise. Notably in the emphasis on process rather than result.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Feb 28, 04:43pm

  Related to Braudel (not in a strict manner, so not from the Annales school, so perhaps mostly related in my head), you might enjoy Norbert Elias' book Court Society. It is a detailed look at the social machinery of Louis XIV's court that dismantles many things along the way.

  Elias' main source is le Duc de Saint-Simon's quite snippy and fabulous Memoirs, which are well worth a summer reading project (there are differently edited versions available depending on the leisure/mojito relation you might deploy)

  Between someone like Braudel and Elias, you can arrive at a relativization of much in the way of the rationalities that folk tend to assume as transparent, so as not conditioned historically and, by extension, not fundamentally variable, so just being-in-the-world as if there are actually are these make-believe things called subjects that operate at some make-believe remove from the social-historical.

  But you don't have to.

  It's OK to just have fun reading.

• 
  David Ackley

  Feb 28, 07:17pm

  Thanks so much, Stephen, I'm all over St. Simon from your "snippy and fabulous,"recommendation. In similar ( maybe) spirit, I like La Rochfoucauld's MAXIMS( if I've got name and title right) who may well have invented the concept schadenfreude in this one: " It is not enough to succeed:others must fail."

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Mar 01, 02:56am

  Carol, I find I get a wonderful exposure to the world reading The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/

  There's also so much available now on YouTube. Right now I'm "taking" Robert Sapolsky's course on human behavioral biology, which is putting together everything I've read in the last 20 years on biology/psychology/behavioral science.

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Mar 01, 03:06am

  Jane, I like The Golden Bough too. And you might want to check out In Our Time's Greek program: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0093z1k/In_Our_Time_The_Greek_Myths/

  And for the myths themselves, I love Ovid's Metamorphoses.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Mar 16, 03:13am

  Reprise: The playing field is leveled by handicap in golf. Handicap at Hazeltine National Golf Club is particularly difficult for a one-time miniputter such as myself to understand not knowing where Jeremy Bentham's head landed. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth revived natural parameters in statistics.

• You must log in to reply to this thread.