More Book Reviews

As I said in the previous post of book reviews, the one nice thing about being stuck in Flagstaff is that I've gotten alot of reading done. And so, here are the reviews of the four books, in order, that I've just finished reading. I admit, I wish that I had read them in a different order.

Aristotle Indeed
One of my favorite authors is Will Cuppy. There's a good chance that unless you've heard me talk about him, you've never heard of him before. I don't blame you, nobody's perfect. Cuppy mostly wrote humorous but well researched articles about various extinct and extant animals. One recurring subject however was Aristotle. Cuppy loved to lambast Aristotle for his various follies in describing the natural world. For instance, Cuppy reports that aristotle believed the chambered nautilus to float at the surface of the water, using its shell like a boat and its two broadest appendages as sails.
It was with this critical frame of mind that I sat down to read Aristotle's Historia Animalia. I even had a pad of paper to write down every error as I read it, so that I could write a very long post about how silly and quaint the philosopher was. It was perhaps the only time in my life that I've been disappointed by someone being smarter and more reasonable that I thought that he or she would be.
Most of Aristotle's errors arose from a problem with homology vs. analogy. For examle, he states that the knee's of all blooded terrestrial animals that have hair or feathers (witht he exception of humans and apes) point backwards. In our modern perspective, we know that it isn't the knee that points backwards, but the ankle in all tetrapods that does so. The confusion arises from the fact that most animals adapted to a cursorial lifestyle have a short femur and a long set of foot bones that are held off the ground, giving the appearance of having a knee that points backwards. If you ask any child which way the knee of an ostrich or a horse bends, it would probably reply "backwards."
Another thing that I thought must be a gigantic error was the claim that "women produce semen." However, when you look at it from an ancient point of view, this is actually much closer to the truth than it sounds. Biblical scholars believed that a woman was essentially like the soil that a man's seed was planted in; that if you looked inside of a sperm cell, you'd see a little person and that if it was a male little person, he would also have proportionately sized sperm which contained even smaller descendants. Aristotle however believed that both a woman and a man had to contribute some form of semen from which the egg/ fetus was formed. From disections, Aristotle saw that the ovaries were connected to the uterus, and it to the other parts of the anatomy in the same way that the testes were attached to a common tube which connected to excretory organs. In animals with a cloaca, this was clearest, and there were greater degrees of seperation of the excretory and reproductive systems as animals became more advanced. All things considered, this is a very advanced way of looking at things.
Other errors that Aristotle committed arose from base assumptions on which he grounded his assumptions: that the right side of the body was interently better than the left, that the closer a bit of the anatomy was to heaven the more spiritually important it was (eg, most animals hold their heads in line with or only slightly above the horizontal line of the body but only people and birds, both of which capable of creating music, hold the head above the body. Only people have their heads directly above the body.), that you could tell a someone's personality from their facial fetures, and that information reported by his collegues was correct more often than not. This last assumption led to the belief that somewhere in africa there was a racy of tiny people who rode tiny horses and raised tiny cattle, rarher like Lilliput.
All together, I have to admit that perhaps Will Cuppy was more of an eisegete than I would normally like to admit of someone that I like.

Alice's Adventures inWonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a genius. If you wonder about the alternate name, it's because the second is his given name, under which he published works on mathematics. People who have a natural flare for both mathematics and the arts (see also M.C. Escher & Bento) are no doubt all at least a little strange. Carroll certainly pushed the limits. Every chapter in his Alice books is positively abserd; filled with poetry, word games and character that take everything too literally. Unlike most victorian literature that has a young protagonist, Alice learns absolutely nothing of any practical use from her adventures and is by far the most reasonable person right from the start. After reading these two books, I'm sure that Carroll must be either the father of modern british humor, or at least the crazy uncle.

Harry Potter and the Complete Lack of Surprise
Rowling's books keep getting longer and longer, but the same amount of material seems to be covered in each. After reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I didn't feel that much more had happened than in The Chamber of Secrets. The primary difference was amount of space devoted to character developement. Getting just about everybody in the book to fall in love with each other at some point or another takes up alot of pages. Not only that, but a tremendous amout of time was spent with Harry and his friends not really solving anything. Given that it was leaked that Dumbledore dies at the end of the book, possibly before the book was even released, it made it difficult for me to appreciate the ending when it happened. Even so, from the second chapter it was kind of obvious. Rowling's books follow a pattern: Harry and his friends enjoy a year at Hogwarts, wherein they solve a mystery, grow up a little, fight Voldemort or his forces and a good guy dies. The person that dies in each book is more important each time than the person who died at the end of the previous book. We all know that Harry can't die (at least until the very end) and it's hard to find someone more important to Harry than Syrius Black without going strait to Dumbledore.
My prediction is that book 7 will not be the ninal volume unless it is exceptionally thick (six inches wide at least). Rowling is richer than the queen of England; why kill the goose that's laying so many golden eggs? Of course, if the series doesn't end by book eight or nine, the readers might get a bit upset.

Chuck Palahniuk's Diary
High art is what an artist calls the attempt of another artist at a profound statement about art. Oscar Wilde did this with A Picture of Dorian Grey, Richard Russo tried this with Straight Man, Tim Burton's attempt was Edward Scissor Hands, and Chuck Palahniuk's claim to high (literary) art is Diary. This novel is almost exactly like every other Chuck Palahniuk novel; all the motifs are there:
1. Being abandoned
2. You always hurt the one's you love
3. The only way to acheive greatness is through suffering - "Self improvement is masterbation" (Fight Club). Another, almost identical motif is that the only way to be saved, is to be destroyed.
4. By the end of the book, the protagonist is toxified, emaciated and trying very hard to save society from themself.
5. The service industry sucks the life/soul out of you, and almost everyone these days is in the service industry.
6. All the characters are well educated and never hesitate to spout esoteric knowledge gained from what they ultimately felt was a wasted education.
7. Prominant architecture is destroyed at the end. This only happens in about half of Palahniuk's works, like the film version of Fight Club, but not the novel.
8. Once again, Palahniuk's disjointed, first person sentence structure has screwed with my internal monologue.
What differentiates Diary as Palahniuk's claim to high art is that the protagonist is a a failed art student instead of a failed something else. This gives the author the avenue to wax bitterly poetic about art history; the diseases of great painters, the pretense of visiual irony among modern artists -"Just smelling super gross doesn't make their work art." Furthermore, Palahniuk writes that "Nothing you ever create is original becuase everything you do is a self portrait. Shows some part of yourself." Given that, Chuck must be one really messed up guy, I mean seriously mentally fucked up. Every book is how he sees himself, his life, or at least that's what he's trying to say. The poor tortured artist.
What Diary lacks, that all the other books possess, is (and this really spoils it for you) a good surprise ending. Unlike all other books that I've read by this author, this book ends exactly the way you think it will. By the time that you're half way through the book, a cynical reader has figured out the conspiracy and all that remains are a few twists at the end that really don't change how you perceive the whole situation. There's no "because we're the same person," no "I shot myself," no "she's a mental patient too." No, it's just stuff like "turns out he was gay, who knew?" and "by the way, I was in on it the whole time." This isn't to say that the ending isn't twisted, it is. It's just that an intelligent reader sees the ending coming a mile away, by about the middle of the book.