December 31, 2004
Carlos's non-fiction best of 2004
I've already written about some books I have found especially charming. Consider this an extension. These books aren't necessarily charming, but I keep on coming back to them. They're not all 2004 releases either, thank goodness.
Deep Time
Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity, Andrea de Jorio
Last Hunters, First Farmers: New perspectives on the prehistoric transition to agriculture, edited by Price and Gebauer
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European poetics, Calvert Watkins
The theme here seems to be, how can we determine how people lived at the limits of historical resolution? The Watkins, especially, is a tour de force of linguistic scholarship.
Dismal Stuff
The Big Problem of Small Change, by Thomas J. Sargent and Francois R. Velde
Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700, Richard von Glahn
The economy might be screwed up, but at least we don't have to worry about the penny-nickel exchange rate, or carry scissors and a roll of silver foil around to the supermarket.
Folklore
Nart Sagas from the Caucasus, edited by John Colarusso
South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan, edited by Lucien Miller
The Inland Whale: Nine stories retold from California Indian legends, by Theodora Kroeber
African Genesis, by Leo Frobenius
The theme here is pretty much 'Legends of people who fell off the map'. Some strange stuff here, and one suspects that without the necessary intermediaries, it would be even stranger.
Godly Stuff
The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, by Richard Fletcher
The Commentaries of Pius II
The Golden Yoke: The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet, by Rebecca Redwood French
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Eight White Religious Leaders, and the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', by S. Jonathan Bass
This is rather a catch-all category. Past members have included Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion. I might be Tuckerized as a polar bear named Otto because of the Fletcher. Then again, I might not.
Math
Proofs from THE BOOK, by Aigner and Ziegler. THE BOOK is Paul Erdos's name for the place the Supreme Fascist (i.e. God) keeps the most perfect mathematical proofs. This book is an Earthly approximation to that ideal. (The 'o' in Erdos should have two little hash marks over it. Not an umlaut, but one of those Hungarian deals.)
Between PFTB, Lawvere and Schanuel's Conceptual Mathematics, and Schneier's Applied Cryptography, I can render an average college student completely unemployable in a matter of weeks. Huzzah!
Poetry
Basho and His Interpreters: Selected hokku with commentary, by Makoto Ueda. An English translation of the great Japanese poet, a Japanese transliteration, a particle-by-particle English trot, a translator's note, and then commentary by three hundred years of Japanese critics on each poem... with no dates immediately given. The effect is compelling.
Songs of the Serbian People: From the collections of Vuk Karadzic, translated by Holton and Mihailovich. I keep on coming back to these poems, I suppose in the same way the Icelandic sagas have found a small but devoted American audience.
I am still coming to terms with the accomplishment of Lorine Niedecker. I tend to think that she was one of the twentieth century's great unknown poets, but she was from Wisconsin (as am I), so I wonder if it is partly due to hometown pride. Which is very Wisconsin, both the pride and the doubt.
And Niedecker is very Wisconsin:
Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into my kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace --
put the spices in the wrong place.
Rocket Science
Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, by John D. Clark. Why isn't this book in print? No, I think I know why. I wore out a Xerox machine for my copy. The story of the heroic age of rocket fuel development, and funny too.
Project Orion, by George Dyson. Already a classic, on the cancelled US atomic bomb powered rocket. Yes, you read that right.
And a runner-up, They All Laughed At Christopher Columbus, by Elizabeth Weil. It's so sad. My favorite part is the reporter's attempt at getting the Roton crew to read Joan Didion.
Take Out
Swallowing Clouds, by A. Zee
The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, by James D. McCawley
Two very cool books on, basically, reading Chinese menus. The digressions are lagniappe.
Whatever
Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, by Deborah Blum
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple
The Quattro Cento & The Stones of Rimini, by Adrian Stokes
I am not sure what mechanical monkey mothers, racism in the Raj, and Renaissance stonework have in common. But it's all good. 'Goon Park', by the way, is 500 N. Park Street in Madison, Wisconsin. Harlow drank at some of the same places I did (now mostly torn down).
And the best weblog for 2004 is Benn loxo du tàccu. Damn.
Posted by coyu at December 31, 2004 09:50 PMA delightful list! Lawvere & Schanuel is a wonderful book; most of your recommendations sound equally compelling.
Posted by: Jim at December 31, 2004 10:04 PMGotta pick up the Sargent; his class was a blast.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 1, 2005 02:42 AM"Nart sagas"? And what is a legal cosmology? I have a notion, but it's probably wrong.
Also, what would be a good starter kit for Niedecker?
-- You could ask James Nicoll about the bear. He would probably know.
Doug M.
Nart sagas are sagas about the Narts, of course. Roughly, they're somewhere between heroes and demigods. (Superheroes! More DC than Marvel, and more than a little Jack Kirby.)
Legal cosmology, I think you probably got it. Things like causation, intention, karmic balance, reincarnation, and so on. The best part is, The Golden Yoke has _cases_. It's much stranger to Anglo-American legal sensibilities than, say, the Code of Lek. Do you remember the Mr. Show episode where the members of the jury were given a special pill? Or that Walter Jon Williams short story.
Niedecker, her Collected Poems has pretty much everything.
I said to my head, Write something.
It looked me dead in the face.
Look around, dear head, you've never read
of the ground that takes you away.
Speed up, speed up, the frosted windshield's
a fern spray.
The interesting bit in Clark's _Ignition!_ comes (I think, it's been six years and I *didn't* scam a photocopier for a copy) after his discussion of boron compounds.
The oil companies were getting better at refining, and they had all these barrels of odd stinky sulfurous hydrocarbon compounds - akyl mercaptans and the like, and would someone like to find a use for them?
Intrepid rocketeers begin tests with said compounds, and discover a whole new world of bad smells. There was "Bad Greek Restaurant" to the hundredth power, "Skunk" of gargantuan proportion, and one compound that smelled so bad, indescribable wasn't descriptive - a kind of post-Singularity beyond horrid smell that attracted flies in swarms.
Cool book.
Posted by: A New York City High School Math Teacher on the Cusp of Matrimony at January 3, 2005 06:21 AMNYCMT (and you're well past the cusp of matrimony, dude), there's an embarrassment of such riches in Ignition!. The fluorine rockets. The mercury (as in Hg) rockets.
Hm. You know who should really read this book? Charlie Stross.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at January 3, 2005 06:11 PMSpeaking of interesting reading, did you see Delong's post of Cowen's review of Archibald's "Information, Incentives and the economics of Control"? Good stuff, it's already helped me clear up a couple of issues I had with my French...
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 3, 2005 06:28 PMHey Bernard. No, I haven't; and Google ain't giving me any clues. What's the URL?
Posted by: Carlos at January 3, 2005 11:05 PMHere's the Cowen post he linked to: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/12/the_socialist_c.html
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 3, 2005 11:30 PMHm. The calculation argument is an old one. Note that Mises (and many of his critics) explicitly made it in reference to producer goods, thinking no planning board would be crazy enough to try it with consumer goods. From Cowan's summary -- I haven't read the Archibald yet -- I think Coase's point about transaction costs still stands. In the jargon of computer science, matching the double coincidence of wants directly is an O(n^2) problem, while with a market it's merely O(n). [I think.]
But it's an interesting point. There's Stafford Beer's homeostatic economy, which never did get implemented in Chile; and I think the British Marxist biologists like Bernal has something like cellular metabolism in mind when they imagined a functioning socialist state. Enzymes instead of actors.
I suppose I should post about Blanchard's model of post-Communist transitions soon.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at January 5, 2005 12:42 AMPlease do!
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at January 5, 2005 12:48 AMI've got a samizdat PDF of Ignition!, and like it so much that for Christmas I lashed out on a print-on-demand hardcover for myself. ($100, eight to twelve weeks for delivery, you get the picture.) It'll go on the shelf next to my copy of "Terraforming" by Martyn J. Fogg.
Posted by: Charlie Stross at January 8, 2005 12:16 AMA great list - I've noted down several of those! The only one I've read is Proofs From the Book - you might be interested in my review.
Posted by: Danny Yee at January 13, 2005 01:51 PM