From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.
Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?
I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.
The surprising thing, though, is how hard it is to found it. I have no trouble finding truly great, truly unique fiction in many languages but my trawlings for worthwhile nonfiction turn out almost always empty.
Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.
Lacking an answer,
my guess these days is that English nonfiction is, personally, by far the only worthwhile modern nonfiction in the world.
But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?
Anything goes, as long as it’s general, nonlocal, non-culturally-specific
(say, no books on Kohdo, the Japanese art of smelling incense, or on the cuisine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca) but to give you a more specific idea of what I’m looking for,
here are some subjects dear to my heart and some outstanding representatives within them (with the few items in languages other than English bolded):
- Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
- History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
- Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
- Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
- Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
- Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
- The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
- Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
- Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
- Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
- Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
- Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
- Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
- Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
- Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
- Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
- Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
- Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
- Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
- Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
- Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
- Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
- Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
- Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
- Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
- Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
- Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
- Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
- Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
- Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
- Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
- Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
- And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.
Extra points (not-at-all-necessary but cool parameters):
- the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
- from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
- third culture-ish,
- NOT yet translated into English.
Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:
..they simply believed anything was possible and that the path forward would reveal itself eventually. When they hit a wall, they turned to the Internet, to the crowd, for help.
Their story is not an uncommon one.
Everywhere you look, you can see entrepreneurs and true believers hurling themselves into the unknown, fortified only with a faith that the “net” will catch them, that small acts by many everyday people can be as useful as the influence of the connected and powerful.
After 3 years of searching for local soulmates in this middle-of-Mexico, beautiful-but-digitally-backward city of mine, as I’m packing for the states, I google idly on San Francisco and, behold, I find the incredible blog of a Guadalajara genius with the same web obsession, the same reading compulsion, the same format fiddly inclinations, the same penchant for writing only in overcrafted English, the same relocation (his some 2.5 years ago, to go work with Max Levchin ELZR, no less).
His name’s Sergio I. Villarreal Pou and following his commenters’ links I’ve found a tangle of worthy local websites (say, the multiple-personality disorder No Limit studio or the gorgeous Arathael) that opens up what is to me a wholly uncharted local sphere. Which I’ll probably be exploring some thousand miles away…
“Jalisco va a dominar el mundo,” says one of dad’s friends from Los Altos, a migrant region of Jalisco. “Estados Unidos va a dominar el mundo y los Jalisquillos van a dominar Estados Unidos.”
For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).
“How many think spreads will widen?” she asked.
The hands of about half the smartest people on Wall Street shot up.
“And how many think they’ll narrow?”
The other half—equally smart—raised their hands.
“Well,” she said. “That’s what makes a market.”
If they didn’t know, nobody could.
Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:
..it is hard to overstate the effect that securitisation has had on financial markets. Until the early 1980s, finance hewed to an “originate and holdâ€? model. Banks generally held loans on their balance sheets to maturity; some debts were sold on loan-by-loan, but this market was small and lumpy. This began to give way to an “originate and distributeâ€? model after America’s government-sponsored mortgage giants issued the first bonds with payments tied to the cash flows from large pools of loans.
Wall Street built on this innovation, and securitisation took off soon after, then paused before exploding in the 1990s.. It was given a lift by America’s savings-and-loan crisis, which encouraged mortgage lenders to jettison their riskier loans, and by new technologies, such as credit-scoring, that facilitated loan-pooling. Around 56% of America’s outstanding residential mortgages were packaged in this way, including more than two-thirds of the subprime loans issued in 2006. Thanks largely to securitisation, global private-debt securities are now far bigger than stockmarkets.
Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.
Charles S. Peirce has been called by
Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of
abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better
(or shorter) intro than the
logical reasoning pedia.
And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
As if there weren’t enough books to read—let alone buy—already, here are six unread ones that have particularly caught my fancy. Just reading about them has been fascinating.
Que magnifico ensayo este de Gabriel Zaid sobre la palabra civil. Que meticulosa recopilacion de tantas hebras de significado. Que claridad y que erudicion—de la buena.
Históricamente, civil ha servido para distinguir una nueva realidad por oposición a otra, de la cual emerge. Según lo que adjetive, puede significar: no astronómico, no de la corona, no eclesial, no en especie, no estatal, no exterior, no familiar, no militar, no natural, no noble, no penal, no religioso, no salvaje.
And enjoy it you should. If you’re not a thief or a politician you earned it, which, being clear about it, is just a handy way of saying that you did stuff that Other People voluntarily value enough that Apple is willing to exchange an iPhone for your stuff (confident that it can then exchange it with Other People for what it itself really wants). The iPhone is yours and yours alone to enjoy. You earned it. You owe nothing to anyone—not, particularly, guilt.
What is more, both you and Apple, by freely exchanging only for how much each could get from each other, are subtly but importantly cementing the worldwide enterprise that has made it possible for the output of 4 Hindu villagers to seem tiny by comparison.
Zipping back and forth along Kottke’s Twitter some minutes ago I finally got Twitter. And I smiled. Like I smiled when I finally got Wikipedia (or blogs or Flickr or Facebook or Google or GMail)—a smile of wonderment at the great and totally unexpected.
His observations on it are spot on—no wonder he’s the web pundit par excellence.
