Brian Eno's reading suggestions for The Long Now Foundation

Brian Eno has been one of music's more cerebral musicians. He is also a founding board member of The Long Now Foundation with Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog) and computer scientist Daniel Hills. The group formed in 1996 with the stated goal to provide a counterpoint to accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. To this end the group hopes to encourage responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. 

The group currently sustains two major efforts, a library of all human language called the Rosetta Project and a 10,000-year clock, designed to run for ten millennia with minimal maintenance and interruption that is currently being constructed in the area around Van Horn, Texas. Recently Eno suggested twenty titles in a list compiled for The Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilization, a collaboratively curated library for long-term thinking. 

It's disorienting to think that rock music has moved from "Rock Around the Clock" to Eno's bell studies for The Clock of the Long Now. (The first prototype of the Clock is working and on permanent display at the Science Museum in London.) As Maria Popova at the site Brain Pickings notes, Eno finds his place among the ever-growing list of cultural figures that have contributed twenty titles to The Long Now Foundation project’s intended collection of 3,500 books most essential for sustaining or rebuilding civilization. 

Here's Eno's suggested list. Brain Pickings includes notes where the title is usually available for free in public locations.

1. Seeing Like a State (public library) by James C. Scott (1998)
2. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (public library) by David Lewis-Williams (2002)
3. Crowds and Power (public library) by Elias Canetti (1962)
4. The Wheels of Commerce (public library) by Fernand Braudel (1982)
5. Keeping Together in Time (public library) by William McNeill (1995)
6. Dancing in the Streets (public library) by Barbara Ehrenreich (2007)
7. Roll Jordan Roll (public library) by Eugene Genovese (1974)
8. A Pattern Language (public library) by Christopher Alexander et al (1977)
9. The Face of Battle (public library) by John Keegan (1976)
10. A History of the World in 100 Objects (public library) by Neil MacGregor (2010)
11. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (public library) by Richard Rorty (1989)
12. The Notebooks (public library) by Leonardo da Vinci (1952 ed.)
13. The Confidence Trap (public library) by David Runciman (2013)
14. The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein (1983)
15. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection(public library) by Sarah Hrdy (1999)
16. War and Peace (public library) by Leo Tolstoy (1869)
17. The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) (public library) by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (2000)
18. The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (public library) by Marjorie Blamey and Christopher Grey Wilson (1989)
19. Printing and the Mind of Man (public library) by John Carter and Percy Muir (1983)
20. Peter the Great: His Life and World (public library) by Richard Massie (1980)

Good reading: some entertaining books reviewed on other sites

Any ranking of "good" writing and writers seems arbitrary and a simple matter of individual choice, even at the New York Times, although beyond the sales chart it's doubtful James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, or John Grisham would make a best-read list. It's good to remember that satisfying reading goes beyond best-of lists or sales figures or popular consensus.

And then today comes word that the estate of the eternally-read Barbara Cartland (the romance author died in 2000) will be releasing one hundred sixty new titles by the prolific writer. This will bring Ms. Cartland's complete works to a staggering 883 books, a figure which might even give Stephen King pause.

So it might be good to take a look at a few other titles, reviewed elsewhere, that proved good reading, even if they might never perch at the top of any best-seller lists.

Above: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell (Random House): David Mitchell reinvents himself with each book, and it's thrilling to watch. ... In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he harnesses that plenitude into a more traditional form, a historical novel set in Japan at the turn into the 19th century, when the island nation was almost entirely cut off from the West except for a tiny, quarantined Dutch outpost. Jacob is a pious but not unappealing prig from Zeeland, whose self-driven duty to blurt the truth in a corrupt and deceitful trading culture, along with his headlong love for a local midwife, provides the early engine for the story, which is confined at first to the Dutch enclave but crosses before long to the mainland. Every page is overfull with language, events, and characters, exuberantly saturated in the details of the time and the place but told from a knowing and undeniably modern perspective. (Amazon, Tom Nissley)

The Imperfectionists Tom Rachman (Dial Press paperback): Set against the backdrop of a fictional English-language newspaper based in Rome, it begins as a celebration of the beloved and endangered role of newspapers and the original 24/7 news cycle. ... In The Imperfectionists chaos of the newsroom becomes a stage for characters unified by a common thread of circumstance, with each chapter presenting an affecting look into the life of a different player. From the comically overmatched greenhorn to the forsaken foreign correspondent, we suffer through the painful heartbreaks of unexpected tragedy and struggle to stifle our laughter in the face of well-intentioned blunders. This cacophony of emotion blends into a single voice, as the depiction of a paper deemed a "daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species" becomes more about the disillusion in everyday life than the dissolution of an industry. (Amazon, Dave Callanan)

The Surrendered Chang-Rae Lee (Riverhead): June Han is a starving 11-year-old refugee fleeing military combat during the Korean War when she is separated from her seven-year-old twin siblings. Eventually brought to an orphanage near Seoul by American soldier Hector Brennan, who is still reeling from his father's death, June slowly recovers from her nightmarish experiences thanks to the loving attention of Sylvie Tanner, the wife of the orphanage's minister. But Sylvie is irretrievably scarred as well, having witnessed her parents' murder by Japanese soldiers in 1934 Manchuria. These traumas reverberate throughout the characters' lives, determining the destructive relationship that arises between June, Hector and Sylvie as the plot rushes forward and back in time, encompassing graphic scenes of suffering, carnage and emotional wreckage. Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, The Surrendered does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking. (Amazon, Reed)

The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes (Pantheon): Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes's biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy's self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of Romantic science that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind's power to not just describe but transform Nature. The Age of Wonder is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. (Amazon, Reed)

Read me! 180 suggestions from TED speakers

Ah, summer. The season of good intentions, precious free time washed away by busy vacations and cookouts, must-see blockbusters at the googolplex, trips to emergency rooms from pratfalls and bug bites and the certain, overwhelming realization that, really, it's too-darn-hot to think by July 4th. 

So summer is also the time when readers hope against hope to get to "a few books" this season. 

The good folks at TED have made the glorious agony of summer reading even more acute by asking their lecturers to suggest reading lists. From Jane Eyre to The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, there are plenty of ideas here to make a porch-side stack to go on top of the books one has already promised repeatedly to read.

It's enough to make a reader lie down and take a long afternoon nap just to consider all of the books that will likely never be opened. Here, to take one example, is the list by TEDster Karen Wickre, the editorial director of Twitter, that illustrates the range of what I could be reading in the next few months ...  if I wasn't out buying ice cream, and more sunblock for those lazy afternoon dozes in the hammock. Still, a summer reading list is always a wonderful thing to contemplate: I see I've read at least some of these suggestions in summers past. There is always hope.

Karen Wickre is an an avid reader and supporter of TED. Her curation philosophy: “These six titles reflect my passions — graphic non-fiction, home and Buddhism, loosely defined. I hope you discover something that speaks to you in any one of them.”

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit. “Such a terrific story: how Northern California became the nexus and nurturer of early technologies, outsized dreams and failures. Little has changed in 150 years.”

Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel. “The saga of Alison’s gnarly relationship with her complicated, mixed-signal-emitting mother. It’s rich in self-awareness, humor, and a hard-won understanding of how life works.”

Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chodron. “I have my share of Buddhism for Westerners titles; the ones I return to are by Pema Chodron. The chapters are short readings that guide us through the various difficulties of being human in a modern world.”

Home: What It Means and Why It Matters by Mary Gordon. “A lovely exploration of what makes a space into home, and how acutely we feel longing for that ideal. As a nester of the first order, I love understanding the deeper impulses.”

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies. “A whimsical (and dark) graphical exploration of our old ideas of what the future could mean, and our grownup understanding of its limitations.”

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. “This cabinet of wonders offers a secret bookstore, Google, magical characters and digital natives interacting and exploring the pull of old and new. Sloan is deft and affectionate.”

"A is for Armageddon": do you feel lucky, punk?

The end is nigh -- the happiest time of the year!

Or so the holiday bookends of December 25 and January 1 are merchandized, pitched, advertised, and wrung (both "-out," after the Christmas wrapping is thrown away, and by New Years, with our party hats askew, back "-in"). What better time to think about the end of days? Humans have thrilled and terrified themselves fantasizing about an event which few of them will ever be unlucky enough to see, although mankind threatens every so often to come tantalizingly close: war, plague, fear, disease, and sheer human nature are capable of capsizing even the warmest holiday thought of good will toward men.

And then there's the ever-threatening volatility of nature itself: the butterfly sneeze in the forest that leads to ultimate planetary destruction. It's a wonder that most of us don't spend the next ten days trembling in bed with the covers pulled securely above our heads. As the great philosopher Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan once phrased our eternal, daily doubts about the human dilemma, do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

A is for Armageddon: An Illustrated Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World As We Know It (Harper Books), just released in paperback, is a funny, nervous laugh at the end of days -- whenever and however it should occur. The eternal, open-ended speculation on ultimate doom-and-gloom, as both religious and secular soothsayers have always emphasized, is a game with a singular escape clause: it will happen to someone else before it ever happens to us....that is, if we heed the warning signs.

The book and its accompanying website, a "veritable panoply of impending doom," is a needed tonic to the never-ending round of mall-shopping and enforced jollity of the holiday season. Of course it's a cynic's cornucopia of unknowably bad things that will happen to good people -- and unsuspecting too -- which provides the chill. Those unlucky folks will not be us, likely, so pour yourself another nog and put another log on the Yule fire.

Part of a colorful periodic table of man's possible Doom

The author Richard Horne is an equal-opportunity doomsayer: Divine wrath is here (as expected) but one ought to be wary of animal flatulence as well. There are untold ways The End might arrive, and no matter how we prepare and contemplate ultimate Doom, it will still catch us off our guard; for those who like to quantify and identify such unknowables Horne provides a handy periodic table of possibilities. In any event, how can a reader know if it's the beginning of the end? The fully-interactive website offers the nervous and worried a glass-half-empty measure of your own Doom-monger status.

Horne is a kind of one-man-disaster band, fixated more on endings than beginnings. He's responsible as well for the list-making success of 101 Things to Do Before You Die. So it's expected that the ultimate end of the inexplicable, irrational human race is presented in all of its widescreen Technicolor glory: the end of the end, so to speak.

And if Horne is even half-right it will be a party with a real bang. At this annual festival season of self-congratulation -- we've made it through another year! -- there's always the realization that January bills are yet to come. Or as one wag put it, we should get down upon our knees and all be grateful that we're still on our feet.

May the new year bring you all of what you really need, and most of what you really want! (Armageddon optional.)

Catching fish with LSD, 1964: "A dreamy new era for fish"

BoingBoing online -- always a fun site -- reports that in its March 30,1964 issue, Sports Illustrated profiled the efforts of marine biologist Howard Loeb to dose fish with LSD, in hopes that they would be easier to catch and thereby helping remove so-called "trash fish" from the larger market supply. Apparently the side-effects of eating tripping fish weren't at issue; Loeb is quoted in the article saying that he liked to work on "the fun stuff," including pond-shockers and poison baits, for commercial use.

The current media coverage of genetically-altered salmon ready for the dinner table seems to pale into insignificance when a reader considers that it was perfectly legal (if somewhat wacky) "to use LSD-25, a hallucinogenic drug derived from d-lysergic acid" as a commercial application, or that the phrase appears in a Sports Illustrated article in 1964. But then again, LSD wasn't put on the Federal schedule of illegal drugs until 1967. Here's an excerpt from the BoingBoing article, with a link to the full 1964 SI article there.

... An imaginative ex-paratrooper who has been in fish biology for 16 of his 42 years, Loeb often comes up with the unusual, working on what he calls "the fun stuff—the thing that nobody knows anything about." He devised the electric pond-shocker that conservation workers use to obtain fish samples. He has worked on selective poison baits for carp, a trash fish that has ruined many game-fish waters in New York and other states, and is assisting an associate, Bill Kelly, in working on long-lasting dyes for marking trout.

Several years ago Dr. Harold A. Abramson, Director of Psychiatric Research at South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., chanced to read of Loeb's work on carp poisons, and he offered a suggestion: use LSD-25, a hallucinogenic drug derived from d-lysergic acid, originally found in the ergot fungus that grows on rye...

If LSD could work on carp and other fish, the opportunities were unlimited for conservation authorities and sportsmen. For example, a pond loaded with carp poses problems. If any of the standard chemicals, such as rotenone, are used, all the fish, both carp and game fish, usually die, aquatic insects suffer and the poison sometimes lingers for months, preventing the restocking of game fish. But if a chemical could cause all the fish to surface for several hours without killing them, then the undesirable fish could be picked out and the game fish left to prosper.

Again, a surfacing chemical would enable biologists to take a highly accurate fish census of a body of water without harming a fin. A low-flying plane could photograph a treated body of water, and biologists, interpreting the pictures, could get a count of species and populations. ...

"This Is Your Brain on Music": Why we listen (and respond to music) the way we do

Does it help to know why you can't get the music of Pink Floyd or Mozart, Adele or Miles Davis out of your head? This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin (2007) makes the reader at least consider the effect of music on the human mind and its functions.

Levitin's theorizing is a bit of wobbly science in an early stage, what might be called psycho-accoustics; his writing is more of a kind of wool-gathering of anecdotes and side-trips into how musicians achieve their effects that support his ideas, rather than extensive research. In a subjective sense, that's how music works: it's an extremely personal response, whether we're hearing it in a comfortable chair at home or charging into battle.

From the Beatles to Coltrane to Disney soundtracks, Levitin layers on a lot of how music is made, how certain keys in the musical scale carry emotional weight, why we respond to tempo and even individual instruments in particular ways. A lot of this, of course, used to get discussed in classrooms in "music appreciation," but no longer.

Paradoxically, the daily wave of music that surrounds us should make books like Levitin's more interesting to the general reader, and maybe that's why many of his examples hinge on pop artists. Here's one example:

... Joni Mitchell had sung in choirs in public school, but had never taken guitar lessons or any other kind of music lessons. Her music has a unique quality that has been variously described as avant garde, ethereal, and as bridging classical, folk, jazz, and rock. Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. This doesn't mean that she plays notes that other people don't – there are still only 12 notes in a chromatic scale – but it does mean that she can easily reach with her fingers combinations of notes that other guitarists can't reach (regardless of the size of their hands).

... A string that is pressed on ('fretted') has a different sound than one that isn't due to a slight deadening of the string caused by the finger; the unfretted or 'open' strings have a clearer, more ringing quality, and they will keep on sounding for a longer time than the ones that are fretted. When two or more of these open strings are allowed to ring together, a unique timbre emerges.

By retuning, Joni changed the configuration of which notes are played when a string is open, so that we hear notes ringing that don't usually ring on the guitar, and in combinations we don't usually hear. You can hear it on her songs 'Urge for Going' and 'Refuge of the Roads' for example.

... But the chords Joni plays, as a consequence of her unique composition and guitar playing styles, aren’t typical chords: Joni throws notes together in such a way that the chords can't be easily labeled. ... Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that could have two or more different roots. When there is no bass playing along with her guitar (as in 'The Circle Game' or 'Urge For Going'), the listener is left in a state of expansive aesthetic possibilities.

Because each chord could be interpreted in two or more different ways, any prediction or expectation that a listener has about what comes next is less grounded in certainty than with traditional chords. And when Joni strings together several of these ambiguous chords, the harmonic complexity greatly increases; each chord sequence can be interpreted in dozens of different ways, depending on how each of its constituents is heard.'

Of course, Levitin makes clear throughout that the physics of music is something most musicians themselves have a difficult time explaining. The author's website has links to many of the songs in the book, page by page, for those who want the much simpler task of hearing what effect Levitin is describing.

While some of his conclusions may be up for discussion (the "sound of a tree falling in the forest" debate gets a surprising "no" answer -- so much for the laws of physics) a lot of his book is very comforting: music, beginning with rhythm, has been a human component for a long time, and is intricately connected with many human activities.

This is Your Brain on Music won't change the reader's listening habits, or musical preferences -- but at the very least it should sharpen an awareness of the role music plays in our everyday lives.

Nabokov & his butterflies get a belated prize: scientific recognition

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer — and I want no other fame.

(Vladimir Nabokov, "On Naming a Butterfly," 1943)

Well, the old lepidopterist has gotten his wish at last. The Royal Society of London has decided that Nabokov was right in his theory of migration by butterflies, an idea he proposed more than sixty years ago.

The author proposed his theory about a butterfly variety called Polyommatus blues in 1945. The New York Times reports that the Russian author's idea of waves of butterfly migration, once discredited as simply being unbelievable, has been proven "absolutely right" by contemporary gene-sequencing technology.

Ironically, gene technology is a method with which the author would likely have taken issue. Stephen Jay Gould once famously called the writer a scientific "stick-in-the-mud" who never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, preferring instead the old-fashioned method of simple observation.

Nabokov with his butterfly net (above, from theSaturday Evening Post, 1966) has been one of the more unusual images in literary history, but it was the writer's lifelong passion with a serious intent: as the Timesreports, he was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and collected the insects across the United States. Carl Zimmer in The Times reports in the Science column that

... Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted over a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.

At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile.

from Nabokov's Butterflies (2001)

Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.

Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge spanning the Pacific. “I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world,” he wrote. ...

Nabokov's son Dimitri published a volume called Nabokov's Butterflies in 2001. He writes that "in a game that asked us to associate natural kinds and famous people, 'butterflies' would yield the answer 'Nabokov' as surely as 'hemlock' would trigger 'Socrates.' ... Nabokov looked at his world tirelessly and at close range, and for all the horrors he could evoke in the darker books, he found it swarming with inexhaustible diversity and delight. Not the least of his delights was Lepidoptera." As the butterfly collector delighted in revealing time and again in his fiction, human nature resisted all efforts to be so neatly pinned down.

(Nabokov drawing of a butterfly, at top, from The Atlantic Magazine, 2000)