Last read of 2011!  Finally posting it, but finished it about December 30th.

#38 of 38 for 2011:

Chapterhouse:  Dune, by Frank Herbert.  Wow, just, wow.

Well, it had to end sometime.  I need to reread the entire series and do a proper write-up on each of them.  No, I don’t know if I will ever read the ones by Brian Herbert- I definitely don’t want to kill the magic.  PURE MAGIC.

Coming up soon:  The Best of 2011 List.

Okay, I needed something ridiculously easy to read, to cleanse my palate before I got back into studying.  (I will most likely post which books I am studying for class these days when I am closer to finishing them, or have finished them.)

So #37 for 2011:

How could you do that? by Dr. Laura Schlessinger

Some of it I agreed with whole-heartedly; some of it I disagreed with rather strongly; some of it was journalism.  But I wasn’t expecting much to begin with here. I mean, the author is a syndicated radio show host, not a novelist.  And it certainly served its purpose.

I will share some interesting bits though:

…the tenacity of spirit and nobility of purpose with which people can choose to behave- where sacrifice and suffering are seen as part of the elevation of the soul in accomplishing something truly special:  being human.  (p. 4)

“If I am not for myself,” asks the Jewish proverb, “who will be?  But if I am only for myself, who am I?”  (p. 26)

It is truly amazing how we can try to dissociate our behaviors from recognition of who we are.  We are what we do, and that’s that!  There is nowhere to hide from yourself when your behaviors outline a lack of ethics or values, i.e., character.  (p.35)

When you choose wrong because it suits you right now, the message you give others is that when it suits you, you may likely do wrong again.  You become a threat and a liability to others.  That’s a pragmatic reason, outside of pride in morality, not to do wrong.
Please do focus in on the word choose.  Ultimately, every action is the result of choice with intent- no matter how much you’d like to blame the devil for makin’ you do it.  And that’s what others recognize and note about you.  (p. 36)

Just remember that your unwillingness to take a stand or take an action in the face of fear,  longing, hope, and abject emotional pain [not to mention inconvenience] will ultimately determine the quality of your life.  (p. 43)

…[W]hat you choose to do under difficult conditions speaks to who you are and what you are like, more than what you do in so-called normal times.  Our behaviors tell us who we are, not our fantasies about our ideal selves under ideal circumstances.  (p. 54)

It is right to stand by your partner.  It is also right to protect yourself from the ongoing destructiveness of self-destructive people, no matter what relationship they have to you, including being “your woman.” (p. 65)

I slept and dreamt that life was Joy.
I woke and saw that life was Duty.
I acted, and behold, Duty was Joy.
/Rabinranath Tagore

If we constantly overreact as though each glitch portends yet another apocalypse, then we don’t allow the other person to be real, we refuse to acknowledge that relationships take work, we assume that the relationship must be a breast to feed only us.  (p. 110)

Insecure sometimes means that you haven’t done the things you need to do so that your reputation with yourself has grown.  (p. 134)

It’s when you blend feelings with a major dose of courage, conscience, and rational thought that you connect to the most self-respectful aspects of your humanity.  (p. 142)

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.  I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate.  It is above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.
/Leo Rosten

Isn’t this like kicking someone when they’re down?  No, quite the opposite.  Her self-esteem and demoralization already exist and are being continually massaged by her destructive behaviors!  My position is that by acknowledging the “wrongness” of her current actions she gives herself a concrete way out of misery. (p. 164)

I have to live with myself and so
I want to be fit for myself to know.
I want to be able as the days go by,
Always to look myself straight in the eye.
I don’t want to stand with the setting sun
And hate myself for the things I’ve done.
I can never hide myself from me
I see what others may never see.
I know what others may never know
I can never fool myself and so
Whatever happens I want to be
Self-respecting & conscience free!
/Author unknown

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#35 for 2011:

Heretics of Dune, by Frank Herbert

This is a really strong series!  It keeps going strong- better, even. 

Random thought, or clarification:  I’ve always been drawn to the Bene Gesserit, because of their extreme self-knowledge and self-control.  I’ve always been repelled by them by their aim to manipulate other people.

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve.  Destroy the place and you destroy the person.  (p. 41)

What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow and go with it.  (p. 97)

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers.  Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet came be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play.  For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force.  Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events.  If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist.  Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.  (p. 131)

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power.  Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is:  Who has the clout?  (p. 151)

Some people never observe anything.  Life just happens to them.  They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.  (p. 154)

He felt his awareness constricted to its tightest purpose and yet that purpose filled his universe.  He was open to infinity.  (p. 157)

… was a two-edged sword.  You might learn to flow along the edge of the blade but you could be cut by it.  (p. 167)

What was it that we spent and what was it we bought?  (p. 331)

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it.  They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations.  Thus, they change the future as well.  (p. 380)

Yes, it was a matter of opening doors, he thought.  You opened one door and that let you into a place where there were other doors.  You chose a door in this new place and examined what that revealed to you.  There might be times when you were forced to try all of the doors but the more doors you opened, the more certain you became of which door to open next.  Finally, a door would open into a place you recognized.  Then you could say:  “Ahhhh, this explains everything.”  (p. 388)

Memory never recaptures reality.  Memory reconstructs.  All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.  (p. 404)

It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.  (p. 405)

“To those out there, a great issues is:  ‘Will I eat today?’
Do I have shelter tonight that will not be invaded by attackers or vermin?’ Luxury?  Luxury is the possession of a drug or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay.”
And you are the beast, he thought.
….
“It’s just that you think of the muck in the wrong way,” she said.  “Luckily, they are the most self-limiting.  They know this somewhere in the damps of their deepest consciousness but cannot spare the time to deal with that or anything else except the immediate scramble for survival.”
“They cannot be improved?” he asked.
“They must not be improved!  Oh, we see to it that self-improvement remains a great fad among them.  Nothing real about it, of course.”
“Another luxury they must be denied,” he said.
“Not a luxury!  Nonexistent!  It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier that we like to call protective ignorance.”  (p. 444)

It was a smile full of compassion, of understanding and real pleasure in his own existence.  He knew it for the most deadly insult he could hurl at them and he saw it hit.  (p. 446)

It was true, Teg thought then, that the process of arranging conflicts involved the hoodwinking of large masses.  How easy it was to fall into the attitude of the Honored Matres.
Muck!
The hoodwinking was not as difficult as some supposed.  Most people wanted to be led…  There were deep tribal instincts (powerful unconscious motivations) to account for this.  The natural reaction when you began to recognize how easily you were led was to look for scapegoats. …. How easy it was to produce scapegoats and how readily they were accepted!  This was especially true when the alternative was to find yourself either guilty or stupid or both.  (p. 467)

There were no words in the language, only a moving, dancing adaptation to a moving, dancing universe.  You could only speak the language, not translate it.  To know the meaning you had to go through the experience and even then the meaning changed before your eyes.  (p. 480)

Theodore Roethke (The Vigil)

#34 for 2011:

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer.
Jots and thoughts:

Monotony collapses time [I'd say compresses it; zip-files it, even]; novelty unfolds it….  If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next- and disappear.  That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exciting locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories.  Creating new memories [actually, anchoring memories to memorable events- we are ALWAYS creating new memories; they just don't stick if we judge them unimportant.  At least this way they can be important in context of an important event/time in our life.] stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perceptions of our lives.  (p. 77)

This shows in a way why the writing doesn’t grab me; he says one thing and then when he restates it, he actually undermines or distorts what he just said.

And he doesn’t clarify or integrate points often, for example in the continuing excerpt:

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890:  “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.  Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out,” he wrote.  [See, here is where he needs to explain, or refer too, or at least later in the book tie together, why it is so difficult to remember early childhood, when everything is REALLY really new:  because our brains are still forming.  I don't know why, but the lack of qualification is disorienting and off-putting.]  “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”  Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.  (p. 77)

It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age [of memory] and our own comparatively leaden one.  People used to labor to furnish their minds.  They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things.  But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast majority of us don’t trust our memories.  We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them.  We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they’re starting to fail us entirely.  (pp. 134-5)

When the Egyptian god Toth presented his gift of writing to King Thamus, the king’s response was:
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,: he told the god.  “They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful’ they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from withihn themselves, but by means of external marks.  What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding.  And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.  And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”  (pp. 138-9)

Well, there’s the modern world summed up for you, eh?

The OK Plateau
Rhetorica ad Herennium
Phoenix by Peter of Ravenna

#33 for 2011:

God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert.

How anyone can take a story and a character this bizarre and unfathomable and make it work, much less make it great, is amazing.  I mean, really:  a prescient boy whose every ancestor is alive and conscious within him, and turbulently so, enters into a physical symbiotic partnership with the great sandworm of Dune, allowing him to live thousands of years in exchange for the slow inevitable loss of his humanity and a fate perhaps more terrible than death, in order to have the time (and means) to bring about an evolutionary change in humans without which humanity will violently cease to exist at all.  Nobody likes the arrangement, or the absolute political and religious reality it necessitates, least of all him. 

In the immortal words of the L.A. Times:  “Heady stuff.”

There is a lot of sophistry involved, but mercifully this is mostly from the mouths of the characters and thus itself a commentary.

“Lady, we all have to live,” he protested.
“You are not alive,” she said.  “Be gone!”  (p. 52)

“Rules change with each surprise.” 
—-
“For what do you hunger, Lord?”  Moneo ventured.
“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions.  Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”
“You have said it many times, Lord.  It is the ability to change your mind.”  (p. 66)

Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you.  I need no witnesses.  You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.  (p. 70)

[T]he struggle with humankind’s view of itself- a sweaty contest on a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend.  (p. 79)

[The trance state of prophecy] is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you com at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanations for anything can work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements.  (p. 180)

“The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality.’  That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.”  (p. 19)

“I try to dispense with casual laws and prisons wherever possible.”
“You have to have some prisons!”
“Do I?  Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective.  They’re a kind of job insurance.”
—
“You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws.”  (p. 225)

“You always know the creative because it is revealed openly.  Concealment betrays the existence of another force entirely.”  (p. 227)

“Here’s an interesting fact about that story:  Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple.  Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve.”  (p. 233)

“Reason is valuable,” he said, “only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.”  (p. 258)

“Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs,” Leto said.  (p. 266)

“The insect has no more freedom from its hive than we have freedom from our past,” he said.  (p. 325)

“Nothing is certain,” he said.
This dropped her into despair.
That had not been Leto’s intention, but he knew that it often happened- an accurate, though ambiguous, answer was taken as confirmation of one’s deepest fears.  (p. 344)

“There’s a lesson in that, too.  What do such machines really do?  They increase the number of things we do without thinking- there’s the real danger.”  (p. 346)

These poor creatures lived on the margins, trying to retain parts of an ancient wholeness.  And all the while, that lost reality slipped farther and farther from their grasp.  … [They] were lost to everything except a bare existence and the rote mouthing of old words which they did not understand and which they did not even pronounce correctly!  (p. 369)

“Now, you’re beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. ….  It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate.  That’s the way it always is with humans.”  (p. 419)

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