The Book Building

A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying, because liars know the truth, while bullshitters just yak away without regard for the truth or non-truth of what they are saying; and 3) that since a person cannot ever really know him/her self, any sincere expression of one's feelings is bullshit. This…

Halfway there. This one first ran earlier this year, back in February. I was actually preparing for an interview, sitting in a bed and breakfast when I posted it, as I recall, which in retrospect makes it yet more meaningful to me. It was snowing, picturesque, comforting. Now a memory. I had the chance to see a talk by William Cronon last week here at U.Va. He's a professor at the University of Wisconsin and a recognized world leader in environmental history and environmental studies. His work, while helping define the field of environmental history as it became one in recent decades,…

Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for…

Tim LeCain, a professor at Montana State (in Bozeman) and a talented scholar in environmental history and the history of technology ("envirotech"), has just published Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. Although I've not read it yet, I'm familiar with LeCain's work in general (having read prior work that is now part of the book). He's a solid scholar and a notable writer; this is important work. I copy here from the Rutgers Press description of the book: The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the…

Alas, I have a book cover to share for Notes from the Ground! I'm pleased with it. I was even brought to use an exclamation point just there. It happens, I know it, it happens, people judge these things by their covers. I don't say so to be cutesy or play the cliche. I'm just acknowledging it happens. I've done it. Not infrequently, in fact. The one for this book is a plate from the 1697 John Dryden translation of Virgil's The Georgics, one of his epics and the one that threads through the book underneath the cover. I'm excited to see it. Make posters, put it on your walls, behold,…

The Morning News's Fifth Annual Tournament of Books, real March madness, is a true highlight of the near-Spring calendar. I'm told there is some other tournament this month, also capitalizing on the month "March" in its title. We'll have to look into that. This TMN tourney has thus far seen four colossal upsets. In one bracket alone, the Booker Prize winner and PEN/Faulkner Award winner's were both taken down by lower-seeded upstarts. Shocking. Startling. Immense. Bloggable. Note that Judge Jonah Lehrer, he of The Frontal Cortex, was the arbiter of one of these upsets, picking Mark…

(Given it being a big week for Darwin and all, I thought it would be kind of cool to repost this post from 07) Not counting Shouts and Murmurs email queries, I've sent pieces to the New Yorker proper on three occasions, the last of which just a few months ago. What I've noticed is that there is a clear trend is how these rejection letters have been developing over the years. Here's the first one I got, which I think is pretty impressive and earned a rating of "A" in a previous post. I mean, it's got it all. Handwritten, reference to a powerful editor at the top of his game, written and…

MIT Press publishes a series called Urban and Industrial Environments. Several of the "author-meets-blogger" books were from that series. The main editor is Robert Gottlieb of Occidental College out in California. I was just made aware of a blog for his Urban & Environmental Policy Institute there, where one can find notices of new books, discussions of current issues in environmental justice, and, you guessed it, matters of urban and environmental policy more broadly speaking. In addition to the well-stocked and premier Urban and Industrial Environments list, Gottlieb also edits a…

An advertisement from Frank Scott's company (as reprinted in Ted Steinberg's American Green). Talk about religion and nature--Scott thought it was un-christian not to keep a manicured lawn. Our lawn finally came in this year after three years in this house. We hadn't put much of an effort into it, I'll admit, though the original builder sought to. Our dirt is awful, just god awful. Ask my dad. He, the ardent gardener, is astonished by how poor the soil is. But this year the crabgrass grew in. And it looks good, real good. Plus it's helped prevent erosion from the occasional torrential…

It's been a while since I've enjoyed a book this much. That's all.

The SCQ children's book contest is back again. link We have been neglectful for the last 5 months, but here we are back again. Once again, the SCQ is seeking general submissions, where any submission that makes its way to our pages is a contender, The one that we receive before the end of August that we happen to like the best will be our victor. These pieces can be anything, serious, not serious, funny, not funny, pretty, not pretty, etc. And the prize... Well, a really pretty dinosaur book, by award winner artist Christopher Wormell. Again, send in your good stuff to tscq@interchange.…

Now that summer draws near, I have ambitions to read the works listed below the fold. True, I put them here so I can keep track of them. Because I get confused and lose things a lot. But I also put them here to offer a mini bibliography on the themes (some related, some not) of Food, Environmental, and Science Studies. Summer's Plan (from Kimberly Applegate) Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, by Gregg Mitman (2007). This book sits at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science and medicine. Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural…

Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read. The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." McWilliams's…

Happen you to need a diversion, check out The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, why not? It's new, it's got about 70 stories (or entries, more properly), it has a picture of a chicken smoking a cigarette on the cover, and if you're not overwhelmed by the end, it even comes with a story I contributed about Borges. Come on, people've been griping for years about the dearth of Borges jokes. It's time. It's here. Admittedly, I would consider the contribution more melancholy than funny. More of a meditation or lament. About Borges. From his time in the Cub Scouts. He made it to Webelo.…

I continually write my own biography by my actions, mixing involvement with knowledge, accountable to those moments when both drop away to reveal the act of mixing--something a priori recognizable. This process doe not differ measurably from the way I come to understand others, my time, or past times. Memory, then, is not only a backward retrieval of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all future moments of corresponding circumstance. We remember forward; we telegraph ourselves to our future selves and to others: "Rescue this; recognize this, or…

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion The title above is a quote from the book, Objectivity, subject of the prior two posts. Below the fold is an extended quote following that line. It circles back to a common topic at the blogs and at this one in particular, at the bottom. (How do I know what/where/why my head is?) All epistemology begins in fear - fear that the world is too labyrinthine to be threaded by reason; fear that the senses are too feeble and the intellect too frail; fear that memory…

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion The last post (Scientific Objectivity has a History) was about an article from 1992 called "The Image of Objectivity," by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Daston and Galison, 15 years later, have now written a book-length treatment of the topic, Objectivity (MIT Press, 2007). It argues that "To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge.…

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion Title page of William Cheselden's (1733) Osteographia; or, the Anatomy of the Bones, showing an artist drawing a half skeleton through camera obscura. Students end up having favorite readings from their schooling. For graduate students, these are sometimes pivotal works in their own scholarship, influencing later doctoral writing and research and steering patterns of thinking one way or another. Other times, they're just a good and memorable read, bringing…

"The British are sniffy about sci-fi, but there is nothing artificial in its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves." Folks are always going on about Science Fiction in these parts. And that's fun. Figured I'd add a link to this essay, "Why don't we love science fiction?," from the UK's Times Online. It refers to two works about SF: A Science Fiction Omnibus edited by Brian Aldiss and Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook. A few excerpts. This one: The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that…

I just picked up Jonah's book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, which so far has me thinking differently about the other things I read. And with Whitman as the first chapter, I got to thumbing through some poetry. Plus, it's a nice season for poetry. Moving on, inelegant as this transition may be.... We've posted a poem by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborksa before ("Discover"). Here is another, called "A Note." I liked it. Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to…