9.99

For anyone who doesn't know what this post is about already from the title, 9.99 is a novel by Frederic Beigbeder. If you go to that link, you'll see that the title has been changed to reflect the discount price since it's gotten older. It's actually available for 3.50 from some seller, but I guess they have to stop at some point, or the joke gets too old. Basic summary and reviews here.

Obviously, I read this book recently. Some thoughts:

Mostly, I’m not sure how to feel at all. :S I think that’s Beigbeder’s intention—to make me conflicted about my feelings for Octave. I am lured in by his charismatic, articulate expression of modern anti-consumerism, then repulsed by his actions ostensibly justified by these very ideals.

Octave is the embodiment of hyperbole, the ultimate caricature of the little voice inside us all that says “something’s just not right.” I imagine that most have fantasized, at some time, of being him (minus the coke habit, maybe). It is easy to idealize him from his clever insights: "Plato's cave really did exist now: it was called television," but eventually issues of fundamental morality smack you in the face.

I was arguing with someone the other day about who is the "worse" character. Obviously, Charlie wins the prize, but it was a battle between Octave and Tamara. They both played games with people who cared about them. Can you really determine who behaved more atrociously?

Sociologist in da hizzouse!

I first read about Sudhir Venkatesh's adventures in the Chicago projects in Freakonomics, one of the coolest books ever written, and now one of my favorite blogs. I'm sure Steve Leavitt had to peel himself off the floor when he first heard about the kind of data Venkatesh had come away with. I guess that too many people wouldn't stop asking Venkatesh about all the details of his experience, and who wants to read a 15+ year old dissertation, so he decided to put it all in a book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

I'm not going to summarize the book, the link is better anyway. I'm just going to say that I could barely believe it was a true story at times, and I was shocked by the level of corruption even among the "good guys." Taxation, extortion...it's all the same thing, really.

I think that reading a lot makes the world seem more messed up than it is, or maybe the world is really messed up and not reading is how most people lie to themselves. I guess I could start reading silly chick lit or Stephen King...but I'd probably puke all over the book, hahaha. Now I'm finally reading 9.99 (blah, I don't know the code for the british pound symbol). It appears that the book is now discounted, so the title has changed to 6.99!!! Stay tuned!

Viral Marketing

I guess ads aren't good enough anymore. Somehow I doubt that all the extra work that goes into this kind of stuff actually gets more people to see a movie. They really do call it "viral marketing."

Anyway, so I never click on ads in Facebook, but this one said something about being "committed to regulating non-human activity on earth." How could I not look? It takes you to www.d-9.com, some kind of alert system for non-human activity. There are other sites, www.multinationalunited.com and www.mnuspreadslies.com

All of this is for some sci-fi movie about aliens coming to earth. The websites are nicely done, with lots of detail, but will I actually go to see the movie? No. I'm so glad I got out of graphic design.

Vertigo

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Musicophilia

I just finished reading the book Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks. It describes many neurological normalities and abnormalities, all related to the perception, creation and experience of music in the brain, told though case studies, personal stories and historical anecdotes.

The fascinating theme that emerges from this book is the simultaneous independence and interdependence of music in our minds. It is clearly associated with distinct physical regions of our brains, but the perception of music engages our entire brains. Musical abilities and disorders often occur without similar effects in language or other auditory perceptions. At the same time, music can intensely affect or be affected by other processes in the brain. Some people with synesthesia literally see notes or chords as having color. Music can give people with severe neurological conditions the ability to speak, move, learn, remember...to overcome otherwise insurmountable disabilities.

It's all pretty deep, but the best parts are the amazing individual cases. Like one guy who is struck by lightening, and though he was previously uninterested in music, becomes obsessed with learning the piano and composing.

Or this story about the author, who heard some music in a dream that continued into a musical hallucination when he woke up.

...I found something deeply disturbing and unpleasant about the music, and longed for it to stop. I had a shower, a cup of coffee, went for a walk, shook my head, played a mazurka on the piano--to no avail. The hateful hallucinatory music continued unabated. Finally I phoned a friend, Orlan Fox, and said that I was hearing songs that I could not stop, songs that seemed to me full of melancholy and a sort of horror. The worst thing, I added, was that the songs were in German, a language I did not know. Orlan asked me to sing or hum some of the songs. I did so, and there was a long pause.

"Have you abandoned some of your young patients?" he asked. "Or destroyed some of your literary children?"

"Both," I answered. "Yesterday I resigned from the children's unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written....How did you guess?"

"Your mind is playing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder," he said, "his songs of mourning for the death of children." I was amazed by this, for I rather dislike Mahler's music and would normally find it quite difficult to remember in detail, let along sing, and of his Kindertotenlieder. But here my dreaming mind, with infallible precision, had come up with an appropriate symbol of the previous day's events. And in the moment Orlin interpreted the dream, the music disappeared; it has never rucurred in the thirty years since.

Unfortunately, there isn't really any unifying thesis in the book. In the end it is just a collection of individual stories, without much in the way of psychological theory. I'm too much of a geek. I think I liked my former psych-major roommate's textbooks better, haha. Sacks isn't the greatest writer, but I'm still glad he put all these stories together, as someone who always prefers music to a silent room...