Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning ** 1/2

Varieties of Meaning is a work of academic philosophy. The title and the back-cover abstract led me to believe it would explore the common thread that connects all the different things we say have meaning: "people mean to do various things, tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things ... What does meaning in the sense of purpose have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying?" I've been pondering the meaning of "meaning" since my undergraduate days, and hoped for new insights.

But Millikan's topic is different. She uses evolutionary psychology to explore the nature of our internal representations (aka concepts), how they differ from those of non-human animals, and how we might have developed them. She concludes that concepts are more directly goal-oriented than is generally assumed, and that they are not constructed from intermediate sense impressions.

This topic is interesting even if it's not what I was looking for. However, Millikan falls into the common academic trap of focusing too much on esoteric terminological disputes at the expense of clear exposition, not to mention the evolutionary psychology vice of "just so stories."

There were a few asides that intrigued me. One was a (probably false) anecdote about how venomous snakes hunt and eat mice without the benefit of a concept of "mouse":

The story is that certain venomous snakes perceive mice for purposes of striking by sight, trace the path of the dying mouse by small, and find its head so as to swallow that part first by feel, and that none of those jobs can be accomplished using any other sensory modality. A snake that was wired up this way would merely perceive first a "strike me," then a "chase me," and finally a "swallow me," having no grasp at all that what it struck, followed, and swallowed was the same thing.

Another was the distinction, attributed to Gilbert Ryle, between "task verbs" that describe an attempt to do something (hunt, look, listen) and "achievement verbs" that indicate success (find, see, hear).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Third Realm ***

The Third Realm is the third book in Knausgaard's The Morning Star series. It is quite similar to the first book, with multiple narrators recounting events just before and after the emergence of the new star. Several sections retell incidents from the first book from a different point of view; for example, we hear from Tove and Gaute who are married to Arne and Kathrine from The Morning Star.

The hallmark of Knausgaard's style is the slow emergence of themes from a wealth of mundane detail. The prominent themes that arise in The Third Realm are questions about the source of evil and the differences between external appearance and internal truth.

Like The Morning Star, The Third Realm ends with a cliffhanger. The star disappears, and the surviving member of the murdered black metal band tells Tove that her task will be revealed to her. I am far enough into the series to know not to expect a resolution any time soon.

The fourth book, The School of Night, recently became available in English. Early reviews tell me it has a single narrator, a peripheral character from the first three books, and is a modern version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. At the moment, I plan to skip it and possibly the rest of the series. I'm starting to suspect that Knausgaard doesn't have a vision for how it all fits together.

Michael Wejchert, Hidden Mountains ** 1/2

Hidden Mountains is the true story of two couples who attempt an unnamed and unclimbed peak in the titular mountain range in Alaska. The couples were serious climbers of the weekend warrior variety; an Alaskan expedition was perhaps beyond their skill level, due to logistics rather than the technical climbing difficulty. One of the men ends up critically injured in a fall, requiring rescue by an elite mountain rescue unit.

The book has all the elements necessary for an exciting and compelling mountaineering tale, but from the start something annoyed me.  Was it the sketchiness of the mountaineering history that the author provides? No. Was it the judgmental tone that crept in when he discussed sport climbing? No. The portrait of legendary climber David Roberts that contradicted everything I knew about him from his books? Well, yes, that did irritate me and make me question the author's credibility.

Eventually I realized that the issue was a lack of relevance and perspective. The idea that sport climbing and improved communication technologies have led to riskier ventures is interesting, but what does it have to do with the story at hand? And should we lament the change or celebrate it?

The book also has organizational issues. As a professional writer myself, I know that you need to keep the reader focused on the task at hand. If you've got interesting background details or tangents, they need to come before or after the main story. For example, the full resume of the helicopter pilot should not intrude on the drama of Emmett's rescue. 

The chapter about the helicopter pickup becomes positively Inception-like in its nested stories: the pilot performed a similar rescue many years before; the climbers in that earlier rescue had completed many important ascents and recently contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome; those climbers left their satellite phone at base camp and eventually called a district ranger at Denali National Park; that ranger was a Vietnam vet who was a "legend in Alaska rescue circles"; he flew a Pave Hawk helicopter whose rotors move at a constant speed of 258 RPM.  Every story here is dramatic and informative, but they interfere with each other, and the reader has to exert a lot of mental energy keeping them straight.

The book's subtitle is "Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong," and indeed its most emotional chapter is about the impact on the fallen climber and his fiancée. The most memorable parts, however, are about the modern systems of mountain rescue. There is one brief scene in which the author himself completes a tricky pitch on an Alaskan peak and receives a text from his girlfriend asking where to find the toner cartridges for their printer. 

Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships *****

The Long Ships is a Swedish adventure novel telling the saga of Red Orm Tostesson, a widely-traveled and notably lucky Viking in the years around the first millennium. Like The Island of Second Sight, it's a classic of world literature I'd never heard of before pulling it from the bookstore shelf. 

From the Introduction to the NYRB edition, written by Michael Chabon:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Like traditional adventure novels, The Long Ships eschews psychological realism in favor of unadorned action. It is largely episodic but soon reveals a recurring theme about the role of religion in that world. On his first long voyage, Orm, raised with the old Norse gods, spends time captive in Moorish Spain, escapes to Christian Ireland, and comes home to find the King of Denmark converted to Christianity. Many of Orm's adventures, and even more of his moral reasoning, involve weighing the impact of each religion on the "luck" of the protagonists. They decide, for instance, that they should sacrifice a goat at the launching of a ship, because the sea gods are more powerful in this instance than Christ; on the other hand, they spare their injured enemies.

The joy of the book comes from the adventure and the dryly humorous way the story is told.

The year (1000) ended without the smallest sign having appeared in the sky, and there ensued a period of calm in the border country. Relations with the Smalanders continued to be peaceful, and there were no local incidents worth mentioning, apart from the usual murders at feasts and weddings, and a few men burned in their houses as a result of neighborly disputes.

Orm has a wise-cracking friend named Toke who is a particularly rich source of bon mots. 

The Long Ships is an entertaining way of learning about the state of Europe in the 10th century, with plenty of battles and violence when our heroes go a-viking.

David Toop, Ocean of Sound ***

Ocean of Sound advertises itself as a history of ambient music, with a particularly inclusive definition of the genre. As Toop says in his author's note, "I think of it now as a Trojan Horse, early-90s ambient music serving as a device to disguise a far more expansive narrative about twentieth-century experimental music of all persuasions."

For Toop, "ambient" refers to the interpenetration of (intentionally composed) music and the surrounding background. Ambient music in the Brian Eno sense is composed music intended to supplement or "tint" the environment; other musicians incorporate natural sounds and non-traditional instruments; yet others shift the listener's attention to the listening context, like Cage's 4'33". "This blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music" (R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World).

Toop extends his premise beyond its breaking point by interpreting other notable aspects of twentieth-century music as examples of the same tendency; for example the post-modern blurring of genres, boundless trance-like compositions, and electronic music in general. All of these innovations serve the contradictory impulses of listening to the entire soundscape as music and helping music lift free from its earthbound context. Twentieth-century music shifts the focus from the intentions of the genius musician to the active participation of the listener. 

Ultimately Toop did not provide me with a new way of listening or introduce me to new artists I am compelled to check out. 

Masashi Matsuie, The Summer House ****

The Summer House tells a low-key story about a small Japanese architectural firm creating a design proposal for a National Library of Modern Literature. To escape from the bustle and heat of Tokyo, they repair to a small village in the mountains.

The book is all about mood, with special attention paid to the soundscape. A light breeze carries bird song into the workshop where the architects work to get the curve of a banister just right, the only sound their pencils on paper. There is just enough plot to move us from one relaxing scene to another and to tie together the metaphorical conversations they have about craftsmanship and about balancing tradition with innovation.

The experience of reading The Summer House reminded me of watching a documentary about traditional craftsmen. It's a pleasure to observe their quiet artistry, to celebrate the care they take.

Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians *** 1/2

Like Herald of a Restless World, which I recently read, Time of the Magicians is a biography of early 20th-century philosophers that also seeks to capture the spirit of the times. The subtitle refers to "the decade that reinvented philosophy." The titular magicians are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger; the decade is 1919 to 1929.

Time of the Magicians improves on Herald of a Restless World by diving deeper into its subjects' ideas and, most importantly, by presenting them as idiosyncratic and compelling characters. However, Eilenberger failed to convince me that they, collectively or individually, "reinvented philosophy." Wittgenstein and Heidegger are surely influential figures, but they were inflection points within continuing traditions.

Despite Eilenberger's efforts to tie together the philosophies of his four protagonists, I didn't see them as asking the same questions, nor did I feel the importance of the issues they addressed. I remain mystified by Heidegger, but I can't fault the author for falling short on the impossible task of explaining Dasein. Philosophically, I was most intrigued by Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, despite Cassirer being presented as the old-school conservative of the bunch. 

A tangential point that I found interesting was about the Weimar Republic that ruled Germany at the time:

The republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States, France, and England... From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but...a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war.