That’s right, 2021.51 – for some reason I never posted a review of this. It’s pertinent to my next Book Corner.

by Dr. Carl L. Hart

To describe this book in one word, I’d maybe choose “scandalous.” Dr. Hart uses heroin & has no intention of stopping. It’s a harmless hobby, like having a drink. “Grown-ups” can responsibly take heroin, and opioids, and meth – there is no drug that should be off limits. Now there’s the general libertarian argument for that, which Dr. Hart espouses; but as a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia specializing in neuropharmacology, he’ll also argue authoritatively that none of these drugs will necessarily harm you, if used responsibly – so it’s not simply a matter of “you should be able to legally destroy your life if you choose”. It’s also that, if you’re a “grown-up” about it, you won’t.

Dr. Hart wrote this risky book to come out of the closet, in the hopes others would follow. I think he will likely find himself forever in the minority. I’ve never read any account of someone in such a prestigious station in life coming clean about so much casual, ongoing drug use (he’s tried everything). But now I have – & I guess he’d say that’s the point of the book.

And I know he’ll say that this is more evidence of how badly the book is needed, but hearing him justify his heroin use and explain how NOT an addict he is made me wonder how long it might take for the inevitable shoe to drop – where will Dr. Hart be a year or more from now? Still a happy user insisting he’s not an addict? Will it be true? I believe it to be true of him now. I do believe his accounts and all the evidence he presents; but being brainwashed by our anti-drug society I just can’t help but wonder…

One constant point of his that I appreciate is this: drugs feel good, and that’s reason enough to take them. He gets really uptight around LSD users because they tend to try to justify their drug use as “different” from others – they’re doing it for mind-expanding reasons or whatever, not to get high. “What’s wrong with getting high?” he cuts one guy off mid-sentence. I love that. The right to pleasure… not currently enshrined in the Constitution, but should be, as Tom Lehrer put it decades ago. He was talking about pornography, not drugs, but the principle’s the same –

“Obscenity. I’m for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on – but we know what’s really involved: dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it. But you can’t get up in a court and say that I suppose. it’s simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the constitution unfortunately.”

by Sheila Liming

I felt like this was a bait-and-switch. It just didn’t seem to be about “hanging out” at all. It was just a bunch of stories about the author’s oh-so-interesting life. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound resentful just because I’m boring, but it’s like she had nine lives, none of which I could relate to. She was an accordion player in a successful jam band in Pittsburgh! She was a bartender in an isolated Washington state bar! She was a professor in North Dakota! She was pals with a Food Network star and appeared in her reality TV show! She was a guest at a dinner party with famous physicist-author Brian Greene! Enough already! No, wait, she also almost got killed ice-climbing tied to three other people, one of whom was 84 years old! I expected every next chapter to find her performing as a rodeo clown or clerking for a Supreme Court justice.

by Nejib

A hardcover graphic novel about the period of Bowie’s life when he was making MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD and HUNKY DORY. He lived in a rambling old house called Haddon Hall with his wife Angie, soon to birth their son Zowie, and a bunch of friends and fellow artists (and apparently Sid Barret).

I knew a bit, not a ton, about Bowie’s life; but I didn’t always know who key characters were (Marc Bolan of T Rex, for example) or exactly what was going on. It was cool though.

The parts about David’s schizophrenic older brother, Terry; and about his father’s death, were VERY touching.

Silly, but you just don’t tend to think about David Bowie as having a “Mum and Dad.” But of course, he did.

by J. B. MacKinnon

Kind of rambling, to be honest.

by Tim Urban

Really brilliant analysis of “what our problem” is – it’s neither right nor left but “low-rung thinking.”

But it takes a long time to get to the point; and then ends up feeling a bit like a screed against “Social Justice Fundamentalism.”

At first I was feeling like Urban wanted to be a cross between the guy who writes the Xkcd comic and Yuval Noah Harari, and coming up way short in both departments. Finally though he hit his stride with his depiction of the “genies” of “high-rung thinking” and the “golems” of “low-rung thinking.” The former is when we use our rational capacities, when we steelman rather than strawman our opponents, and question our biases. The latter is when we devolve into tribalism.

His drawings sometimes made me laugh out loud; I wish I could copy some here. I tended to like the ones where the stick figures had open-mouthed frowns, such as the depiction of “probably you” when Trump was elected, and the depiction of the defendant in court while his lawyer says “My opponent makes some good points, I guess my client is guilty after all.”

After Urban has laid out his definitions of high-rung thinking, and its opposite, the “golems” of low-rung thinking (it’s a golem on the book cover), he turns to some examples. He has Republican examples to lead us off. Another laugh-out-loud was the strip explaining what exactly is going on when the R’s stage one of their ridiculous stand-offs about the debt celing.

Then he turns to the big golem in the room – he terms it Social Justice Fundamentalism. I appreciate how he avoids the term “woke”, and uses “progressive” rather than “liberal” – but to understand what he means by SJF, substitute “woke.” I agree wholeheartedly that this is often a golem, and his examples were as sobering and scary as he meant them to be. But they went on too long (despite his insistence that he really didn’t want to have so many examples, just felt it was really, really necessary). I got the idea. I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to read a book against wokeness. I wanted to read a book against low-rung thinking. He stayed too long on this bugaboo.

by Jane Austen

An Annotated Edition

I’m making this year something of a “re-read” year.

Thoughts: Why is he never once called Mr. Willoughby? In EMMA, it is considered a serious affront when Mrs. Elton refers to Mr. Knightley and merely “Knightley.”

Edward feels like such a minor role… the 1995 movie version had to pad the role out significantly to make the most of Hugh Grant.

Mrs. Jennings comes across as a real dear, though she’s presented as mere silly comic relief at first. The annotations really hammered this home.

Marianne and Elinor are all too real.

I picked up the 1995 DVD from the library for some reason. I know I’m never going to have time to watch it.

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is really special. He wrote this little slice of his life in 2005, two years before that life would end.

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” Agreed… I like either books written in the past, or modern books; people who write new books but place them in the near-distant past I think are just trying to avoid the way we behave with technology.

Speaking of technology, the best part was where he describes how he used to send things out to be typed, by the mail, using a new envelope he would buy for the purpose at the nearby stationary store; all the people he would interact with. He had a crush on the post office counter girl, and purports that she would do things like frizz her hair or wear black lipstick just to entertain her clientele. I like that little appreciation for how we are all part of a big promenade, here to entertain our neighbors and be entertained in our turn.

After his lovely vignette about the post office, he concludes, “Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.”

Finally a quote from his son: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter

I will get through this whole review without using the word “charming.”

Beatrix Potter is a hero of mine. She was a talented illustrator who wanted to do nature drawings for scientific journals. Her claim to fame ended up being Peter Rabbit. This plus 21 other tiny little books of tales served as my bedtime reading this week. We found a complete boxed set at a used book store. While I was familiar with Peter Rabbit, had read Beatrix’s bio, and named a goat after her, I had never read the complete tales until now.

It was a joy. Apart from the fact that the animals wear clothing, the illustrations and even many of the tales are very true to life. Peter Rabbit looks and feels very bunnylike indeed after losing his shoes and coat, lost and disoriented and damp from hiding in the watering can. The dogs, mice, badgers, frogs, “puddleducks”, hens, piglets, etc. inhabiting this world, while engaging in people-like pursuits, keep their respective animal natures about them. One of my favorite tales involved two mice ransacking a dollhouse. After trying and failing to eat the tiny plaster food, they commence making a general mess and then spiriting various objects down their mousehole. Very mousey. Next morning, the dolls just stare and smile.

Beatrix lost her fiance tragically during a long engagement insisted upon by her parents, to whom she felt duty but little more. When they had both passed away, and she had inherited and earned money enough, she left the city she never liked and bought herself a farm among her beloved lakes. She came to life. And she was instrumental in preserving the local breed of sheep. I just felt like putting in a plug of why she’s my hero.

by Peggy Ornstein

Basically, this woman tries all of my hobbies.

Specifically, she shears, cards, spins, dyes, and knits “the world’s ugliest sweater.”

She does this during pandemic times – and megadrought times. I can’t believe she undertook dyeing with a drought going on – surely negates all her other attempts at being a socially conscious crafter.

There’s way too much digression. For example, a chapter on indigo treats us to two pages on Joni Mitchell’s BLUE album. I don’t like when books do this – purport to be about a certain topic, then stray. I didn’t sign up to read about your affinity for Joni Mitchell or what you did during the pandemic or your family. I signed up to read about shearing, spinning, and dyeing.

So, sticking to the topics at hand:

Shearing isn’t very popular as a lifestyle choice because there are “many other ways to make a living that don’t require bending over for eight hours a day while an ungulate kicks you in the face.” Well put! In another blast of the reality of shearing, a sheep comments on her technique by letting loose a “gigantic mound of poop pellets” during the process. Shearing: well captured. Onward!

Carding and spinning chapters weren’t so interesting, so let’s skip to the dyeing. Acid dyes for home use might as well not exist; Author seems to think she has to do natural dyeing. Thus, the reader “might notice I mention yellow a lot.” Confirmed: trying to dye with natural materials you find in your immediate environment means you had better like yellow. Natural dyeing: spot-on! Next!

Knitting. Author undertakes a sweater even though she knows it would have been wiser to choose a shawl or cowl pattern. One small reason she chose the unwiser path is that she admits to “never, under any circumstances, wearing either of those garments.” Yes – let’s face it. Shawls and cowls are just not normal wardrobe options. They’re things knitters like because they are easy and/or use little yarn.

I was put off by Author’s mathophobia. Mathophobia is tiring to read about. “Even writing the phrase ‘set of ratios’ gives me a headache.” Po widdle bebby. Math is hard!!

BUT… Author wins my love again when she correctly identifies the kinship of knitting with programming! Knitting is coding – “with knits and purls replacing the standard binary 0s and 1s.” Knitting patterns are programs (this is me talking). Garbage in, garbage out. Follow the steps, get a repeatable result.

Certainly could not resist this book and hope it encourages just one person out there to try their hand at – almost said ‘sheep-to-shawl’ crafting, but let’s make it ‘sheep-to-article-you’ll-actually-wear’ crafting.

by Jane Austen

This was a re-read, of course.

My new impressions this time were how insufferable Mary Musgrove was. I always remembered her as merely a bit of a whiner.

The BBC adaptation that came to theaters in America in September 1995 always sticks with me. Of course, I don’t remember the very date we saw it, but September or October would have been likely, as Maggie & I would have run right out for it. Most memorable was that Xopher came with us, and didn’t hate it. He was different then.