books-and-reading on jabel

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:01:37 -0400

A bit sad to say I’ve finished Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I’ll be buying a copy so I can have the comfort of its presence. Next up is the book I’ve been heading toward for months: Gregory Shaw’s Theurgy and the Soul. After that I’m returning to uncle Wendell’s fiction.

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:01:12 -0400

I’m in the final twenty pages of Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I estimate I’ve understood a third, kinda understood a third, and not at all understood a third; it has, nevertheless, been worth it. There’s so much here to think about. Reading it took me back to those first few years after leaving the Holiness churches when I was reading academic theology that was way over my head. It pushed me in important ways, and sent me on so many side quests.

What led me to this book was a desire to have a fuller understanding of imagination/“the imaginal” as something more than “fantasy.” That led me first to Corbin’s lecture on Mundus Imaginalis (pdf) and then to this book. I think I have the beginnings of that fuller understanding now, for which I am very grateful to Corbin. Just don’t ask me to put it in my own words yet. :) That’ll take more time.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:56:07 -0400

Finished reading Ann the Word by Richard Francis. The writer was a bit snarky in places but it was an engaging biography. I’m a bit sad it’s over. I’m done with Shaker reading for the moment but I wouldn’t be surprised if I come back to it. There’s plenty more.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:07:04 -0400

Finished reading All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memior by Emilee Hackney. Holy crap, what a book. I haven’t been that engrossed in a book in a long time. Highly recommended.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:58:22 -0400

Emilee Hackney:

To this day, I’ve never been to an Appalachian funeral where there wasn’t a preacher and a sermon.

It’s the same around here. I keep hearing that cremation is now the majority practice but I can count on one hand the number of services or memorials I’ve attended that involved a cremated body. Here, the body is almost always in an open casket and the funeral service always has a preacher, who preaches a sermon well more than half the time. Elsewhere funerals may have changed a lot over the years but my experience of them is essentially unchanged since childhood.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:55:28 -0400

Started reading All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir by Emilee Hackney a couple of days ago. I’m about a hundred pages in and I think this is going to be a good one.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:05:40 -0400

Finished reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Thanks to @jaheppler for reminding me of it. As I read it, the phrase kept rolling through my mind, “the empire must die.” Selfishly, for my family’s sake, I hope its death is not sudden and violent. Maybe there was a time when the empire wasn’t thoroughly corrupt; I wouldn’t know. It’s lies all the way down at this point though. I don’t know what would come next, or whether it would be better. For the sake of a better world, however, the empire must die.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:39:43 -0400

Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:

The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward—never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing— it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:40:05 -0400

It’s strange how a competent biography that attempts to explain someone’s motivations and context can make them more sympathetic. Because, y’all, if Ann Lee was operating today, not one of us would think she’s worth listening to. Not that anyone is holding her up as a model, but you know what I mean

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:14:37 -0400

This wonderful story was alluded to in an Emerald episode on death: “The Story of Jumping Mouse” (pdf)

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:13:02 -0400

Finished reading Tools For Engagement: Reclaiming Craft in an Age of Technology by Joshua Klein and Mike Updegraff. This book is full of Joshua and Mike’s characteristic blend of woodworking history, craft philosophy, technological criticism, and practical skills. I appreciate the way they have never let theory drift far from practice. Embodied intellect.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 06:57:14 -0400

Jaroslav Pelikan, as quoted in Tools for Engagement:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

It matters what thoughts we think with

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:24:39 -0400

Klein and Updegraff, Tools for Engagement:

It’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for us to first recognize that it’s good to be human—inefficiencies, blunders, and all. We are not machines, nor should we desire to be. This means taking a strong stand against what author Wendell Berry describes as “our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.” Berry goes further: “We should banish from our speech and writing any use of the word ‘machine’ as an explanation or definition of anything that is not a machine. Our understanding of creatures and our use of them are not improved by calling them machines.”

Rather than regard ourselves as biological mechanisms calibrated to efficiency and expediency, it would be better to think of ourselves as trees who anchor our roots in the earth yet reach our branches up into the heavens. This metaphor invites us to think of our work in terms of fruitfulness rather than output. As a tree slowly, imperceptibly, organically adds layers of depth and rooted strength as it matures to production, so we too grow imperceptibly over time and through experience. We have times of rest and restoration, times of leafing out, and times of pruning. And the end result of this quiet, patient process is a crown laden with good things to share: apples, acorns, peaches. This is the model of human life and work that our culture desperately needs to recover, because it is the very way that we will acquire the ability to express ourselves creatively and competently.

As Donna Haraway has said, it matters what thoughts we think with.

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:33:09 -0400

Finished reading Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Highly recommended, if you couldn’t tell by all my quotations from it. The great gift of strange books like this is a fresh pair of eyes. There’s always something invigorating in a Jungian perspective, even when I don’t end up fully adopting it.

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:03:20 -0400

You may have noticed how much I’ve been quoting Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality lately. It’s been so engaging that about a third of the way through I knew I needed to return the library copy and buy my own.

Which I received today. Flipping through it tonight I came across the publisher on the copyright page:

Guys, that’s like right over there. I’m not sure you can appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that this book I love so much was published by a company not five minutes from my house—in this obscure town. I am restraining myself from going on and on here. Suffice it to say I might actually call this publishing company tomorrow just to say “what the hell?”

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:42:42 -0400

Many years ago, mom needed some books to fill up her bookshelves so I gave her some that I still had around but no longer cared about. Now I’m cleaning out some stuff in her house and there are a few I’m taking back to my shelves. There was a time when Wilson and Sproul were very important to me, despite one of them becoming quite notorious of late. I told a friend recently never to be embarrassed about who they were before; that’s what makes them who they are now.

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:39:00 -0400

It’s ridiculous, really, that I haven’t read any of the Foxfire books yet. I’ve checked out from the library an ebook edition of The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cooking to get me started and I’m going to keep an eye out for used copies of the main series.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:08:10 -0400

Finished reading Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind by Tara Couture. Wonderful, wonderful. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. 📚

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:39:57 -0400

David Bentley Hart has a translation of the Tao Te Ching coming out in May. I may have to add that to my collection of translations. Interview with Hart about the book here.

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:01:17 -0400

Since reading a great quote shared by @ReaderJohn earlier today, ordinariness has been on my mind and I thought I’d share a couple of books. Coincidentally, I received this in the mail today: Radiance of the Ordinary: Essays on Life, Death, and the Sinews that Bind. Another book I came across a few years ago but still haven’t read: The Tao of Ordinariness: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissitic Age.

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:58:16 -0400

I’ve found myself referring to the notes and bibliography of Finding Lights in a Dark Age even more than usual. One entry in the bibliography that grabbed my attention today: Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:55:57 -0400

So is The Cotton Patch Evidence by Dallas Lee the book to read if I want to learn more about Clarence and Florence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm?

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:53:22 -0400

When I’m looking through the library catalogue for books on the Amish, it’s very annoying to have to filter through all the bonnet rippers .

Update on my Anabaptist reading

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:05:41 -0400

Currently reading:

The Amish Way by Kraybill, Nolt, Weaver-Zercher

Finished reading:

Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof by Markus Baum. Engaging biography. Will be reading more about the Bruderhof.
Becoming Anabaptist by J. Denny Weaver. Focused on the Reformation era. Historical books often lose my interest (my fault, not theirs) but this one did not.

Future plans:

More by Kraybill
The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder. My reading log says I read this in February 2011. Around the same time I read Nonviolence by Kurlansky, An Ethic for Christians by Stringfellow, A Confession by Tolstoy, and some others that tell me what was on my mind fifteen years ago.

Abandoned:

The Naked Anabaptist by Stuart Murray. Wasn’t what I was looking for.
The Anabaptist Story by William Estep. Nothing wrong with it. It’s just that Becoming Anabaptist grabbed my attention and two books on Reformation-era Anabaptists would be overkill for my purposes.

Why am I doing this? Now and then (once a year or so?), I feel a surge of new, loosely-connected interests. Sometimes this results in some new ideas and sometimes it just adds to my store of useless knowledge. I’ve learned to go with it.

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:18:06 -0400

On my morning commute (i.e., walking a few blocks to work!), I’ve started listening to Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce. I think this is going to be a good one.

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:31:00 -0400

I’m honestly a bit surprised how much I’m enjoying this biography of Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof. To be fair, it’s a friendly biography. Still, he’s an interesting guy.

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:29:14 -0400

I wanted to learn a bit more about the archangel Raphael so I read the book of Tobit today, which I had not read before. What a wonderful story! Sparrow droppings and fish guts and even a dog!

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:24:16 -0400

Finished reading: Angels in the Cellar: Notes from a French Vineyard by Peter Hahn. I cannot recommend this beautiful book highly enough. Every page was a joy to read. Special thanks to @JohnBrady for sending it to me.

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:59:18 -0400

Fresh from Henry County, Kentucky

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:39:39 -0400

My friend and neighbor has a new book out today: Orthodox Saints of Wales

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:30:48 -0400

Pretty excited about this one. I started reading it online through the university library just to get a taste, and within five pages decided I had to buy it and put aside everything else I’m reading until I’m through it.

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 17:42:04 -0400

Finished reading Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. Thanks to @toddgrotenhuis for mentioning it. The lesson that will stay with me is that a relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain–and not only metaphorically. In fact, we may have to sometimes embrace pain as a way to reset a healthy balance.

Fri, 10 May 2024 12:36:45 -0400

I’m on the road today—driving from Salem to Paoli to French Lick to Loogootee, looking for old tools in junk shops and flea markets. Listening to the Why We Drive audiobook, appropriately enough.

Tue, 07 May 2024 17:59:23 -0400

Wow! Testimony of Paul Robeson before HUAC in 1956. Audio is a reenactment by James Earl Jones but the words are from the hearing itself. More about Paul Robeson.

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:20:11 -0400

Finished reading Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop and Ajax Penumbra 1969, both by Robin Sloan. I’ve read his newsletter for a while so I figured it was time to start catching up on his books, especially with a new one coming out this year. Sourdough and its associated novella are next.

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:12:14 -0400

Rhyd Wildermuth has just published an excellent article on degrowth (paywalled).

Put as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.

And he uses an excellent analogy with credit cards:

Readers in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.

What often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.

Degrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.

Fossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.

Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.

Where does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.

Degrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?

My first real introduction to degrowth was Jason Hickel’s book. And based on Rhyd’s article, looks like I need to read this book by Kohei Saito.

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 16:41:15 -0400

I’m looking forward to this book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth by Dana O’Driscoll (Grand Archdruid of the AODA). It looks like a great mix of both practical and spiritual work for those who want to contribute to renewing the land.

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 08:08:44 -0400

Finished reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. The best thing about this book was the way Chambers imaginatively de-centered humans. Apart from that, I can’t say it ever quite gripped me. I’m interested enough to read the next book though.

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 15:30:27 -0400

At the moment, my plan is to continue reading Wendell Berry’s fiction until I’ve read it all. Using Tom Murphy’s site as my source (and excluding some hard-to-find small press titles), here’s how it stands:

✔ Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
✔ The Memory of Old Jack
The Wild Birds
✔ Remembering
Fidelity
Watch With Me
A World Lost
✔ Jayber Crow
✔ Hannah Coulter
That Distant Land
Andy Catlett: Early Travels
Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World
A Place in Time
The Art of Loading Brush
How It Went

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 15:23:59 -0400

Finished reading Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry. 📚 This was his first novel but my edition is the revised 1985 paperback. He edited it so that it would fit in what would become the overarching history of the Port William membership. I think I’ll read Hannah Coulter next.

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 18:44:35 -0400

Has anyone read Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale? I had a nice copy of that book that I acquired from Caveat Emptor in Bloomington many years ago—but at some point I sold it or gave it away. What a poor decision! And, obviously, I never read it.

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 09:44:01 -0400

Finished reading Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Beautiful and heart-breaking. I think I’ll keep working my way through his fiction.

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:26:40 -0400

I’ve been an admirer of Wendell Berry for over twenty years now—but, weirdly, I’ve only ever read his essays and poetry. I finally picked up one of his novels, Jayber Crow, and it’s being narrated in my head in Uncle Wendell’s mournful baritone. It’s a lovely experience.

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 10:15:03 -0400

The number of books I’ve read has dropped over the last couple of years because I no longer have a commute during which I can listen to audiobooks. And given the choice of working from home and reading fewer books or working in the office and listening to more audiobooks–that choice is trivially easy for me.

One consequence of this, however, is that I’ve read nearly zero fiction since COVID. Audiobooks were always the way I read fiction; I found that the format was perfect for fiction, less so for nonfiction. So I’ve been feeling the itch to get back to some fiction this winter. I’ve been accumulating a list of possibilities and I’m open to any suggestions:

Apuleius, The Golden Ass
Adam Roberts, The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate (mentioned by Alan Jacobs yesterday)
Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (weirdly, I follow his writing online but have never read his books)
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (this and the one below were recommended by the Weird Studies guys)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Daniel Mason, North Woods
Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 12:24:38 -0400

Finished reading When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Maté. Fewer case studies and biological details would have made this a perfect book for me—but I realize that’s a weird thing to ask of such a book. Nevertheless, extremely important ideas here.

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 09:01:45 -0400

Finished reading Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson. Great, short introduction to the subject by a Jungian analyst. It’s an important idea, despite its popularity among young people who have not lived long enough to have developed much of a shadow. 😉

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:28:47 -0400

Currently reading Gabor Maté’s book When the Body Says No: Exploring The Stress-Disease Connection. Wonderful book. I’m going to have to make some changes, based on this.

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 13:17:43 -0400

Interesting haul at half price books today

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:19:28 -0400

So Blood in the Machine starts with an epigraph from Run the Jewels? Dude, I’ve already bought the book—you don’t have to keep winning me over.

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:58:56 -0400

Cory Doctorow reviews Blood in the Machine, a forthcoming history of the Luddites. I’ve had it on pre-order since the day I heard about it. 📚

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 08:41:24 -0400

My current and upcoming reading pile 📚 What’s in yours?

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 18:04:51 -0400

I’m so glad to have maintained a log of the books I’ve read since 2005. Not least because it’s such a window into the ways I’ve changed over the years. Anyway, I’ve created a page that lists the books in reverse chronological order. Some gaps are true gaps and some are just record-keeping failures.

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 07:38:00 -0400

Now moving on from a book about limits on tools to one about simpler living.

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 07:30:37 -0400

Finished reading Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. Short book but not a quick read. Dense with ideas that, I believe, are crucial for people concerned about staying human in a time of rapidly accelerating technology.

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:28:34 -0400

I’m sad to finish Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Next, I would like to at least read The Portable Jung and the Red Book. Any other recommendations for an interested layman?

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:13:01 -0400

I could read Memories, Dreams, Reflections all day long. It’s a book full of mysterious visions and dreams from a person who is among the deepest minds of the last few centuries—yet it is completely readable.

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:39:08 -0400

When I saw that @ayjay was reading Matthew B. Crawford’s book Why We Drive, it inspired me to revisit Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, particularly since I’ve started woodworking this year. I read the original article when it came out in 2006 (seventeen years ago!) and was thrilled by it and the book that followed. Rather than completing the re-read, though, I’m moving on to The Word Beyond Your Head, which may be more relevant to what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:23:28 -0400

So Cory Doctorow’s new book is about an accountant?? I’m in. To be fair, it’s a book about a forensic accountant, those Humphrey Bogarts of the accounting world that the rest of us can only admire.

The most important book I read this year: Wild Mind, Wild Earth

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:11:00 -0400

David Hinton’s new book is an exploration and treatment of the wound deep in our culture—the illusion of separateness from the natural world. Our Greek and Christian cultural inheritance tells us that we are spirit-centers standing outside and above our fellow-travelers on the planet and our truly important kinship is with the divine, immaterial world. The result has been climate change, deforestation, pollution, mass extinction, and the malaise within humans themselves.

But we have not always held the illusion of separateness and we are beginning to recover from it again. He discusses the thought of Lao Tzu and the influence it had on an ancient China that is in many ways similar to the modern West. He traces the beginnings of a recovery from the illusion of separateness here in the West beginning with the Romantic poets, through Robinson Jeffers, and into ecological thought.

He does not, however, present this modern recovery as assured. One of the most mind-shifting points he makes is that the illusion of separateness and its later manifestation in colonialism and capitalism are in fact a successful short-term evolutionary adaptation. Obviously, it will be a disaster in the long-term—and we’re in the beginning stages of that disaster now. It is not assured, however, that the powers-that-be will abandon that paradigm.

What we face, in fact, is a philosophical and spiritual problem. The wound is deep and technological fixes will never be sufficient. We need a philosophical and spiritual revolution that discards the illusion of separateness and re-integrates humanity into the natural world. With this book, Hinton convincingly lays out our task and leads us to ancestors who can guide us in it.

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 21:06:22 -0400

Finished reading The Green Man by Kathleen Basford. Actually, there isn’t a lot of text—mostly great pictures of Green Man and related architectural decoration. These are a few of my favorites.

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 07:37:23 -0400

If all goes as planned, I am three days away from visiting Muir Woods, so I’m reading this in earnest. Very good so far.

Tue, 03 May 2022 10:17:06 -0400

Thanks to Austin Kleon for telling us there was a word for this: tsundoku. I work at my kitchen table, so here is the pile that sits just behind my work laptop.

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 11:16:00 -0400

I really enjoyed looking through this collection of random pairings of books from Robert van Vliet’s library. There’s something very appealing about his method.

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 05:54:34 -0400

Last night I was walking through Donaldson Woods, one of the few remaining stands of old-growth forest remaining in Indiana, and thought to myself, “What’s new with pantheism?”

So once I regained cell phone reception, I found this book by Mary Jane Rubenstein. Also, this video of her is well worth a few minutes of your time: “Why We Need Pantheism”.

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 14:53:19 -0400

If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.

Hannah Arendt, as quoted by Samantha Rose Hill in her essay “Thinking is Dangerous”. The essay is part of a newly announced project on Hannah Arendt that includes events and a podcast.

I recommend Samantha Rose Hill’s Substack.

I also recommend Richard J. Bernstein’s book Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

Rachel and I recently watched an excellent film about Arendt. (I came across an article challenging its historical accuracy so perhaps don’t wholly rely on it.)

Finally, to round this out, I’m including below some notes I made a few years ago on one of Arendt’s essays.

In “Truth and Politics” (pdf), Hannah Arendt discusses the vulnerability of facts. Facts are contingent; events may have happened otherwise. Unlike mathematical truth, facts are not axiomatic. If facts are suppressed or distorted, they may not be recoverable.

_Facts can be inconvenient: “Facts are beyond agreement and consent. … Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies.” Given this and the vulnerability of facts, political power is a particular danger. “The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed”. _

_Facts may be suppressed and forgotten over time, but modern technology makes a 1984-style memory hole difficult. More likely is the strategy of transforming facts into opinions. When the liar cannot make his lie stick, he “does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his ‘opinion,’ to which he claims his constitutional right.” _

Another way political power may defeat facts is through the use of “organized lying”. Because facts describe events that could have been otherwise, an equally plausible counter-narrative can be fashioned by political power. “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truthteller.”

_The consequence of such widespread substitution of lies for truth is that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed. … Consistent lying, metaphorically speaking, pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand.” _

Or, as Yeats wrote:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 10:02:02 -0400

After reading this post on canonical address books by @annahavron, it occurred to me that something like a physical record of important information that could be referenced by someone upon our deaths would be a great idea. I mentioned this to my wife Rachel and she said she saw something like that at our local bookstore and - after some searching - we found I’m Dead. Now What?, an organizer built for this very thing. We’ve ordered one for ourselves and one for our in-laws. I feel like Caitlin Doughty would be proud.

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 15:52:53 -0400

Started reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. 📚 Quoting Seneca, Charles Eisenstein, and Marilynne Robinson all in the introduction? He’s singing my song.

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 10:52:09 -0400

Washington Post: “An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.”

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 10:06:58 -0400

I received my order from Half Letter Press, which focuses on booklets and independent publishing. Check them out, lots of interesting stuff there.

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 12:17:21 -0400

I love books and lists - and book lists most of all. This post by Mario Villalobos brought two books in particular to my attention: How to Write One Song and How to Resist Amazon and Why. I’m listening to the former on audiobook (via Audible - so much for resisting Amazon) and reading the latter as an ebook through my local library. As I opened up How to Resist Amazon, I noticed that the publisher Microcosm is based in Portland, OR which my family and I visited in June 2021. One of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. Absolutely fell in love with the parts of the state we were able to visit.

Microcosm, it turns out, publishes/distributes a lot of zines, which I’ve taken an interest in lately. So naturally I bought the zine version of the aforementioned How to Resist Amazon plus their zine superpack.

Sometimes the internet doesn’t suck.

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:55:00 -0400

Useful distinctions from Erich Fromm’s book On Disobedience

📚 What I Read in 2021 📚

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 15:55:00 -0400

While I read fewer books in 2021 than in prior years, those books had a large impact on me. The main themes were silence, technology, and Zen Buddhism. (I wrote about my exploration of silence and solitude in this post.) My favorite books of the year were Less is More, Opening the Hand of Thought, The Wild God of the World, and Breaking Bread with the Dead.

China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel
Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer
The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein
The Provisioner by Rhyd Wildermuth
Ned Ludd and Queen Mab by Peter Linebaugh
The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
Greening of the Self by Joanna Macy
Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter
Hermits by Peter France
The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides
Solitude by Anthony Storr
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow
Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama
Privacy is Power by Carissa Veliz
Refining Your Life by Dogen and Uchiyama
The Wild God of the World by Robinson Jeffers
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs

📚 What I Read in 2021 📚

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 14:55:05 -0400

China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel
Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer
The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein
The Provisioner by Rhyd Wildermuth
Ned Ludd and Queen Mab by Peter Linebaugh
The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
Greening of the Self by Joanna Macy
Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter
Hermits by Peter France
The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides
Solitude by Anthony Storr
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow
Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama
Privacy is Power by Carissa Veliz
Refining Your Life by Dogen and Uchiyama
The Wild God of the World by Robinson Jeffers
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:29:00 -0400

From Erich Fromm, On Disobedience (nearly every line of this book so far is worth quoting):

In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. But courage is not enough. The capacity for courage depends on a person’s state of development. Only if a person has emerged from mother’s lap and father’s commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say “no” to power, to disobey.

A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. But not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom is also the condition for disobedience. If I am afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say “no,” I cannot have the courage to be disobedient. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:42:00 -0400

One of the things I’m most grateful for this year is the opening of an independent bookstore nearby. Actually it is a re-opening: the owner was originally put out of business (as I recall) when Borders and Barnes and Noble came to town in the 90s. The Borders closed several years ago and the Barnes and Noble closed during the big wave of closing in the last couple of years. Now Morgenstern’s is back, complete with a cafe, lots of seating, and a clear investment in promoting the local community.

My family and I have had a lot of fun hanging out there weekly since it opened. I have discovered so many books that I never would have come across through my usual ways - and I’m a person who actively seeks out books! I’ve had to start a whole new book list to keep track of them. The joy of bookstore serendipity! 📚

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 11:42:00 -0400