BOOK: De Gelukkige Klas - Theo Thijssen

Title: De Gelukkige Klas
Author: Theo Thijssen
Genre: Novel (1926)
Publisher: Salamander Klassiek (Classics)
Pages: Hardcover 277
Language: Dutch
Rating: 7/10

Summary: The (fictional) diary of teacher Staal, writing about a year in the life of his class in an elementary school in 1926. The students are all from poor families and most of Staal's co-workers (and his wife) think those children don't need to learn anything, because they'll end up in shitty jobs or unemployed anyway. But Staal has ideals and wants the best for 'his' kids. Mostly he wants them to be happy.

Spoilerfree Review
What I like best about reading books that were written a long time ago is to recognize how people haven't changed one bit over time. They still have the same doubts and discussions these days. I'm sure if a present day teacher kept a diary, it would say exactly the same about the different kids in the class. The cheeky one, the shy one, the helpfull one, the mean one; all types are present. And you come to care about each and every one of them. When Mr. Staal has to decide who will benefit from the free language classes after school, you too want all the kids to get that chance.
Although Staal's thoughts and writing are often naive, he is certainly one of those teachers the kids will remember.

BOOK: Meneer Visser's Hellevaart - S. Vestdijk

Title: Meneer Visser's Hellevaart (Mr. Visser's perdition)
Author: Simon Vestdijk
Genre: Novel (1936)
Publisher: Salamander Klassiek (Classics)
Pages: Hardcover 340
Language: Dutch
Rating: 6/10

Summary: A day in the life of Mr. Visser, a small town man on a power trip. Written from his point of view, this is a disturbing look inside the mind of a sadist. Mr. Visser is obsessed with showing his superiority. Better to hurt others before they have a chance to find out what a sad little man he really is. He enjoys to make (and watch) people squirm. Especially his wife is an easy victim for his perverted pleasures. He loves to play nasty tricks on her and then tell his 'friends' all about how scared she got.
Today he is summoned by the police commissioner about an incident involving one of his tennants. Mr. Visser is slightly worried, but spends most of his day thinking about ways to get back at everybody who can potentially harm him. Any information he digs up about his friends and enemies will be used against them.

This brought back some bad memories, a very personal review
This story made me feel very uncomfortable. I had a rough time getting into the brain of Mr. Visser, not in the least because I recognized his unpleasant behavior. I don't want to give a certain member of my family too much credit, but this hit a little too close to home. It's an awfully good book, but if you are looking for a character to love you will not find it. This is a very raw look at the dark side of humans: the ability to hurt other people by playing with their feelings and messing with their minds. It's something I inherited and I definitely do not need to be reminded of having that power. It brings out the worst in people. The story made me shiver.

BOOK: Metamagical Themas - Douglas R. Hofstadter

Title: Metamagical Themas:
Subtitle: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter
Genre: Science
Publisher: Basic Books (Perseus)
Pages: Paperback -unknown- read up until page 400 (Oct2008)
Language: English.
Rating: 9/10

I've been reading this book for a while, but I haven't finished it yet. As it was on loan from brotherdearest, who wanted to share it with more people, I had to return it to him after getting about half way (page 400;) Despite it being a rather scientifical book, it has touched me emotionally. I have been sharing the awesome in my live journal, I am now parking those exerpts and reviews by chapter here.

Comments are encouraged!

Metamagical Themas:
Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Section II, Chapter 5:
Sense & Society: World Views in Collision
"How come Truth is such a slippery beast"
When I was younger, I used to believe that once something had been discovered, verified, and published, it was then part of Knowledge: definitive, accepted, and irrevocable. Only in unusual cases, so I thought, would opposing claims then continue to be published. To my surprise, however I found that the truth has to fight constantly for its life! That an idea has been discovered and printed in a "reputable journal" does not ensure that it wil become well known and accepted. In fact, usually it will have to be rephrased en reprinted many different times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth than in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and socioligists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just as narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!). The idea that the truth has to fight for its life is a sad discovery. The idea that the truth will not out, unless it is given a lot of help, is pretty upsetting.

Read discussion on 'Truth' here

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Metamagical Themas:
Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Section II, Chapter 6:
Sense & Society: On Number Numbness
A rather mathematical chapter
"A computer doing a billion operations per seconds would really be moving along. Imagine breaking up one second into as many tiny fragments as there are seconds in 30 years. That is how tiny a nanosecond - a billionth of 1 second - is. To a computer, a second is a lifetime! Of course, the computer is dawdling compared with the events inside the atoms that compose it. Take one atom. A typical electron circling a typical nucleus makes about 10¹⁵ orbits per second, which is to say, a million orbits per nanosecond. From an electron's-eye point of view, a computer is as slow as molasses in January.[...]

At the other end of the scale, there is the slow, stately twirling of our galaxy, which makes a leisurely complete turn every 200 million years or so. And within the solar system, the planet Pluto takes about 250 years to complete an orbit of the sun. Speaking of the sun, it is about a million miles across and has a mass on the order of 10³⁰ kilograms. The earth is a featherweight in comparison, a mere 10²⁴ kilograms. [...]

These large and small numbers are so far beyond our ordinary comprehension that it is virtually impossible to keep on being more amazed. The numbers are genuinely beyond understanding - unless one has developed a vivid feeling for various exponents. And even with such an intuition, it is hard to give the universe its awesome due for being so extraordinarily huge and at the same time so extraordinarily fine-grained. Number numbness sets in early these days. Most people seem entirely unfazed by words such as "billion" and "trillion"; they simply become synonyms for the meaningless "zillion".
This hit me particularly hard a few times after I had finished a draft of this column [May 1982]. I was reading the paper, and I came across an article on the subject of nerve gas. It stated that President Reagan expected the expenditures for nerve gas to come to about $800 million in 1983, and $1.4 billion in 1984. I was upset, but I caught myself being thankful that it was not $10 billion or $100 billion. Then, all at once, I really felt ashamed of myself. That guy had some nerve gas! How could I have been relieved by the figure of a "mere" $1.4 billion? How could my thoughts have become so dissociated from the underlying reality? One billion for nerve gas is not mereley lamentable; it is odious. We cannot afford to become number-number than we are. We need to be willing to be jerked out of our apathy, because this kind of "joke" is in very poor taste.

Survival of our species is the name of the game. I don't really care if the number of mosquitos in Africa is greater or less than the number of pennies in the gross national product. [...] I don't care a hoot about pointless, silly images of colossal magnitudes. What I do care about is what a billion dollars represents in terms of buying power: lunches for all the schoolkids in New York for a year, a hundred libraries, fifty jumbo jets, [...] and so on.

[...] I want people to understand the very real consequences of those very surreal numbers bandied about in the newspaper headlines as interchangeably as movie stars' names in the scandal sheets. [...] At bottom, we are dealing with perceptual questions, but ones with life-and-death consequences!"

It's quite difficult to find a fragment to summarize the awesome pieces. I hope this made sense. You are invited to discuss the subject or point out typos:) Feel free to comment with a ? or a request for an explanation/addition;) Read discussion on 'Numbers' here

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Metamagical Themas:
Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Section II, Chapter 7: Sense & Society:
Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness
I had planned a long explanation about why this particular part of the book made me cry (in public!). But I can't find the words to express how much this piece touched me. I guess it was a combination of recognition (some sort of relieve that I wasn't imagining this issue) and powerless anger (it that even an expression in english?) - because I know this battle isn't over.

In this column Hofstadter talks about the deep, hidden, and oft-denied connections between subconscious imagery and discriminatory usage in everyday language. More specifically: default sexism.

It's about how we say "Come on, guys" to a group of people of mixed gender or even a group of girls and how if you would say "Come on, girls" to any other group it's considered demeaning. Or how we have different titles for a married woman and a single woman (who is -in addition- known by her 'maiden' name) I could quote more accurately, but it would just make me angry and upset again, and then I lose the ability to get my point across.

If the examples above make you wonder why I'm making such a big deal of this, you should definitely read the magnificent piece Hofstadter wrote to illustrate the issue. It may not hit you as hard as it hit me, but it will make you think.

Before I give you the link to the article, I'll let Hofstadter tell you why he wrote it: "I was provoked to write the following piece about a year after the column on sexism came out. [November 1982] It came about this way. One evening I had a very lively conversation at dinner with a group of people who thought of the problem of sexist language as no more than that: dinner-table conversation. Despite all the arguments I put forth, I just couldn't convince them there was anything worth taking seriously there. The next morning I woke up and heard two most interesting pieces of news on the radio: a black Miss America had been picked, and a black man was going to run for president. Both of these violated default assumptions, and it set my mind going along two parallel tracks at once: What if people's default assumptions were violated in all sorts of ways both sexually and racially? And then I started letting the default violations cross all sorts of lines, and pretty soon I was coming up with an image of a totally different society, one in which... Well, I'll just let you read it."

A Person Paper on Purity in Language

Read discussion on 'Default sexism' here

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