what are you reading?

[MrCarmady]

foundations of micro and macroeconomics, and statistics for people who (think they) hate statistics

you doing a course or just auto-didacting? the prices of university textbooks always make me laugh

[thoxans]

both. but yeah textbooks are a complete racket. the best profs just straight up tell the students to purchase last year's edition. for a thirtieth of the cost, you can get a used textbook that's 99.9% exactly the same as the current edition. the only difference is the new ed uses ariana grande in a word problem, whereas last year's ed used beyonce

[wba]

I'm currently reading a novel about Arsène Lupin from the 1920s, who seems like an obnoxious, narcissistic asshole, which makes his "adventures" somewhat hard to stomach. It seems I'm reading the only novel where he's a youth though, so maybe he isn't as unbearable in the other stories as he is in this one. Don't think I'll read another one by Maurice Leblanc, though. Maybe one by Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau at some point in the future.

[Roscoe]

Maybe one by Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau at some point in the future.

VERTIGO is worth a read. I've never seen the movie in the same light since.

I'm reading THE ILIAD, and getting ready for some good solid Donald Westlake when I'm done with it.

[wba]

Maybe one by Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau at some point in the future.

VERTIGO is worth a read. I've never seen the movie in the same light since.

I've recently read their debut novel (as a writing duo) "She Who Was No More" (1952) which was the inspiration for Henri-Georges Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES (1954) and though I am not a fan of this particular Clouzot film (for me it's easily his worst and most boring film) the novel made me appreciate the film so much more... cause Clouzot took a rather obvious and lame idea and actually made something out of it. I was baffled by the lameness of the idea(s) in the original novel and not surprised that the two authors praised Clouzot and his ingenuity of not adapting the novel at all but making something far more interesting out of some of their central motifs and twists in an afterword of a later edition. This doesn't make LES DIABOLIQUES a better film, but now I can respect the genious of Clouzot (which was huge anyway) in regards to his construction of this specific film much more. It still doesn't work, but he was close to making it work. Hitchcock probably would have made a masterpiece if he had been given Clouzot's script, and at least something funnier and sexier if he had tried to adapt the novel as it is.
So as I'm actually planning to read that Vertigo-book by the duo next, I hope it doesn't treat its central ideas in a similarly idiotic way (or maybe I just felt like the writers took me for an idiot while reading "She Who Was No More"). I've heard that there's a trio of women in the novel (instead of the duo in Hitch's, where one at first always somehow assumed that the Stewart-character should have met someone like the female protagonist before in his past (and maybe 'classically' thought about his mother) - but leaving that aspect out of the film was another of Hitch's ingenious ideas, cause in that way he could pronounce for example the idea of being in love with an image/fetish more clearly) and am looking forward to such an interpretation, though I doubt my idea of Vertigo could be changed by the book as Hitchcock is so much interested in doing his own thing in most of his work anyway, that I'm not going to read the novel as a direct connection to the film or as a help in "understanding" the film anyway (which is for me all in Hitch's psychosexual makeup and the ways he plays with his own fears and desires), as I 'd be surprised to discover that the writers were as ingenious as Hitchcock and implied that the protagonist wants to actually be that woman (what was back then interpreted more in the lines of necrophilia and mysoginy instead of a reading of Stewart as a closeted transgender person, which in my opinion is more interesting) instead of 'merely' being obsessed by her. Anyways, I'm hoping for a good read, as the two writers appear to have talent (even if I think that their debut was a disappointment in the "mystery" department, and what they were trying to "sell" the reader was totally lame).

[Roscoe]

I'll reserve comment until you've read Boileau/Narcejac's D'ENTRE LES MORTS/VERTIGO. For me it was about the interesting twists that Hitchcock put on the material, the economics and historical context, and most especially the second half leading up to the finale. One of the few cases of a Hollywood film adding perversity to material rather than vigorously scrubbing it out.

[sally]

has anyone read the short stories of felisberto hernandez? 'the usher' in piano stories is ARGH! THE! short story about the coming of sound to silent cinema WOW

[nrh]

has anyone read the short stories of felisberto hernandez? 'the usher' in piano stories is ARGH! THE! short story about the coming of sound to silent cinema WOW

piano stories is one of my all time favorite books. looking at the story now and realizing i don't remember the usher all that well, which is maybe i sign to re-read the whole book before the year is over...

[sally]

well i may be over interpreting what with watching so many silent films, but yes, enjoying it all very much, like an other side of the world bruno schulz.

[wba]

has anyone read the short stories of felisberto hernandez? 'the usher' in piano stories is ARGH! THE! short story about the coming of sound to silent cinema WOW

no, but I will now.

[der kulterer]

i am reading a bilingual edition (published by Twisted Spoon Press) of "User's Manual" by Jiří Kolář...
https://www.twistedspoon.com/users-manual.html
there are 52 “action poems” (written in the 1950s and ’60s) for 52 weeks, accompanied with 52 collages.

WEEK 31: SONNET
Take a novel
you don't know
slice off the spine
remove the page numbers
and thoroughly jumble the pages
In this disorder
read the book
and in fourteen lines
summarize its contents.

about the author...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99% ... 3%A1%C5%99

Translator's Note:
How does language relate to the world?
This question lies at the heart of JK's work.
Both in his collages and in his poems, JK explicitly engages with the materiality of language:
he contorts it, recontextualizes it, cuts is up, and reappropriates it.
Whether gluing fragments of texts to a canvas or mimicking the patterns of everyday speech,
his work compels the reader/spectator to view language not as representation but as thing.

[kanafani]

A compelling history of giant factories, from the industrial revolution to the age of Foxconn. I particularly enjoyed certain topics I wasn't much familiar with, like the utopian Lowell mills, and Henry Ford's direct influence on the Soviet Union's early industrialization push. It did feel a little too brisk. Each chapter deserves its own thick book.

[wba]

I actually bought and started to read Robert Harris' novel THE SECOND SLEEP today at the way to work. I don't know why (was looking for something by Jörg Fauser...) but it happened.
Also reading BRACKE by Klabund from 1918, which is great.

[Roscoe]

I'd been reading Krasznahorkai's SEIOBO THERE BELOW and enjoying it, and then suddenly my interest just evaporated, I seem to have lost the thread somehow. I'll keep going for now, I guess, but other books are beckoning from the stacks....

[Monsieur Arkadin]

then suddenly my interest just evaporated, I seem to have lost the thread somehow.

I feel your pain. That happened to be about half way through Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire 4 months ago. I just picked it up again for the first time yesterday. I blame Pandemic Fatigue.

[der kulterer]

I never understand a single page of Kant, I literally don't understand what he's trying to tell me

https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jnitrous.html
William James
Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide

Some observations of the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to make by reading the pamphlet called The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy (Blood, 1874), have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which with pure gas is short an harmless enough. The effects will of course vary with the individual, just as they vary in the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intence metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at the cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.

The immense emotional sense of reconciliation which characterizes the "maudlin" stage of alcoholic drunkeness -- a stage which seems silly to lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a chief part of the temptation to the vice -- is well-known. The centre and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the meum and the tuum , are one. Now this, only a thousand-fold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea of representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanished in a higher unity in which it is based; that all contraditions, so-called, are of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are literally in the midst of an infinite , to perceive the existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the same as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to be striven about; and in this common topic, the same of both parties, the differences merge. From the hardest contradition to the tenderest diversity of verbiage deffierences evaporate; yes and no agree at least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same thing --- all opinions are thus synonyms, and synonymous, are the same. But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again difference and no-difference merge in one.

It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxixation, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thous, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgement of opposition, as "nothing--but," "no more--than," "only--if," etc., produced a perfect delirium of the theoretic rapture. And at last, when definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere form of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter. Let me transcribe a few sentences.

What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -usea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism --
How criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement -- disagreement!!
Emotion -- motion!!!!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech...!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL!
Oh my God, oh God; oh God!

The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this: There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract genus of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other words, although the flood of ontologic emotion was Hegelian through and through, the ground for it was nothing but the world-old principle that things are the same only so far and not farther that they are the same, or partake of a common nature -- the principle that Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the infinitude was realized by the mind) in to the sense of a dreadful and ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is incommensurable and in the light of which watever happens is indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and the inevitable outcome of the intoxication, if sufficiently prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesia, but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one -- this is the upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.

Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the clue. Something "fades," "escapes"; and the feeling of insight is changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion, astonishment. I know no more singulr sensation than this intense bewilderment, with nothing left to be bewildered at save the bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, a causa sui, or "spirit become its own object."

My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived, engender a very powerful emotion; that Hegel was so unusually susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to means he employed; that indifferentism is the true outcome of every view of the world which make infinity and continuity to be its sessence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.

[Roscoe]

Reading Arthur Lennig's biography of Erich von Stroheim. Good so far.

[thoxans]

basic business statistics: concepts and applications ::suicide emoji raised to the nth power::

[kanafani]

basic business statistics: concepts and applications ::suicide emoji raised to the nth power::

Can I work in your company once you start your start-up?

[thoxans]

the scfz film recommendation system is sure to make us billionaires

[flip]

why are you reading that?

[thoxans]

for a class. tbh i'm not dreading it that much; it's just that i've never been a 'math person.' but stats also seems very diff from other maths, in that i can actually see a tangible application

[Silga]

basic business statistics: concepts and applications ::suicide emoji raised to the nth power::

Thoxans reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF_brfZPmjM

[kanafani]

for a class. tbh i'm not dreading it that much; it's just that i've never been a 'math person.' but stats also seems very diff from other maths, in that i can actually see a tangible application

Come on, it can't be that hard, everyone knows 'math for business' is not real math

[thoxans]

:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WBFFoHATx8

[Silga]

[flip]

i know about that kind of stuff so if you want to talk about any of it, i'm happy to

and stats is very different from the rest of math, within math it's usually considered almost a completely separate discipline

[kanafani]

I'm not sure why this conversation made me remember something related to probability, not statistics, but many years ago, in a job interview, someone asked me this question, which I later discovered was a pretty popular problem:

You're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a fancy car; behind the other 2, there's nothing. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has nothing behind it. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2 instead?" Should you switch your choice, or should you stick to door No. 1?.

Since then, I've often asked this question to interviewees.

[brian d]

it's the monty hall problem you're supposed to switch, your odds go up to 50% from 33%. don't ask me to explain why it works though.

edit: it works because the host knew to open door 3 instead of door 2 since he knew which one it wasn't. never occurred to me fully before.

[MrCarmady]

the easiest way to explain the monty hall problem to people, since it initially feels unintuitive, is to imagine a scenario where there's 1,000 doors instead of 3. you pick door 767 and monty opens 998 other doors to show you there's nothing behind any of them, then asks if you wanna switch. obviously at this point you do because the chances that you were right to begin with are miniscule. whereas with three doors it still feels like it's a coin-flip decision when it obviously isn't.