This Old Book: 'Cosmic Consciousness'

February 10, 2013 Patrick LaForge

This 1901 book by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., formerly medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane in London, Canada, was reissued as a paperback in 1969, and apparently thousands of copies were sent to the used bookstores of Ithaca, N.Y., where I ran into so many copies of it that I finally broke down and bought one. "A classic investigation of the development of man's mystic relation to the infinite," the book describes something that might sound similar to zen enlightment, or a born-again Christian experience, or various other mystical states. There are charts and footnotes. The best part is the second half that lists a number of people -- some well-known historical figures, others individuals listed only by their initials -- who the doctor believed had attained this state of consciousness. They include: Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Paul (the saint), Mohammed, Bartolome le Casas, Francis Bacon, Honore de Balzac, Walt Whitman, Spinoza, Pushkin, Tennyson, and Thoreau. Among the anonymous adepts is H.B., who wrote of a realization that came upon him while reading the only copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" available in his town:

The first real mental illumination I remember to have experienced was when I saw that the universe exists in each of its individual atoms -- that is, the universe is the result of a few simple processes infinitely repeated. When a drop of water has been mathematically measured, every principle will have been used which would be called for in the measurement of hte heavens. All life on the globe is sustaned by digestion and assimilation; when by voluntary and traumatic action these stop death follows. The history of an individual mind is the history of the race. Know one thing in its properties and relations and you will know all things.

Th is Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Lost in the Cosmos'

February 4, 2013 Patrick LaForge

Walker Percy, a physician and practicing Catholic in the American South, wrote a number of interesting novels, the best-known perhaps being "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award in 1962 (or was it?), beating books by Salinger and Heller. But Percy also wrote some oddball nonfiction, including this one, billed as "The Last Self-Help Book." It seems to have been an attempt to puncture some of the astrological, spiritual and pseudo-therapy books on the market in the 1970s. It is a strange and entertaining read (marred, alas, by the casual homophobia of that time, among other flaws). The book is part humor, part spiritual quest, part a treatise on semiotics before that word was in vogue. It is also part self-help quiz, and part riff on Carl Sagan's popular science book "Cosmos," with one of the best arguments you'll ever read against suicide. You'll find that in the chapter entitled, "The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is something wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World."

'Ambiverts'

February 4, 2013 Patrick LaForge

"There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't." -- Robert Benchley

This recent piece in The Washington Post (via @danbenjamin) reminded me that the world is more than extroverts and introverts. Extroverts have tended to dominate the culture, for obvious reasons, but there has been a quiet and growing appreciation for introverts in recent years. But extreme introverts do have their challenges.

Well, there is a third way of being. There are also "ambiverts," people who display qualities of both groups. Research success they are more successful than the other two types of people. From The Post:

Extroverts can talk too much and listen too little. They can overwhelm others with the force of their personalities. Sometimes they care too deeply about being liked and not enough about getting tough things done.
But the answer — whether you’re pushing Nissans on a car lot or leading a major nonprofit or corporation — isn’t to lurch to the opposite end of the spectrum. Introverts have their own challenges. They can be too shy to initiate, too skittish to deliver unpleasant news and too timid to close the deal. Ambiverts, though, strike the right balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up, when to inspect and when to respond, when to push and when to hold back.

This Old Book: 'The Dog Is Us'

January 29, 2013 Patrick LaForge

Marcelle Clements was a hot writer in the 80s, with essays in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Village Voice and other soon-to-be fading beacons of the new journalism. The title essay from Rolling Stone is the lament of an ex-hippie who discovers that grown-up worries and responsibilities do not really mix well with a marijuana habit, as euphoria gives way to paranoia. Your high self used to laugh at the silly dog in the dorm room. Now your life is the dog, and it's no laughing matter. Other topics: the rise of the "mutant elite" (I still don't get that one); the evolution of the meaning of "cool"; why no New Yorker should ever go below 14th Street; the lives of anxious professional women in the big city; and other tropes of what people imagine life was like in Manhattan from about 1981 to 1985, when it was still gritty, and somewhat more affordable, and misery was apparently a pose that could sell magazines. She also has interviews with Klaus Kinski, Sting and a woman turned Sandinista guerrilla. It's quite the dog's breakfast, in other words. From the jacket blurb of this rumpled 1987 paperback: "A born social critic unafraid to feel bad about things, Marcelle Clements goes right to the heart of our post-sixties malaise. In this collection of trenchant, sometimes hilarious pieces, she examines..." Yadda, yadda. I was a dude in my own 20something malaise, but I pored over this book for clues to what life might be like down the road for an aspiring writer. I keep it now as some sort of artifact of that youth, when baby-boomer Clements was watching 40 approach fast. Whatever happened to her? It appears she eventually ventured below 14th Street (ha!), where she was teaching Proust at N.Y.U. Here's an interview from 2003.

Get Some Rest, Sleepyheads

January 28, 2013 Patrick LaForge

Last week, a 20-something on my staff said 6 hours of sleep a night was enough. I was skeptical. I used to sleep 9 or 10 hours a night in my 20s and 30s.

Those nights are gone. In the last few years, my sleep has been disrupted by breathing problems related to apnea. Sleeping with a CPAP breathing mask has helped, but I am still lucky to get 7 hours of uninterrupted rest. Lately, I have been using a blue light lamp, which seems to increase my alertness and improve my mood in the winter darkness. I also monitor my sleep with an app.

I am not alone in this obsession. In recent days, many articles about sleep have caught my eye on Twitter. There was the one about how when the brain ages, you get less, sleep, and that impairs your memory. It's particularly hard to get sleep in the short days of winter. Your exposure to light plays an important role (link via @noahWG). Top performers attribute their success (violinists, notably) to getting more than 8 hours of sleep every night, plus afternoon naps (link via @moorehn). So it's a little disturbing that 43 percent of Americans between 14 and 64 report getting a poor night's sleep on weeknights (via @nytjim).

When you consider how much we rely on other people to transport us, make things for us and feed us, it is alarming to think that so many of them are sleep-deprived.

Go to bed!

This Old Book: 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp'

January 27, 2013 Patrick LaForge

Remember zines? Before there was McSweeneys, before "A Staggering Work of Hearbreaking Genius," before The Believer, and so many other Dave Eggers projects, there was Might magazine, which could be found in certain obscure zine shops in the East Village (at least, that's where I found it). I still have most of the full run of Might in a box somewhere, but this 1998 paperback collects the best of its snarky Spy Lite vision. Eggers, the editor, was such an unknown at that point that his name appears nowhere on the cover, though there is an essay in here by him about the F word. Getting top billing is an essay by David Foster Wallace that I had completely forgotten until I just looked closely at this for the first time in a dozen years: "Hail the Returning Dragon, Clothed in New Fire," which tries to look on the bright side of AIDS. Yes, really. Also in here: Ted Rall's "College Is for Suckers." A piece by R.U. Sirius and another by the frontman for Soul Coughing, a band I barely remember. It's a strange little time capsule from the eve of the Internet age.

Caring for Your Introvert

January 27, 2013 Patrick LaForge

Here's a 2003 gem from The Atlantic on introverts (via @smc90). I hire a lot of introverts. They make great copy editors. The hard part is getting them past the newsroom extroverts in the interview gantlet.

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring. Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

Publishing News From Across the Room

January 27, 2013 Patrick LaForge

I'm happy to report that my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has a book contract from Jaded Ibis Press for her fantasy-memoir "An Unsuitable Princess." I am also happy to report that the memoir section (contained in footnotes) predates when we met.

This Old Book: 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy'

January 27, 2013 Patrick LaForge

I used to own individual paperback copies of this cult trilogy as a teenager in the 70s, but they were lost along the way. I picked up this omnibus edition sometime in the late 80s but never got around to re-reading it. A glance at the first few pages makes me think I might not have the patience to revisit it.

Its themes of secret societies and conspiracies, and the absurd or evocative character names (Hagbard Celine, Fission Chips, Mama Sutra), and certain phrases (first line: "It was the year when they finally immanentized the eschaton") remind me of David Foster Wallace, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, though the prose is not nearly as good. (It is much better than the writing in its trashier descendant, "The Da Vinci Code.")

The authors, Robert Shea and the strange polymath Robert Anton Wilson, make the most of it, jumping around in time from the political assassinations of the 60s to Atlantis to John Dillinger and the final words of Dutch Shultz. There is a fair amount of right- and left-wing conspiracy theory about freemasons and the Illuminatti, riffs on Sixties radicalism, drugs and sex, numerology, Aleister Crowley, the Principia Discordia, the mystical properties of the number 23, and more. It's a wackadoodle ride on the dark side of the counterculture, mislabeled a work of science fiction, a perfect cultural artifact of the paranoid style of 1975.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. The Tumblr is probably more readable, until I get around to repairing the imported posts here. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

Migration of Posts From 'This Old Book'

January 19, 2013 Patrick LaForge

My ongoing experiment with Squarespace6 continues. My hope was to migrate all of the content I have created on various sites like Tumblr, Wordpress and Posterous into one domain that I control and own.

I hit a bit of a snag with my This Old Book Tumblr, which somewhat randomly catalogs books that have survived many library purges over the decades. I was able to import the posts but unable to move individual items into the main blog column here on the site. So, instead, the Tumblr posts, with the exception of a few that I duplicated here on the Palafo blog, may be found in this on-site archive, until such time as Squarespace6 makes it easer to merge collections, or I decide to do so manually. Inexplicably, the headline fields for the posts (there were no headlines on Tumblr) appear at the bottom instead of the top. Henceforth, the occasional This Old Book post will appear here on the main blog, and if I write enough of them I will create a link to the tag up in the header.

Here is a list of the books covered to date:

"Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" by Lewis Thomas

"Essays by Robert Louis Stevenson"

"Silverlock" by John Myers Myers

"Bourgeois Anonymous" by Morris Phillipson

"The Media Lab" by Stewart Brand

"America: What Went Wrong?" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

"A Night of Serious Drinking" by Renee Dumaul

"Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me" by Richard Fariña

"The Glass Teat" and "The Other Glass Teat" by Harlan Ellison

"The Deptford Trilogy" by Robertson Davies

"A Book of Surrealist Games"

"Without Feathers" by Woody Allen

"The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker

"Boss" by Mike Royko

"Thinking With Concepts" by John Wilson

"The Common Ground Book"

"The Tales of Hoffman" (Edited Chicago 7 Transcript)

"Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly

"Son of the Morning Star" by Evan S. Connell

"The Capra Chapbook Anthology"

"Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking" by Jessica Mitford

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

"An East Wind Coming" by Arthur Byron Cover

"Soul Catcher" by Frank Herbert

"Crackers" by Roy Blount Jr.

"The Dead Father" by Donald Barthelme

"Generation X" by Douglas Coupland

"Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"The Book" by Alan Watts

"Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges

"The Straight Dope" by Cecil Adams

"Ian Shoales' Perfect World" by Merle Kessler

"The Authoritative Calvin & Hobbes" by Bill Watterson

"Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur"

"The Illuminatus! Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

"Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp" by the Editors of Might

"The Dog Is Us" by Marcelle Clements

"Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book" by Walker Percy

"Cosmic Consciousness" by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D.

"The Philosopher's Stone" by Colin Wilson

"The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog"

"The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction"

Navigating Loss With Poetry

December 26, 2012 Patrick LaForge

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has been on a roll lately with her poetry. Red Ochre Press has just published her chapbook "The Navigation of Loss." Order a copy here. The money goes to a good cause.

Artisanal Coffee by Mail: An Unboxing

December 25, 2012 Patrick LaForge

Updated 4/1/13 (See below)

I heard about Tonx Coffee on John Gruber's "Talk Show" podcast and decided to give it a try. Every couple of weeks the company roasts a variety and mails it out in vacuum-sealed bags to customers from an address somewhere in Los Angeles.

Now, some people will tell you that it is important to have the freshest roast possible for a good coffee. But other people will tell you that's just marketing, that the beans will keep for quite a while once they are roasted. Tonx's pitch is that you are getting a roast as least as fresh as you would get at a local high-end coffee shop. For that luxury, and the convenience of delivery, you will pay a premium. But I am always interested in giving a new idea a whirl, especially if it involves coffee.

I started with the 6-ounce shipment -- a "half-sack" -- every other week, basically two shipments per month, costing $24 every 28 days. I had to wait for the next roast. The stuff came nicely packaged, with a cute seal on the box.

The beans were roasted on Dec. 16, shipped on Dec. 17 and arrived on Dec. 19. Now, six ounces is not a lot of beans, for me. With my normal consumption of a few espressos or one long cup each morning, I finished these up on Christmas morning. So I have increased my subscription to the 12-ounce bag every other week, for $38 every 28 days. That seems a bit pricey, so I'm not sure how long I will continue with it. It's not like New York is lacking for fine roasted coffee.

The shipment came with a little card that explains a bit about the origin of the beans, as well as a somewhat amusing holiday greeting from the company that touched on the prophesied Mayan apocalypse, among other things.

The beans were identified as subscription coffee #34, Los Eucaliptos, grown in Huila, Colombia. by Edier Cuellar Gutierrez, his wife, Notalba Noriega, and their two children. Their farm has 12,000 coffee trees. Varieties include Caturra, Colombia and, more recently, Castillo variety, in an effort to fend off any threat of coffee leaf rust. The tasting notes predicted a sweet, balanced cup, "with a lot of depth... Look forward to flavors of green apple, molasses and vanilla."

I don't know about the green apple. I'm never good at picking out that sort of thing, but it was a gentle coffee, taken black, and I definitely noted the sweet molasses and maybe a hint of the rest. It was definitely as good as many of the quality coffees available closer to home in New York City. I don't know how much of that has to do with the fresh roasting, since most of the coffees I buy locally are roasted in Brooklyn or Manhattan within a similar timetable (typically Cafe Grumpy, Intelligentsia, Blue Bottle, or Stumptown, all excellent). I'll give this a few more shipments before deciding what to do with my subscription.

Update, March 2013: I've continued to use Tonx to supplement my local coffee buying. It's convenient, and the coffee is pretty good. Is it amazing coffee, a life-changing experience, as some reviewers online have said? Well, no. Some beans have been better than others, and while the roasts are certainly fresh, it's a matter of taste. I am also trying to weigh how "green" this is. Yes, everything entails shipping costs, and packaging, but it does feel mildly decadent to have someone mail you coffee when you can quite easily walk down the block to a good local shop. So, there's that. Let me know your thoughts on Twitter.

Update April 1, 2013: This is probably my last update to this post. I ended my subscription, though that is no reflection on the coffee or the service, which remained spectacular. I am trying to save up for some vacation travel and could not longer justify paying $38 a month for the pound of coffee to be shipped to me, when there are some great (also expensive, but slightly less so) coffee options in New York City. I might feel differently if I lived in another town or out in the suburbs. This is no reflection on the quality of the coffee, which is consistently great, and I would not be surprised if I return as a subscriber to this service down the road.