Hi folks,
Welcome to the penultimate elimination round for the 2018 TOA Book Award. I’ve done these rounds based on loose ‘themes’ but I report today that the center is no longer holding – I have no idea why anyone would group these two books together (though I suppose this could be considered its own theme in my particular clueless way).
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October 2018)
I’ve always liked my fellow Tim’s work but I approached this essay collection with some trepidation. I’d always liked his writing because he seemed capable of exploring any topic with humor and insight; I feared that with a clearly defined topic, the work would fail to take advantage of his instinct for exploration and contemplation. As always, I was wrong, and his series of personal reflections on his various relationships with (mostly) women proved a valuable lesson for me – when you write about just one thing, it’s a ripe opportunity to write about everything.
Parting thought: A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite.
This idea is a great reminder for me whenever I start an interaction. It doesn’t matter if the person is someone I’ve known forever or if it’s a person I’m meeting for the first time – it’s vital to be warm and responsive. This is surely not breaking news, reader, but this approach doesn’t come naturally to me and I therefore require reminders. Each moment in an interaction, from the initial greeting to the last word, is a reinforcement, and people shut down quickly in response to cold, negative, or merely indifferent responses.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (December 2018)
I’m not quite sure where I stand on this book. There is a lot going on here, perhaps to the point where I might suggest it was too short, but the other side of me suggests that perhaps it was too long given how not all of the story proved relevant to the main idea. Ultimately, it’s a story about what we lose in the aftermath of a traumatic event and the great courage it requires to face our fears, regrets, and vulnerabilities when we choose to reclaim ourselves.
Parting thought: In genetics, the law of selections tends to trump the dominance of genes.
It’s too easy to look at what goes against us and bemoan the Powers That Be. And without question, life is full of setbacks thanks to forces beyond our control. It’s vital in such moments to remember what remains within our control and to never forget that any prophecy is to a significant degree self-fulfilling.
Showing posts with label books - i wrote this book because i love you. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books - i wrote this book because i love you. Show all posts
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
reading review - i wrote this book because i love you (riff offs)
I thought I would take a few moments today to look over some spare thoughts from Tim Kreider’s essay collection, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
It is a pity that many prefer to confide certain things in total strangers rather than with the closest people in their lives.
When you want nothing from another, you can give freely and without fear.
I think these two thoughts work well in tandem. A total stranger is often a person we make no demands of and the lack of history makes it easier to share without risking anything valuable about the relationship.
A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite. Babies have been seen to do this when their parents do not smile back at them – they will start fussing and finding ways to avoid eye contact with their parents.
An unshared life has a way of feeling like it isn’t happening.
It seems like we have very strongly developed instincts for self-preservation. This goes beyond merely the physical – like knowing to quickly break physical contact with a burning surface. The first quote suggests that even in our earliest years our instincts steer us away from the possibility of emotional harm.
What I found interesting about the second thought is the implication that reversing our self-preserving instincts might take years of focused effort. The loneliness and isolation of the unshared life will compel us to reverse the instinct for disconnection demonstrated by the ignored infant – but how long must a life go unshared before such a counter measure might develop?
The difficult part of identifying your own maladaptive patterns is how it invalidates much of the life you’ve lived by the programming of those patterns.
The end of relationship means the death of the person you were in that relationship.
The biggest opponent to any change is loyalty. In the context of self-reform, most people must overcome their instinct to remain true to a past self and the decisions made by that person.
The core of a protest is that it matters when the truth is spoken even if nobody seems to listen.
A truth is valuable to the extent that it values and promotes life.
This pair of ideas struck me as a decent rule of thumb for how to know difference between the time to speak up and the time to bite the tongue.
An aging pet is often just that – a vet will diagnose a dog as being seventeen years old. As long as the pet is eating and mobile, it’s probably best to keep it comfortable.
One thing that helps hospice caregivers think about how to care for a patient is to understand the patient’s goals. What would a patient like to continue doing to maintain a desired quality of life over the course of a terminal illness? These goals can be used as guidelines for treatment decisions. I liked this thought because it gives a pet owner a simple framework to consider during a related situation – if a pet has goals for its final months, what would those goals be? I suppose if an aging pet can eat and maintain a certain level of mobility, it’s probably appropriate to focus on comfort measures intended to maintain these two functions.
An institution goes into terminal decline when it starts giving irrelevant or obsolete answers to new, urgent questions.
I suppose the fundamental challenge for any institution is to find new problems to solve once it’s addressed the issues that prompted its original formation. This note suggests how to identify a failing institution because the inability to answer questions reveals an inability to adapt existing knowledge to new ways of thinking.
I want to go out but I want to stay home…
The final thought captures the spirit of the many small dilemmas discussed so far. The toughest decisions we have in life aren’t easily determined simply by calculating the positives and the negatives because at the core of the dilemma is a competing set of desires.
Huh?
Well…
Fine, that isn’t from the book, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”. But who better to end a riff off?
Thanks for reading.
It is a pity that many prefer to confide certain things in total strangers rather than with the closest people in their lives.
When you want nothing from another, you can give freely and without fear.
I think these two thoughts work well in tandem. A total stranger is often a person we make no demands of and the lack of history makes it easier to share without risking anything valuable about the relationship.
A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite. Babies have been seen to do this when their parents do not smile back at them – they will start fussing and finding ways to avoid eye contact with their parents.
An unshared life has a way of feeling like it isn’t happening.
It seems like we have very strongly developed instincts for self-preservation. This goes beyond merely the physical – like knowing to quickly break physical contact with a burning surface. The first quote suggests that even in our earliest years our instincts steer us away from the possibility of emotional harm.
What I found interesting about the second thought is the implication that reversing our self-preserving instincts might take years of focused effort. The loneliness and isolation of the unshared life will compel us to reverse the instinct for disconnection demonstrated by the ignored infant – but how long must a life go unshared before such a counter measure might develop?
The difficult part of identifying your own maladaptive patterns is how it invalidates much of the life you’ve lived by the programming of those patterns.
The end of relationship means the death of the person you were in that relationship.
The biggest opponent to any change is loyalty. In the context of self-reform, most people must overcome their instinct to remain true to a past self and the decisions made by that person.
The core of a protest is that it matters when the truth is spoken even if nobody seems to listen.
A truth is valuable to the extent that it values and promotes life.
This pair of ideas struck me as a decent rule of thumb for how to know difference between the time to speak up and the time to bite the tongue.
An aging pet is often just that – a vet will diagnose a dog as being seventeen years old. As long as the pet is eating and mobile, it’s probably best to keep it comfortable.
One thing that helps hospice caregivers think about how to care for a patient is to understand the patient’s goals. What would a patient like to continue doing to maintain a desired quality of life over the course of a terminal illness? These goals can be used as guidelines for treatment decisions. I liked this thought because it gives a pet owner a simple framework to consider during a related situation – if a pet has goals for its final months, what would those goals be? I suppose if an aging pet can eat and maintain a certain level of mobility, it’s probably appropriate to focus on comfort measures intended to maintain these two functions.
An institution goes into terminal decline when it starts giving irrelevant or obsolete answers to new, urgent questions.
I suppose the fundamental challenge for any institution is to find new problems to solve once it’s addressed the issues that prompted its original formation. This note suggests how to identify a failing institution because the inability to answer questions reveals an inability to adapt existing knowledge to new ways of thinking.
I want to go out but I want to stay home…
The final thought captures the spirit of the many small dilemmas discussed so far. The toughest decisions we have in life aren’t easily determined simply by calculating the positives and the negatives because at the core of the dilemma is a competing set of desires.
Huh?
Well…
Fine, that isn’t from the book, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”. But who better to end a riff off?
Thanks for reading.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
i read i wrote this book because i love you so you don't have to
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October 2018)
Tim Kreider describes his relationships with women (and his cat) in this collection of reflective personal essays. It’s an unusual premise for a book, especially for an author whose relationships probably aren’t of much interest to even his most loyal fans, but this is hardly a juicy tell-all account of who, what, and when from Kreider’s personal life. Rather, he uses these experiences to connect and expand on larger themes that any observer will enjoy reading and thinking about.
A good example is my favorite essay from the collection, ‘The Strange Situation’. It describes a childhood attachment study Kreider participated in and explores how those results may (or may not) have predicted his self-destructive behavior in certain adult relationships. It’s an interesting examination of how we all look for the balance of our free will and our ingrained characteristics in our actions, decisions, and thinking.
It also forced me to consider an intriguing question – to what extent are we responsible for fulfilling our own prophecies? I suppose that any prophecy can quickly become self-fulfilling because of how easy it is to blame instinct, upbringing, or circumstance for the various outcomes in our lives. However, I think we all retain a degree of agency over ourselves that we are not always wiling to acknowledge and that the most important quality of a good prophecy is how it points out where we need to make an extra effort to overcome an ingrained tendency toward a certain behavior, reaction, or thought pattern.
In addition to ‘The Strange Situation’, I also enjoyed reading ‘The Feast of Pain’ and ‘Our War On Terror’. The latter essay requires a caveat – I enjoyed it for how it illuminated another of his works, Twilight of the Assholes, a book of political cartoons he published during George W. Bush’s administration.
Footnotes / endnotes
I’ve always enjoyed Kreider’s writing and this time around I was actually prompted to note down a few quotes. One I liked in particular was about his easy childhood – the worst thing that ever happened to me was math – and another made reference to some difficult experiences from his early adult life – at the time I didn't think I took this too hard; I was just angry and depressed and drank too much for a couple of decades.
I also learned after I finished the first draft of this post that Kreider appeared on NPR's Fresh Air podcast to discuss this book. I haven't listened to it - yet - but here's the link to the podcast transcript for anyone interested.
Tim Kreider describes his relationships with women (and his cat) in this collection of reflective personal essays. It’s an unusual premise for a book, especially for an author whose relationships probably aren’t of much interest to even his most loyal fans, but this is hardly a juicy tell-all account of who, what, and when from Kreider’s personal life. Rather, he uses these experiences to connect and expand on larger themes that any observer will enjoy reading and thinking about.
A good example is my favorite essay from the collection, ‘The Strange Situation’. It describes a childhood attachment study Kreider participated in and explores how those results may (or may not) have predicted his self-destructive behavior in certain adult relationships. It’s an interesting examination of how we all look for the balance of our free will and our ingrained characteristics in our actions, decisions, and thinking.
It also forced me to consider an intriguing question – to what extent are we responsible for fulfilling our own prophecies? I suppose that any prophecy can quickly become self-fulfilling because of how easy it is to blame instinct, upbringing, or circumstance for the various outcomes in our lives. However, I think we all retain a degree of agency over ourselves that we are not always wiling to acknowledge and that the most important quality of a good prophecy is how it points out where we need to make an extra effort to overcome an ingrained tendency toward a certain behavior, reaction, or thought pattern.
In addition to ‘The Strange Situation’, I also enjoyed reading ‘The Feast of Pain’ and ‘Our War On Terror’. The latter essay requires a caveat – I enjoyed it for how it illuminated another of his works, Twilight of the Assholes, a book of political cartoons he published during George W. Bush’s administration.
Footnotes / endnotes
I’ve always enjoyed Kreider’s writing and this time around I was actually prompted to note down a few quotes. One I liked in particular was about his easy childhood – the worst thing that ever happened to me was math – and another made reference to some difficult experiences from his early adult life – at the time I didn't think I took this too hard; I was just angry and depressed and drank too much for a couple of decades.
I also learned after I finished the first draft of this post that Kreider appeared on NPR's Fresh Air podcast to discuss this book. I haven't listened to it - yet - but here's the link to the podcast transcript for anyone interested.
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