Reid Holkesvik

Good information, tedious commentary

Revisado: 05-19-24

I learned a lot about silicon, iron, steel, sand and something about industrial chemistry, and that was worth the price of admission.
Having said that, the tiresome, hand-wringing, equivocating about how this or that aspect of the story might be bad, or might be good, seemed to be more about virtue signaling to environmentalists than sharing of any insight or wisdom, and made up way too much of the book. I also would have preferred more pithy, memorable data presentation and less mind-numbing apples-to-pears comparisons such as “while the cost of a kilowatt hour of energy has dropped by 99%, the gross tonnage of hydrocarbons usage has risen from two and a half trillion tons to over 50 trillion tons (a made up example).

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A lovely and unsatisfying book

Revisado: 09-09-21

I wanted to like this book better than I really did. It’s a lovely evocation of the early settler times on the Nebraska prairie. My wife grew up in Nebraska and her grandparents could have fit into this book quite easily. I live on the prairie and I know it is lovely, and I enjoyed her celebration of and descriptions of the scenery.
Nonetheless, I found some of the characters in the story, particularly the narrator, Jim, unconvincing. His mother and father both die in Virginia and he is sent to live with his grandparents on the plains of Nebraska, and he is nothing but happy with that? This 10-year-old boy never seems to have any sad thoughts of his home in Virginia, no sadness for the losses of his familiar surroundings and his Virginia friends, let alone his mother and father; he just seems to be enraptured by the magic of the prairies.
The other central character of the book, the title character, is Antonia. I like her a lot better and find her to be a much more realized character than Jim. The book offers her up repeatedly as somehow the embodiment of the Prairie, of the vibrancy of life there, but I don’t think that really works. She stands out vividly against the pioneers’ Prairie; she is a contrast to the harshness there, the struggle against cold, the sod houses and the loss of city life, with her spunkiness and joy, her effortless beauty and sense of fun, her healthy animal feistiness, her energy and strength, her innocent sexiness. Everyone, all males in the story, are in love with her, and the women like her too despite the fact she outshines them because they just can’t help it.
Jim is in love with her, but a few years younger and stuck in a “little brother” role with her. She knows him to be brave and manly, and she recognizes the extraordinary intelligence and goodness of him. They grow up through the book to be very similar ages, but somehow she just never gives him a chance as a lover, and he seems be okay with that. She turns out to be a bad judge of men; she agrees to marry, almost marries, and becomes pregnant with a totally fake asshole who abandons her. Jim has his chance here, after that romantic disaster; she could sue use some help, he still loves her madly and she still has great affection and respect for him. Push it, Jim, push it! If the asshole train conductor could move her sexually maybe you could too! She often changes her mind, changes her feelings, you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Oy, oy, oy, don’t just give up!
So he says goodbye again and they hug and he goes off for 20 years, into an unhappy marriage in New York, working as a big attorney for western railroads (reminiscent of the job Antonia’s asshole almost-husband always wanted). When he sees her again she has remarried a pretty darn okay guy and they have ten kids and she has lost all of her teeth from dental problems due to no money for dentists and seems battered by life and “flat-chested” (the book’s description) but still spunky. He spends a couple of days together with her and her husband and children at their farm, and then leaves to return to his cold, affluent, loveless urban marriage, but plans to hunt sometime with her older boys, so it’s all okay because Antonia and he still have vivid memories of their childhood and adolescence together, and I guess that’s what really matters. Really, it’s all okay. Really. Say, isn’t that darn prairie just plum gorgeous?
The introductory chapter of the book, though, gives a hint of Jim’s real feelings. The nameless friend he leaves the manuscript with notes that Jim wasn’t sure what to call it, and wrote “Antonia” on it, but then thought again and changed it to “My Antonia”, and that seemed to satisfy him. He was able to possess her if only in the title of this narrative, a satisfaction of a different kind than he really wanted, I suspect.
Changing lanes rather abruptly here, let me say I feel a resonance of this frustrated romance between Jim and Antonia and what I imagine was the life experience of the author, Willa Cather, who grew up on the pioneer prairie of Nebraska and lived the last 39 years of her life with with her partner Edith Lewis. It is said that Cather had romantic “crushes” on her female school friends, and that she fell deeply in love with a striking Pittsburgh girl, Isabelle McClung. After Isabelle’s marriage, Willa spent the rest of her life with devoted companion Edith, who helped shape her literary work and became her first biographer. Willa is buried along side Edith in a secluded cemetery in the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a place she’d first visited when she went there to see Isabelle McClung. Willa Cather burned almost all of her personal correspondence and died in 1947, long before it was safe for same-sex couples to be openly identified. My fantasy here, though, is that Jim’s acceptance of the way things just had to be (i.e. non-sexual) with Antonia might have had a counterpart in Willa Cather’s life experiences, growing up with young women she was attracted to, and with whom things were never going to be the way she might have wanted them to be, and knowing that just had to be okay.

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A story of resistance to facts

Revisado: 02-27-21

I enjoyed this book. I was surprised how much of it was about the resistance within the academic community, as well as society at large, to the scientific exploration of human nature. I was unaware that the field of anthropology, “the study of man”, was so utterly focused on the study of human cultures as super-organisms and so uninterested and hostile to the study of the biological function of human beings, of human brains, of the wonderful and special basket of functions our brains have as a species. I got the unmistakable sense that the elite scholarly world Pinker has lived in for decades is much less about curiosity and wonder and the intelligent pursuit of Truth than it is about turf fights, power and bitchy academic politics. I was not aware of the way that personal slanders and deliberate suppression of facts to serve (often Marxist) political agendas, as well as personal egos and careers, were just normal street life in the Academy. I found it disturbing and rather disappointing; I guess I was just kind of naïve.
The limited amount of knowledge of the actual function of the brain was disappointing but not surprising. As Pinker says at one point, we do not have a “Grey’s Anatomy of the human mind” by a long shot.Plausible arguments from theories of evolutionary biology are rather second best, just not really testable or terribly convincing.
He did have some very interesting things to say about twin studies and development of psychological traits. The fact the parents count for so little was new to me, sort of shocking and refreshing at the same time. I suspect it’s true and he seemed to have solid scientific reasons for saying so. His conjectures about the reasons for differences between identical twins I also found new and, and made a lot of sense to me.The consistent finding that 40 to 50% of the statistical variation between individuals seems to be due to genetics, less than 10% to parents/personal home life, and the other 50% really not known but plausibly just the way people’s brains grow, not a direct effect of any environmental factors, makes sense to me.Obviously this science is still work in progress and I look forward to further developments.
All in all a very worthwhile book and interesting on multiple levels.

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There are good things about this book

Revisado: 05-14-20

And not so good things.
The rather turgid, dramatic prose was not one of the good things. It seemed to endlessly build toward a climax which never happened.
The obsessive focus on the personalities of the scientists working on influenza and closely related problems, and the psychodrama of their interactions, was not completely uninteresting but ultimately led nowhere.
The endless recitation of numerical records and statistics was numbing. The author seemed to recognize this, and to juice it up over and over projected the percentage numbers into current population numbers, as if bigger numbers would be more interesting, which they were not.
The best things in this book were not actually about influenza. The author paints a vivid picture of the pathetic state of medicine in the 1800’s and its dramatic transformation over a few decades to something we would recognize today as medical science. I found his description of how science had undermined faith in old medical practices (bleeding, mustard plasters, purgatives) long before it came up with anything better to do convincing and insightful. I also found the section about Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles conference fascinating.
One other insight he offered which I found most interesting was that the influenza epidemic produced no great literature, that the many important authors who lived through it just didn’t write about it. I think there are reasons for that, and they are closely related to the weaknesses of this book. It is very difficult to write about something so big, so sprawling and ungraspable, something that starts slowly, builds up gigantically and then peters out, something that is somehow so profoundly meaningless. The author gave it a good try, and despite its shortcomings I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the pandemic and it’s historical setting.

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THE BEST!

Revisado: 02-06-20

Let me say first I am a fan of Professor Greenberg. This is not my first rodeo, I have listened to his How To Listen To And Appreciate Great Music perhaps 20 years ago, his Opera series, his Bach, and Great Masters (Mozart, Brahms, Shostakovich etc) and I have enjoyed them all. Something about this series seemed important and rather intimidating. I used to be more interested in Big Music (symphonies etc.) when I was young. Now that I’m a little older (67) I listen more to chamber music and small group jazz, stuff I can actually hear and which sounds good in a room the size I am listening in ( not a concert hall, e.g.). I thought I should listen to listen to Greenberg’s “Symphonies”, I bought it, I wanted to listen to it; it sat in my library for two years, and now I finally listened to it. BOY WAS I WRONG, THIS WAS GREAT!
Professor Greenberg is a wonder, a musician with an extraordinary ear and a gift for explaining to the rest of us in words what it is he is hearing. Okay, after he is done I don’t hear it all as clearly as he does but I hear it better, I feel like I’m in on it, like I get it, like I enjoy hearing it more and I know where to go to find more really great music. This symphony series is now maybe my favorite. He had to exclude a lot of wonderful music, he was very respectful and deferential to many composers, and yet his delight and intelligent awe for some composers shone through in an infectious way. It’s more fun to listen now to Haydn, I hear his music better. I have looked up and listened to additional music from composers like Roy Harris and Howard Hanson, wonderful stuff I did not know existed. I listened again to perhaps the greatest composer of the 20th century, Shostakovich; and his dazzling, spine-tingling and heartbreaking music. I am again grateful to Professor Greenberg for helping me to find this stuff. Listen to this series. It gives you a sense of what has been really new and creative, of music in history,of the way music and culture have changed together,. After you listen to this you will know more, and hear more, worth knowing and hearing now, and in a hundred years. Thank you, Professor Greenberg.

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Finely reasoned, passionate, relevant to today’s divisive issues.

Revisado: 09-19-19

Professor Kronman’s book addresses problems facing colleges and universities today, reflecting issues in American culture more broadly, with uncommon clarity and historical perspective. The issues it addresses are three:

1. Restrictions of free speech on campuses in the name of inclusiveness and welcome.
2. Diversity as a value in itself, defined as it is today in terms of identity groups rather than individuals, approached from an interesting legal/historical perspective; in this his tenure as the Dean of Yale Law School is not irrelevant
3. The renaming of historical memorials, approached with special passion in view of Yale’s wavering course to renaming Calhoun College.

I liked this book, and his arguments for the most part resonate with me.

A central theme of this book, though, is hard for me to swallow; this involves his use of the term aristocracy. As defined by the author, aristocracy refers to the fact that not only are some people better at doing certain things than other people, but some people are just Better, better at being human beings, more highly developed in the areas that really matter in terms of living as a human being. This issue of aristocracy is made absolutely central to his critique of the three political/social trends mentioned above. Not surprisingly, given the book's focus on the academy, these areas that matter turn out to be coincident with the areas of interest in the Humanities. Although it is not stated explicitly in this book, the humanities historically involve the scholarly study of language, history, literature and moral philosophy. The study of these tends to lead to a larger, better way of living as a human, it is implied. I do not disagree with this, and yet there is something stuffy, narcissistic and claustrophobic about the implication that this type of study is the one true path to being a fully developed human. It seems obvious to me that there are many outside the academy who know something about how to live as a human, and that they learned it in other ways; farmers, sea captains, battlefield commanders, Buddhist monks, and wise grandmothers come to mind. I do not mean that "everyone is just as good as everyone else"; I just don't believe there is only one kind of Best, or that academic humanists are necessarily the top of the heap.

I think, though, that even readers who don’t agree with the general drift of his arguments will find it hard to take issue with any of the specific, finely reasoned points he makes. Any fair reader will I think will find it hard to dismiss his authoritative credentials or his sincerity and passion for the subjects at hand. He deserves to be listened to, he knows what he’s talking about and he wants so very much for us to understand.

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