Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver; of willpower and friends

Book cover of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a modern retelling of David Copperfield set in Appalachia.

I finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. A very good book that reminds me of multiple books for multiple reasons.

A modern classic?

Demon Copperhead has a theme and style very much similar to Nick Cave’s The Ass Saw the Angel (alcoholic boy and the atmosphere) and Salingers Catcher in the Rye (a dive into the adolescent mind), for example.

Demon is the son of a junky mother and a father that died when Demon was still young.

The boy ends up in child care and lives with foster parents who are only interested in the allowance that comes with the care. He finds his loving grandmother, who finds a better home for him. The boy is talented in sports and drawing. He has some luck but makes the wrong decisions and ends up addicted to pills himself and with a girlfriend who is addicted to any substance, including heroin.

Will-power and friends try to drag him out of a downward spiral.

My, what a read!

Why This Book Stays With You

It’s not the drama that gets you in this book. It is the quiet, aching truth of it. Kingsolver doesn’t soften the edges. She doesn’t give you a neat ending or easy answers. Instead, she hands you a story that clings, like the scent of rain on dry earth. You don’t just read about Demon’s life, instead you feel the weight of it. It refuses to look away. And neither can you.

One dystopia the other; Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Neil Postman

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman compares George Orwell’s dystopian worldview in 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Postman argues that Huxley’s dystopia might be closer to reality. Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. The situation in the Western world, and especially the United States, is indeed terrifyingly even more spot on than in 1985. In today’s China, and even more so in Russia, Orwell’s reality, where Big Brother watches over the people, seems to be the state of affairs.

How astonishingly farsighted were Huxly and Orwell in 1932 resp 1949.

Remarkable mathematical truths

Kurt Gödel

Deductive systems are either incomplete or inconsistent. Meaning

  • Inconsistent: they contain contradictions. Statements can be true and false in the same deductive system.
  • Incomplete: Statements can be found that can not be proven to be true or false.

Gödel proved this for us.

Wittgenstein formulated something similar:

The truth is built of true facts and untrue facts: facts that are not based on a system of observation yet are true anyway. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein seems to disagree with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Food for a lasting scientific debate. Anyway, Wittgenstein was looking at language and philosophy, not at mathematics.

Final remarkable mathematical truth for now from Cantor.

Cantor proved that one infinity is not the same as the other infinity. He developed a way to compare infinite sets and describe how infinite sets with different characteristics exist.

As an example, Cantor proved that real numbers are more numerous than the set of natural numbers. While both are infinite. He also invented a way to operate on infinite sets.

Cantor ended up in a mental hospital, which seems to be viewed as as heroic achievement among mathematicians—an opinion I do not share.

I recall reading The Mystery of the Aleph by Amir D. Aczel about Cantor. Unfortunately, I have lost my notes and the book. This book was very accessible, I do recall that.

Murakami’s Norwegian Wood reread

On the plane back from Prague, I finished reading Norwegian Wood—re-reading, actually. I don’t often re-read books, but Murakami is a favorite of mine.

Watanabe is in love with Naoko. She is the girlfriend of their mutual friend, who died at a very young age. Naoko can not cope with life and commits suicide in the end, while Watanabe is torn between emotions he is not able to identify or is not even conscious of. The girl who falls in love with him must tell him he is in love with her. An old friend tells him he has to choose for himself. While perfectly capable of analyzing other people’s situations, he is unable to analyze his own issues. Let alone that he is able to come up with a choice for his own problems he is not even aware of.