Excerpts from the Amazon Review Page:

Drawers & Booths

Ara 13. CovingtonMoore, Inc. 2007, Paperback, 224 pages, $12.68

Book Description: Beginning as a modern military civil affairs action, Drawers & Booths spirals into a metafictional journey, testing the boundaries of reader and author, narrative voice, and characterization–the wrapping for Ara 13’s satirical analysis of morality in light of evolutionary psychology.

From the Publisher: An “Outstanding Book of the Year” Bronze Medal “Storyteller of the Year” About the Award: Drawers & Booths won an IPPY—the world’s largest international book awards competition, independent or otherwise. Ara 13 competed against releases from production houses such as, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, and other university presses, as well as Pulitzer finalist Dave Eggers’ production house, McSweeney’s, and Barnes & Nobles’ alliance press, iUniverse. Ara 13’s novel was selected from 3,175 entrants representing 16 countries: Trinidad to Thailand, Croatia to Czech Republic, and France to Finland. Drawers & Booths was one of 32 books to receive the moniker, “Outstanding Book of the Year,” and Ara won a Bronze Medal as “Storyteller of the Year.” According to 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Ara 13 exhibits “the courage and creativity to take chances, break new ground, and bring about change, not only to the world of publishing, but to our society.”

From the Author: About Metafiction: Metafiction is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously draws attention to its status as an artifact by challenging the relationship between fiction and reality. Metafiction reminds the reader that he or she is reading a fictional work. Often, when the boundary between reader and book is blurred, a metafictional device is employed. This can be mild, as with a first-person narrator acknowledging the reader; or it can be extreme and challenge the boundaries of reader and author, as with Drawers & Booths. This reading experience, though not spatially congruent is chronologically linear, which avoids reader disorientation. In short, the metafictional elements are meant to entertain, not confuse.

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Adapted from a metafiction media/reading list found on Wikipedia. Especially useful is the categorization by genre.

1 Novels, novellas and short stories
2 Films
3 Animated short films
4 Stage plays
5 Television shows
6 Comic strips, comic books and graphic novels

Novels, novellas and short stories
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• Ara 13, Drawers & Booths
• Peter Ackroyd, English Music
• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs
• Rabih Alameddine, I, the Divine
• Felipe Alfau, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures
• Martin Amis, Money, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information
• Isaac Asimov, Murder at the ABA
• Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986)
• Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
• John Barnes, One for the Morning Glory
• John Barnes, Gaudeamus
• Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
• John Barth, Chimera, Coming Soon!!!, The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse
• Samuel Beckett, Watt
• Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Neffe
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
• William S. Burroughs, Junkie, Naked Lunch, Queer
• Michel Butor, La Modification
• Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout
• Steven Brust and collaborators, the Paarfi books, Five Hundred Years After
• A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance
• Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres
• Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
• Peter Carey, Illywhacker
• Jonathon Carroll, The Land of Laughs
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man
• Brendan Connell, Dr. Black and the Guerrillia
• Douglas Cooper, Amnesia, Delirium
• Julio Cortazar, Rayuela, Hopscotch
• Douglas Coupland, jPod
• John Crowley, Little, Big, “Novelty”, Lord Byron’s Novel
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Peter David, Young Justice, Sir Apropos of Nothing
• Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection, Dhalgren, Return to Nevèrÿon
• Philip K. Dick, VALIS, The Man in the High Castle
• Joan Didion, Democracy
• Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, The Name of the Rose
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
• Gilad Elbom, Scream Queens of the Dead Sea
• Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
• Steve Erickson, “Arc d’X”, “The Sea Came in at Midnight”
• Raymond Federman, Twofold Vibration, Smiles on Washington Square, Take It Or Leave It
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear
• Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams
• Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice
• John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
• Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World
• John Gardner, October Light
• William H. Gass, The Tunnel
• Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters
• William Goldman, The Princess Bride
• Alasdair Gray, Lanark
• Robert Grudin, Book
• Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story
• Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast, Glory Road
• Douglas Hofstadter, dialogues in Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Rhys Hughes, Nowhere Near Milk Wood, The Postmodern Mariner, The Less Lonely Planet
• John Irving, The World According to Garp
• Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock
• Stephen King, The Dark Tower, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones
• Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”
• Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
• Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
• David Lodge, Therapy
• Dimitris Lyacos, Nyctivoe
• Steve Lyons, Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures:Conundrum
• Barry N. Malzberg, Galaxies, Herovit’s World
• Yann Martell, Life of Pi
• Ian McEwan, Atonement
• Walter Moers, Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär, Ensel und Kretel, Die Stadt der Träumenden Bücher
• Michael Moorcock, The Second Ether sequence (Blood, Fabulous Harbours & The War Amongst The Angels)
• Scott O. Moore, Lullabye for Thunderstorms
• Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
• Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Look at the Harlequins!, Speak, Memory
• Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
• Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
• Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
• Juan Carlos Onetti, El Pozo
• Chuck Palahniuk, “Fight Club” “Diary”, “Haunted”
• Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
• Milorad Pavić’s novels.
• Daniel Pellizzari, Dedo Negro Com Unha
• Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
• Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
• Robert Rankin’s novels
• Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie, La maison de rendez-vous
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Douglas Rushkoff, Exit Strategy
• José Carlos Somoza, The Athenian Murders
• José Saramago, Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, A Caverna, O Homem Duplicado
• Robert Sheckley, Options
• Iain Sinclair, Landor’s Tower
• Dan Sleigh, Islands
• Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 book series)
• Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy
• J. R. R. Tolkien, Leaf by Niggle
• Roderick Townley, The Great Good Thing
• Terry Pratchett, Discworld, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
• Aritha van Herk, Restlessness
• Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla
• Jeff Vandermeer, City of Saints and Madmen
• Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge
• Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five, Bluebeard
• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay
• Colin Wilson, The Personality Surgeon
• Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, The Powerbook
• Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
• Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance

Stage plays
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• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot and Endgame
• Joseph Heller, We Bombed in New Haven
• Arthur L. Kopit, End of the World With Symposium to Follow
• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
• Ira Levin, Deathtrap
• Dimitris Lyacos, Nyctivoe
• Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile
• Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
• Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade)
• Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth
• Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife
• Federico García Lorca, Play Without a Title / Untitled Play (1935)

Films
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• Robert Altman, The Player
• David Cronenberg, screenplay for eXistenZ and Naked Lunch
• David Fincher, Fight Club
• Peter Greenaway, The Baby of Mâcon
• Charlie Kaufman, screenplay for Adaptation
• David Lynch, Inland Empire
• George Nolfi, screenplay for Ocean’s Twelve
• Zak Penn, Adam Leff, Shane Black and David Arnott, screenplay for Last Action Hero
• Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, screenplay for American Splendor
• A Cock and Bull Story, film adaptation of Tristram Shandy
• Some of Wyllis Cooper’s Quiet, Please
• Keith Allen and Peter Richardson’s Comic Strip film Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, Stranger than Fiction
• Mel Brooks, Spaceballs: the Movie
• Wes Craven, New Nightmare, Scream

Animated short films
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• Chuck Jones, Duck Amuck, (1953) and Rabbit Rampage, 1955.

Television shows
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• The Simpsons
• Arrested Development
• It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
• Sean’s Show
• Princess Tutu

Comic strips, comic books, comic characters and graphic novels
back to top

• Berke Breathed, Bloom County
• Penny Arcade, Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga
• John Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk
• Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk
• Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, The Filth
• Dave Sim, chapters “Minds” and “Guys” from his six thousand pages graphic novel Cerebus
• Deadpool and Purple Man
• Claudio Sanchez, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1, first half of the fourth chapter of The Amory Wars, The Writing Writer
• Triangle and Robert
• Alan Moore’s Promethea and Supreme
• Rich Burlew,The Order of the Stick
• The Joker
• Kristofer Straub, Checkerboard Nightmare

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In his recent Scientific American article, Michael Shermer brings out some facts that may explain why and how untested stories—theories in search of an hypothesis, if you will—can trump scientific reasoning. I think that some of the facts about brain functioning that Shermer discusses also provide an insight into possible reasons for why the conflict between science and religion and other mythic types of thinking has persisted for so many centuries and appears set to persist for many centuries into the future.

Here is a quote from the article; you can read more via the link that follows;

We have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

Michael Shermer

Here is the link to the original article:

How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results: Scientific American

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from intro to a Guardian America - Observer article on Darwin and Wallace, “How Darwin Won the Evolution Race,” by Robin McKie

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from intro to set of Wired articles on info-glut:

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn’t just more. More is different

Article by Chris Anderson:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

S

o proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all. > > >

Click here to read the rest of Anderson’s article.

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from a review of Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity on Slate.Com:

I

f you’re a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That’s because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative).

Click here to read the entire review.

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A

given history of something is a story without an author. The events, objects, and persons comprising the action act autonomously. Those elements in a history to which we attribute consciousness and intention act according to known and unknown laws.

The historian seeks and then explains the manifold of butterfly effects that comprise the subject under study. Histories are always already written, but they remain hidden until someone chooses to interpret for an audience.

Is science a type of history? After all, equations unfold in time and constitute the episodes and plots of the phenomena to which they are applied. But there are no conscious actors in scientific, qua scientific, narratives. If conscious actors are introduced, the narrative becomes historical, biographical, or autobiographical.

What about natural history museums? They presumable employ some type of scientific, historical narrative in their exhibits. Everything may be reducible to story, but it will always be someone’s responsibility–everyone’s actually–to decide which stories are better, truer, more meaningful than others.

Our very lives depend on making the right critical judgments and decisions.

It’s true. Otherwise the story of our times will someday cease to be told by historians in a non-existent future.

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