Excerpts from the Amazon Review Page:

Drawers & Booths

Ara 13. CovingtonMoore, Inc. 2007, Paperback, 224 pages, $7.90

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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And light years to go before I sleep
And light years to go before I sleep

Here’s a wormhole to Virgin Galactic’s website.

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The July 11, 2008 Point of Inquiry interview with Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age involves the question of how does the glut of information and ongoing proliferation of information devices that contribute to this glut affect the quality of our thinking and ability to sustain creative attention to that which needs attending?

from the Point of Inquiry introduction:

In this interview with D.J. Grothe, Maggie Jackson discusses her controversial thesis about the downsides of the information age, and how the distractions from modern technologies lead to less critical thinking and less fulfilled lives. She explores the causes and effects of the erosion of attention, including media culture, the internet and personal communication devices . . .

Click here to go to the Point of Inquiry site and listen to the interview.

Distracted

Bill McKibben (Foreword). Prometheus Books 2008, Hardcover, 327 pages, $16.29

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From the introduction to the June 27, 2008 Point of Inquiry podcast.

P.Z. Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and the author of Pharyngula, the most heavily-trafficked science blog online.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, P.Z. Myers details his expulsion from a screening of Expelled, Ben Stein’s documentary which claims that the scientific community is limiting academic freedom by not allowing Intelligent Design to be taught or discussed in the schools. He explains the background of how he and other scientists were invited to appear in the film under false pretenses, and what his response has been. He addresses “focus groups” and other marketing methods for finding the best way to communicate science to the public. Calling himself part of the “radical fringe,” he elaborates on his view that leading science organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement for Science and the National Academies of Science are “playing a shell game” on the public when it comes to teaching the compatibility of science with religion, arguing instead that there is a direct link between science education and religious skepticism. And he also shares his thoughts about the future of the atheist and rationalist movement in the United States.

Download MP3

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What is marvelous, amazing, about nature is that it was here before us and will be here long after we are gone. In the meanwhile we sit around the campfire and entertain ourselves with stories.

The following selections from a recent popular book on cosmology, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, would make for good reading at a campsite under a dark, star-filled desert night sky:

Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, has some unique limitations that call for a high degree of caution. Scientists cannot perform direct experiments on the universe, and they cannot travel back in time. The best they can do is gather indirect information about the history of the universe through painstaking observations of distant objects that emitted their light a long time ago and try to piece together a logical account. But the evidence is uneven, with highly detailed information about some epochs and little or no information about others. Even if one story fits all the available evidence well, there is always the possibility that another story might fit just as well, or better (7-8).

The history of the universe can be compared to a play in which the actors–matter and radiation, stars and galaxies–dance across the cosmic stage according to a script set by the laws of physics. The challenge for the cosmologist is to figure out the story line after arriving at the show 14 billion years too late, long past the crucial opening scenes (18).

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For some time now, a year, two years? the word “narrative” is more or less being continuously used by almost every journalist, reporter, commentator, politician, and critic with access to a microphone or pen.

And now another word is being similarly co-opted for its figurative punch: “brand.” So far I only hear it used by politicos; we’ll see how far it penetrates.

“The Republican brand. The Democratic brand. Obama’s brand. McCain’s brand.

Just sayin’.

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C

ould there be a more important or timely question than that of how, in 2008, to interpret the Second Amendment? Today in a 5 to 4 decision the Supreme Court ruled that Americans do indeed have the right to own and bear arms for self-defense and hunting.

Mark Sherman in the Associated Press reports:

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

What most interests me here, apart from the future effects of this ruling for public safety, is Antonin Scalia’s use of the phrase “historical narrative” to support the majority decision. I’m not sure that “historical narrative”–what has been, no matter whether right or wrong, false or true, ugly or beautiful, cruel or kind–is a good enough, sufficient reason to be for something.

Questionable if not immoral, even horrific, practices and behaviors can be “supported” by “historical narratives” of one sort or another. History purports to tell us why or how events and things came to be; the law should be more concerned with “oughts” that are founded in compassion and reason, not an “historical narrative.”

I am not saying I disagree with the decision. But I do want to point out that “historical narrative” is vague in a way that legal terms like stare Decisis are not.

I will have to read the entire decision with the majority and minority views laid out in full before I decide whether to agree or disagree with the majority.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for stare decisis:

In other words, stare decisis applies to the holding of a case, rather than to obiter dicta. As the United States Supreme Court has put it: “dicta may be followed if sufficiently persuasive but are not binding.”

The doctrine that holdings have binding precedential value is not valid within most civil law jurisdictions as it is argued that this principle interferes with the right of judges to interpret law and the right of the legislature to make law. Most such systems, however, recognize the concept of jurisprudence constante, which argues that even though judges are independent, they should rule in a predictable and non-chaotic manner. Therefore, judges’ right to interpret law does not preclude the adoption of a small number of selected binding case laws.

Meanwhile, let’s all be safe out there!

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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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