Connecting to Other Blogs

Just added the "Blogprints" item on the page today, so I can link to other blogs ... mostly ones that provide leads to ... books!

Today inaugural addition came from reading a blog page called "The Tone Deaf Scientist Sings of Love", an Aug 27, 2007 posting from a blog called "Dial M for Musicology". The book cited is one called The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (2007), which I am about to check out (on Amazon, and possibly from the library).

I know I've not been conscientious about chronicling my meandering through books the past two weeks, but I will be back because the urge is re-emerging to do so.

(I) Start Here

I'm a hopeless bookaholic.  This blog helps me keep track of the random meanderings through the world of books (mostly philosophy books these days) that sum up, take up, so much of my life these days.

Today I picked up a couple of books from the UCSD library, Lying, by Lauren Slater (2000), and Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, by Steve Fuller (2000).  Fuller is apparently no fan of T. Kuhn's.  He compares Kuhn to Peter Sellers' character Chance the gardener, from the movie Being There.  As for Lying, its subtitle is "A metaphorical memoir", and the quasi-autobiographical story is about a girl with epilepsy.  But the author (Slater) warns, she exaggerates, inviting the reader to think of the passing show, esp. the epilepsy, as an elaborate metaphor for the author's life.  Since I love "unreliable narrator" stories, I can tell I'm going to enjoy this one.  

Predictably, I've already dipped into both of these books, but I'm also simultaneously reading dozens of others ... I can't (seem to) help it. Just yesterday I plucked Paul Feyerabend's (1975/1993) Against Method off my bookshelf and read several chapters of it, and read a bit more of it today. Not entirely sure, as I sit here today, what led me to this book in my travels yesterday.

Which is part of the underlying purpose for this blog. To help me establish and preserve "trails" so that, even if I can't entirely retrace my steps, I can at least re-orient and -- hopefully -- maintain a better sense of "how I got here from there".