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Medlem: Jesse_wiedinmyer

SamlingarDitt bibliotek (843)

Recensioner1 recension

TaggarFiction (163), Novel (139), Non-Fiction (46), Memoir (46), Collection (34), Social Commentary (33), Biography (33), Satire (29), Classic (28), Short Stories (26) — se alla taggar

Molntaggmoln, författarmoln

GrupperAlternative Sexuality, American History, American Revolution & Founding Fathers History, Arab, North African and Middle Eastern Literature, Ask LibraryThing, Banned Books, Books that made me think, Buddhism, Californians Who LT, Canonvisa alla grupper

FavoritförfattareJorge Luis Borges, Joan Didion, Richard P. Feynman, Paul Fussell, Michael Lewis, Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, Studs Terkel, Mark Twain, William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Wilde, Richard Yates (Gemensamma favoriter)

FavoritbokhandelCity Lights Bookstore

Andra favoriterReaderville

Om mig"Harold Bloom weeps for me." ~ Chris Bauman, from "Not Fade Away", Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times

"...a little charming and very mad." ~ Appropriated from Whitehead. Mangled by me.

I can also be found at...



"You see, one thing is, I can live with the doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here.

I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." ~ Appropriated from Feynman

Om mitt bibliotekThis is a list of the books I've read. (My apologies to the library catalogers out there.) At some point or another in my life, I've read all book listed here. I don't currently own most of them. It's most definitely not a complete list. There are books I'm pretty sure I've read that I've not added because I'm not certain I've read them. There are books I know I've read that I haven't added, as I'm not sure I remember enough about them.

There very much seems to be a dynamic in my life where the books I own are not the books I've read. The books I've read and not been completely stunned by are very easily parted with. The ones I've read AND been stunned by are very often passed into someone else's hands.

I'm not a fetishist, nor a collector. Over the course of the past four years, I've had to move way too many times, and the books that I now have kept, either by porting them around with me or by pawning them with the option of re-buying are either the cream or the ones I've not yet read, but definitely do intend to. There's no way I will part with my seven volume set of Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, though this is probably the only title that I will say this of. And this may change once I have a chance to actually read it.

Books, for me, are largely about the transmission of information. So the library, for me, is largely about acquaintance with the information within.

I do realise that this can lead to interesting conundrums. For example, I've not been picky about which particular printing of a book I've read. While I do understand that differing translations or printings can offer an entirely different perspective on the text, I'm much more a dilettante than a completist. As far as I can tell, my reading of the text may change simply as I get older and change myself, so I'm not tied to a static or completist reading of the text.

I'm a bit up in the air about the idea of listing the books that I've not read. Is there somewhere aside from the "tags" portion of the entry to label them as such. I've no problems with listing the books that I own. At this point, what I love about LibraryThing is it's ability to give me recommendations based on what I've already read. I'd rather not have these recommendations diluted by the titles that I've not read. If there's a way to circumvent this quandary that I'm not aware of, I'd be more than happy to oblige.

Please understand that because of this, my ratings are rather wonky, as quite a few of these books were read about 10 years ago. I've done my best to place the book in my memory and assign it a value that matches the book's place in my head and heart. As this changes from day-to-day, I'm sure that in another week I'll look at quite a few of these ratings and wonder what the heck I was thinking. If you've a question about any title, feel free to ask and I'll do my damnedest to give you an answer.

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Riktigt namnJesse Wiedinmyer

PlatsHuntington Beach, CA

E-postjesse_wiedinmyerhotmail.com

Kontotypoffentlig, livstid

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URL:er http://www.librarything.com/profile/Jesse_wiedinmyer (profil)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Jesse_wiedinmyer (bibliotek)

Allmänna faktaSerier (77), Utmärkelser (330), Gestalter (3768), Platser (665)

Medlem sedanJun 6, 2007

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Markson sounds very interesting...I will put the book on my list of must reads..love dalkey archive press. I will also look into Dispatches as I spent time in Vietnam a few years ago and have been looking for a book addressing the war in this manner.
Thanks,
Tim
No, I dont't know you. We seem to have similar interests in books and coincidently both live in H.B.
Tim
How's it going, Jesse-pooh?
Sorry to take so long to get back to you. It has been a busy year anyway, and I have been plagued with computer problems. Anyway, a while back you were trying to set up an author discussion with Jeff Sharlet. That didn't sound familiar, and I don't find him in my library, so I wouldn't have been able to contribute much anyway.

Did you get involved in that counseling position, and if so, how is it going?
A question and a couple comments:
* Is the Takaki any good?
* I've GOT to get around to Moneyball one of these days.
* STILL don't believe you read the Sullivan.
You didn't really read the Sullivan.
I've read Money Ball and found it quite interesting. It has inspired me to think of kickoff returns differently. Statisticians currently give the total yards gained from the point of possession to the point at the end of the play. If I take the ball five yards deep in the end zone and run it out to the fifteen, the gain is fifteen yards (or twenty if you are a network commentator) when in reality the play results in a five yard loss, so I should have five yards taken away from my kickoff return yards stat. If I catch it five yards deep in the end zone and advance it to the twenty-five yard line, I should be given a five yard gain on the books.If I catch the ball in the field of play, say the two yard line, and run it back to the fifteen, then I should be credited with a thirteen yard gain.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Nothing. It just shows not all stats are what they seem. If I take the ball five yards deep and return it to the nineteen every time, I have a return average of nineteen yards. That's good enough for some bonus money to kick in, people look around and say, wow, what a great returner, when in reality my lack of judgment has cost my team one yard with each return.

This is how I approach everything, including economics. Straight ahead it seems one thing. Up close, it's not what it appears.
I should've checked this first before bothering you! Thanks for the reference.
Is "meat space" your coinage? If so, may I borrow it?
My first reaction is "You're joking, right?" ... as the tenor of the anti-Bush rhetoric from the Left-leaning mob for the past 8 years had been remarkably bloody. You average A.N.S.W.E.R. rally had maybe 50% signs that had they been against ANY other President would have netted a little visit by the Secret Service ... but the Mass Media thought it was "cute" and while regularly showing the offenses seemed to all-too-much agree with them. Were those signs re-worked for B.O. there would be a huge outcry of outrage and insisting that the "racists" be hunted down and eliminated. For just a bare glimmer of this, take a look at "kill bush" in a Google image search ... http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&so... ... these reflect DAILY occurrences for 8 years ... but the Bush administration basically let it go ... there were hundreds, if not thousands of leftist miscreants who could have been very successfully prosecuted and put away, but (to my knowledge) not a single one was even hassled.
John O'Hara is awesome.
Okay! I will definitely do that in future, and will try to go back and add links to older posts. Thanks for the tip!
Actually, it your comments that inspired that. LOL I've only added it my wishlist for now.
I was looking for Rad Chic & Mau Mau today, actually. The library I was in didn't have it, but mine might. (I was looking for it in a different library, where I was routed by traffic issues.)
Thanks for the DFW at Kenyon link. Interesting!
Charlotte Simmons was okay. A minor problem for me were some of the mistakes: Colleges let students switch courses in the middle of a semester. Thanksgiving Break is in December (!). Final exams for Fall semester are after Christmas Break (that used to be true, but if so nowadays it's quite rare).

The major problem for me is that I couldn't really identify with anyone, including the title character. She's corrupted. She doesn't even hold on to any kind of integrity for one semester. That's the point, but it's so bleak.
The amgdylectomized (sp?) cats at the beginning illustrate Wolfe's point I suppose: Charlotte is naturally pure (not just talking about sex here, but in many ways) but plonked down into the crazy DuPont environment she becomes a cat thrusting its pelvis against someone's shoe.
Overall it's bleak without seeming to offer, even implicitly, any kind of alternative.
I actually had to put it down for a week due to being busy with other things, but I'll get back to it.
As always, thank you for the additional recommendations.
I've gotten totally sucked into I am Charlotte Simmons. For me, the book clicked when she gets to campus and there's that excruciating culture clash between her family and her roommate's family. That's when you realize what the novel is about.
Noticed you liked Girl Interrupted, and I was wondering if you'd be interested in reviewing my new novel and posting your comments here as well as a few other book-related sites. Thought you might like my book since it's also about a disturbed young girl's mental illness and also a bit dark. I could e-mail you the novel in an e-book format if you'd like (I'm out of physical copies at the moment). Let me know if you're interested. Here's a link to a summary in case you're interested:

http://christophertusa.com/

Thanks,

Chris
You're welcome, but you know it'll happen again. Such is the nature of the thing... :)
Heh ... that does sound like the Swoopo dynamic!
I had to call in an outside ringer for html help.

BTW, since you used to trade equity options, you might be the only LT person I know who can appreciate the Accelerando quote. Although I'm a bit baffled as to how "Internet servers" can be irrationally exuberant.
I actually haven't read it yet. This is the list where i keep track of books to read, and that I've recently read (as in - read after I joined LT). I use a program called Readerware/Bookography that I bought from Levenger that interfaces with LT - problem is it doesn't transfer my tags along with the books, just the ISBNs so I end up doing some double data entry. I have another account with the books I own as a backup in case something happens to them (a fire/earthquake).

But I've digressed!
Well, yeah, but an oral history. Studs Terkel meets zombies.
I think I did. I think it works better the other way, though. And the Band Played on is a true, gripping, devastating oral history of AIDS, concentrating particularly on the discovery and earliest spread of it, when people didn't really know what was going on, and the scattered realizations of individuals coalesced into more solid knowledge. World War Z is basically the same thing for the "Zombie Plague." It's not real, and it's not as well written, but the genre and basic play-out is the same—people trying to figure out what a new disease is, and formulating plans against it.
Hello from another Paul Fussell fan and memoirist. Here's what Fussell had to say about my ASA memoir -

"I greatly enjoyed Soldier Boy. [Bazzett] has a rare talent - I've seldom encountered the like in fifty years of college teaching: the ability to keep the reader moving forward!"

Paul Fussell
author of the WWII memoir, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, and The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Hope you'll look me up on Amazon or my website, RatholeBooks.com . And you're right, your readings of certain books do - and will - change as you get older. But the important thing is to keep on reading. We never get too old to learn something - I hope. Be well, Tim
Oooh, I dated a guy like that once. Luckily it was mostly a long distance, online-relationship because I didn't realize until we'd broken up what was going on. Looking back, it was kind of a surreal experience while it happened, nothing was quite right and I could never figure out why.

I never know if people like that realize what they're doing or actually believe everything they say.
He isn't, is he? But he's like a con man - he talks fast and makes it all sound so reasonable. I was taken in once by one of those door-to-door magazine sales guys (I was home alone and I was young, sigh) and it made me so angry later that I resolved, never again. Which is sort of beside the point, except that's what he reminds me of.
I'm impressed that you hung in there on that conversation with rrp as long as you did. I gave up on ever discussing anything with him, it's just not worth it, as soon as it looks like you might have the upper hand, he changes the rules. It's entertaining to read (from the outside) but I sit on my hands whenever he's involved!
Uh oh ... inspired by our conversation i've now discovered that while i can't get to RV, i CAN get to LT from work. There goes any hope of productivity.
On your "About my library" entry: Nicely put, I thought. I'd guess that more than a few people have similar conundrums, about books read a while ago vs. those fresh in mind, books recalled clearly vs. those that are a blur (but with a recollection of liking them, or perhaps not); books, if read now, that would not be appreciated as they once were (and how sad that is, to discover that a previous attachment is now something else). Anyway, thanks for your sensible thoughts on the matter.
I don't do this sort of thing very much myself, but you might look at the library of this LT member:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/csha...

He often complains about people incorrectly deducing the existence of a power law when the data doesn't support that, e.g. here:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/web...
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/noteboo...

Hope this helps.
Much as I'm flattered that you'd ask, I think you've got the wrong guy: one thing I'm not is a mathematician. (I had to drop Diff Eq before I flunked it.)

Which is a sore spot for me - and, while I got my fill of statistics, it still gnaws at me that higher math defeated me. And, much like people enter religious vocations in their old age, I do plan on taking it up again when my kids are grown and my life isn't so full of distraction.

You might try user dukedom_enough - he's a nice guy, and a working physicist.
Thanks again! You read Les Miserables in tenth grade? Now that's a serious reader!
Hey Jesse,

I wasn't aware it was that many postings this morning. Since I didn't bother to count them. I'm Sorry about that. I was just saying what I was feeling at the moment and also feeling very down and Sorry for myself. I still am feeling kind of down right now too. It is going to take me awhile to get over this Election. I just felt it was time for me to leave Pro and Con. Who knows maybe in 6 or 9 months I might decide to try and
give Pro and Con another chance. Anyway, I just felt there
aren't a lot of people that really like me in Pro and Con.
And that sometimes they must really hate my guts. And that I
would be better off if I just left the group.

Beatles1964
It's a pretty straightforward statement.

Oh, sure, I read your account - but that's still what Amazon used to call a "statistically improbable" phrase to encounter.

You have hidden depths, friend.

(P.S. And on the use of a simple "what" as an all-purpose interjection of surprise-tinged-with-incredulity:
LT's own languagehat blogged about it recently - ah, here it is:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/0032...

I started seeing the usage on Metafilter a while back, and rarely have had such need to use it. )
When I was 18 or so, I was in The Bloodhound Gang for about a week.

what
Not yet, no.
This is the note I am sending all new members. This was a great idea!

Thank you for joining Pro and Con (Religion). I hope this is a place where the comfortable are afflicted and the afflicted are comforted. Let’s go it with all seriousness, but I hope we can have great fun at the same time. If I were God, I would part the waters of distance, and instantly transport us all to this great pub I used to frequent in Germany with a group of other Auslanders, but alas, I am but a lowly mortal, and so we have to do this via the internet.

All I ask is that every one remain respectful, even if there are times when you are spewing your coffee over the screen.
Love the dry, dry, dry sense of humor. Carry on!
Thanks for recommending Jean Kilbourne's book 'Can't Buy Me Love'. I just finished it and my head is reeling.

-Nancy
Borges is one of the greats, no doubt about it.

Regarding Black/Gray markets and the rule of law: Alas, it's not my area of specialization. The only name that leaps out at me is [Hernando de Soto]. I've never read any of his stuff, but he comes to this topic from a particular political point of view, I'm told (probably everyone who writes on it does). His ideas were responsible for more than a million people in Peru being given formal titles to land they lived on (whereas legally they'd just been squatters before that). He has also written on "institutions" and law and economics more generally.

Regarding the law and property rights, a tidbit: It is a commonly held idea in economics that the drug trade is so violent not because there's something magical about drugs that makes it violent but because the industry cannot appeal to normal law enforcement measures. Everyone in the industry must be a vigilante regarding perceived violations of contracts.
Thank you for the kind words. Reciprocally, you have provided the occasional chuckle in the past year.

The post that you have singled out for (what I would consider excessive) praise was only a semi-clever substitution for something that I was advised against submitting. I could share it with you, but I must urge upon you the same discretion that I had urged upon myself. If conveyed via "private message", it may only be seen by you and the proverbial "flies on the wall" that are the LibraryThing administrators.

Again, you are too gracious.
Hi Jesse. I was looking at AsYouKnow_Bob’s page and came across
...a map is a map primarily by virtue of what it excludes...Can one view scientific modeling as a form of narrative technique?

On the first part, here Borges makes this point in a witty way: A completely detailed map would be of little or no use.

Regarding the second part, we do a lot of modelling in Economics and I always start undergrad classes with a little section about models being a framework/structure/narrative that we impose on data. It seems that “models” is the standard word in mathematically-inclined fields and “narrative” is the word of choice in the humanities. They’re very similar if not identical concepts though.

Finally, if you find this intrusion into your exchange with Bob irritating, my apologies. It piqued my interest because I just went over this in class yesterday.
What would you recommend as a solid POS book?

Gee, I'm flattered you'd ask me. I have all of two courses in the POS (...and some grad work in experimental design, which sort of counts, I guess) - but that was over thirty years ago.

I found What is this thing called science? to be a useful survey of the state-of-the-art in POS (most of the sources cited there are later than my formal exposure to the field...) but it's probably more superficial than what you're looking for.

Seriously, you could do worse than to ask user cshalizi: he's a stats/physics genius at CMU, AND an LT user. He's blogged extensively about POS-related issues. And he's approachable.
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