books I am reading

I have a pathetic attention span, so I am always reading at least two or three books at once. Usually one fiction and two nonfiction. Right now all of the books I am reading are exceptionally good.

I only recently started reading Phillip K. Dick, and I feel sad that I neglected him for so long. Valis is the fiction book I'm reading right now. It's a bit hard to describe. It is autobiographical, but written in the third person, about the religious and spiritual experiences that Dick had and wrote about in his Exegesis. Because of the voice, there's an interesting balance between his acknowledgement that he (or, the main character) is insane and the conviction that what he experiences is valid and spiritually significant. When you hear people describe this book it usually sounds like they're talking about the ramblings of a schizophrenic, and that's what I was prepared for. It's really not. There's a lot more to it than that.
When I was in college I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that was 8 years ago so I don't claim to remember it accurately, but I think this book reminds me of that. From what I recall, the narrator of that story was losing his mind, and knew he was losing his mind, but was trying to maintain his grip on reality just long enough to document the revelations he was having that, even though he knew they were caused by his illness, he recognized as important. There was the same tenuous relationship between sanity and insanity.
I have only read the first six chapters of this book and I am not really doing it justice the way I'm describing it here, so I'm going to move on.


Another book I am reading is Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. I am a little bit obsessed with Foucault. I skimmed the first half of this book when I was in college and writing a paper on torture and self-mutilation in this 17th century novel called Oroonoko. That was my first experience with Foucault and he hasn't really ever gone away, but he came to the forefront again when I was doing research for my master's thesis last month. So I was reading some of his shorter work, and then Will and I watched this movie called Bronson, which is about a prisoner and made me want to read this book again, more carefully.
It is rather dense, which is what I found frustrating about it the first time around. Maybe dense is not the right word; "dense" implies that a lot of complex information is being thrown at the reader at once. This is sort of the opposite. It is so verbose that it is difficult to pay attention to it sometimes. I think that style was en vogue at the time.
Anyway, what I like about this book, and what makes it important, is the analysis of the relationship between the state and the prisoner. In the story "In the Penal Colony," Kafka imagines a machine used for torture and execution that literally inscribes the broken rule on the body of the condemned with needles again and again until he is impaled. Part of what Foucault is arguing is that as we've moved from torture and public execution to imprisonment, the subject of punishment has shifted from the body of the accused to his soul. The movie Bronson is a wonderful surreal depiction of this. The character annihilates his soul in order to render his punishment ineffective.


The last book I'm reading is James Paul Gee's Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling. I adore James Paul Gee with every ounce of my being. He is a linguist and cognitive scientist who writes about how and why people learn and why our schools are so often ineffective. His main argument in this book, oversimplified, is that a) learning is a cultural process b) because it is a cultural process, it is inextricably tied to identity, and therefore c) if we don't do anything to help students identify with the culture of academic discourse, they aren't going to be motivated to learn. This seems obvious, but it is in radical opposition to the way educational legislation is going.
What I like especially is that he uses the experience of playing a video game to create a framework for the conditions necessary for learning. He wrote a whole other, less "academic" book on video games and learning, which I also read. Games invite the player to jump right in without a lot of boring preparation, learn skills through experimentation, and choose among varying levels of linearity in the narrative they participate in. They also don't punish the player for taking risks and pushing themselves (as long as you remember to save). I think that's really different from what happens in the traditional classroom.

Now that I've written about all these books, I also want to write about the movies I've watched recently. So you can look forward to that, coming soon.