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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2364 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I’m still on Future Shock, 12 Commandments and Closing of the American Mind. Picking up Al-Ghazali’s The Book of Knowledge, which so far is a lot of quotes, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, which is more interesting and lucid than I expected.

The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. I want to upload a review of it but dunno if I should post it on the Wednesday thread or start a substack where I post reviews of the books I am reading.

The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon.

At the part I'm at he's death squading socialists in post WW1 Germany. But confusingly some of his squad mates are secretly socialists and also he hung out with socialists a lot hoping they had the fervor needed to reshape Germany. At least they weren't listless quitters like lots of other people at the time. Some strange confusion where they are killing socialists (and women and children who get in the way) but also are very socialist-curious.

There's a good bit about desperately fighting in urban combat and then wandering into a part of town not currently fighting and seeing people are enjoying themselves in restraunts and prostitutes teasing him and his squad. As though they can't hear the rifle and machine gun fire a few blocks away.

I picked up a few books at the bookstore yesterday. Wind And Truth by Sanderson, On Living And Dying Well by Cicero, Blood Of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski, and an illustrated selection of Hagakure passages. The last one is really nice in particular, it is bound in traditional Chinese fashion and has lots of Japanese illustrations to go with. The only thing I'm not stoked about is that it's only a selection of passages, not the whole thing - but it's such a nice edition that I still enjoy it. Have only started Hagakure so far, but I'll start the others soon enough.

Blood Of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski

Be prepared that the series change fundamentally in style and tone past this point.

I've been kind of afraid of that. I enjoyed the short story collections quite a bit, but with the shift to full novels I know I might not enjoy it as much. But we'll see.

I just finished The NHL: 100 Years of On-Ice Action and Boardroom Battles, by D'Arcy Jenish. Last year I found a copy of David Harris's The League: The Rise and Decline of the NFL, and was captivated by it. It's a history of the power struggle among NFL ownership that culminated with Al Davis moving the Raiders to Los Angeles and Pete Rozelle's authority as league commissioner severely challenged. But it's also a history of ownership and the business side of the league from roughly 1974 to 1982, with the first section covering the "status quo ante" as it had developed since 1960 and a final postscript covering the three years between the immediate aftermath of the move and the time the book went to press. It's a remarkable story, covering the entire history in great detail over its 640 or so pages.

I was looking for something in the same vein and The NHL seemed like it had promise. As a much shorter book (fewer than 400 pages) covering a much longer time period (1917 to 2011), I wasn't expecting the same level of detail. And boy, I did not get the same level of detail. I wasn't really expecting it for the early years of the league, as the author admits that the source material is thin, all the major figures are dead, and the NHL wouldn't give him access to what they had. So when the book seemed to be breezing through the Calder era and including a lot of padding, I sort of nodded along, figuring that by the time we got to, say, the 1960s and the expansion era things would start to pick up a bit. They did, but things were still moving at a pretty good clip, and without records or living witnesses, the task probably wasn't made much easier.

It's once we get to the John Ziegler era that the disappointment started to set in, since he interviewed Ziegler for the book. It seems as though once Ziegler put out all the fires Clarence Campbell left in his wake, very little happened for another decade. Once we get to the Bettman era, though, it takes even more of a nosedive; these are the years I remember paying attention to the league, and while he does a decent job of pointing out all the high points (expansion, lockouts, franchise relocation, etc.), there's not much here that someone buying a book on the subject doesn't already know.

Take the 1994 lockout, for instance. It was the first major work stoppage in league history, it lasted 104 days, and 468 games were lost. This merits fewer than four pages. It is immediately followed by discussion of the Nordiques' relocation to Colorado, which doesn't even get one full page. Major stories of the 1990s, such as John Spano buying the Islanders despite having no money and the Penguins' 1998 bankruptcy (which resulted in Lemieux taking ownership of the team) are not discussed at all. I understand that you can't include everything due to space considerations, but when he spends three pages talking about the on-ice exploits of the 1980s Oilers, and elsewhere discusses the dynamics of various playoff series, it seems disconcerting in a book ostensibly about the business side of the game.

And it gets even worse from there. Once we get past the 04–05 lockout, the final chapter is dedicated to what are evidently magazine articles copied and pasted into the book. There's a section where he discusses the state of the league circa 2012 that centers around an interview with Gary Bettman. This is followed by a detailed description of the War Room in Toronto and a discussion of what's available on the NHL website. Even in the early parts of the book, he leaves threads hanging. For instance, he talks about how competitive balance problems in the early 1950s led the league to institute a draft, but since the good teams wanted to protect their farm systems it was compromised so the losers didn't have access to the really good prospects. As Chekov said, though, if you introduce a gun in the first act, you'd better fire it in the third — the draft is never mentioned again. Obviously, at some point the draft evolved into what it is today where every team has its pick of junior players, but I have no idea how this actually came to be since Jenish forgets about it. This is especially maddening when he's talking about the 70s expansion teams trading draft picks or building through draft picks and I'm left wondering what the system even is at this point. There's stuff like this throughout the book. He also makes one critical omission; when we get to Clarence Campbell's retirement, he chalks it up to his advanced age and inability to keep up with the crises the league was facing. What he doesn't mention is that Campbell announced he was stepping down shortly after he discovered he was under investigation for bribing a senator.

All in all, it's not a bad book by any means, especially if you're just looking for a breezy capsule history of the business end of the NHL, but I'm not sure who it is for. Anyone reading this book already knows 75% of everything that's covered after 1992. Anyone who doesn't probably isn't interested in a book about the business end of pro hockey. Once I read a book on a subject I'm usually ready to move on to something else unrelated, but I just started The Instigator: How Gary Bettman Remade the NHL and Changed the Game Forever because The NHL left me so unsatisfied. It seems promising, but at only 276 pages, I'm not expecting miracles.

I have 0 philosophy background and have really struggled with Beyond Good and Evil. I think i must be missing some key context. Claude has helped a bit but i also have a difficult time trusting that it's giving me the right summaries.

Mind and Cosmos was another one that I just could not grok. I'll have to keep pressing on. But sometimes it feels like I'm reading a book on algebra when i never learned what addition and subtraction were or something

I can't speak for the current quality of Claude, but if you are struggling with the context of a philosophical work and would like a lucid, analytic-inflected explanation of how academic philosophers see it, your best bet is generally the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - hope that is helpful.

(PS - SEP does reflect the mainstream academic interpretation of philosophers, which comes with its own biases, such as the ludicrous claim that Nietzsche did not have a political philosophy. Think of it as a good teacher's opinion rather than gospel truth)

Yeah that is super helpful

Just started A Memory of Empire. it’s amazing so far.

You meant "A Memory called Empire" by Arkady Martine?

Yes

Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. Kind of neat so far, feels like Niven but updated for a 2020 view of the future instead of a 1970 view.

Dresden files

What translation are you reading for Nietzsche?

Zimmern, although it looks like the standard one is Kaufmann.

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