Saturday, October 31, 2009
Cool, steady rule-breaker ...
... The Perfect Traveler.
Maugham's stock sure seems to be on the rise.
In defense of ...
... the little book: Fifty Years of Simplicity as Style. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
If you want to learn how to write, The Elements of Style is a great place to start. I started there myself. But once you've started, keep on going. Writing is an adventure.
The ancient distinction ...
... between depression and despair: Kierkegaard on the Couch. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves.
Glad to see the tagline mentions Gordo's boxing expertise. If want to have a good time, spend 20 minutes on the phone with Gordon Marino.
9/11 and fiction ...
... Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue.
Because the novel “allows for no proper mourning or working through,” you write, there’s a danger that “it can serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration.”
Of course, "movements of redress and moral restoration" need hardly be reactionary or totalitarian. I am not sure Versluys grasps this. Perhaps a good 9/11 novel would focus on the justifiable rage for redress and not bend over backward to understand things from the bad guys' viewpoint. Some of us are not inclined either to forgive what happened on 9/11 it or to forget it.
Thought for the day ...
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.- John Keats, born on this date in 1795
Friday, October 30, 2009
This week's batch ...
... of TLS Letters: Hannah Arendt, 'Pataphysics, Meet Me in St Louis, and more.
Civilized debate ...
... Piers Paul Read and David Heathcoat-Amory discuss How European are the British? (Hat tip Dave Lull.)
I think Heathcoat-Amory comes off as the more Chestertonian here. Piers's father, of course, Sir Herbert Read, was a philosophical anarchist who wrote, in To Hell With Culture, "It is of the essence of genius to be uncommitted to any abstraction" - itself a rather Chestertonian notion.
Inequity of circumstance ...
... Michael Antman reviews Paul Auster's Invisible: A Well-wasted life. (Hat tip, Christopher Guerin.)
Life with father ...
... can prove everlasting: The Watermark.
Such glimpses of this other side of his nature prove that he didn’t lack empathy, only that he deliberately chose not to express it. I find these instances of tenderness almost unforgivable.
While reading this I kept thinking of Tom in "Ploughman's Lunch," the first story in Susan's collection Slipping the Moorings. Tom and William Brown McCallum are very different people but have in common a certain imprisoning obtuseness that is actually touching.
Thought for the day ...
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.- Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on this date in 1821
Thursday, October 29, 2009
John Berger, "G."
When I finish a novel, I typically have in my mind a sense for its shape, its contours. Some are built like boxes, others like ovals, or circles. Then, there are books like John Berger's "G.": these are rare indeed, for they are without any shape at all.
A mixture of philosophy, history, and post-modern meditations on the self and the act of writing, this book defies categorization: it is its own beast, and its central character remains, until the end, as enigmatic as the women to whom he (a sort of Don Juan) is attracted.
Though "G." was awarded the Booker Prize in 1972, I do not consider it Berger's best - or most enjoyable - work. That designation must be reserved for "About Looking," which stands as one of the most insightful collections of essays that I have read (on any subject).
Perhaps, in the end, "G." suffers as a result of Berger's knowledge. That is: the novel is about so much (and so much, all at once) that it fails to come into focus. Berger's colors are always vivid: I only wished that, in "G.," they might have taken shape in a more rewarding fashion.
Distinguishing ...
... right from wrong: Ethical journalism: A book goes case by case.
Gene Foreman is an exceptionally conscientious and honorable man. Like most such people I don't think he realizes just how exceptional. It is, in fact, the quality of the person, not the precision of the rules, that counts most in matters of ethics. That is what I find the following somewhat naive and ill-informed:
The common practice of allowing newspaper staffers to write unedited blogs for online readers annoys [Foreman]."I detest that," he says with understated vehemence that is as close as he comes to swearing. "I've read arguments written by intelligent people who say, 'Let's let the readers be our editors, that if we get something wrong, they call us, we check it out, and we put up a correction.' Now, this is really, really bad because harm can be done by erroneous information getting online."
Harm can also be done by erroneous information getting into print, which nowadays means, ipso facto, to be online. Wonder what he thinks of this and this and this and this and ... (The phrase "layers of editors and fact-checkers" has come to be used derisively on line.)
Which may help explain why Just 4% Trust Reporters More Than Themselves on What’s Good for America.
DEAD, DEAD ...
... Chilling Fiction. . . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The Haunting, the 1963 film based on Jackson's novel - directed by Robert Wise and featuring Julie Harris, Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom and Russ Tamblyn - is quite good. The later remake isn't.
Oh, Jack ...
...The battle for Jack Kerouac's estate.
‘Use my name’, Kerouac told her. ‘Write a book.’
Heartbreaking.
Thought for the day ...
What an insignificant life is this which I am now leading!- James Boswell, born on this dare in 1740
I feel this way all the time.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Let us now praise ...
...Cliff Lee and Chase Utley: Lee, Utley, Phils top Yanks in World Series opener.
Are you there, Bryan?
An intriguing mix ...
... O. Henry's Morphine Overdose, Pay-Scale, and Advice to Writers. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
This sounds a lot like retirement ...
... at least I've been having a lot of the same thoughts: You are here with bloody ankles.
It isn't just me then ...
... The new rules of engagement.
This weekend I realized how much my reading habits have come to resemble my Internet-surfing. I skip from book to book, dipping in, skimming and grazing, as if each book were an article I was reading online. If the book isn't amazing, I rarely get past the first quarter -- let alone finish it.
Actually, I've always tended to have more than one book going at once, but the practice does seem to have got a bit out of hand lately. This may not be such a bad thing, because there still are books that just capture your attention. One such for me recently was Piers Paul Read's Alice in Exile. It is one the best novels about love that I have ever read. It begins just before World War I starts and finishes just after the war ends. The three main characters are Alice Fry, a rather liberated young woman who is part French and whose father publishes progressive tracts (the Frys could fit right in to the set that populates A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book); Edward Cobb, a handsome English aristocrat; and Baron Rettenberg, a Russian aristocrat. Alice and Edward fall in love and agree to marry, but family and social pressure prompt Edward to chicken out when one of her father's books gets him hauled into court for obscenity. Alice, who is pregnant by Cobb (though Cobb does not know this), accepts an offer from Rettenberg serve as governess to his two younger children. Rettenberg proves to be a fascinating, wonderfully complex character. He steals the book.
For some reason, one passage leaped out at me:
There was little opportunity, at Soligorsk, for Alice to discuss her developing ideas because everyone was too busy, particularly Alice herself. In this respect, she missed the company of Baron Rettenberg; she would have liked to have confronted him with her doubts. Tatyana and Sophie showed no interest in such philosophical speculations, and Vera, though she qualified as a member of Russia's intelligentsia, showed all the shortcomings of that intelligentsia - fixed positions based upon emotion rather than reason.
This seems to be a problem with all intelligentsias. Few self-styled intellectuals are as coolly rational as they like to think.
Beckett: Dystopian Fantasy?
This week's TLS is a good one - and includes an excellent piece on isolation in Beckett's Endgame.
Roth as prophet ...
... Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not as irreverent ...
... as you might think: Does God Have OCD?
... if God wants to be irrational, that’s his business. Rationality is a human concept. Consistency and being reasonable, those are all human concepts, and we can’t impose those on the creator.
Lev Shestov somewhere defines God as "infinite caprice."
You can't have one ...
... without the other: A religion of the head as well as the heart. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Once again, I recommed Mark's book After Atheism, which I read on vacation this past summer and think is not only cogent, but wise.
... it’s living a life of faith that confirms religious convictions, not the convictions that must first be proven before the living can begin.
Once again, I recommed Mark's book After Atheism, which I read on vacation this past summer and think is not only cogent, but wise.
Allopathic reading ...
... scary stories for scary times: "It was only during the age of candlelight that the race of ghosts really flourished," or, Edmund Wilson as uncanny anthologist. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... it was published in early 1944, when the war, though going far better than it had been a few years before, was still a long way from being over.
Scrap it ...
... Leonardo DiCaprio's Third Man remake is a cuckoo-clock idea. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Thought for the day ...
I put the words down and push them a bit.- Evelyn Waugh, born on this date in 1903
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Indeed ...
Time and again human pictures of deity prove to be idols that are shattered under the impact of divine reality.- John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion
That's me ...
... a slow reader: Slow Reading at FLICC, Library of Congress: Speech, Handout, Reference. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The view ...
... from Beyond the Grave.
The scriptural warrant is Jesus' assertion that "you shall not come out of it until you have paid the last penny." Also, time in Purgatory could be shortened by indulgences, not by the sale of them. The sale was the abuse, not the indulgence.
Dante also described Purgatory. It had very little scriptural warrant but which greatly increased the spiritual influence of the Roman Catholic Church (because one's fate was not settled at death) and gave rise to many abuses, since the soul's time in Purgatory could supposedly be shortened by the earthly sale of "indulgences."
What is interesting is that the notion of survival after death arose so early in human history.
Come one, come all ...
... A people's history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
America's master painter ...
... Sargent's Sea Fever.
Just as his society portraits give faces to characters seemingly plucked from the pages of Henry James (his fellow American expatriate and future sitter), Sargent's depictions of sailcloth and rigging, of vessels safely moored and battling the furious ocean, offer visual counterparts to the finest descriptive passages of his contemporary Joseph Conrad.
Thought for the day ...
In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.- Enid Bagnold, born on this day in 1889Surely the best reason for citizens of the United Kingdom to vote for David Cameron in the next election has to be that he is married to Enid Bagnold's granddaughter. I know I shouldn't interfere in another nation's political, but God knows there was emough opining from England about our last presidential election.
Monday, October 26, 2009
You can be sure of one thing ...
... the people in charge of the newsrooms will never figure out that there may be something lacking in their product, something like a fresh point of view, rather than the same old same old: .
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In any other profession they would ask, "Are we doing something that turns the public off?"
A livelier spirit ...
... actually: The sovereign ghost of Wallace Stevens. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"... Blackmur, as close to a genius as American criticism ever produced (excepting only Poe) ... "
"... Blackmur, as close to a genius as American criticism ever produced (excepting only Poe) ... "
I think some - not I - would put forth Edmund Wilson as a critic of genius, and have much evidence to support their case. My choice for the critic as artist would be Van Wyck Brooks, whose critical judgments are incorporated into narrative, characterization, and wondrous description. But I suppose Brooks is out of fashion these days.
I am also bothered by Logan's view of Stevens's "philosophizing." Merely because Eliot "trained" in philosophy does not mean that Eliot was somehow more original or sounder in whatever philosophical conclusions he arrived at. There is a difference between being a philosopher and having a degree in the subject. As it happens, Eliot and Stevens both studied under George Santayana, a genuine philosopher. So did Conrad Aiken, and I think Santayana's influence is evident in the work all three, if only in the melody of their verse. I also think it is more important to study under a real philosopher than to get that degree. Anyone who has read both Santayana and Stevens will recognize that Stevens's collected poems are practically a commentary on Santayana's philosophy - except that in the end Stevens, I think, takes a step toward faith that his mentor could not bring himself to take. Eliot and Stevens both, I think, are poets preoccupied with questions of faith.
As for Stevens as being our poet of "emotional extinction," it is useful to remember that it was Eliot who said that poetry "is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Merely because one masters one's emotions, does make a display of them, does not mean one does not feel them, and feel them deeply. Of course, as Eliot also said, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things...."
I confess that the best thing I got out of this piece was the discovery, by way of the comments, of this blog: Poet Tree.
Kindness, decency ...
... and common sense. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It may be possible to be a great chess master, or logician, or mathematician, without being a half-way decent human being, but it’s certainly not so for novelists. While many novelists have been monsters, i feel that even with a narcissist like Thomas Mann there is some fineness of character – even if it was only deployed in his novels.
Good sports column ...
... Bad sports, good sports: Manny Ramirez skips the ninth inning for a shower.
The last time I really liked a sports column was when Larry Merchant wrote for the Daily News (a long, long time ago). There's something refeshingly straightforward about this one.
The last time I really liked a sports column was when Larry Merchant wrote for the Daily News (a long, long time ago). There's something refeshingly straightforward about this one.
Religion of peace ...
... strikes again: Tingbjerg: one neighborhood’s nightmare. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A chat ...
... The Feministing Five: A. S. Byatt. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Shouldn't she be referred to as Dame Antonia?
Frost for Halloween ...
... "The faintest restless rustling ran all through them," or, Frost hears a ghost story. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Chesterton and Dr. Johnson ...
... `Friendship and Honour and an Abysmal Tenderness'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
And a very happy birthday to Patrick.
Companions ...
... on the road to faith: God and despair. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have certainly called upon God in my darker moments, but it wasn't my darker moments that drew me to God. My religious sensibility is Catholic, grounded in the sense of God as, in Dante's famous phrase, "the love that moves the sun and other stars."
Good for her ...
... Hilary Mantel addresses "the time-worn debate about the value of historical fiction."
Thought for the day ...
The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.- Charles Williams
Sunday, October 25, 2009
I should have posted this ...
... on Friday, of course: Robbery on Main Street. (Hat tip, Dave Lull - who sent it to me on Friday.)
A chat ...
... with Glenn Gould (hat tip, J0e of New York).
I still get melancholy when the weather changes a bit in late summer and I am reminded of what it felt like as a child and vacation was drawing to close and school would soon begin.
I still get melancholy when the weather changes a bit in late summer and I am reminded of what it felt like as a child and vacation was drawing to close and school would soon begin.
Today's Inquirer reviews ...
... From 1910's ashes rose ecological, political renewal.
... Katie looks at a Monster mashup: Another altered Austen.
... Paul Davis has the story: Detective Bosch is back.
... so true: There's no burying vampire mania.
Thought for the day ...
Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.- Max Stirner, born on this date in 1806
Saturday, October 24, 2009
On the difference ...
... between that and of: Notes on Philosophical Terminology and its Fluidity.
... the fact that Bill is blogging is made true by the fact of Bill's blogging.
Thought for the day ...
You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.- Denise Levertov, born on this date in 1923
Friday, October 23, 2009
Keeping science in sync ...
... with doubt: Science as a Religion that Worships Doubt as its God. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
No need to despair ...
... How we will survive without newspapers.
Without healthy newspapers, we’re just Myanmar with better department stores and less stylish military uniforms.
That’s the rallying cry of the newspaper industry’s saviors, anyway. As Jack Shafer memorably put it in Slate, this narrative reduces newspapers to a “compulsory cheat sheet for democracy.” They deserve better than that. Throughout the 20th century, our daily broadsheets and tabloids played a far richer role in our culture. They deepened our spiritual lives with horoscopes. They kept our minds sharp with crossword puzzles and the Jumble. They helped us track our favorite TV shows and paid for themselves by offering great deals on detergent. In their lighter moments, they delighted us with the cartoon antics of lasagna-loving cats.
Bringer of jollity ...
... Welcome to the real Narnia. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Fans of Gustav Holst will recognize the allusion in my lead-in.
Thought for the day ...
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.- Michael Crichton, born on this date in 1942
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The trouble with search engines ...
... Globe & Mail spikes post: Headline Writing for Robots. (This was sent to me, but I don't by whom.)
A very thoughtful piece ...
... about which I may have more to say later (we're going to be heading out soon to the orchestra): My Church is not a safe haven for bigots.
Postmodern Bryan ...
... Smith, Gladwell, Humphrys and the Empty Restaurant. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, I'm no ideologue, but I don't think I'm postmodern, either. Dave suggests, given my fondness for Thomism, that I am perhaps pre-modern. That sounds about right. So I guess I agree with Bryan's new friend that "we need ... to keep our minds open not just to new ideas, but new ways of knowing in general." Only I would add that we might want to consider some old ways as well, especially the medieval ways.
Adventures ...
... in Vladivostok: The Doors of Pineappleception (Part One) and The Doors of Pineappleception (Part Two).
Gold into lead ...
... Jessa Crispin wonders: Maugham's the Word? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
If there's a lesson from this sudden dead author revival, it's that you should immediately start burning anything you don't want released instead of waiting for the ones who follow to start cashing in.
Philosophical food fight ...
... Heil Heidegger!
A good many of the comments are not exactly examples of dispassionate discourse. I'm no big fan of Heidegger, who seems to have been a pretty sorry excuse for a human being, but it seems his philosophy ought not to be judged exclusively in terms of his appalling behavior. To ban the publication of his works is up there with banning Wagner's operas. His influence is undeniable, and I can't see how you can examine the ideas of those he influenced without also examining what Heidegger wrote. He is, by the way, not the only German philosopher to emply the term Dasein. Karl Jaspers used it also, but not as Heidegger did. It is, after all, a perfectly common German word.
Thought for the day ...
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.- Franz Liszt, born on this date in 1811
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
HALLELUJAH!!!
The Phillies are the National League Champions for the second straight year. I grieve that Bryan cannot understand the beauty of a 93 mph fast ball.
A city and its newspaper ...
... Richard Rodriguez: The Death of the SF Chronicle. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Don't forget to click on the podcast at the bottom.
Mind on mind ...
...Reflections On Epilepsy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... I am a non-Cartesian atheist who just can’t help noticing that however hard you look, you will not find sensations, affections and reasons in bits of the brain, or even distributed throughout the brain. So although a functioning brain is necessary for every aspect of consciousness, from the simplest twinge of sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is not sufficient for consciousness – and certainly not for the kind of consciousness you and I enjoy.