Saturday, March 31, 2012

The coming unknown...

...Shooting into the dark

I am no big fan of apocalypse theory. Sure, I don't mind watching movies such as 2012 but for purely entertainment purposes. I have never subscribed to the idea that we are all hurtling towards doom. BTW 2012 left me cold. It had brilliant visual effects but the direction was surprisingly canny about the devastation that visited anyone but the protagonists. 

A rare interview …

… The Art Of The Everyday: The Alchemy Of Anne Tyler : NPR. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


"I did do one about 35 years ago," she says. "I don't have that much to say, so I figure about every 35 years will do it, right? It does make me very self-conscious when I go back to writing, after I talk about writing."

Literary companionship …

… Poet Deborah Landau on Collaboration | Word Craft - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Trusted readers often take an active hand in the process of writing itself, uncovering the poem or story buried in a rough draft. Such exchanges can be alchemic.

Dialogue of seen and unseen …

… Edward Hopper | Second Story Sunlight | Double Exposure | Masterpiece by John Wilmerding - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Then there is Mr. Hopper's control of color and light. Of the latter he once famously, if disconcertingly, declared that he was only "interested in painting sunlight on buildings."

Thought for the day …

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
— John Fowles, born on this date in 1926

Friday, March 30, 2012

The waiting


Now he was settled. He had found himself a small cute place on the Western line, and was not far from his office too. The process of moving in had been remarkably easy but setting up the house, if one could call a studio apartment that, was not. He got himself a 20 litre Bisleri to fit atop the water dispenser but while doing so, he dropped the big plastic bottle and it cracked, drowning his house. It took him hours to clear the water with an old T-shirt, wetting, wringing, wetting, wringing.

But it was nice too. All the work, the running around. Running to Khar station to buy the basics, a dustbin, clips to keep clothes in place, paper rolls. And now all he waited for was Internet. The Reliance people had said they would do it the day after he had registered. Today was that day. 11, they had said.

He woke up and rushed to the newspaper seller at the crossing to buy as many as he could lay his hands on. The absence of Internet meant he had to kill time reading. He realised at moments like this how much he had come to rely on the Net to spend his time. It was an experience he could lose himself in for hours.

But the Internet was also a space where he came face to face with his desires, his needs, his frustrations. Towleroad, check. PR, check. Books Inq, check. It was a battle for supremacy. He flitted between sites and webpages with remarkable speed, absorbing it all, when at the end of it, he felt satiated in a very real way, but also, he felt, worked up.

It was too easy, he saw. Everything was on tap. Porn, yes. News, yes. There was no waiting. But today he had to wait. He had to actually wait for the Net to start. He found he had to force his mind to learn to do that.

Besides, the Net's pretence of availability was at best a mirage. Everytime he opened the URL for PR, a sort of electricity ran through him -- the expectation, the possibilities. The real world, real life was always less exciting, more pedestrian.

And so he waited. Happy that he was de-addicting himself, sad that the Reliance guy wouldn't arrive sooner.

Indeed …

Marilynne Robinson Does Politics (Badly) — Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

No longer a human being who is seen clearly for a moment, the pickup driver is transmogrified into the symbol of a politics that Robinson reviles. The irony is that her own failure of generosity is entirely invisible to her. For immediately she sniffs: “There is at present a dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives.” Very much including the lives of pickup drivers, apparently, if they oppose higher taxes!

Yeah, Robinson is all sweetness and light … until she runs into a Republican.

A message for Maxine …

First, thanks for alerting me to those RSS ads. It took me a while to figure things out, but I finally did and have now shut them off.

Sometimes bad is bad …

… Current TV Dismisses Keith Olbermann - NYTimes.com.


Hard to say which is worse, being fired by something as irrelevant as Current TV or being replaced by someone as loathsome as Eliot Spitzer.

Books galore …

… You Can Always Get What You Didn’t Know You Wanted at the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Sale | Town Topics. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
What I was looking for when I walked into the sturm und drang of the Thursday preview was something with a story or a cover quaint and curious enough to write about and reproduce on this page. What I found was a new paperback edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and a like-new copy of Debussy On Music, both of which will be of use for future columns on Sinclair and Debussy, whose 150th birthday falls on August 22.

I have reason to remember Debussy's centenary.  Now we are  half a century past.

Read all over …

… How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


The Mail’s competitive advantage lies in its connection to its readers. “There’s a lot of rubbish talked about what people are interested in,” Dacre told me. “When my executives tell me everyone’s fascinated by a particular subject—say, a pop star or a film—I ask myself, ‘Would my family be interested?’ Eight times out of ten, I instinctively know when the answer is no.”
Connection to readers. Imagine that!

Religion and humane …

… When I Was a Child I Read Books | Books and Culture.


I reviewed Marilynne Robinson's  Home  and found it wanting. But this comment on one of its scenes makes me wonder if I should take another look and see if I was wrong:


Ames, a Congregationalist minister and reader of Reformed theology, is seated on his old friend Robert Boughton's front porch. Boughton is a fellow minister, a Presbyterian, whose estranged son has recently turned up again, raking his fingers across old wounds. Jack, the son, puts the question to Ames, "Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?" 
As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear, if it wasn't clear from the outset, that Jack is asking about himself. Knowing how he has hurt his family, he has come back to the town where he grew up to seek—what? absolution? atonement? He wonders if people can change. Ames dodges the question, not only for its theological intractability—"I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one's understanding ever advanced one iota"—but also because giving a negative answer would mean forgiving Jack for the way he has hurt old Rev. Boughton, as well as Ames himself. And that's not something Ames, for all his wisdom and sensitivity, is quite prepared to do yet.

Coherent, shrewd, and tender …

… The Hanging Garden | Patrick White | Review by The Spectator.


Patrick White certainly does not deserve to be forgotten. His best writing can seem miraculous, and he was at his best more often than not.

Beyond ideology …

… Book Review: Free Market Fairness - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


First, [Tomasi] argues—against the socialist ethic of Rawls—that economic liberty is among the basic rights of individuals, as fundamental as the right to free speech. That is, we value economic liberty not merely for reasons of utility but for the ways in which it enables us to be the authors of our own lives. As Mr. Tomasi eloquently explains: "Restrictions of economic liberty, no matter how lofty the social goal, impose conformity on the life stories that free citizens might otherwise compose."

Majority of one …

… Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?: Guest Post: Lee Lowe - Confessions of a Compleat Non-Professional.

… writing is how I define myself. It's what I do, and have always done, even when I wasn't writing; when I didn't have the self-discipline to shut the door on my five kids and concentrate, when I didn't scribble long into the night or well before dawn. (I'm terribly admiring of writers who manage that!) I'm dreadful at plotting but love sentences—beautiful, intoxicating sentences.

Thought for the day …

Only he who simply and wholly abandons himself to the object of his perception will experience it aesthetically.
— Erwin Panofsky, born on this date in 1892

Hilton Kramer, book reviewer …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `The Work of Intelligence or Imagination'.


I reviewed a Library of America collection of late Philip K. Dick. I found the books fascinating, though I would never revisit them. I also think an acquaintance with psychedelics and other drugs helps in appreciating them.

Not always long …

… Craft Note: The Elegy (part one) — Kenyon Review Blog.
… Merwin’s poem, so brief, put me on my ear for while, but when I stood again I understood that the elegy is an extremely flexible form—whether extremely long and seemingly disconsolate, like Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” or like Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song” elliptical and encrypted in another form (the sonnet).

There is a medieval Japanese poem — I can't remember the name of the poet, but it is an elegy for her little son:
Where is he now
The brave hunter of dragonflies?

OTT you say...

Commenting on Jesse's post, Dave abbreviated "For What It's Worth" to FWIW. That set my (mostly idle) mind racing. So here is a list of common phrasal abbreviations. Can you figure them out (presented in no order of difficulty)?

BTW (there I did it myself) these are phrases incomplete in themselves. In other words, they are NOT proverbs.

Get cracking. Good Luck!

1. HST
2. OUAT
3. ISOT
4. IIMO... (this is followed by a question)
5. ITNEFY
6. TWW (Hint: sentence beginner when referencing the past)
7. OTW
8. WTFO
9. WOTS
10. FTLT

PS The headline is "Over-the-top you say"!!

Update: Changing the timestamp to bring the blog post up


Update 2: Answers:


Hmph! such poor response. Many thanks to Danish Dog for answering
Here are the answers:


1. HST = Having Said That
2. OUAT =Once Upon A Time
3. ISOT = In Spite of This
4. IIMO = Is It Me Or...
5. ITNEFY = If that's not enough for you
6. TWW = Time Was When
7. OTW = On the Whole
8. WTFO = Whatever the final outcome
9. WOTS = While on the subject
10. FTLT = For the longest time



You know what …

… Heroes of Slang 14: Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty — The Dabbler.
It is a wonderful list – and Urquhart produces many similar, and often in the context of the pleasures of sex or food. Some of its words already existed, but most were his coinages; a skill that he had already demonstrated in his Trissotetras, or, A most exquisite table for resolving all manner of triangles (1645) in which of the 200 words he used to ‘simplify’ Pythagoras’ theorem, the bulk were of his own making.

Thought for the day …

God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

— Joyce Cary, who died on this date in 1957

What or whom …

… am I talking about? A Picture of Language - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.” Sometime in the 18th century, teachers began to realize that practical skills were more useful to young people than classical languages, and that the ability to speak English didn’t necessarily mean that a student spoke it well, wrote it correctly or understood its structure. To teach it, they borrowed the concept of parsing from the classical tradition in which they themselves had been trained.

Say it ain't so …

… William Happer: Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or are already happening as a result of mankind's use of fossil fuels. But these ominous predictions are based on computer models. It is important to distinguish between what the climate is actually doing and what computer models predict. The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with model predictions.

Master of forthrightness …

… Roger Kimball: Hilton Kramer and the 'Correction of Taste' - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

He loved telling the story of attending a dinner at the Whitney Museum. He was seated next to the film director Woody Allen, who asked whether he ever felt embarrassed when he met socially artists whom he had criticized. No, Kramer replied, they're they ones who made the bad art: I just described it. Mr. Allen, he recalled, lapsed into gloomy silence. It was only on his way home that Kramer recalled writing a highly critical piece about "The Front," a P.C. movie about the Hollywood blacklist in which Mr. Allen acted. That anecdote encapsulates something essential about Kramer's practice as a critic.

Hmm …

… The World Is Already Filled to Bursting | Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes.


May I suggest that a a lack of imagination may be evident in this, or at least a  lack of appreciation of imagination?

Get ready to laugh …

… Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock: I. -- Maddened by Mystery: or, The Defective Detective. (Hat tip, John Timpane.)


Some pretty funny people loved Leacock's work, including Jack Benny and Groucho Marx. It's easy to see why.

Getting the flow to go with …

… Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus - life - 06 February 2012 - New Scientist. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


But can anyone, by means of this, achieve anything similar to what those "experts " achieve?

Thought for the day …

The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.
— Nelson Algren , born on this date in 1909

I loved these things …

… when I was a kid: AbeBooks: Classics Illustrated: Pioneering Comic Books.


I suppose one shouldn't admit that, but they were great introductions to the classics. After all, if they were good enough to be made into comic books, they were good enough to read.

You have been warned …

… History Repeats: In Europe, They Want Jewish Blood | Via Meadia.


This has seemed obvious for quite some time. It is as if people kept their anti-Semitism to themselves because it was, for a time, so unfashionable, but have suddenly realized that, well, it's back in fashion, and — as before, when it was last fashionable — complete with credentialed academics.

The cold truth …

… Freak Show - Metropolis.



The Inquirer and Daily News are brands built on good journalism -- and good journalistic practices. Their value lies in their truthfulness and reliability.

Philly.com doesn't share those values. It doesn't work under the same rules. Therefore, it runs the risk of pulling the papers down to its level. That cheapens the brand.
That pretty much sums it up. To elaborate:


To put it another way, philly.com stoops to conquer. It can't go all the way down, if you'll forgive the expression, because it is tied to the two news organizations that provide much of its material.It must serve its masters, whose principal purpose is to produce news. It must also get big hits.In the process of trying to do both, it becomes an odd hybrid: a lousy news site and a lousy T&A/Stupid Pet Tricks site.

I know that many will think this is just sour-grapes from a couple of old-timers (I am in complete agreement with Tom, who happens to be younger than I — but has also been around the newsroom for more than a few laps). And so: I call as my first witness: Philly.Com.

Casting a wide net …

… Book Review: Lives of the Novelists - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


The model for this book is Samuel Johnson's famous "Lives of the Poets" (1779-81), where the eminent essayist, who considered that a chief part of the interest of literature is biographical, surveyed a century of English poets and provided a critical model for generations of scholars. Mr. Sutherland usually adheres to Johnson's practice: biography first, criticism second—though he departs from it whenever he pleases.

Observation and imagination …

… Science on the Rampage by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


We gain knowledge of our place in the universe not only from science but also from history, art, and literature. Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. “Physics at the Fringe” is what happens when imagination loses touch with observation. Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. The mythologies of Carter and Velikovsky fail to be science, but they are works of art and high imagining. As William Blake told us long ago, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

A class act...

All those who claim that Meryl Streep is repetitive need to see The Iron Lady. She is excellent as a woman who is looking back on a past that was equal parts glorious and controversial. At its heart, The Iron Lady is not a political movie but a romantic one, as Margaret remembers her time with Dennis (played by regular husband-in-peril Jim Broadbent). In a masterful scene that comes at the movie's end, she finally rids herself of Dennis' possessions and so lets go of his presence as well. Beautiful!

Not so fast …

… from Ursula K. Le Guin: BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG — The Death of the Book. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)



There certainly is something sick about the book industry, but it seems closely related to the sickness affecting every industry that, under pressure from a corporate owner, dumps product standards and long-range planning in favor of ‘predictable’ sales and short-term profits.
As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook.

Correct on both counts.

Thought for the day …

We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source - the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.
— Alfred de Vigny, born on this date in 1797

Fitzgerald's Paradise


Is it me or is is Fitzgerald one of those authors about whom a great deal continues to be said, but for whose oeuvre few have committed the time that might reasonably be expected? 

I may be wrong here, but my sense is that Hemingway's work, by contrast, has been picked over more thoroughly than Fitzgerald's. Sure, there's Gatsby - but what comes next? Tender is the Night is the most likely candidate, but I have the sense that more people have read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or For Whom the Bell Tolls than have completed Fitzgerald's second-tier novels. (Not that "second-tier" does them justice...)

But I digress. 

What I wanted to express most in this post are, first, the similarities between This Side of Paradise (a novel which I've recently finished) and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I mean, wow: whether it's Oxford or Princeton, it doesn't really matter. Both novels chart the academy as it existed in perhaps its most elite modern form - and then go on to chronicle the demise of the novel's central (or seemingly central) character. In the case of Fitzgerald, this is Amory Blaine. 

There's no question that Fitzgerald nailed the first half of this book, but then lost his way a bit toward the end. This owes some, I think, to the fact that the young Fitzgerald hadn't yet experienced that which he attempted to capture. Plus, the very idea of decline was anethma to Fitzgerald's belief in America's promise, particularly in those years before the war. 

All of this is to say that Fitzgerald's best when he's knee-deep in the social and academic muck represented by Princeton, but he's not as good - or not nearly as good as Waugh, I don't think - when it comes to capturing a sense of demise, of withering away like Sebastian Flyte. (Fitzgerald will do far better on this topic in Gatsby, of course.)

Despite this criticism, I enjoyed This Side of Paradise and found it surprisingly readable and entertaining. As this is Fitzgerald, the last line is reserved for the master:

"He felt he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man." (Penguin ed., 258)

National Jewish Book

Award winners for 2011. A very interesting, and diverse, list...

Monday, March 26, 2012

What's ahead ...


The possibilities are not lost on me. I am a keen traveller and would like to be free to spend time where I want to. My books are published primarily in the UK, but with this setup I could be anywhere in the world and still speak at bookshops, festivals and whatever else my publishers arrange for me. Plus, even when I’m in the UK, I can have a much broader reach.

Noble numbers …

 Anecdotal Evidence: `The Poetry of Mathematics'.


Loren Graham's Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity is worth reading in connect with all this.

It's everywhere …

… Age of Ignorance by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.


It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.

The great unraveling …

… PJ Media — The Decline of Literate Thought. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Then we have the fiasco of former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, who delivered a speech to the military base in Gagetown, New Brunswick, on April 14, 2004, in which he twice praised the Canadian effort in the 1944 invasion ofNorway. One is also reminded of President Obama’s notorious gaffes — the Austrian language, the 57 (or 58) states, the identification of a new state called Eau Claire, Hawaii as part of Asia, the Muslim history of Cordoba set in the period of the Inquisition, etc. Clearly, the failure of both memory and knowledge has become epidemic. One recalls, too, in this connection the British company Umbro, which outfits the English national soccer team, that marketed the Zyklon running shoe, unaware until controversy erupted of the Zyklon B poison gas the Nazis used in the concentration camps. “We are sure that the name was not meant to cause offense,” explained an Umbro spokesman, whose own name is Nick Crook. No less disturbing is a student paper I read in which the writer claimed that “man descended from the trees around two hundred years ago and experienced the Enlightenment.”

Few surprises here …

… MLA Rankings of American Writers — Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


I don't know that popularity with academics tells us much.

The wild card of his generation …

… Bryan Appleyard — The Once and Future Tee-Mo. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


[Mo] came to loathe and mistrust the industry, even believing royalty payments were fiddled. So he went rogue and decided to self-publish. It was a move that inspired derision. “What surprised me was that people took the side of the publishers against me. There was a flood of venom about me in the papers. I was really startled. I thought people wouldn’t be interested or would take my side.”

Refreshingly sensible …

… Beckett: Storming for Beauty by John Banville | The New York Review of Books.


… too many Beckett scholars treat their subject as a secular saint, unworldly and impregnably innocent, a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and the prophet Jeremiah.3 As is amply demonstrated by the letters so far published—the two volumes of them now in print and the two that are forthcoming represent a modest selection, vigilantly overseen by the Beckett estate, under the control of his nephew Edward, from the many thousands that Beckett wrote in his long lifetime4—he was as eager as any writer to have his work published, and published in a way that would ensure it should reach as wide a readership as possible. Such a desire is not inconsistent with an unwillingness to be thrust into the jaws of the publicity machine that grinds away tirelessly at the center of the literary marketplace.

Absolutely deplorable...

...Kill the Indian first

This is the text of the letter I wrote to the magazine's editor:

I have not in recent memory come across an article in an Indian magazine that has made my blood boil as much. I am practically shaking as I type this. I have no idea what sort of people Gopinath comes across to warrant his jaundiced view of Indians or how he forms an opinion about a 1.2 billion people through his stained glasses, or even how a magazine that I have grown to like can carry a piece laced with such harebrained hatred.

I have just finished my MBA at IIM Lucknow and have moved to what Gopinath would undoubtedly refer to as an uncouth, unplanned, unhygienic, uncivil city, viz Bombay. I have been here a week and I have my own observations to share. Indians, the same people Gopinath viciously excoriates ("Between a snake and Indian, kill Indian first..." Seriously? If someone had said that to me I would have smacked him in the face, not gloated about it in a magazine), in this beautiful city are courteous, helpful, polite, deeply caring. Yes, they get into "Churchgate mode" because of the sheer size of our population but they also vacate seats in local trains for those more in need and literally fall over one another to answer your query about which side Bandra station would arrive.

I love the city and I love Delhi (where I worked) and Lucknow (where I studied) and Gwalior (where I grew up). Someone remind Gopinath that one need not praise others at the cost of one's own, especially when such criticism is gratuitous and plain wicked. And a humble request to Open to exercise greater editorial control over such deplorable material.

Gresham's Law …

… David Gelernter: The Pros and Cons of Cyber-English - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Digital words seem cheap because they are, and they grow cheaper by the day. Consider the withering hailstorm of mail, text, social net and blog posts that assaults you the moment you go online. It's become impossible for many a normal, solid citizen to answer his email promptly. But young people seem increasingly apt to ignore uninteresting messages on purpose. If the message is important it will be resent, and if it isn't, who cares anyway? So the value of digital words sinks even lower.

Somehow, I think it will all work itself out.

Bad idea …

… Allez Les Books: France Suggests Amazon Tax To Help Independent Bookstores | TechCrunch.


A store is a delivery system. If a better system comes along for what the store delivers, people will inevitably use it. That is too bad for the store, but it is not the new delivery system's fault.  Of course, Amazon could just past the tax along to its customers, who would then be paying for the indie bookstores they no longer patronize. Amazon could also decide, I suppose, to not do business in France, thereby depriving French readers of its superior delivery system. 
Everybody believes in evolution by means of natural selection … until it affects something they like. 

Elusive …

… Bryan Appleyard — The Truth of Islam. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


“When I began to write,” he says, “I had no real idea of the minefield I was stepping into. From various books about Muhammad I had assumed the sources were pretty solid and there must be contemporary sources for these stories. It was quite alarming when I discovered this wasn’t the case. I would keep going to the British Library and my jaw would drop at the implications of what I was reading.”

Giving the Devil his due …

 … Arthur Krystal: The excuses of a mean book critic - The Style Blog - The Washington Post. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


This prompted me to take a look at my review of Guterson's Ed King. It's not nice, but I don't thinking it's self-indulgently nasty.

Thought for the day …

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
— Joseph Campbell, born on this date 1904

Sunday, March 25, 2012

A must read..

...300 Ramayanas, One Ram

The context: Last year the Delhi university banned an essay on Ramayana by Prof Ramanujan that interpreted Ramayana in what some Hindus claim negative light. I have not read the essay but I tend to agree with the argument forwarded in this article.

Not what you think you may know …

… The king and I - FT.com.


When Henry was crowned, aged 21, Becket was 34, an accomplished canon lawyer and archdeacon of Canterbury in minor orders. The young king, admiring Becket’s acumen and trustworthiness among so many courtier parasites and intriguers, raised him from obscurity to one of the highest positions in the land – chancellor of England. He approved of Becket’s eventual appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury (he was ordained priest on the same day) as a means of bringing a too-powerful church to heel. When Becket went holy on him, defied him, and attempted to strengthen church privileges, their relationship soured, then turned to hatred.

Glad I'm just a reviewer …

… A Momentary Taste of Being: Literary Criticism--Collaborative Fiction.


Recently, I reviewed Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. I liked it. But what was interesting about it was the account it provided of how Bloom experiences literature. He experiences it differently from the way I do, and probably from the way most other people do. But how he experiences it is interesting, It's a little to hieratic for my taste. For Bloom, literature is a substitute Torah, and he approaches it Taldmudically. Seems to work for him.

Some merit perhaps …

… but not much: Plot summary or review? | Petrona.

I ran quite a few of Maxine's reviews when I was the The Inquirer's book-review editor. I did not find them to be mere plot summaries. Reviewing crime fiction requires a focus on plot, and what you can always get from Maxine's reviews is some sense as to whether you might want to read the book under review. I suspect the complaint came from someone who thinks reviews have more to do with the reviewer's thoughts and feelings than what the book being reviewed is about.

Brow-beating …

… Dwight Macdonald | HiLobrow. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Regarding the hight-nrow-lowbrow, middle-brow business, something J.B. Priestley wrote in Literature and Western Man provides a little perspective:
That excellent American critic, Van Wyck Brooks, writing as a young man just after the European War (as it then was) had broken out, introduced into an essay, to deplore them, those brand-new slang terms 'Highbrow' and 'Lowbrow'. (He was wise enough, even then, to realize that the common use of those terms, dividing people into two opposed classes and somehow disliking both of them, would do far more harm than good. It has in fact done literature a disservice.)

And so it has. And so did Macdonald. "By Cozzens Possessed" is very funny in sits (I remember reading it when it came out). But it isn't just an attack on Cozzens's novel. It's also an attack on other reviewers. One of its points would seem to be that only the preternaturally perceptive Dwight Macdonald has got it right.

Gita as life's primer...

...On the slow track

"It is gospel for administration. It teaches you how to execute your business, " says the Metro Man. "This is not a Hindu text, and in my opinion Gita should be taught in schools without giving it a religious colouring, " he says.


Pseudo-explanations …

…  Edward Feser: Scruton on “neuroenvy”. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


When I intentionally type these words into my computer, there is the material cause of the action, which is the associated neural and other physiological activity, and the efficient cause of the motion of my fingers, which includes this physiological activity; but there is also thefinal cause of the action, which is the end or goal of conveying some philosophical ideas, and the formal cause, which is the human soul -- “human soul” here understood, not in the popular sense of a wispy, ghostly thing that enters into a body in order to animate it and exits it at death, and not in the Cartesian sense of an immaterial substance, but rather in the technical Aristotelian sense of the substantial form of a rational animal. And the efficient cause of the action includes the intellectual activity distinctive of something with that sort of substantial form (as contrasted with the merely sensory or imaginative powers that a non-rational animal possesses) -- where the intellectual element and the neural element are not two things (as they are for the Cartesian dualist) but rather two irreducible aspects of one thing (just as a sentence is one thing with two aspects, material and semantic).

Thought for the day …

Ah, well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it's the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people's hearts lie.                                                                            — Paul Scott, born on this date in 1920

This must be that smart diplomacy …

… weighty deliberations. (Hat tip, Ed Champion.)

An impossible view …

… AbeBooks: Come to Life: It Narratives and Anthropomorphism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The It Narrative as a literary form came into fashion in mid to late 18th-century England. It originated as a serious device to allow writers, through personification, to present outside observation or criticism of human beings and society from a social perspective without introducing a main human character's moralistic standpoint. The literary device also relieved the reader of the assumptions and notions that a human character's class, gender or social standing carried along with it. Particularly in times of great social turmoil or upheaval, a narrator could be seen as unreliable merely by virtue of his or her station in life (particularly in relation to that of the reader or author). So writers turned to non-human narrators and perspectives.

Spooky-pretty …

… by way of Katie: This is a Love Letter: An Interview with Eliza Frye | The Comics Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Katie has a book of her own coming out in June: White Elephants.

Hmm …

RealClearMarkets - The Inexorable March of Creative Destruction.



 Today's primary political and cultural conflict is, [Virginia] Postrel says, between people, mislabeled "progressives," who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

Stasists see Borders succumb to e-books (and Amazon) and lament the passing of familiar things. Dynamists say: Relax, reading is thriving. In 2001, the iPod appeared, and soon stores such as Tower Records disappeared. Who misses them?

But I am sure all those stasists are devout believers in evolution by means of natural selection, which is a an ex example of order emerging from apparent chaos.




P.S. Many years ago I copyedited a book by Stanley I. Kutler called Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case. I'd like to say I made some contribution to it, but the fact is it was the cleanest manuscript I ever saw. It is an excellent book and highly recommended.

All true …

… zmkc: Life's Necessities.


Once upon a time, I left Georgetown in a car with a friend at 8 a.m. and we crossed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into Phillly not long after 10 a.m. At one point we had been doing 125 m.p.h. The car was a Corvette. The statute of limitations is long past.

FYI …

… Scientists use rare mineral to correlate past climate events in Europe, Antarctica.




They compared the results with climate conditions established in Northern Europe across a 2,000-year time frame. They found a direct correlation between the rise and fall of oxygen 18 in the crystals and the documented warming and cooling periods.
“We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica,” [geochemist Zunli] Lu says.
In other words, the Medieval Warm Period wasn't confined to Europe.

Literary magpie …

… Robert Burton | The Anatomy of Melancholy | Digressions on a Diagnosis | Masterpiece by Danny Heitman - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Casting his prolixity as a virtue, Mr. Burton quotes Seneca: "When you see a fellow careful about his words, and neat in his speech, know this for a certainty, that man's mind is busied about toys, there's no solidity in him." At another point, he waves off any aspirations to popular appeal: "I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else." Paradoxically, Mr. Burton's deaf ear to the rules of literary endearment becomes a form of endearment in itself.