Daniel Green at The Reading Experience takes issue with Joseph Epstein's reassessment of Edmund Wilson that I linked to in this post. I actually do not see that Epstein's objections to Wilson as a critic are grounded in his perception of Wilson as a less than admirable human being. The passage I quoted in the post I just linked to seems to me the crux of Epstein's argument.
But I find this point of Green's interesting:
Insofar as the critic is first of all a reader, he/she does experience the same emotions in reading works of literature as any other reader, but the emotional effects are inevitably particular to, and not detachable from, the reading experience itself. How exactly is it possible to "develop in thought" an emotional suggestion? How could such a "thought" be anything but incomplete and lifeless in comparison to the actual emotion? And why would we need a critic to expatiate on his/her emotional reactions in this way?
As someone whose bias is phenomenological I would answer this by saying that you cannot accurately and precisely describe a work (which I think necessitates reference to its mechanics) without also engaging its emotional implications and reflecting one's own emotional response.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
A sequence of views ...
Arts & Letters Daily links to an interview with evangelical Darwinian Richard Dawkins at Beliefnet. There's a link at the bottom to a piece by Gregg Easterbrook that raises some questions about Dawkins's position. That piece links to another Easterbrook piece, an appreciation of the late astronomer Fred Hoyle, a scientist who did important work in his field -- notably regarding nucleogenesis -- unlike Dawkins, an entomologist (his specialty is arachnids) who preaches how wonderful science is, but doesn't seem to practice it very much. All three pieces need to be read in order to gain, I think, a proper perspective.
Start the day right ...
... and visit the BAFAB Blog BAFAB stands for Buy a Friend a Book. Sounds like a good idea to me -- and a sign of true friendship.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Another fan of Montaigne ...
Stefanie Hollmichel at So Many Books responds in a very personal (which is as it should be) to Montaigne's essay "On Conversation" in a post titled "Let's Talk". I blogged about Montaigne a while back here and here.
The way we were ...
Chekhov's Mistress notes how times have changed when it comes to poetry. It is interesting to look at what sort of books sold well in the past. You can take a look here.
Another list ...
Kirkus has its list of 2005's top books up, which includes a list of 25 we may all have overlooked. (Hat tip: Conversational Reading.)
A twofer ...
Grumpy Old Bookman makes some astute observations about the Mainstream Media and brings to our attention a most interesting book: "This book has, it seems, been online since 1997, is in its 18th revision, and 226,438 people have taken a look at it."
Writing by numbers ...
Booksquare discusses Judging Writing, with particular reference to Sam Sacks's "The Fiction Machine" in New York Press.
Recently, I was reading a book I was thinking of reviewing and, about a third of the way into it, I realized that it exemplified everything that had prompted me in 1966 to give up a fellowship and leave grad school for good. To be a good writer what you need to do is read a lot -- not in order to analyze it, but just to let it sink deep down into your consciousness -- and write a lot. Most of all you need on-the-job training in life. What you don't need is to sit around with a lot of other aspiring writers talking about writing.
Recently, I was reading a book I was thinking of reviewing and, about a third of the way into it, I realized that it exemplified everything that had prompted me in 1966 to give up a fellowship and leave grad school for good. To be a good writer what you need to do is read a lot -- not in order to analyze it, but just to let it sink deep down into your consciousness -- and write a lot. Most of all you need on-the-job training in life. What you don't need is to sit around with a lot of other aspiring writers talking about writing.
Another discovery ...
POD-dy Mouth reviews what sounds like an interesting book published by Xlibris -- in 2000. She is right: Had it been published by Random House -- which has a 49 percent share of Xlibris -- it would have been remaindered long ago. The problem of separating the wheat from the chaff in alternative publishing continues to fascinate me.
More good advice
An unsolicited plug ...
Over the weekend I got my 2006 Weekly Planner from Today in Literature. It's quite nice. In addition to the dates and facts and essays, which I love, the woodcuts by Barry Moser are exceptional.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Finishing books ...
Brandywine Books asked some bloggers if "it's appropriate to ignore or scan parts of a book which you review?"
Here is what they said.
I myself feel honor-bound to read a book I'm reviewing all the way through. Since I write a column designed to recommend books, I don't have to finish one I don't like anyway. But from time to time I have to read a book I don't think is very good -- and even some of those I recommend are not without faults. The Da Vinci Code is bad, but it goes through one eye and out the other, so it's no great effort to read, just not very rewarding -- in fact, totally unrewarding. But I remember reading a book a few years back that had patches of such dull incomprehensibility that I might as well not have read them, given that I got nothing out of them.
Here is what they said.
I myself feel honor-bound to read a book I'm reviewing all the way through. Since I write a column designed to recommend books, I don't have to finish one I don't like anyway. But from time to time I have to read a book I don't think is very good -- and even some of those I recommend are not without faults. The Da Vinci Code is bad, but it goes through one eye and out the other, so it's no great effort to read, just not very rewarding -- in fact, totally unrewarding. But I remember reading a book a few years back that had patches of such dull incomprehensibility that I might as well not have read them, given that I got nothing out of them.
Some good advice ...
Something else we missed ...
The Millions posted A Year in Reading: An Emerging Best of List compiled by Dan Wickett, who runs Emerging Writers Network, where he just has posted a list of What to Look Forward to in 2006.
Something to think about ...
... for sure. Instapundit links to The Death of Traditional Publishing, on Working Smart, Michael Hyatt's blog. Hyatt is the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Read the comments, which are also very interesting.
One slight correction: It's wan't Yogi Berra who made the remark about predicting being hard, though it sounds like the sort of thing he would have said. It was, however, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
That's something to keep in mind, especially in connection with all the prediction you encounter in the media. Sometimes it seems as if the entire newspaper is a subset of the horoscope column.
One slight correction: It's wan't Yogi Berra who made the remark about predicting being hard, though it sounds like the sort of thing he would have said. It was, however, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
That's something to keep in mind, especially in connection with all the prediction you encounter in the media. Sometimes it seems as if the entire newspaper is a subset of the horoscope column.
Odds & ends
Some interesting best books of the year lists at Ghost Word.
Confessions of an Idiosycratic Mind notes -- and registers -- some high dudgeon over the Crime Writers Association's growing cozy with filthy lucre.
Today in Literature reminds us that on this date in 1976, Saul Bellow delivered hi Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "...there is no simple choice between the children of light and the children of darkness," Bellow said. "Good and evil are not symmetrically distributed along political lines." (Tell that to Cary Tennis.)
Read Bellow's whole speech here.
Confessions of an Idiosycratic Mind notes -- and registers -- some high dudgeon over the Crime Writers Association's growing cozy with filthy lucre.
Today in Literature reminds us that on this date in 1976, Saul Bellow delivered hi Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "...there is no simple choice between the children of light and the children of darkness," Bellow said. "Good and evil are not symmetrically distributed along political lines." (Tell that to Cary Tennis.)
Read Bellow's whole speech here.
Something new about Orwell ...
An interesting piece about George Orwell in the Guardian. Seems some previously undisovered letters reveal some things we didn't know. (Hat tip, Sand Storm.
The joy of serendipity (again) ...
I have been spending a lot of my time exploring lit blogs, as should be obvious from the links I have been posting. I hope tonight to get around to posting something of my own again, though I plan to do that less than I have -- not because I don't have the time or the inclination, but because this blog exploration is turning out to be so much fun. Today's first discovery, over at Gumball Poetry, is The Last Expedition.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Verbal pedigree ...
Reader Murray Wilson emails me in reference to a word I used in my review of Claire Harmon's Myself & the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson:
I checked your usage of "fey" on the internet and found only one dictionary
which gave it, which suggests it is quite new and not generally accepted.
What is its pedigree?
Turned out to be an interesting question. The word originally meant "fated to die." Then it started to morph, coming to mean "visionary" and "having a certain otherwordly air," then "a tad precious" and even "campy." Oddly, all of these senses could be applied to Stevenson, who was thought -- and thought himself to be -- fated to die young (which he did, though not for the reason anticipated), who had certain otherworldly air about him and could be -- even in his writing -- a tad precious. Harmon remarks that Stevenson's manner was "gay," though Stevenson himself was straight.
I thought fey worked, and my editor did not object.
I checked your usage of "fey" on the internet and found only one dictionary
which gave it, which suggests it is quite new and not generally accepted.
What is its pedigree?
Turned out to be an interesting question. The word originally meant "fated to die." Then it started to morph, coming to mean "visionary" and "having a certain otherwordly air," then "a tad precious" and even "campy." Oddly, all of these senses could be applied to Stevenson, who was thought -- and thought himself to be -- fated to die young (which he did, though not for the reason anticipated), who had certain otherworldly air about him and could be -- even in his writing -- a tad precious. Harmon remarks that Stevenson's manner was "gay," though Stevenson himself was straight.
I thought fey worked, and my editor did not object.
Get me rewrite ...
... wait, no, I am rewrite -- at least I am if it's my book we're talking about.
Catherine Bush posts a discussion on Bookninja of her own extensive revisions of her novel Claire's Head.
Catherine Bush posts a discussion on Bookninja of her own extensive revisions of her novel Claire's Head.
Reality challenges fiction ...
The Box o' Truth looks at whether shooting a lock off is as easy as books and movies make it out to be. (Hat tip to Bill Peschel.)
And don't miss Sarah Weinman's Conquering Weekend Update.
And don't miss Sarah Weinman's Conquering Weekend Update.
Another good answer ...
Kate Greenstreet at every other day also addresses the question of poetry's usefulness.
Last call ...
Only last month, the Whitbread Book Awards 2005 shortlist was announced. Now the Sunday Times is reporting that Whitbread -- once Britain's best-known brewer -- has decided it's closing time. Not to worry if you're one of those nominated for the 2005 prize: Whitbread's not reneging on that one, which will be announced next month.
(I notice that Hugh Grant was a judge last year. Well, why not? The guy's an Oxford grad, for God's sake -- and he played a book shop owner in Notting Hill.)
(I notice that Hugh Grant was a judge last year. Well, why not? The guy's an Oxford grad, for God's sake -- and he played a book shop owner in Notting Hill.)
Saturday, December 10, 2005
A good answer ...
Lisa Janice Cohen at Blue Muse Poetry proposes a fine answer to a frequently posed question:
What Good is Poetry?
(For Gary B)
It buys us nothing, will not
fill empty bellies bloated
with endless promises
or excise a bullet
from an accidental wound
unravel time to force
the trigger to untrip.
But it is the copper penny
spent, redemption
from the poverty of language
that sucks the marrow
from the bones of our misfortune.
The only thing of value
I can offer.
What Good is Poetry?
(For Gary B)
It buys us nothing, will not
fill empty bellies bloated
with endless promises
or excise a bullet
from an accidental wound
unravel time to force
the trigger to untrip.
But it is the copper penny
spent, redemption
from the poverty of language
that sucks the marrow
from the bones of our misfortune.
The only thing of value
I can offer.
A bit of light verse ...
Melville Goodwin, a frequent visitor to this blog, posted some very clever light verse as a comment on my most recent fashion statement. This has inspired me to post some light verse that I wrote last spring in honor of the Royal wedding. The Inquirer's fine arts editor, Jeff Weinstein, who edits my "Editor's Choice" column -- and is the best editor I've ever worked with -- suggested it, and luckily some ideas actually floated to the surface of my consciousness. Here's what appeared on the day of the nuptials:
Perhaps the most important task of a British poet laureate is to celebrate royal weddings with an epithalamium, a poem in honor of the bride and groom to be. Of course, this particular nuptial has been downscaled, postponed - and the Prince has been asked by the Church of England to apologize to his beloved’s former husband.
But poet laureate Andrew Motion has put off his task for other reasons. He was extremely fond of the previous royal bride, and it’s been reported that he’s having trouble coming up with adequate rhymes for "Camilla. "
So, in his place, our resident laureate offers the couple his poetic gift (having tried and rejected "vanilla," "chinchilla," "sarsaparilla" and, in an American vein, "bridezilla").
Royal Couplets
Of marriage, matron, prince, and bard I sing,
And of delays the fates seem bent to fling
Into the way of true love’s unsmooth course.
Who wouldn’t swap his kingdom for a horse
When called upon to first acknowledge sin
To gain the church’s pardon, just to win
A Town Hall wedding scheduled on the day
That Papal obsequies get in the way?
And now, the charge to praise love’s true devotion
Has England’s Laureate in a commotion.
The scribe dear late Diana’s charms inspired
Has found his rhyming muse is sick, and tired.
What’s to be done, but take our pen in hand,
Declaring even messy love is grand?
All vain and pompous circumstance aside
It’s just another hopeful groom and bride.
Therefore we wish poor Charles and his Camilla
Full wedded bliss, down to the last scintilla.
Perhaps the most important task of a British poet laureate is to celebrate royal weddings with an epithalamium, a poem in honor of the bride and groom to be. Of course, this particular nuptial has been downscaled, postponed - and the Prince has been asked by the Church of England to apologize to his beloved’s former husband.
But poet laureate Andrew Motion has put off his task for other reasons. He was extremely fond of the previous royal bride, and it’s been reported that he’s having trouble coming up with adequate rhymes for "Camilla. "
So, in his place, our resident laureate offers the couple his poetic gift (having tried and rejected "vanilla," "chinchilla," "sarsaparilla" and, in an American vein, "bridezilla").
Royal Couplets
Of marriage, matron, prince, and bard I sing,
And of delays the fates seem bent to fling
Into the way of true love’s unsmooth course.
Who wouldn’t swap his kingdom for a horse
When called upon to first acknowledge sin
To gain the church’s pardon, just to win
A Town Hall wedding scheduled on the day
That Papal obsequies get in the way?
And now, the charge to praise love’s true devotion
Has England’s Laureate in a commotion.
The scribe dear late Diana’s charms inspired
Has found his rhyming muse is sick, and tired.
What’s to be done, but take our pen in hand,
Declaring even messy love is grand?
All vain and pompous circumstance aside
It’s just another hopeful groom and bride.
Therefore we wish poor Charles and his Camilla
Full wedded bliss, down to the last scintilla.
The future of book reviews ...
Steve Clackson of Sand Storm has a very interesting post today about book reviewing. A key point: "Reviews should after all be geared to market the book not the reviewer or the magazine/newspaper..." I'm not sure reviews should be geared to marketing a book -- I think reviews function more along the lines of Consumer Reports -- but they definitely should not be geared to marketing the reviewer or the publication.One of the good consequences of space cuts is that reviewers have been forced to focus on the book under consideration and not other books by the same or differnt authors that the reviewer thinks are comparable: While the comparisons may be apt, they also seem to exist primarily for the purpose of displaying the reviewer's erudition.
Reviewing a book is not as easy as many people seem to think it is. Though reviewing involves criticism, it is not the same as criticism, the principal difference being that criticism presumes the reader has read the work or works being discussed, whereas reviewing presumes just the opposite. The most valuable thing any reviewer can do is bring to the public's attention a worthwhile bit of writing that might otherwise be overlooked.
I also think Steve is right that the future of reviewing is online -- and I think the nature of the Internet will eventually bring about a new form of review.
Feedback, please!
Reviewing a book is not as easy as many people seem to think it is. Though reviewing involves criticism, it is not the same as criticism, the principal difference being that criticism presumes the reader has read the work or works being discussed, whereas reviewing presumes just the opposite. The most valuable thing any reviewer can do is bring to the public's attention a worthwhile bit of writing that might otherwise be overlooked.
I also think Steve is right that the future of reviewing is online -- and I think the nature of the Internet will eventually bring about a new form of review.
Feedback, please!
"Fantastic Variations on a Knightly Theme" ...
That's the subtitle of Richard Strauss's tone poem Don Quixote. It has obvious bearing on what I'm about to link to.
This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote. My colleague Eric Mencher and I proposed to The Inquirer that he and I go to Spain and follow the rueful Don's wanderings, in much the same way as, the year before, we had strolled in Dublin where Leopold Bloom wanders in Ulysses (the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadelphia, which has the manuscript of Ulysses, also has the best first edition of Cervantes's great novel). For various reasons -- these are tight times for newspapers -- the proposal never took off. But Eric and his wife Kass just spent the past few weeks in Spain, and Don Quixote was eveidently still on Eric's mind. One of his ideas was to take this Don Quixote figure he had bought at the Reading Terminal Market and use it as a stand-in for the actual Don. The photo shown is an example of what you would have seen had our proposal been accepted. You can see more HERE.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Fashion progress ...
As you can see, the headwear I modelled just the other day is already catching on in the news room. Further evidence may be seen here.
Yours truly, of course, has already moved on to a grander design.
(Thanks to Ted Adams at Heudnsk Log.)
Remembering James Hilton ...
James Hilton was a very popular novelist in the '30s and '40s. He wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Lost Horizon, and Random Harvest, all made into successful films (two with the great Ronald Colman). He even won an Oscar -- for the screenplay for Mrs. Miniver. I don't know whether anyone reads his books today -- though they are certainly worth reading. Ron Hogan, at Beatrice, recently posted some interesting remarks by Carolly Erickson about Hilton's Lost Horizon.
A chance to speak out ...
Naxos AudioBooks has a competition for Voice of the Year: "The Male Poetry Reader of the Year and the Female Poetry Reader of the Year will headline a 2-CD set – Poetry for the Winter Season – to be released in October 2006."
Many years ago -- I was in college -- one of the three major networks -- I don't remember which -- broadcast during prime time a program of poetry reading. It was a sort of cavalcade, one poem seguing into another. The one I remember best was Hurd Hatfield, the actor who had the title role in the classic film of The Picture of Dorian Gray, reciting T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of JU. Alfred Prufrock," strolling among the ladies in a drawing room. It was mesmerizing. I am convinced if more such were done more people would discover the power that poetry can have.
UPDATE: Here's a link to the Lannon Audio Archives.
Many years ago -- I was in college -- one of the three major networks -- I don't remember which -- broadcast during prime time a program of poetry reading. It was a sort of cavalcade, one poem seguing into another. The one I remember best was Hurd Hatfield, the actor who had the title role in the classic film of The Picture of Dorian Gray, reciting T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of JU. Alfred Prufrock," strolling among the ladies in a drawing room. It was mesmerizing. I am convinced if more such were done more people would discover the power that poetry can have.
UPDATE: Here's a link to the Lannon Audio Archives.
Worth noting ...
ScottMcLemee, over at Cogito, ergo Zoom, links to a piece he wrote a few years ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about the C.S. Lewis Wars.
Chicken Spaghetti links to a CJR Daily analysis of the NYT Book Review's 100 "notable" (no "best" for the august Times, I guess) books of the year. Seems the Times prefers its own.
Thane at Book Clan looks at some Silly Book Titles.
Chicken Spaghetti links to a CJR Daily analysis of the NYT Book Review's 100 "notable" (no "best" for the august Times, I guess) books of the year. Seems the Times prefers its own.
Thane at Book Clan looks at some Silly Book Titles.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Things we missed ...
Martyn Everett at Booksurfer links to a piece about the Bad Sex Award.
David Montgomery at Crime Fiction Dossier has his Holiday Gift Suggestions posted.
King Wenclas at Attacking the Demi-Puppets looks Into the Literary Future.
The Interboard Poetry Community's Poetry Competition winners for November have been posted. Congratulations all!
Jerry Jazz Musician has a competition to determine who will be the next Accent on Youth columnist. It could be you!
And check out Bill Peschel's posts on David Allen's Getting Things Done system. (I must look at this more carefully myself.)
David Montgomery at Crime Fiction Dossier has his Holiday Gift Suggestions posted.
King Wenclas at Attacking the Demi-Puppets looks Into the Literary Future.
The Interboard Poetry Community's Poetry Competition winners for November have been posted. Congratulations all!
Jerry Jazz Musician has a competition to determine who will be the next Accent on Youth columnist. It could be you!
And check out Bill Peschel's posts on David Allen's Getting Things Done system. (I must look at this more carefully myself.)
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
A little more about Colin Wilson ...
Scott McLemee adds some info to his column about Colin Wilson (scroll down).
Editor as dandy ...
I took time out the other day to model some vintage headwear. I think it's quite becoming, actually.
Sic transit gloria mundi ...
Essayist extraordinaire Joseph Epstein weighs critic Edmund Wilson in the balance and finds him wanting. Key paragraph:
Wilson was impressed by the two idea systems of Freudianism and Marxism, my own view is, because he was insufficiently impressed by life’s mysteries; as a professional explainer, he preferred problems that had solutions, questions for which there were answers, and in Freudianism and Marxism he found no shortage of both. I suspect his difficulty with Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, two major writers whose power he could never quite comprehend, stemmed from the fact that each took as his subject, precisely, the complex mystery of life: Conrad on the cosmic level, asking why we are put on earth; Kafka on the level of human nature, asking why we are as sadly and comically limited as we are.
Indeed.
Wilson was impressed by the two idea systems of Freudianism and Marxism, my own view is, because he was insufficiently impressed by life’s mysteries; as a professional explainer, he preferred problems that had solutions, questions for which there were answers, and in Freudianism and Marxism he found no shortage of both. I suspect his difficulty with Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, two major writers whose power he could never quite comprehend, stemmed from the fact that each took as his subject, precisely, the complex mystery of life: Conrad on the cosmic level, asking why we are put on earth; Kafka on the level of human nature, asking why we are as sadly and comically limited as we are.
Indeed.
A good question ...
... is raised in column by Bill Wineke in the Wisconsin State Journal, a link to which was sent to me by Roger Miller, who reviews for The Inquirer and was once a book editor himself. Wineke's piece is headlined Narnia comes from another academic world.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
One-stop shopping ...
Sarah Weinman offers a copious roundup of reviews.
And, as perhaps a corollary to thoughts on The State of Fiction, Bill Peschel recounts how Everybody Goes to Remaindertown.
And my colleague Richard Barron emails me a link to The House of Blogs, where you can find lots and lots of reviews -- and which I will now add to my blogroll.
And, as perhaps a corollary to thoughts on The State of Fiction, Bill Peschel recounts how Everybody Goes to Remaindertown.
And my colleague Richard Barron emails me a link to The House of Blogs, where you can find lots and lots of reviews -- and which I will now add to my blogroll.
The trouble with expertise ...
Theodore Dalrymple write about Shakespeare and much besides in "Truth vs. Theory" in the City Journal (hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily. Once again, cause for caution when it comes to experts and expertise.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Out of the depths of psychology ...
Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert recently posted a piece about "The Vagaries of Religious Experience" at Edge. It seems mostly an attempt to refute William Paley's proto-intelligent design argument (though Paley was not, as Gilbert would have it, a "naturalist" -- he was an Anglican priest, theologian and philosopher) by arguing that "highly ordered phenomena can and do emerge from random processes." But the example he uses -- coin tosses -- seems somewhat bizarre. "If we toss a coin for long enough, we eventually observe some highly ordered strings such as 'head, head, head, head, head, head' or 'head, tail, head, tail, head, tail.'" What highly ordered phenomena are these supposed to be? No predictable sequence will ever emerge. Even if one grants the premise -- that "highly ordered phenomena can and do emerge from random processes" -- the point would be to demonstrate that a given phenomenon has emerged from such processes.
Gilbert says that "statisticians have sophisticated techniques that can help determine whether a particular pattern of coin flips is so unlikely that it (like Paley's watch) can only be explained by a non-random process. But research in psychology has shown that people have rather poor intuitions in this regard, and that they tend to mistake the products of random processes for the products of non-random processes but not the other way around." OK, so people are unlikely, using their intuition, to arrive at a correct determination of whteher something emerged out of randomness. So skip the intuition, and use those "sophisticated techniques that can help determine" it. Stephen D. Unwin, a theoretical physicist turned risk analyst, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Probability of God. Unwin makes skillful use of one of those sophisticated techniques statisticians have: Bayes's Theorem. Gilbert should take a look at Unwin's book.
Gilbert says that "statisticians have sophisticated techniques that can help determine whether a particular pattern of coin flips is so unlikely that it (like Paley's watch) can only be explained by a non-random process. But research in psychology has shown that people have rather poor intuitions in this regard, and that they tend to mistake the products of random processes for the products of non-random processes but not the other way around." OK, so people are unlikely, using their intuition, to arrive at a correct determination of whteher something emerged out of randomness. So skip the intuition, and use those "sophisticated techniques that can help determine" it. Stephen D. Unwin, a theoretical physicist turned risk analyst, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Probability of God. Unwin makes skillful use of one of those sophisticated techniques statisticians have: Bayes's Theorem. Gilbert should take a look at Unwin's book.
A shared enthusiasm indeed ...
On Saturday I wrote a bit about Colin Wilson. Dave Lull sends me a very interesting piece about him by Scott McLemee: "A Killing Concept".
Year' s worst book ...
Robert Conquest, a poet who actually knows something about international relations (being also a historian and a former diplomat), thinks he's found the "Worst Book of the Year". (I'm not sure, but this may be available only to subscribers.)
Score one for me ...
The other day I opined in this post that "the recent surge in [oil] profits is neither typical nor sustainable." Now along comes the International Herald Tribune with this piece, in which John Browne, chief executive of BP, is quoted as calling current [oil price] levels "unsustainably high."
To return to the theme of that original post: Why are high gas prices front page news, but a 30 percent drop in gas prices isn't? Why is it news when the price of crude rises, but not when it falls (and it's fallen about $12 a barrel since the summer high)? Could this selectivity have anything to do with a drop in newspapers' credibility (essential to their survival, if anything is)? Here is another take on the selectivity theme -- note Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady's singularly silly response.
And why is this of interest to a book review editor? Because book revewing is one of the principal areas in which newspapers have chosen to short-change readers. At least as many people read books as watch TV. But you'd never know that from reading newspapers.
To return to the theme of that original post: Why are high gas prices front page news, but a 30 percent drop in gas prices isn't? Why is it news when the price of crude rises, but not when it falls (and it's fallen about $12 a barrel since the summer high)? Could this selectivity have anything to do with a drop in newspapers' credibility (essential to their survival, if anything is)? Here is another take on the selectivity theme -- note Columbia Journalism Review editor Steve Lovelady's singularly silly response.
And why is this of interest to a book review editor? Because book revewing is one of the principal areas in which newspapers have chosen to short-change readers. At least as many people read books as watch TV. But you'd never know that from reading newspapers.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
The joy of serendipity ...
Yesterday I googled a phrase in a poem by Conrad Aiken and so came upon this, which led me to Kate Benedict. I particularly commend, for poets both aspiring and practcing The Rule of Benedict. I also liked the poetry that I read there enough to buy her book. But the way, she's right:
"Conrad Aiken’s poems deserve a much wider readership than they currently enjoy."
"Conrad Aiken’s poems deserve a much wider readership than they currently enjoy."
The state of fiction ...
Sand Storm reprints a piece in the Toronto Globe & Mail entitled "The Great Fiction Crash of 2005".
This is strictly from a Canadian perspective, so I don't know if it reflects things in this country, though I note that one of the publishers interviewed says that Canadian best-seller lists tend to be dominated by American writers. A few years ago, at BookExpo America, the annual confab of the publishing industry, many publishers reps I talked to said that things semed to be trending in the direction of strongly narrative nonfiction. That didn't surprise me, given how often critically approved fiction tends toward atmospherics rather than action and incident.
The lead of the Globe & Mail piece notwithstanding, I don't think The Da Vinci Code has had anything to do with this. Doubleday bent over backwards to publicize The Da Vinci Code and reaped the benefits. That even people with Ph. D.'s found the book plausible proves only that people can actually be educated beyond their intelligence. Had Scribners done for Anthony O'Neill's The Lamplighter what Doubleday did for The Da Vinci Code, I suspect O'Neill's book would have met with similar success. I still think it will be around decades after Dan Brown's tripe has been mercifully forgotten.
But I have a review to get to work on. Here's the Globe & Mail's Top 100 Books of 2005.
This is strictly from a Canadian perspective, so I don't know if it reflects things in this country, though I note that one of the publishers interviewed says that Canadian best-seller lists tend to be dominated by American writers. A few years ago, at BookExpo America, the annual confab of the publishing industry, many publishers reps I talked to said that things semed to be trending in the direction of strongly narrative nonfiction. That didn't surprise me, given how often critically approved fiction tends toward atmospherics rather than action and incident.
The lead of the Globe & Mail piece notwithstanding, I don't think The Da Vinci Code has had anything to do with this. Doubleday bent over backwards to publicize The Da Vinci Code and reaped the benefits. That even people with Ph. D.'s found the book plausible proves only that people can actually be educated beyond their intelligence. Had Scribners done for Anthony O'Neill's The Lamplighter what Doubleday did for The Da Vinci Code, I suspect O'Neill's book would have met with similar success. I still think it will be around decades after Dan Brown's tripe has been mercifully forgotten.
But I have a review to get to work on. Here's the Globe & Mail's Top 100 Books of 2005.
Saturday, December 03, 2005
A shared enthusiasm...
I know I'm not supposed to like Colin Wilson -- or at least I'm not supposed to take him seriously. But I've enjoyed a lot of his books. Poetry and Mysticism, for instance, turned me on to the poetry of Elizabethan scholar A. L. Rowse. I also think there is much to Wilson's insistence on the importance of peak experiences. John Morgan has mounted an excellent Colin Wilson Page and Morgan's Brief Introduction to Colin Wilson's Thought is excellent. Wilson will turn 75 next June. I am already planning to write something about him to honor the occasion.
In the meantime, here's an interview with him.
I also just bought some of Wilson's books. They were out of print, which gives me the opportunity to correct an oversight and introduce people to what I think is one of the best book sites on the Internet: Books & Book Collecting, a subset of Trussel's EclectiCity.
In the meantime, here's an interview with him.
I also just bought some of Wilson's books. They were out of print, which gives me the opportunity to correct an oversight and introduce people to what I think is one of the best book sites on the Internet: Books & Book Collecting, a subset of Trussel's EclectiCity.
Taking a closer look ...
... at the Carnival of Poetry, which I didn't have a chance to do yesterday at work -- because I had a lot of work to do -- I'm impressed by what I see. I haven't read through everything yet, but think it worth noting a few that especially appealed to me:
Six Stories by Sara Goudarzi
Night Blues by Ned Nedful
November Song by Jessamyn of Thereomorph
Vibe by Trebuchet of Legwarmers
The Song by Liz of Letting Me Be
Highway Hymn V by Ed of Life and Times (a very interesting modified sestina)
and
Grenadilla Tone by Garnet of Glittering Muse
As I say, these are just some that especially grabbed me upon first encounter. Do take a look. Find what you like.
Six Stories by Sara Goudarzi
Night Blues by Ned Nedful
November Song by Jessamyn of Thereomorph
Vibe by Trebuchet of Legwarmers
The Song by Liz of Letting Me Be
Highway Hymn V by Ed of Life and Times (a very interesting modified sestina)
and
Grenadilla Tone by Garnet of Glittering Muse
As I say, these are just some that especially grabbed me upon first encounter. Do take a look. Find what you like.
Friday, December 02, 2005
A paradox to ponder ...
Newspapers delight in denouncing any industry that appaears to be making unreasonably high profits -- witness all that's been in the papers recently about oil industry profits. In fact, over time, the average rate of profit in the oil and gas industry is something on the order of 8 cents on every dollar. The recent surge in profits is neither typical nor sustainable.
Newspapers, on the other hand, generally average profits in double-digits. Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., which owns The Inquirer, pulls in about 13 percent profit annually. This is thought to be insufficient. Parent Knight Ridder and Wall Street investors want something nearer to 20 percent. Newspapers have managed to maintain double-digit profit margins by cutting staff and space (newsprint is expensive). In fact, they have been consistently offering customers less of a product, but at the same price. If any other industry did that sort of thing, newspapers would be all over them.
Perhaps if newspapers functioned like other businesses and spent some of those profits enhancing rather than diminishing the product, they might find circulation and advertising increasing. Perhaps the margin of profit would be less, but the long-term health of the industry might improve.
Newspapers, on the other hand, generally average profits in double-digits. Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., which owns The Inquirer, pulls in about 13 percent profit annually. This is thought to be insufficient. Parent Knight Ridder and Wall Street investors want something nearer to 20 percent. Newspapers have managed to maintain double-digit profit margins by cutting staff and space (newsprint is expensive). In fact, they have been consistently offering customers less of a product, but at the same price. If any other industry did that sort of thing, newspapers would be all over them.
Perhaps if newspapers functioned like other businesses and spent some of those profits enhancing rather than diminishing the product, they might find circulation and advertising increasing. Perhaps the margin of profit would be less, but the long-term health of the industry might improve.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
More odds & ends ...
Lynn Viehl takes a look at the NYT's 100 best books of 2005 -- and isn't exactly thrilled by what she sees. (Hat tip to Bill Peschel.)
On Sunday, at the Manayunk Art Center, they're having an Artists' Co-op Show, featuring work by Luke Harris, followed by a reading by poets included in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania.
On Sunday, at the Manayunk Art Center, they're having an Artists' Co-op Show, featuring work by Luke Harris, followed by a reading by poets included in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Odds & ends ...
The Elegant Variation links to best books of 2005 lists here and here. The latter link has much else besides that is more interesting than the lists.
Joel Weishaus, a poet and co-author (with David Rosen) of The Healing Spirit of Haiku has begun a series of digital critiques. The first takes a pretty thorough and imaginative look at David Budbill's Moment to Moment and While We've Still Got Feet. I read While We've Still Got Feet this past summer, thinking to review it. But I disliked it intensely. Joel -- who, by the way, has reviewed for The Inquirer -- evidently thinks better of it.
Finally, here is a link to the blog of Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS.
Joel Weishaus, a poet and co-author (with David Rosen) of The Healing Spirit of Haiku has begun a series of digital critiques. The first takes a pretty thorough and imaginative look at David Budbill's Moment to Moment and While We've Still Got Feet. I read While We've Still Got Feet this past summer, thinking to review it. But I disliked it intensely. Joel -- who, by the way, has reviewed for The Inquirer -- evidently thinks better of it.
Finally, here is a link to the blog of Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Symbols and reality ...
According to the late neurologist Russell Brain (see previous posts), "the receptive function of the brain is to provide us with a symbolical representation of the world outside it." I find this an intriguing notion, especially when one thinks of it in terms of what physics tells us about the nature of the "material" world.
I am six feet tall. According to Eddington, if you eliminated the spaces between the molecules and atoms of which I am composed and reduced me to "matter" and nothing but, I would be a speck just large enough to be seen with a powerful magnifying glass. I am, in fact, a galaxy of electrical impulses.
If Brain is right, then everything we know is a symbolical representaion of energy configurations. The schoolmen and the ancients thought in terms of matter and form. Perhaps it would be more correct to think in terms of energy and form. What we call matter is, to use Brain's formulation, a symbolical representation of those energy configurations. Indeed, the energy units themselves that we speak of -- atoms, protons, electrons -- would also be symbolical representaions.
This leads, I think, to a key question: What is the basis of the symbology? From what does it derive?
I have a hunch that Plato's theory of ideas might be usefully looked at in this regard -- though I can't begin to say how just yet. But I'll keep thinking about it. After all, the brain itself would be a symbol also. If what we are dealing with are symbols and energy, then it would seem that mind is the fundamental reality. And that would seem to suggest that intelligence is a concomitant of reality as well. Of course in Eliot's words, "These are only hints and guesses,/Hints followed by guesses ..."
I am six feet tall. According to Eddington, if you eliminated the spaces between the molecules and atoms of which I am composed and reduced me to "matter" and nothing but, I would be a speck just large enough to be seen with a powerful magnifying glass. I am, in fact, a galaxy of electrical impulses.
If Brain is right, then everything we know is a symbolical representaion of energy configurations. The schoolmen and the ancients thought in terms of matter and form. Perhaps it would be more correct to think in terms of energy and form. What we call matter is, to use Brain's formulation, a symbolical representation of those energy configurations. Indeed, the energy units themselves that we speak of -- atoms, protons, electrons -- would also be symbolical representaions.
This leads, I think, to a key question: What is the basis of the symbology? From what does it derive?
I have a hunch that Plato's theory of ideas might be usefully looked at in this regard -- though I can't begin to say how just yet. But I'll keep thinking about it. After all, the brain itself would be a symbol also. If what we are dealing with are symbols and energy, then it would seem that mind is the fundamental reality. And that would seem to suggest that intelligence is a concomitant of reality as well. Of course in Eliot's words, "These are only hints and guesses,/Hints followed by guesses ..."
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Fiction enters reality ...
Bill Peschel raises some issues with the L.A. Times's David Ulin. "I would love to know what time Ulin thinks that the bottom line didn't matter," Peschel says. Me too.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
News and a blog discovery ...
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind is a blog I hadn't come upon before, but seems very interesting. I certainly was interested in this item about John Banville. My review of Banville's Man Booker winner, The Sea, runs in The Inquirer tomorrow.
A priceless review ...
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit links to Protein Wisdom, which links to a review in the Sacramento Bee of a one-man show put on by Michael Newdow, the guy who wants to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance. Bee staffer Blair Anthony Robertson has written a classic.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Missing in action ...
I spent most of Wednesday and yesterday cooking, and today I was one of only two assigning editors in the features department of The Inquirer. It was a fairly busy day and a fairly long one -- 9 a.m to 8 p.m. But my desk is back in order, and so, to a large extent, is the book room. Two bins of mail are yet to be opened, but we are making progress.
In any event, no serious blogging tonight, though I do want to note something I should have yesterday: On Nov. 24, 1990, Dodie Smith died, age 94, in Doylestown, Pa. In case the name doesn't register, Dorothy Gladys Smith, born in Lancashire, England, on May 3, 1896, was the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
In any event, no serious blogging tonight, though I do want to note something I should have yesterday: On Nov. 24, 1990, Dodie Smith died, age 94, in Doylestown, Pa. In case the name doesn't register, Dorothy Gladys Smith, born in Lancashire, England, on May 3, 1896, was the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Considering how we know (Pt. 3) ...
An email correspondent has suggested that the subject of these posts regarding neurologist Russell Brain's Mind, Perception and Science is wearisomely abstruse. And he may well be right. So I have decided to take the advice Brain himself offers in his Introduction and skip ahead a bit, to Chapter 4 and beyond, wherein he discusses the philosophical implications of the technical matters discussed earlier. In doing so I can actually get around to showing Bill Peschel where Brain was going with those of his observations I quoted in my original post.
Brain differentiates between two "worlds" -- the perceptual "world" and the physicl "world." (This is strictly a verbal distinction, made for the sake of argument; as he points out later, there is really only one world.)
The two "worlds" differ from one another in various respects. One of the most important of these is that events in the physical "world" occur "at different times from those at which the observer perceives them." This is obvious when one considers looking at an object light years away. But as Brain notes, the observer's perception of his own body also is "awareness of its immediate past, for he is not aware of the prick of a pin until after the interval of time necessary for a nerve-impulse to travel to his brain from the part of the body which has been pricked." That is because "what determines our awareness of a sensation, and also its nature, is the arrival of a nerve-impulse, or more probably a series of nerve-impulses, at the appropriate end-station of the brain."
This brings us to what Bill was interested in:
... if at least what the philosophers call secondary qualities, such as smells, sounds, colours and so on, are quite unlike the physical stimuli which give rise to them, then we must regard them as symbols of physical reality and say that the receptive function of the brain is to provide us with a symbolical representation of the world outside it, not only distinguishing objects by their qualities, but also conveying to us the spatial relationships which exist between them, and at the same time giving us similar symbolical information about our own bodies and their relation to the external world. (Emphasis mine.)
I think I'll leave it at there for now. That's a Thanksgiving Day's portion of food for thought.
Brain differentiates between two "worlds" -- the perceptual "world" and the physicl "world." (This is strictly a verbal distinction, made for the sake of argument; as he points out later, there is really only one world.)
The two "worlds" differ from one another in various respects. One of the most important of these is that events in the physical "world" occur "at different times from those at which the observer perceives them." This is obvious when one considers looking at an object light years away. But as Brain notes, the observer's perception of his own body also is "awareness of its immediate past, for he is not aware of the prick of a pin until after the interval of time necessary for a nerve-impulse to travel to his brain from the part of the body which has been pricked." That is because "what determines our awareness of a sensation, and also its nature, is the arrival of a nerve-impulse, or more probably a series of nerve-impulses, at the appropriate end-station of the brain."
This brings us to what Bill was interested in:
... if at least what the philosophers call secondary qualities, such as smells, sounds, colours and so on, are quite unlike the physical stimuli which give rise to them, then we must regard them as symbols of physical reality and say that the receptive function of the brain is to provide us with a symbolical representation of the world outside it, not only distinguishing objects by their qualities, but also conveying to us the spatial relationships which exist between them, and at the same time giving us similar symbolical information about our own bodies and their relation to the external world. (Emphasis mine.)
I think I'll leave it at there for now. That's a Thanksgiving Day's portion of food for thought.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Skipping again ...
A long day, and I have only just got home and had some dinner. So no serious blogging tonight. But I do want to note that tomorrow is the birth date of James Thomson, the Scottish Victorian poet who wrote The City of Dreadul Night, quite un-Victorian in its pessimism. Here is an interesting site devoted to him.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Considering how we know (cont'd) ...
Bill Peschel attached a very interesting comment to my previous post, noting that "in dealing with the outside world, there needs to be some way for the brain to translate the signals it receives into a 'language' it can understand, so the inability of the cochlear and the nerve impulses to vibrate at the exact frequency of the noise doesn't prove bothersome," adding that he'll "be interested in seeing where [Russell Brain is] going with this line of thought."
Actually, I should have pointed out what the first chapter of Mind, Perception and Science has to do with, which Brain explains at the outset:
Epistemology seems to me to be the cardinal problem of modern thought, for we cannot separate our conclusions concerning the nature of perceiving from our conclusions as to the nature of what we perceive. As a neurologist I shall be chiefly concerned with the causal aspects of pereception. I make no apology for that, for it is much neglected by philosophers, who mostly concentrate upon perception as presentational immediacy. No theory of perception can be adequate which does not fully account for both.
He then goes on to examine, first, physiological idealism and then the varieties of critical realism, adding that "I find both ... equally unsatisfactory."
My previous post quoted from the section on physiological idealism.
In his comment on my post, Bill mentioned "the triangulation developed by the noise level from the two ears, as well as the subtle change in noise one ear receives when the head rotates slightly," and Brain also points out that "in our awareness of our own bodies we are directly aware of a three-dimensional object. The position of this object can be changed in relation to the external world and the position of its parts can be modified in relation to the body as a whole. Thus the body serves as a primary model of three-dimensional space."
Brain cites two main objections to physiological idealism. The first involves applying the idealism to the idealist himself: "... if all sense-data are states of his brain, this must also be true of the sense-data derived from his own body; and his brain itself, if, as is not impossible, he could see it in a mirror in the course of an operation, must be reduced to an activity of itself." He may insist that the sense-data provide information about things existing independently of his awareness of them, but, as Brian points out, it's hard to see how he can arrive at this conclusion if the sense-data are "nothing but states of his own brain."
The second objection is that "if physiological idealism is true we might expect to find that there is something circular about the events in the cerebral cortex, for it is these, we are told, which are 'projected' on to the outside world when we perceive a circle." But "nothing of the sort is true."
As it happens, "when we perceive a two-dimensional circle we do so by means of an activity in the brain which is halved, reduplicated, transposed, inverted, distorted, and three-dimensional. ... the circle which is said to be projected from the cerebral cortex never existed there at all."
So here is the mystery, thus far: The nature of the stimulus as transmitted differs entirely from the nature of the stimulus as received. Yet any number of people receiving the same stimulus will perceive the same thing. Our agreement regarding the terminus a quo is grounded in our shared experience of the terminus ad quem. So , one might ask, is reality a consensus?
Next: What Brain says about critical realism.
By the way, the idea behind this series of posts is that by taking a close look at a couple of interesting, related books by the same author, blogger and readers can together try to arrive at the sort of understanding one would hope to find in a really thorough review. That is the experiment I referred in the previous post.
Actually, I should have pointed out what the first chapter of Mind, Perception and Science has to do with, which Brain explains at the outset:
Epistemology seems to me to be the cardinal problem of modern thought, for we cannot separate our conclusions concerning the nature of perceiving from our conclusions as to the nature of what we perceive. As a neurologist I shall be chiefly concerned with the causal aspects of pereception. I make no apology for that, for it is much neglected by philosophers, who mostly concentrate upon perception as presentational immediacy. No theory of perception can be adequate which does not fully account for both.
He then goes on to examine, first, physiological idealism and then the varieties of critical realism, adding that "I find both ... equally unsatisfactory."
My previous post quoted from the section on physiological idealism.
In his comment on my post, Bill mentioned "the triangulation developed by the noise level from the two ears, as well as the subtle change in noise one ear receives when the head rotates slightly," and Brain also points out that "in our awareness of our own bodies we are directly aware of a three-dimensional object. The position of this object can be changed in relation to the external world and the position of its parts can be modified in relation to the body as a whole. Thus the body serves as a primary model of three-dimensional space."
Brain cites two main objections to physiological idealism. The first involves applying the idealism to the idealist himself: "... if all sense-data are states of his brain, this must also be true of the sense-data derived from his own body; and his brain itself, if, as is not impossible, he could see it in a mirror in the course of an operation, must be reduced to an activity of itself." He may insist that the sense-data provide information about things existing independently of his awareness of them, but, as Brian points out, it's hard to see how he can arrive at this conclusion if the sense-data are "nothing but states of his own brain."
The second objection is that "if physiological idealism is true we might expect to find that there is something circular about the events in the cerebral cortex, for it is these, we are told, which are 'projected' on to the outside world when we perceive a circle." But "nothing of the sort is true."
As it happens, "when we perceive a two-dimensional circle we do so by means of an activity in the brain which is halved, reduplicated, transposed, inverted, distorted, and three-dimensional. ... the circle which is said to be projected from the cerebral cortex never existed there at all."
So here is the mystery, thus far: The nature of the stimulus as transmitted differs entirely from the nature of the stimulus as received. Yet any number of people receiving the same stimulus will perceive the same thing. Our agreement regarding the terminus a quo is grounded in our shared experience of the terminus ad quem. So , one might ask, is reality a consensus?
Next: What Brain says about critical realism.
By the way, the idea behind this series of posts is that by taking a close look at a couple of interesting, related books by the same author, blogger and readers can together try to arrive at the sort of understanding one would hope to find in a really thorough review. That is the experiment I referred in the previous post.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Considering how we know ...
Today I begin an experiment. And it shall be a modest beginning. I mentioned awhile back two books by the late British neurophysiologist W. Russell Brain -- Mind, Perception and Science and Tea with Walter de la Mare. What I plan to do over the next few days -- even weeks, if necessary -- is go over each in some detail, a bit at a time. I begin with a passage from the first chapter of Mind, Perception and Science:
A tuning fork is struck or a whistle is blown, or in some other way the air is made to vibrate, and a series of waves with a frequency of, say, 4,000 vibrations a second is propagated through the air. It strikes the observer's ear and a portion of the cochlea, attuned to this particular frequency, is caused to vibrate at the same rate. So far the subject has heard nothing. The vibration of this part of the cochlea starts a series of nerve-impulses in a certain fibre or fibres of the auditory nerve. No nerve-fibre in the body can carry impulses at so fast a rate. The frequency with which nerve-impulses can follow one another along a nerve depends upon the electrochemical structure of nervous tissue and is never more than 1,500 a second, and often much less. ... The auditory nerve-fibre therefore conducts impulses at its accustomed rate, and, by a series of relay paths, the impulses reach the auditory area of the cerebral cortex in the temporal lobe. Electro-encephalography enables us to detect its arrival there and in the experimental animal we can record simultaneously the frequency of the sound-stimulus, and the electrical response which it evokes in the auditory cortex. These are entirely dissimilar. (Emphasis mine.)
Brain goes on to note that "the difference in pitch of two sounds is correlated with a difference in their frequencies, but no such difference is to be found in the events in the nervous system upon which the discrimination of their respective sense-data depends. These have neither the frequencies of the stimuli nor do they differ from each other in frequency (emphasis mine). They differ only in that the nervous impulses travel by different paths and reach different destinations in the cerebral cortex; and this seems to be true not only of the difference between one sound and another, but also of that between nervous impulses evoked by auditory, visual and olfactory stimuli."
I think it will be obvious that the "facts" of the matter indicate, as Brain puts it, "that sense-data are 'really' located in the cerevral cortex or in the mind of the observer." The question is why they appear to be located outside the observer. Presumably, it's because that's where the original stimulus is located. But the absolute dissimilarity of the stimulus and the response makes the whole matter problematic, to say the least.
I throw this out and invite comment. I'm certainly going to be thinking about it -- and this is only the beginning of what is a very interesting little book.
A tuning fork is struck or a whistle is blown, or in some other way the air is made to vibrate, and a series of waves with a frequency of, say, 4,000 vibrations a second is propagated through the air. It strikes the observer's ear and a portion of the cochlea, attuned to this particular frequency, is caused to vibrate at the same rate. So far the subject has heard nothing. The vibration of this part of the cochlea starts a series of nerve-impulses in a certain fibre or fibres of the auditory nerve. No nerve-fibre in the body can carry impulses at so fast a rate. The frequency with which nerve-impulses can follow one another along a nerve depends upon the electrochemical structure of nervous tissue and is never more than 1,500 a second, and often much less. ... The auditory nerve-fibre therefore conducts impulses at its accustomed rate, and, by a series of relay paths, the impulses reach the auditory area of the cerebral cortex in the temporal lobe. Electro-encephalography enables us to detect its arrival there and in the experimental animal we can record simultaneously the frequency of the sound-stimulus, and the electrical response which it evokes in the auditory cortex. These are entirely dissimilar. (Emphasis mine.)
Brain goes on to note that "the difference in pitch of two sounds is correlated with a difference in their frequencies, but no such difference is to be found in the events in the nervous system upon which the discrimination of their respective sense-data depends. These have neither the frequencies of the stimuli nor do they differ from each other in frequency (emphasis mine). They differ only in that the nervous impulses travel by different paths and reach different destinations in the cerebral cortex; and this seems to be true not only of the difference between one sound and another, but also of that between nervous impulses evoked by auditory, visual and olfactory stimuli."
I think it will be obvious that the "facts" of the matter indicate, as Brain puts it, "that sense-data are 'really' located in the cerevral cortex or in the mind of the observer." The question is why they appear to be located outside the observer. Presumably, it's because that's where the original stimulus is located. But the absolute dissimilarity of the stimulus and the response makes the whole matter problematic, to say the least.
I throw this out and invite comment. I'm certainly going to be thinking about it -- and this is only the beginning of what is a very interesting little book.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
A critical crisis ...
Last summer Scott Timberg wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times called "Critical Condition." I linked to it and commented on it here (the link to the LA Times no longer works).
Now, in Prospect, Michael Coveney writes about Critical Clowns. "The long, slow haul of a career as a critic," Coveney laments, "with its period of apprenticeship, dedication and accumulation of wisdom and experience —as exemplified by [Andrew] Porter — is suddenly becoming a thing of the past."
Yet he notes that "the feeling persists that theatre is yesterday's news, though yesterday's news has paradoxically become the stuff of contemporary theatre ... every other play in London seemed (and seems) to be about the war in Iraq, or detainees in Guantánamo bay, or the collapse of the railways, or problems with multiculturalism ..." He also takes The Spectator's Toby Yong to task for leaving "the first night of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh at the interval. [Young]defended his behaviour by saying that he had every right to be as bored as the average punter." Coveney thinks that "McDonagh is trying to push some envelope of extremity in the theatre and the critics have to work out whether or not it should remain sealed."
I haven't seen McDonagh's play, but I've seen enough contemporary drama to know I am tired of seeing the stage taken up with simple-minded editorials about "yesterday's news." A couple of years ago I saw Jesus Hopped the A Train. The production was very fine, the actors extremely good. But the play barely rubbed elbows with reality. The playwright's knowledge of life in prison seemed derived entirely from HBO's Oz and the public defender's grasp of the law was for all practical purposes non-existent.
I think one problem in theater today is that not enough classic plays are staged. If you see something like Ibsen's The Master Builder or Maugham's The Constant Wife, you get an idea of what real theater can do, of how effective well-drawn characters can be. And great drama is rooted in character, not ideology or, worse, policy positions. Even composers and painters nowadays feel they must use art to editorialize. Hasn't anybody noticed that editorials are about the most worthless thing in the newspaper?
Now, in Prospect, Michael Coveney writes about Critical Clowns. "The long, slow haul of a career as a critic," Coveney laments, "with its period of apprenticeship, dedication and accumulation of wisdom and experience —as exemplified by [Andrew] Porter — is suddenly becoming a thing of the past."
Yet he notes that "the feeling persists that theatre is yesterday's news, though yesterday's news has paradoxically become the stuff of contemporary theatre ... every other play in London seemed (and seems) to be about the war in Iraq, or detainees in Guantánamo bay, or the collapse of the railways, or problems with multiculturalism ..." He also takes The Spectator's Toby Yong to task for leaving "the first night of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh at the interval. [Young]defended his behaviour by saying that he had every right to be as bored as the average punter." Coveney thinks that "McDonagh is trying to push some envelope of extremity in the theatre and the critics have to work out whether or not it should remain sealed."
I haven't seen McDonagh's play, but I've seen enough contemporary drama to know I am tired of seeing the stage taken up with simple-minded editorials about "yesterday's news." A couple of years ago I saw Jesus Hopped the A Train. The production was very fine, the actors extremely good. But the play barely rubbed elbows with reality. The playwright's knowledge of life in prison seemed derived entirely from HBO's Oz and the public defender's grasp of the law was for all practical purposes non-existent.
I think one problem in theater today is that not enough classic plays are staged. If you see something like Ibsen's The Master Builder or Maugham's The Constant Wife, you get an idea of what real theater can do, of how effective well-drawn characters can be. And great drama is rooted in character, not ideology or, worse, policy positions. Even composers and painters nowadays feel they must use art to editorialize. Hasn't anybody noticed that editorials are about the most worthless thing in the newspaper?
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
One of the odder anniversaries ...
I must get on with reading the book I am reviewing for Nov. 27 -- John Banville's The Sea -- but want to note that today marks one of the more unusual literary anniversaries: It is the date in 1849 on which Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to be executed. A month later, as the sentence was about to carried out, he was saved by a last-minute reprieve. Thanks to Today in Literature.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Writers, sex, and passion ...
Adam Gopnik has a characteristically fine piece about C.S. Lewis (tip of the hat to Arts & Letters Daily). But I do not think it is altogether fine. There is, for instance, this:
Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”
Interesting enough, perhaps, but Gopnik's next sentence strikes me as rather a stretch: "A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert." How do we get from "mildly sadomasochistic fantasies" to "warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert"? Pornography played a significant role, apparently, in the life of Philip Larkin. So that has to be taken into account in trying to figure the guy out. But there doesn't seem to be much evidence that Lewis was epecially preoccupied with sexual fantasies. Everybody has such, I presume, from time to time, but most people do not obsess over them.
I happen to be one of those people who thinks that, thanks to the pernicious silliness of Dr. Freud, a burden of significance has been placed upon human sexuality -- in its strictly physical manifestation -- that is far greater than it can comfortably bear. I've had my share of sexual adventure -- for which I am quite grateful -- but I really can't say that sex has been much of a determining factor in my life or on my character. Moreover, for all the importance conferred upon it in modern literature, after four decades of book reviewing, I am here to report that it usually doesn't come off very well on the printed page.
The ribald -- Henry Miller at his best -- often comes off quite well. But I can't be the only one who finds Lady Chatterly's Lover risible. And Lawrence is better at describing sex than most.
It isn't sex, in the sense of physical coupling, that makes for great literature; it's passion. There's a wonderful story by A.E. Coppard called "Judith." Here is its opening sentence: "This is the story of a great lady who did a great wrong to a mere man, a man so nearly insignificant and uncouth as to be almost unworthy of the honour." Coppard's is a story of passion. Of course, sex is involved, as it could hardly not be. But the story would not be so grand were it just about sex.
A good example of what I mean can be found in the films of Eric Rohmer, in particular My Night at Maud's and Chloe in the Afternoon. If you're up for swimming against the brackish current of Freudian cliche, rent them.
Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”
Interesting enough, perhaps, but Gopnik's next sentence strikes me as rather a stretch: "A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert." How do we get from "mildly sadomasochistic fantasies" to "warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert"? Pornography played a significant role, apparently, in the life of Philip Larkin. So that has to be taken into account in trying to figure the guy out. But there doesn't seem to be much evidence that Lewis was epecially preoccupied with sexual fantasies. Everybody has such, I presume, from time to time, but most people do not obsess over them.
I happen to be one of those people who thinks that, thanks to the pernicious silliness of Dr. Freud, a burden of significance has been placed upon human sexuality -- in its strictly physical manifestation -- that is far greater than it can comfortably bear. I've had my share of sexual adventure -- for which I am quite grateful -- but I really can't say that sex has been much of a determining factor in my life or on my character. Moreover, for all the importance conferred upon it in modern literature, after four decades of book reviewing, I am here to report that it usually doesn't come off very well on the printed page.
The ribald -- Henry Miller at his best -- often comes off quite well. But I can't be the only one who finds Lady Chatterly's Lover risible. And Lawrence is better at describing sex than most.
It isn't sex, in the sense of physical coupling, that makes for great literature; it's passion. There's a wonderful story by A.E. Coppard called "Judith." Here is its opening sentence: "This is the story of a great lady who did a great wrong to a mere man, a man so nearly insignificant and uncouth as to be almost unworthy of the honour." Coppard's is a story of passion. Of course, sex is involved, as it could hardly not be. But the story would not be so grand were it just about sex.
A good example of what I mean can be found in the films of Eric Rohmer, in particular My Night at Maud's and Chloe in the Afternoon. If you're up for swimming against the brackish current of Freudian cliche, rent them.
Something to ponder ...
Here is an interesting article at Broadcasting & Cable. What is interesting specifically is what NBC Universal President Bob Wright had to say about cable news:
Despite all the media attention given to cable-news programming—from Bill O’Reilly’s histrionics on Fox to Anderson Cooper’s exhibitionistic empathy at CNN—American viewers are not all that interested. Wright pointed out that the cable-news networks combined draw fewer unique viewers all night long than a single half-hour of NBC Nightly News.
“You’d think it would be 25 million people. It’s smaller than that, it’s 5 million-6 million,” Wright said. “It’s not a very large group.”
Two valid inferences, it seems to me, can be drawn from this. One, news junkies form a distinct minority of the population, period. And a significant majority of that minority prefers Fox.
Perhaps newspapers could reverse their declining numbers by finding out what most people are interested in -- books, for example -- and writing about that, rather than assuming that the world of readers is made up of policy wonks (and liberal policy wonks at that).
Despite all the media attention given to cable-news programming—from Bill O’Reilly’s histrionics on Fox to Anderson Cooper’s exhibitionistic empathy at CNN—American viewers are not all that interested. Wright pointed out that the cable-news networks combined draw fewer unique viewers all night long than a single half-hour of NBC Nightly News.
“You’d think it would be 25 million people. It’s smaller than that, it’s 5 million-6 million,” Wright said. “It’s not a very large group.”
Two valid inferences, it seems to me, can be drawn from this. One, news junkies form a distinct minority of the population, period. And a significant majority of that minority prefers Fox.
Perhaps newspapers could reverse their declining numbers by finding out what most people are interested in -- books, for example -- and writing about that, rather than assuming that the world of readers is made up of policy wonks (and liberal policy wonks at that).
Sunday, November 13, 2005
As it happens ...
... my wife and I went off to the Wissahickon this afternoon, she to paint watercolors, while I just sat and read some poetry -- Elizabeth Jennings, Kay Ryan, HD -- and looked at the changing woods. Some of the trees were already without leaves and much of the underbrush had withered entirely, leaving things much more open to view. The upshot is I haven't time to blog. So I'll simply post the little poem that came to me while I was sitting there watching.
Breaking Off
Notice the sprightly wind
Lightly divesting the trees
So that, bare, they may please
Courting winter, and invite embrace,
Disdaining any trace
Of summer’s leaving.
Breaking Off
Notice the sprightly wind
Lightly divesting the trees
So that, bare, they may please
Courting winter, and invite embrace,
Disdaining any trace
Of summer’s leaving.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
This is what I driving at ...
... in a post last month, when I wondered if books such as Evolution in Four Dimensions : Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion C. Lamb or Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden would be banned from classrooms because they challenge what historian Paul Johnson calls Darwinian orthodoxy.
Yesterday, over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds posted the following:
I'M DEEPLY UNIMPRESSED WITH "INTELLIGENT DESIGN," but this NPR story on the harassment, firing, and intimidation of scientists and academics who support intelligent design, or even seem like they might, is pretty appalling. (More accurately, the story is very good, but what it reports is appalling). This is pretty much scientific McCarthyism, and it ought to be stopped.
Listen to the story, and read this letter from the office of Special Counsel on the Smithsonian Institution's behavior in a particularly disgraceful episode.
Of course, with with friends like Pat Robertson, Intelligent Design hardly needs enemies.
Evolution, considered as a process of directional change in nature, from simpler to more complex, seems to me pretty much indisputable (though I know there are some who dispute it). But the mechanism of change, how such change has taken place -- and presumably continues to -- seems far from settled. One problem with intelligent design is that it doesn't address this. It isn't enough to say that an intelligent entity of some sort or another caused something to happen. What we want to know, to the extent that we can, is how it was caused to happen. The best that ID proponents have to offer, it seems, is that it was not caused to happen the way Darwinians say it was.
Now, like it or not, Darwinism is not without problems of its own. The theory of punctuated equilibria proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould to explain, among other things, abrupt appearance of species after long periods of biologial stability, amounts to positing a theory of evolution that doesn't involve evolution, if by evolution one means gradual, incremental change.
Over at Tech Central the other day, Uriah Kriegel had a very interesting article pointing out the unfalsifiability of intelligent design theory:
To win in the game of science, a theory must be submitted to many tests and survive all of them without being falsified. But to be even allowed into the game, the theory must be falsifiable in principle: there must be a conceivable experiment that would prove it false.
If we examine ID in this light, it becomes pretty clear that the theory isn't scientific. It is impossible to refute ID, because if an animal shows one characteristic, IDers can explain that the intelligent designer made it this way, and if the animal shows the opposite characteristic, IDers can explain with equal confidence that the designer made it that way. For that matter, it is fully consistent with ID that the supreme intelligence designed the world to evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. Given this, there is no conceivable experiment that can prove ID false.
I think this is pretty sound myself. But I have just sent an email to Professor Kriegel, bringing to his attention these two papagraphs from Robert Winston's new book The Story of God:
It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages. Many anthropologists and social theorists do indeed take the view that religion emerged out of a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment - explaining misfortune or illness, for example, as the consequences of an angry God, or reassuring us that we live on after death. Rituals would have given us a comforting, albeit illusory, sense that we can control what is in fact ultimately beyond our control - the weather, illness, attacks by predators or other human groups.
However, it is equally plausible that the Divine Idea would have been of little use in our prehistoric rough-and-tumble existence. Life on the savannah may have been in the open air, but it was no picnic. Early humans would have been constantly on the lookout for predators to be avoided, such as wolves and sabre-tooth tigers; hunting or scavenging would be a continual necessity to ensure sufficient food; and the men were probably constantly fighting among each other to ensure that they could have sex with the best-looking girl (or boy) or choose the most tender piece of meat from the carcass. Why would it be necessary, in the daily scramble to stay alive, to make time for such an indulgent pursuit as religion?
It looks to me as if you could use this to demonstrate the unfalsifiability of Darwinism. If Professor Kriegel sends me a reply, I'll ask him if I can share it here.
In the meantime, my own inchoate notion is that intelligence is a concomitant of life and has evolved and adapted along with the organisms in which it is -- in varying degrees obviously -- always present.
Yesterday, over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds posted the following:
I'M DEEPLY UNIMPRESSED WITH "INTELLIGENT DESIGN," but this NPR story on the harassment, firing, and intimidation of scientists and academics who support intelligent design, or even seem like they might, is pretty appalling. (More accurately, the story is very good, but what it reports is appalling). This is pretty much scientific McCarthyism, and it ought to be stopped.
Listen to the story, and read this letter from the office of Special Counsel on the Smithsonian Institution's behavior in a particularly disgraceful episode.
Of course, with with friends like Pat Robertson, Intelligent Design hardly needs enemies.
Evolution, considered as a process of directional change in nature, from simpler to more complex, seems to me pretty much indisputable (though I know there are some who dispute it). But the mechanism of change, how such change has taken place -- and presumably continues to -- seems far from settled. One problem with intelligent design is that it doesn't address this. It isn't enough to say that an intelligent entity of some sort or another caused something to happen. What we want to know, to the extent that we can, is how it was caused to happen. The best that ID proponents have to offer, it seems, is that it was not caused to happen the way Darwinians say it was.
Now, like it or not, Darwinism is not without problems of its own. The theory of punctuated equilibria proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould to explain, among other things, abrupt appearance of species after long periods of biologial stability, amounts to positing a theory of evolution that doesn't involve evolution, if by evolution one means gradual, incremental change.
Over at Tech Central the other day, Uriah Kriegel had a very interesting article pointing out the unfalsifiability of intelligent design theory:
To win in the game of science, a theory must be submitted to many tests and survive all of them without being falsified. But to be even allowed into the game, the theory must be falsifiable in principle: there must be a conceivable experiment that would prove it false.
If we examine ID in this light, it becomes pretty clear that the theory isn't scientific. It is impossible to refute ID, because if an animal shows one characteristic, IDers can explain that the intelligent designer made it this way, and if the animal shows the opposite characteristic, IDers can explain with equal confidence that the designer made it that way. For that matter, it is fully consistent with ID that the supreme intelligence designed the world to evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. Given this, there is no conceivable experiment that can prove ID false.
I think this is pretty sound myself. But I have just sent an email to Professor Kriegel, bringing to his attention these two papagraphs from Robert Winston's new book The Story of God:
It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages. Many anthropologists and social theorists do indeed take the view that religion emerged out of a sense of uncertainty and bewilderment - explaining misfortune or illness, for example, as the consequences of an angry God, or reassuring us that we live on after death. Rituals would have given us a comforting, albeit illusory, sense that we can control what is in fact ultimately beyond our control - the weather, illness, attacks by predators or other human groups.
However, it is equally plausible that the Divine Idea would have been of little use in our prehistoric rough-and-tumble existence. Life on the savannah may have been in the open air, but it was no picnic. Early humans would have been constantly on the lookout for predators to be avoided, such as wolves and sabre-tooth tigers; hunting or scavenging would be a continual necessity to ensure sufficient food; and the men were probably constantly fighting among each other to ensure that they could have sex with the best-looking girl (or boy) or choose the most tender piece of meat from the carcass. Why would it be necessary, in the daily scramble to stay alive, to make time for such an indulgent pursuit as religion?
It looks to me as if you could use this to demonstrate the unfalsifiability of Darwinism. If Professor Kriegel sends me a reply, I'll ask him if I can share it here.
In the meantime, my own inchoate notion is that intelligence is a concomitant of life and has evolved and adapted along with the organisms in which it is -- in varying degrees obviously -- always present.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Scenes in the city ...
Continuing with my fondness for the visual poetry of the urban scene, here's a blog by another colleague of mine, Ted Adams. Ladies and gentlemen: Heudnsk Log.
A chat with Anne Rice ...
The other day I spoke on the phone for an hour or so with Anne Rice about her new novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. My review of the novel will run in Sunday's Inquirer, but you can listen to the interview here.
The voice of the poet ...
Yesterday afternoon I took a cab out to Penn Bookstore to hear poet Daniel Hoffman read from his new book, Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets, which I reviewed last Sunday. It proved to be a wonderful experience.
Many poets, especially American poets, do not read their work well at all, either for lack of a resonant voice or an effective reading technique, or both. Hoffman has no problem on either score. Hearing him read poems I had become pretty familar with actually enhanced my understanding and appreciation of them. Humor, drama, sentiment -- Hoffman's reading brought it all out.
One poem that he read, a longish poem whose title escapes me, which will be included in his next collection, is especially worth mentioning. It's about a fellow in rural Maine who gets his own back from the tax man. It's quite, quite funny. Hoffman said it should be read with Maine accent, which he declined to attempt (though the Maine inflections could be sensed as read). The late Marshall Dodge could have done wonders with this poem, which would make great movie. A poem made in to a movie? Well, why not? Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" was made into a movie, and so was his "Dick Turpin's Ride." Dan, call your agent.
Many poets, especially American poets, do not read their work well at all, either for lack of a resonant voice or an effective reading technique, or both. Hoffman has no problem on either score. Hearing him read poems I had become pretty familar with actually enhanced my understanding and appreciation of them. Humor, drama, sentiment -- Hoffman's reading brought it all out.
One poem that he read, a longish poem whose title escapes me, which will be included in his next collection, is especially worth mentioning. It's about a fellow in rural Maine who gets his own back from the tax man. It's quite, quite funny. Hoffman said it should be read with Maine accent, which he declined to attempt (though the Maine inflections could be sensed as read). The late Marshall Dodge could have done wonders with this poem, which would make great movie. A poem made in to a movie? Well, why not? Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" was made into a movie, and so was his "Dick Turpin's Ride." Dan, call your agent.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Take a look ...
Maybe it's because I spent the first nine years of my life among factories and railroad yards, but cityscapes always delight me. My colleague Eric Mencher, currently loafing in Spain with his wife, Kass, is especially adept at catching the formal beauty of the urban scene, as this and this nicely demonstrate. The ship, by the way, is the S.S. United States, which, on her maiden voyage in 1952, crossed the Atlantic in a record-breaking three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes. She now sits forlorn and neglected at a dock on the Delaware.
And that will be my blogging for today. Tomorrow, back to Russell Brain, the nervous system, and Walter de la Mare.
And that will be my blogging for today. Tomorrow, back to Russell Brain, the nervous system, and Walter de la Mare.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Hmm ...
Over at Crime Fiction Dossier, David Montgomery ponders an important question: Can you trust book reviews?.
I certainly know what he means about having second thoughts later on, especially since the review column I write is specifically designed to recommend books. I recommended Ian McEwan's Saturday, but found I liked the book less and less the more I thought about it after the review appeared. I still think it's worth reading, because there's something interesting about it. I just don't think it's that good.
I can name, off the top of my head, one book that I reviewed this year that continues to resonate in my mind: William Nicholson's The Society of Others.
As for book blurbs, I too can think of at least one comment of mine that was not meant favorably but was edited to appear as such on the paperback edition of the book.
I certainly know what he means about having second thoughts later on, especially since the review column I write is specifically designed to recommend books. I recommended Ian McEwan's Saturday, but found I liked the book less and less the more I thought about it after the review appeared. I still think it's worth reading, because there's something interesting about it. I just don't think it's that good.
I can name, off the top of my head, one book that I reviewed this year that continues to resonate in my mind: William Nicholson's The Society of Others.
As for book blurbs, I too can think of at least one comment of mine that was not meant favorably but was edited to appear as such on the paperback edition of the book.
An odd but interesting pair of books ...
A few weeks ago I ordered from Abebooks.com, a book by W. Russell Brain called Mind, Perception and Science. I had read about it years ago in an article in the Sewanee Review about Teilhard de Chardin's theory of the within of things, and I was thinking of reading up again on Teilhard. While looking through the list of books by Russell Brain, I noticed another called Tea With Walter de la Mare. Had to be the same guy, I figured, and de la Mare is a favorite of mine. So I bought both books and, sure enough, they were indeed by the same author.
Why should that be so odd? Because W. Russell Brain was best known as one of the greatest neurophysiologists of his day. Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System remains a key text in the field, as does Brain and Bannister's Clinical Neurology (co-author Bannister is Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run the mile in under four minutes -- I can still remember the day it made the news). But Brain was more than a brilliant scientist. He was a broadly cultured human being, and his book of reminiscences about his visits to the elderly poet makes for fascinating reading. Moreover, there are interesting points of comparison between that book and the other. In the coming days I shall provide some details.
Why should that be so odd? Because W. Russell Brain was best known as one of the greatest neurophysiologists of his day. Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System remains a key text in the field, as does Brain and Bannister's Clinical Neurology (co-author Bannister is Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run the mile in under four minutes -- I can still remember the day it made the news). But Brain was more than a brilliant scientist. He was a broadly cultured human being, and his book of reminiscences about his visits to the elderly poet makes for fascinating reading. Moreover, there are interesting points of comparison between that book and the other. In the coming days I shall provide some details.
Monday, November 07, 2005
John Fowles (1926-2005)
I am deep into reviewing Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, but must take moment to note the passing of John Fowles. Here is the Times of London's obituary. Here's an even better one in the Telegraph.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Some very nice words ...
Rus Bowden, who does Poetry and Poets in Rags over at the Interboard Poetry Community, sent me a very nice email this morning, which he has graciously said I could quote from. Specifically, he wrote that "In the announcements, I have referred to you as our friend, especially that you came though for us, and the way you have. Thank you, friend." I am honored to be thought of as friend of the IBPC. It's one of the best things that's happened to me since I became The Inquirer's book editor five years ago. It's the sort of thing that makes the job worthwhile.
This connectionm that can take place between and among people who communicate over the Internet is one of those things the mainstream media has failed to notice much, let alone appreciate. It comes, I think, from the simple satisfaction you get from encountering others who are passionate about the things you are passionate about yourself. I actually didn't think I was doing the IBPC a favor by judging their competition; Ithought they were doing me a favor in asking. In a sense I learned more about the contemporary poetry scene from reading the poems they sent me than I could have from going through all the books of poetry that are in my office.
Martin Heidegger was a dubious man and, in my view, an overrated thinker. But he did say at least one thing that is worth pondering (because it's true), that poetry is the essential form of speech. To write a poem means to use the full potential of language -- using a word in such a way that its different senses apply simultaneously, arranging the syntax in such a way as to maximize the meaning, shaping images that resonate both emotionally and intellectually -- and maybe even viscerally. All of that and more. If more people studied and practiced poetry fewer people would be taken in by cheap rhetoric and specious arguments. More might also come to realize that there really are sins of thought and word, as well as deed.
This connectionm that can take place between and among people who communicate over the Internet is one of those things the mainstream media has failed to notice much, let alone appreciate. It comes, I think, from the simple satisfaction you get from encountering others who are passionate about the things you are passionate about yourself. I actually didn't think I was doing the IBPC a favor by judging their competition; Ithought they were doing me a favor in asking. In a sense I learned more about the contemporary poetry scene from reading the poems they sent me than I could have from going through all the books of poetry that are in my office.
Martin Heidegger was a dubious man and, in my view, an overrated thinker. But he did say at least one thing that is worth pondering (because it's true), that poetry is the essential form of speech. To write a poem means to use the full potential of language -- using a word in such a way that its different senses apply simultaneously, arranging the syntax in such a way as to maximize the meaning, shaping images that resonate both emotionally and intellectually -- and maybe even viscerally. All of that and more. If more people studied and practiced poetry fewer people would be taken in by cheap rhetoric and specious arguments. More might also come to realize that there really are sins of thought and word, as well as deed.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
And the winner is ...
Actually, there are several winners -- and a clutch of runners-up. What am I talking about? The InterBoard Poetry Competition. I was asked to judge last month's entries, and those I chose as winners have just been posted here. If you're interested in why I picked them, my commentaries are here. It was not an easy assignment. All of the selections that were sent me had merit, often a lot of merit. Some people wonder why I review so much poetry in The Inquirer. Well, take a look at this site: A lot of people are writing it and a lot of what they're writing is good.
Friday, November 04, 2005
A night off (sort of) ...
I've got to hunker down with Anne Rice's new novel tonight, so I can ask her some intelligent questions Tuesday afternoon. And I got home late, so not much in the way of a post tonight. But one little note: Borrowed from my colleague David Stearns today a collection of CDs called The Sammy Davis Jr. Story. I borrowed it because I found it included the studio version of Davis singing the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse song "What Kind of Fool Am I?" from Stop the World I Want to Get Off. It's the best version of it that anyone has ever done. And there is much else besides by a guy who, in addition to having some the greatest pipes ever, was just spectacularly talented.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
A curious (and pleasant) surprise ...
A couple of years ago I wrote a little essay about what constituted success in poetry. My point was that if you succeed in writing a couple of poems that are widely and routinely anthologized you are in a very select group of poets and, as such, a success in the field. I now realize that in the age of the Internet this notion may have to be modified. I recently found that a poem of mine called "Craft Warnings," which was published a few years ago in First Things, can be found on the Net. But one of the places it can be found intrigues me. I'm not even sure I know what Supernating Superdudes is. So I was both surprised and pleased when I found that someone there who goes by the name of Dragon *Etain* had posted my poem here (you have to scroll down to find it) -- and in a particular context to boot. I like the idea of the poem being out there adrift in cyberspace. Supernating Superdudes seems a youthful undertaking and I'm glad the poem is reaching whoever the people are who frequent the site.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Writing a review ...
Once again, I haven't much time, but -- since one of the points of this blog is to give a look at what goes on behind the scenes in my professional life -- I thought I'd write briefly about my latest experience of writing a review for my Sunday column. The book I reviewed for this coming Sunday is Daniel Hoffman's Makes You Stop and Think, a collection of sonnets written over the past 50 years.
After I blogged last night, I set about reviewing it. I had what I thought was a good lead, but then I got stuck. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't quite figure out how to say it, especially since nowadays there is premium on space and whatever you say you have to say as economically as possible. So, after trying on thing and then another, I took a long walk -- and things started to sort themselves out in my mind. By the time I got home, I was able to wtite the next few paragraphs. And then, as Pepys would say, to bed.
But if you start writing before you retire you are likely to have a restless night: The writing continues even while you sleep it seems. When you sleep, because you wake up often with ideas drifting through your head.
What made this book so hard to review is that it is so good. Good reviews are much harder to write than bad ones. If you don't like a book, there are usually any number of ways of taking aim and firing. But to get across why a book is good demands that you be as precise as you can -- and there's that problem of space: You can't begin to be thorough.
At any rate, I returned to the review at various times throughout the day and finished it this afternoon. Now, you would think that such a piecemeal approach would lead to something choppy. Actually, it turned out rather well, if I do say so myself, and Jeff Weinstein, my editor, seemed to get through it quicj=kly and easily.
And so, though I've had a long and difficult day, I also have a sense of accomplishment. Now I have to settle in with the next book I'm reviewing: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
After I blogged last night, I set about reviewing it. I had what I thought was a good lead, but then I got stuck. I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't quite figure out how to say it, especially since nowadays there is premium on space and whatever you say you have to say as economically as possible. So, after trying on thing and then another, I took a long walk -- and things started to sort themselves out in my mind. By the time I got home, I was able to wtite the next few paragraphs. And then, as Pepys would say, to bed.
But if you start writing before you retire you are likely to have a restless night: The writing continues even while you sleep it seems. When you sleep, because you wake up often with ideas drifting through your head.
What made this book so hard to review is that it is so good. Good reviews are much harder to write than bad ones. If you don't like a book, there are usually any number of ways of taking aim and firing. But to get across why a book is good demands that you be as precise as you can -- and there's that problem of space: You can't begin to be thorough.
At any rate, I returned to the review at various times throughout the day and finished it this afternoon. Now, you would think that such a piecemeal approach would lead to something choppy. Actually, it turned out rather well, if I do say so myself, and Jeff Weinstein, my editor, seemed to get through it quicj=kly and easily.
And so, though I've had a long and difficult day, I also have a sense of accomplishment. Now I have to settle in with the next book I'm reviewing: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
A cool site ...
Learned today about a blog I didn't know about, Jerry Jazz Musician, which offers lots of things besides jazz -- though jazz will do. Being a Bobby Darin fan, I especially enjoyed this interview with David Evanier, author of Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin.
Monday, October 31, 2005
A great, great poet ...
Little time -- and energy -- to blog tonight (I have a review to work on), but the day cannot end without acknowledging that on this date in 1795 John Keats was born. As much as any poet Keats got me interested in poetry. Few have ever been more adept at turning language into music ("Yet would I on this very midnight cease,/And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds..."). Here is a nice site dedicated to him. And here is one of my favorites among his poems:
To Sleep
O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
To Sleep
O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Elites, experts and the like ...
The other day, in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan had a piece about our "elites" making "A Separate Peace". Today Glenn Reynolds links here and here to commentaries on Noonan's piece.
I admire Peggy Noonan immensely, but I tend to agree with much of what Phil Bowermaster and Justin Katz have to say in response. The "experts" the maninstream media has come to rely on tend to be experts in ... commentary and little else. As Katz points out it was genuine experts in typography that put the lie to Dan Rather's fake documents. And asI have suggested here, much public discourse these days has to do with the "meaning" of something without any real reference to what was said in the first place. I listened the other night to a blogger on a panel bloviate about the mainstream media's complicity in the administration's "lies" about WMDs. Well, I can be as critical of the MSM as anyone, but I'm sorry: U.S., British, Israeli, French, German, and Russian intelligence all indicated that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq had used WMDs twice -- against Iran and against the Kurds. Hans Blix wanted more time look for WMDs because ... he suspected they were there. Even the fact that they have not been found does not in itself demonstrate that they were not there. After all, the reason people hide things is to keep them from being found. But even if we grant that they were not there, that would only indicate that all the experts in this matter were wrong, not that anyone lied.
Which brings me to a point I have been meaning to get at for a while regarding th level of public discourse. Calling mistakes lies is bad, to be sure, and lowers the level of discourse. But there are more fundamental problems in this regard: the failure to define terms, for instance, which one sees all the time in the Darwinism/Inteligent Design debate (such as it is). Evolution and Darwinism are not equivalent terms; neither are intelligent design and creationism. More and more, arguments tend to be framed incorrectly. The Inquirer recently had something devoted to "What If." What it amounted to was a collection of counterfactual conditionals (which, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, always lead to correct conclusions, precisely because the propositions themselves are false -- running, as they do, counter to fact). Time and again, in public discourse, correlation is presented as causation and weak correlation as strong. If the media spent more time dispassionately sorting out the faulty argumentation that takes place frequently on both sides of any debate -- rather than taking sides in any of them, however covertly (in fact, especially covertly) -- it would perform a public service consumers might well find indispensible.
I admire Peggy Noonan immensely, but I tend to agree with much of what Phil Bowermaster and Justin Katz have to say in response. The "experts" the maninstream media has come to rely on tend to be experts in ... commentary and little else. As Katz points out it was genuine experts in typography that put the lie to Dan Rather's fake documents. And asI have suggested here, much public discourse these days has to do with the "meaning" of something without any real reference to what was said in the first place. I listened the other night to a blogger on a panel bloviate about the mainstream media's complicity in the administration's "lies" about WMDs. Well, I can be as critical of the MSM as anyone, but I'm sorry: U.S., British, Israeli, French, German, and Russian intelligence all indicated that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq had used WMDs twice -- against Iran and against the Kurds. Hans Blix wanted more time look for WMDs because ... he suspected they were there. Even the fact that they have not been found does not in itself demonstrate that they were not there. After all, the reason people hide things is to keep them from being found. But even if we grant that they were not there, that would only indicate that all the experts in this matter were wrong, not that anyone lied.
Which brings me to a point I have been meaning to get at for a while regarding th level of public discourse. Calling mistakes lies is bad, to be sure, and lowers the level of discourse. But there are more fundamental problems in this regard: the failure to define terms, for instance, which one sees all the time in the Darwinism/Inteligent Design debate (such as it is). Evolution and Darwinism are not equivalent terms; neither are intelligent design and creationism. More and more, arguments tend to be framed incorrectly. The Inquirer recently had something devoted to "What If." What it amounted to was a collection of counterfactual conditionals (which, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, always lead to correct conclusions, precisely because the propositions themselves are false -- running, as they do, counter to fact). Time and again, in public discourse, correlation is presented as causation and weak correlation as strong. If the media spent more time dispassionately sorting out the faulty argumentation that takes place frequently on both sides of any debate -- rather than taking sides in any of them, however covertly (in fact, especially covertly) -- it would perform a public service consumers might well find indispensible.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Ponderings and questions ...
The Guardian recently published some excerpts from Robert Winston's forthcoming book, The Story of God.
I don't know about the book as a whole, but the excerpts seemed to me to raise more questions than were answered.
Take, for instance, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. The intrincically religious regard religion as an end in itself, the extrinically religious accept it as a social convention. Winston cites a study suggesting that the latter are more susceptible to mental and emotional disorders than the former. He then tackles the notion of religion as an advantageous adaptation in human evolution. Specifically, he cites David Sloan Wilson's thesis that "religiosity emerged as a 'useful' genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness." But that sounds like extrinsic religiosity to me, which isn't the variety that offers the advantages. (If the communitarian aspect of religion is what makes it advantageous for survival, this is likely to be the result of a a genuine commitment to the faith. The communal attachment minus the commitment would probably not have such an effect. In other words, if relgion does have an adaptive advantage, it must derive from genuine belief, not superficial assent.)
Winston also cites the study of identical twins that suggested there may be something genetic about religious sensibility. But while genetics may serve to explain why identical twins, separated at birth and raised by parents with vastly different outlooks, end up having the same outlook themselves, what explains identical twins who don't end up having similar outlooks?
I certainly think there is a difference between those who regard religion as a social convention, and accordingly go to church, and those who experience God as a living presence in their lives. I also think that what has really bothered many Catholics about the sex abuse scandals in the Church is the suspicion that members of the hierarchy may be more loyal to the Church than to God -- or, what may be worse, draw no distinction between the two.
Finally, there is what Winston quotes from Richard Dawkins:
"Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion."
I wonder how the Apostle of Darwinism explains this singularly maladaptive behavior and how it has managed to survive and indeed flourish.
I don't know about the book as a whole, but the excerpts seemed to me to raise more questions than were answered.
Take, for instance, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. The intrincically religious regard religion as an end in itself, the extrinically religious accept it as a social convention. Winston cites a study suggesting that the latter are more susceptible to mental and emotional disorders than the former. He then tackles the notion of religion as an advantageous adaptation in human evolution. Specifically, he cites David Sloan Wilson's thesis that "religiosity emerged as a 'useful' genetic trait because it had the effect of making social groups more unified. The communal nature of religion certainly would have given groups of hunter-gatherers a stronger sense of togetherness." But that sounds like extrinsic religiosity to me, which isn't the variety that offers the advantages. (If the communitarian aspect of religion is what makes it advantageous for survival, this is likely to be the result of a a genuine commitment to the faith. The communal attachment minus the commitment would probably not have such an effect. In other words, if relgion does have an adaptive advantage, it must derive from genuine belief, not superficial assent.)
Winston also cites the study of identical twins that suggested there may be something genetic about religious sensibility. But while genetics may serve to explain why identical twins, separated at birth and raised by parents with vastly different outlooks, end up having the same outlook themselves, what explains identical twins who don't end up having similar outlooks?
I certainly think there is a difference between those who regard religion as a social convention, and accordingly go to church, and those who experience God as a living presence in their lives. I also think that what has really bothered many Catholics about the sex abuse scandals in the Church is the suspicion that members of the hierarchy may be more loyal to the Church than to God -- or, what may be worse, draw no distinction between the two.
Finally, there is what Winston quotes from Richard Dawkins:
"Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral consumed hundreds of man-centuries in its building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolised medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion against a scarcely distinguishable alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them, fasted for them, endured whipping, undertaken a lifetime of celibacy, and sworn themselves to asocial silence for the sake of religion."
I wonder how the Apostle of Darwinism explains this singularly maladaptive behavior and how it has managed to survive and indeed flourish.
Friday, October 28, 2005
A touch of blogging ...
It has been a wearisome week at The Inquirer. There is a buyout offer on the table and quite a few people have signed up for it. People I have worked with for 20 years and more are planning to exit. And no one can really say for sure what things will be like when it's all over -- except that it won't be the same.
And so, after a couple of very long days, I shall confine my blogging to noting that on this day, in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Here is a fine piece on him by George Weigel. And this, from my favorite among his novels, Brideshead Revisited, nicely summarizes how I have been feeling of late:
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.
And so, after a couple of very long days, I shall confine my blogging to noting that on this day, in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Here is a fine piece on him by George Weigel. And this, from my favorite among his novels, Brideshead Revisited, nicely summarizes how I have been feeling of late:
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Come to the Village (the East Village, that is) ...
Debra Matsumoto, publicity manager for North Atlantic Books, sent me an interesting email the other, which she gave me permission to share:
Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose was the brainchild of some freelance producers who love books. On Nov. 10, 9:30-11 pm, laundry and language will spin together at the Avenue C Laundromat, 69 Avenue C @ 5th St. in the heart of the East Village. Following a successful inaugural event with Legs McNeil and Sam Lipsyte in August, this second installment will feature Rob Brezsny, the syndicated astrology columnist for The Village Voice and Jungian beatnik, and fiction writer Kelly Link.
This format is urban multi-tasking genius and creative guerrilla bookselling for fly-over city centers where competition for attendance is the most challenging and competitive. For more information, please contact Emily Rubin, emrubin@earthlink.net; cell: 917.501.9825.
Too bad it's a Wednesday. Hard for me to get to Manhattan in the middle of the week. But it sure sounds interesting.
Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose was the brainchild of some freelance producers who love books. On Nov. 10, 9:30-11 pm, laundry and language will spin together at the Avenue C Laundromat, 69 Avenue C @ 5th St. in the heart of the East Village. Following a successful inaugural event with Legs McNeil and Sam Lipsyte in August, this second installment will feature Rob Brezsny, the syndicated astrology columnist for The Village Voice and Jungian beatnik, and fiction writer Kelly Link.
This format is urban multi-tasking genius and creative guerrilla bookselling for fly-over city centers where competition for attendance is the most challenging and competitive. For more information, please contact Emily Rubin, emrubin@earthlink.net; cell: 917.501.9825.
Too bad it's a Wednesday. Hard for me to get to Manhattan in the middle of the week. But it sure sounds interesting.
One more time ...?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote
George Santayana. This piece by Jonathan V. Last offers further evidence that Santayana was right. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.
George Santayana. This piece by Jonathan V. Last offers further evidence that Santayana was right. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Taken to task (cont'd) ...
Oni Lasana, one of the email correspondents who was critical of the last line of my review on Sunday of Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark, responded today to the answer I sent her and has given me permission to quote her. Here's what she wrote:
Hi Frank,
I'm surprised you wrote back in such detail to defend your review. Thanks. I understand all points you made, especially about human nature and the definition of shame. However in my experiences, human nature transends one's race.
To be quite frank, as a person of color, I still find your last line in the review to be a subliminal act of sabotage to the author and publisher of the book. What person of any color would want to read a book that will make them feel ashamed. In my humble opinion, the review was excellent, only the last line was in bad taste.
All the best...all the time~
Oni
This got me to thinking. Specifically, I began to think that Oni was right: I certainly didn't intend it -- in fact, it was the opposite of what I intended -- but that last line might very well turn potential readers off. I should have stuck to the fact of my response and not gone beyond it to a judgment about how others should respond. So I'm going to send out a changed version for the KRT wire and have the online version changed as well. I'll stick to how I felt and not tell others how to feel.
Thanks, Oni.
Hi Frank,
I'm surprised you wrote back in such detail to defend your review. Thanks. I understand all points you made, especially about human nature and the definition of shame. However in my experiences, human nature transends one's race.
To be quite frank, as a person of color, I still find your last line in the review to be a subliminal act of sabotage to the author and publisher of the book. What person of any color would want to read a book that will make them feel ashamed. In my humble opinion, the review was excellent, only the last line was in bad taste.
All the best...all the time~
Oni
This got me to thinking. Specifically, I began to think that Oni was right: I certainly didn't intend it -- in fact, it was the opposite of what I intended -- but that last line might very well turn potential readers off. I should have stuck to the fact of my response and not gone beyond it to a judgment about how others should respond. So I'm going to send out a changed version for the KRT wire and have the online version changed as well. I'll stick to how I felt and not tell others how to feel.
Thanks, Oni.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Taken to task ...
And now for another behind-the scenes glimpse in the life of a newspaper book review editor:
In my review yesterday of Caryl Phillips's novel Dancing in the Dark, based on the life of black entertainer Bert Williams, I had the temerity to write the following:
One would hope that an African American, reading this book, would feel compassion for its melancholy protagonist, trapped in a cultural double-bind. Any white American, reading it, ought to feel ashamed.
My colleague Michael Rozansky warned me that that final sentence might elicit some critical email. And so it did. I can't quote any of them -- there were five, I think -- because I don't have the writers' permission, but the gist of all of them seemed to be that the racism that existed in this country at the time was certainly deplorable but nothing that white Americans today need be ashamed of. I suggested to a couple of my correspondents that it would seem to me perfectly reasonable if a contemporary German felt ashamed over what happened in Germany during the Nazi era. So why shouldn't we be ashamed of our country's racism? I reminded another that the primary defintion of shame is "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety." Accordingly, I think shame is an altogether appropriate emotional rsponse to certain things that have taken place in American society. Finally, I told all of them that I believed in a common human nature and a universal moral law and that decent people tend to find certain actions and attitudes shameful.
So far, none of my correspondents has written back.
In my review yesterday of Caryl Phillips's novel Dancing in the Dark, based on the life of black entertainer Bert Williams, I had the temerity to write the following:
One would hope that an African American, reading this book, would feel compassion for its melancholy protagonist, trapped in a cultural double-bind. Any white American, reading it, ought to feel ashamed.
My colleague Michael Rozansky warned me that that final sentence might elicit some critical email. And so it did. I can't quote any of them -- there were five, I think -- because I don't have the writers' permission, but the gist of all of them seemed to be that the racism that existed in this country at the time was certainly deplorable but nothing that white Americans today need be ashamed of. I suggested to a couple of my correspondents that it would seem to me perfectly reasonable if a contemporary German felt ashamed over what happened in Germany during the Nazi era. So why shouldn't we be ashamed of our country's racism? I reminded another that the primary defintion of shame is "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety." Accordingly, I think shame is an altogether appropriate emotional rsponse to certain things that have taken place in American society. Finally, I told all of them that I believed in a common human nature and a universal moral law and that decent people tend to find certain actions and attitudes shameful.
So far, none of my correspondents has written back.
The trouble with experts (revisited) ...
Earlier this month I posted some thoughts about The trouble with experts in which I commented somewhat unfavorably on a column by George Will regarding the Harriet Miers nomination. I was interested to see that John Hinderaker of Power Line has an article in The Daily Standard that echoes some of my sentiments:
... there is no Constitutional requirement that Supreme Court justices be lawyers. It might well be good to have a non-lawyer or two on the Court. Such justices may not bring much value to issues of, say, bankruptcy law; but the Constitution is a straightforward document, intended to be read and understood by men and women of ordinary intelligence and experience. There is no reason why expositing that document should be solely the province of lawyers.
Harvard law professor Charles Fried also had an interesting article on the same subject in yesterday's Boston Globe.
But perhaps most interesting of all, at least from the point of view of taking Will to task, is this piece by Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards Blog.
... there is no Constitutional requirement that Supreme Court justices be lawyers. It might well be good to have a non-lawyer or two on the Court. Such justices may not bring much value to issues of, say, bankruptcy law; but the Constitution is a straightforward document, intended to be read and understood by men and women of ordinary intelligence and experience. There is no reason why expositing that document should be solely the province of lawyers.
Harvard law professor Charles Fried also had an interesting article on the same subject in yesterday's Boston Globe.
But perhaps most interesting of all, at least from the point of view of taking Will to task, is this piece by Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards Blog.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Schools of evolution ...
In the Oct. 8 edition of the British magazine The Spectator, historian Paul Johnson made a most interesting point in a column headlined "Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science" (available online only to subscribers). Here's the money quote:
Evolution is ... a matter of history. When biologists tell me, as a historian, to get off their turf, my reply is that I have at least as much right to be there as they do. No one disputes that the evolution of life forms took place. But how? Darwinian fundamentalists -- by which I mean those who claim natural selection is the sole and exclusive form of evolution -- have an obligation to produce a chronology showing how their theory fits into the chronology of life on earth. So far as I can see, it does not fit -- natural selection is too slow to be the evolutionary matrix in all cases. It is on this point that Darwinian theory crumbles. And it is a historical point. Clio knows best.
Please, before criticizing me -- or Johnson -- for espousing creationism, read that passage carefully. Note the phrases "sole and exclusive" and "all cases."
I noticed that, last week, at the trial taking place in Harrisburg regarding the Dover Area School District's requirement that students be made acquainted with intelligent design theory, biologist Michael Behe, author ofDarwin's Black Box, testified. I read Behe's book some years ago and interviewed Behe. The book, as I recall, was strictly about biology -- by which I mean there was no discussion of religion in it -- and Behe seemed a very reasonable fellow when I talked to him. I can't see why Behe's book wouldn't be suitable to a reading list for science students. But, presuming I'm wrong, and it wouldn't be appropriate, what about Evolution in Four Dimensions : Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion C. Lamb? This posits that not all evolutionary change can be attributed to selection among random genetic mutations; acquired changes, as well as induced changes, also play a part. If anyone out there catches a whiff of Lamarckianism, well, Jablonka and Lamb previously authored Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension. And speaking of Lamarck, what about Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden? This shows how at the molecular level characteristics acquired by the immune system can be inherited.
If other factors, besides natural selection, can be shown to figure in the process of change known as evolution, that is something worth knowing. Or shall books such as these not be allowed in the classroom either, because they challenge what Johnson calls Darwinian orthodoxy? (None of these books, by the way, so far as I know, has any bearing on, or in any way makes a case for, intelligent design theory.)
Evolution is ... a matter of history. When biologists tell me, as a historian, to get off their turf, my reply is that I have at least as much right to be there as they do. No one disputes that the evolution of life forms took place. But how? Darwinian fundamentalists -- by which I mean those who claim natural selection is the sole and exclusive form of evolution -- have an obligation to produce a chronology showing how their theory fits into the chronology of life on earth. So far as I can see, it does not fit -- natural selection is too slow to be the evolutionary matrix in all cases. It is on this point that Darwinian theory crumbles. And it is a historical point. Clio knows best.
Please, before criticizing me -- or Johnson -- for espousing creationism, read that passage carefully. Note the phrases "sole and exclusive" and "all cases."
I noticed that, last week, at the trial taking place in Harrisburg regarding the Dover Area School District's requirement that students be made acquainted with intelligent design theory, biologist Michael Behe, author ofDarwin's Black Box, testified. I read Behe's book some years ago and interviewed Behe. The book, as I recall, was strictly about biology -- by which I mean there was no discussion of religion in it -- and Behe seemed a very reasonable fellow when I talked to him. I can't see why Behe's book wouldn't be suitable to a reading list for science students. But, presuming I'm wrong, and it wouldn't be appropriate, what about Evolution in Four Dimensions : Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, by Eva Jablonka and Marion C. Lamb? This posits that not all evolutionary change can be attributed to selection among random genetic mutations; acquired changes, as well as induced changes, also play a part. If anyone out there catches a whiff of Lamarckianism, well, Jablonka and Lamb previously authored Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension. And speaking of Lamarck, what about Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward Steele, Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden? This shows how at the molecular level characteristics acquired by the immune system can be inherited.
If other factors, besides natural selection, can be shown to figure in the process of change known as evolution, that is something worth knowing. Or shall books such as these not be allowed in the classroom either, because they challenge what Johnson calls Darwinian orthodoxy? (None of these books, by the way, so far as I know, has any bearing on, or in any way makes a case for, intelligent design theory.)
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