The chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and when all his guests were seared, Pompey stood. He was, as I have said, no orator on a public platform. But on his own ground, among those whom he thought of as his lieutenants, he radiated power and authority. ... He began by giving the latest deatils of the pirate attack on Ostia: nineteen consular war triremes destroyed, a couple of hundred men killed, grain warehouses torched, two praetors - one of whom had been inspecting the granaries and the other the fleet - seized in their official tobes, along with their retinues and their symbolic rods and axes. A ransom demand for their release had arrived in Rome yesterday. "But for my part," said Pompey, "I do not believe we should negotiate with such people, as it will only encourage them in their criminal acts." (Everyone nodded in agreement.) The raid on Ostia, he continued, was a turning point in the history of Rome. This was not an isolated incident, but merely th most daring in a long line of such outrages ... . What Rome was facing was a threat very different from that posed by a conventional enemy. These pirates were were a new type of ruthless foe, with no government to represent them and no treaties to bind them. Their bases were not confined to a single state. They had no unified system of command. They were a worldwide pestilence, a parasite which needed to be stamped out, otherwise Rome - despite her overwhelming military superiority - would never again know security or peace.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Plus ça change ...
One of the good ones ...
When was the last time you laughed while reading an introduction to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas? McInerny must have been wonderful company but I missed my chance. I visited the Notre Dame campus only once, almost 40 years ago, in the company of the professor with whom I was studying analytic philosophy. We were there to hear John Searle speak on Speech Acts, a book we had read together. Campus security escorted us, drunk and disorderly, out of the building before we could hear Searle’s lecture.
There's something admirable about that drunk and disorderly bit.
The nature of discourse (cont'd.) ...
Thought for the day ...
I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.- Zane Grey, born on this date in 1872
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The science is settled ...
Something I missed ...
Weighty volumes ...
But ... bear this in mind: Moderately Overweight Elderly Live Longer?
Nice to know, especially since I'm less than two years away from the the big Seven-O. Luckily for me I have a high fear threshold. I usually don't get scared until afterward, which in this case is very useful.
And doing it himself ...
I guess my work is quite three dimensional; by that I mean, I describe people in relationship to what is around them. There are tables and chairs and walls and skies and rivers. I don't write essay-like fiction. I've always leaned toward descriptive prose. I want the reader to know what something looks like and sounds like and feels like. It's just the nature of the work I've always done.
Shandean game player ...
Nearly everybody loves “The Catcher in the Rye,” and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, “Nine Stories.” But the work that followed, the four long short stories paired together in two successive books as “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.
Sage advice ...
Didn't the ancient Greeks regard the capacity to forget as a blessing from the gods? If do, it is a blessing they have yet to bestow on me.
Very sad news ...
I did not know Professor McInerny well, but he reviewed a couple of books for me, we chatted on the phone and corresponded a bit. Boy, was he sharp.
Any satire ...
Thought for the day ...
It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.- Richard Brautigan, born on this date in 1935
Friday, January 29, 2010
Now you know ...
Get to know ...
Christ, they have to have been more interesting than most professors of literature. I was myself in the alcohol and various drugs category, the drugs includingsome serious no-nos. Big deal.
Oh, my ...
My Jesuit mentor used to say that happiness is for pigs, and the sort of happiness written of here would seem to be just the sort suited to pigs (to whom I mean no disrespect), a kind of psychic torpor. If you have to think about it, you're not happy.
A discovery ...
Something else ...
Lamenting ...
In Cosmopolis, Toulmin started talking up the 16th-century humanist thinker Montaigne as the truly must-read philosopher of the early modern period. Could he have chosen a thinker more likely to drive away the technocrats who dominated professional philosophy at the time? But Toulmin, trained in the hard sciences and mathematics himself, saw through the science worship of less-credentialed sorts. He didn't relent, announcing "our need to reappropriate the wisdom of the 16th-century humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th-century 'new philosophy' with a practical concern for human life in its concrete detail."
Streamlining ...
One of the worst trends in the humanities in recent decades has been the insularity of scholarly expression. The conversation is so mannered and self-involved, so insider-like, that it has no readership beyond a few dozen colleagues in the same sub-sub-field. How many people could stomach a sentence like this one, a runner-up in the celebrated Bad Writing Contest a few years back: "Punctuated by what became ubiquitous sound bites—Tonya dashing after the tow truck, Nancy sailing the ice with one leg reaching for heaven—this melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of un-narrativized representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual codes"?
More on Salinger...
... and Ron Rosenbaum: J.D. Salinger: The Man in the Glass House.
... an Stephen King: 'The last of the great post-WWII American writers'.
Thought for the day ...
Music is an outburst of the soul.- Frederick Delius, born on this date in 1862
Thursday, January 28, 2010
This week's batch ...
News alert ...
Here, from Dave, is the NYT obit: J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91.
Here is the Times (of London) obit: J. D. Salinger: Author of The Catcher in the Rye.
Here's Terry Teachout: J.D. Salinger, R.I.P.
Those darn kids ...
Today, students write more words than ever before. They write them faster, too. What happens, though, when teenagers write fast? They select the first words that come to mind, words that they hear and read and speak all the time. They have an idea, a thought to express, and the vocabulary and sentence patterns they are most accustomed to spring to mind; with the keyboard at hand, phrases go right up on the screen, and the next thought proceeds. In other words, the common language of their experience ends up on the page, yielding a flat, blank, conventional idiom of social exchange.
Something else ...
Another ...
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.- Thomas Aquinas, whose feast is celebrated today
Skepticism now permissible ...
See also: Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data.
Guess they weren't behaving like all the rest of us.
Thought for the day ...
The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.- Colette, born on this date in 1873
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
RIP ...
... also, from Terry Teachout: Louis Auchincloss, R.I.P.
(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It's called music ...
Oddly, atonality and aleatory music—both enjoying a vogue, among the elite, in early and mid-20th century—have failed to find any real momentum, even though they were viewed as contributions to musical "progress." In the meantime, earlier styles—from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, for instance—have captured the interest of serious listeners.
Ho-hum ...
DVD alert ...
I have a copy of A Handful of Dust. I think it's a terrible adaptation. A better bet is the Sword of Honor trilogy starring Daniel Craig.
Start small ...
Explaining longevity ...
Speech and music have to be seamless; timing is vital; the mechanism is as precise – and as likely to malfunction if done hamfistedly – as Rossini. The plot moves forward by way of the dialogue: do it badly and the show will grind to a halt. G&S can never work as a series of short, disconnected musical numbers; it is an integrated work of divine lunacy, propelled by an inner logic, or it is nothing.
I think that's right on the money.
Thought for the day ...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Something to ponder ...
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
The end grows nigher ...
Contradictory and extreme ...
He had just had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled and was awaiting delivery of a painkiller from the pharmacy. When the doorbell rang, he was greeted by a beautiful dark-haired girl with a fish pendant on her necklace. "This is the sign used by the early Christians," she said and took off.
Soon after, Dick began having nightmares and visions. He began to sketch out a theory that these were divine interventions. In his new cosmology, what looked like Orange County was actually 1st century Rome. "The Empire never ended," Dick wrote, realizing he was a fugitive Christian in 70 A.D.
Truth in advertising ...
As an academic philosopher, McGinn looks at Shakespeare’s plays “expressly from the point of view of their underlying philosophical concerns.” By using that rhetorical approach, McGinn promises (and makes good on his promise) to reveal “the source of their depth.”This sounds well worth reading.
Words fail ...
Let us be kind.
The Best African American Essays, 2009
Best African American Essays: 2009
290 pp, Bantam. $16.00.
978 0 553 38536 6
The Best African American Essays: 2009 is the first volume in what is intended as an annual celebration of contemporary “black essayistic art” (xviii). Edited by Gerald Early and Debra J. Dickerson, the anthology pays homage to the “grand tradition” (xiii) of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington by showcasing the work of those – including Barack Obama – who have registered their “blackness” (xxi) through non-fiction prose.
The most engaging pieces in the collection tend to be those which confront, and seek in part to remedy, what Early and Dickerson label in their introductory remarks, “the blood-soaked hypocrisy” (ix) of American history. In ‘Jena, O.J. and the Jailing of Black America,’ for instance, Orlando Patterson writes of a “gulag of racial incarceration” (234) in which a full ten percent of African American men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five are imprisoned. The “catastrophic state of black family life” (235), he maintains, has contributed to a cycle of unemployment, anger, and violence. Indeed, the rate at which blacks commit homicides in America is seven times that of whites.
Like Patterson, Malcolm Gladwell addresses the role of the family, noting in a discerning essay on intelligence testing and race that between the ages of four and twenty-four, African American children, nearly seventy percent of them born to single mothers, lose six-tenths of an I.Q. point per year against their white counterparts. For Maxwell, the celebrated author of Blink, the lesson here has less, however, to do with “cognitive disability” (95) than it does the “quality of the world” (101) in which African American youth are raised. As Kwame Appiah remarks in his essay ‘A Slow Emancipation,’ liberation is only the “beginning of freedom” (170).
Despite the occasional inclusion of banal meditations on hip-hop or international aid, the Best African American Essays succeeds in providing a vivid, often jarring, portrait of what it is to be black in America. From Bill Maxwell’s reflection on the state of Historically Black Universities to Hawa Allan’s perceptive analysis of the racial underpinnings of the fashion world, the anthology reaffirms the centrality of the essay in the history of African American writing, and does justice to what Obama refers to in an assessment of pluralistic democracy as the power of the oppressed “to spur social change” (239).
–Jesse Freedman
Jesse Freedman holds degrees in history from Amherst College and Hertford College, Oxford.
Or used to ...
The student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgment in world affairs. This is a permanent good, not because history repeats--we can never exactly match past and present situations--but because the "tendency of things" shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. The great historian, Jacob Burckhardt, said of historical knowledge, it is not "to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time."
Thought for the day ...
Truth is power, but only when one has patience and requires of it no immediate effect. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes it is better not to think in terms of plans; here months may mean nothing, and also years. Truth must be sought for its own sake, its holy, divine greatness.- Romano Guardini
Monday, January 25, 2010
Art from clutter ...
The debate continues ...
There really is room in life for both the books on your shelves and the books in your Kindle.
Hmm ...
I think Zweig deserves better. I just ordered a copy of his book on Verlaine.
Well, maybe ...
There are, however, other choices besides militant atheism, Biblical literalism, and the approach suggested here.
No double standard ...
Naturalism faces what we can call the problem of mind (where this subsumes all the subproblems mentioned above, including intentionality, qualia, etc.) The fact that no naturalist has every solved this problem is never taken by a naturalist as a reason to abandon his naturalism. So why should the problem of evil, which has not been satisfactorily solved either, be taken by a theist as a reason to abandon his theism? If the naturalist can get away with saying 'We are still working on it,' then so can the theist.
RIP ...
... here is his poem Elegy.
(Hat tip to Rus Bowden for both links.)
Thought for the day ...
Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.- W. Somerset Maugham, born on this date in1874.Here is an interview with Maugham:
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The envelope, please ...
Thought for the day ...
Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?- E.T.A. Hoffmann, born on this date in 1776
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Light blogging ...
Reprise ...
Nervy ...
I have an idea: How about a study of the aesthetics of neuroscience?
Thought for the day ...
The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others.- Walter M Miller, born on this date in 1923
Friday, January 22, 2010
Drawing distinctions ...
Generally speaking ... the distinction between crime and thrillers on the one hand and "literary" fiction on the other lies in their attitude to language. Many crime novelists seem indifferent or unaware that it might be a good idea to have a view of the matter at all, and the result is work that suggests that the writer believes he or she can operate in some medium which exists prior to, or instead of, language.
Check your trust ...
Language and reality ...
Bohm pointed out that quantum effects are much more process-based, so to describe them accurately requires a process-based language rich in verbs, and in which nouns play only a secondary role. In the last year of his life, Bohm and some like-minded physicists, including myself, met a number of native American elders of the Blackfoot, Micmac and Ojibwa tribes - all speakers of the Algonquian family of languages. These languages have a wide variety of verb forms, while they lack the notion of dividing the world into categories of objects, such as "fish", "trees" or "birds".
Alan Watts made a similar point many years ago (he also referred to American Indian languages, I believe) - suggesting that we are not so much "people" as "peopling".
Suggested reading ...
"... who am I to argue with Woolf and Calvino ..." Oh, go ahead, Anthony. Do it anyway!
Beavers and aspirin ...
Just you don't miss it: Book review: On the Spartacus Road. (I just checked on Amazon, and it seems that Peter's book reaches these shores in June.)
Thought for the day ...
A single grateful thought toward heaven is the most perfect prayer.- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, born on this date in 1729
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Anniversary ...
This week's batch ...
Forget about paying the NYT for online content. Buy a subscription to the TLS (I've had one for years).
FYI ...
Attack of the pipsqueaks ...
We only wish that Emerson could have witnessed the 20th century, its brutality, its murderous regimes, its epochal indifference to life.
Ever hear of the Civil War, guys? Emerson lived through it.
Thought for the day ...
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.- George Orwell, who died on this date in 1950
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Forget online piracy ...
Thought for the day ...
Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty.- Eugène Sue, born on this date in 1804
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
A look at ...
I have never read Jurgen. I guess I should, and I think I will, this summer, on vacation.
Thought for the day ...
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.- Julian Barnes, born on this date in 1946
Monday, January 18, 2010
Photolinks ...
... Portrait shows morbid Poe in more flattering terms.
... William Burroughs’s Stuff. All the stuff is here.
The Lull Report ...
... Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler.
... Amid Rubble, Seeking a Refuge in Faith.
... On Language: Movie Misquotations.
... How to hook them from the start.
Paradox or contradiction?
Thought for the day ...
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.- Baron de Montesquieu, born on this date in 1689
Sunday, January 17, 2010
But is anyone ready to pay?
I'm sure in hell not. I do subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online. But it's a better paper.
Problemata ...
In the comments, David says that "for writers, as writers, there is only one moral obligation: to write well." But do you write well only if what you write is perfectly phrased? Doesn't what you write also have to be, as best you can see, true?
Bryan meets...
You Are Not a Gadget broadens the argument far beyond the valley. Lanier — rightly, I believe — associates the tyrannous aspects of cybernetic totalism with a much wider ideology. It is, in fact, just one aspect of a package that includes transhumanism — the belief that we should work to escape our biological limitations and make ourselves more than human — and the weird cult of the impending Singularity, the point at which a computer becomes conscious and takes over the running of the world. Lanier even includes the kind of turbocharged Darwinism that claims natural selection must explain everything. These are all just different ways of trashing the human, a contemporary impulse of extraordinarily persuasive power.
The definitve summing up ...
... Maugham worked for the Winnipeg spymaster Intrepid, convincing the Americans of the need to support Britain in the early days of the Second World War.He was