tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60634511629247945842024-03-18T23:25:25.413-04:00Laconic Prolixity Lickety Split...being of my readings an account, at turns loquacious and taciturn according to the Law of Whim and the Meandering Orbit round the Pestilential Moon of Arbitrarium.Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-44839051990735581002018-07-08T14:45:00.002-04:002018-07-08T14:59:10.339-04:00Openness in Thought<p>
Recently I was discussing with a friend—Hi, Becks—my failed aspirations to be a writer. I have a complex relationship with words. On the one hand they are an art form capable of extending, composing, and in some sense creating the world of our perceptions. On the other hand, they often tend to confine, reduce, limit, and damn us to live within a tinny parody of our fullest experience. In sharing some of my past writing I came across this old exercise which surprised me for having voiced exactly this concern.
</p>
<p class="poem-title">Exercise: God can only hear you if you’re writing</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">Can you hear me now as I revert to word?</p>
<p class="poem-2">Why is it only in the intentionality of words</p>
<p class="poem-2">Made explicit, visible, naked in their black and whiteness,</p>
<p class="poem-2">When all shades of hope are rendered in striking contrast</p>
<p class="poem-2">When doubt is pared away with commas and end stops,</p>
<p class="poem-2">When all the pallid, wobbling fat of honest uncertainty</p>
<p class="poem-2">Is cut off, and the muscle sharpened like a blade of contemptuous</p>
<p class="poem-2">Certainty and conviction, all artificial in its exactness and precision,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Why is it only then that you can hear me?</p>
</div>
<p>
When we “compose our thoughts” we sift through the raw material of our thoughts and feelings and shape them in an attempt to focus them into a form that is easier to convey and understand. And all too often, once we have finished this process and produced a few statements about something, our sense of perception changes to back this limited meaning as if it were complete and essential. It becomes a part of our personal canon of being. But what if when we filtered through that raw material we weren’t quite capable in that moment of being completely honest with ourselves? What if we filtered based on convention, or fear, or some real need for our words to be acceptable to our audience, even if in the sense of an acceptable argument against their own perspectives?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed…. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.
</p>
<p class="poem-ref">
—Epistle of James
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I used to flog myself with this thought. We are taught and constantly encouraged to be absolute in our convictions. But what if these convictions are formed out of an experience of fear or subjugation or compulsion? What if doubt and uncertainty are our most honest offerings?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.”
</p>
<p class="poem-ref">
—Plato’s Socrates, from Apology of Socrates.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
When learning something new, there’s often a lot of rote memorization. I’m getting back into learning the game of Go (Japan, or Baduk in Korea, or Weiqi in China). Similar to Chess’ voluminous documentation of openings, Go has what are called “joseki” which are a set of standard moves, the outcome of which are said to give both opponents more or less equal benefit. A lot of people begin learning these josekis through rote memorization without learning why these moves are the preferred moves, and so there is a long held axiom about them: “learn joseki, lose two stones”, which means that those who set out to learn joseki actually play weaker than they did without them. And yet every professional Go player will have an extensive vocabulary of josekis, and this is because they understand the moves. They understand the implications of the final positions, how the moves relate to overall board strategy, their strengths, and, more importantly what their weaknesses are—what other potential benefits they give up in trade for the final position. And how does one begin to understand such things? By more memorization? Hardly. Because there is a distinct difference between obtaining knowledge and developing understanding. We learn what works, what is true, by questioning, by pushing against what we know with what we wonder, suspect, doubt. It’s important that our questioning or our doubting be as authentic and honest as we can make it, but what other way is there to progress? If your entire life’s understandings are compiled from other authorities, we become merely anthologists, collecting a great quantity of other people’s understandings. What relationship do we have with truth until we’ve participated in it, conversed with it, been pushed and pushed back on it and allowed it to push back again on us?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
…the accumulation of a great quantity of senselessness in a notebook will never arrive at any sense, that facts don’t exist until a man puts something of his own into them, some share of whimsical human genius, something of the fantastic.
</p>
<p class="poem-ref">
—Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
If we are merely recipients and not engaged in understanding, we’ll lose more than two stones, we’ll have wasted a life to passive consumption, living only as consumers of whittled down and composed statements passing as wisdom.
</p>
Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-22973793272545980202016-07-08T11:13:00.000-04:002016-07-08T11:22:42.067-04:00A response to the writer of "Ghetto Homie"A response to "<a href="http://www.theshrewdobserver.com/ghetto-homie.html">Ghetto Homie</a>."
<p>
“Ghetto culture”, is a pejorative term for a complex and diverse culture that grew out of subjugation and oppression. The cultural examples you provide are just a cursory listing of things that befuddle (and annoy) middle class white folks.
</p>
<p>
Do you know how the ghettos came to be? It’s an interesting and awful story. Read and talk to people about redlining, contract deeds, racial covenants. Insurers, banks, government and private citizens all played their parts in focusing the growth of impoverished black communities to specific areas within the cities. What happens to a disempowered community that is constantly taught that money is power and power is the only way to get ahead?
</p>
<p>
Bling? Exhibition of money that increases the perception of power. And we live in a society that worships consumption. You have doubts? Bling just takes it to an obvious extreme. Gangster rap? An exhibition of a different kind of power. In fact, most of the things you list should be understood within the context of a power struggle, or a struggle to find and assert power and “get ahead,” that quintessentially American dream. Milking the state? Welfare? Food Stamps? These are examples of zany delights? Do you know how many recipients of food stamps are employed and not paid a living wage? Is that zany? I realize you were employing ironic humor, but these are real lives we’re talking about here.
</p>
<p>
Our “ghetto” communities are filled with poverty, drugs, alcohol, violence, mental illness, disease. Okay. But they’re also filled with people that are doing their best to survive, struggling with chaos, figuring out how to live in a world where an astounding percentage of the men are incarcerated or dead. Out of American “ghettos” have come jazz, the blues, and hip-hop. You may abhor the stuff, but it’s everywhere, including in contemporary jazz and rock.
</p>
<p>
And we just love a good rags to riches story, don’t we? Did you hear the one about the scrappy fighter that overcame all odds to make a better life? Hence the politics of respectability. You know what happened to the scrappy fighter that never quite managed to break out of the obstacles in his life? The one that was gunned down, or tossed in prison rather than overcoming? Those stories are worth hearing, too.
</p>
<p>
Look at our media. We celebrate the little Napoleons who dare, take great risks, and succeed, and then we preach sermons reflecting the old Protestant work ethic of yore to those who are closest to the edge of our society. We like to think we are the underdogs, which may explain why the concept of white privilege is so upsetting. And yet, do you truly see no disparity in the reality that is experienced by different races or classes of people in this country? The wealthy have always lived with a vastly different life experiences than the poor. We all get sick, but some have better access to health care. We all suffer the fates of natural disaster, but who is better situated to recover? If you’re white you stand less of a chance of getting convicted. If you’re white and convicted you stand a better chance of getting a lighter sentence. I’ve never feared for my life when I’ve been pulled over for speeding. I’ve never been afraid that I was going to be randomly, arbitrarily stopped and frisked. I’ve never had to work to convince people in America that my life, or that my kids’ lives matter.
</p>
Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-31434628668046291442015-08-22T11:48:00.001-04:002015-08-22T11:49:31.727-04:00Exercises from On Poetry, Chapter 1
<p>It’s been quite a few years since I last spent time on poetry. For
whatever reason I seem to go through cycles where I read and write none
of it, and then it comes back like some kind of need. So, I’m re-reading
Glyn Maxwell’s <i>On Poetry</i> and doing some of the exercises this time.
The exercises for the first chapter involve taking a number of blank
pages and pretending certain things about them. What follows are my
just-spit-it-out first draft attempts. Just getting the juices flowing
again.</p>
<p class="poem-title">The page is physically hurt by your every word</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">This very thing. Being.</p>
<p class="poem-2">A razor’s edge. Slicing.</p>
<p class="poem-2">Biting. Tearing into you.</p>
<p class="poem-2">Words thrusting into flesh,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Your blood catching flame,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Burning, till hope gutters out.</p>
</div>
<p class="poem-title">Every mark makes you remember more</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">The memory that something had gone before</p>
<p class="poem-2">Something with meaning, subtle importance</p>
<p class="poem-2">Hides at the back of me, lost,</p>
<p class="poem-2">A mosquito bite, itching into memory.</p>
<p class="poem-2">And so, I pick up paper and pen</p>
<p class="poem-2">And scratch, writing to remember:</p>
<p class="poem-2">At first gently, wanting to ignore,</p>
<p class="poem-2">To cause no pain, to avoid it all.</p>
<p class="poem-2">But then the itching turns to burning,</p>
<p class="poem-2">And no subtle demand for release,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Every word ignites a flame</p>
<p class="poem-2">Of recollection, fear, and hope.</p>
</div>
<p class="poem-title">Every mark makes you remember less, like dementia</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">Every thought put down</p>
<p class="poem-2">Is a memory spent</p>
<p class="poem-2">And lost forever.</p>
<hr class="fancy" />
<p class="poem-2">And what if this were true?</p>
<p class="poem-2">That we write to forget,</p>
<p class="poem-2">That every word on a page</p>
<p class="poem-2">Is a purging of something violent,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Painful. Claiming freedom</p>
<p class="poem-2">From our ghosts, our selves.</p>
<p class="poem-2">Returning us to empty naiveté,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Brimming full of possibility.</p>
</div>
<p class="poem-title">That God can only hear you if you’re writing</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">Can you hear me now as I revert to word?</p>
<p class="poem-2">Why is it only in the intentionality of words</p>
<p class="poem-2">Made explicit, visible, naked in their black and whiteness,</p>
<p class="poem-2">When all shades of hope are rendered in striking contrast</p>
<p class="poem-2">When doubt is pared away with commas and end stops,</p>
<p class="poem-2">When all the pallid, wobbling fat of honest uncertainty</p>
<p class="poem-2">Is cut off, and the muscle sharpened like a blade of contemptuous</p>
<p class="poem-2">Certainty and conviction, all artificial in its exactness and precision,</p>
<p class="poem-2">Why is it only then that you can hear me?</p>
</div>
<p class="poem-title">That only touching the page are you hidden from God</p>
<div class="poem">
<p class="poem-2">The belly of the whale:</p>
<p class="poem-2d">A hiding place where silence</p>
<p class="poem-2">Is empty and nothing</p>
<p class="poem-2d">Is just nothing and not some</p>
<p class="poem-2">Tolling bell</p>
<p class="poem-2d">Calling all to worship.</p>
<p class="poem-2a">And yet now</p>
<p class="poem-2d">I find myself bending</p>
<p class="poem-2">Knee and head</p>
<p class="poem-2d">To this—ghastly, stinking—floor</p>
<p class="poem-2">Unable to not</p>
<p class="poem-2d">Worship you in the abyss.</p>
</div>
Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-19896320214162655892014-06-30T21:47:00.001-04:002014-06-30T21:47:37.728-04:00Quote: Aquarium Face<blockquote>
<p>…he had a great face half as long again as other faces, with a great nose (quite sharp on the end) stuck into it, two dark eyes like clever bits of coal and two little stubby eyebrows like very small fish swimming bravely in a great sea of face.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="poem-ref">Susanna Clarke, from <em><a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/1060">Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell</a></em></p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-52217830550515980652014-06-11T10:50:00.001-04:002014-06-11T10:50:05.418-04:00Little Thoughts: Achievement, Hope, and Beauty<p>Achievement is the death of hope, the realization that the outcome hoped for is too small a thing to bear the weight of anticipation. No achievement is capable of transforming life into something continually beautiful.</p>
<p>Beauty is a moment lived with awareness.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-83330283539586420632014-06-09T21:18:00.001-04:002014-06-09T21:18:18.302-04:00Review: The Final Solution<p><em>The Final Solution</em> is Michael Chabon’s homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s a delightful short novel with a once-famous but never-named sleuth, now an elderly bee-keeper, drawn into a mystery involving a mute Jewish boy and his African Gray Parrot. In Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, almost the whole business is the powerful tidiness of rational deduction, as all the disparate pieces are put together with logic ribbon tied neatly in a bow. In Chabon’s take, the detective is old and diminished, and there is a touch of nostalgia to the story if not the person:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the empire.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chabon has been criticized by reviewers for neglecting the tidy logical forms of the mystery, and he has been criticized for letting his prose run away with the story. It is clear, however, that this is a Chabon story and not a Doyle story. Chabon’s incredible talent is in his command of language, and the ineluctable rhythms of a long sentence. He gives us a Holmes finally aware of his limitations, and of the limitations of rationality and logic. He gives us a story with subtle allusions to heavier things yet unknown to England of the day. Only the boy and the bird knows, and it has turned the boy quiet. The bird sings of things it doesn’t understand. And so do we.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-82515566362995471742014-06-09T19:52:00.001-04:002014-06-09T19:52:16.347-04:00Review: The Penelopiad<p>In <em>The Penelopiad</em> Margaret Atwood gives us a satirical view of the events of <em>The Odyssey</em>. Penelope and her twelve hanged maids speak to us from Hades in our own time, which allows the author to present her work with the convenience of modern perspectives on sex, class, and the gods. The tone remains light and unlabored throughout, even while implicating the patriarchal values of the Homeric world. Penelope speaks from her position as an elite woman, burdened beneath the role her society has forced upon her, while the hanged maids expose the raw inequality suffered by female servants.</p>
<p>That Atwood is a gifted writer is obvious, however <em>The Penelopiad</em> seems a rather short and fast work on these themes. I could imagine them drawn out and explored in much greater detail, though perhaps not while maintaining the lightness of tone. The chorus sections, those of the hanged maids, provide a verse burlesque complimenting and contrasting against the prose of Penelope. These chapters provide a welcome counterpoint, and often heighten the impact of the satire. But the verses, themselves, sometimes seem unpolished and dashed off.</p>
<p><em>The Penelopiad</em> is an slight novel by a great writer, and perhaps re-reading will reveal the novel as something grander and richer than <em>petite four</em> that it appears to be.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-17313217822509968822014-06-09T16:33:00.001-04:002014-06-09T16:36:21.042-04:00Review: Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation<p><em>Initiation, Integration, Immolation, Immersion, Dissolution:</em> so go the stages of Jeff VanderMeer’s <em>Annihilation</em>. As much as these chapter titles appear to signify some type of desolation, they seem to represent something like the steps towards catharsis—and possibly derangement, death, or mutation—for the main character who we only know as “biologist.” It is the biologist’s story, one told with the images and language of nightmare. </p>
<p>At times <em>Annihilation</em> succeeds in oozing an uncanny eeriness, while at others there is a sparseness of feeling and atmosphere. This sparseness is not necessarily a fault. It can be effective, like a minimalist staging of a tragic play. What is compelling, however, is always the biologist—her thoughts, her feelings, her state of mind, her experience of her environment. The literal events of the story can be read as a manifestation of her experience of herself, her failures, the result of her inability to navigate the demands of objectivity as a scientist and subjectivity as a human being. Her world is out of control, consuming her, like a will-o-the-wisp which once approached explodes with the energy of collapsing stars.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-9004145035062167082014-06-09T15:08:00.001-04:002014-06-09T17:43:39.554-04:00Review: Men, Women, and Monsters: A Treatise On The Supranatural In Victorian England (Or A Review of Charles Fletcher's The Oversight)<p>I came to <em>The Oversight</em> during a forced holiday after a long dry spell absent of any fiction. It was just what I needed. This is a playful gothic fantasy that starts in the gas-lit, fog-drenched streets of Victorian-era London, and follows an ages old coterie, now deeply diminished, known officially as the “Free Company for the Regulation and Oversight of Recondite Exigency and Supranatural Lore.” What does this mean? It means magic, but more significantly, it means supernatural monsters, the <em>Sluagh</em> of Irish and Scottish folklore. The supernatural, forgive me, <em>supranatural</em> elements of the story are not overblown, but are rather understated and often lend a tasty eeriness to the story. This is a story with a strong sense of atmosphere and well-handled pacing and complexity, all tied together with capable and often elegant prose.</p>
<p>The characters of <em>The Oversight</em> borrow from a broad range of literary archetypes. This is certainly a plot-driven story, but I find the characters interesting and compelling despite their lack of internal development. These are characters as we find in the best serials, be they comics, penny dreadfuls, or Dickensian tales. And they are bolstered with a sense of authenticity by the summoning of the likes of such real-history characters as John Dee, Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk, and the 17th century encylopedist and esotericist Sir Thomas Browne. (The quotes from Browne are real, while Falk’s writings are fictional, and Dee makes a cameo appearance.) Fletcher even appropriates the historical dispute between two 19th century conjurors, Barnardo Eagle and John Henry Anderson. This blending of the real and the imaginative brings depth and life to the story.</p>
<p><em>The Oversight</em> is the first novel of the <em>Oversight Trilogy</em>, and the second installment, <em>The Drowning Glass</em>, is not due out until May 2015.</p>
<p>I’m waiting impatiently.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-73924459755373055622012-11-15T07:47:00.001-05:002012-11-15T18:07:32.232-05:00A Poem<div class="poem"><p class="poem-title">for Anastasia</p><p class="poem-line">I was wrong to ever try to teach you;</p><p class="poem-line">The things I want for you cannot be learned:</p><p class="poem-line poem-2i">Swallow sun and dance upon the waters—</p><p class="poem-bottom poem-2i">Swallow moon and skip stars across the sky.</p><p class="poem-date">—November 15, 2012</p></div>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-12608608870303507622012-07-22T14:15:00.000-04:002012-07-22T16:35:33.421-04:00On Playful Seriousness<p>I remember my father reading to me. He made the stories into a spectacle of elaborate, silly voices. That spectacle became ingrained in me, and goes with me into the daylight spaces of my own adult life. This childlike play acting, the art of verbal exaggeration and caricature, has sometimes been my only salvation from an unbearably melancholy disposition. My father taught me many things, but the unintentional lessons have been the most cherished. Being raised in a conservative, independent Baptist family, I inherited a predilection for earnestness. Earnestness need not choke out lightness or joy—my mother is a perpetually sunny and cheerful woman—but in me it grew like a cancer, threatening to smother out every other instinct. The explicit lessons on religion fed this cancer, like dry brush to a flame. Fortunately, however, these lessons were subverted by my parents’ other instincts. My father, on the long drives to my music lessons, would sometimes tell me stories about the trouble he and my uncles got themselves into as boys. Rather than being told with the sobriety of a morality play, my father’s exploits were related with a bristling, nostalgic fondness. The voices my father used when reading stories came from a similar place—a certain wildness domesticated and made harmless for my consumption.</p><p>People can be just as earnest in their passions as in their morals. This earnestness-run-amok threatened to poison every aspect of my life. It is really a sort of dissolution, a passion for extremes, which can make of one either a hair-shirted zealot or a besotted hedonist. Perhaps there is something heroic about the passionate saint. I am often awed by the lives of extreme sanctity, and in my inspiration I find myself wanting to emulate them, to be extraordinary. Immediately I turn on that word, “extraordinary,” and find myself staring into the burning eyes of a mad man, hungry, insatiably hungry, for adulation. Stone him. Beat him to death with irony. Kill him with farcical voices and the reading of children’s books. Act the fool so as to escape immolation by spontaneous self-righteous combustion. Laugh violently. Violence. Is that not what passionate extremes really are? Violence exists in the extremes and what is the alternative? A drab, tasteless morsel of balance, compromise, and composure? Somehow I think not. The alternative isn’t some mid-point between two extremities—I imagine it as some other plane altogether, and that plane is filled with silly voices. It is filled with childlike stories. But it consists of more than a romance of childhood, because it is not an escape into naiveté. It is a place of the most serious sort of play and the most playful sort of seriousness. It is a place where tears and laughter are mixed together in a cohesive unity.</p><p>I was late in coming to value childlikeness. It was in my twenties that I began re-reading the Narnia books. When I had first come to them as a child, I found them dry, fusty, and childish. (I had a strong distaste for stories about children.) As an adult I began to see in them something of which I had missed out as a child bent on an early achievement of adult seriousness. Apparently I was finally old enough to start reading fairy tales again. The best sort of fairy tale maintains a deep sense of innocence while avoiding excessive sentimentality. As I was to learn from G.K. Chesterton, the fairy tale admits of monsters, but it also insists that the monsters can be slain. Innocence without naiveté—this, I found, led to a sense of wonder, and wonder is perhaps the greatest of all senses. Wonder is impossible where the mad man with the burning eyes is free to rave. He is the enemy of wonder. In <em>Manalive!,</em> Innocent Smith fights off madness by madness—breaking and entering, a torrid love affair, attempted murder, nothing is quite what it seems, and by the end we find Smith innocent and knowing. He shows us that sometimes the only way to find our way home is to leave it behind.</p><p>While Chesterton dealt in paradox and radical common sense, George MacDonald dealt in sincere, unapologetic goodness. MacDonald’s books often show the movement from sickness to health. In sickness is anxiety and sorrow, and the protagonists of his fantasies, <em>Lilith,</em> and <em>Phantastes,</em> have both been infected with a virulent strain of adulthood. The grail they seek is a life in which innocence and wonder are the very mode of existence. There is a sense of earnestness to MacDonald, but it is free of heaviness and melancholy. His goodness delights. His goodness makes me wonder what attraction could ever have bound me to the mad man. Why would we not wish to be this good? Constant in MacDonald is the sense of play. Not the kind of play that is a shirking of responsibility—nothing dissolute—it is a happy playfulness which takes into its view all the meaning of the world.</p><hr class="fancy" /><ul><li>Download <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1462336/writings/1207221212-D-Essay-Playfulness.pdf">PDF</a></li>
</ul>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-85389603631264591362012-07-19T18:39:00.000-04:002012-07-19T18:39:19.885-04:00The Break-Up of the Modern Home<p>In 1960 Robertson Davies gave a speech at a reception for the Ontario Association of Architects. He uncovered the cause of the break-up of the modern home. It’s the damned architects.</p><blockquote><p>In countless novels written fifty years ago the heroine, having discovered that her husband was deceiving her with the beautiful brunette, crept away to the <em>nursery</em> to weep over her beloved children.</p><p>How is she expected to do that in a house which hasn’t any nursery? No woman of ordinary sensibility can creep away to weep in the <em>rumpus-room.</em> The thing is a psychological absurdity, and by making it so you have contributed to the break-up of the modern home.</p><p>And the <em>study</em>—how many modern houses have a study? Yet every man needs a study. Not to study in, of course, but to retire to when the pressure of domestic life is too great. He summons the other members of the family to meet him there. ‘George, I should like to see you in my study,’ he says to his son, when he wants to tell him to stop spending so much money. ‘Mary, come to my study,’ he says when he wants to tell his daughter to break off her affair with that beatnik she has been meeting on the sly. ‘My dear, will you come into my study,’ he says, when he wants to tell his wife that he knows what she has been up to with taht handsome Mexican dentist. But most of all he needs his study to <em>sulk</em> in. Every man must have a private sulking-place, and as his wife always wants the bedroom for taht purpose, he must have a study, or bottle up his sulks. And if he bottles his sulks, it won’t be long before he has to be taken away in a strait-jacket. How can he sulk in the living-area, which his children are using as the play-area, while his wife is right beside him in the kitchen-area, without so much as a screen to divide them? By forgetting the study you have struck an underhand blow at the mental health of the nation.</p><p>His wife, as I have said, sulks in the bedroom. I wish I could call it a <em>boudoir</em> but those wretched little boxes in modern houses cannot rise to the dignity of such a term. You know what a boudoir is. It’s a bedroom that you can pace in. Consider this passage, from a very fine novel, written not quite a century ago by Mrs. Henry Wood:</p><blockquote><p>Scarce able to see through the mist of tears that clouded her violent eyes, Lady Maude sought her boudoir. There, among the treasures she had brought from her childhood home, she paced the floor, lost in sombre reverie. Had I but known, she mused as she walked toward the window, had I but known when when I gave my trust, my hand—yea, all that a woman holds in store of love and tenderness—to Cyril, that a day might come when I should wish, nay, implore Almight God, for the power to recall every gift, I should have ended my life rather than yield to his suit. Yes, all of this, these broad acres, this stately mansion, yes, and—O God, be merciful!—even my children, I should have wished undone… She turned at the window and continued her weary pacing.</p></blockquote><p>Do you see what I am getting at? She said all of that while making one trip from the door to the window. The book tells us that Lady Maude was tall—say five foot eight—and therefore one of her paces might be estimated at twenty-five inches. Everybody knows that when you are pacing and regretting at the same time, you take a step to every word. Therefore Lady Maude took 85 paces of 25 inches apiece, which is 2,125 inches or 177 feet from door to window. Assuming that the room was a double cube, and that she was walking the long way of it, that means that the dimensions of her boudoir were 177 by 88, giving her a floor space of 15,576 square feet. No wonder she was able to keep the treasures of her old home in it. If they had included a couple of racehorses she could have kept them in it, without serious inconvenience.</p><p>But the important point is that she was able to pace in her boudoir, and the novel has a happy ending. I put it to you, gentlemen, would it have had a happy ending if Lady Maude had been cooped up in one of the bedrooms of which the Canadian Council of Women have been complaining to Mr. John C. Parkin?</p></blockquote><p class="poem-ref">Robertson Davies, from “How to Design a Haunted House,” published in <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/17348">One Half of Robertson Davies</a><br />
</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-50813506172942059622012-07-09T20:06:00.000-04:002012-07-09T20:06:14.236-04:00Quote: Montaigne on Plutarch<br />
<p>My friend, Paul, has been reading and <a href="http://ticklemebrahms.blogspot.com/2012/07/plutarchs-lives-part-3-demosthenes-and.html">discussing Plutarch</a>. I happened to come across this from Montaigne’s essay, “<a href="http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/education_of_children/">On the education of children</a>:”</p> <blockquote> <p>Put into his mind a decent, careful spirit of inquiry about everything: he will go and see anything nearby which is of singular quality: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an old battle, a place which Caesar or Charlemagne passed through:</p> <p class="poem-1i poem-top poem-line">Quœ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab œstu,</p> <p class="poem-bottom poem-2i poem-line">Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.</p> <p style="margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;">[what land is benumbed with the cold, which dusty with heat, which favourable winds blow sails towards Italian coasts.]</p> <p>He will inquire into the habits, means and alliances of various monarchs,things most pleasant to study and most useful to know. In his commerce with men I mean him to include – and that principally – those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time: it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price – the only study, Plato said, which the Spartans kept as their share. Under this heading what profit will he not get out of reading the Lives of our favourite Plutarch! But let our tutor remember the object of his trust, which is less to stamp the date of the fall of Carthage on the boy as the behaviour of Hannibal and Scipio; less to stamp the name of the place where Marcellus died as how his death there showed him unworthy of his task. Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened. That, if you ask me, is the subject to which our wits are applied in the most diverse of manners. I have read hundreds of things in Livy which another has not found there. Plutarch found in him hundreds of things which I did not see (and which perhaps the author never put there). For some Livy is purely a grammatical study; for others he is philosophy dissected, penetrating into the most abstruse parts of our nature. There are in Plutarch developed treatises very worth knowing,for he is to my mind the master-craftsman at that job; but there are also hundreds of points which he simply touches on: he merely flicks his fingers towards the way we should go if we want to, or at times he contents himself with a quick shot at the liveliest part of the subject: those passages we must rip out and put out on display. For example that one saying of his,‘that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable: NO,’ may have furnished La Boëtie with the matter and moment of his book <em>De la Servitude volontaire.</em> Seeing Plutarch select a minor action in the life of a man, or an apparently unimportant saying, is worth a treatise in itself. It is a pity that intelligent men are so fond of brevity: by it their reputation is certainly worth all the more,but we are worth all the less. Plutarch would rather we vaunted his judgement than his knowledge, and he would rather leave us craving for more than bloated. He realized that you could say too much even on a good subject, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the orator whose address to the ephors was good but too long, saying, ‘Oh, Stranger, you say what you should, but not the way that you should!’ People whose bodies are too thin pad them out:those whose matter is too slender pad it out too, with words.</p> </blockquote> <p class="poem-ref">trans. M.A. Screech, from <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/15610">The Complete Essays</a></p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-70737820212642440292012-07-01T12:28:00.000-04:002012-07-01T12:28:19.188-04:00Quote: The Use of Logike<p
>I’ve been reading—<em
>slowly</em
>—Sister Miriam Joseph’s <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/673479"
><em
>Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language</em
></a
>. It promises to be an extremely interesting study of Shakespeare and classical grammar as taught during the English Renaissance. I’m increasingly convinced that we could do worse than to spend more time studying logic and rhetoric. The following quote from Abraham Fruance's <em>The Arcadian Rhetorike</em> provides a good summary of the argument:</p
><blockquote
><p
>Logike is an art of teaching… whose vertue is seene not onely in teaching others, but also in learning thy selfe, in discoursing, thinking, meditating, and framing of thine owne, as also in discussing, perusing, searching and examining what others have either delivered by speach, or put downe in writing; this is called <em
>Analysis,</em
> that <em
>Genesis,</em
> and in them both consisteth the whole use of Logike.</p
><p
>As farre then as mans reason can reach, so farre extendeth it selfe the use and vertue of this art of reasoning,… Men reason in schooles as Philosophers, in Westminster as Lawyers, in Court as Lords, in Countrey as worldly husbands… the true use of Logike is as well apparant in simple playne and easie explication, as in subtile, strict, and concised probation. Reade <em
>Homer,</em
> reade <em
>Demosthenes,</em
> reade <em
>Virgill,</em
> read <em
>Cicero,</em
> reade <em
>Bartas,</em
> reade <em
>Toquato Tasso,</em
> reade the most worthie ornament of our English tongue, the <em
>Countess of Penbrookes Arcadia</em
> and therein see the true effectes of natural Logike which is the ground of artificiall… (fol. 3 <sup>r-v</sup>)<sup
><a href="#201207011219-fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="201207011219-fnref1"
>1</a
></sup
> Let no day passe without some practice, either in making, framing, and inventing of our selves, or in resolving & dissolving of things doone by others, for the triall of their skil, and confirmation of our owne. Neither would I have this practise continued onely in reading, or writing, but in every civill assembly or meeting: wherein yet I will not bee so severe a censor, as to exact every speech to the formall rules of axiomes, syllogismes, &c. It shall be sufficient for us to folow a more easie and elegant kinde of disputation, joyning Rhetorike with Logike, and referring that precise straitnesse unto Philosophicall exercises.</p
><p
>Neyther let any man thinke, that because in common meetings and assemblies the woordes and tearmes of Logike bee not named, therefore the force and operation of Logike is not there used and apparent. For, as in Grammer wee name neyther Noune, Pronoune, Verbe, nor any other parte of speech: and as in Rhetorike, we make mention neyther of <em
>Metonymia, Synecdoche, Exlamatio,</em
> nor any other Rhetoricall figure or trope: yet use in our speech the helpe of the one in speaking grammatically, and the direction of the other in talking eloquently: so, although in common conference wee never name syllogismes, axiomes, propositions, assumptions, & other woords of art, yet doo wee secretly practise them in our disputations, the vertue whereof is ,to make our discourses seeme true to the simple, and probable to the wise. (120 <sup>r</sup>)</p
></blockquote
><p class="poem-ref">Abraham Fraunce, <em>The Arcadian Rhetorike,</em> London, 1588. <br />As excerpted by Sister Miriam Joseph, <span class="smallcaps">C.S.C.</span> in <em><a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/673479">Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language.</a></em></p><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="footnotes"
><hr
/><ol
><li id="201207011219-fn1"
><p
>I believe the <em
>r, v</em
> notations signify <em
>recto</em
> and <em
>verso</em
> page references. <a href="#201207011219-fnref1" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1">↩</a></p
></li
></ol
></div
>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-81338796461225483762012-05-12T14:26:00.000-04:002012-05-12T14:30:59.475-04:00Salacious Dalliances with Disciplined Reading<p><a href="http://ticklemebrahms.blogspot.com/search/label/Harvard%20Classics">For almost two years now</a>, Paul Mathers has been shamelessly dallying with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics">Harvard Classics</a>. When he started this affair, I was quite tempted to abandon my <a href="http://laconic-prolixity.blogspot.com/search/label/reading%20plan">lifelong commitment to dissolute reading</a>. I have been seduced by the glamour of disciplined reading plans before, but eventually one wakens with shame and disgust at having so strayed from the ideal of disarray. All that is then left is to crawl back to one’s proper mistress and beg forgiveness for having attempted such a bit of tawdry erudition. After every such affair a heavy sourness clings to the palate as a lingering reminder of having once again fallen into appalling discipline. And so long as that memory lasts, one permits one’s self to feel safe from one’s darker urges, safe in the arms of arbitrary whim. But sooner or later temptation must again visit as a proof that we are yet fallible. Listen to her now—the siren…</p><blockquote><p><em>Leave the safety of your ships! Forget your wandering, meandering lives and join the stream of the ages! Bury your head in my bosom, and you shall feel the fruit of wisdom within your grasp! You shall be like unto the gods!</em></p></blockquote><p>As much as I try to resist I cannot endure—I love my wayward whim, but I can almost taste enlightenment zipping down my spine, rushing with the libidinal glee of Kundalini.</p><p><em>But wait…</em> what’s that? Adler’s <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/art/megathink/greatbooks/">10 year reading plan</a> for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World">Great Books of the Western World</a> comes out to <em>125 pages per month for 11 months per year for 10 years?</em> Why… but that’s <em>nothing!</em> You mean I can have my salacious dalliance with disciplined reading, <em>and</em> eat my words of whimsy, and <em>still</em> have time for the mercury baths???</p><hr class="fancy" /><p><em>[…with apologies to Paul.]</em></p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-21617286153916401702012-05-09T23:57:00.000-04:002012-05-09T23:58:04.010-04:00Quotes from G.K. Chesterton’s ChaucerSome quotes from the 1<sup>st</sup> chapter of G.K. Chesterton’s <br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/Collected%20Works%20of%20G.K.%20Chesterton:%20Robert%20Louis%20Stevenson,%20Chaucer,%20Leo%20Tolstoy%20and%20Thomas%20Carlyle%20(Collected%20Works%20of">Chaucer</a>:<br />
<blockquote>The greatest poets of the world have a certain serenity, because they have not bothered to invent a small philosophy, but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very great men share with very ordinary men.<br />
<hr class="fancy" />The poet makes men realize how great are the great emotions which they, in a smaller way, have already experienced.<br />
<hr class="fancy" />The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. A man does not learn from Hamlet a new method of Psychoanalysis, or the proper treatment of lunatics. What he learns is not to despise the soul as small; even when rather feminine critics say that the will is weak. As if the will were ever strong enough for the tasks that confront it in this world! The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man</blockquote><blockquote><a name='more'></a><hr class="fancy" />…allowing for that more than human change,<sup><a class="footnoteRef" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6063451162924794584#fn1" id="fnref1">1</a></sup> the poets taught in a continuous tradition, and were not in the least ashamed of being traditional. Each taught in an individual way; ‘with a perpetual slight novelty’ as Aristotle said; but they were not a series of separate lunatics looking at separate worlds. One poet did not provide a pair of spectacles by which it appeared that the grass was blue; or another poet lecture on optics to teach people to say that the grass was orange; they both had the far harder and more heroic task of teaching people to feel that the grass is green. And because they continue their heroic task, the world, after every epoch of doubt and despair, always grows green again.<br />
<hr class="fancy" />Creation was the greatest of all Revolutions. It was for that, as the ancient poet said, that the morning stars sang together; and the most modern poets, like the medieval poets, may descend very far from that height of realization and stray and stumble and seem distraught; but we shall know them for the Sons of God, when they are still shouting for joy. This is something muc hmore mystical and absolute than any modern thing that is called optimism; for it is only rarely that we realize, like a vision of the heavens filled with a chorus of giants, the primeval duty of Praise.<br />
<div class="poem-ref">Chaucer, Chapter 1</div></blockquote><div class="footnotes"><hr /><ol><li id="fn1">i.e. “The coming of the Christian cosmic conception,” from two sentences earlier.<a class="footnoteBackLink" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6063451162924794584#fnref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1">↩</a></li>
</ol></div>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-18070526456834749442012-04-28T11:48:00.000-04:002012-04-28T11:48:20.340-04:00<p>I stayed up until 2<span class="smallcaps">A.M.</span> watching <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now_Redux">Apocalypse Now Redux</a>.</em> The movie was very good, but took a serious wrong turn with the French Plantation scene. It seemed an ill attempt at adding discursive philosophy to the film. It was unnecessary and broke the spell of the river travel.</p><p><em>Apocalypse Now</em> is very much a symbol-journey, such as Dante’s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy">Commedia</a>.</em> Hellish and absurd. An insane carnival of what is commonly bad in men, and what is truly horrific. It made me want to read Conrad.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-57852083030262411752012-04-26T23:04:00.001-04:002012-04-26T23:41:34.084-04:00Dark Matter, Faith<blockquote
><p
><em
>…for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.</em
></p></blockquote><p class="poem-ref">Middlemarch, I.x</p><hr class="fancy" /><p
>Last night I watched a <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html"
>Ted presentation</a
> by a famous string-theory proponent, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene"
>Brian Greene</a
>. He discussed, armed with the trappings of media savvy, the argument for the multiverse, how it’s the only idea which solves certain scientific problems.</p><p
>To what ends? It is fascinating to contemplate, but mostly in a literary sense, wherein two universes interact and relate in some way. And yet scientific enquiry is important. I believe in curiosity and meditation on the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=WbU6AAAAMAAJ&dq=%22handsome%20dubious%20eggs%22%20intitle%3Amiddlemarch&pg=PA124#v=snippet&q=%22the%20world%20is%20full%20of%20hopeful%20analogies%20and%20handsome%20dubious%20eggs%20called%20possibilities%22&f=false"
>baubles of possibility</a
>.</p><a name='more'></a><p
>Interesting, though, that earlier on the same night I had read Book I, Chapter X of Middlemarch—“Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact?” And I had also been thinking of something R—— and K—— had been discussing—what will the religious do if it is proven that there are other universes with other civilizations? C.S. Lewis discussed this, as I recall.</p><p
>Does the complexity of the universe cast a shadow over religious faith? Does it open windows to let in air and dispel the dark air? Does it make anything at all of faith? I think it must only affect us to the degree that our religious feelings are built upon static, closed images of the world. For faith to live, there must be openness. But this openness is itself often perceived as a threat to faith. What is the image which comes to mind? <em
>The man who built his house upon the sand.</em
> If our faith is shaken, it only speaks to the lack of solidity in our foundations. What is left? If there is anything, it must either be so small, and so general as a symbol of everything, that it is bereft of meaning, or it must be something which is, itself, meaning and not mere symbol. I can only conceive of this in terms of hope, love, and intimacy—no matter how cosmic and divine.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-60443911051908616132012-04-21T16:57:00.000-04:002012-04-21T16:57:15.109-04:00Middlemarch: Fetters<blockquote><table><tr style="vertical-align: top">
<td style="text-align: right;">1<sup>st</sup> Gent:</td>
<td>Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.</td>
</tr>
<tr style="vertical-align: top">
<td style="text-align: right;">2<sup>nd</sup> Gent:</td>
<td>Ay, truly: but I think it is the world<br />That brings the iron.</td>
</tr>
</table></blockquote><p class="poem-ref" style="text-align: left; margin-left: 50%;">Middlemarch, I.iv</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-82393519569055844992012-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:002012-04-21T17:55:12.077-04:00Reading Journal: Comics<p>I started reading <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/6392056/book/84725578"
>Persepolis</a
> two days ago. In it <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjane_Satrapi"
>Marjane Satrapi</a
> gives us a memoir and bildungsroman—she grew up during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War"
>Iran-Iraq War</a
>. It is an incredibly interesting look into another culture with different fundamental perspectives. (Although, truth be told, most of the perspectives illustrated are uncontroversial in their Western secularism.) The author’s family are mostly communist, which brings them into conflict with the post-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution"
>Islamic Revoltion</a
> government.</p><a name='more'></a><hr class="fancy" /><p
>I am struggling to figure out comics as an art form. They differ greatly from prose, both fiction and non-fiction. It cannot present ever-closer detail to the point that one feels almost to be directly experiencing the emotions and events of the characters. In a possibly counter-intuitive way, the work has <em
>less</em
> visual potential than pure prose, in that the reader is primarily limited to the images given him. This limits the emotional immersiveness of the reading experience.</p><p
>However, comics gives something else, a sort of non-intimidating, inherently non-stuffy immediacy. They make the brain tick differently. It is a different sort of pleasure. In a single, simple image, a whole range of actions and emotions are <em
>implied.</em
></p><p
>In prose, the author can layer details, almost endlessly, increasing intensity and heaviness. In comics, events are pared down to their absolute essence—a single image representing, taking the immediate place of all these details the prose author must build up. In a prose work, it is the image which the reader must supply. In the comic, it is the connecting action and the fine detail. Each image is just a symbol of what is happening.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-8846195789028749472012-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:002012-04-21T19:01:49.435-04:00Reading Journal<p
>Finished <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/7114/book/84725740"
>V for Vendetta</a
> last night. I still feel that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore"
>Alan Moore</a
> tends to glorify perversity. However, his technique is effective, and literate—the layering of meaning through text that contrasts or mirrors the imagery while literally applying to something not pictured.</p><p
>By the time I finished, I think the political aspect of the story, the themes of it, had grown larger than the specific perversities. It had meaning, or at the least implication. Next up from Moore will be <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/5779"
>From Hell</a
>.</p><a name='more'></a><br />
<hr class="fancy" /><p
>Reading through <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/701392"
>The Forms of Fiction</a
> as a sort of primer on short fiction. I have not been particularly excited by these examples of the form, although the stories have been well written. It’s just that they don’t catch my fancy.</p><p
>Poe’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2149/2149-h/2149-h.htm#2H_4_0029"
>Ligeia</a
> seemed overwrought, giving the trappings of the Gothic story and not real emotion. But then GB Shaw thinks that the story is unparalleled. What am I missing? Gardner takes it for an allegory of idealism, artistry, killing the actual. And if this is so, then artistry also shares its domain with the effects of opium.</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-66174137456531971432011-12-24T09:46:00.002-05:002011-12-24T09:46:58.318-05:00Dostoevsky: Self Interest<p>The following spiel is delivered by Pyotr Petrovich, a man accused of spouting the progressive line by rote. It seems I’ve heard something similar to this much more recently and from different corners. See what you make of it.</p><blockquote><p>“If up to now, for example, I have been told to ‘love my neighbor,’ and I did love him, what came of it? […] What came of it was that I tore my caftan in two, shared it with my neighbor, and we were both left half naked, in accordance with the Russian proverb which says: If you chase several hares at once, you won’t overtake any one of them. But science says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest. If you love only yourself, you will set your affairs up properly, and your caftan will also remain in one piece. And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity. A simple thought, which unfortunately has been too long in coming, overshadowed by rapturousness and dreaminess, though it sems it would not take much wit to realize…”</p></blockquote><p class="poem-ref"><a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/10072/book/75290224">Crime and Punishment</a>. Part II, Chapter V. Trans. Pevear/Volokhonsky<br />
</p>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-38289794649960530962011-12-22T21:15:00.000-05:002011-12-22T21:33:45.928-05:00Habitual Reading<p>Monday through Saturday I wake up at 5:15 <span class="smallcaps">A.M.</span> to read before getting ready for work. I settled on this time despite not being a morning person, because it was the only time I could find to be absolutely to myself and not risk falling asleep, or preferring to play games, or watch a movie with my wife instead of reading. At 5:15 <span
class="smallcaps">A.M.</span> I am entirely on my own. My youngest will wake up at about 6:30 <span class="smallcaps">A.M.</span>, come downstairs and give me a hug, and ask for breakfast. A cereal bar, a bowl of cereal, a glass of water—she’s set and quiet for the next 20–30 minutes. By then I am either finishing my reading, or already on to writing up my notes. At 7:45 <span
class="smallcaps">A.M.</span>, I leave my books and notebooks for the shower, and the rest of the day is work and family until the kids go to bed at night. This is my day.</p><a name='more'></a><p>I started this routine when I was reading <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/4108376/book/77737997">The Magic Mountain</a> with a group on <a href="http://www.librarything.com">LibraryThing</a>. Afterwards, I turned to Dostoevsky’s <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/8454/book/75290233">Notes from Underground</a>, and now I have continued on to <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/10072/book/75290224">Crime and Punishment</a>. In the evenings, I am reading <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/8747219/book/80741747">Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time</a>, the abridged, single volume edition of Joseph Frank’s authoritative literary biography, after which I will continue chronologically through the remainder of Dostoevsky’s novels and <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/521715/book/80741762">A Writer’s Diary</a>.</p><p>While reading a chapter, I use a <a href="http://www.pencils.com/palomino-graphite-hb-pencils-w-erasers-orange-banded-dozen">pencil</a> to underline and make notes in the margin—usually cross-references, or keywords. After reading, I skim through a second time to make further marks and refresh my mind on all the details, and I begin ruminating about what I have read. Finally, I begin to write my notes.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup> They usually start as a summarization of the action, or the characters. On more successful days, this will verge off into reflective consideration of a very personal sort. This constitutes a sort of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book">commonplace book</a>, though a relatively focused one. I will introduce other works as they relate to my thoughts, but the notebooks are specifically focused on the texts I have been reading, and in fact, I keep separate notebooks for each book I read.</p><p>This is just the latest iteration in my attempt to come to terms with my reading, and my need to write something about my reading. I am constantly tempted to return to this blog, or some other forum to share my reading thoughts, but that is a very different thing from what I am now doing, and the one does not readily translate into the other.</p><p>Admittedly, I am stuck wondering how much I really have to say that would be of any interest to the world. I am a mere reader, and not a scholar. And the informal reading blogs are typically devoted to summary and reviews, which is not to my taste. I would rather read someone’s reflections on their reading, what it has meant to them, and to what considerations it leads them. The truth, though, is that I am much too busy reading books to spend time reading many blogs. A private pursuit. A private life. Rewarding, if insular.</p><p>It is good, sometimes, to open the window and let in the air and the far off noises.</p><div class="footnotes"><hr /><ol><li id="fn1"><p><a href="http://www.gouletpens.com/Orange_Medium_Rhodia_Side_Staplebound_p/r119188.htm">Rhodia’s A5 side staplebound notebooks</a> are the perfect size for me, roughly the size of the average hardcover novel, and the paper takes well to my <a href="http://www.gouletpens.com/Noodlers_Ink_s/808.htm">fountain pen ink</a>. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnoteBackLink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol></div>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-72258846686787917682011-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:002011-12-30T21:39:20.945-05:00Notes from Underground: Vanity<p>Joseph Frank, in his exposition of <em>Notes from Underground,</em> has laid bare that in the u.m. with which I so identify. In the end, it is simple. Painfully so, as in <em>Foucault’s Pendulum.</em><sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnoteRef" id="fnref1">1</a></sup></p><p>Vanity. I am incredibly vain. I am constantly self-conscious and concerned over how I am perceived by others, and concerned that I be seen as more discerning, more elevated, more spiritual than they—whoever is “they,” whoever is there to see me, to praise me, admire me.</p><blockquote><p>The underground man’s vanity convinces him of his own superiority and he despises everyone; but since he desires such speriority to be recognized by others, he hates the world for its indifference and falls into self-loathing at his own humiliating dependence.</p></blockquote><a name='more'></a><p>There is one more passage by Frank that is significant.</p><blockquote><p>For one moment he had caught a glimpse of how to escape from the dialectic of vanity: Liza’s complete disregard of her own humiliation, her whole-souled identification with <em>his</em> torments—in short, her capacity for selfless love—is the only way to break the sorcerer’s spell of egocentrism.</p></blockquote><p>Wherever I may go and not be perceived in the light in which I wish to be perceived, I do not go except by necessity. And as no one sees me as I wish to be seen, I go nowhere and limit my interactions to those I have accepted, and with whom I feel safe if not admired. With these is some mystery which does not exist elsewhere—love, but even here the simple is mixed up with the complex—domination, authority, the demanding of respect which elsewhere I must earn.</p><div class="footnotes"><hr /><ol><li id="fn1"><p>I was thinking of the following:</p><blockquote><p>Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas— both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.</p><p>“You live on the surface,” Lia told me years later. “You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up.”</p></blockquote><a href="#fnref1" class="footnoteBackLink">↩</a></li>
</ol></div>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6063451162924794584.post-80398009205297503172011-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:002011-12-30T21:17:34.564-05:00Notes from Underground: Criticism<p>Having finished the initial reading of <em>Notes,</em> I’ve been reading the criticism selections provided in the Norton critical edition of the book.</p><p>The early criticism, that by Mikhailovsky, is the least interesting—he makes of <em>Notes</em> a sort of meditation on cruelty, and I think perceives D as given to an unhealthy interest in cruelty, with “tendencies to torture.”</p><p>Rozanov seems a better reader of Dostoevsky, perceives his recognition of the “extreme in the ideal.” The last two paragraphs of this excerpt are the most interesting to me:</p><blockquote><p>By nature, man is a completely irrational creature; therefore, reason can neither completely explain him nor completely satisfy him. No matter how persistent is the work of thought, it will never cover all of reality; it will answer the demands of the imaginary man, but not those of the real one. Hidden in man is the instinct for creation, and this was precisely what gave him life, what rewarded him with suffering and joy—things that reason can neither understand nor change.</p><p>The rational is one thing; the mystical is another thing again. And while it is inaccessible to the touch and power of science, it can be arrived at through religion. Hence the development of the mystical in Dostoevsky and the concentration of his interest on all that is religious, something we observe in the second and chief period of his work, which began with <em>Crime and Punishment.</em></p><a name='more'></a><br />
</blockquote><p>Lev Shestov, then, makes of D a Nietzschian. He makes the underground man a horn for D’s breath.</p><blockquote><p><em>Notes from the Underground</em> is a heart-rending cry of terror that has escaped from a man suddenly convinced that all his life he had been lying and pretending when he assured himself and others that the loftiest purpose in life is to serve the “humblest man.”</p></blockquote><p>Shestov goes on at length about D’s break with his past. He writes passionately, almost it seems, like a variant of the u.m. Shestov remains an interesting figure for me, one about whom I wish to know more.</p><p>Next come Bakhtin from his <em>Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.</em> This was a fascinating piece on the form of Dostoevsky’s work—a focus on how the u.m. speaks to others, to himself, to us, and how he cannot come to a decisive meaning because he cannot free himself not just from the shadow of the other, but of his consciousness of that shadow—that is what I find so profound in <em>Notes from Underground,</em> and what I most closely relate to. While the philosophical systems are significant to him and to me as well it is much more this matter of the sideways glance which Bakhtin discusses. I look forward to reading more of Bakhtin.</p><p>I then skipped forward to sample Joseph Frank as I have just purchased the abridged edition of his biography of Dostoevsky. I have not finished with this section, but what I have read is encouraging. He states that:</p><blockquote><p>In my view, the vast majority of commentators of <em>Notes from Underground</em> have always been concerned with its significance, and, as a result, its meaning has rather gotten lost in the shuffle.</p></blockquote>Tuirginhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05081067215683168015noreply@blogger.com0