Archive for the ‘ Literature ’ Category

Love Equals Hate Equals Love

I had never realized this before, but yesterday I got the book Love’s Work via my long pipeline from Miami to Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is nowhere – but, if you can pay for it, you can import nearly everything you could want. This includes drugs, of course, like anywhere else – but my drug of choice is literature. And I fancy, in my own modest way, to contribute to this with my blogging – which keeps getting more concise, and harder-hitting all the time. Quite to my satisfaction.

The New York Review has a line of books rescued from being out-of-print, and this is one of those. It too is brief and hard-hitting.

In the Introduction, which I read on the bus home, she quotes from Rilke:

Be ahead of all departures. Sei allem Abschied voran.

Since I am now facing my own departure, I am doing just that. And I have one problem to solve before I go : an all-encompassing hatred of everything. It’s no mystery where I got it from: from my past, of course. It has gradually been dawning on me that this is not so good for me – a conclusion that may seem obvious to you, but was not at all obvious to me.

Above all, I resist the facile solution: that love is the answer to everything. People who preach this are the worst kind: they know nothing of themselves, or hate, or love. Such people taught Sunday-school when I was a toddler. And, thank God, they have gone to their reward.

The author, Gillian Rose, makes a simple, obvious point: that love and hate are the same thing. And she illustrates this copiously with stories from her own Jewish family and friends.

Iain McGilchrist makes the same point in a different way: we have abandoned our integrated, holistic right hemisphere – which handles paradox with no problem, and even thrives on it – in favor of the left, which has to categorize everything, and tear everything down. His book is heavy – literally, you wouldn’t want to drop it on your foot. It will take me forever to finish it.

Rose is dyslexic, which forces her to use her words carefully – McGilchrist, among other things, has been a professor of English, and has the opposite problem: he is too glib in his use of words.

Gilliam Rose’s main point, which I am just beginning to understand, is that death is not nothing - it is a new beginning. The death of everything I see all around me is real enough, and it will soon include me. But it is not the end of the world, we cannot flatter ourselves about that.

I have time for one more quote from her, from the Russian monk Staretz Silouan, 1866-1938:

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

Alternative healing, in all its forms, offers to do just the opposite: to keep your mind out of hell – and assign you to Limbo.

2011
05/19
CATEGORY
Literature
Philosophy
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I Must Read on Paper

More and more, I am hearing something different: “I must have a Kindle.” At first, I sympathized: I too want to have the latest electronic gadget. But reading is different – and the electronic reading experience for me does not satisfy.

This is not to say I don’t read online: I do. I spend hours every day staring at my computer screen as I write this blog. And my inbox fills up rapidly. The computer, for me, is the perfect writing tool. But a poor reading tool.

The computer is ideally suited for fast-moving images (like the television is). But it is poorly suited for the large blocks of text – which are necessary for serious writing.

For me, real reading means I am looking at some paper – and touching it. The tactile experience with a Kindle is far less satisfying. I live my my body, not in my head.

There are other reasons too. I often refer to passages in other books – by page number. The Kindle does not use pages, which makes it useless for this. For example, my other posting today Sensibility and the American Revolution could not have been done with a Kindle. This book is not even available on the Kindle, to begin with – as many serious books are not. A Kindle is only good for a temporary, disposable reading experience – which, I suppose, is what most people want.

Not me, I have books that sit around on my bookshelf, like old friends, where I can always pick them up to refresh my memory, and refer to them. Kindle reading friendships are like most friendships in the business world: always temporary, and easily forgotten. Something no one takes very seriously.

For serious reading, you gotta have paper.

2011
05/17
CATEGORY
Literature
Technology
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Lesbianism in Saudi Arabia

Aubible – The Other

Why am I interested in this? Am I some kind of pervert myself? Perhaps I am learning something about myself – which, after all, is one of the functions of literature. Perhaps I don’t really know.

You can quickly find out for yourself: just listen to the sample on Audible. This is what hooked me: I have a fatal attraction to great – or at least – powerful writing. Like the writer I am, I cannot tell the difference.

A best-selling book when it appeared in Arabic, The Others is a literary tour de force, offering a window into one of the most repressive societies in the world. Seba al-Herz tells the story of a nameless teenager at a girls’ school in the heavily Shi’ite Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Like her classmates, she has no contact with men outside her family. When the glamorous Dai tries to seduce her, her feelings of guilt are overcome by an overwhelming desire for sexual and emotional intimacy. Dai introduces her to a secret world of lesbian parties, online flirtations, and hotel liaisons – a world in which the thrill of infatuation and the shame of obsession are deeply intertwined. Al-Herz’s erotic, dereamlike story of looming personal crisis is a remarkable portrait of hidden lives.

Homosexuality is something we all have to deal with, in one way or the other – if only because it is the other. Something that overlaps our normal lives in many ways.

2011
05/15
CATEGORY
Literature
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Music Came Before Language

One of the benefits of individual study is that, after a while it become self-reinforcing: what you learn in one area is reinforced by what you learn in another.

I am reading two books now: The Master and his Emissary and The Sounds of Poetry. The first is mainly about right-hemisphere vs left-hemisphere differences – but it is also about how people in general have degenerated because of increasing left-hemisphere dominance.

One thing you read about frequently in scientific literature is the question “Why is music so important, what hereditary advantage did it have?” His reply is basically “What a dumb question! Its usefulness is perfectly obvious. It just seems baffling to left-hemisphere people.”

I can remember vividly a family night of music in my Grandmother’s house before they had electricity. Kerosene lamps provided the illumination. Everybody took their turns performing. Grandmother played the piano – she had supported herself for many years giving piano lessons. Dad sang, and as I recall he had a fine voice – and also took voice lessons from a local teacher. Grandfather played his harmonica, a skill he was proud of – and he was a very proud man.

When electricity came, the radio came also – and we became passive consumers of music. Prior to this, people always made up their own entertainment. A favorite was ice-skating on the river – which they were very good at. The overall trend was frightening: they were becoming more and more passive.

My other book, The Sounds of Poetry, makes the same point: poetry is a form of music – and originally it was always a performing art. It isn’t hard to see that music and language have common origins. And it isn’t hard to see why it is no longer popular – people have lost interest in something so sophisticated, and only want simple, immediate forms of gratification.

I can take this even further. Our family were Missouri Mormons and originally speaking in tongues Glossolalia was a common event. This was usually followed by someone interpreting the speech for the rest. No one doubted either one.

Glossolalic speech does resemble human language in some respects. The speaker uses accent, rhythm, intonation and pauses to break up the speech into distinct units.

This likely the type of language first used – before the vocabulary and syntax became standardized.

Babies first use this type of language, and mothers automatically change their way of speaking to accommodate them.

2011
05/04
CATEGORY
Literature
Music
Science
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The Pumpkin Eater

Life is a disaster in the process of happening.

This is obvious to me, and I admire other people who also know this – and can express it eloquently. For me, this is literature.

I subscribe to the New York Review of Books, where all the smart people write for all the other smart people. For me, living in isolation in Costa Rica, it is my indispensable contact with the real world. I feel better just knowing it is out there somewhere.

It is also in the business of publishing books occasionally – and its taste is excellent. That is how I got The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer – which had gone out of print. I suppose you will want to know what this book is about. Its about a talented, but crazy woman who manages to survive a series of marriages and children – but just barely. Just the kind of woman who keeps muscling her way into my life. I keep saying “No, no, no!”, but she keeps coming anyway. Good women, for some reason, don’t interest me.

What are her drawbacks? She is very British, and reading her I can see why my mother’s family were glad to get out of there. America was bad, they could see that – but England was even worse. The other side of my family no doubt felt the same way about Ireland: a good country to get away from.

This is the side of the melting pot you seldom hear about – they were all eager to leave somewhere, and get rid of their former identities. The exception were the Germans: it took two world wars to rid them of their past – which actually was a pity: German culture was a key source of Western culture.

In this book Mortimer said “practically everything she could say about men and women and their relationship to each other.” She was in her relationships, she didn’t just have them. Her dialog is brilliant – some of the best you will ever read.

2011
05/04
CATEGORY
Literature
1 comment

Totalitarianism Destroys People

This is so obvious it hardly needs said. But it was brought back to me when I read an article in the National Geographic about Crimea:

Crimea is practically a throwback to the old Soviet Union…It’s also attitude. Brusque, rigid, humorless: the worst kind of Soviet hangover. You can take Crimea out of the Soviet Union; to pry the Soviet Union out of Crimea is something else. When I asked Yelena Nikolayevna Bazhenova, director of a Sevastopol-based tour company, why Crimea with its lovely seaside didn’t attract more tourists, she hesitated. “We are not accustomed to greeting people with a smile,” she finally said.

Contrast this to the Russians portrayed by Dostoyevsky, no stranger to this kind of treatment himself. From Wikipedia:

Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year, Dostoyevsky, along with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky’s sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk,Siberia.

Dostoyevsky’s characters however, were far from drab and colorless, they are some of the most interesting in world literature. What happened between then and now? In a word: totalitarianism in the Soviet Style. From Wikipedia again:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, introduced the term Gulag to the Western world with the 1973 publication of his The Gulag Archipelago.

I haven’t read this, but I know it is a tale of human destruction on a vast scale.

What interests me is the applicability of totalitarianism to contemporary society in America. This is a tricky subject, with almost everyone either overstating and understanding the case. Totalitarianism has been diluted there, so that the majority can tolerate it without too much difficulty.

Its opposite is freedom, and is well expressed by the  Freedom on the Net report:

Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of freedom. The project methodology is grounded in basic standards of free expression, derived in large measure from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”

Almost any large organization, by contrast, is an hierarchical organization – where those below the upper levels (the vast majority) are hardly free to say what they please – if they want to keep their jobs.

2011
04/24
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Literature
Morality
Psychology
Sociology
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Poetry Can Heal

People seem to think the appreciation of poetry should be natural. No doubt originally it was, but in our degenerate times an appreciation of it has to be cultivated. For me, a poetry session early in the morning helps me get through the rest of the day.

This morning, my text is from Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry, pages 119-120, where he deals with the way wonder interacts with a deranged personality:

“Wonder” is an inclusive name for our most significant feeling in response to nature, an abrupt and non-referential awe. It is an emotional term, as “description” is a rhetorical term. Wonder is non-referential in the sense that as a feeling it seems unrelated, by cause or analogy, to the rest of life. It seems pure…

As in the ordinary phrase, wonder takes the distressed personality “out of himself.” Or does it take the distress out, putting it into the object of wonder? Such questions may be dealt with by the sensible, conservative idea of “objectivity.” In the present context, that idea involves the use of objective reality to clarify a difficult state of mind.

A sane work of art in this sense is one which accomplishes its meaning consciously. Otherwise the meaning is the reader’s creation, the art a symptom; sanity in writing is the tonal adjustment that changes confession into character-making. Authentic clarity is the style’s proof that the fiction is true: not the patient’s tortured, oblique version of a dream, but the authoritative dream itself, naked and magisterial.

I am also listening to The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. Although I know this is a work of fiction, like all great works of art it seems more real – and more useful – than reality itself.

There is also a dark question to be asked: “Why are not more people interested in poetry?” The answer, it seems to me, is obvious.

2011
04/09
CATEGORY
Literature
Poetry
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John Neihardt on Sinclair Lewis

I had the good fortune to attend John Neihardt’s class at the University of Missouri in 1961. Doctor John, as we all called him, was a legend in his own time. He was a tiny man (he wore elevator shoes to make him taller) with a huge mane of white hair. I saw him during registration, admiring the incoming students. He really liked us – quite a contrast to most of the teachers I had in high school – one of the most horrible experiences of my young life.

He was proudest of his epic poetry, his Cycle of the West, which he read from in every class. He made lots of recordings of these readings – and they with the text of this book, which is still in print, would have made a fantastic combination. Unfortunately, this did not happen, and it is now nearly impossible for readers to recapture the Neihardt experience – and an important part of American history.

Epic poetry, even of that about of the Winning of the West, the quintessential American success story, is now hopelessly out of style. The reality of the situation, a story told from both sides, is not pleasant reading. Neither side were angels.

He now has a Web site of his own: neihardt.com. – where his image is being refined (he died in 1973). He was always too superstitious for the establishment. But he was an excellent story-teller, his main craft.

He also wrote some critical essays – something I knew nothing about. I have copied the following from his site.

From the Minneapolis Journal, June 27, 1917, p. 3, Neihardt wrote the following about The Job, by Sinclair Lewis:

Here is set forth, with a patient accumulation of detail, the story of an ambitious small town girl, who, after the death of her father, goes with her mother to New York city, lured by the usual romantic dreams. After a long and sordid struggle with things as they are, she achieves an income of $4,000 a year and a second husband–the latter, presumably permanent. Probably as many as 10,000 stories with practically the same plot have been written, and nearly all of them either insufferably sentimental or indecent. The present novel is decidedly neither.

In writing a realistic story such as this, first hand knowledge of life having been granted, everything depends upon the author’s sense of proportion, which appears to be highly developed in Mr. Lewis. The Job may be described as a pictorial criticism of an individualistic society which is based upon an industrial system conceived as an end in itself rather than as a means to human welfare. His characters, presented with extraordinary vividness and economy of means, are readily seen to be logical products of a civilization (if the term may be used with justice) which has set itself the task of toiling prodigiously to satisfy the unnecessary desires which it is constantly creating. The Job is at once a tragic and ludicrous picture of a world that has made the radical mistake of prizing money (the representation of things) above things–a world worshipping a monstrous delusion.

We doubt if Mr. Lewis’ work may be ranked as literature in the strict sense of the term; for literature is concerned with the enduring truth, the ethos of life as distinguished from the pathos. Here the emphasis is placed, as in all “realistic” fiction, upon the fact, which is essentially transient. One does not produce a great piece of sculpture by making a cast from a human figure; nor does one produce literature by making a studiously exact copy of contemporary life. Nevertheless, we believe that the value of The Job is great. From some such book as this, posterity will understand us of the 20th century and our ephemeral institutions, which have seemed to us not only permanent, but representative of an astounding “progress.” And if such records are to be left, now is the logical time for their appearance, because we have only recently passed the culminating point of the individualistic regime. In the year 1917 we stand upon a watershed of history, looking back upon individualism and forward to some form of collectivism under state control. For Europe, August, 1914, marked the turning point. For us in American the crisis came in April of this year. The change may be slow or rapid, but it has begun. This state conceived as a superbeing will wax, the power of the individual will wane: and Mr. Lewis has done an important thing in that he has given one man’s view, necessarily fragmentary, of an age that is passing.

Hmm. He was right, but not in quite in the way he thought. Like everyone else, he had no understanding of the changes America would go through in the 20th Century. Both Lewis and Neihardt have now been forgotten.

2011
04/04
CATEGORY
History
Literature
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Literature Cannot Compete

Literature, the written word only, cannot compete with a visual production – such as a Movie, a Television show, or a Video. We are primarily visual creatures, audio is secondary – and valuable mainly for what it adds to our visual experience.

True, reading is using our eyes, but in a way that is not natural – and does not have the emotional impact of seeing the real thing – or what seems to be the real thing. In most cases, we react the same way – or even stronger, to a theatrical performance.

This has been demonstrated to me, very dramatically, as I watched an episode of Mad Men, and then followed it by listening to a passage in The Brothers Karamazov. I had been without any Netflix videos for awhile, and in their absence I had been enjoying Dostoyevsky – and didn’t mind that it was taking forever – as Russian novels do. I didn’t notice the lack of visual input – indeed as a bookworm most of my life, reading has been one of my chiefest pleasures.

I can see why television has taken over the lives of most people – without their even noticing it. For some reason, I made the decision to not watch any more television – and ruled it out of my life. Looking back at it, I think I made the right decision.

But the difference between the book and the movie was much more – it was the difference between two cultures: one before the Visual Revolution, and one after it – using the important distinction Daniel J. Boorstin made in his book The Image.

People before this revolution were certainly not angels, as Dostoyevsky make clear – but compared to those after it they were. Watching Mad Men was watching how bad things had really become.

I am indebted to the New York Review for informing me about this show. This started out as the New York Review of Books, in competition with the New York Times Book Review. Heavy competition! But the New York area is so culturally rich, both have thrived. A recent issue of the Review featured a long article about Mad Men, mentioning that it had won nearly every award there was. I put it on my Netflix list, and after the usual delay, it arrived. I cannot watch Netflix instant movies because Costa Rica is outside the curtain of silence imposed by the American entertainment industry – which rules America with a heavy hand.

I sat here watching the DVD for the first season on my laptop. I was watching events in a foreign country – literally! Costa Ricans are hardly angels either – they are descended from the most ruthless conquerers of their time, people who perpetrated the largest cultural extinction of all time. But compared to modern Americans, they look like angels.

Americans do not know, and don’t want to know, how terrible they have become – even though they can watch it happening right on their television screens!

2011
03/27
CATEGORY
Literature
Technology
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Creativity can be a Curse

Creativity, or innovation, is one thing we pride ourselves on. But it is also one thing we should be careful of.

I know I sound like some kind of reactionary or conservative here – which I am not. So I hasten to explain. It all boils down to what we think we are – and that basically the same as it always has been: our bodies and our overdeveloped brains.

But we are never satisfied with what we are and always want to be something better. This is where we can get into trouble, because we can easily end up in situations where we are worse off than we were before – much worse off. At this point we should think over what has happened to us, where we went wrong, and then try something different. This has been the goal of my life, at the end of my life.

I have lots of company, lots of people are trying to do the same thing, and some of them can talk directly to me and my problems – which I seem to be blessed with in abundance. But we seem to be a small minority. For the majority, the careful consideration of our problems is the last thing they want to do. Our problems are so horrible (as they perceive them) that they don’t even want to admit their existence. For them, the only solution is to rush on doing the same thing – or to destroy the whole mess. Or to do both at the same time. This, my dear friends, is where we are – and it is indeed a horrible situation.

I have been obsessed recently with learning programming again, as I have said in my recent posting Once Again, I Fail to Become a Programmer. As always, I am ambivalent about the Computer/Software/Internet (CSI) complex we find ourselves a part of. I am using it now, sitting here in my pajamas in my bedroom.  I cannot imagine being without my blog – the technology for which has matured considerably in the last few years. And I use Wikipedia constantly – and my online version of the Merriam-Websters Unabridged.

On the other hand, the new handheld readers, such as the Kindle, do not interest me at all. Paper books, for me, are still the greatest invention ever invented, and I have a ton of them. But lots of my friends can hardly wait to get one – and make up all kinds of excuses why. It seems to be one of those things everybody has to have – and therefore they have to too. Will their Kindles make them better readers, more learned people? No. They will simply have the latest high-tech toy, and be satisfied with that. They seem to live in a person vacuum, or black hole, that sucks everything into it.

This is amazing. We have created these marvelous things, but have ended up being nothing ourselves. We should be putting all our energy into understanding why this is so. And some of our best thinkers and artists have been doing just that.

I have become interested in poetry, at exactly the same time most have lost interest in it. Poetry Magazine had an interview in it recently with Iain McGilchrist, a Psychiatrist who works at neuroimaging, has taught English at Oxford, and who can also discuss the trends in poetry intelligently. I have his book The Master and his Emissary, and am going to be spending some time soaking it up. Things like this do me a lot of good.

On the other hand, my studies in computer programming are soaking up too much of my time – without giving me, as a person, much at all. I have found an application framework (win2py) that is compatible with me – but is not popular with the business world, which does not care much about quality work or protecting its customers – which are prey to all kinds of virus attacks – one unfortunate side-effect of the Internet.

These studies have opened by eyes to one important fact: that much of our precious creativity is going into making the CSI more powerful – and thereby more attractive to us – and thereby taking away our attention from ourselves – which should be what we are concentrating on.

In practical terms, what does this mean? It means that this morning I have to force myself to forget programming for awhile (which is a struggle, because it gets so obsessive), and concentrate on my people studies – and on some real learning.

2011
03/23
CATEGORY
Business
Literature
Psychology
Technology
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