Archive for the ‘ Literature ’ Category
I lead a strange life – things that interest others do not interest me at all – and things that interest me do not interest anyone else.
Turgenev is in that later category. I only heard about him recently. But I am now listening to his Fathers and Sons – and wondering how I ever got along without him.
So far as I know, none of my readers are interested in Literature. Is this true?
The February issue, that is.
The first is Thomas Frank’s delightful take down of the movie Lincoln, in the front of the magazine. The second is a review of the book Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality in the back. Either one will make you glad you are a reader.
I have a personal gripe about the use of the word spiritual - and I used to complain whenever I heard it used. No more, I just keep my mouth shut and suffer in silence. I don’t suffer fools gladly – I just suffer.
Harper’s online is just the opposite of what it is on paper – it is telling its readers that it is not all interested in them. In this day and age – not smart at all.
People often want to know how to be happy – as if that made any difference. I see such people every day, laying on the ground, passed out – with their empty bottle of booze beside them. Everyone ignores them, and passes on.
It is more complicated than that. Alcohol (or some other drug) is a big help but it clearly is not enough in itself. We are complicated beings and no one solution fits all. What I am going to describe only works for me – and not always at that.
First, I went for a hard walk, determined to build up my stamina after my bicycle accident. No one had the foggiest idea what I was doing. No matter, I came home, had a shower, and had a lunch of left-overs.
I had discovered some chiles mundial at the market, and used them to make my own version of gallo pinto (the Tico version of beans and rice). This was washed down with vino de mora (raspberry wine) which is cheap and can be bought anywhere (not just at liquor stores). To this was added two varieties of Tico sweets, whose name I will not even mention – but they include caramelized milk and coconut. Local perversions everyone is familiar with.
And. to top it off, I read Gore Vidal’s Julian. Literature, for me, is also a drug – but one without hangovers. Except the desire to do even better – the curse of any writer.
Where on earth did I get this? Not from my father, certainly – who had no taste in literature whatsoever. Not even from my mother, who read to us such things as the Little Colonial stories. During one tragic interval in the story, I burst into tears – to my mother’s intense annoyance. I was not supposed to take the story so seriously, she said. I was amazed in turn, how could she not take the story seriously?
It was then that I began to realize that I was different – that I took life seriously – and emotionally. Something most people find strange.
But not everyone – I discovered other people, although never in person, who did have an interest in Literature. And who wrote about their experiences. As I am doing now.
I am listening now to Ancient Light - which is definitely literature – so much so, I sometimes find it alarming.
It takes me back to my childhood – when time moved more slowly, and where our world (back in a forgotten corner of the Midwest) still had time to be - and to be savored.
I remember one evening in particular - where I and my girl-friend of the moment went for a walk under the stars. She never noticed them, or the lovely evening – but instead took advantage of the moment to tell me how much she hated her father. An amazing hatred, as it turned out, that I never forgot.
I learned, for the first time, how attractive – and how destructive women can be. A strange combination.
This is the title of a book by John Banville, that I am listening to now. I need a break sometimes from my non-fiction reading – and this is fiction – literature, in fact. It is extremely well written. Like many English writers, I think he is at pains to convince people that they too have sex – and pretty bawdy sex at that.
It is the story of a 15 year-old boy and a 35 year-old married woman – the mother of his best friend at school. Believe it or not, it brings back a similar incident of my own – when I was 15 years old, and the woman was was the wife of our pastor. Her sole objective in life seemed to be to cause as much trouble as possible. And she succeeded admirably – and ended her life later in a late-night single-car accident. The final disaster in a life full of disasters.
I should add that we were very religious. She made sure my mother knew about this incident – and our relatives too. The result was not as she probably expected. My mother was simply baffled. Not because I had lost my virginity – she probably thought this would have happened anyway – but because she could not understand why she (of all people) did it. It made no sense.
She assumed – entirely wrongly – that religious people didn’t do things like this – even though she knew plenty of instances when they did.
As a much older man, I would even say these incidents were more common among the religious than the non-religious. Once something is forbidden, it automatically becomes more desirable.
I have learned this the hard way. I read about the book Human Capitalism from an advertisement in the New York Review. I looked it up on Amazon and read the sample text provided there. But the paper version would not be available until next May! And it would not be cheap. However, I could buy the Kindle version immediately for much less. So I went with the Kindle version – which I could read with my Kindle app on my Windows PC.
Immediately, I ran into problems. I wanted to refer to sections in the book, and to copy some of them – standard practice for serious writers, such as I fancy myself to be, when I am writing on my blog. All I can to is refer to Kindle locations (such as 235 of 1421) – which is perhaps fair enough – although I have not tested this with another reader. But I cannot copy any text at all! I am practically tongue-tied with frustration.
Of course I looked up the Kindle Help – but it seems to be out-of-date, with no way to tell what version of the Kindle app I am using!
The Kindle may not be for morons – but it is certainly for people with superficial reading and writing skills. Who just want to read text and not do anything with it.
The first two chapters of Human Capitalism (a general overview) are well-worth reading – the rest are not.
I have almost finished listening to The Winds of War – and wondering what to say about it. In a flash, it came to me – and I made it the title of this posting. Which I am writing from my bedroom/office with an Internet connection/dining room/living room in Costa Rica.
In the book, Hitler has died, Roosevelt has died, and Truman is President. It spends some time explaining how Mid-Western he was – quite a contrast to FDR, who was an Eastern Sophisticate.
He came from Independence, Missouri – which happens to also be the headquarters of my family’s religion. Which faded in the Fifties, as Truman also faded from sight.
It has taken me fifty years to begin to understand what happened then – in that far-away time – when so many bad things happened.
They have been called the Great Generation (because they won WWII) when they should be called something far less flattering – perhaps the Custodians of the Final Collapse.
Here we sit, among the ruins. If you want to understand what caused these ruins (although few do) – this book can tell you a lot about it.
I get some of my best reading done on the bus going to the next large town on my weekly shopping trip there. This week I read this article, one that I had looked at earlier online. This proved to me, once again, that reading (for me) is best done from paper.
Here is the final paragraph:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” On the contrary: it is what we cannot speak of in the sense Wittgenstein means, what we cannot point to and scientifically describe, that we speak about most and best, and always have. What can be wholly comprehended and demonstrated is “trivial” in the sense that mathematicians use the word: even if it is very hard to understand, once understood it does not provoke further discourse, does not point anywhere. But authentic speech and writing are always productive of more speech and writing—indeed, that is the point of discourse, not to describe reality but to avoid silence.
How can I add to that? But, being a writer, I must – if only to take exception to this paragraph:
Literature operates on the premise that humanity can be transcendent; but it now looks increasingly likely that humanity can only be transcended, that is, left behind. Like all culture, literature is a matter of directing the will inward, to create an inner life; this was a necessity for most of human history, when the conditions of outer life could not be changed. But the future will be defined by the ever more successful direction of the will outward, in the form of technology and power, which is now genuinely able to transform the conditions of life. In this sense, culture is an obsolete technology, a sunk cost that we keep adding to only because we lack the courage to write it off.
This makes me want to scream, and become violent!
This is precisely what American thinkers and writers (they tended to be both) such as Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman missed entirely. Their world was fast falling apart – and they never noticed! For all his brilliance (typical of our time) he is as stupid as he can be.
I am reminded of the character Aron Jastrow in The Winds of War. He didn’t realize what was going on until a Nazi thug nearly kicked him senseless – then he got the message – too late.
I just listened to his death scene, where he was gassed to death in Auschwitz. Another brilliant man (and a writer) who was also just plain stupid.
This is the final event of what might be called The Triumph of the Machine - although we never saw it that way. It just seemed like the latest, cleverest, idea – which, of course, it was.
It triggered off a financial bubble of its own, which was called many things, such as the dot-com boom. But I was there, and I remembered clearly that is was the Internet boom – and, as it turned out, the Internet bubble. Everyone was certain that it would create tremendous business opportunities – but they had no idea what these would be. The result was a complete mess.
But eventually the smoke cleared, and smart heads in business (yes, there are a a few of those) realized what this really meant – total control of the world by Business – or Globalization. Made possible by the Net – and clever software that tied everything together. Control-at-a-Distance on Steroids.
A side-effect was the total control of the people in this Global Economy – which was easy, because they had been preconditioned by Television – which was also a network, but a send-only one. People had become used to accepting whatever the saw on the Tube.
For them, the Computer was just like their Television screen – except that it was two-way – they could talk to it, as well as listen to it. They had no idea what was going on behind that magic screen – and didn’t want to know – about anything, because the Computer was doing all the knowing for them.
I hardly need say this was a disastrous situation – in one stroke, people had been eliminated from the picture. And no one noticed.
It did not have to be this way. Like any of our other inventions, it can be very useful. I order books all the time from Amazon, and download books from Audible. And I write in my blog (as I am doing right now). For me, the Internet is a gigantic printing press – printing trash, however, for the most part.
But for most, it is something else entirely – some kind of magic that will make them all-powerful. This latest incarnation of this is LinkedIn.
I keep getting requests from people I haven’t heard from for years – wanting me to join their professional network on LinkedIn. These are always people who cannot be considered professionals in any sense of the world.
Real professionals have their own professional organizations – that give them ample opportunities for networking. The helpless souls on LinkedIn have nothing – but want to have everything, and LinkedIn seems to promise that. In reality, it is just another social site milking its members for all they are worth.
It might be worthwhile for a few hardy souls that understand what is going on – like anything else. But it usually does not pay to wade into a swamp infested with alligators.
Which is what the Internet has become.
Being, for me is a very big deal – it is everything. Either I am, or I am not. And having my druthers, I would rather be than not be. I really get worked up about this.
It amazes me that most people feel differently. But even more amazingly, that they are unaware of this preference – which is not too surprising, since if you do not exist, you cannot be aware of much of anything.
But here a strange reversal takes place, which no one seems to have noticed – this state of being nothing feels like its opposite: being everything. Follow me? It’s the oldest and strangest fact in human psychology – for us, opposites are identical. And this gets us into all kinds of trouble.
People in this state, the vast majority of the population, cannot see why anyone would want to be – since to them, this is being nothing – and is subject to the strongest social disapproval.
The key phrase here is social disapproval – a skill contemporary society excels at. Growing up as a child in this society – although I sometimes wonder how much growing up I have done – has left me a badly damaged person. But – and this is very important – I do exist - dammit. I cannot brag about this, because it is a social handicap – but for some reason I have ended up this way – and I have to live with it.
McLuhan – another strange duck – has provided an important insight here. He pointed out that we have extended ourselves into our technologies – most importantly, Television. He did not live to experience the Computer – the double-whammy that finished us off.
It did not have to finish us off – if we had stayed in control of it. But alas, we did not. We quickly started serving it (and being it) with disastrous consequences. This is another one of our human abilities – to merge with our technologies – a huge advantage and (as it turned out) a huge disadvantage.
But I see I have neglected my subject – which is being and writing - and I must get down to work.
Being is mostly a matter of being in the body – not being in the mind. But writing is a mental activity and a emotional (bodily) activity. And here is where an immense confusion ensues. Somehow. words on paper (or a computer screen) have to connect people. But, beginning in the US with its Civil War – and soon beginning everywhere with WWI – the human race went completely crazy. And has never completely recovered.
I sometimes wonder at my obsession with writing (and reading). A very strange obsession that many have wondered at. I suspect it is genetic, something I inherited from my mother’s mother – not someone I would consciously emulate, since she was a driven person. But I was her favorite – something I relished very much (since my mother did not feel this way about me at all).
Now you know the secret of my life – I crave approval.
I used to be a technical writer in Silicon Valley in California. Now I live on my Social Security in a beautiful valley in Costa Rica.
