"O tempora o mores!" is a quote from Cicero (106-43 BC), the boring old gasbag who somehow became the single most well-respected writer in Latin and has remained that way for thousands of years. It translates to "Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!" and it means, basically: "Oh, how our civilization has fallen from what it once was!" Or, to put it another way: "Let's make Rome great again!" It has been a very popular saying from Cicero's time down to ours because there has never been a shortage of boring old farts complaining about these kids these days with their hair and their clothes and pining for the supposedly good old days.
I don't deny that Cicero was an effective politician, I just don't find him to be a very effective writer. Put it this way: I think Sallust's accounts of Cicero's actions are much better-written and more edifying than Cicero's own accounts of himself, and I think it's a real shame that dozens of times more of Cicero's writing has survived than Sallust's.
I realize that I'm in an extreme minority position with my dislike of Cicero the writer. I realize this, and I'm trying to keep an open mind about it. If I'm completely wrong about Cicero, it wouldn't be the first time someone had stubbornly clung to a completely-wrong position about something for a long time. (Not that that's any excuse.)
It has often been said that the study of human history is a study of horrors, and to a great extent this is true: history records a great number of wars, famines, plagues, murders, deceptions, betrayals, a great deal of cruelty, cowardice, stupidity -- a whole lot of Very Bad Things. That has been said, and to a very great extent it is true. It may seem strange when I say that studying all of these things can be very encouraging, but that is also true, if it leads one to the realization that, however bad things are at the present, they were in earlier times even worse. In other words, progress is being made.
Progress is a fairly new concept in human thought, barely a couple of centuries old. Cicero was hardly unusually in ancient times in his belief that civilization had sharply declined from a glorious past. A few centuries ago, some people started to notice that things changed, and that some changes were good. Then, what with world wars and genocides, many people found the idea of progress ridiculous. It may be that it is, ironically, mostly confined to circles of capitalists who are making things worse for humanity, what with pollution, global warming, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, the continuous struggle to squeeze more and more out of poor people, etc, etc. It may seem downright quaint that I am both a Leftist and optimistic.
But look at some historical evidence. Yes, exploitation is still with us -- but slavery is almost gone, and social support has grown greatly over the past two centuries, even in the US where so many people are terrified of the word "socialism," not realizing that all it means is a lot of things they're in favor of. Yes, pollution and global warming are very bad -- but the use of petroleum can be reduced to almost none, any time we decide to convert to solar/wind/tidal/geothermal/etc. We have the technology. We can make us better than we was. Call me quaint if you want to, but what should we call people who call themselves Progressives but who have great difficulty seeing progress? Historically illiterate, perhaps.
We must keep in mind that the study of history can distort things greatly if it is poorly done. And there are all sorts of ways in which it can be poorly done. One of these is to fail to grasp the selectivity of history. Vincent Van Gogh's painting are well-liked today. During his own lifetime, only a few of them were sold, and not for very much money. Not nearly enough to to make a living for a single person for the years in which Van Gogh did nothing but paint.
Everybody knows that much. What is probably a little less well--established in people's minds today is the art which was popular and which sold for high prices during those same years when Van Gogh was failing to sell his, and which has been forgotten in the meantime.
The physics of Einstein and Planck and Bohr and Heisenberg is well-known today. Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969) is much less well-known today, but this contemporary of Einstein was one of the most highly-respected theoretical physicists of their day. He became the the President of University College Cork in 1943. And he completely rejected Einstein's theory of relativity, championing instead the theories of Walther Ritz (1878-1909), of whom you've probably also never heard. O'Rahilly also believed that the theory of evolution did not apply to humans. And he and Ritz have been forgotten, along with a great many other scientists of their time who rejected the ideas either of Einstein or of Darwin or both.
We know that the academic authorities of Bruno's time opposed him sharply -- do you know any of those influential people's names? How about the names of the academics who made life difficult for Galileo? Or those who ran the University of Glasgow and refused to approve Hume's appointment to a professorship there?
Lincoln's speeches are still printed and read. Stephen Douglas' -- much less so.
Who today knows the names of the people on the Pulitzer prize board of directors who overturned the unanimous choice of the fiction panel who in 1974 had decided to award the Pulitzer in fiction to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow? Were they the same ones who, 2 years later, approved the awarding of the Pulitzer to Humboldt's Gift, the one and only novel of Saul Bellow's which savagely and hilariously mocks the Pulitzers? (Bellow, as editor of the journal The Noble Savage, was one of Pynchon's first publishers, printing an excerpt from his novel-then-in-progress V in 1961 under the title "Under the Rose." Is it a complete coincidence that Von Humboldt Fleischer appeared in print dissing the Pulitzers so soon after the Pulitzers had dissed Pynchon?)
The passage of time sifts things. And so, many of the more senseless and horrid aspects of the past are forgotten. And so fools call the past "the good old days."
(Yes, I'm aware that my opinion of the quality of Cicero's writing combined with the stupendous endurance of his popularity as a writer completely contradicts the rest of this post. I'm aware of that. There are exceptions to rules.)
Showing posts with label saul bellow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label saul bellow. Show all posts
Friday, September 2, 2016
Monday, March 21, 2016
How I Can Tell Whether I'll Like A Book
CAUTION! Just because I like a book doesn't mean you'll like it too. Although if you like my writing, there may be a greater chance that you'll share some of my reading tastes than if you find my blog ill-written -- in which case I sincerely hope you find reading material which pleases you better, and recommend Stephen King and John Grisham, reckoning strictly from statistics.
The only way to know for sure, of course, is to read some of it. But there are so many books. How do I decide which ones to try? Here are some of the ways.
-- If a book is written in Latin and I haven't heard of it, I will be intrigued. (If I have heard of, there's a chance I already either have a copy or have decided I'm not interested. Life is to short for Cicero and Seneca.) Being intrigued at first glance is not always the same, of course, as eventually liking a book. But I've got this thing about Latin, seeing as how it's been in use in our civilization for thousands of years and was used by Caesar and Columbus and Milton and Spinoza, besides all of those kings and queens and Popes.
-- If a book is written by a Nobel laureate in literature, the chances are over 85% that I will like it very much. Other prizes aren't nearly so strong an indicator for me, but the Nobel folks and I seem to be on a similar wavelength. Except that they've given it to too many Scandinavian writers. Astonishingly, they managed to avoid giving it either to Ibsen or Strindberg, and still gave it to way way too many Scandinavians. Aside from 85% or so of the Nobel Literature laureates, authors whom I like generally are good guides to other authors I will like.
One notable exception is Thomas Pynchon's rave for Tom Robbins, nota bene, that's Tom Robbins, the novelist, not Tim Robbins, the tall, thin actor who supports the Democratic Party and used to be married to Susan Sarandon. I'm not saying Robbins is a bad writer, he's just -- well, for me personally, he's not nearly in the same class as Pynchon. Your mileage may vary, as Germans say. (They say that in English, about books or movies or whatever. It's weird.)
-- Lots of books have many blurbs on their covers. Sometimes these blurbs are attributed to a publication. For example, "Brilliant and deft." -- The New York Times Book Review. or "A pulse-pounding page-turner." -- Publishers Weekly. By and large, these anonymous blurbs mean less to me than ones attributed to specific people. Especially if they're attributed to Nobel Literature laureates or other writers I like. If King or Grisham recommends it, it's probably not for me. There are some exceptions to this: I cannot recall seeing a single blurb attributed to an individual rather than to a publication on the cover or first pages of any volume by Gore Vidal, although plenty of writers of whom I thought highly, thought highly of Gore. Strange. Perhaps when a writer produces big blockbusting bestsellers, and Vidal certainly did, publishers prefer anonymous blurbs. I don't know.
Nietzsche's reactions to authors are amazingly predictive of mine. The 1st half of p 65 of the insel taschenbuch-edition of Goetzen-Daemmerung (ISBN 3-458-34380-6) could almost have been written by me. Nietzsche compares Carlyle to puke -- nailed it. I hadn't read read any Carlyle before I read Goetzen-Daemmerung -- why didn't I listen about Carlyle? Well, anyway, I found for myself that I too find him absolutely disgusting, and now here I am warning you. Sorry to bring up something so unpleasant as puke, but, assuming my advice is as accurate for you as Nietzsche's is for me, I'm warning you.
-- If I've really liked one book by an author, I'm very rarely disappointed in others of his or her books. I'm not counting unfinished books which have been published posthumously, because, duh, they're unfinished. The biggest exception to my rule about non-posthumous books is the novel Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. That one had me shaking my head all the way through and muttering curses at Allan Bloom, neocon monster, Bellow's close friend, the author of The Closing of the American Mind and clearly the real-life inspiration for the title figure Ravelstein.
-- Different publishers go about their business in different ways. A book published by Oxford or Farrar, Straus and Giroux is more likely to be my kind of book than one published by Simon & Schuster, although here again, there may be exceptions published by Simon & Schuster or other lowest-common-denominator, their-books-are-in-grocery-stores-and-Wal-Mart's publisher. Those exceptions, those glorious exceptions are those few authors like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and John Cheever who are both popular and good.
The only way to know for sure, of course, is to read some of it. But there are so many books. How do I decide which ones to try? Here are some of the ways.
-- If a book is written in Latin and I haven't heard of it, I will be intrigued. (If I have heard of, there's a chance I already either have a copy or have decided I'm not interested. Life is to short for Cicero and Seneca.) Being intrigued at first glance is not always the same, of course, as eventually liking a book. But I've got this thing about Latin, seeing as how it's been in use in our civilization for thousands of years and was used by Caesar and Columbus and Milton and Spinoza, besides all of those kings and queens and Popes.
-- If a book is written by a Nobel laureate in literature, the chances are over 85% that I will like it very much. Other prizes aren't nearly so strong an indicator for me, but the Nobel folks and I seem to be on a similar wavelength. Except that they've given it to too many Scandinavian writers. Astonishingly, they managed to avoid giving it either to Ibsen or Strindberg, and still gave it to way way too many Scandinavians. Aside from 85% or so of the Nobel Literature laureates, authors whom I like generally are good guides to other authors I will like.
One notable exception is Thomas Pynchon's rave for Tom Robbins, nota bene, that's Tom Robbins, the novelist, not Tim Robbins, the tall, thin actor who supports the Democratic Party and used to be married to Susan Sarandon. I'm not saying Robbins is a bad writer, he's just -- well, for me personally, he's not nearly in the same class as Pynchon. Your mileage may vary, as Germans say. (They say that in English, about books or movies or whatever. It's weird.)
-- Lots of books have many blurbs on their covers. Sometimes these blurbs are attributed to a publication. For example, "Brilliant and deft." -- The New York Times Book Review. or "A pulse-pounding page-turner." -- Publishers Weekly. By and large, these anonymous blurbs mean less to me than ones attributed to specific people. Especially if they're attributed to Nobel Literature laureates or other writers I like. If King or Grisham recommends it, it's probably not for me. There are some exceptions to this: I cannot recall seeing a single blurb attributed to an individual rather than to a publication on the cover or first pages of any volume by Gore Vidal, although plenty of writers of whom I thought highly, thought highly of Gore. Strange. Perhaps when a writer produces big blockbusting bestsellers, and Vidal certainly did, publishers prefer anonymous blurbs. I don't know.
Nietzsche's reactions to authors are amazingly predictive of mine. The 1st half of p 65 of the insel taschenbuch-edition of Goetzen-Daemmerung (ISBN 3-458-34380-6) could almost have been written by me. Nietzsche compares Carlyle to puke -- nailed it. I hadn't read read any Carlyle before I read Goetzen-Daemmerung -- why didn't I listen about Carlyle? Well, anyway, I found for myself that I too find him absolutely disgusting, and now here I am warning you. Sorry to bring up something so unpleasant as puke, but, assuming my advice is as accurate for you as Nietzsche's is for me, I'm warning you.
-- If I've really liked one book by an author, I'm very rarely disappointed in others of his or her books. I'm not counting unfinished books which have been published posthumously, because, duh, they're unfinished. The biggest exception to my rule about non-posthumous books is the novel Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. That one had me shaking my head all the way through and muttering curses at Allan Bloom, neocon monster, Bellow's close friend, the author of The Closing of the American Mind and clearly the real-life inspiration for the title figure Ravelstein.
-- Different publishers go about their business in different ways. A book published by Oxford or Farrar, Straus and Giroux is more likely to be my kind of book than one published by Simon & Schuster, although here again, there may be exceptions published by Simon & Schuster or other lowest-common-denominator, their-books-are-in-grocery-stores-and-Wal-Mart's publisher. Those exceptions, those glorious exceptions are those few authors like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer and John Cheever who are both popular and good.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Fun Facts About This Blog
1) I published my first post about Michael Paulkovich on the 29th of September, 2014, and my first post about Justin Bieber on the 19th of March, 2015. In the first 48 hours after they were published, the post on Michael Paulkovich received more than 100 times as many pageviews as the post on Justin Bieber.
2) On the 28th of March, 2011, I made an experiment to see if I could get more traffic on the blog by pandering to mass tastes than by doing what I usually do, with a post entitled Cute Baby Animal Pictures! whose texts begins: "In this post I'm going to pander to mass tastes." and after that consists mostly of baby-talk, like: "Widgiewidgiewidgiewidgie! Who's a pwecious liddle fing? Who's my liddle pwecious?" interspersed among 6 photos of baby animals, 4 of which have disappeared. The photos were linked from the web rather than uploaded by me.
"Cute Baby Animal Pictures!" has received about 40 times as many pageviews as the average Wrong Monkey post, second all-time on this blog only to my aforementioned first post on Michael Paulkovich. It continues to be one of The Wrong Monkey's most popular posts week-in and week-out, despite the missing photos. But it was the only such attempt I have made to pander to mass tastes. This blog's lowered potential commercial success has been literature's gain -- or it has been literature's loss if you prefer to look at it that way. I'm just glad you're reading my blog, I'm not going to try to tell you what to think of it.
3) One of The Wrong Monkey's all-time most popular posts has been the ironically-entitled Why I Stopped Reading The Watch Snob, and I have no idea why so many people have viewed it. Nobody has commented on it, so I've gotten no clues that way about what's aroused people's interest. I haven't been able to find it linked anywhere. I repeat, this post is ironically-titled. I haven't stopped reading The Watch Snob, I think it's a good column, I actually learn things by reading it. Also, it's witty. Also, as I've mentioned on that post, The Watch Snob and The Wrong Monkey sound like a pair of super-villains teamed up to thwart Batman & Robin.
But I don't know why people are reading that post. For all I know, the Watch Snob's online presence might be popular beyond my wildest imagination, and people find my post just by mistake. For all I know, people who dislike the Watch Snob surf to my post thinking I'm a kindred spirit. Sorry about that, if that's the case.
4) I'd very much like it if each and every one of you would talk me up for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. That's a stone-cold fact: I'd appreciate it very much indeed! Especially if you happen to know -- or be -- extremely-influential people in the worlds of publishing and literature. I want that Prize, I want it bad. That's a fact. You know how Roger Daltrey sings on "Magic Bus," "I waaaant it, I waaaant it, I waaaant it[...]" That's how I feel, it's how I am all the time. Fame? I waaaant it. Fortune? I waaaaant it. That Prize? I waaaaant it. A date with Reese Witherspoon, if she's single? I waaaaant it. A platinum Daytona with an ice-blue dial? Why yes, thank you, in fact I'll take two of those! Yeah. Yeah! I want a whole bunch of all of that! Desire makes me strong and improves my posture.
5) In "Him With His Foot In His Mouth" by Saul Bellow, the title character and narrator, who realizes that on many occasions in his life he has been more candid than was either prudent or kind, says to one character whom he hopes will give his university a grant, who at a banquet has been telling him for hours on end about all of the money she has given to artists and other deserving people, when she mentions that she plans to write her memoirs, asks her: "Do you plan to use a typewriter or an adding machine?" and says to a family member attempting to involve him in a court case which he regards as nothing better than rank extortion, and who says to him, the narrator, the artsy, literate one in the rough-and-tumble family: "You're the one with the words" -- Ah say Ah say this one wit his foot in his mout, this artsy one, he replies: "And you're the whore with nine cunts!" But it's a fact that Bellow wrote this high-minded piece of frankness after he'd published several huge bestsellers AND won that great big Nobel Prize -- the very same one. That's a fact. So if his ghost or his fans want to look down their noses at me for wanting a whole bunch of stuff they can, pardon my French but they can all go sit on it!!! That's a fact, that's exactly what they can do! ("Him With His Foot In His Mouth" is a great story, the title story of a great volume of stories. I don't know what to do with the fact that such a beautiful writer let himself be politically seduced by the neocon Mephistofeles.)
2) On the 28th of March, 2011, I made an experiment to see if I could get more traffic on the blog by pandering to mass tastes than by doing what I usually do, with a post entitled Cute Baby Animal Pictures! whose texts begins: "In this post I'm going to pander to mass tastes." and after that consists mostly of baby-talk, like: "Widgiewidgiewidgiewidgie! Who's a pwecious liddle fing? Who's my liddle pwecious?" interspersed among 6 photos of baby animals, 4 of which have disappeared. The photos were linked from the web rather than uploaded by me.
"Cute Baby Animal Pictures!" has received about 40 times as many pageviews as the average Wrong Monkey post, second all-time on this blog only to my aforementioned first post on Michael Paulkovich. It continues to be one of The Wrong Monkey's most popular posts week-in and week-out, despite the missing photos. But it was the only such attempt I have made to pander to mass tastes. This blog's lowered potential commercial success has been literature's gain -- or it has been literature's loss if you prefer to look at it that way. I'm just glad you're reading my blog, I'm not going to try to tell you what to think of it.
3) One of The Wrong Monkey's all-time most popular posts has been the ironically-entitled Why I Stopped Reading The Watch Snob, and I have no idea why so many people have viewed it. Nobody has commented on it, so I've gotten no clues that way about what's aroused people's interest. I haven't been able to find it linked anywhere. I repeat, this post is ironically-titled. I haven't stopped reading The Watch Snob, I think it's a good column, I actually learn things by reading it. Also, it's witty. Also, as I've mentioned on that post, The Watch Snob and The Wrong Monkey sound like a pair of super-villains teamed up to thwart Batman & Robin.
But I don't know why people are reading that post. For all I know, the Watch Snob's online presence might be popular beyond my wildest imagination, and people find my post just by mistake. For all I know, people who dislike the Watch Snob surf to my post thinking I'm a kindred spirit. Sorry about that, if that's the case.
4) I'd very much like it if each and every one of you would talk me up for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. That's a stone-cold fact: I'd appreciate it very much indeed! Especially if you happen to know -- or be -- extremely-influential people in the worlds of publishing and literature. I want that Prize, I want it bad. That's a fact. You know how Roger Daltrey sings on "Magic Bus," "I waaaant it, I waaaant it, I waaaant it[...]" That's how I feel, it's how I am all the time. Fame? I waaaant it. Fortune? I waaaaant it. That Prize? I waaaaant it. A date with Reese Witherspoon, if she's single? I waaaaant it. A platinum Daytona with an ice-blue dial? Why yes, thank you, in fact I'll take two of those! Yeah. Yeah! I want a whole bunch of all of that! Desire makes me strong and improves my posture.
5) In "Him With His Foot In His Mouth" by Saul Bellow, the title character and narrator, who realizes that on many occasions in his life he has been more candid than was either prudent or kind, says to one character whom he hopes will give his university a grant, who at a banquet has been telling him for hours on end about all of the money she has given to artists and other deserving people, when she mentions that she plans to write her memoirs, asks her: "Do you plan to use a typewriter or an adding machine?" and says to a family member attempting to involve him in a court case which he regards as nothing better than rank extortion, and who says to him, the narrator, the artsy, literate one in the rough-and-tumble family: "You're the one with the words" -- Ah say Ah say this one wit his foot in his mout, this artsy one, he replies: "And you're the whore with nine cunts!" But it's a fact that Bellow wrote this high-minded piece of frankness after he'd published several huge bestsellers AND won that great big Nobel Prize -- the very same one. That's a fact. So if his ghost or his fans want to look down their noses at me for wanting a whole bunch of stuff they can, pardon my French but they can all go sit on it!!! That's a fact, that's exactly what they can do! ("Him With His Foot In His Mouth" is a great story, the title story of a great volume of stories. I don't know what to do with the fact that such a beautiful writer let himself be politically seduced by the neocon Mephistofeles.)
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Long and the Short of Description
Near the start of Saul Bellow's marvelous short story "Zetland: By a Character Witness," in the collection Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories,
there is a brief description of the history of the universe; comically brief, really, but good for its length, impressive. It impressed me, anyway, and my Wrong Monkey Blog posts "History of the World[...]," Parts I, II, and III, (See below, in the posts from May) were partly inspired by it. I wanted to see how well I could do in a very brief and quickly-written summation of everything I knew. (I may get around to Part IV eventually, don't rush me.)
In my childhood and early adulthood I had some pretty firm opinions about how long the descriptions of certain things should be. I don't know where I got these opinions; in retrospect in seems very odd to me that I ever had them. Clearly, my views were not well thought out and consistent on this issue. Examples! Examples are called for here. I admired H.G. Wells' Outline of History
, but I felt that it was only an introduction to world history and that the serious student should study his speciality in more detail. Most likely very few serious students of history would disagree with me on that point; but they might find it odd how I found it odd, for example, that there were so many multi-volume works, some on quite specialized topics, listed in the bibliography of John Richard Alden's 1-volume history of the American Revolution
. Why dwell for several volumes on one individual involved in the Revolution -- even, perhaps, a relatively obscure individual? Or one a single battle in the war? One very obvious answer, among several good answers to those questions -- namely: to provide the material for an historian like Alden to competently compose a shorter one-volume summary -- somehow eluded me at the time. Let's just say that it's probably good that at as yet I had no ambitions as an historian myself.
What makes it doubly strange in retrospect is that at the time -- in my teens -- I had already read, and re-read, and enjoyed immensely, a book which had addressed this question in a very sensible way, so that my questions should have been answered, questions like: Why, and for that matter how, would anyone compose several thick volumes of biography of someone like Samuel Otis? (No offense to Samuel's memory: I was a young fool, and although no longer young I'm probably still pretty foolish in some important ways.) The book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig. The narrator recounts how he had been teaching a college class and gave his students the assignment of writing a 500-word essay on a topic of their choosing, and how one student had come to him in distress, unable to think of anything to write about, and how he told her to write about the brick building across the street from the window of her room at home, starting with the upper-left-hand brick, and how she had gone away sceptical but come back amazed with herself, having written a 5,000-word essay. I have no idea how much of Pirsig's book is factual, how much fictional, whether all or any of the anecdote actual occurred, but factual or fictional, that anecdote should have cured me of my strange notions of the appropriate lengths of descriptions.
I've condensed the history of the world up until the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, in the Wrong Monkey essays mentioned above, into a couple thousand words. I could easily write a much longer account than that of the room I'm sitting in. You don't believe me? Just to my left is a small paperback book by Phaidon entitled 10,000 Years of Art
. On the front cover, the words "10,000 YEARS" are printed in dark green, and the words "OF ART" in black, all in capital letters, against a light-green background. Near the border of the front cover a narrow dark-green line almost makes a rectangle: almost, but not quite, because in the lower right-hand corner, it makes a couple of turns to go around the publisher's name, "PHAIDON." The title is all in a bold, cursive font, "PHAIDON" is not cursive, not bold and the font is much smaller.
That book is one of about thirty lying in stacks in the eight feet or so between me and the wall to my left, against which wall many more books are shelved. And I only described the fron cover of that one book; as you may have surmised from its title, it contained hundreds of pictures of masterpieces of art made by people all over the world over the course of the last 10,000 years, each one of which pictures could easily coax forth at least a few words. Do you believe me now?
You think that because I'm a bookworm I've given myself more to describe? Fine, we'll leave the books out of it: Just to the left of the keyboard on which I'm typing is a mug made of white ceramic, part of the outside of which has been painted: near the rim there's a narrow band of dark blue. Under that there's a broader band, about a half-inch band of a lighter shade of blue, in which you can see brushstrokes. It doesn't go all the way around the mug: there's a gap left white around the handle. This makes me think that the mug was hand-painted after the handle was put on, or that the mug is a mass-produced copy of one which was hand-painted.
I could go on for a while about the outside of the mug. Inside, there's about one finger of coffee left. It's cold by now light-colored. Ilike a lot of creamer in my coffee. Yeah, creamer, not actual cream or milk, it may be a little odd but that's how I like my coffee. Gonna toss that coffee off and get a refill. Mmm. Be right back.
Ahhhh. Thanks for waiting. I grind "gourmet" beans at Meijer's, and and brew them in a machine at home. I'm not sure how an actual gourmet would like this stuff, especially when it comes to the creamer, but I like it a lot more then Folger's instant, which I used to drink, and which I in turn liked a lot more than other brands of instant, although earlier still I didn't really notice the difference between any types of coffee and was manly interested in the caffeine.
I hope I've made my point about the expansion of or compression of description being something very much up to the individual writer.
I haven't?
Underneath the mug, serving as a coaster, is a piece of cardboard which came in the package containing One Flat Sheet which I bought at Target. On the bottom side of the cardboard there's some information about the sheet, on the top side I've jotted a few phone numbers, and there are some brown rings from the mug having been set on it a lot of mornings. If I haven't made my point yet, I probably won't. There's no lack of things to write about, there never has been. It's a matter of the writer observing, and transferring his observations to a written text, hopefully with some clarity and style.
there is a brief description of the history of the universe; comically brief, really, but good for its length, impressive. It impressed me, anyway, and my Wrong Monkey Blog posts "History of the World[...]," Parts I, II, and III, (See below, in the posts from May) were partly inspired by it. I wanted to see how well I could do in a very brief and quickly-written summation of everything I knew. (I may get around to Part IV eventually, don't rush me.)In my childhood and early adulthood I had some pretty firm opinions about how long the descriptions of certain things should be. I don't know where I got these opinions; in retrospect in seems very odd to me that I ever had them. Clearly, my views were not well thought out and consistent on this issue. Examples! Examples are called for here. I admired H.G. Wells' Outline of History
, but I felt that it was only an introduction to world history and that the serious student should study his speciality in more detail. Most likely very few serious students of history would disagree with me on that point; but they might find it odd how I found it odd, for example, that there were so many multi-volume works, some on quite specialized topics, listed in the bibliography of John Richard Alden's 1-volume history of the American Revolution. Why dwell for several volumes on one individual involved in the Revolution -- even, perhaps, a relatively obscure individual? Or one a single battle in the war? One very obvious answer, among several good answers to those questions -- namely: to provide the material for an historian like Alden to competently compose a shorter one-volume summary -- somehow eluded me at the time. Let's just say that it's probably good that at as yet I had no ambitions as an historian myself. What makes it doubly strange in retrospect is that at the time -- in my teens -- I had already read, and re-read, and enjoyed immensely, a book which had addressed this question in a very sensible way, so that my questions should have been answered, questions like: Why, and for that matter how, would anyone compose several thick volumes of biography of someone like Samuel Otis? (No offense to Samuel's memory: I was a young fool, and although no longer young I'm probably still pretty foolish in some important ways.) The book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig. The narrator recounts how he had been teaching a college class and gave his students the assignment of writing a 500-word essay on a topic of their choosing, and how one student had come to him in distress, unable to think of anything to write about, and how he told her to write about the brick building across the street from the window of her room at home, starting with the upper-left-hand brick, and how she had gone away sceptical but come back amazed with herself, having written a 5,000-word essay. I have no idea how much of Pirsig's book is factual, how much fictional, whether all or any of the anecdote actual occurred, but factual or fictional, that anecdote should have cured me of my strange notions of the appropriate lengths of descriptions.I've condensed the history of the world up until the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, in the Wrong Monkey essays mentioned above, into a couple thousand words. I could easily write a much longer account than that of the room I'm sitting in. You don't believe me? Just to my left is a small paperback book by Phaidon entitled 10,000 Years of Art
. On the front cover, the words "10,000 YEARS" are printed in dark green, and the words "OF ART" in black, all in capital letters, against a light-green background. Near the border of the front cover a narrow dark-green line almost makes a rectangle: almost, but not quite, because in the lower right-hand corner, it makes a couple of turns to go around the publisher's name, "PHAIDON." The title is all in a bold, cursive font, "PHAIDON" is not cursive, not bold and the font is much smaller. That book is one of about thirty lying in stacks in the eight feet or so between me and the wall to my left, against which wall many more books are shelved. And I only described the fron cover of that one book; as you may have surmised from its title, it contained hundreds of pictures of masterpieces of art made by people all over the world over the course of the last 10,000 years, each one of which pictures could easily coax forth at least a few words. Do you believe me now?
You think that because I'm a bookworm I've given myself more to describe? Fine, we'll leave the books out of it: Just to the left of the keyboard on which I'm typing is a mug made of white ceramic, part of the outside of which has been painted: near the rim there's a narrow band of dark blue. Under that there's a broader band, about a half-inch band of a lighter shade of blue, in which you can see brushstrokes. It doesn't go all the way around the mug: there's a gap left white around the handle. This makes me think that the mug was hand-painted after the handle was put on, or that the mug is a mass-produced copy of one which was hand-painted.
I could go on for a while about the outside of the mug. Inside, there's about one finger of coffee left. It's cold by now light-colored. Ilike a lot of creamer in my coffee. Yeah, creamer, not actual cream or milk, it may be a little odd but that's how I like my coffee. Gonna toss that coffee off and get a refill. Mmm. Be right back.
Ahhhh. Thanks for waiting. I grind "gourmet" beans at Meijer's, and and brew them in a machine at home. I'm not sure how an actual gourmet would like this stuff, especially when it comes to the creamer, but I like it a lot more then Folger's instant, which I used to drink, and which I in turn liked a lot more than other brands of instant, although earlier still I didn't really notice the difference between any types of coffee and was manly interested in the caffeine.
I hope I've made my point about the expansion of or compression of description being something very much up to the individual writer.
I haven't?
Underneath the mug, serving as a coaster, is a piece of cardboard which came in the package containing One Flat Sheet which I bought at Target. On the bottom side of the cardboard there's some information about the sheet, on the top side I've jotted a few phone numbers, and there are some brown rings from the mug having been set on it a lot of mornings. If I haven't made my point yet, I probably won't. There's no lack of things to write about, there never has been. It's a matter of the writer observing, and transferring his observations to a written text, hopefully with some clarity and style.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Saul Bellow
Not all is vanity. There have been wise man and women who have told us great things. One valuable thing which philosophy often offers is the evaluation of the wisdom of others. Philosophers are voracious readers with high standards and strong opinions about each other. Saul Bellow's
fiction often resembles philosophy in that he, and so too his characters, have read so very widely; they digress from their immediate problems with family or business to reflect on Plato
or Aquinus
or Nietzsche,
they connect their present surroundings to the developments and trends of centuries and millenia, and they are able to do this convincingly because they have read Plato and Aquinus and Nietzsche and a lot of the other authors on the great-books lists. No-one who's relied on secondary summaries, on Western Civ textbooks and such, would be able to talk to you that way. More, the constant name-dropping encourages one to seek out and read the great thinkers of Western society going back to ancient Athens, to learn different languages in order to read the great thinkers still more directly, untranslated -- in short, to take the full course oneself, as Charlie Citrine, the narrator and protagonist of Humboldt's Gift,
describes the amount of reading one had to do in order to keep up with the thrilling, brilliant conversation of the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleischer, based on Bellow's erstwhile friend and sometime enemy Delmore Schwartz.
At least, I was encouraged to take the full course. And having read by now a few of the philosophers in the Western-Civ canon, I would not hesitate to list Bellow, or Goethe,
for example, among them. The similarities far outweigh the incidental differences of genre. In France, as shown for example by the careers of Voltaire
and Sartre,
such division of labor is not so strongly insisted upon, and sometimes the French will point to countries like Germany and the United States, and criticize us for insisting that this thinker or that is either a novelist or a philosopher, either a poet or an historian, but not both at the same time, and they're absolutely right to criticize us for that. In Germany this rigid classification is much worse even than here, although at least two prominent German philosophers, other than Goethe who is not usually classified as a philosopher, have bucked the trend: Nietzsche, not only with his famous tale Also Sprach Zarathustra,
but also with many highly-regarded shorter poems; and Peter Sloterdijk with his novel -- we would call it a novel, the Germans also subdivide this category -- Der Zauberbaum,
published in 1985, set in France in 1785.)
So, yes, by all means, read Bellow, read Goethe, read Plato, Aristotle
, Lucretius
, Boethius
, Dante
, Machiavelli
, Descartes
, Spinoza
, Hobbes
, Vico
, Hume
, Kant
, Voltaire, Schopenhauer
, Kierkegaard
, Nietzsche and Sartre. You probably can't read them all in their original languages -- but why not try? Maybe you can! At least try to learn some other languages. Read the people I didn't list. Suggest your own list. Doesn't have to be all Western Civ. I'm relatively ignorant of non-Western philosophy -- but I'm not proud of that, by no means determined to keep it that way, and do not wish to imply that I'm dismissing that that which I do not not know, nor that I support any sort of exaltation of the West at the cost of the rest of mankind. It's just that I happen to know a little about this particular corner of the library, and find much there of value, and hate to see it getting so dusty and being forgotten. Furthermore: within this corner, I favor those dead white man who are less bigoted. Not that everyone is in perfect agreement about who exactly is to what degree progressive or reactionary, cf below. For now let me just say that one should not expect a hymn of praise of Kipling
from me, and that Juvenal's
xenophobia, for example, marks him out as just as dull and dreary amongst the poets of his age, as Kipling.
You'll do what you want to do. But if you happen to learn German, and read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger
, Adorno
and Sloterdijk, you may notice that they present you with five distinct, often conflicting accounts of Hegel.
Nietzsche's account stays very close to Schopenhauer's until very late in his career, to the point that one feels it may have been borrowed -- and then, in Jenseits Von Gut Und Boese,
after having in his earlier books heaped scorn on Hegel very much in the manner of Schopenhauer, and having gradually shifted his position on Schopenhauer from one of unmixed praise to one mixed with steadily more contempt, Nietzsche comes forth with the very startling remark that Hegel and Schopenhauer were two great brother-geniuses of philosopher, and that in striving to opposite poles of the German spirit they had been unfair to each other as only brothers can be. Can it be that if he had written longer, Nietzsche would have become an Hegelian? Probably not; the mind boggles at the suggestion. More to the point is that Nietzsche neither entirely accepted not entirely rejected other thinkers based on hearsay. He kept thinking for himself, reading the primary texts for himself, revising his own positions. Some have accused Nietzsche, unfairly, I think, of inconsistencies. I see instead growth and a very unusual degree of self-criticism, with changing philosophical positions as their unavoidable consequence. Can it be that some philosophers even today seek absolute, unchanging truth?
I am a leftist, or at least, I see the left wing of the Democratic Party in the US, and the Social Democrats and Greens in other countries, as the lesser of the available evils. I've never been tempted to vote Republican, (I have to wonder what Teddy Roosevelt, environmentalist, enemy of racial discrimination and of the largest corporations, would make of the remains of his erstwhile party today. The image of Teddy in safari gear, boots and gauntlets, chasing W out of the White House with a riding crop, like Jesus with a reed in the temple among the moneychangers, is stuck in my mind.) nor to favor a conservative in another country. Mario Vargas Llosa
in Peru was a very intriguing presidential candidate, but I was a distant and largely ignorant observer of his political campaigns. I only know his fiction, not what his actual political platform looked like.
And then there's Bellow, whom I have praised above. They say he was a young Trotskyite
who became an old neocon. It's true that he was a young Trotskyite, and that his best friend was Allan Bloom,
and that in his collection of nonfiction entitled It All Adds Up
Bellow says some things which don't add up at all, and which can only be described as reactionary. And so I feel I must offer an exasperated and qualified defense of Bellow. I feel that his books are beautiful and valuable, with several exceptions: in his first two novels, Dangling Man
and The Victim,
he has not yet fully found his remarkable style. And then there are It All Adds Up and, not beautiful at all, but very valuable indeed as an aid to understanding Bellow, his last novel, Ravelstein,
a roman a clef. Ravelstein is Allan Bloom, the neocon puppetmaster, the narrator is Bellow himself, dancing enchanted on one of Bloom's many strings. Bellow a conservative? I don't know. I would prefer to think that Bellow was hypersensitive, emotionally needy, longing for close friendship, and that the nefarious Bloom saw the aching void in Bellow's soul and permanently occupied it.
Not that Bloom himself was all bad: in his hugely best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind
-- helped onto the bestseller lists, perhaps, by his pal Bellow's foreword? Or did the book's success have more to do with Reagan and Bill Bennett? -- in this book, amidst some nonsense, Bloom does say some sensible things, as, for example, when he states that Nietzsche, although appropriated by many antisemites, was himself the opposite of an antisemite. (Perhaps eventually enough people will actually read Nietzsche himself to make such statements superfluous.) In his criticisms of the contemporary (1988) student, however, I cannot recognize any reality I knew as a student at the time. And, more to the point, nowhere in the entire book can I see anything remotely resembling the character Ravelstein. And I suppose I simply trust Bellow much more than Bloom. If you're going to read one of these two books, please read the other, too. Bellow was ordinarily very good at at recognizing other people's motives, passions, obsessions, delusions, agendas. He does not tend to be flattering in his depictions of politicians either of the left or of the right. In Ravelstein, however, you see how blind he was to his best friend's faults. (Another blind spot was his own relationships with women: Bellow's wives seemed to remain constantly in or near their 20's, while he himself got older and older like Dorian Grey's portrait.
)
Apart from such reservations, however, I cannot go along with the general characterization of Bellow as conservative or reactionary. That's just too simple, and Bellow is irreducibly complex. It's true, he does attack some self-serving positions of the left, but he certainly is not kind to the right, either. Bellow reminds me of Nietzsche's dictum #579 in the 9th chapter, "Der Mensch mit sich allein," of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches:
"Nicht geeignet zum Parteimann. — Wer viel denkt, eignet sich nicht zum Parteimann: er denkt sich zu bald durch die Partei hindurch." ("Not well-suited to be a party member: he who thinks too much is not well-suited to be a party member: he thinks his way too quickly through the party and out the other side.") Like many of Nietzsche's sayings, this one is very easy to recite and to misunderatnd, to superficially understand, extremely difficult to fully live up to. So many of us would like to think that we have broken away from the human herd, but how many of us can assert this of ourselves with any authority? Bellow was very unusually independent: he broke away from the Trotskyite crowd early on, and was not nearly so completely co-opted by by the neocons as many leftist critics, or some neocons, would have liked to believe. How many of Bellow's readers, from the left or the right, are anywhere near as free from the constraints of a party line as he was?
fiction often resembles philosophy in that he, and so too his characters, have read so very widely; they digress from their immediate problems with family or business to reflect on Platoor Aquinusor Nietzsche,they connect their present surroundings to the developments and trends of centuries and millenia, and they are able to do this convincingly because they have read Plato and Aquinus and Nietzsche and a lot of the other authors on the great-books lists. No-one who's relied on secondary summaries, on Western Civ textbooks and such, would be able to talk to you that way. More, the constant name-dropping encourages one to seek out and read the great thinkers of Western society going back to ancient Athens, to learn different languages in order to read the great thinkers still more directly, untranslated -- in short, to take the full course oneself, as Charlie Citrine, the narrator and protagonist of Humboldt's Gift,describes the amount of reading one had to do in order to keep up with the thrilling, brilliant conversation of the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleischer, based on Bellow's erstwhile friend and sometime enemy Delmore Schwartz.
At least, I was encouraged to take the full course. And having read by now a few of the philosophers in the Western-Civ canon, I would not hesitate to list Bellow, or Goethe,for example, among them. The similarities far outweigh the incidental differences of genre. In France, as shown for example by the careers of Voltaireand Sartre,such division of labor is not so strongly insisted upon, and sometimes the French will point to countries like Germany and the United States, and criticize us for insisting that this thinker or that is either a novelist or a philosopher, either a poet or an historian, but not both at the same time, and they're absolutely right to criticize us for that. In Germany this rigid classification is much worse even than here, although at least two prominent German philosophers, other than Goethe who is not usually classified as a philosopher, have bucked the trend: Nietzsche, not only with his famous tale Also Sprach Zarathustra,but also with many highly-regarded shorter poems; and Peter Sloterdijk with his novel -- we would call it a novel, the Germans also subdivide this category -- Der Zauberbaum,published in 1985, set in France in 1785.)
So, yes, by all means, read Bellow, read Goethe, read Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Boethius, Dante, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Vico, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre. You probably can't read them all in their original languages -- but why not try? Maybe you can! At least try to learn some other languages. Read the people I didn't list. Suggest your own list. Doesn't have to be all Western Civ. I'm relatively ignorant of non-Western philosophy -- but I'm not proud of that, by no means determined to keep it that way, and do not wish to imply that I'm dismissing that that which I do not not know, nor that I support any sort of exaltation of the West at the cost of the rest of mankind. It's just that I happen to know a little about this particular corner of the library, and find much there of value, and hate to see it getting so dusty and being forgotten. Furthermore: within this corner, I favor those dead white man who are less bigoted. Not that everyone is in perfect agreement about who exactly is to what degree progressive or reactionary, cf below. For now let me just say that one should not expect a hymn of praise of Kipling from me, and that Juvenal'sxenophobia, for example, marks him out as just as dull and dreary amongst the poets of his age, as Kipling.
You'll do what you want to do. But if you happen to learn German, and read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adornoand Sloterdijk, you may notice that they present you with five distinct, often conflicting accounts of Hegel.Nietzsche's account stays very close to Schopenhauer's until very late in his career, to the point that one feels it may have been borrowed -- and then, in Jenseits Von Gut Und Boese,after having in his earlier books heaped scorn on Hegel very much in the manner of Schopenhauer, and having gradually shifted his position on Schopenhauer from one of unmixed praise to one mixed with steadily more contempt, Nietzsche comes forth with the very startling remark that Hegel and Schopenhauer were two great brother-geniuses of philosopher, and that in striving to opposite poles of the German spirit they had been unfair to each other as only brothers can be. Can it be that if he had written longer, Nietzsche would have become an Hegelian? Probably not; the mind boggles at the suggestion. More to the point is that Nietzsche neither entirely accepted not entirely rejected other thinkers based on hearsay. He kept thinking for himself, reading the primary texts for himself, revising his own positions. Some have accused Nietzsche, unfairly, I think, of inconsistencies. I see instead growth and a very unusual degree of self-criticism, with changing philosophical positions as their unavoidable consequence. Can it be that some philosophers even today seek absolute, unchanging truth?
I am a leftist, or at least, I see the left wing of the Democratic Party in the US, and the Social Democrats and Greens in other countries, as the lesser of the available evils. I've never been tempted to vote Republican, (I have to wonder what Teddy Roosevelt, environmentalist, enemy of racial discrimination and of the largest corporations, would make of the remains of his erstwhile party today. The image of Teddy in safari gear, boots and gauntlets, chasing W out of the White House with a riding crop, like Jesus with a reed in the temple among the moneychangers, is stuck in my mind.) nor to favor a conservative in another country. Mario Vargas Llosain Peru was a very intriguing presidential candidate, but I was a distant and largely ignorant observer of his political campaigns. I only know his fiction, not what his actual political platform looked like.
And then there's Bellow, whom I have praised above. They say he was a young Trotskyitewho became an old neocon. It's true that he was a young Trotskyite, and that his best friend was Allan Bloom,and that in his collection of nonfiction entitled It All Adds UpBellow says some things which don't add up at all, and which can only be described as reactionary. And so I feel I must offer an exasperated and qualified defense of Bellow. I feel that his books are beautiful and valuable, with several exceptions: in his first two novels, Dangling Manand The Victim,he has not yet fully found his remarkable style. And then there are It All Adds Up and, not beautiful at all, but very valuable indeed as an aid to understanding Bellow, his last novel, Ravelstein,a roman a clef. Ravelstein is Allan Bloom, the neocon puppetmaster, the narrator is Bellow himself, dancing enchanted on one of Bloom's many strings. Bellow a conservative? I don't know. I would prefer to think that Bellow was hypersensitive, emotionally needy, longing for close friendship, and that the nefarious Bloom saw the aching void in Bellow's soul and permanently occupied it.
Not that Bloom himself was all bad: in his hugely best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind-- helped onto the bestseller lists, perhaps, by his pal Bellow's foreword? Or did the book's success have more to do with Reagan and Bill Bennett? -- in this book, amidst some nonsense, Bloom does say some sensible things, as, for example, when he states that Nietzsche, although appropriated by many antisemites, was himself the opposite of an antisemite. (Perhaps eventually enough people will actually read Nietzsche himself to make such statements superfluous.) In his criticisms of the contemporary (1988) student, however, I cannot recognize any reality I knew as a student at the time. And, more to the point, nowhere in the entire book can I see anything remotely resembling the character Ravelstein. And I suppose I simply trust Bellow much more than Bloom. If you're going to read one of these two books, please read the other, too. Bellow was ordinarily very good at at recognizing other people's motives, passions, obsessions, delusions, agendas. He does not tend to be flattering in his depictions of politicians either of the left or of the right. In Ravelstein, however, you see how blind he was to his best friend's faults. (Another blind spot was his own relationships with women: Bellow's wives seemed to remain constantly in or near their 20's, while he himself got older and older like Dorian Grey's portrait.)
Apart from such reservations, however, I cannot go along with the general characterization of Bellow as conservative or reactionary. That's just too simple, and Bellow is irreducibly complex. It's true, he does attack some self-serving positions of the left, but he certainly is not kind to the right, either. Bellow reminds me of Nietzsche's dictum #579 in the 9th chapter, "Der Mensch mit sich allein," of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches:"Nicht geeignet zum Parteimann. — Wer viel denkt, eignet sich nicht zum Parteimann: er denkt sich zu bald durch die Partei hindurch." ("Not well-suited to be a party member: he who thinks too much is not well-suited to be a party member: he thinks his way too quickly through the party and out the other side.") Like many of Nietzsche's sayings, this one is very easy to recite and to misunderatnd, to superficially understand, extremely difficult to fully live up to. So many of us would like to think that we have broken away from the human herd, but how many of us can assert this of ourselves with any authority? Bellow was very unusually independent: he broke away from the Trotskyite crowd early on, and was not nearly so completely co-opted by by the neocons as many leftist critics, or some neocons, would have liked to believe. How many of Bellow's readers, from the left or the right, are anywhere near as free from the constraints of a party line as he was?
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