Everything Readable

Upside Down

2011-06-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

Eduardo Galeano

They don't live in the city where they live. They're not allowed to set foot in the vast hell that threatens their tiny private heaven. Beyond the walls lie regions of terror filled with ugly, dirty, envious people. They grow up rootless, stripped of cultural identity, aware of society only as a threat. Their homeland lies in the designer names on their clothes, and their language is a modern Morse code. In the cities around the globe, children of privilege are alike in their habits and beliefs, like shopping malls and airports, which lie outside the realms of time and space. Educated in virtual reality, they know nothing of real reality, which exists only to be feared or bought.

From the point of view of statistics, if a person earns a thousand dollars and another earns nothing, each of them appears to earn five hundred dollars when one calculates per capita income. From the point of view of the struggle against inflation, adjustment policies are a good remedy. From the point of view of those who suffer such policies, they spread cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other damnations.

In a world that prefers security to justice, there is loud applause whenever justice is sacrificed on the altar of security. The rite takes place in the streets. Every time a criminal falls in a hail of bullets society feels some relief from the disease that makes it tremble. The death of each lowlife has a pharmaceutical effect on those living the high life. The word 'pharmacy' comes from pharmakos, the Greek name for humans sacrificed to the gods in times of crisis.

But God, being rather scatterbrained, forgot to make the first woman and man, and they had no choice but to make themselves. Way down there in God's garbage dump, at the bottom of that abyss, the first woman and the first man made themselves out of God's leftovers. We human beings were born from garbage, and that's why we all have a bit of day and a bit of night, and we're all time and earth and water and wind.

Galeano lays out an incriminating vision of the modern world. It's incriminating because if you're reading this, you speak English and you have access to the Internet and probably live in the developed world. This is incriminating because Galeano alleges that the developed world is responsible for a lot of evil everywhere else.

If the things he says are true, I come close to thinking that enjoying the pleasant life we lead here is a mortal sin, because it is afforded us by the suffering of so many people. So I take refuge in the lovely qualification, if the things he says are true. And you get the sense that the things he says are true by perception, just as so many things North Americans believe about the innocence of their society are true by perception. After all, it's a complex world, isn't it? And how can we really know if cheap mangoes arranged pleasingly on a shelf in a grocery store actually cause someone somewhere else misery. And how can we tell if trade agreements aren't fair? We can't even figure out if taxation within our own borders is fair.

So you read Galeano and if it's true, dammit. Which means you probably won't finish the book. Because half way through you are already feeling like there is just too much to deal with. Wow it sucks, yeah, in fact, you don't even make any excuses, you just say yeah wow it sucks. Besides, the copy of Upside Down I got from the library reeks of pot smoke, so despise the probably snooty granola hater who lives in this first world and hates it and read this book before you and probably felt all superior to the rest of us who are just trying to get by. At least that way you won't have to feel badly about the woman in Bolivia who has to pay extortionate rates for her water because a US company purchased it all.

Double Fold

2011-06-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

Nicholson Baker

The British Library's newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane--possibly mistaking the library for an aircraft-manufacturing plant--dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum's crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility.

If the thought that the British Library later willingly destroyed these 'unscathed' newspapers arouses a surge off emotion in your breast, you will be interested in Double Fold. If not, you might want to read it anyway and see what it does make you feel, or you may not want to waste your time.

Life: A User's Manual

2011-06-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

Georges Perec

However irksome are the discomfitures which a man who has given himself body and soul to the profession of ethnography may encounter in his attempt to grasp the deeper nature of Man in concrete terms--or, in other words, to apprehend the minimal sociality defining the human condition by conquering the heteroclite evidence of diverse cultures--and although an ethnographer may not aspire to more than the discovery of relative truths (since it is vain to hope to reach any final truth), the worst difficulty I have had to encounter was not at all of that kind: I wanted to go to the absolute limit of the primitive; had I not got all I wanted in these graceful Natives whom no one had seen before me, who would perhaps not be seen again after me? At the end of an exhilarating search, I had my savages, I asked for nothing more than to be one of them, to share their days, their pains, their rituals. Alas! they didn't want to have me, they were not prepared to teach me their customs and beliefs! They had no use whatever for the gifts I laid beside them, no use at all for the help I thought I could give! It was because of me that they abandoned their villages and it was only to discourage me, to convince me there was no point in my persevering, that they chose increasingly inhospitable sites, imposing ever more terrible living conditions on themselves to show me they would rather face tigers and volcanoes, swamps, suffocating fog, elephants, poisonous spiders, than men. I think I know a good deal bout physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying...

As always there is a thread that seems to weave together the books I'm reading, no matter how far apart they objectively may be. And as usual with this thread, I do not always realize it until I have already been reading books that are a part of its weave for some time.

Perec's book, although somewhat ponderous to read, seemingly filled with trivialities and recorded data that may not have anything to do with plot or anything other than Perec's urge to report, is a story told by recounting different bits and pieces about all the residents of a single building in France. Sometimes he tells you of past residents, sometimes of present ones, but the story is always circling around this building. The chapters themselves are divided by rooms or characters (In the Boiler Room, Entrance Hall, Dinteville). The story is concerned with puzzles and is itself a puzzle. It's a book that's fonder to remember having read, than to read.

Much of what seems to be the clutter of Perec's story can either be ascribed to his desire to create puzzles or to his ethnographic impulse. Although Life is placed under the genre of fiction, it isn't hard to imagine it simply being an ethnography of one rather strange set of neighbors.

Box of Matches

2011-05-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

Nicholson Baker

Claire told me last night that Lucy, the frail but funny woman who lives on our street, has had to go into the hospital. She's going to be okay, but the woman who helps Lucy was trying to fin d a home for Lucy's pets. Claire was wondering whether we should take one of the cat. I see that it would be a good thing to do but it seems to me that our current cat gets into terrible fight with neighbor cats already, and he's had a major blow this year as a result of the arrival of the duck. Greta, although not very bright in some ways, is shrewd about cats. What you do is you walk up to the cat slowly, as if you want to say hello, and when the cat tentatively extends its nose in the willing-to-sniff-and-be-sniffed stance, you peck at him sharply. Then, when the shocked cat turns to walk away, his ears back, his feelings and nose hurt, lunge at him again and peck him directly on or near his anus. That makes him gallop off--for no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.

I want to take care of the world. Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earlfaps that I swivel down over my ears. There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away. It is like listening to the whales groan and squeal--there is usually one cry that is prominent, and, by turning my head from side to side, I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is. I can fly, of course.

This is a good-feeling book. You wouldn't imagine that a good story could be made of a man describing his thoughts while sitting in front of a fire in the early morning, but Nicholson Baker manages to do this: his narrator writes a series of goodmornings each based on the starting of a fire by a match. You know you can trust him because it is a truly wise person who can point out that no one likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck. But beyond this, Baker demonstrates to me that it's not really that important what your story is about; as long as you can tell it good and tell it well, it will be interesting.

Wonderful World

2011-05-08T14:03:00.001-07:00

Javier Calvo

If you want to create a special place, says Mr Bocanegra, put in all the statues you can.

Wonderful World makes for an interesting light read, but honestly it didn't stand out to me. It's a wacky crime story, and a bit of a farce--okay, it's a gigantic farce (when was the last time you heard of the high crime world of antique dealers?)--but as much as I enjoy these styles, something about Calvo's writing never really does it for me. It has all the right things: he takes Stephen King and Pink Floyd seriously and makes them central players in the reality of the story; there are majestically outrageous characters, absurd characters with a touch of prophetism about them; and it has all the color of sherbert ice cream, but I think the flaw is in how he ties it all together: it didn't tie together for me.

Garbage

2011-02-22T22:32:00.000-08:00

Stephen Dixon

Two men come in and sit at the bar. I say 'How you doing, fellas, what'll it be?'
'What are you, about to close?' the stocky one says.
'No, it's just empty for a change. Still want to stay?'
'Sure. Beers. Whatever you got.'

Interesting story about a bar owner who gets pressure from a garbage company run like the mob. The bar owner doesn't want to switch services, in fact he is damned stubborn on this count. Dixon makes a story out of it.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

2011-02-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

Thornton Wilder

The Archbishop knew that most of the priests of Peru were scoundrels. It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy. On one occasion, the iniquities in his see having been called to his notice, he almost did something about it. He had just heard that it was becoming a rule in Peru for priests to exact two measures of meal for a fairly good absolution, and five measures for a really effective one. He trembled with indignation; he roared to his secretary and bidding him bring his writing materials, announced he was going to dictate an overwhelming message to his shepherds. But there was no ink left in the inkwell; there was no ink left in the next room; there was no ink to be found in the whole palace. This state of things in his household so upset the good man that he fell ill of the combined rages and learned to guard himself against such indignations.

Even now, she thought, almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters

2011-01-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

Gary Zukav

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics says that the cat is in a kind of limbo represented by a wave function which contains the possibility that the cat is dead and also the possibility that the cat is alive. When we look in the box, and not before, one of these possibilities actualizes and the other vanishes. This is known as the collapse of the wave function because the hump in the wave function representing the possibility that did not occur, collapses. It is necessary to look into the box before either possibility can occur. Until then, there is only a wave function.

Scott of the Antarctic

2011-01-17T15:05:00.001-08:00

David Crane

They were six days behind schedule, and Scott had already abandoned the idea of stopping in Melbourne, but these faltering spirits were enough to prompt him to break their journey at the 'weird, blighted island' of South Trinidad. The island was sighted on the morning of 13, September, and dropping anchor on its western side, Scott took two small boats and a landing party in on the heavy, shark-infested breakers that smashed up against its rocky shore. It was a dangerous operation, and if it is typical of Scott that he should have first checked that everyone could swim, it was even more so that he should have pushed on even when he found out that they couldn't.

In many ways what we have here in its ur-form is the Scott of modern myth, a man of ambition without direction, of aspirations without vision, of will without conscience, of charm without kindness, of character without centre. It is worth conceding, too, that Mason knew Scott well enough to make the similarities to this grotesque more than mildly discomforting, and yet if he portrayed a pragmatism and complacent ordinariness in Rames which he did not much like, he also recognised the burning, redeeming idealism that his hero is reluctant to admit even to himself. 'She saw something in his face which she had never seen there before,' he wrote of the moment when Cynthia, by now Rames's disillusioned wife, discovers that her rival is not another woman but the old Antarctic charts that her husband has kept like a guilty secret in a locked drawer, 'which she had never thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.

Even at the height of the Raj, however, there can have been few better 'haters' than Birdie Boweres, and fewer still with such a rich portfolio of prejudices. In a perverse kind of way he retained a soft spot for the 'sausage-eaters' for having produced Martin Luther, but that was teh limit of his tolerance. Bowers hated teh half-caste and he hated the native. He hated teh 'heathen darkness' of Islam and the fetishistic, crucifix-worshipping antics of Popery. He hated teh priest-ridden Irish and the idolatrous Spanish and Portuguese. He hated teh Russians and he hated teh 'Maccaroni'. He hated the 'filthy smelly creatures' he found in the Far East and the 'Godless heedlessly happy, licentious, desperately wicked 'froggies'' he found in Paris. 'If ever I could call a dear little kid like that my own,' he wrote home of the offspring of a white father and an Asian mother, 'it would break my heart to feel that she wasn't 'pure'. Thank God we are white & that our parents were pure, & that we were brought up in a country where purity--at least in name--is not at a discount.'*
*This was not the limit of Bowers's oddities. An imperialist who looked with glad eyes on the imminent destruction of the British Empire; a patriot who had no time for his King; a little Englander who saw the Church of England as the 'Daughter of the Harlot'; a naval officer who could salute a Dreadnaught as the instrument of Divine Retribution--contradiction was at the heart of his character.

If there was no name on that telegram that could have more surprised Scott, there was certainly none that could have been more disturbing. In terms of courage or audacity men like Scott and Shackleton were the equals of anyone, but in all the disciplines, skills and attitudes that made the polar traveller, and that were almost second nature to the Norwegian, Amundsen simply belonged to a different league. It is not just that a Scott could not compete on those terms, but rather that there was no way in which he possibly could have done, because skiing as Amundsen and his men could ski was not the skill of a week or a month or even a year, was not something that could be picked up on the job, or learned on an ice floe on the way down to the south. It is unarguable that British expeditions did not help their cause by recruiting from the Irrawaddy and the Indian maidan, but even with the most technically accomplished party that Scott or any other British leader could have put together, there was no chance that any 'race' against as skilled and ruthlessly single-minded an opponent as Amundsen could end in anything but defeat.

The is no 'tomorrow' in the diary, and the next entry is for the fifteenth or sixteenth--'Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping-bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on.' That night Oates was done, and they knew it was the end. 'Should this be found,' Scott wrote in his diary, shifting for the first time from private mode to an invisible and posthumous public, 'I want these facts recorded. Oates's last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not--would not--give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning--yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

It was not faulty logistics that did for Scott, not lack of food or fuel, not washers, not Meares taking more than his share, not imprecise instructions, not over-rigid instructions, not arrogance, nor stupidity, not the fifth man, not scurvy, but the weather. It is obvious that if he had marked his depots more clearly on the Barrier and plateau he would have saved himself a world of anxiety, but the miracle of it is that with their depots over-spaced and their line of retreat ill-marked, their food devoid of vitamins and their time on the plateau so much longer than Amundsen's, that Eastern 'slab' that had been so elaborately fashioned for them came within a whisker of not falling.

A First Rate Tragedy

2011-01-01T14:17:00.001-08:00

Diana Preston

'It has happened! we have found what we sought! Good God, what a twist of fate.' So the young Norwegian Tryggve Gran recorded a grim discovery on 12 November 1912 by a search-party trekking across the blinding whiteness of Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier. They had found the snow-covered tent containing the bodies of Captain Scott and his two companions, Edward Wilson and 'Birdie' Bowers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of food and fuel which might have saved them. Of the two other members of the Polar party, Captain Oates and Petty Officer Edgar Evans, there was no sign. However, Scott's diaries and letters, found by his body, recounted their terrible fate. It was a story that would resonate throughout the world and make heroes of them all.

If you imagine the most snooty, ugly, pompous English woman you can think of, you will be somewhere close to Preston. Her writing makes you want to spit.

The Last Place on Earth

2010-12-31T16:14:00.001-08:00

Roland Huntford

When Nansen said that 'to do everything with human beings causes much work and much suffering' he was denouncing culpable stupidity; but to Sir Clements the squandering of human effort was the expression of an ideal. One aspect of the English romantic movement was to equate suffering with achievement. There was a virtue in doing things the hard way. Contemporary drawings show British bluejackets straining in serried ranks before grotesquely overladen sledges, like soldiers marching into battle; humbly heroic figures overcoming the power of Nature by brute force and sheer grit. Dogs interfered with this vision; they made things seem too easy. That really was their crime.

'Adventure' as the American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson liked to say, 'is a sign of incompetence'

The Panda's Thumb

2010-12-29T10:59:00.000-08:00

Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is irreversible; signs of ancestry are always preserved; convergence, however impressive, is always superficial.

In reading Schweber's detailed account of the moments preceding Darwin's formulation of natural selection, I was particularly struck by the absence of deciding influence from his own field of biology. The immediate precipitators were a social scientist, an economist, and a statistician. If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understand of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense--the debate about angels on pinheads--makes sense once you realize the theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. In certain theological systems, the corporeality or noncorporeality of angels is an important matter indeed.

But I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation--and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. Few honest passions are not based upon some valid perception of unity or some anomaly worthy of note. The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.

Gould's work, in addition to being very accessible biology and natural history, also carries a valuable tone: Gould sounds impressively fair. Often when I read science or history, or almost anything that claims to be non-fiction, I am most struck by the human capacity to be wrong. It seems that given a choice, we always choose the wrong answer. Gould's value lies in his ability to see, without ridicule or pride, the folly of past generations. Gould chronicles the physiometrists of the nineteenth century, complete with their repulsive racism, and yet manages to find room for the context and thus to find the value in their bullshit. It is not so much a magnanimous stance that reviews the many points at which humans have chosen to stick their heads in the sand, but a humility that recognizes we are probably wrong on a good many counts ourselves. Gould recognizes that dismissing another person's thought is the easiest mode of life, but certainly not the pathway to wisdom.

Siddhartha

2010-12-16T21:55:00.001-08:00

Hermann Hesse
Tr. Hilda Rosner

And Siddhartha said softly, as if speaking to himself: What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes this same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowls of rice wine or cocoanut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary escape. Falling asleep over his bowl of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape from their bodies by long exercises and dwell in the non-Self.

He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. All this, all this yellow and blue, river and wood, passed for the first time across Siddhartha's eyes. It was no longer the magic of Mara, it was no more the veil of Maya, it was no longer meaningless and the chance diversities of the appearances of the world, despised by deep-thinking Brahmins, who scorned diversity, who sought unity. River was river, and if the One and Divine in Siddhartha secretly lived in blue and river, it was just the divine art and intention that there should be yellow and blue, there sky and wood--and here Siddhartha. Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them. How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion, I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened. I have indeed awakened and have only been born today.

And yet he envied them; the more he became like them, the more he envied them. He envied them the one thing that he lacked and that they had: the sense of importance with which they lived their lives, the depth of their pleasures and sorrows, the anxious but sweet happiness of their continual power to love. These people were always in love with themselves, with their children, with honor or money, with plans or hope. But these he did not learn from them, these child-like pleasures and follies; he only learned the unpleasant things from them which he despised.

The ferryman smiled again. He touched Siddhartha's arm gently and said: Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.

When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

The story of the Buddha who the people flock to in order to learn wisdom and how to live the good life is almost a cliche. The story of the ancient philosopher who gathers those who are seeking around him and who teaches the good way permeates our culture. The guru on the top of the mountain has had ten million people climb up to him, all seeking enlightenment. We want to know so we can live the good life.

Although it is going out on a bit of a limb, I wonder if the reason most people seek after knowledge is to get at the good life. Many philosophers pursue understanding in order to discover this good life. I wonder if when it is sought at it's root, if the reason for all learning isn't to live the good life. People want to know so that they can live better.

How is it then, that our institutions of learning, Universities and colleges and schools, feel so different? Professors in schools are not interested in the good life. Or, if they are, the good life is apparently the academic life--which is to say, is not a life that everyone can live. When you look at our learned men and women you can't help feeling that there is quite a bit of difference between them and the guru's on the mountain's, the peaceful sage ferryman, and the great philosopher kings. Who among the professor's in our society is living the good life? An unfair question that asks you to judge and qualify things you couldn't really know, but all the same a question that gets at this root.

Most professors, the people who are learned, still submit to the institution of the academy which often times seems to be designed more by the flow of money than anything else. They teach classes and purvey their wisdom in the form of credits and class hours and assignments and letter grades and degrees. Is this learning? Is this wisdom? Credits and degrees may be good and wonderful, but it makes me feel like the learning we have is cropped and shallow.

What are we pursuing learning for in the United States? Is it to get rich? Is it to be healthy? To be happy? To be famous or powerful? To make a difference? Aren't all these things encompassed in the good life? Why else would you seek riches unless you thought they could make life good; why else try to be healthy or happy? Why would you want to be famous or powerful or make a difference? We pursue learning in order to find the path to the good life, but we won't admit it.

Where is the learned sage who gathers round those who are seeking and lives this good life, rather than isolating it in their writings and having nothing to do with it in their lifestyles? I realize that I am resorting to questions to argue a point, but I feel that our understanding of learning is far too narrow. I am restrained to questions because the varieties of academic experience I see available are so pinched. I do believe that wisdom and learning can be helpful to living a good life and I would like to see learning recognized in a broader sense.

Essays Vol I

2010-12-13T18:22:00.001-08:00

Michel de Montaigne

I felt compassion for the poor people who were taken in by these follies. And now I think that I was at least as much to be pitied myself. Not that experience has since shown me anything surpassing my first beliefs, and that through no fault of my curiosity; but reason has taught me that to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible, is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God's will and the power of our mother Nature; and that there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence. If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine understanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits. Now, what seems to me to bring as much disorder into our consciences as anything, in these religious troubles that we are in, is this partial surrender of their beliefs by Catholics. It seems to them that they are being very moderate and understanding when they yield to their opponents some articles in dispute. But, besides the fact that they do not see what an advantage it is to a man charging you for you to begin to give ground and withdraw, and how much that encourages him to pursue his point, those articles which they select as the most trivial are sometimes very important. We must either submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical government, or do without it completely. It is not for us to decide what portion of obedience we owe it.
Moreover, I can say this for having tried it. In other days I exercised this freedom of personal choice and selection, regarding with negligence certain points in the observance of our Church which seem more vain or strange than others; until, coming to discuss them with learned men, I found that these things have a massive and very solid foundation, and that is only stupidity and ignorance that makes us receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not remember how much contradiction we sense even in our own judgment? How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday, which are fables to us today? Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul.

Montaigne sees two sides to every story; or, he will always show you how your viewpoint fails to fully understand the opposing viewpoint. A continual thread that runs through most of Montaigne's essays is his desire to disarm our tool of dismissal. Montaigne recognizes the basic human desire to not meet what we do not understand or disagree with, but to circumvent it by ipso facto arguments. Society would rather deal with personality or culture or the color of a person's eyes than meet the logic of an argument. Therefore, as Montaigne's continual picking at our scabby opinions reveals, we tend to hide from reality by facing superficiality.

The color of a person's eyes, like their skin, may matter, but not for the reasons generally given. Democrats say that you shouldn't vote for Republicans because they are war-mongerers and support the rich and are racists, not because Democrats believe that wars won't achieve what they think they will nor because wars are evil, and not because they believe that tax cuts will not benefit low-income families as much as they will benefit those with higher incomes. The Republicans say you shouldn't vote for Democrats because they want to give control of the country to other nations, because they play to the victim mentality and don't believe in good honest hard work, not because presenting a strong presence on the international level will benefit US interests nor because continuing unemployment benefits enables people. We--and you can define this term however you feel necessary--have become adept at telling strong stories that preempt logical arguments. Immigrants are illegal drug-running aliens who all probably belong to a gang; laws against abortion curtail women's rights and extend male hegemony; and the people who blew up the World Trade Towers are terrorists who cackle evilly and enjoy destruction. If you can find the right name, the right story, for your opposition, you don't have to worry about what they say at all. If you need any more proof of this, have you ever heard a cogent explanation of 9-11 from the people who did the bombing? Contrast the paucity of such explanations with the vast effort we expend explaining why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, I think it's equally dangerous to fall into the trap of meeting only the argument and ignoring the color of eye and skin and faith. It seems to me that we are eager to dismiss these colors because when it comes down to it, we don't understand them. They point out to us that there really are differences among humans. In a perfect world of logic, if we knew all the information, and had all the clarity of reasoning power at our disposal, no one in their right mind could disagree with anyone else. But you only have to look at a person's eyes and note the color there, to be assured that no amount of reasoning is ever going to bring about such broad agreement. At least for now, these things remain to remind us that there is still so much that we do not comprehend.

The Creators

2010-12-12T15:40:00.001-08:00

Daniel J Boorstin

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story--a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. Here I have chosen creators who appeal to e, who have brought something new into the arts. But each of us alone must experience how the new adds to the old and how the old enriches the new, how Picasso enhances Leonardo and how Homer illuminates Joyce.

I used to believe that there was no such thing as originality. I was convinced that there was nothing new beneath the sun and I read Ecclesiastes as the greatest expression of the futility of searching for something new. But I couldn't help enjoying all the many stories I read, and I did keep reading stories, old ones and new ones (speaking chronologically). Somehow, in the reading of all the many stories, I have become convinced that there really is such a thing as originality. That there can be a new story.

Boorstin's primer of the history of European (see end note) art has convinced me all the more of this truth. Although Boorstin's review of art quickly becomes a review of great artists, it none-the-less leaves you with the feeling that there is a chance that someone might make something new, that the forms of beauty and imagination, though they are all based off of the same subject matter, somehow hold the potential for genuine creation.

I was convinced that nothing new could exist because the only source we have is that which has already existed. If this was the case, I thought, it would be unreasonable to believe that something new could be managed since new would seem to entail not having existed before. It isn't new if it's old. I believed that all art was trying to reach back to truth or to reach back to depicting nature (by which I probably mean truth) in its fullest revelation. To me, that necessarily meant nothing was new.

I do still believe that art is attempting to depict truth (as opposed to reality or facts). But newness becomes real when we understand truths which we had not understood before. Truth being eternal, I don't think it can be new or old, but our understanding of truth is hardly eternal. The history of human understanding of truth is a history full of newness and originality (and also a good deal of missteps). So I do believe in originality. You have only to look at art to come to this belief.

End Note. Boorstin subtitled this work A History of Heroes of the Imagination. A suitably grand subtitle for such a topic, it leaves me with a unpleasant taste in my mouth as I finish the work and find that it was much more accurately a history of heroes of the European imagination. Boorstin makes nods at other cultures, adds odd chapters in which he condenses the art of entire cultures (cultures which have lasted longer than the Europeans) into quick blurbs. This is frustrating. His subject is admittedly of gigantic scope and it would be impossible to discuss the entire history of art without leaving out many important figures, but in light of his consistent decision to focus on the art of Europeans, really Western Europeans, I feel that Boorstin should re-market the work as a European history of imagination.

You Bright and Risen Angels

2010-12-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

William T Vollmann

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

An owner of an apple orchard has a bad year because his apples aren't selling. He believes that the reason they aren't selling is that people have suddenly started eating more oranges. At a town-hall meeting, he tells a group of community members who don't know much about orchards, What we're talking about is oranges, not apples. The implication of this statement is that most people think the important issues is apples, and while they matter, the true professional knows that there is something else going on.

In a recent interview with Barbara Walters, General David Petraeus, US head of command in Afghanistan said, What we're after is increasing security for the population, not trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in the country.

The implication here is that most people believe the US is trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in Afghanistan. The last time you heard about people trying to kill or capture everyone in a specific group, didn't it sound like genocide? Though we do not always think about what we say, Petraeus' comment reveals something very disturbing to me in how America thinks about its War on Terrorism. Petraeus' comment was not a harsh correction or a firm reminder; he spoke calmly and it did not seem that capturing or killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan was a thing that should be avoided, only that it wasn't as good a goal as providing security to the population. One got the sense that capturing and killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan would be a nice by-product, but regrettably it was not as important as security.

It's dangerous when any nation or group of people decide that another group needs to be captured or killed. This is a very troubling idea to me. Few Americans would have difficulty digesting the statement: Our mission is to kill every terrorist. Yet, terrorist is a term that we reserve the sole power of applying. I'm willing to bet that Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic extremists do not think of themselves as terrorists. When they get together at Ramadan for family reunions, and mom asks what Osama is up to now days, the answer is not, Oh, he's still a terrorist, probably will stick with it for a few more years, there's a lot happening in the field right now. Since we have the right to apply the label and the label removes its bearer's right to life, shouldn't someone be asking some questions about this?

Beatrice and Virgil

2010-12-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

Yann Martel

He has another one that morning, while Beatrice is still sleeping. Virgil remembers how their miseries started. Started in his mind, that is, the moment when he realized what was happening to them. He acts it out. He's reading his morning paper at his favorite cafe and his eyes are drawn to one of the headlines. The headline announces a government edict concerning new categories of citizens--or rather, as the article makes clear, a category of citizens and a new category of non-citizens. Virgil reads with increasing astonishment as he realizes that he--he himself personally, in all his specific details, this monkey sitting in a cafe reading a paper, such an ordinary thing--is the exact and intended target.

Yann Martel writes with burning realizations. I've read three works by him now, and in all of them, the reader is exposed to a slow welling into sudden realization of some awfulness. It's not as simple as saying he uses twists or a gimmick in every novel, although one wonders if he hasn't trapped himself with the fame of his famous twist. Martel's burning realizations are like strings holding back sharp blades while candles are placed to burn through them. You get a sense of what is going to happen, sometimes a very detailed and clear sense, but it's nothing compared to the sudden whoosh of the blade swinging down.

When I started Beatrice and Virgil, I worried that it was going to be Life of Pi all over again. A story of animals signifying things too horrible to tell factually, things that required the truth more than they required the facts, and of course, I also worried that there would be a twist at the end--that sudden jerking away of the screen that shows everything in a new light. But, and this is the but you will be happy to hear, it is not the case.

Beatrice and Virgil is an adequate continuation of Martel's work. He doesn't try to do Life of Pi over again, he writes a novel knowing that he has written that famous novel, and he resists making the spectacle of this the awesome spectacle of that.

Interestingly, there still may be a giant shocking twist in this novel. But it is only revealed by the cover. If you remember that most of what Martel writes confuses fact and fiction, confuses stories and history--in fact most of what he writes suggests that everything is story--and if you remember this, his calling Beatrice and Virgil a novel is very interesting. It's a story about an author who wrote a very famous book and then didn't really write any others. The author is from Canada. The author wrote a book that had animals in it. The author has a son named Theo. The author moved to a new city after he couldn't write any more. A good question to ask is can a biography be turned into fiction by calling it a novel?

Note
Criticism is not figuring out what the author intended or the meaning a reader can take from a work; criticism is writing a new book. Each reader reads a thing the author never could have written. In fact, each reader can actually be said to write a new book. When we make connections or see images, feel emotions and imagine characters, we are not playing a game where we try to align ourselves as closely as possible with what was happening in the author's head as he traced his words on the page. No, we are performing an equally creative act. Unless criticism is seen as a creative act, it will be empty. Criticism is not reactive, it is creative. More than this, criticism is creation.

Waiting

2010-12-09T23:59:00.001-08:00

Ha Jin

Once alone in a toilet stall, he tried to sort out his thoughts. Manna must have hoped he would spend two thousand yuan to buy off Bensheng at that time, though she had never made her wish explicit to him. He remembered clearly that she refused to share such a cost. Then why did she call him 'miser'? He felt something clutching his lungs, and a pain gnawed him in the chest. Had he had that much money, he would certainly have brought about the divorce sooner. He had told her that he only had six hundred yuan in the bank, and she wouldn't even reveal to him how much she had saved. She must have thought he was a rich man and could easily afford two thousand yuan. After so many years, how come she still didn't believe him? Why on earth had she always kept her secrets from him, never allowing him to see her bankbook?
In his mind a voice replied, Because money's more precious and more effective than love. If you had spent the money, everything would have worked out all right and you could have enjoyed a happy marriage.
No, it wasn't that simple, Lin retorted.
It was simple and clear like a bug on a bald head, the voice went on. Say you had owned ten thousand yuan and spent one-fifth of it on your brother-in-law, counting that as a loss. Then you could have married Manna a decade ago. If so, she wouldn't have harbored a grievance against you. You see, isn't money more powerful than love?
That's not true, Lin countered. We needed no money to help us fall in love, just as we need no money to consummate our marriage.
Really? Then why did you spend eleven hundred yuan for the wedding? Why have you kept separate bank accounts?
Lin was at a loss for an answer, but he suppressed that cold voice. For a long while he remained in the bathroom, which was the only quiet place where he could be unobserved. Now he was sitting on the windowsill with his back against the wall, absentmindedly watching the backyard. It was already dark; beyond the screen mosquitoes were humming and fireflies were drawing little arcs. From a dormitory house a harmonica was shrieking out "The Internationale" disjointedly. A truck driver was burning oily rags at the corner of the garage, a bucket of water standing by him. Far away on the hill a cluster of gas lamps were flickering in a temporary apiary. Some beekeepers were still busy collecting honey over there despite nightfall.

Ha Jin's story of a man waiting to get married stumps you. What are you to do with this? A man waits to be with the woman he loves because he's already married by an arranged marriage to a woman who, let's face it, isn't all that bad, although she does have bound feet and is a bit of a peasant, but all the same she takes care of his aging parents and serves him and is faithful and raises their daughter and works really hard and at the end of the story she seems like a pretty wonderful woman all-round, yet still this man is determined to marry this other woman, the one he loves, only he doesn't feel forceful enough about it to be harsh and compel his wife to divorce him, nor does he feel passionate enough to break the rules and have an affair with this woman he loves, so instead he waits twenty years or so and then divorces his first wife and marries this woman who becomes his second wife. What do you do with this guy?

Lin (this wishy-washy guy) comes across as a repugnant wimp, yet you can't really be angry with him because he has good motives. He doesn't want to hurt his first wife, because while he doesn't necessarily love her, he does care about her. He doesn't want to hurt his second wife by having an affair with her because he's conscious of the laws of culture enforced in China during the Cultural Revolution and doesn't want either of them to lose their jobs. Really, he just can't make a decision. The story is one that vividly characterizes indecision.

But Ha Jin, like every good writer, knows the importance of a bathroom. I am convinced that there is no more thoughtful place than a bathroom. Lin's strongest moments occur in the bathroom. I would like to point to the cliche: shit or get off the pot, which is what one wishes someone had yelled at Lin earlier on in the story, but he manages to figure something out in the bathroom.

Nero

2010-11-17T20:48:00.000-08:00

Edward Champlin

Nero has remained notorious for two millennia because of a series of extravagant public gestures, usually outrageous, often repellent, always riveting: murdering the mother with whom he may have slept, killing his pregnant wife in a rage, castrating and marrying a young freedman, mounting a public stage to act a hero driven mad or a woman giving birth, racing a ten-horse chariot at the Olympic Games, fiddling while Rome burned, burning Christians to light up the night, building the vast Golden House, and so forth. My purpose in this book has been restricted: to explain what Nero might have meant by the deeds and misdeeds that that have made him so notorious for so long. I have not tried to justify his actions or to rehabilitate his character, and I have not attempted to discern any large program, political or artistic. I have assumed that his actions were rational--that is, he was not crazy--and that much of what he did resonated far more with contemporary social attitudes than our hostile sources would have us believe. The Nero who has emerged in the preceding pages, whatever his many faults as an emperor and a human being may have been, was a man of considerable talent, great ingenuity, and boundless energy. He was an artist who believed in his own abilities and vision, and an aesthete committed to life as a work of art. He was a historian with a keen sense of the sharp reality of the past (real, legendary, mythical) in daily life at Rome, and a public relations man ahead of his time with a shrewd understanding of what the people wanted, often before they knew it themselves.

The center of the triumphal spectacle was of course the triumphator. He entered the city riding in a high, two-wheeled chariot, the currus triumphalis, drawn by four horses and decorated with laurel branches. All of Augustus' successors in fact used the first emperor's own, elaborately decorated chariot. Beneath it, for the purpose of warding off evil, was slung a large phallus, which might be adorned with bells and whips. The general himself was a blaze of color in his triumphal garb, the vestis triumphalis. Normally he wore a purple tunic embroidered with gold palm branches, the tunica palmata, and over this a purple toga embroidered with gold stars, the toga picta. On his head he might wear a laurel wreath, the corona laurea, as did some of his suite, or a public slave might hold a heavy gold wreath, the corona triumphalis, over him. In his right hand, he would carry a laurel branch; in his left, an ivory scepter topped by an eagle. Around his neck he wore a bulla, a protective amulet, and, in the old days at least, he would have his face painted red.
There is no question that the triumphator, the successor of the kings of old, was meant to represent Jupiter. Riding with him in the chariot, the slave would periodically remind him who he was: Respice post te, hominem te esse memento, Look behind you, and remember that you are a man.

In publishing Nero, Champlin was still publishing for academics. Nero is more concerned with sources than the actual subject. More than two-thirds of the book is devoted to discussing the merits of various sources, leaving you with precious little that addresses the content of the these sources. Perhaps I came to Nero hoping for a biography of Nero and so was disappointed when I read a very good primer on the epistemology of history.

Champlin demonstrates the unreliability of most historical sources and the bias the riddles the body of work known as 'history'. He makes you doubt whether any history can be trusted. The service Champlin provides of reminding you that every source has a reason for saying what it says, and that every history is also an objective, a goal, a tool, would be pleasing in moderation, but this biography leaves you wondering if anything can be known about Nero at all. Maybe he wasn't even Roman.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

2010-11-10T09:02:00.001-08:00

Rebecca Solnit

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in his Confessions, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning. That history began with the walks of various characters in the eighteenth century, but the more literary among them strove to consecrate walking by tracing it to Greece, whose practices were so happily revered and misrepresented then. The eccentric English revolutionary and writer John Thelwall wrote a massive, turgid book, The Peripatetic, uniting Rousseauian romanticism with this spurious classical tradition. IN one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages: I pursue my meditations on foot, he remarked. And after Thelwall's book appeared in 1793, many more would make the claim until it became an established idea that the ancients walked to think, so much so that the very picture seems part of cultural history: austerely draped men speaking gravely as they pace through a dry Mediterranean landscape punctuated with the occasional marble column.

Solnit spends a few of her words on this subject, but misses so many opportunities to dwell in walking like a true history of walking could. She commits the boring sin of so many subject historians, turning her history into a chronicle of famous people who have talked about walking. The subject of walking presents such a large untilled field, yet Solnit only manages to raise a crop of sickly alfalfa. But her thoughts on walking did inspire a few interesting moments for me.

Have you ever marveled at the balance of a human being walking? They flow smoothly forward like liquid poured and yet beneath the flow is disguised a drip drop foot placement, defying gravity. The walker does not carry his weight on feet so much as in movement. In momentum, which is the magic word, abracadabra of the walker. Like sliding, like sleighing, like drifting and flowing, walking is the only movement I have seen that looks like a wheel without a wheel. Walkers should be rollers, but the mechanics are nothing like rolling, the mechanics are tottering. It's a marvel to me that two jointed limbs can produce such a gliding movement.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

2010-10-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

Richard Farina

But in such a place you choose to live? From five years old, except for summers, you've been in institutions. This is life? Here, in the microcosm, with what you know, you are a waste. Lost, but truly lost.

There is a lot of shit that gets written. It is this realization that has kept me from writing anything about the quotes I've been putting up. I don't want to contribute. Much of the shit that gets written originates in laziness; I hope this where mine comes from. But I have also read shit that seemed to be the product of hard work. It was still shit in case this is unclear. Not to join the bandwagon of haters on the present era, but it also seems that more shit gets written now than ever before. Easy answer is that there are fewer hurdles between you and publishing. Whatever the case, there is a lot of shit written.

This is not to say that Farina wrote shit. Well, he probably did, but this is not to say that this particular piece of writing by Farina is shit.

But despite all the shit being written, mine included, it's better that it get written than nothing be said at all. There are dead bodies floating in the water with which people brush their teeth. There are people who live in their cars and get tickets for having nowhere to go. There are people who are out of their minds and no one will help them in order to preserve their rights. There are people saying the same evil about their evil enemies that their evil enemies are saying about them. Going back to Vollmann and his question (How can we not know what goes on in this world?) I would rather write shit about the shit that goes on, than be too afraid to write anything at all.

On Beauty and Being Just

2010-10-24T20:34:00.001-07:00

Elaine Scarry

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation.

Before leaving the site of persons, we must recall that we were here looking at only one complaint, the complaint that we might, by looking at such persons, bring them harm. But there are, of course, other arguments less political but equally antagonistic to the site of persons, such as the notion that beautiful persons do not deserve to be attended to for their beauty. Sometimes this idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that their beauty is natural: such persons were born with it, lazily inheriting it through no labor or merit of their own. (This argument is not very strong since so many things we unembarrassedly admire--great math skill, a capacity for musical composition, the physical agility of a dancer or speed of an athlete--entail luck at birth.) With equal energy the idea of undeservingness is urged on the grounds that such beauty is artifactual: such persons spend hours running along the beach, plaiting their hair into tiny braids, adorning themselves with beads, bracelets, oil, arrays of color. (This argument is also not very strong since we normally admire feats of artifactual labor, the formation of good government, a well-run newspaper, a twelve-year labor of self-education.) The two complaints contradict one another--one proposing that it is not the natural but the artifactual that should be honored, and the other proposing that it is not the artifactual but the natural that should be honored. More important, they together contradict the complaint we were considering: they say beautiful persons do not deserve to be looked at, whereas the complaint we were wrestling with says beautiful persons deserve not to be looked at (for their own safety). Although, therefore, we have limited ourselves to political arguments, we find--when we step off the straight and narrow path of our present inquiry--an incoherence equal to the one that lies straight ahead.

Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we do not search it out, it comes and finds us.

It is as though one has ceased to be the hero or the heroine in one's own story and has become what in a folktale is called the 'lateral figure' or 'donor figure'. It may sound not as though one's participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about, but as though one has just suffered a demotion. But at moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality, we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our own private story; and when we feel ourselves to be merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate), we are probably more closely approaching a state of equality.

Radical decentering might also be called an opiated adjacency. A beautiful thing is not the only thing in the world that can make us feel adjacent; nor is it the only thing in the world that brings a state of acute pleasure. But it appears to be one of the few phenomena in the world that brings about both simultaneously: it permits us to be adjacent while also permitting us to experience extreme pleasure, thereby creating the sense that it is our own adjacency that is pleasure-bearing. This seems a gift in its own right, and a gift as a prelude to or precondition of enjoying fair relations with others. It is clear that an ehtical fairness which requires 'a symmetry of everyone's relation' will be greatly assisted by an aesthetic fairness that creates in all participants a state of delight in their own lateralness.

True Grit

2010-10-21T22:26:00.001-07:00

Charles Portis

That is bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.

If the River Was Whiskey

2010-10-20T22:32:00.001-07:00

T C Boyle

Let's face it, Ellis said, it's a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we're the haves.

The Trojan Women

2010-10-18T21:32:00.001-07:00

Euripides
Tr. Richard Lattimore

Achaeans! All your strength is in your spears, not in
the mind. What were you afraid of, that it made you kill
this child so savagely? That Troy, which fell, might be
raised from the ground once more? Your strength meant nothing, then.
When Hector's spear was fortunate, and numberless
strong hands were there to help him, we were still destroyed.
Now when the city is fallen and the Phrygians slain,
this baby terrified you? I despise the fear
which is pure terror in a mind unreasoning.

The Boilerplate Rhino

2010-10-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

David Quammen

The yellowfin tuna is not celebrated for its intelligence. It's celebrated for its flavor. The spotted dolphin, on the other hand, is famously brainy and no one will tell us how it tastes. The killing of dolphins is a national outrage; the killing of tuna is a given. I keep asking myself why. There are some good reasons and some bad reasons, I think, which haven't been closely examined, or even sorted apart.

The Ethics of Memory

2010-10-13T23:09:00.001-07:00

Avishai Margalit

Caring is a demanding attitude toward others. Some of us are by inclination good-hearted people, who may have a diffused benign attitude toward our fellow human beings in general. But this diffused good will does not amount to that unselfish heed to the particular needs and interests of others that caring requires. The snag is not that it is hard to like people we don't know: caring does not necessarily require liking. What we find hard is the attention that is implied by caring. Women may be better at dividing their attention than men, and thus more able to c are for others than men, as Carol Gilligan used to argue. But even Mother Theresa lacked the resources to pay attention to everyone. Along with Dostoyevsky, we are suspicious of those who care for humanity in general but who do not care for any human being in particular. We should be even more suspicious of those who pay attention only to what they feel toward others but are incapable of paying attention to others; in short, we should be suspicious of sentimentalists.

Are we wrong to judge our life by the way we remember it rather than by the way we experience it? The so-called scientific picture says yes; the literary picture says no. And I say (timidly perhaps) that the truth is in a combination of the two--a picture, that is, that can combine our experienced life, which is colored by moods, with our remembered life, which contains emotions. There is, however, one other picture that I would like to mention, which challenges the assumption taken for granted both by the scientific and the literary images. The common assumption is that life should be measured by addition, not by subtraction, and that the difference between the two pictures is in what it is that should be added. The scientific picture contends that the addition should encompass all the experiences in one's life, remembered as well as unremembered. The literary picture, in contrast, contends that the addition should comprise all the highlights that are remembered and that go into a coherent story of one's life.

The hope with which I credit moral witnesses is a rather sober hope: that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony. What is so heroic in this hope is the fact that people who are subjected to evil regimes intent on destroying the fabric of their moral community easily come to see the regime as invincible and indestructible and stop believing in the very possibility of a moral community. Being a helpless inmate in a Nazi concentration camp or a Bolshevik gulag can make you believe that the thousand years Reich or the unstoppable juggernaut of the communist triumph is just the way of the world. The disparity of power between victim and perpetrator confirms every minute what seems to be the invincibility of the regime. Under such adverse conditions, to believe in what would under normal circumstances be a rather reasonable belief--namely, that the evil power is limited and temporary--is hard indeed. The belief, under such conditions, in the possibility of a moral community calls for a veritable leap of faith. But then the moral witness does not have to have the assured confidence of a sleepwalker that is manifested by a religious witness.

In the 'enlightened' picture, truth is given in principle to all; truth is on the surface. Even expert scientific knowledge is not esoteric knowledge but is in principle knowledge open to all. In the final analysis, the authority of the 'new knowledge' hinges only on observations. In this new picture, the reliability of hearsay testimony is tested by sampling the witness's statements against our observations.

The comparison between the God who remembers man and the mother who remembers the child of her womb is interesting. In Hebrew the words rehem (womb) and rahamim (mercy) stem from the same root. Mercy is returning those who are far away to their source, the womb. Hence, the act of remembering is an act of mercy and grace.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

2010-10-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

David Markson

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody, came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.

The Comforters

2010-10-09T13:34:00.001-07:00

Muriel Spark

Caroline thought, 'Well, he will ring in the morning.' She lay on her divan staring out at the night sky beyond her balcony, too tired to draw the curtains. she was warmed by the knowledge that Laurence was near to hand, wanting to speak to her. She could rely on him to take her side, should there be any difficulty with Helena over her rapid departure from St Philumena's. On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.

Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.

Finding a Form

2010-10-05T23:06:00.001-07:00

William H Gass

Narratives like the story of Gyges and his ring imperceptibly seduce their listeners, because they always solicit our participation: not for a naive or complacent identification with the protagonists necessarily (where each of us is Gyges, Eve or Adam, maybe God), or even with the rich raciness of their roles (where each of us takes the queen's place in bed, or the serpent's in the tree), but by an implication that extends to the idea of man in general; so even if I say to myself: "I wouldn't go down in that gorge--no way--or sneak that ring from that dead man's finger--not me--and I'm too good a guy, basically, to be bought by a little loose change, free flesh or a position of power," nevertheless (and this is Glaucon's expectation), I can believe everybody else would; so when Glaucon suggests we place one such ring on the finger of a plainly unjust man, who has already flouted society's conventions without its aid, and then another on the finger of a man who has always behaved like a good worker bee, a diligent drone, my mind moves easily along the track which has been greased for it to the right rhetorical conclusion: beneath clothes, cosmetics, and conventions, where we confront the naked soul, there is no difference to be discerned between the sinner and the saint, both souls are so stained and opaque, except that the saint, in addition to his other vices, is a successful hypocrite.

The Last Unicorn

2010-10-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

Peter Beagle

My lady, he said, I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

Libra

2010-10-03T15:26:00.001-07:00

Don DeLillo

Kennedy should have blown it up when he had the chance, Ferrie said.
You blow up Cuba, you get the Russians.
I've got my rubber bedsheets all ready. An eternity of canned food. I like the idea of living in shelters. You go in the woods and dig your personal latrine. The sewer system is a form of welfare state. It's a government funnel to the sea. I like to think of people being independent, digging latrines int eh woods, in a million backyards. Each person is responsible for his own shit.

Memory

2010-09-27T22:55:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Loftus

Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable.

A healthy distrust of one's memory, and of memory in general, is not a bad idea. When all is said an done, memory is selective; the memory machine is selective about what gets in and selective about how it changes over time. This may be adaptive in many ways. Why should we cling tightly to those memories that disturb us and spoil our lives?? Life might become so much more pleasant if it is not marred by our memory of past ills, sufferings, and grievances. What good does it do for my friend Diana to remember clearly all the ways an old beau has mistreated her? We seem to have been purposely constructed with a mechanism for erasing the tape of our memory, or at least bending the memory tape, so that we can live and function without being haunted by the past. Accurate memory, in some instances, would simply get in the way. Now, knowing this, others can--if they so wish--take advantage of us. Advertisers and politicians, for example, can bend memory to their advantage. In doing so, they are simply tampering with a system that serves us well in some ways but occasionally does us in.

According to the cliche, memory fades. In fact, however, it grows. What may fade is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event we must reconstruct the memory, and so each time it is changed--colored by succeeding events, increased understanding, a new context, suggestions by others, other people's recollections.

The Strange Tale of Mr. M and the Nature of Memory

2010-09-22T19:54:00.001-07:00

Philip Hilts

In reflection upon these things, after a time, I began to feel that the heart of memory's mystery is not actually the memory. It is the act of experience itself that is most mysterious.
We do not actually see the color of objects; we merely pick up with limited antennae--the rods and cones--a few of the different wave forms, in a narrow range of vibration, among the many deflected-off objects. Because we sense them as different, we have named them 'colors.' But the colors are not properties of objects; they occur between the object and the eye. We do not hear the sounds of the world either; we merely pick up a few of the scattering waves of pressure in the air, in a narrow range of frequency, as they tap against the stretched skin drums within our ears, and we have named them sounds. We do not smell the fragrances of the world but merely pick up a few of the escaping chemicals from the surface of nearby objects, in a narrow range of shapes that well fit the detectors within our noses, and we have called them smells.

And so it is, after some years of exploration and thought, that we must conclude that the central feature of memory is its malleability. It is changeable upon the instant. New information adds to, overlays, or confuses old feelings, thoughts, and knowledge. Memory is, at the end, a site of endless construction where facades come down, beams are shifted, walls are sucked together or blown apart, all in response to the current, most urgent needs.

Mental life may be imagined as a continuous storytelling--taking bits and fitting them into a running narrative that makes sense of where we have been, what's going on now, and what to do next. It is stories that make some kind of sense of the welter of data from outside, where there is no sense. It is we who must make sense of things. 'Stories' are merely the structure we make with selected bits of input. We meet two Italians and so, on meeting the third, expect something and are pleased to find it. Now we have some kind of internal rule about Italians. True, it could be overturned on further experience, but we use our expectations like pitons to scale the side of life.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

2010-09-19T22:43:00.001-07:00

David Foster Wallace

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain's context, its--as it were--shape and texture. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. The depressed person had, as a child, required orthodonture, and each parent had claimed -- not without some cause, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement, the depressed person always inserted when she described the painful struggle between her parents over the expense of her orthodonture -- that the other should be required to pay for it. And the venomous rage of each parent over the other's petty, selfish refusal to pay was vented on their daughter, who had to hear over and over gain from each parent how the other was unloving and selfish. both parents were well off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person that s/he was, of course, if push came to shove, willing to pay for all the orthodonture the depressed person needed and then some, that it was, at its heart, a matter not of money or dentition but of 'principle'. And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a trusted friend the circumstances of the struggle over the cost of her, to concede that it may very well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, just that (i.e., a matter of 'principle'), though unfortunately not a 'principle' that took into account their daughter's needs or her feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of parental neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected -- here the depressed person nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment -- to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in. This was just one example. The depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies each time she recounted for supportive friends this type of painful and damaging past circumstance on the telephone, as well as a sort of preamble in which she attempted to describe how painful and frightening it was not to feel able to articulate the chronic depression's excruciating pain itself but to have to resort to recounting examples that probably sounded, she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their 'painful childhoods' and 'painful lives' and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them.

Vineland

2010-09-19T16:23:00.001-07:00

Thomas Pynchon

What it was, 's your mother lost her respect for me. She'd be too honorable to say it, but that was it. She'd think these things all the way through, politically, but I'd only be trying to get out of the day in one piece. I was never the brave Wobbly her father was. Jess stood up, and he was struck down for it, and there was all of American History 101 for her, right there. How the hell was I gonna measure up? I thought I was doing what was necessary for my wife and my baby, freedom didn't come into it the way it did for Sasha, your grandpa, understood that taking 'free' as far as you can usually leads to 'dead,' but he was never afraid of that, and I was, 'cause they can drop a Brute 450 on you just as easy as a tree...

If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, and all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha, deal with Zoyd and his footloose band and all the drawbacks there, forget Brock, the siege, Weed Atman's blood, 24fps and the old sweet community, forget whoever she'd been, shoot inoffensive little home movies now and then, speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light. Prairie could be her guaranteed salvation, pretending to be Prairie's mom the worst lie, the basest betrayal.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

2010-09-07T18:21:00.001-07:00

Mark Haddon

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

The History of Love

2010-08-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

Nicole Krauss

It's also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it--just to name it--must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)

I was beginning to seriously worry. What if Bird's religiousness wasn't just a passing phase but a permanent state of fanaticism? My mother thought it was his way of dealing with losing Dad, and that one day he would grow out of it. But what if age only strengthened his beliefs, despite the proof against them? What if he never made any friends? What if he became someone who wandered around the city in a dirty coat handing out life jackets, forced to deny the world because it was inconsistent with his dream.

Dune

2010-08-19T21:24:00.001-07:00

Frank Herbert

In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

The Atlas

2010-08-11T21:50:00.001-07:00

William T Vollmann

Scissoring legs and shadows scudding like clouds across the marble proved destiny in action, for the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other. A few, like the small girl who sat on the stairs holding her bald baby doll, or the lady who stopped, shifted the strap of her handbag, and gazed at the departure times for the New Haven Line, delayed judgment (and an executive paused in his descent of the steps, snorted at the girl’s doll, and said: I thought that baby was real!). But no one stayed here, except the souls without homes. Above the information kiosk, the hands of the illuminated clock circled all the directions, and condensed into meaningless animal sounds. There was a circle and its spokes were their trajectories. But the circle turned! They did not understand the strangeness of that. Creased black trousers, naked brown legs, merciless knees, skirts and jeans, overalls swollen tight with floating testicles, paisley handbags passing as smoothly as magic carpets, these made noise, had substance, but the place become more and more empty as I sat there, because none of it was for anything but itself. The belt of brass flowers that crossed the ceiling’s belly meant something, made the place more like a church; the tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were the catacombs. One of those passageways went to the Montrealer, my favorite train. Canada’s railroads continued north from Montreal, which was why when I peered into that tunnel (I’d ridden the Montrealer so many times, and wouldn’t anymore), it was almost as if I could see all the way to Hudson Bay; one Canadian National sleeper did still went to Churchill--

The Cellist of Sarajevo

2010-08-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

Steven Galloway

A dead body won't bother anyone. It will be a curiosity, but unless some viewer knew the hatless man it will mean nothing. There's nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive. No one will know if the man had unusually large feet, which his friends used to tease him about when he was a child. No one will know about the scar on his back he got from falling out of a tree, or that his favorite food was chocolate cake. They will not know that when he was eighteen he went on a trip with his friends from school, hitchhiked all the way to Spain, where he slept with a blond girl whose last name he never even knew, and that he would think about this often over the next thirty years, always at the strangest times, while peeling an orange or sharpening the blade of a knife or walking up a hill in the rain.

Lucky Jim

2010-07-24T20:58:00.001-07:00

Kingsley Amis

Dixon didn't trust himself to speak. Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom. Then he realized that Christine must perhaps unconsciously, be quoting her boy-friend, or some horrible book lent by her boy-friend, whose desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids by thus specializing his needs was not, at the moment, worth attacking. Dixon frowned. Until a minute ago she'd been behaving and talking so reasonably that it was hard to believe she was the same girl as had helped Bertrand to bait him at Welch's arty week-end. It was queer how much colour women seemed to absorb from their men-friends, or even from the man they were with for the time being. That was only bad when the man in question was bad; it was good when the man was good. It should be possible for the right man to stop, or at least hinder, her from being a refined gracious-liver and arty-rubbish-talker. Did he think he was the right man for that task? Ha, ha, ha, if he did.

'Well, it's this. From what you've seen of us both, do you think it would be a good thing if I got married to Bertrand?'
Dixon felt a slight twinge of distaste he couldn't quite account for. 'Isn't that rather up to you?'
'Of course it's up to me; I'm the one who's going to marry him or not marry him. I want to know what you think. I'm not asking to be told what to do. Now, what do you think?'
This was clearly the moment for a burst of accurate shelling from Dixon in his Bertrand-war, but he found himself reluctant to fire. A reasoned denunciation of the foe, followed up by a short account of his recent conversation with Carol, would stand a good chance of bringing total victory in this phase, or at least inflicting heavy losses. He felt, however, that he didn't want to do it like that, and only said slowly: 'I don't think i know either of you well enough.'
'Ah, to hell, man' - had she picked that up from Uncle Julius? Dixon wondered - 'you're not being asked to do a thesis on it for your doctorate.' As Carol might have done, she pinched his arm too hard, making him cry out, saying to him in vocal italics: 'What do you think?'
'Well, it's...I must say what I think, you know.'
'Yes, yes, of course, that's what I asked for, isn't it? Do get on with it.'
'Well, then, I should say No.'
'I see. Why not?'
'Because I like you and I don't like him.'
'Is that all?'
'It's quite enough. It means each of you belongs to the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don't.'
'It sounds a bit thin to me.'
'All right, if you want reasons, remember they're my reasons, though that doesn't mean to say they oughtn't to be yours as well. Bertrand's a bore, he's like his dad, the only thing that interests him is him. On any issue you care to mention he can't do otherwise than ignore your side of things, just can't do otherwise, see? It's not just him first and you second, he's the only bloody runner. My God, what you said about him putting you int eh wrong by starting rows shows you've got his number. I don't see why you have to have someone else to say it for you.'
She said nothing for a moment, then spoke rather in her censorious manner: 'Even if that were true, it needn't prevent me from marrying him.'
'Yes, I know women are all dead keen on marrying men they don't much like. But I'm saying why you oughtn't to marry him, not whether you want to or are going to or not. I think that once the things that are supposed to wear off wear off, you'll have a hell of a time. You couldn't trust the fellow with your best...I mean, he'd always be having rows, and you say you don't like rows. Are you in love with him?'
'I don't much care for that word,' she said, as if rebuking a foul-mouthed tradesman.
'Why not?'
'Because I don't know what it means.'
He gave a quiet yell. 'Oh, don't say that; no, don't say that. It's a word you must often have come across in conversation and literature. Are you going to tell me it sends you flying to the dictionary each time? Of course you're not. I suppose you mean it's purely personal - sorry, got to get the jargon right - purely subjective.'
'Well, it is, isn't it?'
'Yes, that's right. You talk as if it's the only thing that is. If you can tell me whether you like greengages or not, you can tell me whether you're in love with Bertrand or not, if you want to tell me, that is.'
'You're still making it much too simple. All I can really say is that I'm pretty sure I was in love with Bertrand a little while ago, and now I'm rather less sure. That up-and-down business doesn't happen with greengages; that's the difference.'
'Not with greengages, agreed. But what about rhubarb, eh? What about rhubarb? Ever since my mother stopped forcing me to eat it, rhubarb and I have been conducting a relationship that can swing between love and hatred every time we meet.'
'That's all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is it gets you in such a state you can't look at your own feelings dispassionately.'
'That would be a good thing if you could do it, would it?'
'Why, of course.'
He gave another quiet yell, this time some distance above middle C. 'You've got a long way to go, if you don't mind me saying so, even though you are nice. By all means view your own feelings dispassionately, if you feel you ought to, but that's nothing to do with deciding whether (Christ) you're in love. Deciding that's no more difficult than the greengages business. What is difficult, and the time you really need this dispassionate rubbish, is deciding what to do about being in love if you are, whether you can stick the person you love enough to marry them, and so on.
'Why, that's exactly what I've been saying, in different words.'
'Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure's different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don't ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?'

Runaway Horses

2010-07-19T19:19:00.001-07:00

Yukio Mishima
Tr. Michael Gallagher

I'm not a beginner at this any more, Honda mused. I've done my work without being swayed by the opinions of others, and I can say that I've met the prescribed standards. I've become thoroughly adept at my profession--like a potter whose clay seems to shape itself, taking the form that he wants it to.
Suddenly he realized that he was on the verge of forgetting the face of the defendant who had just stood trial before him. He shook his head. Try as he might, he could no longer clearly visualize the man's features.

Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across has been destroyed.

I don't understand. I don't understand it at all. And then, after we did the killing, not one of us would have disregarded his vow to kill himself at once. So if we could have done as we had meant to, not a single branch, not a single leaf of the tangled thicket of the law would have brushed so much as the tip of our sleeve or the hem of our kimono. We would have slipped marvelously through the thicket and gone rushing headlong up into the bright sky of heaven. So it was the with the League of the Divine Wind. Though, I know, the tangled underbrush of the law didn't grow as thick in the sixth year of the Meiji. The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind. The extraordinary purity of a handful of men, the passionate devotion that knows nothing of the world's standards...the law is a system that tries to degrade them to 'evil', on the same level as robbery and crimes of passion. This is the clever trap that I fell into. And because of nothing else but somebody's betrayal!

The Lazarus Project

2010-07-17T13:49:00.001-07:00

Alexandar Hemon

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it--Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity--you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story, and maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth--reality is the fastest American commodity.

I was still too weak to pursue my pleasures at the expense of others, certainly not at the expense of Mary or this wretched harlot who was probably going to be slapped by her pimp for failing to fuck a God-given American. And I was not unselfish enough not to be tempted by pursuing pleasure with abandon. Forever stuck in moral mediocrity, I could afford myself neither self-righteousness nor orgasmic existence. That was one of the reasons (unspoken, to Mary, or anybody) why I absolutely needed to write the Lazarus book. The book would make me become someone else, go either way: I could earn the right to orgasmic selfishness (and the money required for it) or I could purchase my moral insurance by going through the righteous process of self-doubt and self-realization.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

2010-07-06T20:47:00.001-07:00

Oliver Sacks

He was understandably discouraged by this experience--and this thought--and also by another thought which he now expressed. 'Suppose you could take away the tics,' he said. 'What would be left? I consist of tics--there is nothing else.' He seemed, at least jokingly, to have little sense of his identity except as a ticqueur: he called himself 'the ticcer of President's Broadway' and spoke of himself, in the third person, as 'witty ticcy Ray', adding that he was so prone to 'ticcy witticisms and witty ticcicisms' that he scarcely knew whether it was a gift or a curse. He said he could not imagine life without Tourette's, nor was he sure he would care for it.

Superficially she was a mass of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and felt herself to be, a mental cripple--beneath the effortless skills, the happy capacities, of others; but at some deeper level there was no sense of handicap or incapacity, but a feeling of calm and completeness, of being fully alive, of being a soul, deep and high, and equal to all others. Intellectually, then, Rebecca felt a cripple; spiritually she felt herself a full and complete being.

'She is an idiot Ecclesiastes, I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her--as idiot adn as symbolist--met, collided and fused. She had done appallingly in the testing--which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously 'together' and composed.
Why was she so decomposed before, how could she be so recomposed now? I had the strongest feeling of two wholly different modes of thought, or of organisation, or of being. The first schematic--pattern-seeing, problem-solving--this is what had been tested, and where she had been found so defective, so disastrously wanting. But the tests had given no inkling of anything but the deficits, of anything so to speak, beyond her deficits.

This was my human, as opposed to my neurological vision.

Is it possible, I wondered, that this being before me--at once a charming girl, and a moron, a cognitive mishap--can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode, which, in her, is so defective that it simply doesn't work?

It didn't work with Rebecca, it didn't work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment.

This is the positive side--but there is a negative side too (not mentioned in their charts, because it was never recognised in the first place). Deprived of their numerical 'communion' with each other, and of time and opportunity for any 'contemplation' or 'communion' at all--they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another--they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives. But this is considered a small price to pay, no doubt, for their having become quasi-independent and 'socially acceptable'.

Written before 1985, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat continually uses a terminology of idiot, moron, retard to refer to mental conditions. Reading the book now you get a strangely shocked sense as though Sacks were insulting his patients, yet loves the people he serves. So you find yourself cornered: he clearly does not mean to demean but it cannot be denied that he is speaking for society when he speaks here.

This barbaric way of speaking of those with mental health conditions and the revolution in sensistivity that occured and is occuring within it, is something that should and will begin in the homelessness world. Now we speak of and see homelessness and poverty with the insensitive and uncaring and unrecognizing eye that was so characteristic of how the people with mental conditions were seen in the '80s. Of course, you can err on the side of too much sensitivity, but what is called for is an eye that sees as God sees and recognizes the humanity, which is to say usefulness of each person.

But this leads me to ask, where is Mark useful? Or, where is Alvin useful? I really don't know, at all really. See, Mark is a difficult case: he's violent and has been drunk for so many years you think his brain is fried. So is Alvin: he's a hoarder and a health hazard to himself and doesn't seem to understand the realities of society. So is Michael, so is Mike so is and now I'm just filling in these names without thinking. There were so many instances in Sacks where what we took to be a problem, what was seen as a flaw actually became something entirely else as he began to see it with different eyes. In a way his book is almost a step by step walking you out of the one and into the other.

What I see in Sacks is the beginning of a desire to move from problem-centered therapy to gift-centered therapy. What happens in the case of many people with severe mental conditions is that in our attempt to discover what is 'wrong' so that we can fix it, we end up 'driving them full-tilt upon their limitations' like sailing a boat onto a reef in order to see where it is leaking. And so you get this sense that medicine is more concerned with what's wrong than what's right. But what if the best way to bring about a good (the best?) equilibrium is to focus on what's right in Sacks' case histories? Seeing the artist in the autism and the music in the 'mental retard'. So then what would this look like for homelessness?

Right now we ask, 'What do you need?' but waht if the more important question is 'What don't you need?' Because if we can figure that out, then we know what they are good at and we know what we can start with, what can be the basis of 're-entry into society'.What if the most important thing for us to be asking is what is good here? What is good about who this person is, what is good about their situation?

Now, all this is a load, a bunch of crap because, frankly, I haven't done anything yet to see if good things happen. I ahven't helped anyone yet. But time isn't up yet and we will see.

Problems: medical, mental, societal, emotional, attitudinal, economical, whatever, are only ever part of the whole, and if you give them a veto over the things that are going better than perfect, the gifts, the goods, then you'll never really get anywhere. It's like a black and white drawing: to see only one color is really to see a distortion or a half, no matter how much color there is. The shape of the other color is just as much a shape as the first. So the good is just as much a reality as the bad.

The Giver

2010-06-28T21:57:00.001-07:00

Lois Lowry

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane.

The Tao of Pooh

2010-06-21T23:42:00.001-07:00

Benjamin Hoff

Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems--appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots--but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door. The Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing.

There is something to be said for not doing anything.

The Harvest Gypsies

2010-06-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

John Steinbeck

In this series the word 'dignity' has been used several times. It has been used not as some attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man's responsibility to the community. A man herded about, surrounded by armed guards, starved and forced to live in filth loses his dignity; that is, he loses his valid position in regard to society, and consequently his whole ethics toward society. Nothing is a better example of this than the prison, where the men are reduced to no dignity and where crimes and infractions of the rule are constant.
We regard this destruction of dignity, then, as one of the most regrettable results of the migrant's life, since it does reduce his responsibility and does make him a sullen outcast who will strike at our Government in any way that occurs to him.

Dignity is a register of man's responsibility to the community. What Steinbeck says here of the migrants from Oklahoma applies equally to the various other 'problem groups' in our societies today--the homeless, the poor, illegal immigrants, felons, sex offenders, etc...

Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that the actions or attitudes of these various groups have precluded their valid position towards society. We act as if it would be nice if such groups could have a valid position towards society, and ethics towards society sound good too, but, well....we shrug our shoulders. After all, there is a reason they are the groups they are. I guess what we really say is that it wasn't us who took their dignity away, it's them, they gave it up. Coming here illegally, committing a felony (or getting caught), their choices, their foolishness, their addictions, their faults are what have brought them to this undignified situation. They stepped away from society; we didn't step away from them.

Though expectations are not what will determine their actions, though by expecting upstanding citizenry of them we won't erase their faults, it is still possible that the return of a clear position in regard to society might be the first, necessary foundation from which to fix their problems. They them their. Theirs those, these, them. The arrogance behind fixing their problems, behind the language of they is more evidence of the loss of relation to society.

Expecting a man to be a man won't make him one, but expecting him to be a pig will achieve even less. At least if we expect a man of him, we have a chance of recognizing the man in him...I don't know what we'll ever see expecting a pig of him. If a man is expected to be an animal, how will we recognize when he has become a man? I guess being poor takes away your dignity, but it seems that dignity, as in 1936, is something we still haven't connected with success in society.

The old story of giving a man a fish and that guy eating for a day has been told in many versions, but I'm going to add another. It's been said that it's better to teach him to fish, so that he'll eat for more than a day; it's been said that it's hard to learn when your starving, so giving a fish and teaching at the same time are probably pretty good in relationship; and it's even been said that you have to look at the pond the man is fishing in, to see if there are any fish for him to catch; but what about the reason the man would want to fish in the first place? If while he is learning he doesn't feel that his fishing has any meaningful relation to society, if he doesn't feel like society needs him to fish, how long will even the best fisherman keep at it?

I agree with Steinbeck: the destruction of dignity is one of the most regrettable results of our current attitude towards poverty, crime, and addiction.

Whores for Gloria

2010-06-16T09:09:00.001-07:00

William T Vollmann

He remembered how Melissa had said to him well one of the things I used to do to combat that boredom was building forts, building like a little cave with the sheets, crawling under it, like a little tent I was inside by myself, setting up housekeeping, just pretending I was somewhere else. It was kind of easy in the dark environment. That's what being a kid is about, pretending. You've got to pretend you're this, pretend you're that, pretend you're a grownup, pretend you're not, pretend you're somebody else. --That's right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed and when you're a grownup you've got to pretend you're with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is.

Prostitution is a topic that is very interesting to me. Putting a price on something so intimate as love--love being a thing that should be out of the realm of economies as much as eternal is out of the realm of time. Love surely does not operate by any economic law. So prostitution is one of the few places love subjects itself to economics.

As much as prostitution is paying for a physical feeling, it must also be paying for an emotional feeling; nothing can be so close, so physically personally close and not be emotional. If there's any sense you get from Whores for Gloria, it's that prostitution is about much more than paying for sex.

On Violence

2010-06-13T13:17:00.001-07:00

Hannah Arendt

The amount of violence at the disposal of any given country may soon not be a reliable indication of the country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power.

Not only has the progress of science ceased to coincide with the progress of mankind (whatever that may mean), but it could even spell mankind's end, just as the further progress of scholarship may well end with the destruction of everything that made scholarship worth our while. Progress, in other words, can no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes we have let loose.

Not every graph has an asymptote, but we seem to be nearing an asymptote in technological growth. If Arendt is speaking of nuclear war in the first part of her sentence (progress of science vs progress of mankind), could the Internet be the meaning of the second part of her sentence (progress of scholarship ending the value of scholarship)? Probably not since the book was published in 1970. Still, I wonder if it isn't true.

Epitaph of a Small Winner

2010-06-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

Machado de Assis
Tr. William L Grossman

These are my thoughts as I disembarked at Lisbon and set out for Coimbra. The University was waiting for me with its long list of difficult subjects. I studied them with profound mediocrity, which did not prevent my acquiring a bachelor's degree; they gave it to me with all the customary solemnity, at the end of the number of years required by law. The beautiful ceremonies and the festivities filled me with pride and, even more, with sadness at having to leave. I had won at Coimbra a great reputation as a playboy; I was a harebrained scholar, superficial, tumultuous, and capricious, fond of adventures of all kinds, engaging in practical romanticism and theoretical liberalism, with complete faith in dark eyes and written constitutions. On the day when the University certified, in sheepskin, that I had acquired a knowledge which, in truth, I had not, I confess that I felt somehow cheated, although nonetheless proud. Let me explain: the diploma was a letter of enfranchisement; if it gave me liberty, it also gave me responsibility. I put it with my other possessions, said goodbye to the banks of the Mondego, and came away rather disconsolate, but with an impulse, a curiosity, a desire to elbow other people out of the way, to exert influence, to enjoy, to live--to prolong my college days throughout my life.

I left him with these suspension marks and went to take off my boots, which were tight. One relieved of them, I breathed deeply and stretched myself at full length, while my feet, and my whole self with them, entered a state of relative happiness. Then it occurred to me that tight boots are one of the greatest goods in the world, for, by making feet hurt, they create an opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of taking off your boots. Torture your feet, wretch, then untorture them, and there you have inexpensive happiness exactly to the taste of Epicurus and of the shoemakers. While this idea was working out on my famous trapeze, my mind's eye turned toward Tijuca and saw the young cripple disappearing on the horizon of the past, and I felt that my heart would soon take off its boots. And that is exactly what this lascivious fellow did. Four or five days later I was to enjoy that swift, ineffable, spontaneous moment of pleasure that succeeds a bitter pain, a worry, an illness...From this I inferred that life is the most ingenious of phenomena, for it sharpens hunger only so that it may offer an opportunity to eat, and it creates corns only because without them one cannot achieve the relief that is perfect earthly happiness. In truth, I tell you that all human wisdom is not worth a pair of tight boots.

Sobs, tears, an improvised altar with saints and crucifix, black curtains on the walls, strips of black velvet framing the entrance, a man who came to dress the corpse, another man who took the measurements of the coffin; candelabra, the coffin on a table covered with gold-and-black silk with candles at the corners, invitations, guests who entered slowly with muffled step and pressed the hand of each member of the family, some of them sad, all of them serious and silent, priest, sacristan, prayers, sprinkling of holy water, the closing of the coffin with hammer and nails; six persons who remove the coffin from the table, lift it, carry it, with difficulty, down the stairs despite the cries, sobs, and new tears of the family, walk with it to the hearse, place it on the slab, strap it securely with leather thongs; the rolling of the hearse, the rolling of the carriages one by one...These are notes that I took for a sad and commonplace chapter which I shall not write.

I guess there are two ways of looking at things: either we think that no matter what happens in this world, where you are is a reflection of your mettle, how hard you scraped and scrounged and pushed and persevered and that if you are doing well in life, it's because you earned it, or we think that mostly it's just how things worked out.

The generation before this current rising one, and the baby boomer generation, these (at least in the US) experienced quite a bit of prosperity and good life. They worked hard and they profited and they were able to raise the next two generations in a atmosphere of plenty.

So what would it mean if the national debt got too big, if the US economy followed the Greek and Portuguese economies into untenable standings? And what would happen if in this difficult economic situation, even the scrapers and scoungers, the pushers and perseverers found that it was not enough?

Those who prospered in the last generations no doubt prospered because of their own merits, but what if people are like seeds? Tossed into lousy soil in a time of drought, how will seeds grow? I do not mean to demean the achievements of the generations before us that provided such plenty and comfort as we were raised, but I want to ask, how much of these accomplishments were bought on borrowed time? The US national debt is $13,043,347,548,011.01 (as of June 30, 2010 at 12:29:01 AM GMT). I don't get the feeling that anyone is going to stop spending money they don't have soon.

So where is this going? Well, you know the maxims, You work hard and you'll be alright. Hard work and honesty have their rewards. But what if it has a lot more to do with the crap shoot of when you are born? We already know that location has a lot to do with plenty. If you're born to a powerful king it's more likely that you'll have food to eat everyday than if you are born to a crack addict in Imperial County. I'm contending, I think, that it's the same time-wise, and that the generations before us managed to be born into prosperity, as were we, but that this prosperity was purchased at the expense of both past and future.

But still, that isn't much more than whining. And it might even be an argument for sitting around on your sorry ass watching television shows like Glee and Heroes. I do believe that hard work matters, scraping and scrounging are mostly good, as are pushing and persevering, but also the more than healthy realization that if you have anything, you got a good deal lucky. So open your hand and act like what you have is what you were given, not what you earned.

The Metaphysical Club

2010-06-09T20:11:00.001-07:00

Louis Menand

Veblen's view of the hedonistic calculus was that it was founded on "a faulty conception of human nature," picturing a person as "a homegeneous globule of desire of happiness" played upon the external forces. Like most academic opponents of Social Darwinism, Veblen did not reject Darwinism; he only thought that by reading Darwin in the light of classical economic theory, Spencer and his American epigones had missed the point. Real ecolutionary economics, Veblen thought, required a picture of human beings not as passive reactors to stimuli, but as actors for ends. And not all our ends can be expressed in the language of profit and loss. "In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the substance of an individual's conscious life," as he put it in The Theory of the Leisure Class, "the economic interest does not lie isolated and distinct."

Menand provides an interesting, accessible map of the development of thought in the United States from just before the Civil War through the turn of the century up to right before WWI. Any time I read a history of philosophy, I am always somewhat startled how strongly the evolution of thinking influences what I imagine are my own, private and individually determined beliefs. Usually the most uncomfortable aspect of this realization is not so much finding what I believe determined by and predicated on thoughts thought a hundred years ago, but that the very way I think is greatly influenced by people I have never heard of, and sometimes do not agree with. Though our thoughts may occasionally be our own, the walls within which our minds are allowed to run, are built ages ago and are very difficult to raze.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

2010-06-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

Hunter S Thompson

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an our with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

The word is that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is non-fiction.

Inherent Vice

2010-05-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Thomas Pynchon

What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn't give odds either way.

Inherent Vice is a pleasant read, and probably one of Pynchon's more accessible books. For a person born almost thirty years after the sixties came to a close, Inherent Vice is about as close as one can come to understanding Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In America

2010-05-26T18:49:00.003-07:00

Susan Sontag

Leaving the cabin, after dutifully cleaning up after Julian, he regained the sun and wind and his own perch of scornful acuity. Like most writers who are intelligent, Ryszard had long since accustomed himself to being actually two people. One was a warmhearted, anxious man, rather boyish for his twenty-five years, while the other one...in the other one, detached, reckless, manipulative, flourished the temperament of someone much older. The first self was forever being surprised by the evidence of his own intelligence; it never ceased to astonish him, thrill him, when words, eloquence, ideas, observations just came, like birds flying out of his mouth. The second was condemned to finding nobody clever enough--and everything he saw a challenge to his skills as an observer and describer, because so blindly, thickly steeped in itself ("the world" is not a writer).

You men have it much easier. You are commended for recklessness, for boldness, for striking out, for being adventurous. A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave prudently, amiably, timorously. And there is much to be afraid of, I know that. Don't assume, dear friend, that I have lost all sense of reality. Each time I am brave, I am acting. But that is all that's needed to be brave, don't you agree? The appearance of bravery. The performance of it. Since I know I am not brave, not brave at all, this spurs me on to act as if I were.

Every marriage, every community is a failed utopia. Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else. Is there an instinct, a very ancient instinct, for breathing in unison? The ultimate utopia, that. At the root of the desire for sexual union is the desire to breathe more deeply, deeper still, faster...but always together.

No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.

You're asking me, and you have every right to ask me, if I really do love you. And I want to say--oh, dearest Ryszard, you know what I want to say. And that wanting is love, too, though not the kind you mean. But the truth is, I never know exactly what I feel when I'm not on stage. No, that's not true. I feel intense interest, curiosity, pity, anxiety, desire to please--all that. But love, what you mean by love, what you want from me...I'm not sure. I know I don't feel love the way I represent it before an audience. Maybe I don't feel much of anything at all.

December 9. I thought you liked happy endings, I say. I think this is a happy ending. M. says. You can't see why she wants to leave? All too well, I say. Everyone dreams of bursting the chains of marriage and starting over. Yes, M. says, but I don't now. And you, Bogdan? Do you want me to answer that? I reply. I thought we were discussing how to end this play. Husband, husband, M. says, we're always talking about ourselves when we talk of anything else. Yes, answer. Then why can't the ending be changed, I asked. I'm not leaving, I said.

Americans are incapable of emigration. The best we can do is become ex-patriots somewhere--Americans living abroad. Is this because we are an immigrant nation? You would think that would predispose us to ever more movement, ever more migration. But migration beyond our national borders is a thing Americans are simply incapable of. Perhaps this is because we have so many 'sovereign' states within these United States to which we may emigrate. But this sort of emigration seems more like drinking Sierra Mist because you don't want to support Mountain Dew (guess who owns both?) or eating Chex because you don't like Cheerios (again). If you're a US Citizen, where would you emigrate to (if you were going to emigrate)?

Wanting

2010-05-26T18:49:00.001-07:00

Richard Flanagan

His ambitions, like his body, were collapsing. He found balance difficult. He hoped for a brass plaque to be attached to his house after his death. He was no longer sure how best to lobby for, or even obliquely suggest, such an honour on the ever-rare occasions he met the few who paraded themselves as powerful in the old Regency spa town. What was he commemorating? His thoughts were mist. He heard strange chanting. Saw a naked man dancing between the stars and the earth. Remembered rivers, a dark child at his door, fingers greasy with sawing. He awoke early on the eighteenth of October, 1866 and, rolling his head to one side in his warm bed, he looked at an autumnal light, red and diffuse, softly falling through a window. He felt a great serenity wash over him, his body peacefully stretched out, and, secure in the knowledge he had been a good man who had helped many others, he died.

It was noted with approval how Sir John was finally decisive with his wife on the matter of the black child, who, he now said, would not be taken with them to England. He declared medical opinion against it: experience showed savages' bodies were constitutionally incapable of surviving a robust climate; it was as proven and undeniable as were the advantages she had enjoyed which would ensure her future was bright indeed. He did not involve his wife in the matter of the memorandum ordering that the child be taken away to St John's Orphanage. He would not hear her protests, but observed that it was as fine an institution as had ever been erected, and that the child would there be able to finish her education to the satisfaction of all. He would not enter into an argument with Lady Jane about the experiment being not yet ended.
'It was unscientific yearnings from the beginning,' Sir John said, and though the word they both knew he intended was mad, there was about his statement the tone of undeniable conviction. When Lady Jane said that she must prepare the child, and went to assure her that her destiny was still promising, it was already too late. They had taken Mathinna the morning before, without warning or explanation, but with the precaution of giving her a special breakfast of toasted cheese. Whether this was to calm the fear she might have or to assuage the guilt he possessed, he was unsure: he simply felt it an act born of necessity, rather than nostalgia.

Mathinna lay down, curled into the rug, closed her eyes and let her frail shell of a body ride the bumps and jolts. She told herself she was warm and safe and, consoled by such necessary untruths and with the comforting fullness of toasted cheese in her belly to further the illusion, she somehow fell asleep and dreamt of running through wallaby grass.

The Warden believed in God's love and pity. A terrible love. A most terrifying pity. And against all that belief and all that love and all that pity, against all the questions already answered, even a spirit as indomitable as Lady Jane's faltered.

She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, holder her close, feed her warm soup and bread. She wished to be the mother she had tried so hard never to appear, to put her nose in Mathinna's wild hair and comfort and protect her, and revel in her difference and not seek to destroy it, because in that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below, and the white coffins below that.

Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirees, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn't Government House but Ira Bye's sly grog shop--an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay--that it wasn't a soiree and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro's bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.

We spend our time in life wanting. Wanting, we need; wanting, we desire; wanting, we hope; wanting, we build and build. All of life is a wanting. And everyone has their theories about wanting and how to address the thing. But when it comes down to it, everyone still wants and they cannot escape the wanting. Even in wanting to not want, we want. So much wanting, that the word begins to twist in our minds and our ears and on our lips. Can you say want want want want want want without the word warping?

Put a list together of all the things you've ever wanted. How many times does this wrap you in want and trail about your feet and trip you up, like some clothing made for a person many times larger than you. Indeed the human appetite for wanting is larger, much larger than the human capacity for attaining or realizing or accepting or handling. How could we want so much more than we can have?

I don't know what to tell you about the wanting. Cross your fingers and hope to die, you won't ever get all that you want. And what you want can be what you need, no matter how good the Rolling Stones are. So sing and sing, but remember that a bird does sometimes sing for what it wants, though sometimes it may only want to sing.

Wanting is the baseline of our lives, wanting is the thing that we have in common, wanting is our humanity. Can you say you haven't wanted? Who can?

Ragtime

2010-05-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

E L Doctorow

An interesting note is that this poor fellow, Charles Victor Faust, was actually called upon to pitch one inning in a game toward the end of this same season when the Giants had already won the pennant and were in a carefree mood. For a moment his delusion that he was a big-leaguer fused with reality. Soon thereafter the players became bored with him and he was no longer regarded as a good luck charm by Manager McGraw. His uniform was confiscated and he was unceremoniously sent on his way. He was remanded to an insane asylum and some months later died there.

The Great Railroad Strike - 1877
July 14, 1877 Governor of Maryland directs the National Guard to put down strikers in Baltimore, firing on an attacking crowd and killing 10 and injuring 25. Several National Guardsmen were injured by the crowd. July 21, 1877 Militiamen in Pittsburgh bayonet and fire on strikers, killing 20 and wounding 29 others. Local law enforcement officers had refused to fire on strikers. July 22, 1877 Militiamen in Pittsburgh fire on and kill 20 more strikers. July 25, 1877 Chicago mayor asks for 5,000 militiamen to restore order, 20 strikers are killed. July 25, 1877 Shamokin Uprising: 1000 coal miners march on railroad depot in Shamokin; mayor forms vigilante group that kills 2 strikers and wounds 14.

Homestead Strike - 1882
July 6, 1982 Three hundred Pinkerton agents are given Winchester rifles in order to help break Steelworkers' strike. Fighting erupts, a striker and a Pinkerton are both injured. Pinkertons fire on the crowd, killing 2 and wounding 11; the crowd fires back, killing 2 and wounding 12. The strikers, now more than 5,000 people (including women and children), set up a brass cannon. Pinkertons fire on them again, killing 4. Pinkertons end up surrendering but state militia arrive and quell the strike.

Haymarket Affair - 1886
May 3, 1886 Striking workers in Chicago are fired on by police at a rally, two men are killed. At a rally the next day, a man throws a pipe bomb at the police, who return fire. At least eight policemen and four workers are killed. Over 60 policemen were injured and at least as many more workers.

Pullman Strike - 1894
June 29, 1894 President Grover Cleveland orders 12,000 Federal troops and U S Marshals to break up the strike because it prevented the delivery of the mail. 13 strikers are killed and 57 are injured.

The Bread and Roses Strike - 1912
February 24, 1912 Strikers try to send children via train to refuge in other cities. Lawrence city authorities attempt to prevent strikers from sending the children to Philadelphia. Police begin clubbing mothers and children, causing one pregnant woman to miscarry.

The Southern Colorado Coal Strike - 1914
April 20, 1914 Two companies of Colorado National Guardsmen install machine guns on a ridge overlooking the camp of striking mine workers. Miners, resenting machine guns aimed at their families, try to flank the militia and a firefight breaks out. Fighting lasts for most of the day. 19 strikers are killed, four of these are women, and eleven are children. Three company guards and one militiaman were killed.

Columbine Mine Massacre - 1927
November 21, 1927 Colorado police and guards working for the mine fire on unarmed coal mine strikers, allegedly with machine guns, killing 6 and wounding dozens.

How many owners, managers, politicians, and CEOs have been killed in labor disputes? How many times have police fired on wealthy crowds? How many people who were comfortable have been shot to death by National Guardsmen? Any look at our history shows that people with money tend to be safe. But the history of abuse that has fallen on the shoulders of people who haven't money is as long as history itself.

Now
1,954 people died crossing the US-Mexican border between 1998 and 2004. In 2005, more than 500 immigrants died crossing the border, according to the United States Border Patrol.

Vertigo

2010-05-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

W G Sebald

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance, he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Muller's engraving after it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never set eyes on a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them.

Sebald's consciousness of image and memory, as demonstrated in the quote above, is worth keeping in mind in this age of remade memory, as sponsored by Facebook and the general digital record of life. That a picture can replace our memory is something we were already getting used to--you have known that some of your earliest childhood memories are actually memories influenced by pictures of that era, or even worse, the memories of pictures themselves. But now, as pictures become the purpose rather than the record, as people do things in order to take a picture, we have to worry, what will our memory be like fifty years from now?

Although such online functions as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and YouTube have become known as Social Networking, what they truly are is Social Remembering. Social networking is a tool for the public editing of individual memories. We have always edited our memories in a public realm; the familial or friendly act of remembering, telling over the experiences everyone already knows, recreating the feelings of the time of memory, storytelling, have always been our most conscious means of making changes to our memory. Though memories can be changed on our own, though we can find our memories of past events changed by the feelings and acts of life as they weigh down on our memories, the method of changing memory over which we have the most control is by exposing our memories socially, curing them like wet paint in the open air. Through the gift of belief, society can give us a power over our memories that we could never escape with in the solitude of our lonesomeness. As with so many things, there is safety in numbers when it comes to remembering.

Memory has always been somewhat social in its function: the most conscious means by which we edit our memories is the telling of them as stories to others. The elements of the social environment became the components with which our stories reacted. Relating a memory to a certain group of people, we are mindful of what we think the group wants to hear and using that information to produce effects. But as we export our memories to a Facebook existence, we are relinquishing much of this little control we once had over the structure of our own stories. Social networking websites exert a much stronger influence on the memories we hand over to them. Like a person writing a journal for a specific audience--a persuasive journal--these are false records or the reality of our past. More false even than our own memories. And, dangerously, they are more powerful than our own memories.

All these pompous words are to say to my generation: when you are sixty, you won't have memories, you'll have Facebook albums, profiles, MySpace pages, and YouTube channels and these will be your memories.

A Death in the Family

2010-05-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

James Agee

There were nearly two hours of helpless anguish and fright before the doctor arrived. During that time it is possible that Ralph suffered more acutely than anyone else. For besides suffering, or believing that he suffered, all the pains that his father must be experiencing, and all of his mother's grief and anxiety, and all of the smaller emotions of all the smaller people who were present, he suffered deep humiliation. When he rushed in and swept his mother into his arms he felt that his voice and his whole manner were all that they ought to be; that he showed himself to be a man who, despite his own boundless grief, was capable also of boundless strength to sustain others in their fried, and to take complete charge of all that needed to be done. But even in that first embrace he could see that his mother was only by an effort concealing her desire to draw away from him. He came near her over and over again, hugging her, sobbing over her, fondling her, telling her that she must be brave, telling her she must not try to be brave, to lean on him, and cry her heart out, for naturally at such a time she would want to feel her sons close around her; but every time, he felt that same patient stiffening and her voice perplexed him. Everyone in the room, even Ralph in the long run, knew that he was only making things harder for her; only his mother realized that he was beseeching comfort rather than bringing it. She was not in the least angry with him, she was sorry for him and wished that she could be of more help to him, but her mind was not on him, her heart was not with him, and his sobs and the stench of his breath made her a little sick to her stomach. What perplexed him in her voice was its remoteness. He began to realize that he was bringing her no comfort, that she was not leaning on him, that just as he had always feared, she did not really love him. He redoubled his efforts to soothe her and to be strong for her. The harder he tried, the more remote her voice became. At the end of a half hour her face was no less desperate than it had been when he first saw her. And he began to feel that everyone else was watching him, and knew he was no use, and that his mother did not love him. The women watched him one way, the men watched him another. He felt that his wife was thinking ill of him, that she was not even sorry for him; he felt slobbering and fat, the way she looked at him and suddenly with terrible hatred was sure that she would prefer to sleep with flat-bellied men--what man? Any man, so long as his belly don't get in the way. As for Jessie, he knew she had always hated him, as much as he hated her. And George Bailey just sitting there looking serious and barrel-chested and always being careful to look away when their eyes met: George thought he was twice the man that Ralph was and twice as good right at this time, better with his in-laws than Ralph could be with his own flesh and blood; and they all knew that George was twice the man and were just trying not to say it or think it even, or let Ralph know they thought it. And even Thomas Oaks, an ignorant hand who couldn't even read or write, just setting there with his ropy hands hung between his knees, staring down at a knot in the floor with those washed-out blue eyes, even Tom was more of a man and more good use too. When Tom got up and said if there wasn't nothing he could do he reckoned he would get on up to the loft, but if there was anything, they would just let him know, Ralph understood it. He knew Tom might be ignorant but he wasn't so ignorant but he knew when it was best to leave a family to itself; and when Ralph's mother said, 'All right,, Tom,' Ralph heard more life and kindness, and more gratefulness in her voice, than in every word she'd said to him, the whole night; and as he watched Tom climb the ladder, heavily and quietly, rung by rung, he thought: there goes more of a man than I am, he knows how to take himself out of the way, and he thought: he's doing a power more good by going than I can by staying, and he thought: every soul in this room wishes it was me that as going, instead of him, and he called, in a voice which sounded unfriendly, though he had meant to make it sound friendly to everyone except Tom, 'That's right, Tom get ye some sleep'; and Tom pulled his head back through the ceiling and looked down at him with those empty blue eyes and said, 'That's all right, Mr Ralph,' and suddenly Ralph realized that he had no intention of sleeping and would be there alone, not sleeping a wink, just ready in case he was needed; and that Tom had seen his malice, his desire to belittle him, and had belittled him instead, before his mother and his wife and his dying father. 'That's all right, Mr Ralph.' What's all right? What's all right? He wanted to yell it at him, 'What's all right, you poor-white-trash son-of-a-bitch?' but he restrained himself.
Every time he felt their eyes on him especially strongly he went over to his mother again and hugged her, and held her head tightly against him, and tried to say things that would make her cry, and every time, her voice was a little bit further away from him and her face looked a little older and dryer, and every time, he was still more acutely aware of their eyes on him and of the thoughts behind their eyes, and every time, he would swing away from his mother as if he could bear to leave her uncomforted for a moment only because there were still more important things to do, matters of life and death, which he and only he, the son, the man of the family, now that poor Paw lay there so near to death, could handle. And every time, there was nothing whatever to do except wait for the doctor. They had already given the medicine the doctor had given them to give, and they had already given him so much of the ginseng tea the doctor had said wouldn't anyhow do any harm, that Ralph's mother decided they shouldn't give any more of it. His head was low; his feet were braced against hot stones wrapped in flannel, and Mother kept everyone except herself at the far, lighted end of the room, except for short visits. There was nothing to do, nothing to take charge of, and every time Ralph swung about from his mother with an air of heroic authority and rediscovered this fact, he felt as if a chair had been pulled out from under him, in front of everybody, and he began to think that he would burn up and die if he didn't have another drink. He said, 'Scuse me,' once in the choked and modest tone which should signify to the women that he had to empty his bladder, and he got a good, hard swig that time, and found when he came back in that he didn't care whether they were looking at him or not, or guessed what he really went out for; for two cents he'd take out the bottle and wave it at them. Sooner than it was possible to use that excuse again, eh became even more thirsty than before. At the same time he first realized that he was drunk. He was bitterly ashamed of himself, drunk at this time, at his father's very deathbed, when his mother needed him so bad as never before and when he knew, for he had learned by now to take people's word for it, that he was really good for nothing when he was drunk. And then to feel so thirsty on top of that. He braced himself with all the sternness and strength he was capable of. By God, he told himself, you'll pull yourself together. By God, or...By God, you will. You will. And he got up abruptly and walked straight through them into the dark and splashed his face and neck with water. He realized than that he could take another, now. Just a little one. To brace him. He cursed himself and splashed his face again, and dried carefully with his handkerchief before he came back in. He realized that to everyone else int eh room, those two silences meant two more drinks. He made a cynical grimace. By God, he knew better! He felt as if he had great physical strength, and in his feeling of strength his thirst was merely like the bite under a punch bar, a pleasure to feel and to brace against. But within a short while the thirst returned even more fiercely as irresistible pain. No, by God, he said again to himself. But he began to wonder. If they thought he'd had one anyhow--two in fact--why in a way he owed himself a couple. Three, for that matter: a third, because he knew they mistook that cynical face he had made for a drunken shamelessness. After all, it wasn't he who didn't want to be drunk. he was being careful for their sake. And by God, if he was going to get blamed for it anyhow, what was the good of that. Besides, when he really took care he knew he could hold his liquor good as the next man. He'd show them. But it wasn't so easy, figuring how to get out. Can't go out to pee so soon. Nor dipper of water. He felt a sudden terrible excess of shame. No, by God, he wouldn't sit there scheming himself a shot over his own dying father, and his mother looking on at him, knowing his mind, not saying a word. By God, he wouldn't! He set himself to put everything out of his mind except his father, not as he had ever feared him, or wished he approved of him, or wished he was dead, but as he lay there now, old and broken, cast aside near the end of the trail, yes sir, the embers fading; and within a short while he was sobbing, and talking of his father through his sobs, and within a short while more he began to realize that he had found his way out. His struggles against this temptation, his iterations of 'I'm no good,' and, 'I'm the son he set least store by, but I'm the one that cares for him the most,' and the voices of the women, soothing him, trying to quiet him, only added to his tears, the richness of his emotions, and his verbosity, and before long he had realized that this too was useful, and was using it. Toward the end all genuine emotion left him and he had to scrape, tickle and torture himself into sufficient feeling and sufficient evidence of an impending breakdown he would inflict on nobody, but at length he felt he had achieved the proper moment, and rushed headlong from the room, all but upsetting his wife in her rocking chair. The instant he was outside he felt nothing in the world except the ferocity of his thirst. He leaned against the cabin wall, uncorked the bottle, wrapped his mouth over its mouth as ravenously as a famished baby takes the nipple, and tilted straight up.

Agee records emotions with a precision I have rarely come across. Sometimes he lays out emotions so strongly, you feel they are more your own emotions than his characters. As he tells the thoughts and feelings of children and men and women, you can't help feeling that the reason you are shivering, the reason your eyes are blurring up to overflowing, is that his characters are truly living the things you remember with the memories that go beyond words. Did you ever feel as a small child the awful emptiness of being alone? Agee's characters experience the world with such awful roots that you wonder if they aren't you.

Few authors have made me feel the presence of a ghost; Agee achieves even this in A Death in the Family.

The truth of emotions in A Death in the Family creates a structure that cannot be denied. For every moment you recognize yourself in every character, you know that this life is okay, that the weakness and shabbiness of our feelings, especially when we are trying to feel honorable and worthy, is a thing that signifies the truth of our condition.

In the long quote above, Agee captures the soul of a weak man, of a true coward. Without doubt, you can know that you are alive if you can feel this and feel the twinge of this and feel that you have done that, as despicable as Ralph is, as disgustingly weak as he is, you know that it isn't Ralph that makes this passage strong, nor even Agee, but yourself and the mirror-recognition you have or your own cowardice. Agee let's you know you are you. This is enough.

Down and Out in America

2010-04-28T08:22:00.001-07:00

Peter H Rossi

Each successive section of this chapter has documented another set of problems experienced by the extremely poor and especially the homeless. In the previous chapter we also saw that unemployment and underemployment are endemic, and in this chapter we learned that so are signs of chronic mental illness, alcoholism, and poor health. The homeless have also frequently had run-ins with the criminal justice system, and their social supports are minimal. The accumulation of these conditions result in a profile of the homeless showing that only a handful do not suffer from one disability or another.

Rossi's famous survey of homelessness in Chicago during the '80s is a very factual survey of poverty and homelessness. How much truth you get out of it is debatable. It's hard work being poor.

On the Natural History of Destruction

2010-04-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

W G Sebald
Tr. Anthea Bell

This secondhand memory going back over half a century is horrible enough, yet it is only a tiny part of what we do not know.

What we do not know. On the Natural History of Destruction is a pair of strong arms that grasp you by your shoulders and force you round to face the sight of things you want forgotten: we would rather medicate pain than deal with it. Sebald remarks the paucity in German society of attempts to be with the horrors of WWII. Sebald points out a conspicuous absence through admission that borders on denial. It seems that German literature, with a few exceptions, has acknowledged that the horrors (Stalingrad to U-boats to Auschwitz to Dresden to Surrender to Nazism) of WWII happened, but has gone no further. We did it. It happened. You did it. We've moved on. But Sebald argues that this sort of approach to such horrific atrocities is a very cheap escape.

With a coldly critical eye, Sebald proceeds to slowly turn each page of the lauded German literature that claims to deal with the most evil and painful aspects of WWII. Mostly he finds that people do not deal with it. History and remembrance begin somewhere after 1947 or even later. And who can blame them? Who can face these things? Who wouldn't rather not know?

We like our wars to be won or over. That was then and now we're here and no longer there. Think of Iraq. Most of the Americans you ask about it will tell you that we just need to get out of there. Whether they were against it from the first, fully in support of it, disillusioned, or never really cared, the near-unanimous stance now seems to be that it's time to leave. Even those who believe we must stay in Iraq out of a responsibility to provide stability think the sooner we get out the better. And how will we deal with it? It's over. Think about the first Gulf War...what war? It happened, sure it was tough, all war is, but it's over now, we've moved on, they've moved on. Everyone's doing their thing...

We don't want to deal with our wars anymore than the Germans wanted to deal with theirs. Without doubt the collective culpability of societies like Germany and Japan after WWII was far greater and a much harder weight to slide out from under, but whether you would find the US guilty in either Iraq war or not, you cannot doubt that we do not want to deal with it.

The closest anyone comes is to talk about the returning veterans with PTSD or the collateral damage (all those other people who happen to be killed, dismembered, or in other ways have the life in their bodies displaced). But think about it: what have you heard that faces the Iraq War? What have you seen? What do you know?

The 'second-hand memory going back over half a century' that Sebald cites is this:

There was a bunker built in the middle of the meadow, said to be bombproof, made of concrete with a pitched roof....Fourteen hundred people took shelter there after the first night of terror. The bunker received a direct hit and burst apart. The extent of what happened then must have been apocalyptic....Hundreds of people outside, including my mother, were waiting to be taken to an assembly camp in Pinneberg. To reach the trucks, they had to climb over mountains of corpses, some completely dismembered, all lying around on the meadow among the remains of the former bombproof bunker. Many could not help vomiting when they saw the scene, many vomited as they trampled over the dead, others collapsed and lost consciousness. So my mother told me.

Remember that this is only a tiny part of what we do not know. So then think of what you do know about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the first Gulf War. It is very many very horrible things, what we do not know.

I remember watching the opening movements of 'Shock and Awe' on the television, live. In that unique green of nightvision, things flashed in the Iraqi night sky. I watched this on television. This was people dying. This was death. This was people hiding in their basements because the buildings were being unbuilt. And I called it 'the opening movements'.

Have you ever seen such a small moment of violence....some image or footage of a shattered limb or a corpse....and felt it in your stomach and your heart because it was real and horrible and you could imagine it being your limb, your corpse? Always remember that it was only a tiny part of what we do not know. Vollmann's question comes back: How can we not know what goes on in this world?

Housekeeping

2010-04-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

Marilynne Robinson

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs Sylvie Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it.

Lucille wants to be Housekeeping and so do most of the people in town, but everyone has such trouble with it. If you organize a stack of empty tin cans, keeping them clean and storing them up for housekeeping, is that housekeeping? If you decide windows are better without the glass and leave them be when they are broken, is that housekeeping? Is wearing the same style of dress that all the other girls are wearing housekeeping? Is wandering around aimlessly good housekeeping? Is doing your homework?

Sylvie lives a life that does not seem to follow any convention or have much of a purpose. What do you do with Sylvie? She was married but it didn't work out and when they ask her how Mr Fisher is, she doesn't recognize the name. She goes for walks without destinations and is generally absent-minded.

If you've ever seen a person pause, with a small frown or maybe not even that much expression, maybe just slight concern that could be puzzlement on their features, and seen from their posture that they were letting something pass by or happen because they couldn't quite understand it and weren't sure what was going on, that they were keeping their hands off because they had not quite figured out what it was they were seeing, if you've ever seen this expression, you will know how the characters in Housekeeping feel. It's the look of not recognizing something.

The Last Supper

2010-04-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

Pawel Huelle
Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Nothing that requires a lot of explanation is perfect, replied Berdo decisively. So perhaps the best definition of faith is a medicine? As the prophet says: God did not create a suffering without also creating some remedy against it. Such a remedy is faith. Or at least that is how I understand it.

In late middle age, an artist wants a picture from which to paint a rendition of the Last Supper. He gathers twelve of his friends from his youth and has them pose at a table in a theater on an empty stage. Pawl Huelle's Last Supper is painted of the memories and stories of some of these men as they come together again.

The People of the Abyss

2010-04-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

Jack London

From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's streets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to move on. You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is also a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.
But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer.
Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise. What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived. They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

Reading The People of the Abyss will do many things to you: it will impress upon your soul the miserable state of the East End of London in 1902; it will make you angry at Jack London; it might make you wonder just when the "developed" world became distinct from the "developing" world, and it might raise this question--how could things be this bad?

There is so much abundance on this planet. Yet somehow we've managed to divide it up in such a way as to keep most of it out of most everyone's hands. But how could you divide it better? Many people I respect would say that the best way to divide everything is through the freedom of capitalism. But while this seems to be a good idea, isn't it evident that one of the basic premises of capitalism is not in effect? There is no equal starting point. At least a third of the world is receiving a substantial head-start, so substantial that many of the rest might as well give up the race. So how do we divide it better?

In the vein of Jack London, perhaps a little observation is in order. Recently traveling, this is what I saw: I went through four airports (Seattle, Chicago, Ft Lauderdale, and Dallas). These airports are in very different geographic regions of the United States, yet in each and every airport, certain sights were ubiquitous. Every time I passed a shoe-shine station, it was invariably a white person on the high chair, while a person with darker skin was shining the shoe. Every janitorial cart that passed (and I spent almost three full days in the airport, being passed by many janitorial carts) was not pushed by a white person, but a person with darker skin. Without fail, the people performing the most menial tasks were not white people.

How is it, if the freedom of capitalism does work, that a minority population is so vastly over-represented in menial positions and so vastly under-represented in all the positions above this? It's not an issue of geographic location, because what I saw was the same in the Pacific Northwest as it was Miami as it was in Dallas as it was in Chicago. If this is happening in a nation where the freedom of capitalism is kept more free than anywhere else, what hope is there for the freedom of capitalism?

Some part of the system is promoting this. I don't think that it is inherent in capitalism (although I can imagine it so), which leads me to suspect that the problem is with the base assumptions that we use as the foundation of our system. One of those is that everyone gets to start from an equal point. Capitalism is equitable as long as the people who participate in the system are allowed to start at the same level. This clearly does not happen.

Of course, some might say that the system was never intended to be equitable, but rather to generate the greatest amount of wealth for the largest number of people. Or they might just say that it was intended to generate the greatest amount of wealth. Either way, it is not hard to see how such a system could generate the situation London saw in The People of the Abyss.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2010-04-12T13:44:00.001-07:00

Haruki Murakami

Noboru Wataya glanced at his watch in order to ascertain that the world was still spinning on its axis and costing him precious time.

Do you know the story of the monkeys of shitty island? I asked Noboru Wataya.
He shook his head, with no sign of interest. Never heard of it.
Somewhere, far, far away, there's a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world's foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It's an endless cycle.
I drank the rest of my coffee.

Well, how can I put this? Sometimes, when I'm looking at you, I get this feeling like maybe you're fighting real hard against something for me. I know this sounds weird, but when that happens, I feel like I"m right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it's got nothing to do with you, but you're not really like that. In your own way, you're out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can't tell by looking at you. If you weren't, you wouldn't have gone into the well like that, right? But anyhow, you're not fighting for me, of course. You're falling all over yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and the only reason you're doing it is so you can find Kumiko. So there's no point in me getting all sweaty for you. I know all that, but still, I can't help feeling that you are fighting for me, Mr Wind-up Bird--that, in a way, you are probably fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you're fighting for Kumiko. And that's maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes. That's what I think, Mr Wind-up Bird. But when I see you doing this, I get all tense and nervous, and I end up feeling totally drained. I mean, it looks like you can't possibly win. If i had to bet on the match, I'd be on you to lose. Sorry, but that's how it is. I like you a lot, but I don't want to go broke.

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style that he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which were not was not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reminded me of something Salman Rushdie would write, only with more edges, or again, of something Isabelle Allende would write but not as much like a flowering plant (thorns or no thorns). It seems those historical chronicles that so often include magical realism, or those magical realism stories that just always seem to be historical chronicles, are mostly concerned with revealing the dirty secrets in our minds and our histories.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about wounds. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about fate. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about losing things. What most links the characters in Murakami's novel is their relation to Manchukuo, the puppet state Japan established in Manchuria in 1931-32. Perhaps because of their straightforward approach to incredible brutality or perhaps because of the tension between despair and hope in magical powers, the scenes and stories from this chapter of history are some of the most spell-binding in the book.

There are so many backwaters of history, little or large bits of the story that escape the notice of the mainstream history everyone is busy telling each other. Each culture, each nation has their own story they are telling, and as if by agreement they tell certain parts with grace and gusto so that other parts will go unnoticed. And it usually falls to the unofficial storytellers, the artists, to tell the omitted stories such as they find them. Because the artists can trick you into listening to a story you would otherwise have closed your ears to and run away from.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gives you a sense of the hurt that society's framework is supposed to allow us all to hide and hold and function on with. To escape from his escaped wife Kumiko, Toru Okada goes to sit at the bottom of a well for three days because Lieutenant Mamiya was thrown into one, but May Kasahara decides to trap Toru down there because she wants to scare him because she's a crazy young girl because she wants to see how he will deal with it because she's fascinated by death because she likes the feeling of power because she might already be responsible for someone else's death. And this is only a tiny bit of the action, all of which seems to point to people who are trying to break out of the supporting framework because they want to know what their pain is like.

Toru can't seem to find a job (or make anything of himself), May doesn't go to school and counts bald men instead, Cinnamon doesn't speak, Kumiko runs away, Lieutenant Mamiya didn't die and can't fall in love, and the list goes on, all because they are people who don't want medication. Saying no mean thing against doctors, sometimes medication is not the thing the patient wants because the patient does not even want to be a patient. So everyone hopes that there really are some people who have superpowers and that maybe pain is like the snow that was general all over Dublin.

The King's English

2010-04-07T08:10:00.001-07:00

Kingsley Amis

Perceive, perception
To perceive something, or that something is so, used to mean simply to take in with the senses or the mind; you would perceive a tree on the horizon or the importance of heredity. The word is almost a synonym for see, except that a degree of effort or special ability is implied. But whatever you perceived was understood to be really there.
Then, in the earlier 1970s, a new meaning started creeping in. From then on what was perceived no longer had to be really there, it might be just the way you saw it, looked at it, saw not in the primary meaning of taking in reality but in the secondary meaning of taking a view of, e.g. I see things differently now. Nowadays journalists write of X's perception of the Labour Party when X might see the Labour Party as anything from a capitalist conspiracy to a gang of communists, while Y's perception might be entirely different and yet equally 'valid'.
When Samuel Johnson said to an acquaintance, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig,' he certainly did not mean to say anything as wishy-washy as that his uneven and temporary view of the chap took him to be some sort of vile Whig; he meant he now knew the other chap was a depraved supporter of parliament rather than the crown, etc. As Johnson would have known, the Latin roots of perceive indicate that it meant to grasp thoroughly. Latin roots of English words are notoriously often bad guides to meaning, but not seldom, as here, they may remind the user of what the English word once unequivocally meant.
This user of perceive and perception will remain at best potential until further notice. The distinction between their traditional and contemporary meanings is quite substantial enough to deter me from ever running the risk of being thus misunderstood. Such is a common result of verbal innovation: instead of anything valuable, it causes either muddle or the departure of a once-useful word.

The moral of The King's English: Words are dangerous.

The Pagan Rabbi

2010-04-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Cynthia Ozick

Meanwhile Isabel frowned with logic. But it's only that the caterpillar's future is longer and his fate father off. In the end he will die too. Never, never, never, said Fishbein; it is only the butterfly who dies, and then he has long since ceased to be a caterpillar. The caterpillar never dies.--Neither to die nor to be immortal, it is the enviable state, little dear, to live always at the point of beautiful change! That is what it means to be extraordinary--when did I tell you that?--He bethought himself. The first day, of course. It's always best to begin with the end--with the image of what is desired. If I had begun with the beginning I would have bored you, you would have gone away....In my ideal kingdom, little dear, everyone, even the very old, will be passionately in the process of guessing at and preparing for his essential self. Boredom will be unnatural, like a curse, or unhealthy, like a plague. Everyone will be extraordinary.

Cynthia Ozick's Rabbi quite literally was a pagan. Not what you expected. Have you ever heard of a rabbi who converted from Judaism to Paganism? The Pagan Rabbi is a page-turner, though.

The Bostonians

2010-04-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Henry James

My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish. They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are willing to patronize us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a few moderate concessions; to say that there are two or three little points in which society has not quite been just to us. But any man who pretends to accept our programme in toto, as you and I understand it, of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him! It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have thought it all out.

James's novel about the early feminist movement is not flattering to women. Or it is very unflattering to Bostonians, not just the female variety. If you cannot tell from the quote above, women in The Bostonians are a flighty, exceedingly emotional, vindictive, silly collection of individuals. They have passion but they go about it very foolishly.

Perhaps it demonstrates my ignorance of Henry James, but The Bostonians was not at all what I expected. The story of a bitter old maid who is young and her infatuation with a hypnotist's daughter who she (the young old maid) sponsors into becoming a motivational speaker for women's liberation would have been surprising itself, but when you include a cousin from Mississippi, some very strange views about women and men, and finally marriage of tears, it leaves you with little to say.

I never expected James to be so wild.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

2010-03-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

James Agee
Walker Evans

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it; and the question, Why we make this book, and set it at large, and by what right, and for what purpose, and to what good end, or none:

that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.

All over Alabama, the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there, with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast. The plow handles are wet, and the rails and frogplates and the weeds between the ties: and not even the hurryings and hoarse sorrows of a distant train, on other roads, is heard. The little towns, the county seats, house by house white-painted and elaborately sawn among their heavy and dark-lighted leaves, in the spaced protections of their mineral light they stand so prim, so voided, so undefended upon starlight, that it is inconceivable to despise or to scorn a white man, an owner of land; even in Birmingham, mile on mile, save for the sudden frightful streaming, almost instantly diminished and silent of a closed black car, and save stone lonesome sinister heelbeats, that show never a face and enter, soon, a frame door flush with the pavement, and ascend the immediate lightless staircase, mile on mile, stone, stone, smooth charted streams of stone, the streets under their lifted lamps lie void before eternity.

This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself.

The furniture in general and the eating implements are all at or very near the bottom of their scale: broken, insecure, uncomfortable, ill-smelling, all that a man without money must constantly accept, when he can get it, and be glad of, or make do. Since I have talked of 'esthetics' the least I can do is to add a note on it in their terms: they live in a steady shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities, piecing these together into whatever semblance of comfortable living they can, and the whole of it is a stark nakedness of makeshifts and the lack of means: yet they are also, of course, profoundly anesthetized.

For that reason and for others, I would do just as badly to simplify or eliminate myself from this picture as to simplify or invent character, places or atmospheres. A chain of truths did actually weave itself and run through: it is their texture that I want to represent, not betray, nor pretty up into art. The one deeply exciting thing to me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant. He is not some artist's or journalist's or propagandist's invention: he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented literary imitation of a human being.

There are times of year when all these three are overlapped and collaborated, all in the field in the demand, chiefly, of cotton; but more largely, the woman is the servant of the day, and of immediate life, and the man is the servant of the year, and of the basis and boundaries of life, and is their ruler; and the children are the servants of their parents: and the center of all their existence, the central work, that by which they have their land, their shelter, their living, that which they must work for no reward more than this, because they do not own themselves, and without hope or interest, that which they cannot eat and get no money of but which is at the center of their duty and greatest expense of strength and spirit, the cultivation and harvesting of cotton: and all this effort takes place between a sterile earth and an uncontrollable sky in whose propitiation is centered their chief reverence and fear, and the deepest earnestness of their prayers, who read in these machinations of their heaven all signs of a fate which the hardest work cannot much help, and, not otherwise than as the most ancient peoples of the earth, make their plantations in the unpitying pieties of the moon.

My father, my grandfather, my poor damned tragic, not unusually tragic, bitched family and all these millions of each individual people that only want to live in kindness and decency, you never live an inch without involvement and hurting people and ----ing yourself everlastingly and only the hard bastards come through, I'm not born and can't be that hard apparently and God ---- Genius and Works of Art anyway and who the hell am I, who in Jesus' name am I. This is a beautiful country. You can take that and good art and love together and stick them up your ---. And if you think da dialectic is going to ring any conceivably worthwhile changes, you can stick that and yourself up after. Just an individualizing intellectual. Bad case of infantilism. And ---- you, too.

For half my blood is just this; and half my right of speech; and bland chance alone is my life so softened and sophisticated in the years of my defenselessness, and I am robbed of a royalty I can not only never claim, but never properly much desire or regret.

It is not likely for her; it is not likely for any of you, my beloved, whose poor lives I have already so betrayed and should you see these things so astounded, so destroyed, I dread to dare that I shall ever look into your dear eyes again: and soon, quite soon now, in two years, in five, in forty, it will all be over, and one by one we shall all be drawn into the planet beside one another; let us know, let us know there is cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun, and in slow agonies and all deceptions clearing; and in the teeth of all hope of cure which shall pretend its denial and hope of good use to men, let us most quietly and in most reverent fierceness say, not by its captive but by its utmost meanings:
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come: thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven: give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: and lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom: and the power: and the glory: for ever and ever: amen.

When there was an earthquake in Haiti early this year, television coverage was speedy and morally righteous. I heard many announces, television personalities, and correspondents asking where such and such aid was and why wasn't the aid being delivered faster and don't you see all these problems and how deplorable is all this and yet sublime for the human struggle and will to triumph. Particularly of note, I remember seeing a small boy, who looked to be naked, hugging his knees and looking around as people walked by him, looking entirely scared and worried and not knowing what to do. This image is in my memory because I saw it every commercial break, every time they displayed the network's logo and "Breaking News" graphics. It was always the same shot and the boy always looked just as naked, just as bewildered, just as scared, just as lost in the middle of a million busy people all bigger than he was.

What happened to the boy?

There are too many stories for every story to be told, and surely the television crews had their hands full and there really is only so much air time. And maybe someone did help him. Of course this shot probably drew quite a few viewers in--it was very compelling--so you can say that the boy made the network quite a lot of money. I doubt he received any compensation for that. But then again maybe those people who watched were compelled to donate and so maybe this naked knee-hugging boy is responsible for large sums of money that would otherwise have been slightly less large. Still, I don't know what happened to this boy.

Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about three families: he gloried in their very factualness, their livingness, and yet with the printing of his words, the telling of their story, what happened to them? Vollmann and Steinbeck the same. All these authors who write of what is real, they leave uprooted the lives they've told. You see, like a camera catching and moving into fame for anonymous brevity the face of some child bystander, victim, representative, all the famous men's relatings of their relations with those who are not famous are sneakingly vile. Not only are they unfair, but they happen also to be incredibly painful, fraudulent, and you could even say that they use people. Because they steal the emotion, the pain, the happiness, the is, the life and personality of these who are defenseless in the realm of fame, and they (the famous) use them (they who are not) as so much reason to make money and speeches, and even sometimes to draw morals. Often they do not ask permission. Many times they even do it covertly so that no unfamous has even a hope of representing their self as the famous will represent him or herself through the story of the unfamous.

And now the famous men are still famous and some even have made their fame off those who are not, like fortunes made off the unfortunate, we find that the unfamous vanished and we do not know the fullness of their story; they have become nothing more than pages to the fullness of the famous man's story. And is he even thankful? Are we? Who remembers them after the prop they were made into? Who can?

Travels with Charley

2010-03-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

John Steinbeck

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process; a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.

Charley is a tall dog. As he sat in the seat beside me, his head was almost as high as mine. He put his nose close to my ear and said, "Ftt." He is the only dog I ever knew who could pronounce the consonant F. This is because his front teeth are crooked, a tragedy which keeps him out of dog shows; because his upper front teeth slightly engage his lower lip Charley can pronounce F. The word "Ftt" usually means he would like to salute a bush or a tree. I opened the cab door and let him out, and he went about his ceremony. He doesn't have to think about it to do it well. It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness--chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."

I succumbed utterly to my desolation, made two peanut-butter sandwiches, and went to bed and wrote letters home, passing my loneliness around. Then the rain stopped falling and the trees dripped and I helped to spawn a school of secret dangers. Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protests against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was a caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true--a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? Now and then there appear accounts of babies raised by animals--wolves and such. It is usually reported that the youngster crawls on all fours, makes those sounds learned from his foster parents, and perhaps even thinks like a wolf. Only through imitation do we develop toward originality. Take Charley, for example. He has always associated with the learned, the gentle, the literate, and the reasonable both in France and in America. And Charley is no more like a dog dog than he is like a cat. His perceptions are sharp and delicate and he is a mind-reader. I don't know that he can read the thoughts of other dogs, but he can read mine. Before a plan is half formed in my mind, Charley knows about it, and he also knows whether he is to be included in it. There's no question about this. I know too well his look of despair and disapproval when I have just thought that he must be left at home. And so much for the three notes below the red stain on the ketchup bottle.

Here, Charley, I give you a warning, should you be drawn to generalities. If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And if this is so, why are there no condiments save ketchup and mustard to enhance their foods?

The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life. And what the scorching, searing, freezing, poisoning weapons of non-life have failed to do may be accomplished to the end of its destruction and extinction by the tactics of survival gone sour. If the most versatile of living forms, the human, now fights for survival, as it always has, it can eliminate not only itself but all other life. And if that should transpire, unwanted places like the desert might be the harsh mother of repopulation . For the inhabitants of the desert are well trained and well armed against desolation. Even our own misguided species might re-emerge from the desert. The lone man and his sun-toughened wife who cling to the shade in an unfruitful and uncoveted place might, with their brothers in arms--the coyote, the jackrabbit, the horned toad, the rattlesnake, together with a hoist of armored insects--these trained and tested fragments of life might well be the last hope of life against non-life. The desert has mothered magic things before this.

It's hard to know what to say when there is so much to say. Without wanting to spoil either the thoughts I've had or the thoughts you might have, I don't know how to let out all the excitement and wonder with which reading Travels with Charley filled me. It is not unlikely that in reading this book you will come to the conclusion that John Steinbeck was a prophet.

Looking Backward

2010-03-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

Edward Bellamy

Who is capable of self-support? he demanded. There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your system.

Looking Backward couldn't be more logical in its arguments, and therefore demonstrates the most damning loophole in logical argument: if your axioms are false, you will deduct entire systems of logical truth that has no bearing on reality.

Bellamy sends a man of the late Nineteenth Century to the eve of the new millennium, Julian West is put to sleep by a hypnotist in May of 1887, his house burns down and everyone he knows thinks he's dead, but really he's just hypno-sleeping until the year 2000, when someone finds him and wakes him up.

The back of my copy actually had a pretty gripping description, if only because of its folly: It is the year 2000---and full employment, material abundance, and social harmony can be found everywhere.

Bellamy's novel is a detail-light exposition of his utopian vision for society. He spends the vast majority of the novel expounding how this perfect system works and a little bit about how it developed from what the novel considers to be the darkest era of humanity. Looking Backward lends itself to, not surprisingly, looking backward; Bellamy's vision of the future reveals something of his perception of reality in 1887.

As an author, perhaps his greatest feat is to capture in brief moments one generation's incredulity at the 'ethical barbarism' of a past generation. But otherwise, he continually forgets that the conceit of the book is that it is written by Nineteenth Century man in the year 2000 to a Twentieth Century audience. When he forgets this, his novel turns into a sermon and is not terribly pleasant to read.

Although Bellamy is pretty far off the mark as to what we are now, he did predict the invention of something that I never would have expected a man of the late-nineteenth century to predict: the credit card.

Loaves and Fishes

2010-03-16T22:18:00.001-07:00

Dorothy Day

Ours is a great place for nicknames.

In the Catholic Church one never needs any money to start a good work, Peter replied. People are what are important. If you have the people and they are willing to give their work--that is the thing. God is not to be outdone in generosity. The funds will come in somehow or other.

But there are no wages. Well, people do not need to work for wages. They can offer their services as a gift.

I explained that we were not a community of saints but rather a slipshod group of individuals who were trying to work out certain principles--the chief of which was an analysis of man's freedom and what it implied. We could not put people out on the street, I said, because they acted irrationally and hatefully. We were trying to overcome hatred with love, to understand the forces that made men what they are, to learn something of their backgrounds, their education to change them, if possible from lions into lambs. It was a practice in loving, a learning to love, a paying of the cost of love.

On the other hand, to continue examining these subtleties: What about this business of letting the other fellow get away with things? Isn't there something awfully smug about such piety--building up your own sanctimoniousness at the expense of the increased guilt of someone else? This turning the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace--how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I'd rather be the striker than the meek one struck. One would almost rather be a sinner than a saint at the expense of the sinner. No, somehow we must be saved together.

It just happened. It is the living from day to day, taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, trying literally to follow the Gospel, that resulted in this work.
"Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not away....Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and calumniate you."

Easiest of all is to have so little, to have given away so much, that there is nothing left to give. But is this ever true? This point of view leads to endless discussions; but the principle remains the same. We are our brother's keeper. Whatever we have beyond our own needs belongs to the poor. If we sow sparingly we will reap sparingly. And it is sad but true that we must give far more than bread, than shelter.

Even then, deep within, I would be sure; even though I said to myself, "I believe because I want to believe, I hope because I want to hope, I love because I want to love." These very desires would be regarded by God as He regarded those of Daniel, who was called a man of desires, and whom He rewarded.

Use your common sense as far as it will take you, Father Roy used to say, and, when you realize you can do nothing, bow your head to the storm and pray--pray without ceasing. If that fails, rejoice that you, too, are accounted worthy to suffer and to realize your weakness and keep on praying like the importunate widow.

The city, the state--we have nicknamed them Holy Mother the City, Holy Mother the State--have taken on a large role in sheltering the homeless: But the ideal is for every family to have a Christ room, as the early fathers of the Church called it. The prophets of Israel certainly emphasized hospitality. It seems to me that in the future the family--the ideal family--will always try to care for one more. If every family that professed to follow Scriptural teaching whether Jew, Protestant, or Catholic, were to do this, there would be no need for huge institutions, houses of dead storage where human beings waste away in loneliness and despair. Responsibility must return to the parish with a hospice and a center for mutual aid, to the group, to the family, to the individual.

I am afraid that nature may become similarly enraged at our own waste here in our too blessed America. You see it on every hand: in the Army, in the jails, in all public institutions. Even the school lunch system gives evidence of it. Corporations hire efficiency engineers to eliminate waste motions and thus help them save a few pennies; unions fight and strike to get a few cents an hour wage increase for their workers. At the same time there is wanton waste everywhere, on the part of every man, woman, and child.

You wonder: how did they do it? Was the world so different that you could take in pretty much everyone off the streets, offer them a bed, and sleep safely? Have perceptions of the homeless, the down and out, so incredibly altered that we cannot even fathom this? Where has this dream gone?

I turned to Loaves and Fishes looking for some kind of explanation that could be my hope. I didn't really find any explanations other than a very hard one: just do it, but I did find some hope. It seems that they didn't have so much better an idea of what they were doing than I.

I envy the Catholic Workers their lack of institution, their abundance of energy and right-timing-ness, their faith, and their freedom. It seems that not so much of this is possible in this day. I feel pathetic even in writing it, because I have not tried, so perhaps the writing is my way of purging this poison so that I can try, but aren't there so many new hurdles? Liability. A different sort of person living in poverty. Sex crimes that seem to be more common (although, I'm not actually convinced this one is true). But how could one open up a building and say, come live with me?

As always Grace. I don't know that there is too much more to say on the subject than that where God requires, God supplies. I wonder if the old truth doesn't remain the big truth: pray. The Catholic Workers spent quite a lot of time in prayer. They went to daily mass. They prayed at the noon time. They prayed Vespers. And they opened their doors wide and feared no evil.

Perhaps one of the greatest aspects of reading Loaves and Fishes is that you get a sense of a life, a world, a set of rules entirely different from those commonly accepted as in force. The Kingdom has a different set of laws and often they don't seem to be possibilities to the world, much less make sense.

As a note. I have been reading quite a few books written in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century and one thing that has poked me in the mind a good deal, has been their asides on the subject of garbage. From Steinbeck to Dorothy Day to Edward Bellamy, people were noticing that garbage was piling up, that we live lifestyles of a particularly wasteful sort, and that it can't go on. It has gone on. Is that ominous?

Travels with Lizbeth

2010-03-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

Lars Eighner

Once I was the sort of person who invests objects with sentimental value. Now I no longer have those objects, but I have the sentiments yet.

Home is the natural destination of any homeless person. But nothing can be done in a day, in a week, in a year to get nearer that destination. No perceptible progress can be made. In the absence of progress, time is nearly meaningless. Some days are more comfortable than others. And that is all the difference. A homeless life has no storyline. It is a pointless circular rambling about the stage that can be brought to happy conclusion only by a deus ex machina.

In spite of the challenges that homelessness presented, the chief characteristic of my experience of homelessness was tedium. The days and nights that Lizbeth and I were literally without a roof over our heads, although by far the majority of the more than two years encompassed here, are represented by relatively few examples. One of those days was so much like each of the others that to call any of them typical would be an understatement. Our immediate needs I met with more or less trouble, but once that was done I could do no more. Day after day I could aspire, within reason, to nothing more than survival. Although the planets wandered among the stars and the moon waxed and waned, the identical naked barrenness of existence was exposed to me, day in and day out. I do not think I could write a narrative that would quite capture the unrelenting ennui of homelessness, but if I were to write it, no one could bear to read it. I spare myself as much as the reader in not attempting to recall so many empty hours. Every life has trivial occurrences, pointless episodes, and unresolved mysteries, but a homeless life has these and virtually nothing else. I have found it best in some parts to abandon a strictly chronological account and to treat in essay form experiences that relate to a single subject although they occurred in disparate times and places.

Unfortunately anyone who writes a book about being homeless is bound to miss the true heart of the thing because anyone who can write a book is not going to be homeless like the homeless are. If you are capable of writing a book you are capable of much more than most people in the world, and one of the things you are capable of is finding yourself a home. This doesn't mean, however, that you cannot make accurate observations, as in Travels with Lizbeth.

The Homeless

2010-03-12T08:19:00.001-08:00

Christopher Jencks

Even in America, the world's most commercialized society, blame is still free. That means there is always plenty for everyone.

The Homeless provides an extensive statistical analysis of homelessness and its causes in and before the early '90s. One of the truths Jencks illuminates most starkly is that when society (read: ) looks at poor people they will see what they want, whether in the causes or in the realities or in the statistics.

The Dumb Ox

2010-03-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

G K Chesterton

What is called the Manichean philosophy has had many forms; indeed it has attacked what is immortal and immutable with a very curious kind of immortal mutability. It is like the legend of the magician who turns himself into a snake or a cloud; and the whole has that nameless note of irresponsibility, which belongs to much of the metaphysics and morals of Asia, from which the Manichean mystery came. But it is always in one way or another a notion that nature is evil; or that evil is at least rooted in nature. The essential point is that as evil has roots in nature, so it has rights in nature. Wrong has as much right to exist as right. As already stated this notion took many forms. Sometimes it was a dualism, which made evil an equal partner with good; so that neither could be called an usurper. More often it was a general idea that demons had made the material world, and if there were any good spirits, they were concerned only with the spiritual world. Later, again, it took the form of Calvinism, which held that God had indeed made the world, but in a special sense, made the evil as well as the good: had made an evil will as well as an evil world. On this view, if a man chooses to damn his soul alive, he is not thwarting God's will but rather fulfilling it. In these two forms of the early Gnosticism and the later Calvinism, we see the superficial variety and fundamental unity of Manicheanism. The old Manicheans taught that Satan originated the whole work of creation commonly attributed to God. The new Calvinists taught that God originates the whole work of damnation commonly attributed to Satan. One looked back to the first day when a devil acted like a god, the other looked forward to a last day when a god acted like a devil. But both had the idea that the creator of the earth was primarily the creator of the evil, whether we call him a devil or a god.

Since there are a good many Manicheans among the Moderns, as we may remark in a moment, some may agree with this view, some may be puzzled about it, some may only be puzzled about why we should object to it. To understand the medieval controversy, a word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That 'God looked on all things and saw that they were good' contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

Hooray for Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Dumb Ox!

In the old, old argument between intention and action, I have missed entirely the third dimension: the actual thing. There is what you actually do, say hit someone with a shovel. There is what you intended to do: stop them from breathing by putting the shovel in their mouth. And there is the actual thing: the shovel. Clearly the shovel is not a bad thing. The intention is a bad thing. So perhaps is the action of hitting someone with a shovel. It is difficult to think of a situation where the act of hitting someone with a shovel is a thing that is good, that God smiles upon. So then maybe with the reintroduction of this third element--the shovel--we can realize that there are actually only two elements: the thing and its use.

Use includes intent and the action. So often it seems like intent and action are separable, but the problem with separating them is that sometimes they are not separable (ex. cursing someone) and if we treat them as separate entities, what are we to do with them when they are an inseparable entity? It is important that Chesterton didn't say "there are no bad things only bad intentions," instead he said "uses".

A Personal Matter

2010-03-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

Kenzaburo Oe

Well then, don't hesitate to let me know if there's anything I can do. Bird and the doctor bowed decorously and passed each other on the stairs with faces averted. Well, that's probably for the best! the doctor had said. To weaken and die before they could operate. That meant escaping the burden of a vegetable baby, and without fouling your own hands with its murder. All you had to do was wait for the baby to weaken and die hygienically in a modern hospital ward. Nor was it impossible to forget about it while you waited: that would be Bird's job. Well, that's probably for the best! The sensation of deep and dark shame renewed itself in Bird and he could feel his body stiffen. Like the expectant mothers and the women who had just given birth who passed him in their many-colored rayon nightgowns, like those who carried in their bodies a large, squirming mass, and those who had not quite escaped the memory and habit of it, Bird took short, careful steps. He was pregnant himself, in the womb of his brain, with a large squirming mass that was the sensation of shame.

We're a pack of vermin, Bird thought, a loathsome league of self-defenders. Nonetheless he delivered his report, his voice hushed, wary of the patients who might be crouching like mute crickets behind the closed doors that lined the corridor, their ears aflame with curiosity: The baby's milk is being decreased and he's getting a sugar-water substitute. The doctor in charge said we should be seeing results in a few days.

How the above quotations make you feel pretty much says it all about A Personal Matter.

Five Essays on Man and Nature

2010-03-01T18:16:00.001-08:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hellfire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band.

'T is the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty,--knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it at least for your good.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has, hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,--with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired,--into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us the fact is invariable with the Neopolitan, that when mature he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little overstated--but may pass.

If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions and weights are wings and means,--we are reconciled.

One wonders what Emerson thought of Hope? It seems to me that there can be few entities so diametrically opposed as Fate and Hope. What does the fated man have to hope for? What does the man of hope have to fear from his fate?

The Master and Margarita

2010-02-25T13:29:00.001-08:00

Mikhail Bulgakov

One might, perhaps, ask Ivan Nikolayevich why he assumed that the professor would be precisely near the Moskva River and not anywhere else. But the trouble is that there was no one to ask this. The foul alley was totally deserted.

The citizen had nabbed the tom at a moment when the beast was proceeding with a stealthy air (and what can you do if this is the manner natural to toms? It's not that they are criminal, but that they are afraid of stronger creatures--dogs or men--who might inflict some harm or wrong upon them. And this is easily done, but, I assure you, there is little honor to be claimed from such an act, yes, very little!), and so, the tom was, for some reason of his own, proceeding with a stealthy air into a clump of weeds.

This book was not at all what I expected it to be. It's Faust, but really really wacky. As much as I love the Faust story, I was not too impressed by The Master and Margarita, which is saying a lot. This seemed a case of authorial self-indulgence as bad as any I've seen. I know authorial self-indulgence, I'm an expert at it. Bulgakov has his moments, but for the most part, this was not a read to put at the top of your list.

Nickel Mountain

2010-02-22T16:07:00.001-08:00

John Gardner

Those fifteen people in New York City might be right in the end, but you had to act, and beyond that you had to assert that they were wrong, wrong for all time, whatever the truth might be. And it was the same even if you only thought you saw an old man being stabbed: You ran to the center of the illusion and you jumped the illusory man with the knife, and if it was empty, sunlit sidewalk you hit, too bad, you had to put up with the laughter, and nevertheless do it again the next time and gain and again. So Simon. It wasn't true that the world was about to end or that sinners were going to torment, but all the same he was right to go out with his crackpot pamphlets: Henry Soames would try to persuade him, but he wasn't going to stop him--except in the diner, because the diner, at least, was still his own.

A man doesn't need that sort of thing. Fact is, he doesn't need anything at all, except when he's young. When he's young a man wants something to die for--some war to fight, some kind of religion to burn at the stake for. He refilled his cup with whiskey, holding the bottle with both hands. But a man gets over all that. A woman's different. Woman's got to have something to live for. He toasted womanhood, a toast even more grand than the last, on his face the same dazed, miserable smile, then drew the cup very carefully toward his fleshy lower lip. When the cup was empty he set it down and at the last, very deliberately, stood up and started for the door.

Anything you make, he was saying, gripping Willard's arm, anything you make at all has got to be finding out what you want to make. I mean, finding out what you are. Maybe you'll draw cars or maybe you'll drive them, either way it's the same thing, you do what you do because of everything you ever did, or in spite of all you ever did--I don't know. I mean, it's love, it's like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt. It's what poor old Kuzitski used to say: It's finding something to be crucified for. That's what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion. His voice cracked--stupid, sentimental, Soames voice--and Willard Freund jerked back and laughed. Callie too seemed repelled by it, but she reached out to touch their arms, Henry Soames' and Willard's. Then she drew her hands back, for Henry was blundering on.

She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.

He felt the way he had felt long ago when his father would ask him, Where have you been till this hour, young man? knowing he had been nowhere, as always, had done nothing as always, had driven his motorcycle around on the mountain roads in the vague hope that something new might happen, that the world might stand suddenly transfigured, transformed to a movie--a gangster picture, a love picture, anything but the tedious ruin it was, a worn-out country (not worn-out enough to be morbidly interesting), worn-out farmers, a worn-out sixteen-year-old boy partly too shy and partly too righteous (all things foul to his dry-rotted mind) even to look through car windows at lovers.

Now they got gutter cleaners--seven thousand dollars they cost, and you got to pay for it month by month, summer or winter, whether or not you got hay in the barn, because banks don' t care about hay. We used to make it, in the old days, no matter how long the rain held off. But the way things are now, you can't compete without gutter cleaners and diesel tractors, combines, balers, crimpers, blowers, grain silos, motor-run unloading machines, hammermills, sorters, all the rest. Lou Millet bought that farm of his for four thousand dollars, house included. You know how deep he's in right now? A hundred thousand. Fact. Can't even sell it.

A little, he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one. Reflected in the windshield, he looked like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney or someone, and the recognition simultaneously pleased and disgusted him. Fake, he thought; sucker. And that too was from some movie. Even his self-hatred was second hand, cheap show. He blew out smoke and took a deep breath of air but seemed to get none, like Fortunato in the basement.

Really, there's only forgiveness. That's all there is. In the long gaping stretch of time, there is only forgiveness. It's natural, it's the way of things, a nature more deeply seated than all the rage and anger and hatred we think runs the world. Forgiveness is the old law, the true law of Nature. So says John Gardner in Nickel Mountain.

The Music School

2010-02-21T22:02:00.001-08:00

John Updike

Sweetie, Richard blurted, will they hurt me? The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had been 4-F, and at college and now at the office he had, less through his own determination than through the diffidence of the solicitors, evaded pledging blood. It was one of those tests of courage so trivial that no one had ever thought to make him face up to it.

The grape leaves outside my window are curiously beautiful. Curiously because it comes upon me as strange, after the long darkness of self-absorption and fear and shame in which I have been living, that things are beautiful, that independent of our catastrophes they continue to maintain the effect, which is the hallmark and specialty of Nature. Nature: this morning it seems to me very clear that Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt. Our bodies are in Nature; our shoes, their laces, the little plastic tips of the laces--everything around us and about us is in Nature, and yet something holds us away from it, like the upward push of water which keeps us from touching the sandy bottom, ribbed and glimmering with crescental fragments of oyster shell, so clear to our eyes.

Updike reminds me of Ford Maddox Ford. Kind of a bitter guy. There seems to have been a period in American writing, after the Second World War and before the late Eighties (actually it might still be going on) when we were given a series of very tired, very jaded, almost catatonic writers who knew no other subject than familial trouble and ennui. I'm exaggerating a bit, but after The Music School with its repetitive hammer stroke themes, I feel a bit like exaggerating.

Carpenter's Gothic

2010-02-18T22:56:00.002-08:00

William Gaddis

She came into the kitchen with the halves of the china dog from the mantel, found glue and stood there at the sink pressing the pieces together. An ear snapped off, and she walked more slowly to the trash, her thumb to her lips with a fleck of blood. Here in the top of the trash lay that harsh glimpse of boats off Eleuthera and, down wiping it clean of coffee grounds, a torn piece of a letter in a generous and unfamiliar hand drawn out in severed fragments, anyone's fault, the last thing I, for you to believe me, what else to do. Deeper down, under the wet batiste remnant shorn of its buttons, she found the torn half of the envelope with the Zaire stamp URGENT PLEASE FORWARD, picking it through till the phone brought her up with her thumb to her lips, tasting blood,--Mrs who...? No I'm afraid not, I'm not...Well it's a very small street and I mean I don't even know who lives...No now listen I can't join your march against cancer, I don't like cancer I don't even like to think about it that's all, now...yes you're welcome goodbye.

Never heard of, wait it might be the VA give me it, might be about my pension hello...? What...? No, twenty fifth, I was in the twenty fifth infantry what's the...platoon leader look, what's it about who...look, I...No look I, medical, eighty percent look how the hell did they get hold of my record, who...No well look now look I'm, I can't just told you I can't just too God damn busy I'm, got to be out of town be out of, out of the country just too God damn busy no I'm, goodbye no, goodbye... He held the phone tight for a moment, and then hung it up.--Liz?

And stop calling me that! That's, what's sorry no, that's what my father always did, saying I'm sorry and he'd pat me and try to give me a kiss no, it's always something else, saying I'm sorry it's always for the wrong thing that's why people say it. I'm sorry I disturbed you Mrs Booth, loading all those books on him and driving away filling his head with, with I don't know what, that whole show you put on for him in there from the minute he, the minute you found out his name, that his name was Vorakers. Fossils and brimstone and calling Reverend Ude the missing link so he could make fun of Paul why, why. Just to make it all worse between him and Paul? yes, and me?

Took him out drinking half the night no, no I told you he took me I hardly got a word in, you think you have to teach the young outrage? Not just Paul not just your father no, he was outraged at everything, everybody who came before him you think eh left me out? that he had some kind of romantic picture like the, like you did? finding gold out there when I was his age do you know what he said? Just one more four fucking thousand foot hole in the ground they'll pack with black skins to dig it out for them oldest damned story there is, the new generation blames the old one for the mess it inherits and they lump us all together because tall they see is what we've become, lying in wait for you out there one misstep and they pounce, grab one straw of expediency and they're on to you for betraying yourself, betraying them, selling out like the ones writing bad books and bad everything who are doing the best they can? when we thought we could count on civilization? Two hundred years building this great bastion of middle class values, fair play, pay your debts, fair pay for honest work, two hundred years that's about all it is, progress, improvement everywhere, what's worth doing is worth doing well and they find out that's the most dangerous thing of all, all our grand solutions turn into nightmares. Nuclear energy to bring cheap power everywhere and all they hear is radiation threats and what in hell to do with the waste. Food for the millions and they're back eating organic sprouts and stone ground flour because everything else is poisonous additives, pesticides poisoning the earth, poisoning the rivers the oceans and the conquest of space turns into military satellites and high technology where the only metaphor we've given them is the neutron bomb and the only news is today's front page...

Gaddis very adequately captures miserable people doing miserable things to each other. In the midst of it all, there are moments when he manages to make these miserable people lovely and wonderful and to make you want to kiss them. It does take a magician to make people want to kiss lepers.

Reading Gaddis' dialogue is like trying to draw while driving over a very badly washboarded road: jarring. If you can manage a short novel of constant jarring, no rest and lots of lepers, Carpenter's Gothic is a good place to find one.

Poetic Diction

2010-02-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

Owen Barfield

That the idea of Poetry and Science as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life should have taken firm hold of a generation which honours Aristotle, Bacon and Goethe, will, I believe, be as much a matter of wonder to our posterity as it will--if not re-adjusted--be a matter of tragedy to ourselves.

Oscar Wilde's mot--that men are made by books rather than books by men--was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'.

Barfield's project in Poetic Diction, more a proposal, an outline, than exhaustive research, points to what will be one of the most fundamental crisis of the Internet Age. How many generations have absorbed scientific speech as a more precise, less figurative mode of speech than poetic? The Science-Poetry duality is second-nature to most of the Western World at this point, so that at its best Poetry is a way of discussing the things that are too wishy-washy for Science (thus far that is, Science fully expects to reduce the amount of wishy-washiness and with time fully eliminate the need for Poetry) and at its worst is cheap emotional off-gassing.

In most of Western culture, Poetry is allowed by Science to have some credibility in the realm of the unconscious but this is only because Science has not grown into its own quite yet. The necessity, even the meaning, even the worth of Poetry will vanish with each Scientific measurement. It is against this lunacy that Barfield raises his sword.

Barfield proposes that science cannot exist without poetics, indeed that scientific thought cannot be fully understood except through poetics. Based in the concept that scientific discourse cannot take place except in the forum of words*, Barfield launches into wordy warfare. Tracing words back to their first union with meaning, Poetic Diction argues that it is Poetry that has given words their meaning.

In 1928, at the time of Poetic Diction's publication, there were several schools as to how words originally gained meaning: one school was that words were once entirely literal. When a man used the word for tree he meant most completely specifically that tree over there next to the rock that looks like a dog picking its nose. Essentially this school argued that at one point all words were proper names. At some point then comes along an age of such poetic greatness that words are divorced from their specific name meanings and the concept of abstraction is born. The tool for this great divorce, they claimed, was metaphor.

The second school said claimed that all meaning had its root in metaphor. That words originally could not be anything other than metaphor. Since the vocabulary of early languages was so limited, metaphor was forced to be applied to almost all speech.

Barfield contends that neither of these approaches is correct. Instead he says that the trend of speech is to become more and more abstract, which is to say precise, and that in the early stages of language, concepts and physical identities were not so distinct. To Barfield, a myth is a thing that embodies both metaphor and proper name and so Barfield believes that language once rolled and mixed these two together so entirely that neither was neither. The development of language has been the process of separating the two.

I have not done justice to Barfield's complex argument about a complex subject. Read the book if you'd like an unscathed understanding.

*As a note, I find it incredibly interesting that with electricity we have now converted words back into numbers...binary code and the like. This of course makes the system incredibly more complex. I'm sure that Kurt Godel has something to do with this at some point, but mostly the concept of mathematics as a language is interesting to me. Because with coding languages we now have a link from numbers to words and a language which can be converted into numbers and understood that way as well as understood as words. It wouldn't do to convert Crime and Punishment into binary code and show it to people. Not at all. But some people can read simple programming in its numerical state...

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

2010-02-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Stein

In explaining his unhappiness he told Gertrude Stein they talk about the sorrows of great artists, the tragic unhappiness of great artists but after all they are great artists. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artists and he is not a great artist.

Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives of many geniuses.

It was a pleasure to meet, it was even an honour, but that was about all.

Fernande roused like a lioness defending her cubs. That is a brutality that I will never forgive him, she said. I met him on the street, he had a comic supplement in his hand, I asked him to give it to me to help me to distract myself and he brutally refused. It was a piece of cruelty that I will never forgive. I ask you, Gertrude, to give to me myself the next copies you have of the comic supplement. Gertrude Stein said, why certainly with pleasure.

But the gist of the matter was that Guillaume challenged the other man and Max Jacob was to be the second and witness for Guillaume. Guillaume and his antagonist each sat in their favourite cafe all day and waited while their seconds went to and fro. How it all ended Gertrude Stein does not know except that nobody fought, but the great excitement was the bill each second and witness brought to his principal.

One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.

He says, she says, that I don't look it because I have more courage, but I don't think I am, she says, no I don't think I am.

I always say you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do. A good many years later Jane Heap said that she had never appreciated the quality of Gertrude Stein's work until she proof-read it.

Constance Fletcher came a day or so after we arrived and I went to the station to meet her. Mabel Dodge had described her to me as a very large woman who would wear a purple robe and who was deaf. As a matter of fact she was dressed in green and was not deaf but very short sighted, and she was delightful.

Sunrises were, they contended, alright when approached slowly from the night before, but when faced abruptly from the same morning they were awful.

Then began a long correspondence, not between Gertude Stein and T S Eliot, but between T S Eliot's secretary and myself. We each addressed the other as Sir, I signing myself A B Toklas and she signing initials. It was only considerably afterwards that I found out that his secretary was not a young man. I don't know whether she ever found out that I was not.

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.

I write for myself and strangers.

I have never read so many well-placed, even beautiful 'very's. If you ever question Gertrude Stein's ability as a writer, read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. This book shocks you with the beauty of its sentences.

Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is a testament to Gertrude Stein. Speaking for her friend about herself, Stein creates conversational ripples of voices spreading out from each anecdote into the whole of the work.

As my first experience with Stein, I had never before been confronted with Stein's reluctance to use commas. I admire her style, but cannot admire her paucity of commas: sometimes (far more often than Stein imagines) they are just useful.

I feel especially unworthy writing these thoughts on the book. She really is that good.

The Tin Drum

2010-02-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

Gunter Grass

It's amazing how long a man can sit on a park bench; he sits till he turns to wood and feels the need of communicating with other wooden figures: old men who come only in good weather, old women gradually reverting to garrulous girlhood, children shouting as they play tag, lovers who will have to part soon, but not yet, not yet. The swans are black, the weather hot, cold, or medium according to the season. Much paper is dropped; the scraps flutter about or lie on the walks until a man in a cap, paid by the city spears them on a pointed stick.

It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board--pig or fish--a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice--what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?

LANKES: Oh, all right, if you put it that way. This is how I figure it. When this war is over--one way or another, it will be over some day--well, then, when the war is over, the pillboxes will still be here. These things were made to last. And then my time will come. The centuries...(He puts the last cigarette in his pocket.) Maybe you've got another cigarette, sir? Thank you, sir...the centuries start coming and going, one after another like nothing at all. But the pillboxes stay put just like the Pyramids stayed put. And one fine day one of those archaeologist fellows comes along. And he says to himself: what an artistic void there was between the First and the Seventh World Wars! Dull drab concrete; here and there, over a pillbox entrance, you find some clumsy amateurish squiggles in the old-home style. And that's all. Then he discovers Dora Five, Six, Seven; he sees my Structural Oblique Formations, and he says to himself, Say, take a look at that, very, very interesting, magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality. In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the twentieth century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely, and for all time. I wonder, says our archeologist to himself, I wonder if it's got a name? A signature to tell us who the master was? Well, sir, if you look closely, sir and hold your head on a slant, you'll see, between those Oblique Formations...
BEBRA: My glasses. Help me, Lankes.
LANKES: All right, here's what it says: Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: BARBARIC, MYSTICAL, BORED.

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declare at the very start that it's impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I have also been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak, if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero any more because there are no more individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man--each man and all men together--is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled to individual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a 'lonely mass' without names and without heroes. All this may be true. But as far as I and Bruno my keeper are concerned, I beg leave to say that we are both heroes, very different heroes, he on his side of the peephole, and I on my side; and even when he opens the door, the two of us, with all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being a nameless, heroless mass.

It was in this picture that I first arrived at a decision which I have had no reason to alter. It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same size.

However, there is something very strange and childish in the way grownups feel about their clocks--in that respect, I was never a child. I am willing to agree that the clock is probably the most remarkable thing that grownups ever produced. Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.

I toppled the cut-out disk into the interior of the showcase. It fell with a quickly muffled tinkle, which however was not the tinkle of breaking glass. I did not hear it, Oskar was too far away; but the young woman in the threadbare brown coat with the rabbit collar heard the sound and saw the circular aperture, gave a start that sent a quiver through her rabbit fur, and prepared to set off through the snow, but stood still, perhaps because it was snowing and everything is permitted when it is snowing, provided it is snowing hard enough. Yet she looked round, suspicious of the snowflakes, looked round as though behind the snowflakes there were something else beside more snowflakes, and she was still looking round when her right hand slipped out of her muff, which was also made of bunny fur.

The showcase of Bansemer's jewelry store was not overcrowded. A few choice watches, Swiss quality articles, an assortment of wedding rings on sky-blue velvet, and in the center six or seven of the choicest pieces. There was a snake in three coils, fashioned in multicolored gold, its finely chiseled head adorned and made valuable by a topaz and two diamonds, with two sapphires for eyes. I am not ordinarily a lover of black velvet, but the black velvet on which Bansemer's snake lay was most appropriate, and so was the grey velvet which created a provocative quietness beneath certain strikingly harmonious articles of hammered silver. There was a ring with a gem so lovely that you knew it would wear out the hands of equally lovely ladies, growing more and more beautiful in the process until it attained the degree of immortality which is no doubt the exclusive right of jewels. There were necklaces such as no one can put on with impunity, necklaces that wear out their wearers; and finally on a pale yellow velvet cushion shaped like a simplified neck base, a necklace of infinite lightness. Subtly, playfully woven, a web perpetually broken off. What spider can have secreted gold to catch six small rubies and one large one in this net? Where was the spider sitting, for what was it lurking in wait? Certainly not for more rubies; more likely for someone whose eye would be caught by the ensnared rubies which sat there like modeled blood--in other words: To whom should I, in conformity with my plan or the plan of the gold-secreting spider, give this necklace?

How wonderful that this cupboard should be there with its heavy, scarcely breathing woolens which enabled me to gather together nearly all my thoughts, to tie them into a bundle and give them away to a dream princess who was rich enough to accept my gift with a dignified, scarcely perceptible pleasure.

Greff needed a good three-quarters of an hour for his hole. Don't ask me, please, how I know. Oskar knew just about everything in those days, including the length of time it took Greff to dig his hole in the ice. Drops of salt sweat formed on his high, bumpy forehead and flew off into the snow. He handled his ax well; its strokes left a deep circular track. When the circle had come full circle, his gloveless hands lifted a disk, perhaps six or seven inches thick, out of the great sheet of ice that extended, it seems safe to say, as far as Hela if not Sweden. The water in the hole was old and grey, shot through with ice-grits. It steamed a bit, though it was not a hot spring. The hole attracted fish. That is, holes in the ice are said to attract fish. Greff might have caught lampreys or a twenty-pound cod. But he did not fish. He began to undress. He took off his clothes and he was soon stark naked, for Greff's nakedness was always stark.

Close to this stretch of wall, which gave the impression of being new, as painfully white as Leo's rumpled shirt, Leo became very active. He took great long strides which he appeared to count; at all events, he counted aloud and, as Oskar believes to this day, in Latin. Whatever this litany was, he chanted it as he had no doubt learned to do at the seminary. Leo marked a spot some ten yards from the wall and also set down a piece of wood not far from the white washed portion, where, it seemed pretty obvious, the wall had been mended. All this he did with his left hand, for in his right hand he held the cartridge case. Finally, after interminable searching and measuring, he bent down near the piece of wood and there deposited the hollow metallic cylinder, slightly tapered at the front end, which had lodged a lead kernel until someone with a curved forefinger had exerted just enough pressure to evict the lead projectile and start it on its death-dealing change of habitat.

What do you want of me? I'm just a man taking a walk with this dog I borrowed to take a walk with?

There is no doubt that we should be in tears. We have every right to break down and sob. A brief survey of the last century, a playlist of its greatest hits (WWI the Great Depression Spanish Civil War WWII Stalin Pakistan India Anti-Communism Korea Vietnam Cultural Revolution The Shah Ethiopia Berlin Wall Burma/Myanmar Bosnia Mogadishu Iraq...) is not even needed. There's a lot to cry about. So here is the shocker: no one is crying. I'm not crying. I don't see people crying (except occasionally on tv, but that's a spectacle, not normal). Are you crying?

Gunter Grass imagines an onion bar. You step into the grungy cellar, past the bouncer, past the coat check, into the murky interior, stylishly dilapidated and together with thirty some other odd guests you get to cut into your own onion and cry. The bar supplies onion, knives, and cutting boards, you bring the tears. What an idea Grass has. The Tin Drum is worth reading just for the onion bar.

Onion bars are only a part of what is going on in The Tin Drum (see the first quote above). Boredom, not necessarily to blame, but entirely to blame. What happens to a soul when it no longer feels useful? Not only does it give itself and others reason to cry, it cannot even find the tears when the time comes. Of the many thoughts inspired by The Tin Drum one was this: everyone, if any rights they have, has the right to be useful.

Though I struggle with the very idea of rights, the plight of the man of empty time sitting on a park bench. For a human to have no purpose but to pass the time, for a person to have no life but to get through it, this is a failure of everything I can think life to be. To unseeing eyes this has meaning for the handicapped, the damaged, those who are somehow un-whole in the world, but I think with seeing eyes its meaning can be found for and in everyone.

Elective Affinities

2010-01-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Granted this fashion of argument, Eduard replied, you women would be invincible: first sensible, so that one cannot contradict; affectionate, so that one is glad to give in; sensitive, so that one does not want to hurt you; full of premonitions, so that one is frightened.
I am not superstitious, Charlotte replied, and would pay no attention to these obscure stirring if that was all they were; but mostly they are instinctive recollections of the happy or unhappy consequences of our own or other people's past actions. There is nothing of more significance in any situation than the intervention of a third party. I have known friends, brothers and sisters, lovers, married couples, whose relationship has been altogether changed, whose life has been turned upside down, by the chance or intended arrival of another person.

But before long they separated again. The ladies retired to their wing, where they found plenty of entertainment exchanging confidences and criticizing the latest fashions. The men busied themselves with the coaches and horses and were soon horse-trading and horse-exchanging.

Take some subject, some matter, some idea--call it what you will. Take a really firm grip on it. Be clear about it in your own mind in all its parts. It will then be easy, by talking to a group of children, to discover what they already know of it and what they still have to learn. No matter how inappropriate their answers are or however far from the point they wander, so long as your next question draws their minds and thoughts back to the subject in hand, so long as you do not let them draw you away from it, the children are bound in the end to think and understand only what and in the way the teacher wants them to. The greatest mistake a teacher can make is to let his pupils draw him away from the point, is to be incapable of keeping them fixed to the subject he is at that moment treating. Try doing it yourself, and you will find it very interesting.

Charlotte climbed further up and Ottilie carried the child. Charlotte was sunk deep in thought. Even on dry land it was possible to be shipwrecked; to recover from it as quickly as possible was a fine and praiseworthy thing. Life was, after all, only a matter of profit and loss. How many plans went awry! How often one was diverted form one's chosen course! How often we were turned aside from a clearly envisaged goal so as to achieve a higher! The traveller on his way breaks a wheel and is greatly annoyed by it, yet through this unpleasant accident he makes the most agreeable connections and acquaintances, which then go on to influence his entire life. Fate grants us our desires but it does so in its own fashion, so that it can give us something over and above what we desire.

Maybe Elective Affinities is better in German. I must say, as one who particularly admires Goethe's Faust, this little novel did not cut the mustard. Particularly, I would draw your attention to the second quote above. Elective Affinities is full of such cliche statements. You hope, and expect, from such a master as Goethe a knowing and artistic use of archetypes already so worn and abused: he does not deliver. His characters are more than mere cliches, but they partake of them often enough--whether they are women discussing needlework or men slapping their thighs and talking about politics--to make you wonder if the cheap characterization of men and women by society may not be true. I don't believe it is, but Goethe seems to in this one.

Goethe did put the incomprehensibility of love down right, though. That his characters fall in love with whom they do, seems to make no sense until it is seen as not needing to make sense, after which it of course makes complete sense.

Elective Affinities might be called Goethe's ode to 'chemistry', that oft-blamed term that gets blamed for both love and hate and inability to get along as well as perfect connubial bliss. In Goethe, we are attracted to the souls we are, by and like chemical properties, and that stronger bonds lurk that can always pull us away from the bonds we've formed, seemingly without hope. What is love now, will be as much love when you leave it cold for that stronger love--it's just that in the presence of a catalyst, hydrocarbons would rather form carbon dioxide and water than stay as they were.

Though observation isn't really an argument, I'd like to point out that if Goethe's right, we're all screwed. But I don't buy elective affinity in romance, and I'm very suspect of the term 'chemistry' in romance. This might only be because I never liked Chemistry (the subject). As before, I choose insanity.

Rising Up and Rising Down

2010-01-18T11:42:00.000-08:00

William T Vollmann
Abridged

In short, satyagraha is correct only if the sacrifice is for something, and only if the oppressor will eventually be moved to cease his aggression should the sacrifice become of sufficient magnitude. If one or both of these conditions remains unmet, then counterviolence is justified.

That was the beginning, their pact to be one family. Gandhi prayed and fasted to keep it so. he failed; mass loving-kindness perishes; but maybe violence, wrong, rivalry and envy can be sublimated into emulation. hence this Spartan definition of the best government: The one in which the largest number of citizens are willing to compete with each other in excellence and without civil discord. But a child stole another child's pretty rock, as he would have done before people came together. A woman liked somebody else's husband. I ask you, Plato: Who is too rich or too poor for that to happen? And you, Spartans: Tell me how she can leave one man for another without civil discord? --A family feared, hence hated, another family's God. A man kept pretty cattle, and he knew that other men wanted him to die so that they could get them. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar's bodyguard was growing ominously large. It was time for government. Unfortunately, it is always time for government.

Martin Luther in the Heidelberg Theses of 1518 had warned that too vivid an apprehension of the beautiful things would give a moral actor confidence--which by the Lutheran definition must be unwarranted--in his own moral capacity. The works of men are all the more deadly when they are done without fear, he wrote, and with pure and evil assurance. (A modern restatement: When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.)

Carry out your program, please, not your ideology.

The gloomy conclusion begins to appear that whenever violence defines my relationship to you, I must be an apple and you an orange, and only dust upon our peeled carcasses can make us one; that because the stakes can be so high (literally, life and death), violent confrontations tend to be predicated on insoluble disagreement.

My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth--cold-blooded enough, you will say, but life cannot evade death. Have you ever shot a cow in the head, slit her throat, cut her hooves off, skinned her, gutted her and quartered her so that you and others can eat? Have you ever been the doctor who must decide which one of ten patients gets the life-support machine? Surely it is better to have a rational and consistent means of doing these things than to do them trying not to think of what one is doing.--Suppose, then, that the calculus can prove that one ought never to kill. --Well and good. We are surely better off for seeing it proved.

As a factory worker, my productive power becomes potentially unlimited. New machines decrease the amount of time it takes me to make something, thereby allowing--that is, requiring--me to make more such items than before, for the same fixed wage. It is as if I suddenly found myself digging not one ditch for my lord but ten. I may expend no more effort than I did in completing a single ditch, and so in a certain sense opaque to Marxism am not exploited at all (or at least I'm not more exploited than I was), but thanks to capital, embodied in the new machine, the gap between my wage and my lord's profit has increased by an order of magnitude. The distinction between absolute and relative poverty suddenly becomes much more important. It is no longer what I make but I myself who am for sale.

Were they just cynical loyalists? Maybe not. Arkhipenkov's persecutors must have been quite sure of themselves, one would think. So they were. As the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, a fellow who is known to have worked in a grain confiscation brigade noted about new people 'raised up' by the Party: 'It's hard to find the right words to express this confidence, but I'll try. It's a feeling of power, might, and serenity that comes from the realization that the mighty Soviet people, a hundred seventy million strong, is behind you.' Joan of Arc, and those who burned her, could have said the same thing, substituting God for the Soviet people. They too were sure that they were right. And perhaps the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers was right, too.

Again and above all, no clay-eater can be blamed for wanting to do something about his hunger.

But what about states' rights? asks Lincoln derisively in his speech. Well, if the citizens of Nebraska can invoke those to keep slaves, then it is certainly within their rights to go to Africa to buy slaves, and we've already made doing that a capital crime! --Not that anybody's yet been hanged for it...--For Lincoln the struggle between state and federal authority can be resolved in only one way; we never hear him argue that the federal government ought not to have the power to regulate slave trading. (Oddly enough, however, when the issue of granting statehood to Utah comes up, he says that there is nothing in the Constitution which allows the government to prohibit polygamy there, which is precisely what the government ultimately does.) Trotsky and Tolstoy speak of natural law; and there does seem to be a natural law that authority enlarges itself indefinitely, whether by frenzied growth in revolution or by incumbency's subtler increase. Given the rights of the self, it seems to me that authority possesses the right to self-aggrandizement only through imminence or incumbency. Most of the time, it grows without right.

An Aztec war hymn runs in part: 'I go forth, I go forth about to destroy, I, Yoatzin; my soul is in the cerulean water.'
Meanwhile Cortes addresses his men at the very beginning of the expedition to New Spain: 'We are engaging in a just and good war which will bring us fame.' Doubtless he prays for his good success every day when he goes to Mass. 'He was devout and given to praying,' recalls his secretary; 'he knew many prayers and psalms by heart.'

Metaphors ought to be left outside both courtroom and battlefield; metaphors and political action (to say nothing of metaphors and violence) make a dangerous mix.

Overreliance on context might lure me into the false assertion that the functionary of an evil regime must be evil--or, more vulgarly still, that the 'objective' nature of that context allows for only a certain moral decision. Trotsky tells us that he was prepared from childhood to be a revolutionary, simply as a result of seeing around him so much injustice. But his parents, who saw the same things, did not become revolutionaries. Context does not determine; it only contextualizes.

The most illuminating way to perceive the shoddiness of your own ideals is to witness someone else practicing them.

Lincoln's victory in the American Civil War was justified certainly by the abolition of slavery it brought about, and arguably by the fact that the South attacked first. But one result of his victory, and the main point for which is was fought--federal control--was not justified.

The letter itself is much shorter than its signature pages. The terrible year of 1992 has dwindled away from these people now; they live on or they have died. This letter accordingly means nothing. Their names mean nothing today as they meant nothing before the evil men and women whose policies locked them fast to the front line of a besieged city. Let them stand in for all the other people whose names have meant nothing to war criminals.

Most of the people I've helped are either in jail or dead, he said.

The same comment/quote made of Europe Central applies to Rising Up and Rising Down as well: How could you not know what goes on in this world?

Did you know that there are parts of Kingston, Jamaica (Trenchtown, Rema, Tivoli) are almost wartorn? Did you know that in 1999 Kosovo residents had to run everywhere for fear of being a sniper's target? Did you know that in 1995 the UN pulled out of Somalia (see page A24 of your local newspaper)? Did you know that Khmer Rouge executed people with pickaxes? I guess the exhaustive list of violence committed by humans would be a violence itself, since so few could be faced with such a condemnation. So I'll stop woefully short.

I am a sheltered person. I have made feeble efforts not to be, but they have amounted to very little. I would not want to unfairly condemn my generation, class, or nation, but I feel that those who partake of these three with me, also partake of my shelter.

How can we not know what goes on in this world?

We may have an obligation to ensure that we do know, at least a little of what goes on in this world, but how can we dare to know what goes on in this world? Who could bear that burden? Both valid questions that together leave me right here.

Vollmann makes a courageous attempt to face the violence in the world and he speaks from experience--true he doesn't speak from the experience of a boy in Rema or a woman in Kosovo, but he did his best to share some of this with them, without mocking the blessings of peace he has been given. You wonder by the end how he isn't dead--if not from all the danger he has placed himself in, than from the sheer horror of what he's researched, witnessed, and been told. My only answer is that even he, a man without faith, still has hope. If Vollmann can have hope, no Christian ever has the excuse of giving hope up.

It's sadly funny that Vollmann had to abridge his seven-volume opus into this so much condensed edition in order for it to get read; it's sad that his seven volume edition probably anoints many a university library shelf like a bottle of forgotten, disliked perfume sitting in the back of a bathroom drawer. But at least in its abridgment it reaches a few more voices with its potency, even if there is less of it.

If you read this post and read Rising Up and Rising Down, it will probably make you feel like a thief, at least a little, for the gifts and blessings and peace you most likely have. Count yourself lucky, if you do feel like such a one, for 'This day you will be with me in paradise'.

Europe Central

2010-01-12T15:36:00.001-08:00

William T Vollmann

In the era of total war, coddling musicians might appear to be a weakness. But our apparatchiks knew better. Music inspired harder work and distracted the toilers from dangerous thoughts. Besides, music was all we could offer just now. The Seventh and Seventy-third Armies of the Northern Front, the Eighth, Eleventh and Twenty-seventh Armies of the Northwestern Front--thirty-nine divisions and two brigades in all--they held the line against the Fascists, but they were dwindling by the thousands. (Many had been liquidated by the SS Death's-Head Division.) And those squat, propeller-driven MIG-3s in formation over Leningrad, they weren't ready just yet; first we had to relocate our airplane factories out of Hitler's reach, and then we'd need to so to speak, you know. Where were the T-34 tanks? Wait two years; we had no tank armies yet. That was why loudspeakers chanted from every street corner (Akhmatova was on the radio); that was why even along the White Sea Canal, on whose construction a hundred thousand people died, there'd occasionally been convict orchestras huddled on concrete slabs, their horns drooping down like the beaks of perishing ravens as they played inspirational melodies.

It was Nina's fate to always give, but hurriedly and quick-temperedly, so her gifts were not received with gratitude. He for his part was a generous man without anything to give.

He knew that he could hold on until death. He'd always been brave; he'd endured many discomforts: but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father's dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He'd won the prize!

He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won the princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.

A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel's Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store's ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women's black gowns. Something for his wife...He allowed himself to imagine how Christian's face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one's soul.

Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us?

Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead.

I remember the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it's necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.

When four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up at their snouts. Don't yield a single square centimeter to them! IF you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you'll become King of the Golden Castle.

She's too high, too far away. That's how I've felt about each woman in my life. For their part, women have tried to understand me, but what is there to understand? I am nothing more than I am.

A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given isntant, adn a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it's writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence.

All magic spells fail without belief. We enforced belief. In place of ruins we offered the wide white monumentality of Stallinallee, arched, windowed, black and white, fading magnificently into the East.

(In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)

Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he's got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That's just how it goes. Sometimes I think you're not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, adn you can't help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker--

Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn't marry me.

What's that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the 'organs' are watching. Or perhaps they've developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we're in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forest of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper's barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by teh way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, 'Lady Macbeth' remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina's on her way to Siberia! But she's happy, she sings Seryosha's name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina's just another, you know. They'll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a...It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners' faces, because then she might ahve found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips--buried alive! Well, that's par for the course in Opus 110.

And from a Polish father, a Jewish mother, how could you not know what goes on in this world? And then what happened to your mother, you, well, that's how it is for all of us. Irinochka, please, please forgive me for my, for, for speaking to you in this monstrous fashion; I know I'm a...Poor child! What a lot of pain I've caused you! And you knew it anyway, didn't you?

Europe Central is the closest thing I've ever found to a novel written in the second person plural. Vollmann writes a novel we live. Focusing on many historical actors--D D Shostakovitch, Roman Karmen, the Soviet general Vlasov, the Nazi general Paulus, the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, the Christian member of the SS Kurt Gerstein, and others--Vollmann tells the story of all the hurting people of central Europe. It's a story that comes at time when we need to hear what we are living. Vollmann tells the story of we because we are at risk of not recognizing our membership in we.

Vollmann puts more flesh and bloody rags on the structure of history than many author's I've read. He takes the history we think we know, and turns it into the stories of people and makes us realize that it isn't like anything we knew. Since the general attitude towards WW2 is pleasant--because we're far enough from it now, because we won it, because it was a white war, because we have to have something to be proud of--we rarely dwell on the atrocity of that bloody period. It's shocking to thick that more gruesome atrocities were being committed seventy years ago in Europe than we hear about in most troubled areas of Africa. From the Holocaust to Stalingrad to Dresden to the Soviets, people proved to be wildly inventive at inflicting fiendish pain on each other. So much for WW2.

Through all of it, there is the nerve-twisting music of Shostakovitch. Shostakovitch might be the central character of Europe Central and what a central character he is: weak, cowardly, stuttering, soft, tormented, adulterous, yet capable of courage for his art, and with the heart of a lover to bring fame to love. The story of Shostakovitch, dreary, sad, tormented, terrified, beautiful, is the story of his times. For a generation that has come into adulthood in the 2000s, it is hard to imagine the awful destruction and poverty and pain that Central Europe spent most of the 20th Century slogging through.

How could we not know what goes on in this world? Well, if we're as insulated as I feel, as insulated as the people I meet seem, as insulated as the media proves, it seems that the answer is quite easily. We are privileged because we can choose to not know what goes on in the world. Exercising this right of ours, do we risk losing our ability to choose? What if we live in chosen ignorance so long we no longer realize the choice? We have access to more information than any generation before us; we have the ability to travel more freely, we have the calm of a country whose land has been at peace for over a century: How could we not know what goes on in this world?

The Wounded Healer

2010-01-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

Henri J M Nouwen

A Christian leader is a man of hope whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived from his personality, nor on specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given to him.

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.

When we are impatient, we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge--that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition.

Promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian leadership.

It is an act of discipleship in which we follow the hard road of Christ, who entered death with nothing but bare hope.

For a man of prayer is, in the final analysis, the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that men feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

Making one's own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one's own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share.

A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared. When someone comes with his loneliness to the minister, he can only expect that his loneliness will be understood and felt, so that he no longer has to run away from it but can accept it as an expression of his basic human condition. When a woman suffers the loss of her child, the minister is not called upon to comfort her by telling her that she still has two beautiful healthy children at home; he is challenged to help her realize that the death of her child reveals her own mortal condition, the same human condition which he and others share with her.

The many who call themselves father or allow themselves to be called father, from the Holy Father to the many father abbots, to the thousands of "priest-fathers" trying to hand over some good news, should know that the last one to be listened to is the father. We are facing a generation which has parents but no fathers, a generation in which everyone who claims authority--because he is older, more mature, more intelligent or more powerful--is suspect from the very beginning.

In practically all priestly functions, such as pastoral conversation, preaching, teaching and liturgy, the minister tries to help people to recognize the work of God in themselves.

In this context the pastoral conversation is not merely a skillful use of conversational techniques to manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.

And if priests and ministers of tomorrow think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership for the future generation, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of today. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the hungry. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.

No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him. Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhilaration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.

Thinking about martyrdom can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make one's own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding.

Many will put their trust in him who went all the way, out of concern for just one of them. The remark, He really cares for us is often illustrated by stories which show that forgetting the many for the one is a sign of true leadership.

I have--found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

Nouwen's concept of Christian leadership, the Wounded Healer, is echoed in Samuel Wells's concept of over-acceptance, and both are rooted in Christ: the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection--which is to say, forgiveness.

Nouwen describes a leader who embraces his own wounds (his own cross), and finds Christ there, most present. By living with our pain and wounds we transform them into the places of our greatest strength. Because these are the places that we can truly meet other people.

Nouwen sidesteps the idea that ministers (Christians in general) need to bring healing to each other; instead, he says that Christians need to reveal the unity of the Body of Christ through the wounds we bear. It is leadership by compassion. Really, it shouldn't work. But the promise is that it will.

The Wounded Healer is a slim little book that outlines what it means to be a Christian leader.

The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

2010-01-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Farley Mowat

I have not previously mentioned that Itchy lacked toilet facilities. The truth is that I had never thought about installing them because, until Claire's coming, they would have been redundant. The bob chains forward, and the bumpkin aft, provided adequate comfort in an open environment. For men.
Having boarded the ship, I went below to light the lamps, leaving Claire the privacy of the dark adn slippery decks. Soon I heard a mammoth splash and rushed on deck with a flashlight to find her small, white face bobbing in the black, oily waters alongside. She was not alone. A few feet away my flashlight beam picked up the grinning gape of a cat that had died hard, and died a long, long time ago. Fortunately, Claire had sense enough to keep her mouth shut. Had she swallowed any of the water of the inner harbor it is possible my story would have ended on a tragic note.
Rescuing her was something of a task because, as she pointed out when she was finally dragged , dripping and furious onto the deck, Nobody can swim with their slacks down around their ankles! In truth, she must have found it a harrowing experience, but when she had been taken up to Paulo's, hot-bathed, fortified with brandy, and given clean clothes, her good nature reasserted itself. In fact, I was so pleased with her that I redesigned the forepeak of the schooner so that there would be a room for a small convenience, Ladies, for the use of.

I did not look back. When a man has made a really monumental asp of himself, he should never, never look back.

Mowat has a wonderful wit, and writes humor with a flair that avoids triviality (mostly). Every time the boat seems to need a miracle for it to float any more, Mowat denies you the cute miracle, everything's alright miracle but also manages to avoid ending the story. Instead he presents a tribute to how much a foolish human can take and how much fun it is to laugh at man getting ground under the heel of the elements--this post's date notes its proximity to the earthquake in Haiti of 1.12.2010--we like to laugh at how little nature makes us feel, when we aren't crying. Although man's sometimes unfair struggle against nature figures as a prominent source of humor in Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, I don't think someone reading it in the aftermath of such an event as Haiti's quake would feel it tasteless.

But in the spirit of unfairness that lands a 7.0 magnitude earthquake under one of the poorest nations on earth, I'll change the subject, and talk about something else I want to talk about.

Mowat's treatment of women in The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is rather odd. I haven't read any of his other work, so I don't know if it is peculiar to this novel or not, but I find him at curious odds with himself when it comes to women. It should be said first though, that The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is not a novel of women. What few women characters there are tend to be pretty flat (only on the page of course, in other ways otherwise). He introduces the main female character, Clair a little more than halfway through. Clair is rarely quoted by the narrator as most other (male) characters are, and because of her seeming silence she looms in the back of the narrative like some overbearing specter. I'm no feminist, but I couldn't help feeling that Mowat did Clair a great disservice. What kind of character doesn't exist so prominently? Sometimes you wonder if Mowat has forgotten poor Clair, but then she resurfaces again and stuns you with the revelation that she's been there all along. How is this possible? How can so much happen, so many pages be filled, and this character be with us through it all, but unknown to us? The reader feels betrayed. Especially since Clair, when she does appear, appears to be such a real winner.

Mowat's Clair might be the perfect woman, if Mowat could have made her something more than a cardboard cutout that he looks at every once in a while. As the above quote will convey, she takes the worst of scenarios and only needs a bit of the stiff stuff to be her cheery self again. Every time Mowat comes to a particularly dangerous crossing in his suicidal and depressed little boat, he promptly puts Clair ashore at the nearest port so that she can meet him on the other side. She never seems to say anything about this. I can see that she is a less experienced sailor than Mowat and that she probably had no desire to go drown herself, but the strange silence in which all this occurs feels weird.

By this point you may wonder what I'm driving at. Is it a case of too good to be true? Does Mowat try to paint the picture of a woman who'll have adventures with him and live the rough life with him and let him be a knight in shining armor when he wants and does he simply fail to pull it off because it's so much like what he dreams of? I don't think so. It seemed to me more that Mowat didn't notice that he wasn't actually creating a character, but was creating a pin-up poster of a girl who he could roll up and store in a waterproof tube when Itchy's cabin was especially leaky. Most likely, Mowat suffered as most writers with an inability to write the other sex. But something more is missing: the romance Mowat paints in the last fifty pages of the book, isn't a romance at all, it's a fantasy--the difference being that a fantasy is only ever about one person.

Think about this if you are having dreams of flying down to Haiti to help out.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

2010-01-03T23:24:00.001-08:00

Lynne Truss

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's."
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

What would Ms Truss think of my blog? I make a point of removing almost all quotation marks, as well as much of the punctuation from posted pieces. Oh dear. While Ms Truss's "Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is clear, helpful, and perhaps even warranted, I found myself thinking that she might have missed something: namely that people miss things. Many of the cases of intolerable punctuation she cites seem to me to be lapses of thought rather than the absence of knowledge. To be sure, the case she cites in the quotation above is not likely to be such an instance, but in general I felt that many times punctuation is misused it stems from trying to think too fast and not rereading what has been written rather than ignorance of the rules. Ms Truss even acknowledges this in a few instances but says there can be no excuse. Perhaps she is right. After all, this is our language and we, in speaking, surely shoulder the responsibility of changing it. For that, Eats, Shoots & Leaves ought to be commended. And she does appreciate the beauty of punctuation done well, which is something that I admire. However, there is a point after which priggishness of her sort tears beauty apart rather than helping others admire it.

The Power and the Glory

2009-12-21T13:21:00.001-08:00

Graham Greene

You know nothing, the stranger said fiercely. That is what everyone says all the time--you do no good. The brandy had affected him. he said with monstrous bitterness, I can hear them saying it all over the world.

The mule suddenly sat down under the priest. It was not an unnatural thing to do, for they had been travelling through the forest for nearly twelve hours. They had been going west, but news of soldiers met them there and they had turned east; the Red Shirts were active in that direction, so they had tacked north, wading through the swamps, diving into the mahogany darkness. Now they were both tired out and the mule simply sat down. The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

If he left them, they would be safe, and they would be free from his example. He was the only priest the children could remember: it was from him they would take their ideas of the faith. But it was from him too they took God--in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem. He lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy to his mouth.

He said, One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty...He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that did not come. He said, We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty--for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal... Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the nocturnal heat; people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority, That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure. He said, Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get form the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger...that is all part of heaven--the preparation. Perhaps without them, who can tell, you wouldn't enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven? Literary phrases form what seemed now to be another life altogether--the strict quiet life of the seminary--became confused on his tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the Golden. But these people had never seen gold.

He said, a poor man has no choice, father. Now if I was a rich man--only a little rich--I should be good.
The priest suddenly--for no reason--thought of the Children of Mary eating pastries. He giggled and said, I doubt it. If that were goodness...

Yes, he said again, and the mule plodded on. Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, What is God like? and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion....But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery--that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God's image had thought out, and God's image shook now, up and down on the mule's back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and god's image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot? and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God's image.

Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner--to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to.

He couldn't see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity--that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman. You and Father Jose, she said. It's people like you who make people mock--at real religion. She had, after all as many excuses as the half-caste. He saw the kind of salon in which she spent her days, with the rocking-chair and the photographs, meeting no one.

He took off his shirt and began to tear it into strips--it was hopelessly insanitary, but what else was there to do? except pray, of course, but one didn't pray for life, this life.

Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair. Watching her wounded progress he had a sense that this had happened daily--perhaps for weeks; he was watching one of the well-rehearsed effects of the new day, like a bird-song in happier regions.

It was appalling how easily one forgot and went back; he could still hear his own voice speaking in the street with the Concepcion accent--unchanged by mortal sin and unrepentance and desertion. The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency. It seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.

That's another difference between us. It's no good your working for your end unless you're a good man yourself. And there won't always be good men in your party. Then you'll have all the old starvation, beating, get-rich-anyhow. But it doesn't matter so much my being a coward--and all the rest. I can put God into a man's mouth just the same--and I can give him God's pardon. It wouldn't make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.

I was never any good at books, the priest said. I haven't any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn't that right?
Yes.
Well, if I hated you, I wouldn't want to bring up my child to be like you. It's not sense.
That's just twisting...
Perhaps it is. I've never got your ideas straight. We've always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry--hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It's better to let him die in the dirt and wake in heaven--so long as we don't push his face in the dirt.

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart's an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn't talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child's strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.

The road that rises keeps on rising. Why? Is it fair to ask the road that rises to stop, to desist from it's upward inclinations if only for a while? Probably not, for every minute we enjoy the peaceful level or the easy decline, we find a many tonned lodestone weighted round our necks when once the road that rises again begins to rise. So the road must rise and always rise, but if this is so, how can we, men of weak legs and ankles, be expected to walk the road that rises?

Times come when feet are heavy and all paths still lead up. What then?

That's when dreams carry us on, and act as wings to the burdens on our backs. But who has dreams enough to carry him up this road that rises? Who has dreams so lush that they can weather the high altitudes? And what when wings of dream bone-crack, tendon-split under pressure?

What now?

Keep on walking: The Power and the Glory.

Cryano de Bergerac

2009-12-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

Edmond Rostand

Truly, I should not look to find his portrait
By the grave hand of Philippe de Champagne.
He might have been a model for Callot--
One of those wild swashbucklers in a masque--
Hat with three plumes, and doublet with six points--
His cloak behind him over his long sword
Cocked, like the tail of strutting Chanticleer--
Prouder than all the swaggering Tamburlaines
Hatched out of Gascony. And to complete
This Punchinello figure--such a nose!--
My lords, there is no such nose as that nose--
You cannot look upon it without crying: "Oh, no,
Impossible! Exaggerated!" Then
You smile, and say: "Of course--I might have known;
Presently he will take it off." But that
Monsieur de Bergerac will never do.

(After a pause) And you brought me here to tell me this?
I do not yet quite understand, Madame,
The reason for your confidence.

Hush--absurd! How can you know?
I thought I loved you, ever since one night
When a voice that I never would have known
Under my window breathed your soul to me...
But--all this time, your letters--every one
Was like hearing your voice there in the dark,
All around me, like your arms around me...
(More lightly)
I came. Anyone would! Do you suppose
The prim Penelope had stayed at home
Embroidering,--if Ulysses wrote like you?
She would have fallen like another Helen--
Tucked up those linen petticoats of hers
And followed him to Troy!

I want her love
For the poor fool I am--or not at all!
Oh, I am going through with this! I'll know,
One way or the other. Now I shall walk down
To the end of the post. Go tell her. Let her choose
One of us.

Yes--that has been my life....
Do you remember that night Christian spoke
Under your window? It was always so!
While I stood in the darkness underneath,
Others climbed up to win the applause--the kiss!--
Well--that seems only justice--I will say,
Even now, on the threshold of my tomb--
"Moliere has genius--Christian has good looks--"
(The chapel bell is ringing. Along the avenue of trees above the stairway, the Nuns pass in procession to their prayers.)
They are going to pray now; there is the bell.

Cyrano will break your heart; Cyrano will crack the dam in your eyes; Cyrano will cry out words of weight and wisdom; Cyrano will walk the mile; Cyrano will save your life; Cyrano will wait with you till death; Cyrano will hold your hand; Cyrano will bear the load; Cyrano will kneel--but because of his nose...ah well, Cyrano will simply never be...

(More and more delirious)
"Very well,
But what the devil was he doing there?--
What the devil was he doing there, up there?"....
(He declaims)
Philosopher and scientist,
Poet, musician, duellist--
He flew high, and fell back again!
A pretty wit--whose like we lack--
A lover...not like other men....
Here lies Hercule-Savinien
De Cyrano de Bergerac--
Who was all things--and all in vain!
Well I must go--pardon--I cannot stay!
My moonbeam comes to carry me away....

Was this Cyrano a good life? Knowing love, he never knew love. That seems to be the threat of the play. Would you be Cyrano if you could? Who else better would you be? Michael Jackson was Cyrano, but that one is too obvious. You know Cyrano, he's walking all over the city. Can you see him? It's hard sometimes not to confuse Cyrano with the lepers, but he's not a leper. Do you think Mark Twain was Cyrano? There are many bumps on life's wheel that are being ground down, not all of them are Cyrano, but aren't many? We wish them normal, but wish them not. Would you have been Cyrano de Bergerac if you could? Before you choose, remember that he took the road that rises. He took it as far as he could.