As if I needed any more — I just found out that this fellow (bloke??? lol) Michael Wright mentioned Outwitting Dogs
Category Archives: Book Reviews
The Portable Romantic Poets
Happened on a copy of this Viking Portable Library book at Talking Leaves Books in Buffalo yesterday (drove my guest to Niagara Falls and then tried to hit the Albright-Knox on the way back but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, booooo A.K.).
The collection is edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and their introduction alone made the purchase worthwhile for me. They argue that the romantic poets marked the redefinition of mankind’s conception of self as self-consciousness:
Like God and unlike the rest of nature, man can say “I”: his ego stands over against his self, which to the ego is a part of nature. In this self he can see possibilities; he can imagine it and all things as being other than they are; he runs ahead of himself; he foresees his own death.
This romantic self is driven primarily to experience; that is its highest end. For instance, unlike Marlowe’s Faust who wanted to “do great deeds and win glory,” Goethe’s Faust wants to “know what it feels like to be a seducer and a benefactor.” Further,
. . . if the enemies of reason are passion and stupidity, which cause disorder, the enemies of consciousness are abstract intellectualizing and conventional codes of morality, which neglect and suppress the capacity of the consciousness to experience. Reason has to distinguish between true and false; the will, between right and wrong: consciousness can make no such distinction; it can only ask “What is there?”
Therefore the redemption of the Ancient Mariner is “no act of penance” and “is not even directly concerned with his sinful act” but is “the acceptance of the water snakes by his consciousness which previously wished to reject them.”
The collection itself begins with Blake’s Song (Memory, hither come):
Memory, hither come
And tune your merry notes;
And while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.I’ll drink of the clear stream,
And hear the linnet’s song,
And there I’ll lie and dream
The day along;
And when night comes I’ll go
To places fit for woe,
Walking along the darkened valley,
With silent melancholy.
and ends with Poe, From childhood’s hour:
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then — in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent or the fountain,
From the red cliff or the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed my flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
The book was first published in 1950 too, btw . . . in print 56 years later.
Settling oneself
When I was younger, I let my emotions drive my choices (often to my eventual sorrow, sigh) and I suppose I still do to some extent but at least now I make an effort to engage my emotional responses as consciously as I can — part of which involves trying to free them such that they flow their courses more easily, reveal themselves more fully & thereby reveal also the contours of the landscape their flowing paints.
Since I’m by nature a kinesthetic person this involves paying close attention to where feelings lodge. Lately I’ve also jettisoned the distinction between purely physical feelings — e.g. pain or tension — and emotions. My working theory is that there is no difference, really: the physical body acts as a tangible map of the emotions; physical sensations are simply a more intense inclination of the map’s contours.
So I look for tools that help me bridge through my body to the emotions beneath it, and here’s one of the best I’ve found: a book of exercises that combine yoga and the stimulation of accupressure points. Awkward title, unfortunately — Acu-Yoga???? — but I can forgive that; it’s one of the most valuable books I own.
Whether the techniques described in the book actually “do” anything is, of course, entirely a matter of speculation. Perhaps the exercises are more a way to ritualize a routine of auto-suggestion and physical relaxation.
But it works. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it.
“And what about her, my lord,
“what about her? Is the kingdom of heaven only a step from her also and will the passions of the earth at a single movement of her heart fall back and bow their heads as she passes?”
From The Visitor, in The Miner’s Pale Children by W.S. Merwin. It’s more like a short short story, whereas some of the pieces in the book read like dreams, like In a Dark Square, which ends this way:
He wonders what will happen if it starts to be day. The little lights, then, will still burn over the doors. They will grow yellow and fade as a new day brightens the lie numbers and he sees (for the first time, as he says) that each of the doors is crossed with colored ribbons, like a gift-wrapped package, complete with a huge bow and flowers. Then what? Are they really, all of them, presents sent from the old relatives whom he has never seen, the aunties, the grannies, the eyeless, the toothless, who have never seen him and yet presume to say what his whole life is to be? Will he finally (for the cold of the morning is terribly penetrating, after a night with no sleep, in the open) walk up the few steps, feeling a monument toppling inside him, and set his hand deliberately to the end of one of the ribbons, and undo the bow in the full knowledge that whatever that package contains will be his for the rest of his life?
“No,” he says, thinking of the day warming up sooner or later and everything starting to resume just where it left off. “No,” he says, “we have nothing to do with each other.”
And though no one is listening he repeats aloud to the darkness that he will continue to put all his faith in himself.
“Feeling a monument toppling inside him.” Oh, man.
Not all of the pieces work for me, some feel too forced — always the risk when prose sidles so close to the poetic. But the ones that do work are simply wrenching.
Sigmund’s long goodbye
Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)
Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.
Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”
I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)
My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.
Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.
I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.
What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph [UPDATE, link no longer good :(], of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:
Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .
Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memoryâ€.
Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”
Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.
Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”
Know in their hearts? LOL
Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:
Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.
Excuse me? Scientists may not “blow each other up” literally, but they are all too happy to mine each other’s professional reputations and careers if they feel their assumptions are political power is being threatened. Even when the “controversy” is as mundane as why our muscles get sore when we exercise.
The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.
Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.
Step away from the book
In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:
. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.
I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.
They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.
At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)
Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:
Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.
But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.
Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?
“Secret Society Girl,” by Diana Peterfreund
I’ve been looking forward to reading this book every since making my cyber-acquaintance with Diana earlier this year. Diana’s living the dream of every aspiring writer of commercial women’s fiction: she’s pursued publication determinedly and is now reaping the rewards with a debut novel, Secret Society Girl, — issued by Delacorte in hardcover — that’s garnered significant press including reviews in Bloomberg News, the New York Observer, Booklist, and The Washington Post.
She’s also smart and high-energy (if you need proof of that just follow her blog!) and is dedicated to mastering the craft of writing and the ins & outs of commercial fiction as a profession.
So it’s no surprise that Secret Society Girl is a well-structured novel. The characters come alive — I feel I could practically pick them out on the street — and the pacing is excellent.
The book’s setting is a fictional Ivy League campus (Diana’s a Yalie) and the mileu is definitely the 20-something crowd; since I haven’t been 20 in (ahem) some time, and since my politics tend toward libertarianism rather than the heroine’s liberalism and have also had a lot of their rough edges knocked off over the years, I am not exactly a 1:1 fit with the book’s natural born audience. All the more tribute, then, to Diana’s writing that the narrative engaged me as it did. Never once did my attention to Amy’s fate flag; never once did I lose interest in the story’s arc.
Diana’s now working on the book’s sequel, of course — but I, for one, am equally interested in where she’ll go as a writer once the Secret Society franchise has run its course. I have no doubt she’ll be scaling some impressive peaks. It’s going to be wonderful to watch.
“Cold Mountain,” by Charles Frazier
I finally read one of the books on the Snarkling list. And coincidentally, this is a great book for considering the so-called demarcation between literary fiction and pop fiction. Cold Mountain is most definitely literary fiction in terms of its atmospheric writing style (the dialogue isn’t even set off by quotation marks, but by single m-dashes, as if Frazier decided not to interrupt the book’s poetry with something as mundane as human speech) but the book is also very much plot-driven; it follows two people: a Civil War deserter as he makes his way back to his home and sweetheart, and the sweetheart as she struggles to acquire the skills she needs to run a farm after her protective and indulgent father dies and she finds herself rendered cash-poor by the South’s impending collapse.
I liked the book a lot, although I was somewhat disappointed by the ending, which I arrived at around 2 a.m. today. And so here is the rub. The book has big bones: not only the emotional toll of the war but even more interesting to my mind its effects on civilian life, the moral and actual anarchy that sets in as its consequence. As a deserter, Inman has to negotiate what would normally have been the fringes of rural Blue Ridge society but has grown, as the war has waned down, to occupy a much larger influence : “outliers,” fellow deserters, the thuggish Home Guard charged with capturing deserters, Federalist raiders, Federalist sympathizers. So naturally as I rode along with the characters and the plot I was looking to Inman as a metaphor for, perhaps, contemporary America (the book was published in 1997 so is pre-Iraq but by Frazier’s photo on the back he looks to be a boomer, so it could have been a statement about Viet Nam) or even more likely the post-War American South. I was looking, therefore, for something in the book’s resolution that would point to such themes.
Instead, I felt that the book was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, ending as it did as a “mere” romantic tragedy.
I put mere in quotes because far be it from me to belittle the lives of fictional romantic figures, lol.
But truly, I wanted more. You have two sensitive people rebuilding their emotional selves in the aftermath of experiences that were both physically and emotionally brutal. Brutalizing, literally, in Inman’s case. That’s plenty to hang a book on, yeah. But against that particular backdrop, for some reason, I wanted more. Instead, I got the exact invert of a romance novel’s HEA, every bit as improbable in its own way as a bedazzling kiss in the last paragraph of a mass market paperback.
There’s a caveat to this criticism, of course: my disappointment reflects perhaps my own expectations more than any objective failure on the part of Frazier (although perhaps not; there are many stories nestled within this story, and aren’t they all about how the war tore peoples’ lives apart and left them alone to patch the scaps together?) Nonetheless, what captivated me more than Cold Mountain‘s love story was the question of how individuals who survived the Civil War rebuilt their lives afterward. They did, somehow; we did patch this country together again, somehow.
About midway through the book, Inman is betrayed to the Home Guard and finds himself bound chain-gang like to fifteen other men being yanked toward either prison or death, and suddenly Frasier breaks in with this:
Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing–not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces–would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.
So maybe that’s the fulcrum, then, and maybe that’s why the book’s ending narrows down the way it does; maybe it’s intended as an existential back of the hand about the meaningless of individuals’ lives. But then why do some characters not only survive but come to be pictured, some decade later, as flourishing? To highlight also that fate is arbitrary? And why go easier, ultimately, on the women than the men? (I’m trying to do this without inserting blatant spoilers, btw, sorry if that makes this part of my post go a bit vague.)
What succeeds in the book is that it’s written with a literary hand, yet for the most part I don’t feel Frazier himself inserted into the prose; the story-telling is that strong; when he does, as in the paragraph I quoted above, it’s not unwelcome, it works as a clue to help frame the narrative; it’s not intrusive. But somehow with the ending it seems his hand suddenly becomes both evident and heavy, as if as the deity of this book’s world he had his own private reasons for snipping particular threads.
So I’m left thinking “why did you do that?” where before the ending I was thrilling to the idea that I’d be left with a different question altogether.
Lit fight! Lit fight!
Via novelist Lauren Baratz-Logsted, The Huffington Post has published two bits by Rachel Sklar on the dueling anthologies This is Not Chick Lit and This is Chick Lit. Baratz-Logsted has a piece in the latter.
The “not chick lit” HuffPo piece is here. The “is chick lit” piece is here.
If you haven’t had a peek at this debate, the second post in particular will catch you up nicely. Hint: the divide is deep, and writers who think the genre is beneath them really, really hate it.
(And in case you didn’t catch this when I first linked it a couple months ago, see also this post at 2Blowhards: a transcription of a talk by writer Richard Wheeler on the divide between literary and genre fiction.)
Now, this should be required reading
For everyone who follows the news.
Struck by Lightning by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal.
In a review in The Sydney Morning Herald, David Messer writes:
Tear up your lottery tickets. Scrap that plan to visit the casino. This easy-to-read guide to probability by Canadian mathematician Jeffrey Rosenthal quickly illuminates the folly of such activities. But it’s not all bad: as he explains, an understanding of probability will also allow us to stop worrying about plane crashes, crime rates, opinion polls, disease and maybe even spam.
The sad fact is that the media tends to feed a state of constant, low-grade anxiety. And when we’re in a state of constant, low-grade anxiety, we are less likely to get a clear read on actual threats when we encounter them.
Fear is supposed to be a gift, as per Gavin De Becker. We need to use that gift wisely, not squander it on abstractions.
