MTheads

The Elysian Fields of Prose

I highly recommend Christopher Logue's book, War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad.  Homer's The Iliad is one of my favorite works of prose, and I've read several versions, such as Lattimore's and some other guy's.  But Logue's is particularly engaging.  His heroes and battles, his pressed-upon Zeus and his conniving Goddesses, and his peculiarly self-aware Helen and his lascivious Aphrodite are wonders. 

One interesting difference btwn his version and others I've read is that Logue puts thoughts into his characters' minds, giving them a self-awareness I've not noticed in other versions, but which I highly appreciated in his.  I'm too lazy to find a good example of this right now, you'll have to take my word.  But I do have an example of his striking imagery:

Running her tongue around her strawberry lips

While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap,

The Queen of Love, Our Lady Aphrodite,

Touching the massive Greek aside with one

Pink Fingertip, and with her other hand

Lifting Lord Paris up, big as he was,

Lacing his fingers with her own, then leading him,

Hidden in wings, away.

Christopher Logue recently died and The Economist ran an obituary on him on their back page.  Good for me, not so good for him.  Reading the obituary, I knew his version of The Iliad was something I'd have to read, and, so, two weeks later, I had the book!  (I'm in Moscow, two day shipping from Amazon is only a theory.) 

My Subconscious Doesn't Understand Me

One of my recent reading kicks has been for those trendy "how we think and why your brain is no more capable of free choice than a hamster's" books.  You know the books - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Danial Kahneman, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks, etc, ad nauseum, and so on. 

These authors are all smitten with the new studies which seem to imply that our subconscious mind is making all our choices for us while we blithely go around assuming we're in control.  I've come to find the methodology and conclusions of these brain studies highly suspect --  rather like modern phrenology.  And for a field whose conclusions lean on the side of questioning everything we think we know about ourselves, their conclusions sure sound suspiciously confident.

All these authors cite studies done on human brains while their owners are in MRIs looking at various pictures or told to think on some topic.  Nothing contrived here!  Nothing unscientific about showing self-selected test subjects researcher-selected photographs while in a metal coffin!  I think we can now definitively say that our brains light up. 

Of all the books, I like Taleb's The Black Swan best.  It is good to be shown how difficult it is for our minds to encompass super big numbers and difficult statistics.  Accurate risk assessment is difficult for humans.  We should constantly remind ourselves of our tendency to rationalize and ignore.  You've got me there.  We do delude ourselves.  Some of us may even be closer to automatons than to Socrates, think of the Occupy Wall Street types.  But to go farther, to assume all of us are automatons in the control of a subconscious that apparently is bent on us buying groceries from the perimeter of the store, is idiotic. 

And in these human behavioural studies, 100% of the time results are never 100%.  Instead, its 80% of the time, or 78% of participants did such and such.  What about the rest?  Outliers?  Margin of error?  Contrarians who are as predictable in their contrariness?  Or free will?  Ask the hamster. 

 

Snobbery Is A Funny Word..Like Rubbery Or Shrubbery

I just finished Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version.  I found the book through an article of his in the Wall Street Journal about the state of higher education (about which he has little good to say).  Mr. Epstein describes snobs as either insecure status seekers who fear being thought one of the masses or as arrogant prigs ever on the lookout to prove their superiority.  That sounds about right. And while Mr. Epstein has many good points about what constitutes snobbery and all the ways we engage in it, I think he overestimates snobberyas a motivator in our lives.  Status seeking behaviour isn't always about leaving other people behind, sometimes it's about finding people like ourselves; people who like the same things we do.   Aspiring to elevate one's tastes can also be about exploring what all life has to offer.

It's also not snobbish to want a nice car and to live in a good neighborhood.  Just like it's not snobbish to want to spend time around people we consider our peers in intellect and interest.  We should be picky about what we buy, who are our friends, and how we spend our time.  Resources are finite.  Life is short.  I think snobbery has little to do with our actual choices - sushi vs Vienna sausages.  Those are a matter of taste, preference, and culture.

Instead, snobbery is making a virtue out of our particular tastes and then measuring other people with ourselves as the measuring stick, and finding them wanting.  Snobbery is making choices with the neighborhood's collective opinion in mind.  Snobbery is to think people slightly less human, just a tiny bit, for being lower class or less sophisticated than we imagine ourselves to be.  Snobbery is to elevate shallow preferences over acts of good character when judging other people.  Snobbery is not nice.

Snob motto - For me to have worth, there must be others who compare poorly.  And this must be obvious to the casual viewer.

The book made me ask myself if I was a snob.  I don't think so, although Mr. Epstein would probably interpret this as a snobby opinion in itself, one that implies superiority - I'm not a snob, not like all you other losers.  But I can suffer from arrogance, which is akin to snobbery (but better).  So, I've made a list of all the good reasons I ought to work on not being snobbish, even if I'm not.

Why being a snob is self-defeating:

1) Snobbery impairs our ability to think clearly.  It's difficult to judge people and events objectively under the influence of our own infallible tastes or when obsessed with how our judgements will be viewed by our peers. Snobs have to accept the fact that they do not see the world as it actually is.

2) Snobbery is a sign of insecurity.  The guy really comfortable with his station in life doesn't overmuch care what car his neighbor drives, or, better, doesn't care what his neighbor thinks of what he drives.  Snobs worry a lot.

3) Snobbery is a character flaw.  Of course, most of us take great care to hide our snobbery from outsiders because we know this. 

4) Snobbery is a form of self-flattery and deception.  Better to know your true self.  The rest of us do.

I'll go work on eradicating all feelings of superiority while I'm making a sandwich. 

 

My Heart Name Is "Why The F- Did I Read This Stupid Book!"

La la la, just a normal human being, la la la.  Ahhh, love the Ice.  Ice makes love to me.  Make ice hammers and smash ice into humans.  F word F word F word.  Speak to me heart!  Urination.  F word F word F word.  More brothers of the heart.  The light!  Hammer some humans.  The light! Hammer some humans.  Cuddle while thinking about the light.  F word F word F word.  Hammer some humans. Big meet up.  Puzzling end.

That was my weekend, and that is basically the plot of Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, with a bit of editing.  I did not like the book. Yet the reviews practically gush.  Here's a typical one from the New York Review of Books:

Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.

Yeah, uh-huh.  It was like an even more horrible, horrible Johnathan Livingston Seagull with lots and lots of F words and rough sex.  And with about as much trippy transcendental blah blah blah.   No character development.  Unlikeable characters.  Too much urinating and defecating, though admittedly it's difficult to find that sweet spot between too much and too little.  Redundancy and more redundancy. No tension. Plot given early on and then we never deviate, depriving us of any suspense or surprises.  

What was there to like??  I'm thinking it was the Russian writer thing and the time trip through Moscow.  

 

 

There's An Intellectual Side To Me, Not Just A Stupid Animal Picture Side

As I'm in a rather international community here in Moscow, I've been motivated to read books by authors with strange names like Saramago and Zamyatin and Llosa.  I've been surprised how good these books are.  Not that I think less of non-English language authors, but that I think so little of contemporary fiction.  Several of these authors have made me love fiction again.

Blindness by Jose Saramago was a wonderful read.  I loved his style of writing in that stream of consciousness with less attention paid to grammar and stops.  I partly chose to read the book because of the bad review given him overall in National Review after his death.  The reviewer is not a fan. 

But something about the review caught my attention.  I happen to love modern art.  And what I read in the review reminded me strongly of how I feel about certain kinds of modern paintings.  Can't say for sure what.  So, I read the book.  Fantastic.

I also sought out Mario Vargo Llosa after reading reviews in the NR.  His book The War of the End of the World was great.  It was a sweeping story written in the wry manner without sentiment I particularly love and with memorable characters I still think about.

I did not love Arto Paasilinna's book The Year of the Hare. I worried too much about the rabbit. 

I finally got around to reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  It was much better than I had supposed, partly because I had had absolutely no idea what it was like.  And I had expected it to be a typical Northern European type mystery so popular now -- where the misery and the darkness and the futility of even thinking one could possibly be happy is so thick death is welcome.

I have also read several Russian works, in English.  But, then, I love Russian literature so no surprise how good Gogol's Dead Souls was.  What is it with those guys?  Why and how are they so good?  Although Zamyatin's We wasn't quite up to that standard.  It certainly was interesting as a post-apocalyptic Soviet world sci-fi.

Next up, and I can barely wait to nudge the tiny square button on my kindle and turn the first page, is Sorokin's Ice trilogy.  It just recently became available on Kindle.   So, I'll say goodbye and go read.

 

Decline of Handwriting, Decline of War?

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a mix of people from different countries.  We were talking about the decline of various skills like handwriting and face to face conversations.  Instead, the newer generations type and think in short little bursts.  One man said he fears our century's cultural decline is indicative of humanity's decline. 

Someone else mentioned that the 20th century was no standard by which to judge humanity if you take into consideration the atrocities of those past 100 years.  Surely good handwriting couldn't save us from wars, epidemics, genecide or inhuman ideologies.  This got me to thinking about something I had read recently by Neal Stephenson. 

In In the Beginning ...Was the Command Line, Stephenson writes:

...Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being.  And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.

Perhaps the ambivalence of modern thinking and modern behaviour is paralyzing our ability to act on cultural or moral grounds, thus keeping us from engaging in either very good actions or very bad ones.  Or not.  Who knows. 

Neal Stephenson is an incredible writer, and a very interesting thinker.  I definitely recommend reading In the Beginning...Was the Command Line.  While it is about how the various personal computer operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) developed and why, he spends quite a bit of time considering the whys of what makes us make the choices we do.  A favorite topic of mine.

And read his Cryptonomicon.  It's The Name of the Rose for our feckless century.

 

Organized Madness

I recently read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt.  I learned a bunch I didn't know. For one thing, I had no idea how much the Nazis and their counterparts in other countries relied on Jewish leaders to organize, administrate, and carry out the complex task of rounding up every Jew and sending them off to their doom.  Of course, the Jewish leaders were not responsible for the genocide.  They had attempted to apply order and reason onto unimaginable events. 

Arendt also made the point several times throughout her book that whenever a country chose to protect their Jewish population, either through evasiveness and sabotage or through out and out defiance, they were quite successful - like Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Bulgaria. Letting Evil happen was a choice.  

She made stabs at why a few countries protected their Jews, and others couldn't shove them into the cattle cars quick enough -- something to do with Jewish assimilation at higher levels of society.  But she admitted that the efforts of Bulgaria to protect their Jews defied easy explanation.  Why wouldn't the people there condone the murder of their neighbors, despite their anti-semitism? 

Arendt attempted to understand and explain how a mediocre man like Eichmann, who professed to have no prejudices against the Jews, who worked hard to find a non-lethal way out for them, could nevertheless end up sending millions of them to their deaths.  She writes about Germans developing a rationale centered on doing their duty, of having the strength to develop a "ruthless toughness" to do what was necessary for the security of the State.  The ends justify the means kind of rationale.

 

 

Atlas Shrugged VS Lord of the Rings

In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, the author, Bill Bryson, writes a short bit about John Lubbock.  Among other activities, John Lubbock spent some three months trying to teach his dog to read.  I've also tried to teach my dog to read!  I doubt I went about it with the same scientific rigour with which Mr. Lubbock did.  My efforts were all through teaching my own children to read while making sure the dog was paying attention. 

No, he did not learn to read.  Why a dog can learn to understand and carry out the commands of subtle hand signals but can't learn to distinguish between certain shapes on paper, I don't know.  But, I think we've found our new "Space Race".

Anyway, here's a picture of my cat after reading Atlas Shrugged for a few minutes.  Unlike Fluffy Justin Beeber, I happen to like the book.  Admittedly, as a novel on humans, it's greatly flawed.  As a distopian struggle against the end of humanity, it's great.  True, the Evil threatening the world is of our own doing for not being born beautiful and brilliant, but, still, it's a rousing struggle between Good and Evil.  

I like to pit Atlas Shrugged against The Lord of the Rings.  Here are some of the differences:

1) In Atlas Shrugged, the heroes are beautiful, perfect individuals with the only flaw of not being fully cognizant of just how wonderful they are. 

In LOTR, heroes can be found amongst even the smallest and weakest of beings.

2) In AS, there is no forgiveness for a moment's weakness or for any mistakes.  Actually, the protagonists do not make mistakes. 

In LOTR, the characters learn from their mistakes.  They do the right thing despite personal shortcomings.

3) Neither work has much to do with children, but inferences can be made.  It is implied in AS that children are the by-product of the slack-jawed crowd engaging in a shameful need they can't enjoy because sublime sexual pleasures are only for an incredibly small number of highly attractive people, say three or four.  And then only with Dagny. 

In LOTR, children are lovable, wanted, protected, and trained.  Young boys are reluctantly armed and sent out to fight in a desperate battle to save humanity.  And the boys go.  Very heroic and moving.

4) In AS, there is no attempt to reach out to people with IQs lower than 200, or worse, who are unattractive.  Whenever a minor character in AS starts to see the light, Rand kills them off.   One is born perfect or one is born a sneering, dead-eyed slattern.  She preaches a form of predestination.

In LOTR, characters do change.  Boromir is one.  Gollum questions himself.  Pretty much everyone toys with the idea of using Evil for Good before rejecting the idea.  Even characters lost to Evil are given the chance to change sides, like Saruman.

So, why do I like Atlas Shrugged?  Rand was a master at capturing certain people who litter our modern world -- the vacuous, self-rightous, self-promoting, untalented, entitled, sneering; the taste-makers without taste, the critics without talent, the leaders without vision, our betters without morals.   She skewers such people as they deserve to be.  It's all very entertaining and satisfying. 

 

Inevitable Evolution or Devolution?

I've just finished reading two interesting books about the near future.  The first is The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama and the second is We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism  by John Derbyshire.  Both were great reads.  

Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy and capitalism are the inevitable result of societal evolution; the distilled form of human organization after thousands of years of selecting what works and rejecting what doesn’t. 

There can be no evolved theocracy or communism or feudal societies because the natural mechanisms underlying societies will eventually reject these as ineffective, and will naturally adopt the attributes of a liberal democracy with a market economy as these attributes are more effective.  As our societies approach the perfection of open societies and free markets, we are less likely, even unable, to return to more flawed methods of governance.  Hence, the end of history with history defined as change.

The good news, according to Fukuyama, is that this means liberal democracy isn't just for lucky Westerners and their friends, but for any society that manages to stay around long enough to learn from their mistakes.

Derbyshire, on the other hand, sees nothing but troubled times ahead.  Once a society has reached the liberal democracy stage with its literate populace, accumulated wealth, and freedom from starvation, various interest groups within that society inevitably exploit these very attributes for their own agendas -- agendas designed to rid society of injustice, inequalities, guilt, and  ignorance.  Pursuing these ends will be our undoing because the pursuit of human perfectibility through government means is not compatible with liberal democratic societies.  

Derbyshire is pessimistic because he doesn't think there is much we can do to counteract these forces.  The groups who want to apply force to correct human behavior are acting out of biological programming.  We are programmed to behave this way.  Conservatives, who might be a brake on these forces for devolution have instead bought into the hope and change and do-goodyness of the crusaders.  Nothing to be done about it except to guide our children into the elite ruling classes of government work and wait for the wheel to turn.

So much to think about! 

 

 

Clever Title Escapes Me.

Thought I'd put out a list of books I've read over the last few weeks while you were watching TV and shopping at Walmart.

Starting from most pretentious:

To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czeslaw Milosz.  Sort of reminded me of the Koestler book of essays.  Like Koestler, he was also a refugee from the Nazi parts of Europe.  He wrote a lot about homesickness, intellectuals, and the years running up to World War II.  His writing is rather understated.  I preferred the directness of Koestler. 

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.  Wow.  One of the best books I've read in a long time.  Wonderfully discursive, original, funny, with interesting characters not straight out of the pantheon of moody, narcissistic, bitter post modern types who populate much of contemporary fiction.  The fact that it didn't have any well developed women characters did not bother me.  I write this because this fact was mentioned as a detraction in many Amazon reviews.  But the book is about a bunch of guys!  I wouldn't have appreciated the wedging in of a fully developed woman character just to fulfill some people's a priori fictional check list.  I crave a true creation from an author, not a politically correct template where the writer fills in some blanks.  Blech.

The Dog Who Bit A Policeman by Stuart M. Kaminsky.  This is another of his Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov books.  Besides being good police procedurals, the setting of this series is Moscow, which is fun for me as I'm living in Moscow.  Plus, the author writes sympathetically about the police in Moscow.  Kaminsky's characters are hard working, competent human beings trying hard to navigate the "new" Russia and solve their cases.  His portrayal of the police here is rather refreshing from what one mostly hears about them.

The Charm School by Nelson Demille.  Since this novel is about an American embassy military attache in Moscow back during the Cold War, I thought it might be fun.  It wasn't bad as far as these plot driven books go.  I don't enjoy that kind of escapism much.  It's not that I'm a snob.  After all,  I've got the visual-media tastes of a precocious 14 year old with bad acne (Yes, Dr. Who is the penultimate culmination of television entertainment.  Ditto for BattleStar Galactica).  It's because I read so fast that books that are mostly action and plot read like the back of a cereal box for me. 

I read some English Reformation-era mystery which I did not enjoy -- today's sensibilities in the 1600s.  I can't even remember the title of the book or the author.   Then, to clear my palate after that mediocre read, I read several Father Brown mysteries by Chesterton.  Much better written, though a bit heavy in the psychological analysis.  I blame William James.