Have Some Green Onions For Christmas

December 22, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Are deeply tragic and exiquisitely-timed comedic writers having trouble finding newer audiences within older forms?

What effects are the distance-shortening and attention-altering technological networks having on more traditional arts?

‘The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.’

English writers Ian McEwan and Martin Amis have a discussion; a bit about writing, a bit about personal habits and audience attention spans, but also about this past century’s ideological fever dreams.

You might just recognize some of these living and dead horses:

AC This idea of belief systems comes out in both of your books, doesn’t it – what people will do in the name of the beliefs that they’ve constructed or developed.

MA Yes: it’s a world in itself that – belief systems. Ian’s been talking about religion, but also ideology. Although what I discovered when I’d gone on reading about the Holocaust over the last 25 years is that in the Russian case, very pedantically following various Marxist tributaries and deviations, the ideology remained very strong.

I was shocked to learn that Gorbachev, just as the whole empire was crumbling, was up all night reading Lenin, saying, “The answer must be here.” But in Hitler’s case, in the German case, there was no ideology. There were two or three ideas: Lebensraum – extra land empire; hallucinatory anti-Semitism; and just wanting to stay in power – and that was it. People weren’t attracted to Nazism because of its ideology; it was a sort of rallying cry for sadists and that was all it was meant to be.

IM Yes, those black flags of Northern Iraq are another case – it acts as a great attractor for every available would-be torturer. Psychopathia is thinly spread through all populations and they just need their historical chance, don’t they?

AC And why are novelists drawn to it?

IM We love things going wrong.

McEwan mentions the death of the inductive novel, or novel as puzzle to reason through, perhaps requiring greater and deeper attention which is occupied elsewhere.

—

Are you willing to go on this type of journey with a good artist? From this Playboy interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

Nabokov: ‘On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of burning Humbert Humbert’s little black diary. No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.’

Is the artist supposed to solve a puzzle or ask you to help solve his puzzle?

—

On that note, serial, narrative fiction and reasoned problem-solving meet with you-know-who:

by Colin Angus Mackay

“I must take the view, your Grace, that when a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.”

–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A discussion of deductive and inductive reasoning here, as it might relate to solving crimes (which is highly dramatized in our culture, perhaps partly due to Holmes).

Strange Maps has this.

221B Baker Street page here.

—

In the meantime, once you’ve thought long and hard about a problem, find a groove and settle-in.

Have some Green Onions for Christmas.

Update & Repost-From The LA Review Of Books-‘Death By Prefix? The Paradoxical Life Of Modernist Studies’

July 15, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here.

What is modernism, exactly?

This blog is still trying to work towards a definition:

‘Like many scholars of modernism, I’m often asked two questions: What is modernism? And why is modernist studies, it seems, all the rage right now? I don’t have a good, succinct answer to either question — and I’ve no doubt frustrated plenty of friends because of that — but the reasons why I don’t are pretty telling.’

From the comments:

‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known?Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’

As previously posted:

-Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism And Truth’

–Repost-‘Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?’

–Land Art Links Along A With A Quite Modernist W.S. Merwin Poem

–William Logan At The New Criterion: ‘Pound’s Metro’…Monday Poem: ‘A Pact’ By Ezra Pound

Of some note:

James Lileks responds to an Atlantic piece

‘There is no morality in art. There is morality in religion; there are philosophical objectives embedded in politics. The two are intertwined in a society and reflected in its art. When you sever art from its cultural moorings and make “newness” the overriding criterion by which the merits of a work are judged, then anything is possible. This results in crap. Not always’

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, the Bauhaus, the imagists, the futurists etc. Some of those influences have morphed into post-modernism or where such currents have flowed and keep flowing. Were they the best models, or has much been lost in translation?

Lileks’ take:

‘The primary urge of the revolutionary and the modernist and the adolescent: impatience.’

So, do we aim for maturity? Reverence? Good old Longfellow? Sonnets? Rhyming couplets delivered by higher powers to monks in haylofts?

—

Perhaps there is a growing body of intellectual and cultural pushback against the ‘-Isms’ (environmentalism, feminism, utopian political idealism) as these ideals and idealists continue their contact with current institutions, Nature and human nature.

It’s tough to get an education in the arts and humanities these days, moving through the postmodern landscape, without running into pockets of ‘-Isms.’

Results vary:

It’s not that the sciences, nor even the social sciences, don’t contain valid truth and knowledge claims.

This isn’t worrying so much as the cults of rationality and irrationality out and about; the reefs of radical discontent and group-thought hardening into new rules.

It’s not that change doesn’t need to happen, nor that what’s true remains even if we don’t want it to be so, rather, it’s the inability of many moderns to provide deep enough wisdom, truth and understanding so as not not slip into the same old problems with authority and hierarchy.

I think for some people, there’s an appealing critique of liberal rationalism contained within nihilism, but also something deeper which draws folks to seek out other ideas: An instinctive defense of the arts, myth, music, and tradition; the complexities of the human heart and mind, the long sweep of history, the wisdom contained within religious texts.

Defending tradition, even perhaps having been influenced by Nietzsche to some extent, has become heretical in parts of the academy and the media.

Merely pushing back against the influence of Foucault and Lacan in the academy, or perhaps questioning the motives of student radicals during Paris ’68, can be enough to torpedo an academic career:

—

Before modernism, there was the Romantic break of the individual artistic genius driving all this change forward on his own. Isaiah Berlin had some thoughts about this (as well as the horrendous totalitarianism which emerges when you start-out thinking the Ends Of Man are already known).

Thanks, reader. Probably worth revisiting:

A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

Anyways, let’s enjoy a poem:

Cousin Nancy

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.

–T.S. Eliot

Matthew=Matthew Arnold. Waldo=Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ben Sixsmith At Quillette: ‘Britain’s Grooming Gang Crisis’

March 18, 2018March 18, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here.

‘The scale of the street grooming crisis in the UK almost defies belief. Hundreds of girls and young women were raped in the city of Rotherham, and hundreds by similar exploitation rings in Rochdale, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, and Bristol. Now, up to a thousand girls are thought to have been drugged, raped, and beaten in Telford between the 1980s and the 2010s.’

Large numbers of migrants (more than possibly can be admitted) desire entry into more successful civilizations from less successful and often failing civilizations. Some are genuine war refugees, some are seeking political asylum, some want economic opportunity, and others’ll just take money if it’s being handed-out. Some are smarter than you, some are considerably dumber; some have particularly valuable skills, others have few to no marketable skills. Some are of exceptional character, some are of particularly low and criminal character; some are from instantly recognizable civilizations, some from very different and potentially conflicting civilizations. All will take much from their own civilizations into yours, and without proper incentives, most will likely wall themselves off into separate and unequal enclaves.

Better to start getting more serious about these questions sooner rather than later.

—

As posted:

Christopher Caldwell piece here.

Quite detailed:

The flood of Middle Eastern refugees into Austria began in the summer. By September they were arriving at the southeastern border at the rate of 10,000 or 12,000 a day. These migrants are associated in the public mind with the war in Syria but, in fact, come from throughout the Muslim world—Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Most of them are on their way to Germany. The great majority are young men. By the end of this year, Austrian authorities estimate, 375,000 will have passed through the country, and a quarter of them will have stayed to apply for asylum. Austria will have added 1 percent to its population in just about three months, with virtually all the newcomers Muslims. When migrant families follow, as they inevitably do, the effect will be multiplied. Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the European Council, warns that the biggest tide of migrants “is yet to come.”

A few things that stuck-out:

–The inability of the leading Social Democratic coalition in Germany to craft reasonable policy, instead making naive, idealistic, short-sighted rather self-serving political choices with consequences for millions of people, and for decades to come.

–The fact that while many of these refugees are simply looking to escape war, many are young men, anchors who will bring more family over to become likely ‘European Muslims.’

–Again, what is Europe doing? With a rather socialistic Left defending freedom with such vaguely utopian idealism, this invites the more ethnically purist, nativist, and further right interests to take measures, almost out of principle alone.

An interview with Caldwell here

Caldwell raises some important points, and sheds light onto the Muslim immigration debate in Europe:

“SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is America more successful when it comes to integrating immigrants?

Caldwell: For now, yes. I think the first reason is the ruthlessness of the American economy. You either become a part of it or you go home. There are more foreigners in the workplace, and that’s where a lot of integration happens.”

Another review here. (updated, Fouad Ajami’s piece, which was not the original…from 2009)

Book found here.

A few quotes:

“The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic”

================

Salman Rushdie at about minute 57:00: ‘This idea of separate treatment for separate cultures…I think essentially if we follow that to its conclusion…destroys our ability to have a really moral framework for society.’

A British Muslim tells his story, suggesting that classical liberalism wouldn’t be a bad idea…as a more entrenched radical British Left and Muslim immigration don’t mix too well: From Kenanmalik.com: ‘Introduction: How Salman Rushdie Changed My Life’… Via YouTube: ‘Christopher Hitchens Vs. Ahmed Younis On CNN (2005)’…

Repost-John Gray Reviews Francis Fukuyama At The Literary Review: ‘Destination Denmark’

Out of the Valley of modernism, post-modernism, and relativism…one path from Nietzsche’s nihilism is through Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

On this site, see also: From The NY Times: Review Of Christopher Caldwell’s Book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West”

..Via A Reader-Douglas Murray Speaks At ‘The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Crisis In Retrospect’ Conference

Four Poems & A Short Story Collected Throughout The Years-Aging

March 10, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Men At Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

–Donald Justice

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

–William Butler Yeats

Whole poem here (Vacillation).

An Old Man

In the inner room of the noisy café
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.

And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.

He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
and yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.

And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and how he always trusted her—what folly!—
the liar who would say, “Tomorrow. You have ample time.”

He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.

…But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the café.

C.P. Cavafy (translation from the Greek found here).

The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange;
Why aren’t they screaming?

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

–Philip Larkin

It’s barely twelve pages long, dear reader.

What are you doing with your time and imagination?

You’re fine, Mr. Corte. In fact, you’re looking a little better than yesterday…:

‘Giuseppe Corte didn’t need anything, but he began to chat freely with the young woman, asking for information about the clinic. In this way, he learned about the hospital’s unique practice of assigning its patients to different floors in accordance with the gravity of their illness. On the seventh floor, the top floor, only the very mildest cases were treated. Those whose forms of the illness weren’t grave, but who certainly couldn’t be neglected, were assigned to the sixth floor. More serious infections were treated on the fifth floor, and so on and so forth. Gravely ill patients were housed on the second floor; and on the first floor, those for whom all hope had been abandoned.’

You probably spent a lot of energy when younger, wishing to be older, and as you get older, find yourself spending time wishing you were younger.

Repost-From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

February 27, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full review-essay here.

Nussbaum’s book can be found here.

“Nussbaum sees the university as under attack from two directions, one represented by conservative critics, such as Allan Bloom, George Will, and Roger Kimball, who accuse the university of fostering relativism, trendy “political correctness,” and an ignorance of, if not downright antipathy toward, the standards of reason and the canon of Great Literature that the university, they believe, should be defending. The other threat comes from groups, including some feminists and advocates of racial and ethnic difference, who have also challenged the traditions of the university, questioning its reliance upon Western- or male-centered rationality and a canon that is insufficiently inclusive of the contributions of nondominant groups.”

This is insightful. Perhaps, like Camille Paglia, you are genuinely concerned that humanities departments have given too free a home to equality ideologues, feminists and relativists, and that this has spilled back out into the culture at large. Yet, popular political thinkers on the right, like George Will (and Paglia herself who’s not on the right), aren’t deep enough to get at the root of the problem as Nussbaum is here defining it: classical learning.

So what does Nussbaum suggest?

“Between these two lines of attack, she believes, the university must articulate a conception of itself that defends the standards of reason, while remaining open to new points of view; that preserves the intellectual traditions and canons that define U.S. culture, while consciously broadening the curriculum to expose students to traditions which diverge from their own and which, in their difference, may confront students with an awareness of their own parochialism; that remain respectful and tolerant of many points of view without lapsing into relativism; and in short, that manages to prepare students simultaneously to be citizens of U.S. society, and cosmopolitans, “citizens of the world.”

This has always struck me as a little too broad of a vision to maintain (too heavy on the gender and equality side of things, too much of its time and part of feminist logic I find has little to no place for me and can threaten the classics), though I certainly respect the attempt. We should aim to be citizens of the world and in the best Aristotelian sense (such depth and breadth may be in fact necessary). But is it enough within this framework?

Our author remains skeptical, and finds that the book didn’t quite meet Nussbaum’s own aims:

“In all of this, I think, we return to the narrow conception of philosophy that drives Nussbaum’s argument. By equating philosophy with the defense of Socratic reason, and by refusing to consider that this mode of analysis may not provide the universal discourse for resolving disagreements even within this society, let alone on a global scale, Nussbaum ends up providing, on the whole, a conception of liberal education that diverges very little from the secular university’s present self-conception.”

An interesting review. Obviously, there’s more depth here than I’ve addressed.

A Link To Some Official Photos Of North Korea, Catalonia, And A Great Morning Walk

February 19, 2018February 20, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Via Mick Hartley: You never go full Stalinist (photos at the link):

So much emptiness and marble kitsch:

‘Dutch photographer Eddo Hartmann travelled four times to North Korea, between 2014 and 2017. He makes no claim that the resulting project and book – Setting the Stage – are a behind-the-scenes look at the real Pyongyang. On the contrary, he was chaperoned at all times, the images approved by his minders. This is the official North Korea, as they want it to be seen – which makes it all the more chilling. Pristine marble totalitarian kitsch, with the few isolated individuals only serving to emphasise the soulless alienation of the socialist utopia.’

Behold the Dear Leader promoting gleaming new make-glorious subway cars! All is well!

—

Remember, Madrid has had to deal with ETA, and real terrorism, so the issue is complicated.

A while back, I was a young mole in Barcelona for a month at a law faculty, and there was an older woman who came in for a few hours a day, sharing our tiny, rented office. She explained her job was to make sure all posters and communications in Spanish at the law faculty also appeared in Catalan. This was a very important job.

She was small in a way many Spanish (Catalonian!) people are small, diminuitive, and in her case determined and a bit mousy. I can still hear her voice echoing ‘Si, digi‘ as she picked up the odd phone call. Down the corridors she’d be off again on another stroll to ensure protocol.

Per Josep Goded:

‘Pro-independence parties have restarted talks on the formation of an effective government in Catalonia. The negotiations broke down two weeks ago, following a wave of mutual reproaches and criticism.’

—

Personal update: This blog is a way to communicate and share ideas, and if you were to meet me, you’d probably have a pretty good sense of what kind of guy I am after a few minutes of conversation (like all of us, right?). May we meet one day, talk, and share a few moments on this strange journey.

Today, I decided to hike alone at the rather pedestrian Cougar Mountain on a sunny and cold morning (out of the noise of the house and away from work).

The ground was frozen and crunched underfoot. There was a welcome stillness and only a few light breezes (5-10 mph from the west/northwest) occassionally clacking some smaller trunks together.

After an hour or so of walking, I arrived at the small falls where a healthy amount of winter water tumbled and cascaded down. I decided to clamber up the left side and go off-trail. I took a few photos back towards the falls, and for some reason, just kept going off-trail.

Exhilarated, I soon found myself powering through pretty dense undergrowth, getting lashed in the face, having my shoes pulled off occasionally, falling down a few times, and you know, wondering what I was doing, exactly.

I checked my phone and there was no signal. I figured I had another mile to go through the growth at that heading, and such a mile was becoming long, unsure and miserable. I did what any self-respecting suburbanite would do and decided to double-back towards the stream and the falls and the ravine. Executive decision.

I sat and took the photo below in a little clearing under the 10:30 am sun along the way back.

I saw a female mule deer bounding ahead, in and out of shafts of sunlight, keeping a safe distance between us. I must have disturbed her. Her ears swiveled wildly and I could see her eyes watching me.

In another shaft of sunlight, back near the stream, I saw a piliated woodpecker swooping ahead of me from limb to limb (explains the woody, jackhammer sound I’d been hearing). Flashes of black, white and red.

All in all, a great morning:

Downward To Darkness: Friday Poem From A Reader-Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’

January 4, 2018January 4, 2018 / chr1 / Leave a comment

A return to Nature? To origins of faith? To a simple freedom in a wild land, and new understandings, with death in view? To visions of Romantic Primitivism becoming modern?:

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

–Wallace Stevens

Full poem here.

Read it aloud, for God’s sake, as the meaning lies in the experience of saying.

Chris Navin

Agnostic-Looking for Liberals In The Postmodern Wilderness

Language