All Things Reconsidered

By in books, foolosophizing 2 Comments

One of the reasons for anger at the theory-ridden English departments of our day is that they sold out the richness of literature for a small number of crude ideas — gender, race, class, and the rest of it — and hence gave up their cultural birthright for a pot of message.

— Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays

I am a complete sucker for brilliant metaphors, apt allusions, clever puns, or, especially, brilliant metaphors wrapped in apt illusions and dipped in clever puns. I would be positively smug if I had come up with this one. So far, I’m greatly enjoying this book, as I have his other essay collections, but it’s funny to think how easily I might have gone without ever checking them out.

A few months ago, while fishing for suggestions from Mr. Dalrymple of other familiar essayists I could read, I mentioned to him that I had read a few of Epstein’s books but had never quite warmed to him due to what I perceived as a certain haughtiness. In what has become somewhat of a predictable pattern with me, though, I almost immediately set about contradicting myself, and have spent the last few months slowly accumulating Epstein’s books of essays while revising my opinion.

Like I said, this happens often. Apparently I have a daimon who exists primarily to whisper to me, “Remember, you might be wrong about that.” Having planted a strong opinion in the turf, the ground beneath it begins to crack and crumble. It’s almost as if, having issued a strong ruling from the bench, I feel compelled to shuck my robe and wig, change into a attorney’s suit, and plead the defendant’s case. Am I just a relativist with a pathological fear of commitment? I don’t think so — in most respects, I’m a creature of near-obstinate habit and routine. Did two years of Mr. Sestina’s debate class in middle school and a few semesters of community-college philosophy with Ms. McCarty (far and away the two best classes I ever took) leave me, like an acid casualty, mesmerized by the shimmering fractals underneath the seemingly-solid surface of things, incapable of making a simple distinction between black and white? Again, I don’t think so — I believe that there’s a truth to be found in any given context and that it’s worth ceaselessly striving for; there’s no honor in abandoning the search to stand proudly in the intellectual nude alongside Walt Whitman, non-sequiturs dangling in the breeze. Could I just be a one-man Hegelian dialectic generator, a mere instrument of the World-Spirit, producing an antithesis for every thesis in order to manifest absolute knowledge of, say, Joseph Epstein’s oeuvre?

I suppose, as in many things, the origin of the tendency doesn’t matter; what’s important is whether you harness it productively. So, let me state for the record that I don’t read much fiction, let alone great literature. I prefer non-fiction. Now, hopefully, having said that, I’ll find myself up to my eyeballs in Shakespeare and Russian novelists by the new year.

Obiter Scripta, no. 51

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Although I’ve had some commercial and critical success with my books, I’ve never written a book at whose completion I felt that, like a gymnast making a perfect landing, I’ve nailed it, a perfect ten. Only a year or more later, when for one reason or another I might open the book and find a passage that pleases me, do I say to myself, “Not bad, not bad at all. I wasn’t stupid when I wrote that. How come I’m so stupid today?”

—Joseph Epstein, “The Perils of Prolificacy,” Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays

I feel that way all the time. Apparently I suffer from a type of writer’s farsightedness, where my opinion of my efforts grows in proportion to my temporal distance from it. Up close, I can only see wasted potential and disappointment. “I felt stupid when I wrote that. How come it looks so much smarter in retrospect?” Ah, hindsight — both the torment and the solace of an amateur writer.

Constant Companions Although We Wander, We’ll Meet Again In the Milky Way

By in poetry, the big sleep No Comments

Stephen Pentz informs me that the poet Sam Hamill died this past April. As I’ve mentioned several times here over the years, his translations, especially of Chinese and Japanese poetry, were truly life-changing for me. His book Endless River: Li Po and Tu Fu: A Friendship in Poetry was the first poetry book that inspired an almost-religious devotion from me. It’s also the only book I’ve read so many times that the binding has cracked and the pages are literally falling out.

I would usually Google him every year or so to see what he’d been up to. Obviously, I hadn’t done so since the spring, at least. It used to be that new articles were hard to come by, but there were several obituaries, including one in the New York Times. Most of them focused on his political stances, especially his “Poets Against the War” initiative from 2003, which I suppose might be the closest he ever got to the mainstream. One remembered him spending a lot of time on Facebook in recent years, issuing political updates concerning anti-racism, Donald Trump, Palestine, and “contempt for the ‘Repugnicons’.” I have to admit it’s a little disappointing to have my memories of his work now diluted with images of him ranting on social media like a million other tedious bloggers in a hyperpolitical age, but I still have a happy memory of reading a Buddhist magazine in a Barnes & Noble and seeing a letter to the editor from him, making fun of a recent article about Buddhists whose Gnostic-like contempt for earthly existence manifested itself in disdain for a meditation center located above a sex shop in NYC. From Hamill’s Zen perspective, life is the sex, blood, filth and suffering of everyday life, not an otherworldly realm of intellectual abstractions. His poetry was visceral like that too.

Obiter Scripta, no. 50

By in antisocial networking, books, obiter scripta No Comments

What distinguishes the junk language of our day from the junk language of earlier days is that it is so quickly taken up by people who are supposed to — but of course don’t — know better: journalists, public figures, academics in high places with low tastes. Glimpsing a recent book about Henry James, I came across the phrase “James’s take on this question.” Henry James had a point of view, insights, observations, aperçus, a striking pensée or two, yet I am certain that he didn’t do “takes,” ever.

— Joseph Epstein, “Don’t Ask, Multitask,” Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays

I didn’t “lol,” but I did indeed laugh out loud to read this, given that it was written eighteen years ago. What would Epstein (or even more amusingly, Henry James) think now that “take” has become the preferred term in our attention-deficient age for referring to an expressed opinion, of either sentence-fragment or article-length, used by precisely the same culprits he named so accurately? There are many disgusting and enraging things about social media and its heaviest users, but this particular piece of overused argot is one that makes me wish I could delete other people’s accounts.

Obiter Scripta, no. 49

By in bonsai minimalism, books, obiter scripta, santutthi No Comments

The dreadful fact is that there is no God. But what if there is a multitude of gods, small gods of small things, all the small things of the world?

What Horace is telling Leuconoe is this: everything that is needed lies at hand, if only we know how to taste and appreciate it. Spiritual sustenance comes from a winter view, the snow-whitened peak of a familiar mountain; from a beloved waterfall, with ilex growing from the rocks; from the apparent monotony of the sea’s waves; from wine, the great heartener and restorer of spirits; from friendship and conversation; and from love, so long as we do not expect too much from it or grab hold of it with too much vehemence. Horace’s way is the way of worshipping small things and small gods.

— Harry Eyres, Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet

In our current populist-nationalist moment, there are a number of prominent voices announcing and praising the return of the strong gods. They would no doubt prefer the term “idols” for those Horatian miniatures, which they see as shallow pleasures appealing to hollow men. Others, like Peter Watson and Anthony Kronman, have each in their own way called for renewed attention to the transient things of this world in place of grand hopes of otherworldly salvation; Kronman even names his ideal “born-again paganism.” Who will turn out to be more prescient? Who knows? Let the ambitious ghost-hunters attempt to capture the zeitgeist in a narrative; I prefer the poetry of everyday visible life, expressed with haiku-like brevity. Quod satis est, said Horace. Santutthi paramam dhanam, said Buddha. Bonsai minimalism, said some insignificant blogger. Let it be enough.

Deference and the Machine

By in foolosophizing, technology No Comments

Chris Matterazzo:

Until then, make your toaster; your car; your TV; your oven; your smartphone; your Alexa…make them call you My Lord or My Lady. They are our servants. They are our slaves. And it’s okay: Compel them. Command them. Demand their compliance.

You don’t ask a machine; you tell a machine. If that is jarring to you, you are infected with the phony sense of civility that is contributing to a world in which people are afraid to say…anything.

I was cruising right along, enjoying the fresh breeze of this little thought experiment, right up until my wheel dropped into that non-sequitur pothole at the end. Let’s be clear: whatever the merits (or demerits) of addressing your smart tools politely — and I do not doubt that there will eventually be a lot of clickbait articles produced by underemployed critical studies majors analyzing the problematic subtext of our relationships with our increasingly-intelligent gadgets — our “world in which people are afraid to say anything” is not the product of excessive civility. The young Brahmins who enforce today’s politically-correct strictures are just as amoral and sociopathic as any other group of power-hungry fanatics. The fact that their path to cultural power involves taking cynical advantage of the widespread desire to be considerate does not bring consideration into disrepute. It may well be overly sentimental to talk to machines as if they’re people, but sentimentality and civility are not the same thing.

Besides, even if you freely curse at inanimate objects, as I do, the whole point of commanding obeisance from social inferiors depends upon them being not objects but subjects who could choose to act differently. A man who shows me courtesy, respect or fear has given me something meaningful, with emphasis on the “giving” aspect. A smart gadget that addresses me as Lord and Master is only an extension of my own will, a fig-leaf for my own ego. The empty satisfaction gained is purely auto-erotic, and masturbatory narcissism is another social plague we should seek to quarantine in today’s world.

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XVI)

By in books, so many books, so little time No Comments

Patrick Kurp:

Read the first OED definition of desultory and see how it mutates: “Skipping about, jumping or flitting from one thing to another; irregularly shifting, devious; wavering, unsteady.” A butterfly flits, purposefully. Watch one moving from flower to flower, probing for nectar. Butterflies have evolved a proboscis resembling a coiled, retractable straw. Their flitting is methodical, not superficial.

Flitting among books is what some of us do every day. Sometimes the flitting is pragmatic – consulting a dictionary or other reference work. More often, we have several books going simultaneously, and one book inevitably leads to others.

For a long time, especially when I bought books at retail prices, I prided myself on doggedly finishing every book I started and never owning more than a couple unread books at a time. Parsimony was my guiding principle. I chose carefully which books to buy and ran my eyes over every inch of text between the covers. Once online shopping came around, I was exposed to a lot more suggestive algorithmic whispers from the shadowed alleyways of Amazon, but I stuck to the straight and frugal path, buying used-good as often as possible, usually after letting a book dwell in wish-list purgatory for a while to make sure I really wanted it. Nowadays, money isn’t quite so tight and I haunt library sales dozens of times a year, so I find myself willing to take a chance on a three-dollar-or-less book which might not have interested me in the abstract. Correspondingly, I’ve become a bit more willing to flit away from an uninteresting book rather than plod through like a tortoise, though I still feel slightly guilty about doing so. That Protestant book ethic is difficult to shake off.

Here’s the group of hitchhikers I picked up last weekend. I may have already read the Wodehouse stories, but since I don’t know of any convenient compilations of his plentiful works, I just grab whatever I find. I had the Lasch book on my wish list once, but it never graduated to a purchase. Epicurus, Horace and Erasmus sounds like one of those “ideal dinner party” scenarios. And I’m delighted to see the unjustly-maligned season of winter being honored with a sympathetic biography:

Noteworthies (42)

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• Ivan Hewett, “What the Classical Devotees Get Wrong About Modern Music”

• John Gray, “The Rise of Post-Truth Liberalism,” and an interview with J.P. O’Malley, “Humankind is Unique in its Incapacity to Learn from Experience”

• Deirdre McCloskey, “Why Liberalism’s Critics Fail”

• Stephen Pentz, “Quiet” and “Autumn”

• Chris Matterazo, “Steering the Pitches”

• Seth Barron, “Confirmation Bias”

• Francis Fukuyama, “Huntington’s Legacy”

• They write themselves.

Wading Through the Market’s Waste; We Locked Eyes, Felt Our Loneliness Abate

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Like shipwrecks that come to serve as sea-life habitats, even the most banal and throwaway products of consumer society could be refashioned into the stuff of community and personal meaning. “Anything can be a sunken ship — a point around which a species of social life can muster,” McCracken wrote. “But, strictly speaking, the metaphor has its limits. After all, real sunken ships draw only existing species while the metaphorical ones of the contemporary world actually help invent new ones.”

— Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture

Conservatives, nostalgic for a lost sense of cultural unity, often lament the modern weakening of social bonds and the individualist, ad-hoc manner in which people go about finding or creating a sense of belonging and meaning. But the Heraclitean flow of life carries some of us out beyond the dependable, safe harbors of tradition, where we must adapt to the endless flux in our own experimental ways. Sometimes a devoted listener discovers a song that sank unnoticed and unmourned beneath the waves of popular culture, but he communes with its beauty and it strengthens his spirit. Sometimes an attentive reader happens upon an earnest passage in an old book that failed to crest any waves of popularity or significance, and writer and reader are suddenly joined in an intimate confidence that transcends time and distance. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the higher values like truth and beauty have to be created and recreated through unceasing effort, often by working in non-ideal circumstances with meager resources. The humble structures of popular culture may not have the grandeur and majesty of ancient cathedrals and coliseums, but even in a denuded environment of plastic and pixels, the innate human drive to connect and celebrate through shared rituals remains undiminished.

Obiter Scripta, no. 48

By in books, fresh hell, obiter scripta, the cult of multi, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I read these magazines in the first place — there is no second place — in the hope that in doing so, I shall keep up with some of the things that preoccupy the culture in its wider, sometimes more youthful, often wildly excessive aspects. I tell myself I do so because it is the duty of the writer to try to grasp the unique quality of his time and make sense of it.

— Joseph Epstein, “An Extremely Well Informed SOB,” Narcissus Leaves the Pool

In theory, that sounds compelling. In practice, the “unique quality of [our] time” is often senseless and not worth grasping:

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