books

Private Thoughts

By in books, bricolage

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

— Montaigne, “On Giving the Lie”

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More than once, too, I have pleased myself with the notion that somewhere there is good Company which will like this small sententious Book—these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of gray soft matter in the bowl of my skull.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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The musical progressives of his time, their ears and minds full of Wagner’s epochal agenda for opera and art and humanity, condemned Brahms’s art as “the private thoughts of a clever man,” writing only for the private thoughts of his listeners. But after the betrayals of this century by one epochal agenda after another, the private thoughts of a private craftsman may be the best thing we have left.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

Wallowing Without Thought

By in books, music

The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering — wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion — is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

I feel seen, and not in a good way!

I’ve always been aware that I don’t “get” classical music on its own terms, and that’s my loss. I’m aware that there are all sorts of subtle nuances that my coarse understanding is incapable of detecting. Like many simpletons, I just know what I like, even if I have no idea what the composer was trying to communicate, or how a composition would have been understood in context. I imagine it’s like trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language, having to rely entirely on tone and body language to have the slightest sense of what’s going on. Well, life is full of trade-offs and opportunity costs, and that just happens to be one of mine.

All Hail the Book Conqueror

By in books

I can’t listen to audiobooks for the same reason I can’t listen to podcasts. If I’m sitting still, I quickly get sleepy listening to someone’s uninterrupted voice droning on (I believe Sun Tzu noted this in the first chapter of his famous book on parenting advice). If I’m active, with an audiobook playing in the background, I can’t focus on it. The Lady of the House can spend all day with earbuds in, listening to books while doing other things. I evidently lack the necessary railroad switch in my brain to do that. Reading books is for the couple hours before bed, when there are no other distractions.

I do sometimes read e-books, but I still feel like something’s lacking in the format. Sometimes the combination of convenience and cost-effectiveness wins out — “I can have this right now, for half the price, or wait a week to get the physical copy.” But it never quite feels the same somehow. I have a better sense of location in a physical book. I often remember where I encountered a particular passage— left-side page, near the bottom, about three-quarters of the way through — which is useful when I want to look for it again. In an e-book, I have no such sense. There’s no physical geography to an e-book; it’s just a blizzard of words in a shapeless landscape. I have to digitally highlight anything I want to find again (admittedly, it is useful to have a menu option to see all of your annotations).

Ultimately, though, in an age of sensitivity readers, I think it’s foolish to trust anything important to the cloud. We’ve already heard of incidents where a previously-purchased e-book was stealthily “updated” to eliminate words or thoughts that suddenly became unfashionable. Eric Hoffer said that the features of an idealist loudmouth always contain the lineaments of a commissar, and Lord knows we have a surplus of that type these days. I’m afraid that sensitivity reading is probably a growth industry. It’s basically a profession designed to absorb the glut of overeducated, otherwise-unskilled orthodoxy-sniffers who can’t do any useful work, so I expect it to expand in the coming years. Buy physical copies of any media you want to keep.

The signaling charge is the easiest to sidestep. I do have hard copies of books on shelves all around my living room. If I never have people over to my house, though, who am I showing off for?

Want to Want

By in battling personal entropy, books, bring me the head of nicholas carr

Epicurus thinks that if we’re honest with ourselves, though, it’s more that we want to want greater understanding, freedom from our phones, time to cultivate and maintain close friendships, etc. Or, to be more precise, we wish our desire for these things were more powerful than our desire for less important things. Epicurus might say, “Now, of course you want to walk out the door to enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon with your friends, and it’s in fact quite easy to walk out the door, but people often do not leave because they want to stay alone indoors on their phone more.”

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

Freddie deBoer:

Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

In 2015, when Jurgen Klopp took over as manager of Liverpool FC, one of the major changes he made was to bring along a backroom staff, including a nutritionist and a conditioning coach. Such specialists weren’t entirely unknown in the sport, but, shockingly to me, they weren’t ubiquitous either. Multimillion-dollar athletes at the top level at their profession would still eat the equivalent of fast-food takeout after games, which itself was still an improvement over the not-too-distant past, when players often partied like rock stars. Anyway, Klopp, who had a background in sports science himself, brought a stereotypical German efficiency with him and his staff and set about raising the standards. The club would release promotional videos for the fans, behind-the-scenes stuff, showing the staff at work and having them describe their methods and goals. It was then that I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and sports science. I couldn’t get enough of it. The Lady of the House suggested one day that there was a gym in town where I could indulge my interest, and the rest is history.

A couple years ago, I convinced my stepson to start doing a nutrition program, even if he didn’t want to train yet. He’s lost seventy pounds since then, without doing any exercise at all. It’s not even a diet, per se. You just learn how to combine the optimal amounts of protein, carbs and fat at each meal to achieve whatever your goal is. True, certain foods don’t fit within the meal plan. He hasn’t eaten pizza, ice cream, etc. in two years. But it’s not like you’re forced to eat nothing but salads. I have more possible variety in my own meal plan than I could ever make use of, plus, because I also train, I get a cheat meal once a week. Point is, it doesn’t really take superhuman levels of willpower and self-control. Best of all, it only costs twenty-five dollars per visit. I go in every two weeks to get my body fat and proportions measured. My stepson only has to go about once a month. Twenty-five, maybe fifty dollars a month, to have expert advice on how to structure your diet and adjust it if needed. Trust me, fellows, this is not esoteric knowledge or unattainable luxury.

I’ve often mused out loud that if I ever had the chance to meet anyone from Liverpool FC, I wouldn’t choose any of the players. I’d want to meet Klopp, of course, but also Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist, and Andreas Kornmayer, head of conditioning and fitness. Oh, for a chance to sit and pick their brains! Dreams aside, though, I still often marvel at the fact that here, in a small, unremarkable town in the middle of Virginia, for an insignificant amount of money, I can still get the benefits of a comparable level of expertise. I don’t blame individuals for not realizing how easy and affordable it can actually be to be fit and healthy. I do feel nothing but hatred for people who profit by promoting the fatalistic message that technology, marketing, genetics, whatever, have robbed you of your agency. We’ve always been constrained by “structural” forces, whether man-made or natural, but within those limits, there’s still enough freedom left to use. As Epicurus knew back in antiquity, though, the relevant thing is whether you actually want what you claim to want. Honesty and self-awareness are, as ever, rare commodities. We’d rather lie to ourselves and pay others to lie to us even more. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives.

Left Wing, Right Wing, Broken Wing

By in books, political philosophy, tribalism

Susan Neiman:

Now, the New York Times is neither unique nor particularly leftist, but it does set standards for progressive discourse in more than one country. What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. The Right may be more dangerous, but today’s Left has deprived itself of ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the Right.

This Rightwards lurch is international and organised. The solidarity between them suggests that nationalist beliefs are only marginally based on the idea that Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your tribe, and you need have no deep commitments to anyone else.

Amusingly enough, I just got done reading a short, incisive book about this exact conceit, that your political opinions are the result of mindless tribalism, while mine are the fruits of dispassionate reasoning. As the authors state early on:

As an alternative to this essentialist theory of ideology, we propose the social theory of ideology. While the essentialist theory says that distinct political positions correlate because they are bound by a unifying essence, the social theory says that issues correlate because they are bound by a unifying tribe. According to the essentialist theory, people start with an essential principle, use that principle to think themselves to hundreds of distinct political positions, and then join the tribe that just happens to agree with them on all of those positions. The social theory says this is backward: people first anchor into an ideological tribe (because of family, peers, or a single issue), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then invent a story that ties all of those positions together. Ideologies, in other words, are reverse engineered to fit tribal actions and attachments. They are “post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to.”

Practically speaking, “conservative” and “progressive” don’t mean anything more than “what Republicans and Democrats are currently doing.” Different eras are defined by different core issues around which the parties sort themselves, and like everything else, parties evolve with no regard for consistency. The authors compile numerous amusing examples of radically opposed policies and beliefs being forced to lie down together on the Procrustean beds of “left-wing” or “right-wing.” Neither conservative nor liberal/progressive mean the same thing they meant a century ago, and they surely won’t mean the same thing in another century. The temptation to find abiding essences behind these political labels is like a mechanical rabbit, and without fail, the intellectual greyhounds take off in pursuit of it. Neiman is a philosopher, so naturally she prefers her theories of what the left should be to the reality of what it means today. And speaking of intellectuals:

Self-deception also explains why the educated are more ideological. It’s counterintuitive that more intelligent people would be more likely to accept a simplistic model in politics when they don’t in other realms, but once we realize that intellectuals are more skilled in using “system two” thinking to rationalize “system one” impulses, it makes sense that they would be more likely to construct stories that make their partisanship sound principled. Psychologist Tali Sharot notes that “the greater your cognitive capacity, the greater your ability to rationalize and interpret information at will, and to creatively twist data to fit your opinions.”

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Sensitivity Readers

By in books, fresh hell, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening

Jeff Zymeri:

Children’s horror author R.L. Stine has accused his publisher of editing references to weight, mental health, and ethnicity in over a dozen of his books without his permission.

Certain titles from the Goosebumps anthology, second only to the Harry Potter books in terms of popularity, have been re-released as sanitized e-books by Scholastic, a new report from The Times has revealed. The move comes after huge controversy enveloped the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s books for hundreds of similar changes, leading the publisher to agree to continue printing the original versions alongside the new bowdlerized editions.

On the one hand, it’s no surprise to see the kind of person behind these initiatives. I mean, they can’t all get make-work jobs in academia or human resources departments, and we’ve got a huge surplus of the severely educated with no practical skills, so I suppose this is the best we can do to keep them off the streets. On the other hand, couldn’t they have gone into a more honorable profession, like prostitution or drug-dealing? At least those provide a useful service. What kind of lowlife dreams of growing up to work at Winston Smith’s job?

Do Your Own Bit of Saving

By in books, the geist of the zeit

Sweet baby Buddha, Charles, I’m only a third of the way toward my complete Wodehouse collection! Don’t give them any more ideas! I get that this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum, but irony and satire are feeble weapons against such literal-minded philistines.

I do wonder if this Dahl episode, like the Seuss episode of a couple years ago, represents a new front in the culture wars. Do we have to worry about the estates of unfashionable authors falling into the hands of woke dogmatists who then give their legal blessing for “sensitivity readers” to set about bowdlerizing the original works? Maybe we should start building our samizdat networks now, fellows.

The Real Work of Epicureanism

By in books, philosophy

The real work of Epicureanism, then, is cataloguing, organizing, and minding the store of our desires. Remember that Epicurus doesn’t think happiness results from mere subtraction of corrosive desires. We must keep the store stocked with necessary items, which means devoting the time and energy we once expended in corrosive arenas to cultivating the prudence, habits of mind, knowledge, virtuous dispositions, and close relationships with like-minded people that make tranquility possible for creatures like us.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

I must admit, my ataraxia had been chronically ruffled by my inability to find a pleasurable book about Epicurus to read. I was being deprived of the literary companionship of one of my closest philosophical friends, you might say, and we know how much value Epicurus places on friendship. Thankfully, Austin’s book came along to calm my troubled waters and serve as a corrective to Catherine Wilson’s book of a few years ago. Austin is conversational without oversharing, funny without forcing it, and thankfully, her attempts to make Epicurean perspectives relevant to current issues are only lightly applied, so we are blessedly spared from hearing what “Epicurus” would have thought of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, or Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. This is one of those rare books about philosophy which I eagerly looked forward to picking up again each night.

Mediocre Talents

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

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[Beethoven] quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.”

— Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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Andrew Tate seems to fancy himself as a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, a strong, powerful individual that has risen above society’s norms and become the best version of himself. But besides both men being accused of misogyny, there is nothing else the two share in outlook. Asceticism and a love for eternal, idealised archetypes at the expense of the ever-changing and evolving world of the senses would have left Nietzsche distinctly unimpressed.

— Alexis Papazoglo, “Andrew Tate, Nietzsche and the Matrix“

One Side of a Personality

By in books, foolosophy, literature as moral fiber supplement, moralizing

Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.

— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance, “I get my quotes from movies because I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain.’” As clever as that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.

I would defend the practice of reading simply because it is, so to speak, my home. As Michael Oakeshott put it, “What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” I have always been a reader and always will be, and as such, the aggressively illiterate types that Williams talks about are beneath my contempt — although, I would add, I didn’t need to know that Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sean McElwee hated books to gauge their lack of character; that should have been obvious to anyone beforehand. All that said, though, I have no desire to proselytize on behalf of the “virtue” of concentration and refinement, let alone witness to the heathens. I know many people who will cheerfully inform you that they haven’t read a book since high school, and yet they are still good people in all the ways that matter. Conversely, I would just point to any number of authors and academics as proof that a lifetime’s immersion in literature doesn’t necessarily do anything to develop character or general intelligence. By all means, spend your time reading. Just don’t fall prey to the conceit (that particularly seems to afflict writers for the Atlantic) that you’re “progressing” in any way by doing it.

If You Want to Be Perfect, Then Go and Donate Your Books

By in books

Rhiannon Cosslett:

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a poster that for a while was following me around the internet in advert form, under the misapprehension that because I love cats and read books – and, indeed, have written a book about a cat – it had my taste in interior decor pinned down. The poster shows a cat and bears the slogan: “THAT’S WHAT I DO, I READ BOOKS, I DRINK TEA AND I KNOW THINGS.”

Apologies if you own this poster, but to me it encapsulates everything that is smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership. I don’t mean reading – provided you’re lucky enough to still have a local library, that is a pastime that is accessible to almost everyone. No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one “know things”.

I understand that certain books can feel vital and precious. I grew up in a family where there were a lot of books on the shelves, though we couldn’t always afford new ones. I’ve never forgotten the privilege of that, nor of the position I’m in now, where I am sometimes sent books free of charge. Perhaps that’s why I find the idea of hoarding them rather sad – there’s even a Japanese word, tsundoku, for allowing books to pile up unread. Instead, I choose to donate mine to places where there are people who can most benefit from them, or leave them on the wall outside my house, where they always disappear.

I don’t mean to display my repulsive middle-class roots in front of my betters, but if Mrs. Cosslett spent a little less time humblebragging about how she transcended her privileged past and became a codex Communist, a Bodhisattva of book-donating, a one-woman welfare state for the literary indigent, and a little more time rubbing elbows with us fishwives and costermongers, she might have been aware that the whole “That’s what I do, I [blank] and I know things” meme template comes from Game of Thrones, and is generally used as, you know, a joke. (I even have a sticker on my laptop at work that says, “That’s what I do, I pick things up and put things down, and I know things.” See, it’s funny because I do indeed spend my time at both labor and leisure picking things up and putting them down, whether boxes or barbells, and also because…oh, never mind.) Ah, Guardian, you never disappoint.

I’ve Been Too Long, I’m Glad to Be Back

By in books, so many books, so little time

Ted Gioia:

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

That’s an extraordinary thing to hear from a corporate CEO. Daunt wanted to run a bookstore that was “intellectually satisfying” and “feeds your mind.” The first time I heard an interview with him, I decided I trusted James Daunt. I wanted him to succeed. But the odds seemed stacked against him.

Then it started to happen—book sales at Barnes & Noble began rising again. Sales in 2021 quickly got back to pre-pandemic levels, and then kept growing. Readers regained trust in the company. The workers at the stores were more motivated and started genuinely acting like booksellers.

I recently visited a Barnes & Noble store, for the first time since the pandemic. I saw a lot of interesting books, and bought a couple. I plan to go back again.

I went to Barnes & Noble today, for the first time in about a year. Mainly, I wanted the irreplaceable experience of browsing among physical copies of books again. Library sales mostly went dormant after the pandemic, and by the time they started reappearing, work had changed and there wasn’t much time for traveling to them anymore. But in recent weeks, I’d begun to notice that I simply wasn’t encountering much in the way of interesting reviews online. Weeks and months would pass without me feeling excited to read anything new and different. Frankly, I was starting to feel a little brain-dead. But as I’d hoped, I found my visit to be a real tonic. Within a few minutes, I’d found a new book by my old pal Anthony Kronman that I didn’t even know existed, and I quickly added several others. Like sunlight and fresh air, a fellow needs to regularly browse in a bookstore to feel hale and hearty. I think we’ll even make some time to start traveling to library sales again in the new year. Retail stores are fine, but there’s nothing like the discovery of some old, out-of-print book being sold for one or two dollars to inspire you to take a chance on something different.

(The Lady of the House also got me another batch of Everyman Wodehouse for Christmas.)

Obiter Scripta, no. 125

By in books, obiter scripta

One of the things which make life on this planet more or less agreeable is the speed with which alarums, excursions, excitement, and rows generally, blow over. A nine-days’ wonder has to be a big business to last out its full time nowadays. As a rule the third day sees the end of it, and the public rushes whooping after some other hare that has been started for its benefit.

— P.G. Wodehouse, The Head of Kay’s

One of the smaller pleasures of this time of year is reading the year-end summaries of notable events and thinking, “Oh, yeah, I forgot all about that.” For three days, the fate of the world seemed to hinge on this thing, and now it’s just an afterthought. I admit I take a tiny satisfaction in seeing how many supposedly-momentous happenings passed into obscurity without managing to solicit any comment from me.

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