Paul Vitols's Blog, page 30

monkey read, monkey write

In my last post I talked about my self-designed study program to learn the classical liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and mentioned my work with the text Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett. Now I want to give more of an idea of what that study entails.

Corbett arranges the material in four sections:

Introduction, with a brief description of what classical rhetoric is and some examples of ancient and modern rhetoric
Discovery of Arguments, or how to find what you want to say

Arrangement of Material, or how to organize what you want to say
Style, or how to choose your words

He also has a concluding section called Survey of Rhetoric in which he looks at the development of the art of rhetoric over time. I haven't got that far yet so I can't comment on it. I'm still in the Style section, doing exercises in imitation.

That's right: imitation. In this, you read a piece of good writing and then imitate it, either by trying to mimic the writer's style in the writing of an individual sentence, or by out-and-out copying of one of his paragraphs in longhand. Apart from the early grades in elementary school, I had first come across the pedagogical technique of copying in an art book given to me by my artist brother-in-law Fred Douglas back in 1988. The book was devoted to expanding your drawing technique, and the author advocated that the student simply copy excellent drawings in order to discover the master's way of seeing and rendering. I remember the first one I tried: a Rembrandt self-portrait in black conté crayon. I did a pretty good job, and it was indeed illuminating. The author said that only by copying Rembrandt's own drawing would you learn such things as just how big his nose was, and sure enough, I would never have been so bold as to allocate that much real estate on the paper to the subject's nose!

Fast-forward to 2012: I'm back at it, but this time with prose. For the past 10 or 12 days I've been copying out, longhand, a specimen paragraph or two by exemplary writers. Corbett has arranged the extracts chronologically, starting with two from the Bible (one from Ecclesiastes, one from the Gospel of Luke). Last night I copied a paragraph by William Hazlitt from "On Familiar Style" (1821), in which he criticizes Samuel Johnson's elevated writing style and praises the use of plain English. My favorites so far have been extracts from John Bunyan (1688), John Dryden (1693), and Edward Gibbon (1796), most famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which now occupies two of the 54 volumes of the Britannica Great Books series. To give a sense of these exercises, here is the extract from Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life and Writings:

The renewal, or perhaps the improvement, of my English life was embittered by the alteration of my own feelings. At the age of twenty-one I was, in my proper station of a youth, delivered from the yoke of education, and delighted with the comparative state of liberty and affluence. My filial obedience was natural and easy; and in the gay prospect of futurity, my ambition did not extend beyond the enjoyment of my books, my leisure, and my patrimonial estate, undisturbed by the cares of a family and the duties of a profession. But in the militia I was armed with power; in my travels, I was exempt from control; and as I approached, as I gradually passed, by thirtieth year, I began to feel the desire of being master in my own house. The most gentle authority will sometimes frown without reason, the most cheerful submission will sometimes murmur without cause; and such is the law of our imperfect nature that we must either command or obey; that our personal liberty is supported by the obsequiousness of our own dependents. While so many of my acquaintances were married or in parliament, or advancing with a rapid step in the various roads of honor and fortune, I stood alone, immovable and insignificant; for after the monthly meeting of 1770, I had even withdrawn myself from the militia, by the resignation of an empty and barren commission. My temper is not susceptible of envy, and the view of successful merit has always excited my warmest applause. The miseries of a vacant life were never known to a man whose hours were insufficient for the inexhaustible pleasures of study. But I lamented that at the proper age I had not embraced the lucrative pursuits of the law or of trade, the chances of civil office or India adventure, or even the fat slumbers of the church; and my repentance became more lively as the loss of time was more irretrievable.

Corbett advises the student not to write too quickly, rather to write in a legible hand as though one is going to send the document to someone. My hand is not what could fairly be called legible, but I do take more time with these samples than I do when jotting notes to myself. As for whether it's improving or expanding my own writing style, so far I will have to trust to Corbett's assurance that sustained effort at this will pay dividends.

The second imitation task, that of mimicking individual sentences, is much more challenging. For this is an effort at copying, not someone's actual words, but his writing style as manifested in one sentence. For one thing, it requires an accurate breakdown of the structure of the sentence, which in turn requires grammatical knowledge. As mentioned in my previous post, my knowledge here was lacking, so I got out an old university textbook to refresh my memory or, let's face it, to encode for the first time in some cases, the necessary knowledge of sentence structure.

My first attempt was to analyze this sentence by John Dryden:

No Government has ever been, or ever can be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.

Great sentence, huh? I cannot falsify his statement from my own observations of contemporary politics. But that by the way. I attempted a grammatical breakdown of the sentence, and then struggled to come up with an imitation of my own. But I found myself unable, and in the end I put it down to a lack of certainty about my parsing of the sentence. Solution: try an easier sentence.

I picked another one from the same Dryden extract:

Blood and money will be lavished in all ages, only for the preferment of new faces, with old consciences.

Using my newly refurbished grammatical nous, I parsed the sentence: a compound subject, intransitive verb phrase, prepositional adverb phrase modifying the verb lavished, and so on. It took me a while, with quite a bit of rechecking. But when I was done I felt confident that I had parsed it accurately, and so could essay my own effort.

I jumped in and just let some image come to mind, some experience. I didn't want to think about it too much, or I would be paralyzed. Here's what I came up with:

Camels and horses rested among the rubble, hard by the blocks of the pyramid, under ageless skies.

Not bad. As I worked on this and a couple of other efforts at imitation of the same sentence, I came to recognize what, for me, made it stylistically significant; what made it something out of the routine or anyway unfamiliar to my own style. The biggest single element was Dryden's use and placement of the adverb only. As far as I can tell, it modifies the following prepositional phrase for the preferment, and to me its placement here is unusual. In my imitation I came up with the adverbial use of hard before the prepositional phrase by the blocks—a use that I think is quite clever and fitting.

Imitation at the sentence level is demanding work. I've only drafted a few sentences, so I can't speak of progress in enriching my own style. But I am learning a lot about grammar, and since that is another of the arts of the trivium, I'm well pleased.

learning rhetoric the old-fashioned way

My daily reading period starts at about 4 p.m. and runs to dinnertime at 7 p.m. (gosh, I just checked the spelling of dinnertime as a closed-up word and found that it dates back to the 14th century), with a break of about 45 minutes halfway through. Each day I start with fiction or "imaginative" writing, and right now I'm most of the way through the Britannica Great Books translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Next I read 4 or 5 pages of the Great Books edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Then I take a break to come down to my office and check e-mail and such. Then it's back upstairs for a glass of wine and the remainder of my reading.

For the past weeks this has been taken up mainly with Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett. My old gray hardcover from the Oxford University Press is the original 1965 edition (first owned by a certain John Malcolm, who inscribed his name in blue ink on the flyleaf), a rugged, well-made textbook in great shape. I got the book in September 2009 and have been working through it, off and on, ever since.

My aim is to advance my knowledge of rhetoric, the third of the three liberal arts that made up the so-called trivium or higher triad within the full set of seven liberal arts, the first two of which are logic and grammar. When I was growing up I had only ever heard the word rhetoric used in a pejorative sense, meaning, roughly, "an argument made up of emotional, specious, and misleading statements in order to persuade a credulous audience". The first time I encountered the word used in a different sense was in (I think) 1978, when I read Robert Pirsig's bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he, as the narrator, describes himself as a teacher of rhetoric. It seemed to be the term he used to name the subject I knew as English composition.

I became aware that the word has more than one meaning. Since I have started to pursue my own liberal education, I have come to appreciate the original idea of rhetoric as the art of persuasion. With the growing size and success of the advertising industry after World War&nbs;II, I think persuasion came to mean, for many, inducing people to buy consumer products they didn't really need or want and to vote for politicians who didn't really deserve to be elected. Rhetoric was a way of getting people who are dumber and more naive than you to do what you want.

Sister Miriam Joseph, author of The Trivium, gives an excellent overview of what the three arts of actually are: Logic is the art of thinking accurately about reality; grammar is the art of expressing one's thoughts accurately in symbolic form, such as in writing; and rhetoric is the art of persuading others of the validity of one's thoughts. To me these are in no way "ancient" or outmoded arts; they are the vital skills of any citizen who wants to be a full, equal, functioning member of his society. They are called liberal arts, I believe, not only because they were once the sole concern of free, that is enfranchised and fully participating citizens, but because they are the skills most essential to freedom. They are themselves how to be politically free.

So I've been studying all three. I've studied logic by reading the Organon of Aristotle—his six books on the art of reasoning and deduction, and I'm studying rhetoric with Corbett's book. I thought that my lifelong pursuit of writing and reading had probably given me an adequate background in "grammar," but now I'm finding, to my embarrassment, that that is not so. I've run into an exercise in the text that requires one to analyze sentences into their component parts, and I've discovered that I'm not really able to do this. Writer or no writer, when the rubber hits the road I struggle to distinguish a prepositional adverb phrase from a participial adjective phrase and an adverb clause from a noun clause.

So I whipped out my copy of the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers, 7th edition, which I got in September 1979 as a textbook for English at UBC and started studying up. It's all there in compact form in the very first section, "Sentence Sense". There are exercises there, too, and I've struggled through those.

All in all, its been a chastening experience, but, I have no doubt, a valuable one. I was going to talk about what my current rhetorical exercises are, but that will have to wait.

sketchbook: Saturday 24 March 2012

Sat 24 Mar 2012 ca. 12:45 pm Lonsdale & Esplanade

An urgent thrum of traffic barreling along Esplanade in front of me. But now, with a green light for Lonsdale, there is the electronic cuckoo of the pedestrian signal. And before I could finish that sentence, the light has changed again and the determined roar of hurrying vehicles streams through the intersection. A busy thoroughfare, stressful to be near.

The sky is clear but for a few smudgy wisps of cloud hanging over Vancouver. The sun is bright and a cool fresh breeze whips past, gusting up and down. I'm on a bench of steel coated with black plastic. The sidewalk here is a wide generous curve offering plenty of space between the curb and the recessed doorway of Tradwinds Real Estate, current occupants of the maybe 110-year-old 2-story building, now set with large shop-windows in its pale-green walls.

Pedestrians move in small knots, mainly downhill across Esplanade, as though en route to Lonsdale Quay or the SeaBus. Now Asian girls are crossing to the cuckoo sound. A few cars shoot across the level intersection to the final short block of Lonsdale down to the waterfront. The cuckoo is brief: Esplanade is the artery here. But now it beeps again, sending 6 more people across, while 3 more, again Asian, all in black jackets and blue jeans, await the next crossing.

The sun glares above the new Pinnacle Hotel diagonally opposite me, the glass-paneled 12-story building casting a shadow over 2/3 of the intersection. A skateboarder rolls swiftly past; a woman pushing a stroller follows slowly. A #239 Park Royal bus lumbers by on my left, growling a puff of diesel into the air.

Cuckoo, cuckoo . . .

It’s a Wonderful Life—what it means

Remember Christmas? As part of our Christmas viewing Kimmie and I watched the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and in a first post and a second post I offered up my earlier search for the controlling idea or theme of the story. To tie up that loose end, I’ll finish the train of thought and reveal my final version of the controlling idea.

I’ll continue by inserting edited extracts of my document from 2010.

TUE 23 MARCH 2010

He wants to see the world—he wants adventure, not to be stuck in Bedford Falls, even with a girl who loves him.

George learns that love and helping are a two-way street. He’s not just a martyr to responsibility. He is also a recipient of love and kindness. In becoming this, he gains perfect emotional fulfillment—more than any he could have hoped for in adventuring alone. (For it was alone that he was to go adventuring—key point.)

He thought the world and its marvels would provide the thrills of his life, but it is not exotic marvels that will do this—it is local people. The humdrum neighbors he takes for granted and who are such a burden to him.

Clarence shows George that, far from being worth more dead than alive, as Mr. Potter put it, he has been indispensable to everyone around him all his life. All their enjoyments and achievements have been due to him. He has been a happiness-creator. This is fulfilling enough on its own, but the kicker is that when he returns he discovers it’s a two-way street. All those people—every one of them—help him too in his turn, completing the circuit. This is what turns it into an ecstatic moment for George—of total realization, total fulfillment. He has been a linchpin of everyone else’s success and happiness—but they are linchpins of his happiness too, when the time comes.

It’s a paradox: by becoming nonspecial, a member of the group who needs help in his turn, George discovers the intensity of being truly, totally, cosmically special. It’s as though as part of the community, you lie low and do your bit for others, then, when your turn comes, you enjoy the sum of everyone’s specialness and fulfillment—more than any individual could accrue on his own. And knowing that you’re providing this experience for others is a joy to sustain you in the meantime, when you’re not receiving the bounty personally.

For George, only his moment of crisis, of weakness, of failure, was the opportunity for his friends to show him how much he meant to them. Before that he had been the strong one—the responsible one, there to help others get what they wanted in life. In this way his crisis and catastrophe are the best things that ever happen to him. He has love, friends, and a good life, but he doesn’t appreciate them. He never got to do what he wanted. Instead, he got something vastly better than what he wanted.

He hankered after excitement, exoticism, adventure. His belief was that these things could be found only in unfamiliar places. He wanted novelty. It’s the old Zen story: he’s searching for the lost cow—by riding on it.

Bedford Falls provides him with plenty of excitement and adventure: love, sex, death, enmity, heroics, sacrifice, temptation, fury. George’s mettle is tested plenty—probably more than by any adventure in the wide world. But he doesn’t see it as exotic, and so he doesn’t value it. He feels cheated.

WED 24 MARCH 2010

George’s situation has roots: he has history with these people, and this history is what gives their relationships depth. The wanderer lacks such history, and will move on from one fleeting relationship to another in his quest for novelty. The Eiffel Tower and Samarkand might be exciting, but experienced alone, these things will pall. It’s sharing that gives experience its preciousness.

This is a story about sharing. Potter does not share. (A potter’s field is a burial place for unknown and indigent people.)

Final draft controlling idea of It’s a Wonderful Life:

True fulfillment is born when you give up the search for your own private joy and recognize that the greatest joy lies in sharing life with the people around you.

So there it is. That, in one sentence, is what I believe this excellent story is saying.

It's a Wonderful Life—what it means

Remember Christmas? As part of our Christmas viewing Kimmie and I watched the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life, and in a first post and a second post I offered up my earlier search for the controlling idea or theme of the story. To tie up that loose end, I'll finish the train of thought and reveal my final version of the controlling idea.

I'll continue by inserting edited extracts of my document from 2010.

TUE 23 MARCH 2010

He wants to see the world—he wants adventure, not to be stuck in Bedford Falls, even with a girl who loves him.

George learns that love and helping are a two-way street. He's not just a martyr to responsibility. He is also a recipient of love and kindness. In becoming this, he gains perfect emotional fulfillment—more than any he could have hoped for in adventuring alone. (For it was alone that he was to go adventuring—key point.)

He thought the world and its marvels would provide the thrills of his life, but it is not exotic marvels that will do this—it is local people. The humdrum neighbors he takes for granted and who are such a burden to him.

Clarence shows George that, far from being worth more dead than alive, as Mr. Potter put it, he has been indispensable to everyone around him all his life. All their enjoyments and achievements have been due to him. He has been a happiness-creator. This is fulfilling enough on its own, but the kicker is that when he returns he discovers it's a two-way street. All those people—every one of them—help him too in his turn, completing the circuit. This is what turns it into an ecstatic moment for George—of total realization, total fulfillment. He has been a linchpin of everyone else's success and happiness—but they are linchpins of his happiness too, when the time comes.

It's a paradox: by becoming nonspecial, a member of the group who needs help in his turn, George discovers the intensity of being truly, totally, cosmically special. It's as though as part of the community, you lie low and do your bit for others, then, when your turn comes, you enjoy the sum of everyone's specialness and fulfillment—more than any individual could accrue on his own. And knowing that you're providing this experience for others is a joy to sustain you in the meantime, when you're not receiving the bounty personally.

For George, only his moment of crisis, of weakness, of failure, was the opportunity for his friends to show him how much he meant to them. Before that he had been the strong one—the responsible one, there to help others get what they wanted in life. In this way his crisis and catastrophe are the best things that ever happen to him. He has love, friends, and a good life, but he doesn't appreciate them. He never got to do what he wanted. Instead, he got something vastly better than what he wanted.

He hankered after excitement, exoticism, adventure. His belief was that these things could be found only in unfamiliar places. He wanted novelty. It's the old Zen story: he's searching for the lost cow—by riding on it.

Bedford Falls provides him with plenty of excitement and adventure: love, sex, death, enmity, heroics, sacrifice, temptation, fury. George's mettle is tested plenty—probably more than by any adventure in the wide world. But he doesn't see it as exotic, and so he doesn't value it. He feels cheated.

WED 24 MARCH 2010

George's situation has roots: he has history with these people, and this history is what gives their relationships depth. The wanderer lacks such history, and will move on from one fleeting relationship to another in his quest for novelty. The Eiffel Tower and Samarkand might be exciting, but experienced alone, these things will pall. It's sharing that gives experience its preciousness.

This is a story about sharing. Potter does not share. (A potter's field is a burial place for unknown and indigent people.)

Final draft controlling idea of It's a Wonderful Life:

True fulfillment is born when you give up the search for your own private joy and recognize that the greatest joy lies in sharing life with the people around you.

So there it is. That, in one sentence, is what I believe this excellent story is saying.

sketchbook: Thursday 1 March 2012

THU 1 MAR 2012 1:00 pm ETERNAL SALON

Not a busy place. Japanese being spoken by the bearded young guy at the reception desk. The woman customer is gone, and now he clinks pens in a glass jar, seeking the right one to write with.

Some hip-hop number throbs tinnily and faintly on the sound system: robotic synthesized vocals. Outside on 3rd St. are gruff traffic noises. A car door slams.

Now the Japanese guy sweeps the floor with a push-broom, picking up the hair with a long-handled dustpan so he does not need to stoop.

I hear the soft cheerful voice of Kathy, my hair cutter, breathily greeting the other people as she comes in. Time to get cut.

sketchbook: Sunday 26 February 2012

SUN 26 FEB 2012 ca. 2:00 pm SEAWALL FALSE CREEK

The cold rolled steel of the bench on my backside. Wan sun falls on the brick pavers set in a herringbone pattern; shadows are long; the bricks are outlined trimly in moss. Behind us: Yaletown: where eagles float over high-rises. Before us: a marina, where white-hulled launches ride at their concrete floats.

"There's a seal!" says Kimmie, sitting beside me.

People troop by, walking tiny dogs and absorbedly fiddling one-handed with mobile phones. A young guy runs past, panting so hard that he vocalizes, uttering cries of exertion, his long hair flying behind him.

An old man goes the other way, blowing his nose wetly into a handkerchief.

Off to our left: residential high-rises, snap-together grids of greenish windows. And beyond the boats: the long low concrete arc of the Cambie Bridge. And above all: great amorphous masses of cloud, shaded like gulls' plumage.

Kimmie is chuckling at the dogs going by: they are all dressed in fitted sweaters of different colors and styles, and the dogs are all of expensive breeds. This is Yaletown.

Off to our right the cloud is darker and hangs like smoke over the stepped low-rises on the south shore. The water between is green, and rippled like old-style frosted glass.

Guitar Fretboard Workbook by Barrett Tagliarino

Guitar Fretboard Workbook: A Complete System for Understanding the Fretboard for Acoustic or Electric Guitar by Barrett Tagliarino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally, after plugging away for 18 months on Barrett Tagliarino's Guitar Fretboard Workbook, I've completed exercise #59, the last in the book (except for a "final project" he leaves you with at the end), I can report on my experience with it. I would say that thanks to this book, my guitar-playing has improved more in the last 18 months than it has in any comparable period since I bought my Sigma acoustic guitar in 1977. Speaking for myself, Mr. Tagliarino's objective in writing this workbook—helping me gain much greater understanding and mastery of the guitar fretboard—has been achieved.

I'm a hobby guitarist who belongs in that vast category usually termed "intermediate". My training on the guitar consists of periods of instruction with four different private teachers for periods of between a month and a year each, and whatever I was able to pick up from those few people I've played music with over the years. In this I'm probably like the great majority of guitarists, and my knowledge of the instrument is accordingly patchy. Indeed, my knowledge of music theory is probably better than most guitarists at my level of ability due to the fact that I had a friend who shared a lot of what he was learning when studying composition, plus I just like theory of any kind and seek it out.

Still, did I know exactly what an F-sharp minor 11th chord was, and could I construct it from scratch? Did I know exactly how to use the terms "major", "minor", "augmented", and "diminished" in their various contexts? If I knew where the root note was on a string, could I quickly locate, say, the 6th for that scale? I can do those things now, and much else besides.

Of course, over the years I had learned to play many things up the neck of the guitar, and had learned many chords and some scales. But what this workbook does is to complete that knowledge gained piecemeal, render it systematic, and synthesize it into a unity.

As with any workbook, what you get out of it depends on what you're willing to put into it. The author makes use of a teaching technique that he has developed over years of personal instruction. It involves reading, writing, speaking, and playing. You not only do written exercises, but you speak out loud what you're learning, and you say it while you're playing it as well. This multi-channeled learning approach causes you to advance faster.

I took my time, and would recommend that you do the same. When I found the content of a chapter to be new or overwhelming, I would stay with it and keep playing the exercises. It's not about getting through the book, it's about mastering the material; so be willing to paddle slowly.

I suppose my dominant impression of this book is that it filled in gaps in my knowledge. I knew quite a few of the things the author was teaching, so I was able to move through those more quickly. But even within those things I thought I knew there were gaps. I feel I have a much more seamless, complete knowledge of the instrument.

Does that mean I play like Mark Knopfler now? No. But I have a greater calm and confidence in what I'm doing. And I'm able to do things like notice, in another guitar songbook, that a chord marked as diminished is actually a diminished 7th. Holy crumbs—I'm becoming a musician!

Dollar for dollar, this is the best money I've ever spent on guitar instruction.

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The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finally, after 30 years, I've closed the gap and completed the task that Thomas Mann, in his afterword to the novel, suggests for his readers: to read The Magic Mountain not once but twice.

My first reading of it was in the spring and summer of 1982, when I was 23. It was not the first of his works that I had read, for I had already made my way through his short stories, including "Death in Venice", and before any of those, his late novel Doctor Faustus, which I read first because it happened to be on the bookshelf at home. Even so, it was not our book, for it was on loan from my mother's friend Dorothy Burt, an avid reader, a close friend of Malcolm Lowry, and a passionate fan of Thomas Mann. It was Dorothy who first made me want to read Thomas Mann, and Dorothy, wherever you are: thank you.

I enjoyed The Magic Mountain very much the first time through, although I was not in a position to get a great deal out of it except the pleasure of sojourning at length in that world of his creation, populated with so many striking and memorable characters. Although I was a writer myself, even a serious one, I did not have the experience or the literary education to appreciate it for its deeper qualities, beyond the realization that these deeper qualities were there to be plumbed by the knowledgeable.

By 1982 I had already read Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology, but I don't recall applying any of Campbell's thoughts on that first reading of The Magic Mountain. However, the next time I read Creative Mythology, I paid much more attention to his discussion of The Magic Mountain and his comparison of it with James Joyce's Ulysses. Campbell regarded them as the two greatest novels of the 20th century, and held them up as examples and products of the unfolding and altogether unprecedented mythology of the modern West: a mythology created not by prophets, priests, or shamans, but by "adequate" individuals—people with the courage and integrity to be their own unique selves. The conveyor of this new "creative" mythology is the artist who is true to his own conscience and his own experience of value, and Campbell regarded Joyce and Mann as the preeminent voices of this new mythology in the literary field.

So The Magic Mountain, set in the years before World War I, is the story of a 22-year-old German, Hans Castorp, who travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joaquim, a young soldier who is taking the rest cure to rid himself of infection before embarking on his military career. Castorp, for his part, is merely taking a quick break before he himself embarks on his own chosen career in nautical engineering. He plans to stay for three weeks.

He stays longer. Much longer. For the bacillus is discovered in his own lungs, and the medical director, Hofrat Behrens, advises him that he too will need to clear his infection before returning to the "flatlands." So young Castorp settles in to life among the international clientele of the Berghof.

It is a strange life of indolence and routine, in a setting of sumptuous luxury and scenic splendor. Ordinary concepts of time vanish, and before long one forgets about the world below and one's interests in it, and becomes a feverish, sometimes moribund, patient with little on one's mind but passing amusements, gossip, and flirtations.

At least, that describes the typical sanatorium patient; everyone is different. One important friendship for Castorp up here is with the down-at-heel Italian pedagogue Ludovico Settembrini, who views the Berghof and its denizens with an ironic and mocking eye. Another important relationship is with the patient Clavdia Chauchat, an attractive and mysterious creature from the wastes of central Russia.

The story is subtle, meandering, and takes its time (my disintegrating pocketbook edition—the same yellow one I read in 1982—runs to 727 pages). If you're in a rush, this book is not for you. But then, the whole idea of being in a rush is what those at the Berghof would call a "flatland" preoccupation. It arises from a vulgar, bourgeois, and thoughtless attitude toward the great mystery of time. For Hans Castorp, in stepping off the little train in the alpine village, enters what we would now call a time warp, and he soon discovers that he hasn't the least idea of what time is or how it works. What exactly is it? Indeed, at one point in the book the narrator confides that he is telling a "time-romance".

That is all I will say about the story itself. Mann is a master artist and he has woven his literary tapestry with great care. I see that it is described as a "novel of ideas", and I suppose it is; but then I regard every novel as a novel of ideas. Yes, characters talk about ideas, and there is a lot of abstract talk in the book; maybe too much. But that is the milieu here; it is the time and place. The world has not yet slid off the cliff into the conflagration of world war. Ideas are part, but only a part, of Castorp's journey. Without knowing it, he is on an inward quest of self-discovery, and the the seeming outward events mirror back to him the transformations happening within his own soul, as within the chrysalis of the butterfly.

Is The Magic Mountain the greatest novel of the 20th century? That's a matter of opinion. In mine, it's certainly one of them. After this my second reading, I intend to reflect on the book and its meaning over the coming days and weeks, and I fully expect it to repay that reflection. I thought that I couldn't truly enjoy fiction-reading anymore, but The Magic Mountain has reminded me that I can.

Thank you, Dorothy Burt.

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The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In summer 2011, having become convinced that the machinations of what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" represents one of the most serious threats to peace and freedom everywhere, I set about trying to find a book on it. Nothing really seemed to deal with that subject directly, although there were books on particular weapons, wars, and companies. Then I found The Shadow World by Andrew Feinstein: it looked like a close fit. As for being up to date, it was not even yet published; I had to preorder it.

So I did. The book duly arrived in November, and I started reading it in December. One thing that impressed me off the bat was an endorsement on the back cover by Desmond Tutu. "How did he get that?" I wondered. Because I removed the dust jacket without reading the flap blurb, I had to wait until about 100 pages into the book to learn that Mr. Feinstein had been a member of the African National Congress and a Member of Parliament for South Africa. In that capacity he had had occasion to investigate improprieties in arms deals there, and became something of an expert on the topic, as well as a passionate critic of the arms trade generally.

Over the following 10 years or so Mr. Feinstein, with the help of a research team, dug into the arms business from multiple angles: its history, its leading suppliers, its personalities, specific arms deals large and small, government involvement, notable attempted prosecutions; and some of its key outputs: body counts, forced migrations, perpetual political instability, and widespread impoverishment.

Aristophanes satirized how the sword- and shield-makers of ancient Athens were militant and pro-war; and that phenomenon has not changed in any way except scale. The makers of weapons are now some of the world's biggest corporations, like Lockheed Martin and BAE, and they want and need to sell their products. The best time to do this is when weapons are being consumed in armed conflict. And some of their key salespeople are their own governments.

It's very hard to find anything good to say about the industry—and I shrink from using the word industry because to me this suggests some kind of legitimate competitive business that produces things for which there is a real public demand. But Mr. Feinstein shows how this is very far from being the case here. The industry as a whole is deeply corrupt, root and branch. Large weapons makers spend years bribing whole parliaments into buying their systems, one representative at a time. Senior ministers and heads of state are often on the payroll. For a multi-billion-dollar weapons deal to a developing country like Saudi Arabia, 30% of the total will be bribes. Maybe more. Most of these activities are, to be sure, illegal. But weapons makers operate under the special protection of their governments, and even in those rare cases when prosecutions are undertaken by zealous bureaucrats, they are generally scotched by the governing executive.

In the United States, the weapons capital of the universe, the military-industrial complex has expanded into what is known as the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC): an intricate, self-lubricating clockwork of congressional pork, "campaign contributions", cost-plus noncompetitive contracts, and revolving-door career-switches between the Pentagon, the White House, and military contractors. The dollar figures involved are stupendous. It is a juggernaut.

The very complexity of this shadow world and its many effects make it difficult to organize an account of it, and in reading I felt a little bit as though I was being shown many sides of this business, but without a single overarching point being developed, other than, "this is bad." I also felt I was at times being patronized by the author by his reliance on value-charged modifiers. Flipping the book open at random, on page 194 I see that in an account about payoffs to a Tanzanian government minister, the author says, "Displaying remarkable insensitivity, Chenge referred to the money in his account [$1.2 million] as 'pocket change'." This reader did not need his attention drawn to the minister's "insensitivity."

Another example from page 105: "None of the parties to the IBC agreement knew how to organize money transfers in a way that would obscure the origins of their ill-gotten gains." Here again, the term ill-gotten felt like an effort to make sure I understood that what these guys were doing was wrong. There are many more examples throughout the book.

However, these reservations aside, I feel that this book is a great service to humanity, and we owe the author a great debt. There is a wealth of carefully documented evidence here of how the arms industry works at all levels and in almost all places. The ills that result are very many and very large. Mr. Feinstein's passion and disgust are amply justified. We should bear in mind that when we hear people justifying these activities and these transactions, those doing the justifying are mostly receiving large—often extremely large—cash payments from those very transactions.

Think about it.

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