Paul Vitols's Blog, page 37

sketchbook: Wednesday 3 August 2011

WED. 3 AUG 2011 10:30 a.m. THE KITCHEN

touch: Cool pressure of the tabletop on my bare left forearm; slightly damp, puffy texture of the page beneath my right hand as I write: sketchbook swollen with entries. Light pressure of the circular arc of the table's edge on my diaphragm. My weight on the kitchen chair, feet lying inert in my slippers.

taste: Faint residual thickness of the blueberry-blackberry cocktail I drank a few minutes ago.

smell: A neutral, barely perceptible quality of indoor air, paper, cotton of my T-shirt.

sound: Continuous breathy hum of the refrigerator. The rumbling growl of accelerating cars, a vibration of bass in the sound. Faster swish of a car already at speed, zooming by outside. Single short creaks from the pine wood of my Ikea chair as I shift. The rub of my hand as it moves in little jerks on the page, the pen squiggling jerkily as well.

sight: The yellow-tan hues of the aged pine of the table, smudgy dark knots scattered on it like negative images of galaxies. The cream page below me, my arm wrapped along its top to steady the notebook. Papers dispersed to the perimeter of the table: a little square slip with grocery ingredients in pink ink; a double set of brochures from the passport office; a yellow carbon copy of a work order from the company that checks our fire-safety equipment; a letter from our insurance broker; a payment receipt from my chiropractor; 2 sections of The North Shore News. There's a heavy clay fruitbowl of olive-green with 2 clay birds perched on its rim looking in. Inside it: a red apple and a Ziploc bag containing about 10 winegums. A stein of water, my eyeglasses, the rumpled plastic bag in which I keep the sketchbook; 3 more chairs around the table; the mauve wall.

use your words

Right now one of the leading stories in the news is about the impasse over raising the "ceiling" of the American federal debt. It's turned into a game of political chicken, with the deadline now only four days away, at least notionally. Here in Vancouver, some expatriate Americans have been glued to their TV sets, following the vicissitudes of the story.

For what it's worth, my own view is that the issue is somewhat of a phony one, in the sense that the United States has already been "defaulting" on its public debt for some time now, in the form of creating enormous quantities of new dollars (under the euphemism "quantitative easing") and paying creditors with those. Paying your debts with money that is worth 20% less than the money you borrowed is no different from paying back your debts at only 80 cents on the dollar, but it's slow and stealthy rather than abrupt and obvious, and that makes it easier to do.

The point I wanted to address though is about the quality of debate on the issue. I haven't paid much attention to it, but last night on the (Canadian) news a commentator was being interviewed, and when asked about what the cause of the impasse was, he said that the "blame" lay clearly with right-wing Republicans in the House. And there it is, I thought: the "discussion" of the issue really doesn't go beyond finger-pointing and blame.

I recall reading a talk given by the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler about the theory of evolution on the 1950s TV series he hosted on the Great Ideas. Even at that time the question of Darwinism vs. the Bible was a contentious topic in the United States. But I was struck by one of Adler's opening remarks, to the effect that, before entering into the debate, we each need to ask ourselves, and answer honestly, this question: Do I have an open mind on this topic? For if our minds are not open, discussion is pointless. Our voices then are used only to shout at our opponents.

But why should your mind be open if you know you're right? Your mind used to be open, then you found out what the truth is, and now it's closed—but in a good way. Your opponents just haven't caught up with you yet; they haven't seen the light. Right?

Of course, with any contentious issue you have two sides that are both "right", and frustrated and angry with each other for not acknowledging what is obviously true. Increasingly the only arguments used are ad hominem attacks: the other guys are self-interested, that's why they obstinately cling to an obviously false position.

If you think about it, there are only two ways to resolve differences of opinion: by agreement, or by violence. In the ideal case, all participants in a discussion are calm, open-minded, and reasonable, and they find consensus by engaging in rational discourse. For issues on which they cannot find consensus or agreement, they have recourse to a rational, rules-based decision-making system, such as voting. Every step you take away from the ideal case—from calmness to emotionalism, from open-mindedness to self-righteousness, from reasonableness to dogmatism—leads you closer to violence. And while violence might at least feel decisive, it isn't, for the strong today are the weak tomorrow, and those beaten by force are not convinced; they'll be back.

But where do calmness, open-mindedness, and reasonableness come from? Are they simply traits that some people are born with? Is it merely a matter of luck whether they'll be found in any given group?

No. These qualities are fostered by a proper, that is by a liberal, education. They are fostered by sustained training in the three liberal arts of logic (how to think), grammar (how to speak and write), and rhetoric (how to argue). They are fostered above all by familiarization with the Great Ideas, which are all, every one of them, unresolved after thousands of years of debate. The liberally educated mind is one that realizes that certainty is elusive, and confined only to relatively trivial topics. The big topics, the big questions, have no certain answer, and honest people of good will can and do and always will disagree on them. But if those people are liberally educated, they will discuss them calmly, reasonably, and maybe even with a sense of humor.

Our society is moving not closer to this ideal, but farther away. That means, inevitably, we are heading for an era of increasing violence. Can it be turned around? Of course! It just takes enough of us wanting to—and knowing how. I for one am working on it, from my own little corner.

why do we do it?

According to the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, there are two reasons to read a book:

amusement
learning

According to the economist Ludwig von Mises, there are two kinds of writer:

creative artists
businessmen

Are these dichotomies telling me anything?

For one thing, all my trolling through online stores, forums, and Twitter tells me that the great majority of writers, in the e-book world at least, are businessmen trying to sell amusement. This is not to say that there is no creativity involved, or no learning. On the contrary, even the most "commercial" story requires creativity to produce, and, according to Aristotle, what makes any created work enjoyable—"amusing", in Adler's sense—is precisely that we learn from it. Even by seeing something familiar in a new way, with different eyes, we learn, and in so doing experience aesthetic pleasure.

So it seems to come down to a question of motivation. If all writing is both creative and instructive in some way, then the above dichotomies must point inward: why are we reading? why are we writing?

One of my favorite passages from von Mises' Human Action is the following:

A painter is a businessman if he is intent upon making paintings which could be sold at the highest price. A painter who does not compromise with the taste of the buying public and, disdaining all unpleasant consequences, lets himself be guided solely by his own ideals is an artist, a creative genius.

The businessman is driven by the profit motive; the artist is driven by his ideals. Even Van Gogh sold a picture or two in his lifetime (or did he?), but he was no businessman.

On the reader's side, I find the question a little more difficult. I believe that all (self-chosen) reading should be done for pleasure, which presumably means amusement. Or does it? Is pleasure to be found only in what is easy, familiar, and effortless? Or can one choose to read (or do) something that is demanding and a bit beyond one's comfort zone, and find pleasure in doing so? Speaking for myself, this latter is definitely the case.

And here's an observation from Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye:

There is no reason why a great poet should be a wise and good man, or even a tolerable human being, but there is every reason why his reader should be improved in his humanity as a result of reading him.

"Improved in his humanity." This is starting to sound like the motivation of the "type 2″ reader—the reader who reads to learn.

I've had the pleasure of reaching a large audience in my day. My TV series The Odyssey has been seen by millions of people all over the world. And even though it has not brought me much money by TV standards, I would have to call it a commercial success. Even then, though, my motivation was not primarily commercial. I see my career as being a long training in how to purge commercial considerations from my motivation in writing, and that training remains a work in progress.

It also means I feel relatively detached from the community of writers. I wish all my colleagues well, but I will continue to go my own way.

what am I reading? glad you asked

Ever since the age of about 18, I've never read just one book at a time. At first I probably added a nonfiction book to the novel I always had on the go, and then I started adding more—and more—nonfiction books (I never liked reading more than one novel at a time), until by the time I was 21, and had moved in with two friends, my cohabitors felt driven to try to legislate how high a "stack" I could be allowed to maintain on our coffee table.

But my reading stack survived, and lives on to this day, having also escaped a few, not very serious or sustained, attacks by my wife Kimmie (who now pays it not the slightest attention, and even offers me moral support when I express concern about its size). Where did this stack come from? Why does it exist?

I think there are three reasons: 1) a slow reading speed, 2) a wide array of interests, and 3) a relatively short attention span.

When I say "short attention span", I mean both a short period of attentiveness to a single topic at any one time, which means that I can read from a single book for only about 45 minutes, tops, and often for 30 minutes or less; and, over a longer period of days or weeks, a shifting of interest between topics, which makes me want to delve into a new book before I've finished others already on the go. I always think I'll get back to those unfinished books presently, so I leave them in the stack, bookmarks in place, and there they sit for weeks or months, migrating to the bottom of the stack until I finally decide to reduce its height and reshelve those unfinished books.

Usually I read from four different books each day. My book-reading period is from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., punctuated with a couple of breaks, so I generally read for two hours or a bit more. I always start with fiction, attacking that when I'm at my freshest. Right now in the "fiction" slot I'm actually reading the plays of Sophocles as I work my way through volume 5 of The Great Books of the Western World. (The rest of this volume contains the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes. I've already made it through Aeschylus.) Because these are works of poetry and of drama, I read them aloud. I've overcome most of my initial shyness and am starting to put more oomph into my performance.

Just now I'm making an exception to my fiction rule, because Kimmie has asked me to read a book aloud to her. Her pick: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. This started out as a weekend, after-breakfast activity, and now we're working it in to her post-work routine, so it's become part of my reading period. So I'm having a chance to hone my narrating performance there too. (Kimmie claims that she can understand a book much better if I read it to her than if she reads it herself.) Also, reading it aloud is letting me realize just how good a book it is—even better than I remembered.

If I use my reading period from last night as my example, next up is a new paperback reprint of Caravan Cities by Mikhail Rostovtzeff, a book about the desert caravan trade in the ancient Near East, the English version of which was originally published in 1932. This is research reading for my work in progress, The Mission. I'm really enjoying it, because it throws an unusual light on the history of that time: the light of commerce and international trade, which is not usually prominent in most histories of that time.

Finally last night, in slot 4 of my reading period, I pushed on with Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History 2: The Geneses of Civilizations (Part Two), the second of the 10-volume series, published between the early 1930s and, I think, about 1950. I already read, a couple of years ago, the two-volume condensed version of the whole series prepared by D. C. Somervell in consultation with Toynbee, and decided that this work deserves to be read in full. So I'm picking up the Oxford University Press paperback edition piecemeal online. I was lucky to find four volumes of it for sale by a Dutch bookseller, so I got all four of those (volumes 1, 2, 5, and 6). Recently I bought volume 3 online, a library copy, and am awaiting its arrival. (Can I boil down Toynbee's thesis to one line? Let's try: "The true and proper object of study for the historian is not the nation, but an entity called the "civilization", which is a society that becomes developed enough to evolve and leave records of its existence, and if one scrutinizes the 32 civilizations that have been known to exist, one finds that they undergo a characteristic series of developments that amounts to a life cycle.")

The Toynbee reading is also, strictly speaking, part of my research for The Mission, although it is also I think important reading for one's general knowledge and even one's liberal education.

Ah yes: liberal education, a topic I will revert to time and again. For the past year or so I have reserved one of my reading slots for my, what shall I call it, I want to say my "formal" liberal education, even though it is not that—at least not in an institutional sense. It is formal in the sense of being deliberate and planned, and my plan is to start by giving myself a grounding in the so-called trivium or upper 3 of the 7 "liberal arts":

logic
grammar
rhetoric

So far I've studied the 6 books by Aristotle on logic (the so-called Organon), and am now making my way through his On Rhetoric. But last night that got bumped. I'm not going to let it slide, though; I'm committed to liberal education, starting with my own. As far as I can tell, the survival of our civilization depends on it. But more of that anon.

That was my reading for last night. There are maybe 8 or 10 other books in my stack which I may or may not get back to before I reshelve them. If you have a voyeuristic interest in exactly what I'm reading and how far I'm through each book, I'm keeping my reading stats updated at Goodreads.com. Look for me there if you're so inclined.

But now, in any case, you know what I'll be doing come 4:00 p.m. PDT.

The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes by Mortimer J. Adler

The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes by Mortimer J. Adler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This philosophical analysis of the problem of "human nature" casts a strong and rare light on one of the most important questions ever asked.

What is this thing called Man? In the first place he's an enigma, or, in the words of Jacob Needleman, "partly divine and partly an animal that reads." From ancient times man has been exalted as a being above all the other animals, holding mastery over the rest of creation by virtue of his intellectual power and his special relationship with God or, anyway, with ultimate reality. On the other hand, since the advent of modern science and particularly since the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, the species known as Homo sapiens has come to be seen as one organism among the many that make up the natural biological world, possessing unique and distinctive traits to be sure, but only in the sense that every other animal does as well. Man is the smartest land animal in the same way that the elephant is the heaviest and the cheetah the fastest.

This latter view is generally the view of the modern world and certainly that of modern science. But, as Mortimer J. Adler shows, we're not very consistent about this, and we certainly have not worked through the implications for our attitudes about society, law, and rights. He's convinced that if we wish to be governed by principles and by reason, it makes the biggest possible difference what our view of human nature is. For if man is really just one animal among many, then there can be no fundamental reason to justify treating humans and animals differently. We may not like what Hitler did to Jews, gypsies, and Jehovah's Witnesses, but our modern scientific view of human nature gives us no principled reason to criticize his regarding those humans as animals and treating them as such. True, Hitler was an animal too, but, he would say, a superior animal—and there lies the crux.

No one denies that man is an animal. The question is whether he is also anything more or other than that. Adler finds that the issue boils down to this: does man differ from all other animals in kind, or only in degree? He further examines the question of what it means to differ in kind, and finds that there are exactly two ways: a superficial way, which arises when a difference in degree passes a certain threshold that causes a jump in capability; or a radical way, which arises when a trait possessed by one creature is not possessed in any degree by another. In other words, if man is radically different in kind from other animals, then he possesses one or more traits that are not possessed at all by any other animal, and no amount of increasing other animals' existing traits will bring them any closer to humanity.

Adler takes his time developing his argument, and I found him sometimes repetitive in rephrasing and recapitulating his points, which made the book a bit longer than it needed to be. But I was very impressed with his rigor and his fearlessness in working through the issues in detail. I was also very impressed with his level of authority on this topic.

What do I mean by that? I mean that Adler, rather than being one arguer among many in this debate, brings a greater detachment, a much deeper education in the history of the topic, and perhaps most of all a keener insight into the consequences of its resolution for human society and the justice attainable within it. (That said, I think that Adler differs only in degree from his adversaries—not in kind!) As editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica and co-editor of the Britannica Great Books series, Adler brings a unique degree of background knowledge to the discussion. Indeed, his essay on "Man" in volume 3 of The Great Books makes an excellent warmup for reading this book.

Adler regards the question of human nature a "mixed" one—that is, a question that can be answered only by a combination of philosophical and scientific methods. He believes that psychologists, zoologists, and computer scientists have as much to contribute to the question as philosophers do, and expects (writing in 1967) a definite—or definite enough—answer to the question in the future. At the end of the book he sketches what he believes will be the implications of either answer to the question (the key difference turns out to be whether humans are or are not radically different in kind from other animals.)

In all I found Adler's treatment of the topic serious, cogent, and forceful. He really helped to make clear and definite many things that were fuzzy and confused in my mind. Possibly because my own spiritual and philosophical training, such as it is, has been Buddhist, I felt that the argument did not actually cover the whole terrain. Adler's viewpoint and background are unabashedly Western, and I felt that, despite his unswerving effort to be impartial and objective, he accepts certain ideas without question, or at least regards them as demonstrated beyond doubt. One of these is that perceptions, unlike conceptions, are a physical, material phenomenon. As far as I can tell, a "perception" is as much an intangible, mental phenomenon as a "conception" is, and if this is so, it has important, even decisive, implications for Adler's argument.

But even if that's the case, this book is extremely valuable and should be required reading for anyone who wants to participate in the discussion of human rights, animal rights, or the environment. In other words, so far from going out of date, Adler's book is becoming more timely with each passing day.

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The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the most important books of the 20th century, Campbell's breakout text transformed the word myth from denoting something antique, primitive, and false into one signifying those stories and images that express the deepest and strongest forces that underlie our lives today, as they always have done and always will.

I first heard the name of Joseph Campbell in 1979, during my three-month flirtation with university education at UBC. My English prof was a passionate enthusiast of Campbell, and did his best to get his students to attend a lecture that Campbell was giving on campus (I believe the topic was Dracula). I never went (drat!), but I see from my disintegrating copy of the Bollingen edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces that I bought it in December that year, which proves that Dr. Whitehead did eventually get through to me. Thank heavens he did.

I've read the book four or five times, and my copy is heavily highlighted. As I flip through it now I see it's time to read it again. Oh boy!

Drawing on a knowledge of world mythology, religion, art, and symbolism that was already vast (the book was published in 1949, when Campbell was just 45), Campbell, choosing the word monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake as his master term, sets out to explicate the archetypal adventure of the hero. He shows how all hero stories follow the same basic template, that of the rite of passage: separation, initiation, and return. Campbell summarizes the template in one sentence of his prologue:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell goes on to illustrate this template with episodes from world mythology: Greek, Egyptian, Arabian, Indian, European, and many others, including the stories of the Buddha and Jesus. This latter point is important, for one of the great strengths of Campbell's work is in how he shows that myth is the force behind those texts and rites that we regard as sacred, as well as the force driving our own individual psychology. For myth is not merely a matter of inventing stories for amusement; it is the structuring, organizing force by which we understand our world. Myth arises from the same mysterious source from which our dreams come; myth, indeed, is a kind of public dream.

Campbell's writing is forceful, self-assured, and compendious. He writes with passion and with humor, and his prose is excellent. Well thought out, deeply researched, and concise, this work is the furthest thing imaginable from a dry, scholarly text. He manages to combine intellectual detachment with a sense of urgency and love of the topic.

In this book is laid the groundwork for Campbell's future works, notably his Masks of God series, in which these themes are developed in greater depth. Here he introduces the idea that myth is not something "out there," but rather the organizing principle of our lives both individually and collectively. By understanding it we can take hold of our own destiny and live more consciously, more spiritually, more adventurously. In a word, more fully.

Myth is everyone's business, and this book reintroduces us to that part of ourselves which is most alive. We are heroes, each of us; let us not refuse the call to adventure when it arrives.

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how to read like you mean it

I read with a highlighter. My brand? The yellow Sharpie Accent highlighter, which I get from Staples. I go through a package of four about once a month, and like to have a package or two in the drawer of my Ikea credenza, ready to go.

I don't highlight fiction or creative writing, except in those rare cases when a book contains material that I think will be of research value. Recently I made highlights in The Mystery of Mar Saba by James H. Hunter (and which I reviewed in this space). But my highlighter is poised over every work of nonfiction I read, and if I can't find anything worth highlighting, then for me that book is not worth reading.

I'm not sure exactly when I took up the practice of systematic highlighting, but I believe it was in the 1990s. My first efforts at marking up books were in my late teens, underlining a phrase here and there. (Of course, I mark up only my own books. Library books I actually read with an eraser, removing as much markup as I can. I also clean off the covers of library books with a damp cloth, my intention being to return the book in better condition than I got it.) It took a long time to break down the taboo against marking up books, inculcated mainly by 12 years of public schooling with school-owned textbooks. Later, with my own books, I was worried about "wrecking" books by marking them up, especially expensive hardbacks.

But I'm over that. I came to realize that my books were not assets whose value to others I was trying to preserve, but rather assets of my own whose value to myself I was trying to maximize.

Why do I highlight? There are a couple of reasons. One of course is that I want to be able to pick out the key ideas if I return to a book. Over the years, I came to realize that returning to scan a book was a lot easier if the text was highlighted in complete sentences rather than in disconnected phrases. So gradually my highlighting became a process of compressing the text of a book, creating a condensed version of it for my own use. Now I can go into any highlighted book and read it cover to cover, scanning only its highlights. A book that originally took me 20 sittings to read I can now read in, say, 3 or 4. The "full sentence" approach makes this rereading easy and logically connected.

And it does something else: it intensifies my initial reading of the book. Looking to highlight a book in full sentences turns me from a relatively passive reader into something more like an active editor. For the full sentences I create are not necessarily full sentences in the original text; they are often stitched together from clauses and phrases in different sentences, even different paragraphs.

Here's an example. This morning I was typing notes from a book called Why People Don't Heal and How They Can by Caroline Myss. My date-mark inside the book tells me that I got it in November 2000, and I probably read and highlighted it shortly thereafter. I started typing notes (my highlights) from the book at the time, but then left off. I recently picked it up again—almost 11 years later. This morning I typed my highlights from this paragraph on page 76, from chapter 3 on "The Chakras, the Astrological Ages, and the Forms of Power":

Eastern culture was initiated into this new energy pattern through the birth of Gautama the Buddha. The Buddha was born around 500 BC, roughly three-quarters of the way through the age of Aries, but the growth of Buddhism took place in three distinct periods, of which the first shared certain characteristics of Arien energy. The first era, or "turning of the wheel" in Buddhist parlance, is known as Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism and dominated the first five hundred years of Buddhism. Theravada was characterized by practices of renunciation of all earthly possessions and a life of strict separation from any personal human bonding. Reflecting the fire elements of Aries and the law-and-order quality of that age, the strict code of behavioral disciplines that made up Theravada doctrine did not recognize emotional needs as anything more than obstacles to being in the present moment.

And here is the compressed version, made up of my highlights:

Eastern culture was initiated into this new energy pattern through the birth of Gautama the Buddha. The Buddha was born around 500 BC, but the growth of Buddhism took place in three distinct periods, of which the first shared certain characteristics of Arien energy. The first era, or "turning of the wheel" in Buddhist parlance, is known as Hinayana, characterized by renunciation of all earthly possessions and a life of strict separation from any personal human bonding.

Typing the highlights is the final step in my "reading" of a book. I create a Word document and type out all the highlights in the book, so I have a single compressed version of it on my PC, which I can then search, copy, and paste at will in my other documents. The process of typing acts as another rereading of the book, one that is further intensified by the very fact that I'm not simply reading but am also typing—so that the information goes in not only through my eyes but also, so to speak, through my fingers. It's a chance to further consolidate my grasp of the material.

Now that I've written this I realize that I could probably do a more expanded version as a "how to" text on reading with a highlighter. Maybe that could be my first Kindle Single! What do you think?

on knowing what you're doing

Even though I'm a writer and have always considered myself such, it's only been in the last few years that I've taken any interest in literary criticism. My lack of interest was probably due to a number of perceptions I had about it. I felt that "literary criticism" was:

mainly a lot of academic hairsplitting
a way for effete snobs to rationalize their conviction that they had better taste than other people
a consolation activity for those who lacked creativity and talent ("those who can, do," etc.)
for killjoys who liked to ruin works of art by vivisecting them
a swamp inhabited by devotees of tiresome theories such as Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism

I've written in another post how I was gradually introduced to manuals on how to write drama. I never saw those books as works of literary criticism, and perhaps they're not in the strict sense, but now I would say that they are, for they are books about how creative writing achieves its effects. And this is now what I understand literary criticism to be.

The art of writing is not well understood even by its practitioners. This is a confession, for I am a practitioner of it. Maybe I shouldn't take the public school system to task for this, since its job is not to turn out creative writers, and I never formally studied creative writing anywhere. From talking with those who have studied it, I don't feel I've missed much. Even at the university level these seem to be little more than writers' groups moderated by a supposed teacher, where students compose pieces on oddball themes like "write a scene from the point of view of a piece of furniture" or "write about a place you've never been", and then make comments on each other's work.

Maybe there's some value in such programs, but they do not help writers acquire their art, which, by ancient definition, is a body of knowledge connected with a skill. Aristotle understood an artist to be someone who knows how to do something, with the emphasis on knowledge. In other words, art was not merely about the fine arts, but about all skilled activities whatever. Thus there is an art of brain surgery and an art of diamond prospecting, an art of swimming the butterfly stroke and an art of breeding goats. They all involve know-how. They all involve both theory and practice, and both the theory and the practice are bodies of knowledge.

Creative writing, or literature, as one of the seven classical fine arts (can you name the other six? architecture, music, sculpture, painting, drama, and dance), is one such activity of human skill. There's no hope of acquiring such a skill from a group of one's peers saying things like "this worked for me but that didn't." It can only be acquired when those who have mastered an art pass on their knowledge of it, which can in turn happen only if they are conscious of that knowledge and can articulate it. And with the creative or fine arts, this is not often the case.

Luckily, in the case of writing, it is not just writers who can have valuable things to say, but also perceptive readers. This is what Aristotle was. For although he was highly regarded by his peers as a writer of prose (his works for laymen have not survived; the extant works of Aristotle are all technical treatises for students), he was not a poet. Nonetheless, as a reader or audience member of poetry he wrote an analysis of how poetry achieves its effects, called the Poetics. This short work is still one of the best works of literary criticism ever written, and probably still the best single manual for the storyteller. Aristotle does not shrink from telling the writer what he needs to know: how to achieve his effects, how to make his story stronger.

In recent years I've also read a few other critical works that I've found stimulating and helpful in deepening my understanding and my craft, notably Anatomy of Criticism and The Great Code by Northrop Frye. I'm sure there are plenty of others out there, and I'll be on the lookout for them.

At bottom my hunger is a simple one: I want to know what I'm doing. Is that so wrong?

sketchbook: Friday 15 July 2011

ca. 1:30 p.m. PARK ROYAL SOUTH

Vague subdued din of voices from the 2 wings of the food court. A modernistic setting with a curved ramp & great circles inset in the ceiling, glowing with blue recessed lamps hidden at their edges. I sit in the rest area, an oasis of worn sofas & chairs on the bone-colored desert of tile, large flags running diagonally. My chair is cocoa-colored; the other chair is somber blue; the 2 sofas face each other, one the color of pumpkin, the other of tomato soup.

Now others have arrived: 2 unrelated couples have taken to the sofas. One a retired pair, the man a tall stick-figure with long training shoes of bright white, drawing the eye from the rest of his olive-drab attire. The woman has a mannish haircut of iron-gray; she has a large mouth & small eyes. The other couple are younger and more animated in their talk. The man, heavy-set in a scarlet vest, appears to an aboriginal; the woman, sitting with right ankle on her left knee, does not. They've been laughing as they've tried to look up someone's number on her smartphone. He sprawls artlessly, legs splayed, taking up space.

And now a 6th person arrives to use the final chair: a young slim blonde girl, who puts her pink bag down on the chair while she checks her phone. Now she's gone again.

"It's musical! It's very musical!" squeals the younger woman. The man toms on the back of his sofa, an Indian 4/4 beat while he hums.

"My dad made up that song."

The Epic Cosmos edited by Larry Allums

The Epic Cosmos by James Larry Allums

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Looking at epics ancient and modern, each of the 12 essays in this collection offers deeply considered insights into the significance of epic as a literary form.

Nowadays the word "epic" is used loosely to denote various works that are large, sprawling, contain heroic adventure, or have large casts of characters. Robert McKee, in his screenwriting text Story, defines a "modern epic" as a story that features the conflict of "the individual against the state". But epic is much more than this.

Aristotle, when he named epic as one of the four genres of poetry (the others being comedy, tragedy, and "dithyrambic" or lyric), defined it as a long connected narrative, in contrast with the genre that interested him most: tragedy, which was dramatic (performed) and so of greater inherent power than a narrative, which was simply told.

This book, prepared by a group of scholars at The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture under the guidance of Louise Cowan (who provides the excellent introduction), aims to right the scales a bit by examining what makes epic a valuable and profound genre in its own right.

In her introduction, "Epic as Cosmopoesis", Cowan sketches the vision of epic taken by the group: the true heart of epic as a genre lies not in a checklist of features (invoking the muse, stating the theme, etc.) nor even in conventionally heroic deeds, but in its culture-defining role. Epic describes the cosmos of a culture, and depicts the struggle involved in its birth or transformation.

In the opinion of Cowan and the other scholars, epic did not die out with the publication of Paradise Lost. Epic lives on in any work that seriously engages the epic themes, which Cowan gives as: penetration of the veil separating material and immaterial existence; the "eschatological expansion of time"; the restoration of equilibrium between masculine and feminine; and the linking of human action to a divine destiny. From this point of view, epic lives on through the work of modern and contemporary writers such as Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, and Toni Morrison.

Most of the essays examine aspects of individual epics, including all the major standard ones: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Exodus, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. But there are also essays on the Gilgamesh epic, as well as Go Down, Moses by Faulkner and Green Centuries by Caroline Gordon. The essays are all different, but they all share this common vision of epic as profound, serious, and relevant.

It is a deep, serious work for a deep, serious subject. I found it consistently illuminating and even thrilling to read. The great mass of contemporary narrative and dramatic entertainment suffers from a terrible frivolity and banality. Epic lies at the opposite extreme: works of art that treat the human enterprise as significant, difficult, painful, but also profound, joyous, and total. True epics are created by the greatest talents working under the greatest inspiration and stress.

Because of this book I've just finished reading Green Centuries, and have gone out to get Robert Fagles's translations of the Iliad and the Aeneid. The Epic Cosmos has done much to help make these works accessible and meaningful for me.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to rediscover the excitement and wonder possible in literature.

(Note: I first wrote this review for Amazon.com in February 2008.)

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