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July 2162. Tariq Ali, The Stone Woman [2000] 274 pages
The third book in the Islam Quintet is set in 1899, in the last decades of the tottering Ottoman Empire. It deals with the family of an Ottoman nobleman, Iskander Pasha, of ultimately Albanian descent. (When I read this I was startled to realize that this novel is set in approximately the same time and place as Kadare's Palace of Dreams which I read a few weeks earlier, because there is no resemblance at all between the imaginary Empire of Kadare and the realistic Empire of Ali.) The first person narrator is Iskander's daughter Nilofer, who ran away to marry a Greek schoolteacher when she was thirteen and has just returned nine years later with her young son Orhan to the family's summer palace a short journey from Istanbul. A few days after her return, her father suffers a stroke which deprives him of speech. The other siblings also return, the oldest Salman who was also estranged from his father and has been a diamond merchant in Alexandria, the younger brother Halil who is a general, and the older married sister Zeynep. Iskander's brother Memed and his lover the Baron have also returned from Berlin, and near the end of the book the other brother Kemel, a seagoing merchant, also arrives. The "stone woman" of the title is a rock, perhaps originally a pagan statue, to which the family members confess their secrets in chapters which are not in the voice of Nilofer; this is a structural device to let the reader know things that would not be otherwise revealed without flashbacks.
The narrative seems focused at first on the domestic and romantic history of the family, but as the book progresses we learn of a conspiracy against the Sultan. In the beginning, the political discussions seem somewhat detached from the plot of the book, but later they are illustrated by events in the plot. I thought that structurally this book was weaker than the first two books. There is much discussion of the coming collapse of the Empire, the need to modernize and eliminate the influence of the "beards", the Islamic clergy who are considered responsible by the characters for the decline of the Empire and its weakness in the face of the British, French, Germans and Russians. Note that the characters more anti-clerical than anti-religious, although there is somediscussion of Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed that Ali, as a Marxist, has not tried to illustrate the economic causes which underlay the decline, but perhaps he has simply chosen to show us the ideas of the opponents of the Sultan at the time. There are forebodings of the Armenian massacre in the village of the servant Petrossian. We also see the influence of Western events through a journal Iskander wrote in Paris during the Commune.
One of the blurbs on the back compares the three first books to Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy; if we leave aside the fact that Ali is not as accomplished a writer as Mahfouz, I think there are resemblances. I would say this is a worthwhile book and series to read.
July 2263. Ann Moyal, Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World [2001] 226 pages
Platypus is a popular account of the discovery of the Platypus by European science in 1798 (it was of course well-known to the aboriginal population) and the controversies it caused among scientists. Moyal explains how biologists were confused by the combination of mammalian traits such as fur and a four-chambered heart with a bill that they thought was birdlike (actually this was an artifact due to the hardening of the "bill" in prepared specimens; the actual organ in the living animal is very flexible and cartiliginous) and a reproductive apparatus similar to reptiles (the uterus, bladder and anus end in a common orifice, the cloaca, which accounts for the term "monotreme" meaning "single orifice" now used for the order Monotremata). At first they were unsure where it fit in the "chain of being", whether to consider it as a reptile, bird or mammal, or as a separate class of its own (together with the echidna, which has a similar combination of features.) Later, there was a controversy when the mammary glands were discovered over whether they were actually milk-producing for suckling the young or for some other purpose, since there is no actual teat or nipple. There was also controversy over whether it was viviparous (bringing forth live young) like mammals, oviparous (egg-laying) like most reptiles and all birds, or oviviviparous (hatching the egg internally) like some reptiles.
Much of the problem in solving these questions, according to Moyal (who is Australian) was the contempt of British and European scientists for the amateur Australian naturalists who were actually producing factual descriptions, but were diffident about theory, leaving that to the mother country (not to mention for the aboriginal population who knew the truth that the platypus laid eggs but were considered "unreliable" witnesses.)
There is much about the role of Richard Owens, who became the expert on the monotremata and marsupials in the middle of the nineteenth century; Moyal describes him as an expert on reconstructing extinct species from fragmentary fossils (he was called the British Cuvier) but out of his depth in theory, and a rigid Anglican who was part of the establishment. She describes him in his later life as arrogant, and as the most hated scientist in England, with a habit of taking credit for other researchers' discoveries. This is corroborated by the descriptions I have read of him in other books on the history of biology; I have a biography of him on my TBR list, which I hope to get to next year after I retire. Owens denied as long as possible that the mammary glands were real and argued for oviviviparity. (Many of those who considered it a mammal insisted it must be viviparous, but Owen knew that could not be the case given the primitiveness of the uterus; but he could not accept that it was actually oviparous, which was mainly the view of those who considered it a reptile or bird.)
Moyal also shows the role the platypus played in Darwin's thinking about evolution and the debates over the theory. Darwin described Owen as the one opponent he actively disliked. Lyell, whom Darwin respected highly and was particularly concerned to convince, initially opposed his theory as "progressive", i.e. as claiming that there was a progression from lower to higher forms, as was the case with Lamarck and other previous evolutionists, and used the platypus as a counterexample; Darwin wrote back that his theory did not assume a necessary "progress" from less to more complex, but only that species became more fit for their environments, which could involve becoming less as well as more complex.
Nevertheless, after professional (and Darwinian) scientists proved by field studies that the platypus in fact laid eggs, the monotremata were considered as a link in the development from reptiles through marsupials to placental mammals (correct) which had simply not evolved further (not correct). In the 1980s it was discovered that the platypus had a system of electrolocation unique in the animal kingdom (some fishes have electric organs but they work in an entirely different way) which shows that the platypus had a long evolution, which simply went in a different direction than other mammals.
I was expecting to read that like so many unique animals the platypus was endangered, but that is apparently not the case; they still thrive in their native habitat and are a protected species throughout, although pollution of rivers creates a certain danger.
July 2564. Toni Morrison, Paradise [1997] 318 pages
Toni Morrison's novels Beloved, Jazz and Paradise form a sort of trilogy about the history of Black women from slavery to the present, and it has also been described as similar to Dante's trilogy of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Paradise could only be described as Paradise with a heavy dose of irony, however. The novel is set in the all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, obviously a twisted parody of Nora Zeale Hurston's Eatonville. The older inhabitants consider Ruby (and its predecessor, Haven) as having been a kind of Paradise in the past, a safe place without whites or light-skinned Blacks, where their ancestors all worked hard, helped each other when necessary, and lived in a direct connection with God. The novel gradually exposes this nostalgic "history" as a myth. In the present, there is now conflict with the younger generation, influenced by the civil rights movement, as well as among some of the founding families, encouraged by the feud between the Baptist and Methodist preachers (another echo of Hurston's novels.)
The novel opens with the sentence, "They shoot the white girl first." We see a group of men from Ruby invade a building a little outside the town known as "The Convent" (formerly a Catholic boarding school for Native American girls)to try to kill the women who live there. The time is apparently about 1975. Then we get flashbacks about each of the five women who were living there and their personal histories: Mavis, Grace (Gigi), Seneca, Pallas, and the earliest, Consolata (Connie), who remained from when it was a school. All are mentally or emotionally disturbed victims of abuse (as is the case with many of the women who live in Ruby itself.) The chapters also give some of the history of Ruby and Haven, and two figures from town, Patricia (who is writing a history of the town) and Lone get their own chapters. The final chapter is named for a little girl whose funeral is described in it, but it is mainly an epilogue about what came after the attack.
Like the other two novels in the "trilogy" and most of Morrison's novels, this is very complex and hard to pin down to one theme.
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Toni Morrison, The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the Sixth of November, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Six [2007] 17 pages
Although this is printed as a book I can't really bring myself to list it separately, since the title is almost as long as the book. It's what the subtitle says, a short speech she gave when she got an award. There are two anecdotes.
July 28 - July 3165. Kendrick Frazier, ed., Science Under Siege: Defending Science, Exposing Pseudoscience [2009] 370 pages
66. John Grant, Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality [2011] 374 pages
These two books are a kind of book I usually don't read. I prefer reading books on evolutionary biology rather than books which try to refute the creationists; books on philosophy (and philosophy of science) rather than "atheist" books which try to refute religion; and generally speaking, books which present the science rather than concentrating on answering anti-scientific views which I simply can't take seriously as "live hypotheses" worthy of discussion in the first place. I even dislike the chapters of that sort in popular science books, which I feel usually waste space the author could have used to include more of the science. (It doesn't help that they often make simplistic claims about philosophy which strike anyone trained in philosophy much the way pseudoscience strikes those trained in the sciences; a fault in both these books as well.) Generally, I don't think most people who choose to believe antiscientific religious nonsense (which usually has a political rather than a purely religious origin) can be convinced by reasonable arguments about scientific method anyway -- even if you could get them to read books which aren't from their own perspective.
However, I was subjected last week to a long harangue by a woman who, rather than giving us (the Library I work at and our clerks and pages) credit for trying to provide as much service as possible in a way that is safe for our patrons (and at some risk to ourselves; librarians have died of COVID-19), attacked us for giving in to a "conspiracy" by the "Democrat Party" to (of course) "destroy America", telling me that no one she knows has gotten COVID-19 and she thinks the people "allegedly" dying in New York for example are dying of other things and being claimed as COVID-19 "to get money from the government." She also told me that she has been crushing flowers to make her own "quinine" which can cure COVID-19 "as President Trump says." (Not sure how "quinine" could cure something that was a just a hoax to begin with. . .) Another clerk was cornered by a patron in the lobby who also argued for over half an hour that COVID-19 was a hoax, that people were being diagnosed with it because it's "profitable to charge them for ventilators", and then claimed to have evidence that it was manufactured by a biological warfare plant in China. (Again, if it is a hoax, what was being manufactured in China. . .?) Of course as city employees at work we can't argue politics, so we're forced to listen to this crap without answering it. As a result I decided to check out these two books on the anti-science movements.
The book edited by Frazier is an anthology of articles by various authors from the Skeptical Inquirer. This magazine and its parent organization originally specialized in debunking "claims of the paranormal" such as ESP, ghosts and the like; and there are a few chapters devoted here to that sort of thing, which is more humorous than dangerous, apart from soaking the gullible out of money. Later on, it began answering the more serious sorts of anti-science propaganda, such as Intelligent Design creation-"science", the antivaxers, the AIDS denialists, and most dangerous of all the climate-change denialists. The COVID-19 denialists of course were not around when the book was published, but they clearly follow the same model and use the same strategies. The articles here more or less divide into two groups, general "philosophical" or methodological arguments which I wasn't impressed by, and specific arguments refuting specific claims, which were very useful and interesting.
Denying Science on the other hand, although it seems equally miscellaneous, is by a single author, John Grant, who has also written other books on the same subject (Bogus Science, Discarded Science and Corrupted Science, among others). It is not clear what Grant's scientific credentials, if any, are; the author bio on the flap mentions only that he has won two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and "other international literary awards." This is not a small point, given that Grant's arguments often hinge on showing that various figures in the anti-science movement do not have appropriate scientific credentials in the areas they are writing about. The book covers many of the same subjects as the Frazier book, but focuses mainly on Intelligent Design and the climate-change denialists. He describes the many organizations with scientific sounding names set up (initially by the Tobacco Industry, and later (with many of the same people) by Exxon-Mobile and the Koch brothers) to promote the idea that there is scientific controversy on questions such as the danger of tobacco smoke, evolution, and anthropogenic global warming, all of which in fact are supported by an overwhelming consensus of all the legitimate scientists in the fields in question. It's interesting that a book with a title mentioning "conspiracy theories" basically describes real conspiracies -- which is the problem with the idea that "conspiracy theories" are a single class of loony theories. Of course what the title refers to are the claims of the anti-science advocates that vaccination and global warming for example are "conspiracies to destroy America", as the woman I listened to on the phone believes about COVID-19.
Neither book has any real analysis of the political basis of these movements, which they tend to attribute to "magical thinking" and other personal deficiencies. At most there is a preference for liberalism over the far-right, although to their credit the authors occasionally expose a Democratic politician as well. The Grant book also points out that while the explicit attacks on science come largely from the far-right, the liberal academic penchant for "postmodernist" relativism disarms defenders of real science by claiming that science is just another ideology as false as any other (a claim used by anti-science writers in the developing world, especially the Islamic countries, to claim science is "colonialist".) However, like the postmodernists, he tries to refute the anti-science groups by showing their affiliations to the far-right and the corporations rather than by taking on their arguments in a detailed way. In the end, it is just the liberal theme of "good" people (scientists) vs "bad" people (and greedy corporations) with no understanding of the structural issues.
To sum up, both books have some valuable information about the anti-science movement as an organized political force, and some arguments against specific lies. However, if someone confused about these issues asked me for recommendations, I would be much more likely to recommend books on evolutionary biology or climate science rather than these.
August 267. Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid [1992, tr. 1996] 119 pages
As with many of Kadare's novels, The Pyramid uses the form of a historical novel to present a "parable" (as one of the blurbs on the back calls it) about modern "totalitarian" regimes. Ostensibly, this is a novel about the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops (the classical name for Khufu), but the political and social assumptions are completely present-day; for example, there are foreign diplomats (from Sumer, from the "land of Canaan", and even from "Greece", which was certainly not known to the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom) who send regular reports analyzing the situation in Egypt in modern-day terms. "Cheops", like "Mao" in The Concert, is deliberately trying to impoverish the country because prosperity, according to his advisors, leads to questioning of authority. Not only is this anachronistic with regard to ancient Egypt, but more importantly it is simply wrong as an explanation of the modern regimes he is trying to criticize -- Kadare considers the economic disasters which were a frequent consequence of the Stalinist bureaucracies as their intended goal, which gives them far more credit for intelligence than they deserve. Apart from that, however, the descriptions of the climate of suspicion and the frequent purges do apply to the Stalinist regimes -- and to right-wing dictatorships as well. Perhaps the best passage in the novel is when the legacy of Cheops is reassessed, "Men who had yelled for all their worth 'We are innocent, we have always been loyal to the Pharaoh' before being sentenced to a stretch in the quarries, now shouted from the rooftops 'We were guilty, we wanted to undermine the pyramid, but they didn't let us!'" In short, this is a good humorous parody of bureaucratic regimes, and worth reading, provided you don't expect any real history, and take Kadare's theorizing with a grain of salt.
August 568. Larry Niven, Rainbow Mars [1999] 316 pages
The book Rainbow Mars contains a novel of the same title and five related short stories about a time-traveler named Hanville Svetz. The book is written in a humorous vein. In the stories Svetz captures various extinct animals, which turn out to be creatures of fantasy: a unicorn, a dragon, a roc, Leviathan (and Moby Dick) and a kind of reverse werewolf. In the novel, he returns to an earlier time on Mars with a dying civilization. The novel is a sort of homage to previous science fiction novels about the Red Planet, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds to C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, all of which contribute elements to the plot. There is also a tree which is a sort of organic space elevator, with echoes of the Kim Stanley Robinson trilogy . . . and an undercurrent of references to Jack and the Beanstalk. The novel was originally intended to be a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, which didn't work out. Nothing serious, but a fun read.
August 7
69. Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad 296 pages [Kindle]
The twelfth book in the Discworld series, and the third in the subseries about the Ramtop Witches, this is a book about stories, and particularly fairy tales. The main plot is based on a twisted version of Cinderella, with good and bad fairy godmothers, witches and a voodoo practitioner; it seems to be set in the Discworld's equivalent of New Orleans at Mardi Gras. There are also passing references to many other well-known fairy tales, all with a kind of twist (as one would expect from Pratchett.) The evil ruler of the city is particular concerned with "crimes against narrative expectations." In my opinion, one of the best books in the series.
August 1270. Wahneema Lubiano, The House that Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today [1997] 323 pages
As a librarian I'm in a good position to notice trends in people's reading, and one hopeful sign lately is the significant increase in circulation of books about racism and anti-racism among our largely white demographic after the police killing of George Floyd and the many similar incidents that have forced their way into the media and popular consciousness as a result of the wave of protests. I don't want to exaggerate the significance either; one of the few good memes I've seen on the Internet says, "Stop calling George Floyd a "wake-up call", the alarm's been ringing for four hundred years and y'all just keep hitting snooze." Since the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties we have seen the battle to desegregate the Boston schools, Rodney King (the incident most referred to in this book), Ferguson, and so forth, and the media and public attention lasts just about as long as the protests. In any case, I decided to join the trend; I chose this book among those that the Library had because I've been reading Morrison's novels lately and it came up when I searched for her as an author in our catalog.
The book is a collection of sixteen essays deriving from the 1994 Race Matters Conference of left-liberal Black academics held at Princeton. While the subtitle gives prominence to the three "celebrities", in fact the introductory essay, "Home" by Toni Morrison and the "Afterword" by Cornel West were very short and almost without any real content. The other essays took a variety of positions and were somewhat uneven (and of course had varying amounts of academic "culture-theory" jargon).
The first essay was probably the most useful, Stephen Steinberg's "The Liberal Retreat from Race During the Post-Civil Rights Era", which documents the Johnson administration's -- and the "mainstream" liberals' -- abandonment of the Civil Rights movement after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when Black demands shifted from formal legal equality to the question of economic equality to make practical use of the legal rights -- particularly the demand for "affirmative action." He describes the strategy of shifting attention from racism and discrimination to the supposed "pathology" of Black culture and the Black family, which was orchestrated largely by Johnson's advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his academic coauthor Nathan Glazer. (I admit to a real dislike for Moynihan and Glazer from the time I had to read their book Beyond the Melting Pot for a class in high school -- I knew that their argument was reactionary but at that time I couldn't really explain why.) He points out how Black conservatives (e.g. William Julius Wilson) tried to give legitimacy to the Moynihan emphasis on the "culture of poverty" and the pathology of the Black family, shows that Wilson was a favorite of Bill Clinton, and interestingly accuses Cornel West, one of the conference organizers, of being the "Left-wing of the Backlash" (criticism and defense of West run through many of the articles, though not always explicitly.) This article should be required reading for those who still think the liberal Democrats were great supporters of Black civil rights.
The overall argument about the importance of genuine affirmative action and the rejection of the Black cultural pathology strategy is a leitmotif of the book. Steinberg claims that the Johnson administration missed a "great opportunity" to break the racial domination hierarchy, but as another author points out, genuine affirmative action was "never on the table" in any case. Most of the articles in the book are very critical of liberalism, but in the end they just appeal from the "bad" liberals to the "good" liberals; it is telling that the index has no entries for "socialism" or "Marxism", and the few entries for "capitalism" are almost all from the single article by Angela Davis.
I won't discuss all sixteen articles here, but just highlight three more that were particularly interesting:
Patricia J. Williams' "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness" discusses the appeal of racist conservative arguments to white workers, and the way that elitist liberals play into the idea that there is a monolithic racist white working class -- "the wholesale depiction of "poor whites" as bigoted, versus the enlightened, ever-so-liberal middle and upper classes who enjoy the privilege of thinking of themselves as classless." Well-said!
Two of the most disturbing articles, because they describe facts rather than just theorizing, are Robin D.J. Kelley's "Playing for Keeps" and Angela Davis' "Race and Criminalization", which document the lack of any real employment opportunity for young Black workers, with the consequent fortification of the inner cities and imprisonment of a large proportion of Black youth. Dystopian novels and films fall far short of the actual truth about American cities in the age of deindustrialization.
August 13-1871. Belinda Thomson, Gauguin [1987] 215 pages
72. Françoise Cachin, Gauguin: The Quest for Paradise [1989, tr. 1982] 195 pages
73. Ingo F. Walther, Paul Gauguin, 1848-1903: The Primitive Sophisticate [2006] 95 pages
74. Paul Gauguin [2003] 80 pages
75. Paul Gauguin, Gauguin's Intimate Journals [1903? tr. 1921] 118 pages
For my "work-at-home" I have to read and write blog entries on a number of different genres each month; my more or less random choice for a "classic" this month is Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, and when I saw that it is based loosely on the life of Paul Gauguin, I decided to start by digging out the library "discards" on Gauguin from my garage.
The first and longest book, by Belinda Thomson, is a volume in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series. It has a fairly objective biography and description of his paintings and the evolution of his style, without too much interpretation. There are 182 illustrations; 31 in color and 151 in black and white, which is not very useful when the descriptions emphasize that the importance of his work is largely in his use of color. In addition, the color illustrations are the darkest and most saturated of all four books that contain illustrations, which is very noticeable in the works that are in three or four of the books.
Françoise Cachin is the author of a major book on Gauguin; that's not this one. This is a volume in the series (or perhaps simply an imprint) called Discoveries published by Harry N. Abrams. It is similar in tone to the Thomson book, with perhaps a bit more interpretation. It is a small-format book; there are (color) illustrations on most of the first 133 pages, but they are all small. The remainder of the book, titled "Documents", contain excerpts from the writings of Gauguin himself and various aquaintances and critics.
The book by Ingo Walther is in a slightly larger than normal format and has a high ratio of illustrations (all color) to text; there is also much more interpretation of the paintings. It is published by Taschen and probably also belongs to a series.
The next book is published by Grange books, and no author is listed. The text is fairly unimportant. It's mainly a collection of 64 color illustrations, in a somewhat larger format than the other books (though not by any means a "coffee table" book). The selection of paintings is a bit different than the others, and the printed colors are the lightest of the four.
The book titled Gauguin's Intimate Journals is a translation of Avant et Après, one of the journals he wrote in the Marquesas, apparently during the last year or two of his life. I don't know when the French edition was published; the translation is from 1921 and has a preface by his son Emile. It consists of fairly miscellaneous but often quite interesting observations on life and art, and like his paintings is not particularly concerned with factual accuracy.
August 2076. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence [1919] 142 pages [Kindle]
Maugham was one of the most popular and prolific British writers of the first half of the twentieth century, but today only a handful of his novels are still read. This is one of them. It is usually described as based upon the life of Paul Gauguin, but having just read some books on Gauguin before reading this, I would have to say there isn't much resemblance. Maugham's English artist Charles Strickland has three things in common with Gauguin: he was a stockbroker before devoting his life to art; he was a major, influential painter; and he lived the later part of his life on Tahiti. Perhaps some other features are based on the legend, rather than the facts, about Gauguin; on the other hand, the novel may have influenced the legend.
In any case, what Maugham has actually done is create his own myth of the creative and totally egotistical artist, contrasted with the foil of the inept but Christlike altruist Dirk Stroeve, both as seen through a rather philistine narrator. The writing is certainly good and full of quotable passages (if I could get that feature to work on my Kindle), and perhaps if I had not known it was supposed to be Gauguin I would have been more attuned to the actual theme of the book, but in any case I don't really agree with Maugham's romantic conception of the artistic genius (if the narrator reflects the author's viewpoint).
August 2277. Michael Chabon, Summerland [2002] 500 pages
For my "work-at-home" reader's advisory/blog post, I did something I almost never do -- read a book intended for children (probably aimed at ten and eleven-year-olds). I chose the novel by Michael Chabon because I enjoyed his adult novel Moonglow a few years back; it was a complex book with interesting subject matter. This children's book is of course much simpler with a traditional narrative structure; it is essentially a typical middle grade fantasy in which a group of eleven-year-olds (a Little League baseball team) save the universe from supernatural evil. The villain is called "Coyote" and is the trickster figure of Native American legend, but also identified with the Norse Loki. In fact, the book seemed to me to be a combination of Norse mythology and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, with a good deal of baseball. Not really what interests me, but the story was fast-paced and consistent and would probably be a good read for someone of the appropriate age.
August 2478. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language [2009] 342 pages
Okrent is a linguist with an interest in invented languages; this is a popular and very interesting account of the history of artificial languages. She gives a list in an appendix of five hundred known invented languages, but says there are almost as many more. Although the first known invented language dates from the middle ages (Hildegard of Bingen) the first real wave was in the seventeenth century, and was largely inspired by the development of mathematical notation; the idea was that concepts could be defined and combined in a mathematical way to create a logical language that would indicate truth in its very structure. (Although she doesn't mention the fact, they were also partially derived from Kabbala and systems of magical incantations.)
The second wave came toward the end of the nineteenth century, and had as its goal to combat the nationalism based on language groups by creating a new language which would be a "neutral" common language; it was partly inspired by the discovery of the relatedness of languages, and these languages were less completely from scratch, and used the roots common to European languages. The most important, and the one artificial language which has succeeded in creating a significant body of speakers, was Esperanto.
In the twentieth century there were three trends. In the earlier part of the century there were "written" languages, based on a misunderstanding of Chinese characters, which tried to replace words based on sounds with iconic characters which would supposedly be recognizable with little learning by people who had different spoken languages; the example she focuses on was "Blisssymbolics." This had had some practical use in teaching children who cannot speak to read. The second trend was similar to the philosophical languages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but concentrating more on structure than on the concepts. They were influenced by modern symbolic logic (which, though she doesn't mention the fact, was a development from some of those languages, especially Leibniz's "Characteristics".) The main examples she uses are Loglan and its offshoot Lojban. The third was more purely aesthetic and entertainment -- Tolkien's Elvish languages, and Klingon. There is a whole internet community today which is dedicated to this sort of playful language construction. She also mentions Suzanne Haden Elgin's attempt to create a feminist language (Láadan).
I enjoyed the book, although there wasn't as much detail as I would have liked on the actual languages and their grammars. I'm also planning to read Umberto Eco's book on the same subject.
August 2779. Tariq Ali, A Sultan in Palermo [2005] 246 pages
The fourth book in the Islam Quintet, A Sultan in Palermo returns to the period just before the second book, the middle of the twelfth century, in Siqilliya (Sicily). The main character is a historical person, although one about whom not a lot is known: the cartographer and geographer Muhammed al-Idrisi, who made one of the most accurate world maps before the modern period, and accompanied it with a descriptive geography. He is completing the writing of his books at the court of the dying King Roger, also known as the Sultan Rujari, a descendant of the Normans who conquered the island from the Moslems. In the same style as the earlier novels of the Quintet, the loves and domestic affairs of al-Idrisi take place against the background of the conflict between the Moslem population and the Christian barbarian overlords.
August 3180. Ismail Kadare, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost [Fr 2000, Eng tr 2002] 181 pages [Kindle]
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is a novel about Albania after the fall of the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha and his ephemeral successor; the title expresses the ambiguity of the post-Stalinist period. On the one hand, the end of the repressive regime; on the other the corruption and disillusionment of a capitalist restoration under the tutelage of the World Bank and the Western powers, and the return of reactionary feudal customs suppressed by the Communists.
The main character, Mark Gurabardhi is a painter employed by a government Arts Center, and the domestic part of the plot concerns his relationship to his girlfriend and model. His father was a policeman, and from time to time Mark hallucinates himself as a deputy police chief in a parallel world where he followed his father's wishes and went to Police Academy instead of the Academy of Fine Arts.
The novel opens with the unearthing of a hibernating snake, which then leads by association to the legend of the woman who married a snake, which is fully narrated in the first "Counterchapter". Throughout, there are references to myth and legend, which are initially presented as simple reflections of Mark but are later incorporated into surrealistic dream or vision sequences. Even the presumably realistic parts of the narrative, however, seem charged with symbolic meaning, such as the changing of the locks on his studio and, running through the whole book, the story of a bank robbery (ironically treated as the symbol of Western "progress".)
In the course of the book, the code of the Kanun, based on family vendetta, makes its appearance and becomes an important part of the plot, affecting Mark and his girlfriend directly.
This is the most difficult and experimental work I have read by the author; I noticed that many of the reviews I have seen misunderstand even the literal level of the plot. It was nevertheless an enjoyable and worthwhile novel and better than the last two books I read by Kadare.
Sept 581. Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom [2020] 264 pages
Yaa Gyasi's second novel, after the best-selling and award-winning Homecoming, this was not as significant as the first one, but it was still a very good book. It is written as the first person remembrances of a woman from a Ghanaian immigrant family.
Gifty is currently a graduate student doing research in neuroscience at Stanford. and caring for her mother, who is suffering from extremely debilitating depression.
The novel is almost entirely in flashbacks, out of chronological order, to her childhood and teens, as well as some about her own life and relationships in college. I was strongly reminded of Edwige Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which is also about a Black immigrant girl with an emotionally disturbed mother.
In addition to the subjects of the Black immigrant experience (since Gifty's family, like Gyasi's own, lived in Alabama, it is probably far from typical) and mother-daughter relationships, the novel takes on the subjects of opioid addiction (both in her family and in her research) and religion. The discussion of addiction is well-done; I had problems with the discussion of religion. While the break with religion in her adolescence I could relate to, the fact that she was still agonizing about God as a graduate student in the sciences was harder to believe. The ending is also a bit abrupt, although there is an epilogue set a few years later.
Sept 15/1982. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1831] 273 pages + 5 secondary articles (82 pages)
83. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1840] 152 pages
Everything I read leads to adding something else to my list. I read Eun-Jin Jang's No One Writes Back last year for a Goodreads Group; this alluded to W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, so I added it to my list; I got around to reading The Moon and Sixpence last month, which was very loosely based on Gauguin, so I added several books sitting on shelves in my garage about Gauguin; these mentioned the period with Van Gogh at Arles, so I checked out Zegers and Druick's Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South from the library. That book mentioned that both Van Gogh and Gauguin were influenced inter alia by Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and On Heroes and Hero-Worship, so . . . Here I am reviewing Carlyle.
What eventually became Sartor Resartus ("The Tailor Re-Tailored") began as a short story for Fraser's Magazine, which was rejected. The original story forms approximately the first "Book" of the novel. It is based on a very modernist-sounding premise, namely that it is a review article by an anonymous English "Editor" on a German book published in Weissnichtwo by Stillschweigen & Co., Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh's Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken, which is of course totally imaginary. (For the language-challenged, the title is Clothes, their Origin and Uses, the author's name means "Devil's excrement", and it is published in "I know not where" by "Keep Silent & Co.") Some critics, incredibly, apparently became angy at the "hoax" and "deception"; of course this was written before that technique of fiction had been used by so many other writers from Kierkegaard to Lem, but still. . . This first book is a fairly amusing satire on German pedantry, overblown language, and British and European customs/costumes. After it was rejected, Carlyle added two more "books" and resubmitted it as a serial, which was how it was published initially.
I think whoever wrote the description on Amazon, "a send-up of German Idealist philosophy", didn't read the rest of the book. The second book is a biography of Teufelsdröckh, supposedly reconstructed from six paper bags full of autobiographical fragments and miscellaneous papers; essentially it is a Bildungsroman in the German style, describing his fall into materialism and unbelief and subsequent epiphany and conversion to Post-Kantian Idealism in religion, here rather superficially presented as a sentimental Romantic Christianity -- as always when European ideas cross the Channel and even more so the Atlantic (Sartor Resartus was first published in book form in Boston, at the urging of Ralph Waldo Emerson) they tend to become trivialized. (If he had been around today, I would have called him "New Age" guru.) The third book returns to the theme of the "Clothing Philosophy" which now becomes an obvious and explicit allegory for this philosophy, the world as the garment of God and so forth. Teufelsdröckh, despite his exaggerated prose (which is hard to distinguish from Carlyle's own overinflated Victorian writing) ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a relatively serious porte-parole for Carlyle.
The "Editor" does from time to time make various very English philistine objections before essentially agreeing with the Professor, which seems to disturb many modern literary critics. I think Carlyle is basically using this device to divert the reader's critical attention from the content to the "Editor"'s bad arguments, and hence "slip" the philosophy in. There are no actual arguments for it (he pores scorn on logic); it is just asserted over and over again, with much invective against atheists, materialists, and Carlyle's particular bête noire, Bentham and the Utilitarians, and like Plato's Ideas, the reader is just supposed to "see" it.
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Secondary Articles from Academic Source Premier:
Lee C.R. Baker, "The Open Secret of Sartor Resartus: Carlyle's Method of Converting His Reader" (Studies in Philology, 83, 2, Spring 1986) 18 pages -- Discusses Carlyle's strategies of trying to convert the reader.
Mildred D. Harding, "Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus: The Secret Doctrine in a Western Mode" (Journal of Religion & Psychical Research, 22, 1, Jan 1999) 6 pages -- Speak of the Devil, I mentioned "New Age" in my review and behold!
Jeremy Tambling, "Carlyle through Nietzsche: Reading Sartor Resartus" (Modern Language Review, 102, 2, April, 2007) 15 pages -- discusses the book through the lens of Nietzsche's description of Carlyle as basically dishonest with himself, someone who talks about the importance of believing because he never actually believed anything.
John B. Lamb, "Spiritual Engranchisement": Sartor Resartus and the Politics of Bildung" (Studies in Philology, 107, 2, Spring 2010) 24 pages -- Discusses the novel as a political statement in the tradition of the German Bildungsroman, seeking to replace political revolution by "revolutions" in individual consciousness and culture.
Tom Toremans, "One Step from Politics: "Sartor Resartus" and Aesthetic Ideology" (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 45, 1, Spring 2012) 19 pages -- Similar to the previous article but with much more jargon. Discusses Marx' and Engels' reviews of some of Carlyle's writings.
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On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History is a series of lectures given about a decade after Sartor Resartus was written, and presents a similar thesis in non-fictional form. It is one of the worst books I have ever read. Carlyle is again attacking the modern world for "materialism", "mechanism" and of course "utilitarianism", and assuming without argument the same Idealist philosophy as in the first book. He maintains (I would usually be using the word "argues" but he again doesn't give any arguments, just invective) that the proper attitude for all decent people is "Hero Worship", uncritical admiration of some "great man", and complete unquestioning obedience to him. It's hard to read this without a shudder after the twentieth century with its Führerprinzip and its "cults of personality", especially in the context of praising everything "Teutonic".
The first lecture is on the hero as God, which presents a euhemeristic account of Odin as a "great man" who was promoted to godhood: "We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom the race had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into boundless admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years, over the field of Teutonic Life." and so forth. He saw Nature as a reflection of Divinity; i.e. he was a precursor of German Idealism as interpreted by Carlyle. His achievement was to instill "Valor" and lead his people to conquests.
The second lecture is on the hero as prophet, and focuses on "Mahomet" and the founding of Islam. What is his greatness? "He sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see: That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed, Nothing; is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and presence, -- a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite; nothing more." In other words, a precursor of German Idealism as interpreted by Carlyle.
The third lecture is on the hero as poet, and treats of Dante and Shakespeare. A lot of superlatives and idolatry of both as "Great men"; he doesn't in my opinion understand either one of them. Of course, they saw through the world of phenomena to the divine noumenal world behind it. . . The fourth lecture is on the hero as priest: Luther and Knox. The fifth lecture is on the hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau and Burns.
The final lecture is on the hero as king: Cromwell and Napoleon. What he sees as greatest about Cromwell is that he ruled without Parliament; what was greatest about Napoleon was that he made himself Emperor.
Sept 2184. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South [2001] 418 pages
A large (13" x 10") format book, this was based on an exhibition of the two artists' works in Amsterdam and Chicago, sponsored by the Van Gogh Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. It has 510 illustrations, more than 60% in color and many half or full page. As great as the illustrations were, the text was important, unlike many art books; each painting is analyzed and placed in the context of their development. The focus of the book was on the mutual influence of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The first chapter, "Origins", traces the beginning of the two artists' careers before they came into contact; the second chapter, "Encounters" is about their first discoveries of each other; the third chapter, "North vs South" deals with their correspondence before the move to Arles. The fourth and longest chapter is of course on the period they worked together at the Yellow House, the "Studio of the South", divided into sections of about a week each. The fifth chapter, "Correspondence" is on their exchanges of letters (and paintings) after the breakup, through Vincent's suicide; and there is a coda on Gauguin after that, focusing on the "myths" of the two painters and what Gauguin said and wrote about Vincent. Each chapter and section is divided into alternating subsections on each of the two painters and their works.
One of the most impressive things about the book is that it was based on new research on the paintings themselves as physical objects, the types of canvas they used and the types of grounds and means of preparation (the details of the methodology and the results are presented in an appendix), which allowed for the paintings to be put into order and roughly dated even within the Arles period, showing that they were part of a discussion between the two artists on style and technique as well as their general views on art. The authors argue that Van Gogh won Gauguin over to a view of art as a sort of substitute for religion and themselves as apostles; both men were influenced by Carlyle's discussion of Heroes and Hero-Worship and saw themselves as the Hero as Artist. They were also both influenced by Zola's L'Oeuvre. Gauguin, on the other hand, was far more in touch with the movements in modern art, the factions of impressionists, neo-impressionists, and so forth. Both were influenced by Japanese art, and Gauguin extended the interest to other so-called "primitive" non-Western art. Both artists influenced each other on color and technique.
This is one of the most informative and interesting art books I have read in a long time.
Sept 2685. Tariq Ali, Night of the Golden Butterfly [2010] 275 pages
The fifth and last novel of the Islam Quintet is set in the present, probably not too long before the book was written. The premise is that Plato, a painter from Pakistan, commissions the narrator, Dara, an old friend from Lahore living in exile in London, to write a novel about his life. The book then describes the narrator's relationship with Plato and various other friends from the Partition of India and Pakistan through the present in flashbacks. (Dara is the same age and has much in common with Tariq Ali himself.) The foreground is occuppied by the personal relations of the characters, but the background describes the political and social realities of the country. The climax of the book is the unveiling of a symbolic painting by Plato, which defines the four "cancers" of the country: America, the military, the mullahs, and corruption. A character called Naughty Lateef satirizes the Westerm media's use of women "victims" from the Islamic countries to justify hatred for Moslems and by extension the foreign policy of the Western powers. Plato's girlfriend Zaynab, a real victim ("married to the Koran" to deprive her of an inheritance), emphasizes that the problem is not Islam but the backward economic structures, which use Islam as an excuse -- not much different than the "Christian" Right here. "So they're all doing religion, I thought to myself. And France, like Italy, despite pretensions to the contrary, is a Catholic country. The veneer of the Enlightenment is wearing off very fast."
I was a bit surprised and a little disappointed that, as with the earlier books, there wasn't actually much about those economic issues, especially given Ali's background, but the central organizing theme of all five books is the relations between the Islamic world and the West. (Maybe I shouldn't say "West", since one of the most interesting parts of this volume is the story of Jindié's ancestors in the nineteenth-century Moslem revolt in Yunnan against the Manchu dynasty, a historical event I hadn't ever heard of before.)
Other major characters are Plato and Dara's old friends Zahid (husband of Jindié), who became a famous doctor in the United States, joined the Republican Party, and then was caught up in the reaction after 9/11 and moved to London, and "Confucius" (Hanif), Jindié's brother, a once dogmatic Maoist who suffers from total amnesia (obviously symbolic.)
Sept 3086. Nizar Qabbani, Journal of an Indifferent Woman [1968, tr 2015] 88 pages
Nizar Qabbani (1923=1998) of Damascus was one of the most popular poets of the Arab World. Although best known for his erotic love poetry, he was particularly concerned with the freedom of women. In this book of poetry, he writes as a woman expressing her longing for freedom and her anger at the way love is banned by the male-dominated culture. This was an e=book free with Kindle Unlimited, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys modern poetry with a bite to it.
87. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch [1990] 384 pagesAnother fantasy for the blog at work. This was a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, when both were still starting out. I haven't read anything by Gaiman before, but the style is definitely Pratchett, with the bizarre ideas presented deadpan and occasionally footnoted, as in the Discworld books. The subject is the Apocalypse, with the Antichrist and the Four Horsemen and everything; the main characters are an angel and a demon who have been around since the Creation (4004 BC) and don't want the world to end. It's very humorous, and takes on a lot of subjects, although some of the language and jokes are a bit too British to follow.
88. Nizar Qabbani (Kabbani), Arabian Love Poems [1993, rev 1998] 223 pages
This anthology was the first work of Qabbani (or Kabbani, as it's spelled in this book) to be made available in English; it was reprinted in this revised edition shortly after his death in 1998. Most of the selections are taken from two of his collections, The Book of Love and 100 Love Letters. It's all love poetry (what he was most famous for) and it is very good, although I found his Journal of an Indifferent Woman more interesting. I'm just not very good at reviewing poetry.
Oct 289. Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla [c. 1630] 121 pages [in Spanish]
Because I'm planning to read Handke's Don Juan as part of my Nobel prizewinner project (if I make it through the 763 pages of Die Bildverlust), I decided to do a mini-project on the most important earlier versions (the only one I had read previously was Molière's).
El Burlador de Sevilla is the first work that introduced the character and story of Don Juan. The edition I read had a brief introduction taken from an article on Tirso de Molino's theater, which was basically only the few facts known about his biography with nothing about the play itself; I had to turn to Wikipedia to discover that it was first published about 1630 and may have been performed as early as 1616.
All the essential features of the story are already here, the various "tricks", the cowardly and overtalkative servant, the killing of Doña Ana's father (the Comendador) and the invitation to his statue to dinner, and so forth.
Tirso's Don Juan seems rather cruder than Molière's and the comedy is less witty (if I remember that play correctly; I'm going to re-read it next). His character is really what the title says, a "trickster", rather than the seducer of the later tradition; he disguises himself in two cases as the lover of the woman, and in one he convinces the father to arrange a marriage without consulting the woman.
The Spanish looks rather strange but isn't at all difficult, although there were one or two words I couldn't find in the dictionary, perhaps because they are now obsolete.
Oct. 990. Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy [2018. tr 2020] 418 pages
This book just came out in translation last month. It gives short accounts of the lives and mostly early works of three of the major figures in early twentieth-century philosophy, the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, Walter Benjamin up to the founding of the Frankfort School, and Martin Heidegger up to just after the publication of Being and Time. The only older figure is Ernst Cassirer, at the height of his career and publishing the multiple volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The book opens with a prologue in 1929, then goes back to 1919 and proceeds year by year, with the four figures alternating, then ends (apart from a brief epilogue about their later careers) with the disputation between Cassirer and Heidegger at Davos which crystallized the half-century separation and virtual isolation of the Analytic and Continental traditions.
The book is a popularization, written for the general reader with an interest in modern philosophy -- I doubt whether it will find the same degree of success here that the original version seems to have had in Europe. It doesn't require any previous knowledge of the four philosophers (I have taken courses in Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but have only read one or two books each by Benjamin and Cassirer.) If it is occasionally difficult, that is because the thought of these four is often difficult.
Eilenberger begins with the situation of Germany and Austria after the First World War (all four subjects of the book were from Germany or Austria), defeated, economically in chaos, and intellectually in despair, and argues that these four thinkers are responding to the breakdown of confidence in the culture of the period with a radically individualist type of philosophy of life (less so in the case of Cassirer, who often seems to be included simply as a foil to the other three, as an established academic philosopher, and isn't dealt with as thoroughly or sympathetically as the other three -- unfortunately, because he is in some ways the most interesting of the four.) He shows how they interpret the "crisis" of philosophy and "failure" of the modern world in similar ways, and quotes from their writings and personal letters which often use the same or very similar phrases. The emphasis is on how similar they are, how they were dealing with the same questions even if the answers were different and how they interacted with each other before the split at Davos.
It is obvious that Eilenberger has his own views and judgements on the four; he devotes the most space to the views of Heidegger and seems to be most sympathetic to his philosophy of existentialism (although very unsympathetic to him as a person, for good reasons), emphasizes those aspects of Wittgenstein and Benjamin that he can fit in with Heidegger but portrays them as mentally disturbed losers, and likes Cassirer as a person but isn't really interested in his philosophy, because he is too rational and objective and doesn't talk about Angst or unmotivated "authentic" choices. In short, we are seeing them all through a certain lens, which isn't necessarily the lens I would prefer seeing them through. The book was quite interesting both for the biographical material which I didn't know much about and because it showed how these figures who are usually not brought into contact were really part of the same development.
Oct. 1091. Molière, Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre [1665] 101 pages [in French]
The second play in my reading of the Don Juan tradition; I had read this one decades ago. Molière does not base the play directly on Tirso, but on French versions of Italian versions; it seems though that he was the first to change the "trickster" of the previous plays into the "seducer" of later tradition and create the character that gave the theme its importance to later philosophers and psychologists such as Kierkegaard.
The play is comic but also deals with serious themes such as hypocrisy (part of the play is obviously a comment on the banning of his earlier Tartuffe.) In fact, he implies that the divine vengeance is more for Dom Juan's hypocrisy than for his sexual adventures or his blasphemy.
The play was performed fifteen times before disappearing from the repertory -- the sixteenth performance was two hundred years later -- presumably due to the same "cabale des dévots" that suppressed Tartuffe. The printed editions were subject to varying amounts of censorship; many of the suppressed passages were restored in an edition published in Amsterdam, which is used for the modern editions, but we probably don't have the play exactly as it was written.
Oct 1492. Tariq Ali, Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays [2009] 294 pages
This book is a collection of essays on literature and politics. The title essay is one of the weakest in the book, a strange satire on Zionism which begins with a discussion of politics in fiction, turns to a discussion of Proust's novel Sodom and Gommorah, makes some absurd historical claims which I'm not sure were intended seriously and then ends up with a tongue-in-cheek argument which uses the language of the Zionists to argue that just as they claimed that anti-Semitism and ancient Biblical history justified a Jewish state in Palestine, so gays should respond to anti-gay prejudice by establishing a gay state in their ancient homeland of Sodom and Gommorah. I can understand using this as the title for the collection, for shock value, but it is unfortunate in that it suggests a false idea of what the book really is.
The book is divided into three parts; the first part is entitled "Politics and Literature" and contains a very interesting essay on Cervantes (arguing that Don Quixote was a disguised attack on the Catholic Church from the vantage point of the Jewish conversos); an essay on Russian literature, comparing Tolstoy and Vassily Grossman; an essay on Anthony Powell, whom I have never read; an essay on Salman Rushdie, arguing that Shame is his most important novel; an essay on the roots of Indian democracy; interviews with Mario Vargas Llosa (on The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta) and Juan Goytisolo; two "notes" on Kipling and Sartre; a general article on commercialized literature and another article on Zionism and anti-Semitism. All were very interesting and I added a number of new writers to my already too long list of things I need to read (Andrei Platonov, Vassily Grossman and Juan Goytisolo at least).
The second part is called "Diaries" and uses Ali's travels as springboards to discuss the politics of various countries; they were very informative, but some were rather out of date and some assumed more knowledge than I have of the recent history of the different regimes, especially in Pakistan. The third part is made up of elegies of various persons, political figures and friends of Ali who have died in the recent past.
In his discussion of Rushdie, he defends his early novels against the charge that they are "pessimistic", arguing that they are simply realistic and have been borne out by events; Ali himself in these essays is "realistic", but not at all pessimistic, which I found refreshing.
Oct 1593. Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon [2014] 321 pages
Lagoon is a literary combination of science fiction and magical realism, which uses (and twists) the sf cliché of an alien invasion to describe the culture and life of the city of Lagos, Nigeria. Of the other books I have read by Nigerian authors (Okorafor was born in America of Nigerian (Igbo) parents)-- and Nigeria has one of the most dynamic literatures around -- this reminded me most of certain plays by Wole Soyinka; Father Oke reminded me strongly of Brother Jero, and the mythical treatment of the horrendous carnage on the Nigerian roads was also a theme of Soyinka's writings. (It's perhaps not accidental that Okorafor has been a winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature.)
This was the first book I have read by the author, but I may ultimately read some of her other books, such as the Hugo and Nebula winning Binti trilogy.
Oct 1694. Ismail Kadare, Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories [1984-1986, 1993; Eng tr 2006] 226 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
This book consists of the novella, Agamemnon's Daughter and two stories, "The Blinding Order" and "The Great Wall".
Written just before the fall of the Stalinist regime in Albania, the title novella was smuggled out to France and intended to be published after the author's death, and thus is far more direct and outspoken in its criticism of the regime than the more allegorical novels which preceded it. There is really no plot; the entire novel is the stream-of-consciousness of a low-level official who has just learned that his girlfriend Suzana, the daughter of a high official, has been ordered to break up with him to avoid jeopardizing her father's new position as the Successor to The Guide, Enver Hoxha. He has also, much to his and everyone else's surprise, been invited to watch the May Day Parade from the official grandstand. He feels a combination of pride and guilt, afraid that others will think he must have done something terrible to be rewarded by the regime. He compares his girlfriend's being ordered to break up with him to Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigeneia. He also recalls various events (purges) in the history of Albania. As we see his thoughts we feel that he is totally paranoid -- and then realize that that is precisely the point of the novella, that Albanian life as the dictatorship becomes more desperate is a kind of institutionalized paranoia.
"The Blinding Order" is an allegory of a similar kind, although less realistic in style, set in the unreal "Ottoman Empire" of The Palace of Dreams. "The Great Wall" is about a rebuilding of the Great Wall of China in the time of Timurlane, and also serves as an allegory of the Albanian regime and the so-called "iron curtain". All three are well-written and reminiscent of Kafka.
Oct 17
95. Ismail Kadare, The Successor [2003, tr. 2005] 206 pages [Kindle]
The Successor is a sequel to Agamemnon's Daughter, written more than a decade later after the collapse of the regime, which is foreshadowed in the novel. Suzana's father, the "Sucessor", is found dead of a gunshot wound. Initially described as a suicide, it is later suggested it may have been murder -- perhaps at the highest level of government. The novel is again a Kafkaesque mixture of bizarre investigations and rumors which never seem to add up to any conclusion, as the Successor is variously rehabilitated and denounced. The enigma is similar to that of the death of Lin Biao, the "Successor" to Mao, as Kadare presented it in The Concert. I was unsure reading it how much of this was based on history and how much was made up, but one review I read says it was based on the suicide or murder of Mehmet Shehu in 1981.
Oct. 24
96. Heather Ewing, The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian [2007] 432 pages
There have been other books written about the founder of the Smithsonian, mostly combined with a history of the institution itself, but Ewing's book is based on new original research by the author and seems far more complete, to the extent anything can be known. Smithson left a great deal of material -- journals, unpublished manuscripts, and so forth -- but it was nearly all destroyed in the fire at the Smithsonian in 1865. The author has searched for letters to other scientists, documents in various government and private archives, and the annotations in the books he left (which were in the library wing of Smithsonian which was not damaged by the fire) in order to reconstruct as much of his life and work as is now possible.
Although he is not known for any great discoveries, Smithson was a significant figure in the early history of chemical mineralogy, and had a high reputation among his contemporaries, which I had not realized. He was on the governing board of the Royal Society, a founder of the Royal Institute, and a member of several other important scientific societies. The book is interesting for its descriptions of the European scientific community of the time (Smithson spent much of his later life on the continent, including three years as a prisoner of war in Denmark, and had contact with nearly all the major scientists).
97. Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said [2006] 128 pages
Although Tariq Ali is listed as the author, apart from a memorial preface (reprinted in the collection of essays I read last week), the text is primarily the words of Edward Said, who was interviewed by Ali for a filmed documentary in 1994. Said was from a relatively wealthy Palestinian Christian family which left Jerusalem for Cairo in 1947 (most of his other relatives were driven into exile the next year); he was sent to a boarding school in the United States and later attended Princeton and Harvard before becoming a professor of comparative literature at Columbia. As an academic, he is best known for his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. He was also quite knowledgeable about music; the only books I had previously read by him were about music, Music at the Limits and his dialogue with Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes, both published posthumously. To most people, however, he is best known for his role as an activist for the Palestinian cause.
The conversation here touches on all these facets: his early life, his involvement in politics, his books, and even his ideas on music. His criticisms of the Palestinian leadership, and Yasser Arafat in particular, are quite interesting, as is his view that the Palestinians needed to win over and make alliances with sectors of the Israeli Jewish population, something the Palestinian official leadership never attempted (and couldn't, given their commitment to a military strategy long after it was hopeless.) I was reminded of the debates within the Irish movement. The book ends with a criticism of liberal and "left" academics for their lack of real involvement in political movements.
Oct 3198. Lord Byron, Don Juan [1821] 720 pages
Lord Byron is considered a major English poet, and according to Wikipedia Don Juan is his Magnum opus. It's certainly one of the longest poems I've ever read, and it's unfinished -- actually Don Juan has barely gotten started, with fewer amorous conquests than Byron himself. But to be honest, I found it rather boring. The first two cantos, in mock epic style, are quite funny in places -- he follows a stanza and a half of deliberately bad verse with a parenthesis "and this last simile is trite and boring", and there are also some wonderful digressions in the first few cantos on monarchy and war, but once the hero arrives in England, he is almost lost sight of in long degressions satirizing the British aristocracy and marriage practices. Perhaps if anyone other than historians remembered who many of the people he is aiming at were, it would be as funny as the first parts, but I just kept thinking, when is Don Juan going to do something besides eat dinner?
99. Chimamanda Adichie, Zikora [2020] 35 pages
Adichie packs an awful lot of emotion and good observation into a story that can be read in under an hour, and the time of the narrative itself is not much longer. Zikora, a Washington lawyer and immigrant from Nigeria, is having a baby, and she reflects on her boyfriend, her mother and father, and her sister and brother-in-law, juxtaposing different forms of relationship. This was an Amazon original short story, free on Kindle Unlimited.
Nov 3100. Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies [2010. tr. 2018] 243 pages
The 2019 Man Booker International Prize winning novel by Omani author Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies traces the generations of a family in the Omani village of Al-Awafi. The novel begins with the arranged marriage of Mayya to Abdallah, the son of Merchant Sulayman. The style is modernist, with first-person chapters told through the stream-of-consciousness of Abdallah alternating with chapters told in the third person focusing on other characters; the chapters are not in chronological order, but weave backwards and forwards in time, often within a single chapter. We focus in various chapters on Mayya's mother Salima, whose father and uncle were Shayks (the local nobility), on her and Abdallah's daughter London, as a newborn and then more than twenty years later, on Mayya's sisters Asma and Khawla, on her father Azzan, on a Bedouin girl named Qamar, on Zarifa, a former slave and mistress of Abdallah's father, Merchant Sulayman, and her son Sanjar, and near the end of the novel, on Asma's and Khawla's husbands, as well as other minor relatives. We get glimpses of the slave-owning past, the oil-rich present, and the years in between. We see the characters, especially the women, submit to and rebel in various ways and to different degrees against the traditional customs, creating a kaleidoscope of differing relationships. Family secrets are gradually revealed. There are allusions to other authors I have read or will be reading for the same Goodreads group, such as the poets Nisar Qabbani and Mahmoud Darwish. The novel depicts the changing life of Oman in an age of rapid transition.
Nov 6101. Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope [2006] 244 pages
Another nonfiction book by Tariq Ali, the last of the books by him which I have. In this one, he turns his attention to the politics of the Caribbean and South America, which he sees (or saw some fifteen years ago) as more hopeful than other parts of the world. Ostensibly, the book is about Cuba (Fidel Castro), Venezuela (Hugo Chávez) and Bolivia (Evo Morales); in fact there is relatively little about Cuba (and I have read better) and not much more about Morales, who had just been elected, although there is a good deal of background on Bolivia. Essentially, this is a book about Hugo Chávez and his "Bolivarian Revolution" in Venezuela.
Especially in a long period of reaction, revolutionaries tend to grasp at any sign of an upturn, and I think Ali may have overestimated the significance of Chávez (and Morales). There was no actual revolution in Venezuela, Chávez won the Presidency in an election; unlike Castro, he didn't end capitalism or destroy the landowning oligarchy as a class; even Ali refers on several occasions to his "moderate reforms." On the other hand, the reforms were genuine and substantial, particularly compared to previous regimes anywhere in South America (with the exception of Allende in Chile). The oligarchy (backed by Washington) tried at least four times unsuccessfully to remove him, and the capitalist world media waged a campaign of disinformation about him second only to their campaign against Castro. It is definitely worthwhile to have a book which answers the neo-liberal propaganda.
The real value of most of Ali's nonfiction writing (as opposed to his novels) is his presentation of the historical context in a wider frame, rather than the details of his own position, and that is true here as well, especially now that Castro and Chávez are dead and Morales deposed and in exile.
Nov 9102. Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance [rev ed 1959] 1022 pages
While obviously somewhat outdated after sixty years, this is probably the most comprehensive book on Renaissance music available in English. It's divided into two parts; the first part is on the "central language" in France and the Netherlands and in Italy; the second, shorter part is on the "diffusion" of the language in Spain, Germany, Eastern Europe and England. The first part begins with chapters on the generations of Dufay, Ockegham and Josquin, which were the most interesting chapters; it then becomes more encyclpedia-like dealing with the Late Renaissance, in places becoming more like a listing of many composers. The second part is even more list-like. It was emjoyable reading it (while listening to many of the composers on Spotify) although in some ways it was beyond my musical knowledge as a non-musician.
Nov 10
103. Alexander Pushkin, The Little Tragedies [1830, tr 2010] 118 pages [Kindle]
Four very short plays by Pushkin written in 1830, in a new verse translation by Alan Shaw. The four were "The Miserly Knight", "Mozart and Salieri" (which was a source of Amadeus, "The Stone Guest" (Don Juan) and "Feast During Time of Plague." The characters were interesting, but I don't think it is really possible to appreciate works like this in a translation, however accurate it may be. I wish I knew Russian.
Nov. 12104. Ismail Kadare, Elegy for Kosovo [1998, tr. 2000] 125 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
The Plain of Kosovo has been a battlefield between Albanians, Serbs and Turks for nearly a thousand years. This short book is divided into three parts -- another English translation is called Three Elegies for Kosovo, which is a literal translation of the Albanian and French titles. The first part, "The Ancient Battle", deals with the battle of Kosovo in 1389 between the Christians and the Turks, the second, "The Great Lady", with the fugitives from the battle, and the third, "The Royal Prayer" is the thoughts of the murdered Sultan Murad I (assassinated by his own viziers at the end of the battle) from the time of the battle through the recent war between NATO and the Serbs. The book, unusually straightforward for Kadare, is essentially a plea for peace in the Balkans.
Nov. 15105. Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance [1999] 243 pages
Leonard Peltier has been in prison for over 43 years, making him one of the world's longest-confined political prisoners. This book was written 22 years ago; since that time he has been denied clemency by Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. I assume shortly we will be able to add Biden to that list. The book does not re-argue his case; there have been many books that have done that, including the comprehensive In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen, which I reviewed a few years ago. Instead, he explains how he became an activist and his vision for the future. A book both disturbing and inspirational, to add to the ones by Dennis Banks, Mary Crow Dog and Russell Means which I have read over the past few years.
Nov 19106. Edward Everett Bostetter, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan: A Collection of Critical Essays [1969] 119 pages
Given the contradiction between the reputation of Byron's Don Juan as a major work of literature, and my own less-than-enthusiastic impression, I decided to see what it is the critics see in it. This collection contains eight longer critical articles, and eight shorter excerpts about the poem. I didn't really change my opinion; in fact, most of the critics agreed with me that the first cantos were the best (and I perhaps got a better understanding of what they were doing) and the ones set in England weren't that great, although one or two of the shorter selections took the opposite position, that the satire of the British aristocracy was his greatest achievement (mainly British critics, and especially T.S. Eliot, who probably know that social stratum better than I do.) One interesting point they brought up was that Don Juan, and especially the English cantos, should be considered more as a novel in verse than a real poem, and perhaps from that standpoint they could be better appreciated in context with say Jane Austen's novels rather than with poetry.
Nov 25107. Honoré de Balzac, Le lys dans la vallée [1836] 314 pages [in French]
Although written between two of his greatest novels, Le père Goriot and Les illusions perdus, Le lys dans la vallée is not in my opinion one of Balzac's best. Balzac in the Comédie humaine vacillates between the Romanticism of his time and a not yet fully developed Realism; while his best works, like Le père Goriot and Les illusions perdus, are predominantly Realist, Le lys dans la vallée is very Romantic. As in many of his less successful novels, it is hard to get into at first with long descriptions of scenery, furnishings and so forth before the reader is interested in the characters or the action; the emotional scenes which can be very powerful are continued too long and with too much repetition and too many religious platitudes (although those may have been more acceptable in a more Christian period.)
The novel is ostensibly a long letter from Félix de Vandenesse to his current lover Natalie, in response to her request to explain his past. (The conceit hardly works; the style is not at all like a letter, and as her short reply at the end tells him it is obviously inappropriate to send to his lover, or to write at all.) He describes his unhappy childhood and how as a young man he fell in love with Henriette (Mme. de Mortsauf), a woman a few years older than he is who is in an unhappy marriage. The bulk of the novel describes their attempt at a Platonic love affair without infringing on her duties to her husband and children. Apparently he wrote the novel in reply to one by Sainte Beuve, to show how he would present the theme of a renunciation of erotic love in favor of marital and family duty, and to meet criticisms that his women characters weren't sufficiently moral, but he didn't convince the critics of his time (or me): whether he intended it or not, the novel shows how the morality it is supposedly supporting only creates misery for all the characters (and in her dying moments Henriette herself seems to reject it). He also describes his very un-Platonic love affair with a British noblewoman, Lady Dudley. Balzac makes it easier on himself (and I think makes an aesthetic mistake) by opposing the completely negative character of Lady Dudley as a foil to Henriette (although at the very end Natalie in her reply suggests that the narrator is unfair to both.)
Nov 26108. Jose Zorilla, Don Juan Tenorio [1844] 201 pages [in Spanish]
A classic of nineteenth century Spanish literature, this play in verse is probably the best-known version of the Don Juan legend after Molière's play and Mozart's opera (Byron's poem is not really about the same character, as far as it was completed). The play begins with the meeting of Don Juan and Don Luis, to settle their bet as to which of the two could in one year kill the most men and seduce the most women; Don Juan of course has won easily. He then extends the bet -- he will seduce Don Luis' fiancée, Doña Ana, and a novice about to become a nun, Doña Inez. The plot concerning Doña Ana is dealt with rather perfunctorily; the play concentrates its interest on the abduction of Doña Inez. The action then skips forward five years, with the invitation and visit of the Comendador's statue and the final scene in the cemetery, which is quite different from other versions and more theological.
Nov 29109. Ismail Kadare, A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B. [2009, tr. 2016] 185 pages
Another strong story of the Albanian dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, by Ismail Kadare, this is the story of a playwright, Rudian Stefa, who becomes, without his knowledge, involved in the life story of a teenage girl, Linda B., who is interned because her family were connected with the pre-World War II monarchy. As in many of his novels, there are mythical allusions (here the story of Orpheus and Eurydice) and surreal dream sequences. One of the many crimes of the Stalinists (not only in Albania) was the mistreatment of so-called "class enemies", including those who were children or not even born at the time of the revolution, reminiscent of the bourgeois reign of terror in the French Revolution. This whole idea is really a bourgeois conception of the world -- see today's liberals who all think in terms of "good" vs. "bad" individuals. For real Marxists, the enemy is the class structure of capitalist society, not the individual representatives of the bourgeoisie, who should be treated based on their actual individual behaviors.
Nov 30110. Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the pessoptimist [1974, tr. 1985] 169 pages
A black comedy modeled on Voltaire's Candide, set in the years after 1948, when the Palestinians were driven out of Palestine by the Zionists. Avoiding the Romantic or Naturalist style of much political fiction, instead of heroes and villains Habiby gives us an anti-hero, Saeed, as naive and unintelligent as Candide, though a "pessoptimist" rather than an optimist (instead of thinking everything happens for the best, he thinks it isn't as bad as it might have been). He believes whatever the authorities tell him, and works as an agent for the Israeli government, though rather ineffectively. His ideas are constantly being refuted by the realities, but he just doesn't catch on. The novel is supposedly told as a letter from Saeed, who has been rescued by space aliens. It makes its political points all the more effectively for not being strident or directly propagandistic. (The edition I read had an introduction which gave some facts about the author; a founder of the Israeli Communist Party, he was elected three times to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) and was the editor of the newspaper Al-Ittahad. He was one of the best-known Palestinian novelists. He died in 1998.)
The date 1998 on the back cover is apparently a typo; he actually died in 1996.
Dec 4111. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy [1903] 261 pages
It's been some fifty years since I read Shaw, and I'm not sure which plays I read, but I don't think this was one of them. Shaw in his dedicatory letter to Arthur Bingham Walkley says that this is his response to Walkley's suggestion that he write a play about Don Juan. Of course he twists it, so that his Don Juan Tenorio (John or Jack Tanner), a purely verbal "libertine", is afraid of women and particularly of being trapped into marriage by Ann Whitefield (Doña Ana). The original Don Juan, Doña Ana, Commendatore, and the Devil appear in a dream sequence which is essentially a pamphlet and usually ommitted in actual performances of the play. The printed version also has an appendix, supposedly the book written by Tanner, called "The Revolutionist's Handbook", which is also a long pamphlet expressing Shaw's opinions.
Revolutionist? While Shaw and the Fabian Society of which he was a leader may be considered "socialist", given a sufficiently broad definition of the term (unlike our own "Democratic Socialists", which don't meet any definition of the word, being barely even liberal), the last thing one could call them is "revolutionary." The content is basically just eugenicist twaddle about breeding the "Superman", misunderstood from Nietzsche. Essentially, rather than socialist, eugenicist, misogynist (which suggests itself) or any other label, Shaw is a contrarian (a more talented and much less unreadable version of today's Slavoj Zizek, who also calls himself a socialist.) Like most contrarians, he occasionally makes good points, among much that just seems silly.
Taking away the two pamphlets, one is left with a mildly amusing satirical comedy about marriage and the battle of the sexes, which was undoubtedly funnier and perhaps more daring a century ago than it is today.
Dec 6112. Ismail Kadare, The Accident [2008, tr. 2010] 265 pages
The Accident is one of the strangest of Kadare's books, and that's saying quite a bit. It opens with what appears to be a routine traffic accident in Vienna: a taxi suddenly veers into the meridian wall, the two passengers, a man and a woman, both Albanians, are thrown out and killed and the driver hospitalized. When he recovers, he says that he was momentarily distracted by seeing them in the rearview mirror "try to kiss", but he can't explain what he means by this strange expression. The two victims are identified as Besfort Y., a Balkan analyst for the Council of Europe, and Rovena St., an archaeologist. Because of the odd statement of the driver, the case is filed as an "unusual accident." Shortly afterwards, the intelligence agencies of Serbia-and-Montenegro and Albania take an interest in the case, and it is suggested it may have been a political assassination of some sort. They investigate and find a lot of incoherent information about the two (some evidence suggests that they have been lovers for twelve years, other evidence that it is a call girl and her client), but eventually they give up the effort and conclude that it probably wasn't a murder after all. Sometime later, an unidentified researcher for unknown reasons decides to look into the case. So far, it seems as if the book will be what the back cover blurbs call it, a criminal or political "thriller."
The second and longest part, however, turns in a very different direction. Here we have the researcher's "reconstruction" of their love affair, which turns out to be very strange, especially in the year before the accident. This part alternates chapters from the viewpoints of the two lovers, with all their thoughts and memories, and it takes an effort to remember that this is not an omniscient narrator's description but a very speculative reconstruction by the "researcher". Essentially, this is a psychological description of a very abnormal love affair (or is it?), and the psychology is the main interest of the novel. As in all of Kadare's novels, there are political allusions, here to what Americans call the "War in Bosnia", but in this novel they seem to be included by reflex or habit rather than the point of the book -- unless as one Amazon reviewer claimed the whole novel is a political allegory of Albania's relationship to the West. If so, I didn't get it at all.
A short third part then calls into question everything we thought we knew. (Remember Kadare is a postmodernist.)
Dec 9113. Emile Habiby, Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale [1991, tr. 2006] 210 pages
The last day of November, I read the first and most famous of Habiby's seven novels, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, written in 1974. Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter was his last novel, written in 1991. As far as I know, they are the only ones that have been translated into English. While the first novel had some strange elements, it was relatively straightforward compared to Saraya. The book is told as a conversation between two friends, the overall narrator who is more or less Habiby (he mentions writing the Pessoptimist book) and Abdallah, the protagonist, who is recounting his "tale". Most of the chapters begin with "HE SAID:". The "tale" begins near the end, with Saraya, or a vision of Saraya, appearing to Abdallah on a boulder in the sea. The story then keeps returning to various times in his life, but not in a straight chronological order, and the various episodes are not all consistent; some have magical aspects or may be dreams or imagined events.
Most people are familiar with the Arab fairy tale of Saraya the Ogre's Daughter, although not in that form; the Western version has a witch-mother rather than an ogre-father, and calls the girl Rapunzel. Right, the one with the long hair who got tangled up with Disney. In the Arab version, she is found not by a wandering knight but by her cousin, the preferred husband in traditional Arabic and other traditional cultures. Despite the subtitle, this novel does not tell the fairy tale of Saraya, or even give a modern retelling, although there are allusions to it throughout the book. Abdallah tells us, or at least implies, at various points that his Saraya (at one point he says he gave her that name, at another that it was her real name) may have been his cousin, the daughter of his strange uncle Ibrahim and his Coptic wife Maria (who might also have been Jewish and named Miriam), although he also says that daughter died as a baby; or a foundling adopted by his uncle, or a gypsy girl, or something more supernatural (he emphasizes several times that "his" Saraya is "flesh-and-blood", but also seems to assume that she hasn't aged in half a century.) There are also references back to the first novel; the narrator says "you remember in my novel the Pessoptimist Said's uncle, also named Said (this translator gives the name as Said rather than Saeed), found a vault with a treasure" and Abdallah says, "that really happened, it was found by my uncle Ibrahim." I assume in both books it has some symbolic meaning.
Apparently (you can't be sure of anything Abdallah says) Uncle Ibrahim disappeared for the last time taking Saraya with him (here Abdallah refers to him as "the ogre"), and Abdallah has always felt guilty for "forgetting" her, while he lived in the diaspora, until he finally comes back to try to find her and his past, in what he calls his "Via Dolorosa". (The book has many Christian allusions; although Abdallah is presumably Moslem, Habiby was raised Christian, and as he says the Zionists made no distinction. Note that Edward Said (the Palestinian activist and Columbia professor, not the Pessoptimist) was also from a Christian family.) As in the first novel (and presumably the other five) the real point is to describe the plight of the Palestinians driven out of Palestine or relegated to second-class status in Israel, without making that the obvious subject of the story.
Dec 10114. Tariq Ali, The Leopard and the Fox: A Pakistani Tragedy [2007] 204 pages
I thought I was through reading Tariq Ali for the time being, but then I found this in my garage. It is a screenplay about the overthrow and execution of the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, by the military dictatorship of General Zia. It was commissioned by the BBC Drama Department but as with other plays by Ali it was cancelled under political pressure. The book has the opinion of the BBC legal department as an appendix; the excuse for cancelling the project was that General Zia might sue the BBC for libel, and it would be difficult to prove that the trial of Bhutto was unfair since it was held in secret and there was no transcript. One might think. . . but remember that at the time the dictatorship of General Zia was funding the Taliban's jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The most important passage in the play, however, is not about the coup or the trial and execution, but this about Bhutto himself (omitting the stage directions):
Habib: He promised the people the moon. Food, clothes and shelter for all. I remember telling the crowds on his behalf that our People's Government would build schools and hospitals for the poor in the large mansions of the rich. People believed us, Lily. He couldn't deliver. He could have, but it needed a revolution. Your papers called him our Fidel Castro but he wasn't. So, finally, he made a pact with the very politicians we defeated and destroyed. He lifted the people to the skies, then dropped them to the ground. Confiscated their aspirations.
Lily: Saint Just. . .!
Habib: Saint Just?
Lily:: "Those who make the revolution half-way dig their own graves."
Dec 12115. Ismail Kadare, The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother [2015, tr. 2020] 175 pages
As far as I know, The Doll is Kadare's most recent book; at any rate it is the last I will be reading for the time being (although maybe that's dangerous to say, since whenever I do another one shows up at the library or in a box in my garage.) It's an autobiographical novel, mainly about his mother, nicknamed "The Doll", and his grandmother. It is very different from his other works, a fairly straightforward narrative, although not entirely chronological, without dream sequences or alternate versions of reality. There is much less about politics, except occasionally as background. It talks about his family and education, his early writings, and his marriage.
Dec 17
116. Alexandre Dumas, Don Juan de Marana: Pièce de théâtre [1836] 172 pages [Kindle; in French}
I had missed this one initially when I looked for versions of Don Juan, because I was looking for Don Juan Tenorio. Dumas created a new character, Don Juan de Marana, in order to deviate from the original Don Juan story -- no statue of the Commendatore, and in fact no Commendatore. There is one allusion to this Don Juan's rivalry with the earlier Don Juan. Actually, there is much in common with Zorilla's Don Juan Tenorio -- the wager in the inn with Don Luis, an extended scene in the cemetery, and an ultimate repentance. I was surprised to see that this was the earlier of the two, if I can trust the dates on Wikipedia. The play begins with the good and bad angels of the Marana family, who play a role throughout the play.
Dec 18117. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Trois Don Juan [1914] 140 pages
This short book is divided into three independent stories, each dealing with a different version of the legend. The first part is "Don Juan Tenorio ou le Don Juan d'Espagne", a rather eclectic version which begins by conflating several versions (probably owing the most to Mozart's Don Giovanni), follows Zorilla's play very closely (even to the words, although abridged) for the story of Doña Ines, and then returns to Mozart for the final scene. The second part, "Don Juan de Maraña ou le Don Juan des Flandres", contrary to my expectation, had a completely different plot than the Dumas play, although the ending is similar and there are a few reminiscences. The third and longest part (about half the book) is "Don Juan d'Angleterre ou le songe de Lord Byron", which is a very abridged (it leaves out most of the satire of the English episode) but otherwise close prose translation of his poem. Although the first two parts were interesting (and the third part might have been if I hadn't just read Byron) I doubt this would be reprinted at all if it weren't by Apollinaire.
Dec 22118. Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas [1996] 381 pages
'Tis the season when the conservative Christians launch their yearly propaganda campaign about how "the atheists are trying to suppress Christmas." And after all, the atheists did make celebrating Christmas illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681, right? Oh wait, that wasn't the atheists, it was the Puritans (a.k.a. conservative Christians.) The first chapter of Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas is called "New England's War on Christmas", and quotes many anti-Christmas sermons and writings by the Puritan clergy, particularly Increase and Cotton Mather. As early as the first year after the Mayflower, Governor Bradstreet of Plymouth ordered would-be Christmas-keepers to return to work. English almanacs, when reprinted in New England, always had the entry for December 25 removed up until 1720 (when Benjamin Franklin's older brother James broke the taboo), and there were no Christmas hymns or other songs printed in New England before that date, except during the brief dictatorship of Governor Andros, when the Puritans were out of power. Christmas celebration was legalized under Andros; after his ouster, it remained legal but the campaign against it resumed with laws forbidding churches to be open or shops and workplaces to be closed on December 25 unless it fell on a Sunday. Nevertheless, all the efforts of the Puritan oligarchy were unable to prevent the working classes, particularly the sailors and fisherman of Marblehead and Nantucket, from "keeping Christmas".
Why did the Puritans oppose Christmas so fervently? First, because it's not in the Bible; they asked, if God wanted people to celebrate the nativity, why didn't he tell them when it was? They clearly and explicitly recognized that in fact the date and the rituals associated with Christmas were pagan survivals of the Saturnalia and solstice celebrations (the "true meaning of the season"? -- mention the fact today and they'll mutter about "the atheists are trying to . . ." but it's emphasized in Increase Mather's writings.) Second, because Christmas was a time of feasting, drinking, dancing and "sexual license", and, worst of all, working people demanding to be treated as equal to their "betters." (All sounds good to me!) The main custom of Christmas was "wassailing", in which peasants and other working people came to the houses of the rich and expected to be given food, drink, and even gifts of money, in exchange for singing and other performances -- and there was a veiled or not-so-veiled threat of what might happen if they didn't get it. This was later put back to Halloween as "trick-or-treat" but as a game for children rather than a serious activity for adults. (Trivia: wassailing in early modern Scotland was called "Hogomany" -- the true origin of Hogswatch?)
As America approached the Revolution and Puritanism weakened, the rising class of small shopkeepers and merchants, true to their class nature, tried to compromise: Christmas should be celebrated with "moderate" feasting, "moderate" drinking, "respectable" dancing, and of course church services and no class antagonism. They weren't successful. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christmas did change. It's worth quoting what Nissenbaum says about it:
"What happened was that in New England as elsewhere, religion failed to transform Christmas from a season of misrule into an occasion of quieter pleasure. That transformation would, however, shortly take place -- but not at the hands of Christianity. The "house of ale" would not be vanquished by the house of God but by a new faith that was just beginning to sweep over American society. It was the religion of domesticity, which would be represented at Christmas-time not by Jesus of Nazareth but by a newer and more worldly deity -- Santa Claus."
The second chapter details the invention of Santa Claus and the present holiday of Christmas by a group of New York aristocratic landowners calling themselves the "Knickerbockers". Prominent among the inventors of the modern Christmas were Washington Irving, John Pintard, and most importantly, Clement Clarke Moore. All were of English, not Dutch ancestry, High Church Episcopalians, who were equally contemptuous of the bourgeoisie and the working class, and opposed the economic development of New York City in terms of a largely invented Dutch heritage from New Amsterdam. (See Irving's writings.) Santa Claus (a.k.a. Saint NicK) was presented as a revival of the old Dutch customs of Christmas, supposedly forgotten in the social transformations of the City. In fact, there was a Dutch tradition of Santa Claus, not exactly the same as the new American one, but it had never been brought to the New World -- it was a Dutch Catholic tradition, and New Amsterdam was founded by Dutch Protestants who were as anti-Christmas as their English Puritan cousins.
Who remembers reading Michael Wigglesworth's poem "The Day of Doom" in high school? (Okay, so I went to high school in Massachusetts.) Nissenbaum prints excerpts of this poem side by side with Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", better known today as "The Night Before Christmas". Moore follows the structure exactly, just replacing Jesus and hellfire by Santa and presents. I never laughed so much reading a serious book. The new Christmas also echoes the structure of the old Christmas -- the inversion of hierarchy and giving of gifts to social dependents -- but in place of the poor peasants or workers, the dependents involved are the rich person's own children, and it takes place safely within the family rather than in a potentially threatening public way. The third chapter follows the evolution of Santa Claus and the gradual extension of the domestic, child-centered Christmas at the expense of the Saturnalian, carnavalesque Christmas among the middle classes and eventually the working classes. It was a gradual process; this is the "battle for Christmas" of the title. He shows that it was also connected with the Romantic "invention of childhood."
The fourth chapter focuses on presents, and shows that the new child-centered conception of Christmas was also commercialized from its very beginnings. (Interestingly, the commercialization of Christmas gifts began with books, not toys.) The fifth chapter deals with the Christmas tree -- no, that's not an ancient tradition either. It seems to have begun about 1600 as a local tradition in Strasbourg, and was spread to the rest of Germany in the late 1700's, largely by Goethe's popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. It arrived in the U.S. about the same time as the invention of Santa Claus, and was spread again by literature, especially the Christmas Gift Books. The sixth chapter is about the connection of Christmas with organized charity, from Dickens' Scrooge to the Salvation Army. The seventh chapter deals with Christmas under slavery in the South, which was similar to the original Christmas, with the rich (i.e. the slaveowners) giving license and presents to their dependents (slaves). The book ends with a short Epilogue tying it all together.
The bottom line: Christmas was transformed from a pagan, Saturnalian holiday to a secular, commercialized domestic holiday in the course of the nineteenth century. And the Christian, religious holiday some people want us to "go back to"? It never existed. Which is why atheists have no interest in abolishing Christmas.
Dec 29119. Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012 [2012] 639 pages
Louise Glück is the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, the second American poet in four years (after more than two decades of mostly European novelists). This anthology is made up of the eleven poetry collections she published over her first fifty years as a poet. The poetry is very image-heavy free verse, all very personal and domestic (even the mythological poems, mainly from the Odyssey and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, are treated as domestic and personal.) The first collection was so private it was difficult to follow; I felt I was missing the key. The later books were mostly understandable. The most consistent and probably the best collection was Ararat, which focused on the deaths of her father and baby sister, and her relationships with her mother and sister; these themes also reappear in most of the collections. The major themes of all the books are childhood, old age, death and lost love; the images are taken largely from plants and gardening, the seasons, and the sea and beaches. None of the poems reference an urban setting, and there is no social or political poetry; a small number could be considered religious, but hardly in any orthodox sense. I admit I'm not very good at reviewing poetry; I found some of the poems interesting, but many were repetitious, probably a result of reading all her books together rather than separately over a long period of time as they were written.
Dec 30120. Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night [2014] 71 pages
Her latest collection, as far as I can tell the only one since the 1962-2012 anthology. This one is superficially rather different; the persona of most of the poems, rather than a New England woman poet with a sister is a man from Cornwall, a painter or visual artist with a brother. There are almost no flowers or beaches. Many of the poems are prose poems. However, the themes seem almost all the same: childhood memories, time, old age and death.
Dec 31121. Edmund Rostand, La dernière nuit de Don Juan: Poème dramatique en deux parties et un prologue [1921] 114 pages [Kindle, in French]
Written sometime between 1911 and Rostand's death in 1918, this was first published posthumously in 1921, and although it is probably more a closet drama it was performed the next year. A play in verse, it takes a comic but serious look at the Don Juan legend. The prologue begins just after the end of Molière's play and Mozart's opera, with the statue taking Don Juan down into hell. He makes a deal with the devil to let him return to life for ten years to complete his project of seductions. The play proper takes place at the end of that ten-year period, when the devil returns to claim him. There is a sort of contest in which Don Juan defends his life in the terms that many critics have seen him, as a great lover, a symbol of revolt, and so forth, and the devil basically shoots him down on every count.
61. Stoic Six Pack 9: The Presocratics [2016] 182 pages [Kindle]
Every once and a while I read a number of articles (for instance on one of Shakespeare's plays or something else I'm reading or watching) and group them together as a "book" for my Goodreads goals. This is the same sort of thing, only pre-made by someone else (the editor is anonymous) and sold for ninety-nine cents on the Kindle store. It's part of a series of "Stoic Six Packs", collections of six articles on various topics in ancient Greek philosophy; the selections are in the public domain and all very outdated, but I read anything I can find on the presocratics, who are a particular interest of mine. This "book" contained one real gem that was worth the price; the other four were misfires.
Four, not five? To begin with, one selection wasn't here at all. I was looking forward from the contents to reading what George Grote, one of the better-known classicists of the nineteenth century had to say about the presocratics. There was a title page saying "The Presocratics/by George Grote". However, the next page begins with an "abstract" of Plato's Republic, which was essentially just a paraphrase of the arguments of the dialogue, with no commentary whatsoever; I'm not even sure whether it was by Grote, though that doesn't really matter. It was the sort of thing a high school student might read as a crib, of no real interest to anyone else. It made no mention of the presocratics, except insofar as some characters in the dialogue are "Sophists" who are sometimes lumped with the presocratics. There was nothing even about them as actual existing thinkers, just a paraphrase of what their characters say in the dialogue. I assume it was an accident by the person who put this together and included the wrong file.
The first article chronologically was called "The Pre-Socratics" by Benjamin Cocker, apparently a chapter in a book called Christianity and Greek Philosophy published in 1871. It was totally worthless. Cocker begins with the premise that everyone, always and everywhere, is born with an "intuition" that there is a unique, incorporeal God who created the universe; he considers it "proven" that the Greeks (contrary to everything we know about their early religion) believed in this unique, incorporeal God. Since the presocratics don't explicitly deny that there is such a God (because the idea never occurred to them, obviously), we are entitled to assume that it was the real basis of their system, and that they were talking about how God created the world from water, the Infinite, air, fire, etc. He tells us nothing specific that everyone doesn't know about their systems, and bases himself on hints in the late, Latin writings of Cicero, ignoring all the earlier Greek sources that contradict his theory. In short, Christian special pleading which should not have been included.
The next two selections were actually both chapters from the same book by John Marshall, A Short History of Greek Philosophy, published in 1891. The first chapter is "The School of Miletus: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Herclitus"; the second is "The Eleatics: Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus". They were both fairly standard short treatments of the subject as it was understood at the time, and the book was probably a textbook. (Note that the Six Pack has nothing at all about the Atomists.)
Next is a 1903 article by William Arthur Heidel, called "The Logic of the Pre-Socratic Philosophy", from Studies in Logical Theory. This dealt with the general presuppositions of the earliest Greek philosophers had some interesting ideas about their evolution. Unfortunately it was based on a very schematic use of the subject, predicate, copula formula which made it difficult to understand.
Finally, the gem: another article by Heidel, from 1921, called "Anaximander's Book, the Earliest Known Geographical Treatise". Most treatments of the presocratics are based on Aristotle and the doxographic tradition, which consider the philosophies purely from a cosmological and metaphysical viewpoint. Heidel on the other hand has collected the references to Anaximander in particular from ancient works on geography. One thing we know about Anaximander is that he is credited with making the first map of the world; he is also credited (obviously incorrectly) with the invention of the sundial, but he may well have been the first to use it for astronomical -- and geographical -- theory. He is also credited with astronomical discoveries such as the obliquity of the zodiac. The Suda -- still referred to as "Suidas" in 1921 -- in its article on Anaximander credits him as having written not just one book On Physics but several others: A Tour of the Earth, The Sphere, and so forth. The writers of the sixth century did not use titles, and these are all conventional titles added in the catalogs of the later libraries such as the Museum at Alexandria; some of them may be titles of parts of the same book which existed as separate manuscripts in the library. Tour of the Earth is a title given to all early books which combine history and geography. Many of the titles attributed to Anaximander are also books attributed to his younger colleague Hecataeus, who may have been mainly concerned with improving the theories of Anaximander. The conclusion Heidel comes to is very interesting: the cosmic theory of Anaximander, and the fragments about the evolution of life in the sea, are an introduction to a longer book concerned with the history/geography of the world. He suggests that with Anaximenes and Hecataeus, this complex is divided into specialized studies of cosmology and geography, so that Anaximenes is known only for his cosmic theory and Hecataeus is a geographer not considered in the doxographical tradition as a philosopher.
This view of Anaximander -- which may also explain the little we know about Thales -- seems very plausible, and I don't really understand why none of the more recent books and articles on the presocratics consider the idea or the testimonia from the geographical tradition; perhaps they are still too focused on Aristotle and the doxographers. In reading this, I thought about two analogies (not in Heidel). One is the way the book of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus serve as an introduction to the law code of the Torah. The other, even closer, if modern example, is the first adult book I ever read: H.G. Wells' Outline of History, which begins with chapters on astronomy and the evolution of life as an introduction to the actual human history of the world.