Review of Witold Gombrowicz's "Pornografia"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

When reaching the end of a novel, rarely do I have so much to say, and also so little. This was my first experience with Gombrowicz, and it was a bewildering, exciting one. It has elective affinities with Kundera that make it a unique, and not wholly pleasurable, read. About one third of the way through the novel, I wasn’t sure that I would make it the rest of the way. The purely distilled, unrelenting psychological depictions of its characters and occasional absurdism can sometimes make it arduous, but this eventually lets up a bit. I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. I think I had insisted a bit too much before I even began reading the novel that it would have somehow relate to the War, our relation to it, and how we react to it. 

As has already been noted by other reviewers, the title is appropriate, but the novel is not “pornographic” in the sense that we usually use the word. Perhaps that’s why “Seduction” has often been used as a translation in the past. Instead the pornography here is a perversely pathological inspection of its central characters. While the novel is set only in Poland, Gombrowicz actually fled Poland shortly before the outbreak of World War II, thinking that he would wait it out; he would remain there for almost twenty-five years. 

The two main characters in the novel, Fryderyk and Witold (again, like Coetzee, Gombrowicz tempts the reader with autobiography by using his name), conspire to get Henia and Karol romantically interested in one another, even though they hardly notice each other, and Henia is already engaged to a young attorney. Witold initially is the one who shows an interest in the young couple, however Fryderyk’s interest soon comes to border on the obsessive, conniving to have Henia’s fiancée catch them in a romantic tryst. Meanwhile, a Polish soldier fighting in the resistance movement heightens the tension of the story as several plots to kill him are eventually hatched within the household. 

A fascination with youth apparently imbues much of Gombrowicz’s work (the effort to realize the romantic connection consumes an inordinate amount of time), including 1937’s “Ferdydurke,” which I look forward to reading. He views youth as a kind of purity, physical and perhaps ideological. He says in his play “The Marriage,” “Each person deforms the other person, while being at the same time deformed by them.” I find it interesting and telling how he chose to define the interaction between two people here as a kind of destruction instead of construction. It definitely sums up the bleak undertones of the novel, while also showing what a relentless psychologist Gombrowicz is. 

A few words in closing: I have heard that Danuta Borchardt’s translation is the best one, so opt for this one, assuming you cannot read the original Polish. Also, do not approach it with some preconceived notion that it should be a philosophical meditation on war simply because World War II is its setting. I think this was one of the things that vitiated my reading pleasure the most. This novel certainly is not for everyone, but for those that love a thoughtful author – a real writer’s writer – I would recommend this. 

Review of John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This review contains spoilers.

That John Webster’s birth records were quite probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a fitting biographical fact in light of reading “The Duchess of Malfi.” It perfectly highlights the senseless destruction, both physical and spiritual, that permeates this play. The duplicity, violence, and familial division rival anything that you can find in Shakespeare. While the poetry itself doesn’t quite reach the Shakespearean firmament in its baroque floridity, the language is wonderful, and just as full of double entendre and puns as the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays are.

The action is relatively straightforward. The Duchess of Malfi, whose overbearing brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal insist that she never re-marry for fear that they might have to share her wealth with someone else, disobeys them and asks Antonio, one of her stewards, to marry her. Several years pass, during which the Duchess has two children by Antonio, while the brothers remain ignorant of the marriage, but they eventually find out. In an attempt to escape Ferdinand’s wrath, Antonio flees to Ancona. Bosola, the Cardinal’s goon, chases them in hot pursuit. The Duchess, her two younger sons, and her female servant are all killed on Bosola’s instruction. Bosola, long upset by the Cardinal’s venality, decides to revenge the Duchess and her children. The Cardinal, after murdering his mistress to keep her quiet, plans to kill Bosola, too, but instead kills Antonio who has since returned to Malfi. Just to drive home the idea of complete and utter wanton cruelty, the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola all die in a final melee. Just when you think all hope is lost, the Duchess’ oldest son appears on stage in the final scene to take charge of a court that has destroyed itself because of its singular bloodlust. However, Webster leaves little room for the reader to imagine matters getting any better.

While Bosola seems like he might be the least interesting character because he has the least qualms with murder, he shows some interesting moments of moral ambiguity and even clarity, which makes his development interesting to watch. Needless to say, by the end, you’re left feeling rent in two by the treachery, deceit, and duplicity of it all. The Duchess’ son does not provide the necessary Aristotelian catharsis, and instead of a court being wholly purged of bad seeds, you feel that that he will end up a young victim in further machinations, another courtly pawn.

While others seem to not have appreciated the introduction and editorial notes, I rather enjoyed them and thought they shed some light on the production, composition, and historical background (yes, this is based on historical events – can you imagine?) As the footnotes are located at the bottom of the page, you don’t have to flip back and forth between pages - one of my bête noirs when it comes to Penguin Classics editions. All in all, I look forward to reading more New Mermaids in the future, and I especially appreciate their effort at trying to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

Review of William Trevor's "Love and Summer"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This review contains spoilers.

I read this quickly after finishing my first book by Trevor, his previous novel “The Story of Lucy Gault” (2002). While I didn’t find “Love and Summer” to be as spectacular, it was still wonderful, treating many of the themes – the irrevocably of decisions made and unmade, forced conformity to social standards, and institutional decline – with the same sensitivity and honesty.

While we usually associate funerals and death with separation, “Love and Summer,” William Trevor’s fourteenth novel, shows how it can just as easily lead to passionate connections. On the death of Mrs. Eileen Connulty, the young amateur artist Florian Kilderry intends to photograph the funeral procession through the town of Rathmoye. He stops to ask a young woman, Ellie Dillahan, for directions, and they are mutually taken with one another. Ellie, a foundling raised from childhood in a nearby convent, has been taken in as a housekeeper and was eventually married to Mr. Dillahan, a kindly, older, loving farmer with good intentions, but whose slow, regular life fails to satisfy the young Ellie. The death of his first wife and their child in a horrible farm accident also hunts him constantly. During their first encounter, Florian is taken with Ellie’s innocence, and she is drawn to him because he stands for something – anything – outside of her small farm and her life of daily routine. 

Florian idles for much of the book, occupying his parents’ house while he waits for a buyer to appear, all the while thinking about his meetings with Ellie and his parents’ artistic pasts. Over time, they meet more and begin an affair. He eventually tells her that, after selling the house, he plans to move to Scandinavia. Ms. Connulty, the daughter of the deceased woman whose funeral originally brought Florian and Ellie together, watches what she perceives to be Florian’s encroachment on Ellie’s life with suspicion. Ms. Connulty and a curious, verbose man by the name of Orpen Wren cast a shadow over the relationship of Ellie and Florian. In the middle of the night, Ellie slips out of the farmhouse to meet Florian on the road to give Florian one last embrace before assuming the only choice she ever really had – to live out the rest of her life with her harmless, unexciting, damaged husband. 

It may just be the sentimentalist in me, but Trevor captures the poignancies and ambiguities in life with a wonderful tenderness. He can catch those feelings that pass between the quick silences in conversations that we so often look over, and a beautiful way of making even the pedestrian occurrence highly poetic. I already have “Fools of Fortune” and “Death in Summer,” two of his other novels, and very much look forward to reading and reviewing them soon. For those new to Trevor, I recommend “The Story of Lucy Gault,” his second-to-last novel, and probably the best work of fiction that I’ve read in the last year. 

Review of William Trevor's "The Story of Lucy Gault"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This review contains spoilers.

This is a wonderful, evocative novel tracing the life of the Gault family beginning during The Troubles in the twenties. Fearing reprisals against Irish nationalists and a previous attempt to burn down their family estate, Lahardane, the Captain Everard Gault and his wife Helene consider fleeing for the Continent. Lucy, their daughter, overhears them talking about moving, but wants to do anything but move from her home on the Irish seaside, the only place she has ever known. In an act of lapsarian rebellion, Lucy runs off into the woods abutting Lahardane just as the Gaults are getting ready to leave, and they end up having to leave without her. Later, the servants (a husband and wife named Henry and Bridget) that are left behind to tend the house stumble on Lucy, and decide to stay behind and raise her there.

She leads a reclusive life, socialized by only an old local canon, a solicitor charged with looking after the house – a displaced child in a world of adults - and the library of books her parents left behind. She meets and is dutifully courted by a young, earnest boy named Ralph who has been invited to be the tutor of a couple of local boys, and while she very much returns his affection, her sense of abandonment lingers, and whenever Ralph shows his romantic interest, she coolly refuses him. He leaves at the end of the summer, and much later Lucy sees in the newspaper that he has married another woman.

Very occasionally, we get flits of the life that Everard and Helene are leading in Europe. Her heart is understandably broken, but she can’t stand of returning to Lahardane even though Lucy is still there. She dies of influenza before she can ever see her daughter again. However, as an old man Captain Gault eventually makes his way back to Lahardane to see Henry, Bridget, and Lucy. While the servants understandably expect Lucy to be thrilled with his return, her relationship with him seems just as inadequate as her relationship with Ralph. Long silences and short, terse replies from Lucy dominate their conversations, even as her father tries to engage her meaningfully, and we immediately know that this is not the silence of rejection, but rather one of a young girl who was forced into an exile all her own, though not a physical one. While he is at Lahardane, one of the boys, named Horahan, who tried to burn down the estate decades earlier shows up and tells of his part in the attempted arson, and he expressed his deep, heart-felt anguish and regret at what he has done. One night, Captain Gault quietly passes away in his sleep.

In her later years, she visits Horahan in an asylum where he has been driven to the verge of madness from his guilt, comforting and talking to him. It is finally in Horahan, who has riven the Gault family into pieces, whom Lucy finally finds her redemption. The end of the final sees Lucy passing the days as an elderly woman. On the radio, she hears “If you’re not on the Internet, you’re not at the races.” The sudden mention of the Internet in a story that started some seventy years before is a jarring reminder of the impersonality of history, and the relentlessness of its march.

Some reviews have found this book depressing, sad, or pessimistic. All is not sweetness and light in the lives of the Gaults, but Trevor injects the comforts of consolation and possible salvation through meaningful human relationships. Compared with the work of John McGahern whose work is downright bleak, Trevor doesn’t see the vagaries as time as wholly malevolent. As Lucy later realized, “What happens simply did.” This novel is superior in both the expansiveness of its themes – of love, sin, regret, meditation on history, and the possibilities of reconciliation – and the tight, sharp elegance of Trevor’s prose. Above all, as a first-time reader of his work, I was struck by the poignancy that never devolved into mawkish sentimentality, and the honesty that never lowered itself to bare confession.

By the time I was halfway done with “The Story of Lucy Gault,” I was already enjoying it so much I had already ordered another William Trevor novel. Trevor has also published about as many volumes of short stories as novels, which may very well tempt me out of my continued disinterest in the form. If they are anywhere near as beautifully done as “The Story of Lucy Gault,” they will be nothing short of endlessly rewarding.

Review of Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This book is hilarious. More than once I made a fool of myself while reading it in front of other people, bursting out in spontaneous laughter when I got to a particular passage. It is pure parody. But of course, it helps to know what is being parodied: the object of derision here is the rustic, rural life portrayed in countless novels by D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Webb. But even if you’re not familiar with the dark, brooding nature of some of these characters, I think the book remains funny because it has aged very well. 

The book begins with the death of the Flora Poste’s parents, and her relatively blasé reaction. Unaffected though she is, she finds that her parents have left no money to support her, and she simply cannot bring herself to work for a living. Instead, she decides to impose upon her cousins, the Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm with only the aid of a favorite book, “The Higher Common Sense.” This is when the fun begins. 

On arriving at Cold Comfort Farm, she finds a host of backward, absurd rubes with names like Urk, Elfine, and Amos. (On the farm, there are four cows named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless.) Presiding over the whole clan is the loony, elderly matriarch Aunt Adam Doom, who at one point repeatedly declares that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” But none of this manages to perturb Flora, whose Englishness seems to foreordain a neat, tidy plan for everyone involved. She rescues Elfine from a freewheeling “loam and lovechild” life of writing poetry, and marries her off to a local man by the name of Richard Hawk-Monitor. She sets up Mr. Mybug, an officious hack-scholar who is working on a book supposedly demonstrating that the works of the Bronte sisters are really the product of their brother Branwell, with a girl named Rennett. Perhaps her biggest accomplishment is convincing Aunt Adam Doom to leave Cold Comfort Farm to finally leave the room she has confined herself to for twenty years to spend some time in Paris.

This novel is wonderful lightness, but that should not be confused with being light: it is so wonderfully crafted, full of such deft sharpness and acerbic wit that it is difficult to write off as simply a parlor game satire. The narrative voice is memorably tart and sardonic, but not overweening. Whenever you think that Flora will trip up in one of her plans, you find that she is already three steps ahead of you: in fact, she already has you, the reader, figured out. The silly, unbelievable characters do prevent Flora from having a Big Problem to solve, but I always appreciated her ability to compartmentalize, rationalize, and order what she conceived to be a very disorderly universe. It struck me as a very English theme. And you’ll probably walk away from the novel smirking at yourself if you’ve ever admitted that you admired a novel by Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence. 

Review of August Wilson's "Fences"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Published in 1983, this is the sixth play of August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and by far the best known, winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. All the plays in the cycle take up various aspects of the American-American experience during the first part of the twentieth century. “Fences,” as the namely subtly hints at, looks at the differing ways of life and cultural assumptions that Americans – black and white – of two generations as they find themselves growing further and further apart. 

The action revolves around Troy Maxson, the dictatorial, autocratic patriarch who rules over the play with a brooding, constant, suffocating presence. Everyone slavishly concedes to his authoritarian, overbearing personality – his wife Rose, his best friend Bono, and his two grown children, Lyons and Cory. Troy, now a garbage man, was once an aspiring baseball player when he was younger, but was unable to break into the game because of the color barrier. When his son shows similar athletic promise, he shuts down any opportunity for him to pursue it, demanding that he get a job at the local store instead. Whether it is out of spite or not is unclear, but his negation of his son’s dreams comes across as mean-spirited and petty. At another point, his son Cory asks his father “How come you ain’t never liked me?” to which Troy responds “Liked you? Who the hell said I gotta like you?”

Much of the play revolves around the ways Troy exerts his power over his wife and children. His son, Lyons, occasionally asks him for money, which always makes Troy bristle with resentment and sends him into a seething tirade about how Lyons shouldn’t feel entitled and should stop coming by just to borrow money. Troy has an affair with Alberta (whom we never see) and conceives a child with her, Raynell, whom we only see in the last scene at Troy’s funeral.

The title refers to the fence that Troy and his son try to build throughout the play, yet Troy always seems to be castigating him for doing something else, but it preforms other functions, too. Troy has an (extreme) aversion toward death and loss; the fence is, one supposes, there to militate against death. The fence had another, much more resonant meaning for me: it stands for the wall that separates black Americans raised in the 1930s and 1940s from their children raised in the 1960s, with all the social, cultural, and political baggage that comes along with that chasmal divide. 

At the end of the play, Wilson has certainly made a hell of a character out of Troy – a character who begs for the readers’ sympathy. But as great of a playwright as he is, he just couldn’t bring me there; I could never see Troy as anything other than a tyrannical despot. I felt sorry for his children, and wondered why his wife suffered his presence. I tried to find virtues in him, but the fact that he is a soi-disant hard-drinking Lothario really doesn’t help his case. I have to admit, however, that I am biased: Troy reminds me of someone in my own family whose very presence I cannot bear, yet who I grew up around, and whose philistinism I occasionally still have to bear. Much of what he said in the play, his motivations, his attitudes, are exactly like those of said relative. I know it is precisely this fearful symmetry which caused such a visceral reaction toward the play itself. As much as I disliked Troy, the play itself is superb. To capture the psychology of a man like Troy, as well as his long-suffering wife and children, takes a superb craftsman, which Wilson definitely is.

Review of George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The title isn't pretentious; it doesn't claim to be something it isn't. This book is, quite literally, about being down and out in Paris and London. Having been published in 1933 it is, as far as I know, the first full-length book that Orwell published. However early it comes in his career, you can sense some of the nascent ideas and concerns that would haunt his work for the rest of his life: the virtues of democratic socialism and the plight of the working poor. 

In Paris, Orwell takes a job as a plongeur in an anonymous hotel. He trenchantly describes the "caste system" that exists within all of the finest hotels in Paris, from the manager to the lowest of the low, the dishwashers. His work is grueling, lasting up to fourteen or sixteen hours a day, only to go home, get almost no sleep, and have to do the same thing the next day, six days a week. While in Paris, he befriends an ex-military Russian by the name of Boris who is much the same predicament. Eager to find a job that allowed more than a few hours of sleep every night, he eventually quits his job and heads to London. 

When he arrives in London, he is without a job and is forced to live in hostels and lodging houses. Because of British law which says that you can't stay in the same one for more than a few days, he is forced into becoming a transient. In London, he meets several people, including the Irishman Paddy and Bozo, a street artist. His ability to relate to them as more than simply "homeless" people is extraordinarily honest and sincere. He openly admits that these people are every bit as interesting (sometimes more so) than the middle-class Parisians and Londoners who walk the city streets and look down on Orwell and his friends. 

The details of his day-to-day life can be debilitating to anyone with even a soupcon of optimism, but the book isn't without its gems. There are a handful of times when Orwell interrupts the action of the novel and interjects his critical social commentary. Even though they only last a couple of pages a piece, this constitutes some of the best writing in the book, reminiscent his greatest essays. This is a shining example, from Chapter XXXIV on "tramps":

"To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And, because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is said, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek opportunities for crime, even - least probable of reasons - because they like tramping. I have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp in an atavism, a throwback to the nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is staring one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism - one might as well say that a commercial traveler is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more of less villainous motive for tramping" (p. 201). 

Reading of W. B. Yeats' "Under Ben Bulben"

Review of Annping Chin's "The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

With the ascendancy of New Age religion and metaphysics, if one can even bear to grace them those names, it has been increasingly difficult to discern the scholarly from the hogwash, the learned from the those whose aimless spirits are drawn to the next universal panacea. The problem is only compounded when we see the convergence of these ideas with those in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian traditions. Thankfully, Annping Chin provides us with a carefully thought out perspective, a deep reverence for the history of both China and Confucius’ life in particular, and the much-appreciated scholarly credentials. After studying mathematics, she received her Ph.D. in Chinese Thought from Columbia, and has taught at both Wesleyan and Yale. Her husband, renowned author and sinologist Jonathan Spence, who is also at Yale, wrote one of my favorite books, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.” (Incidentally, Ricci, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit priest, was the first to Latinize Confucius’ name from the original Chinese Kung Fuzi, and would also later translate much of the Confucian corpus into Latin.) 

Chin does a sublime job at contextualizing Confucius’ political thought. He was born in the time commonly referred to as the Spring and Autumn period, spanning some three-and-a-half centuries, when China was in a state of existential crisis, riven by familial conflict and discord. Matters came to such a head that he spent 14 years, from 497 to 484 B. C., in exile passing from feudal state to feudal state. Only later does he return to his home state of Lu as a reluctant political advisor. In such a mess, the principle concerns of Confucius’ thought make much more sense. In emphasizing the rites, customs, and social mores that he saw as the fabric of Chinese society, he thought that he could restore order, propriety, and that piety that had been lost in all of the fighting. These inherently conservative ideas (in the purest sense of the word) were utterly essential to work one’s way into Chinese civil service up until the end of the Qian Dynasty, which fell in 1912 (with a moribund resurgence five years later). While that is no longer the case, the ripples of his influence are still very noticeable Chinese culture.

Ping’s ability to marshal the gaps in ancient Confucian historiography is just as remarkable. Her primary sources are small in number, almost wholly limited to the Analects, the Zuo Zhuan, and Sima Qian’s biography, all of which date anywhere from one hundred to five hundred years after the Confucius’ death. The hagiographic nature of a lot of these materials, especially those written by his students, makes painting an accurate portrait even more difficult. Ping uses these sources not only to create a biography, but to provide illustrative vignettes that shed a lot of insight into what Confucius considered the most important in both the individual and the state.

This is a highly reliable introduction to the history, thought, and influence of Confucius, all couched nicely within the political context he was continually at odds with, and should come highly recommended for anyone interested in the historical Confucius or the history of the Warring States period. 

Review of Julia Kristeva's "Hannah Arendt: Life Is A Narrative"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This is a collection of five Alexander lectures that Kristeva delivered at the University of Toronto in 1999. It attempts to delineate certain aspects of Arendt’s political philosophy, including her idea of the political, the vita activa/vita contemplative distinction, and the influences of various thinkers, especially Aristotle and Heidegger on Arendt’s body of work. Kristeva’s main focuses are Arendt’s conceptions of language, the self, “political space,” and the body, addressing all with a particular focus toward their deployment and usage in political life. 

During the first two lectures, Kristeva convincingly makes the case that at the center of Arendt’s political thought rests several distinctions which enable us to live political lives (political in the sense of Aristotle’s famous ζῷον πολιτικόν, the observation that we are by nature social animals, not necessarily party politics). She says that we interpret, understand, and react to our world through and by our unique ability to create narratives. The ability to share life, action, and thought in an interactive human matrix arises from what Nietzsche called the “shaping power” of human memory. Kristeva beautifully sums up her argument in the first part of her book, in my judgment the best, in the following way:

"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living” (p. 42-43).

The third lecture is a reading of several fiction writers, including Dinesen, Brecht, Sarraute, and Kafka, with emphasis on the implications their work has for political action. While interesting, I didn’t find Arendt’s reading, or Kristeva’s reading of Arendt’s reading, especially compelling. 

In the last two lectures, she mostly discusses the political relevance of forgiveness, memory, and judgment. Kristeva is makes some peculiar statements about Arendt, i.e., like that Arendt wasn’t aware of the large corpus of eighteenth century treatises on aesthetics and taste. I find this highly unlikely, considering Arendt’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophical traditions. 

Overall, this book could have been much better if Kristeva herself was a political philosopher, though she does bring interesting points to the issue at hand considering her background in theory and psychoanalysis. It was enjoyable to get to read a synthesis of Arendt’s work from someone whose work epitomizes interdisciplinarity, and does not rest purely within the realm of political science or philosophy. But this is ultimately a double-edged sword for this book. While I always found Kristeva’s arguments thoughtful and well-argued, they always lacked a certain historical force that could have been better lassoed with a “tighter” focus on Arendt’s purely historic-political métier. 

Review of Hilary Putnam's "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The first essay establishes that the fact/value distinction (a later incarnation of Hume’s “you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought” thesis) rests on a dubious positivist definition of “fact” that derives from sense impression. In the second, Putnam explains that the values that science assumes aren’t necessarily moral or ethical ones, but epistemic ones. Epistemic values like “coherence” and “simplicity” are assumed in the scientific pursuit, yet science continues to be thought of as wholly objective. John Mackie argued that words like “cruel” and “just” were simply words that described “natural facts,” instead of realizing that they cannot be used intelligibly without employing some kind of evaluative judgment. 

The third essay transposes this debate into the world of classical economic theory. This same debate found itself transposed into the field of economics ensconced within the framework of a Benthamist moral calculus, but were removed by the empiricist is/ought distinction (later, the work of the positivists.) Amartya Sen’s project is to reintroduce ethical concepts and norms (once so lauded by Adam Smith, but since having been forgotten) back into the discourse on classical economics without losing any of its original rigor. Sen realizes that people are motivated by non-self-interested motives, as well. In its place, Sen posits a capabilities approach which emphasizes a plurality of human rights, freedoms, and goals, instead of the poverty of utilitarian ethical monism.

Throughout the three lectures, Putnam carefully picks apart one of the most enduring shibboleths of modern philosophy. Like Rorty, with whom he shares many intellectual affinities, he has an explicit, self-conscious relationship with the analytic tradition. Unlike Rorty, however, he has not wholly eschewed that tradition. While he disagrees with many of its conclusions, he is able to use some of its assumptions and to break outside of the box of morally bankrupt positivism. 

The last part of the book contains five essays of in tangential relation to the three main lectures. “On the Rationality of Preferences,” one of the essays included in the collection, but not one of the three original lectures, is Putnam’s answer to an interlocutor who made a curious criticism of the paper that he presented. Putnam’s presentation considered a person who had two choices before them, A and B, neither of which the chooser preferred. Would it matter, he asks, if, instead of the chooser making the decision simply tosses a coin or gets a random person to make the decision for him? After all, they don’t have a preference, right? Most classically trained economists would assert that it didn’t matter who made the decision. In fact, that’s what the interlocutor pointed out. However, this essay, Putnam’s response, is a brilliant response defending the idea that, even though one might not prefer A to B, the ability to choose one’s own option engenders a kind of “dignity of the self” which economists have heretofore ignored.

Review of Barrington Moore Jr.'s "Moral Purity and Persecution in History"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

In this book, Moore’s stated purpose is to delineate some historical connections between ideas of moral purity and persecution or ostracization. After a few moments of reflection, however, it strikes me as difficult to think of many instances in which persecution that didn’t have their roots in some notion of purity, moral or otherwise. It especially won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the wide swath of anthropological literature on the subject, like Mary Douglas’ “Purity and Danger.” I thought this book might have something new or interesting to say about it, but I was wrong.

This book has at least two problems that should be considered egregious shortcomings in a book of such sweeping history. Firstly, the paucity of examples from which he chooses to draw is problematic. He considers only, in chronological order: the literature of the Old Testament, the religion wars of sixteenth-century France, the French Revolution, and “Asiatic civilizations.” Secondly, one walks away from the book with the idea that the topologies of persecution – how they shame, in what circumstances they occur, their sociological functions, et cetera – are never explored. There is nothing for the almost two millennia between the Old Testament and the France of the 1500s. And then there’s the fact that “Asiatic civilizations” is so anachronistic as to be risible. But then again, so is the picture in the back of the book, showing him with a gigantic corncob pipe hanging out of his mouth. 

The thesis of the book is that, in the first three historical instances, persecution and concepts of moral purity were closely tied together, while in “Asiatic civilizations” (he considers Confucian and Buddhist religious thought here mostly), the connection is much more tenuous, and perhaps even nonexistent. We are simply told, in instance after instance, that people were persecuted or driven out of different movements or societies (the radicals in the Revolution, Jewish society of the Old Testament, et cetera) because they broke some sort of ethical-moral stricture. This almost reduces the entire book to a set of linear, historical treatments whereas I thought that it would bring in something more integrative and interdisciplinary. 

Review of William R. Everdell's "The First Moderns" | Dedicated to Michał

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Books of intellectual history with this size and scope are always difficult to talk about. I’ve read some that were abysmal failures, while others were highly successful. If I had to place this one along a spectrum, it’s certainly close to the latter for a couple of reasons. First, a point which has nothing to do with the quality of the book itself, but that I admire nonetheless: it was written not by an academic with narrow scholarly interests, but a wonderfully eclectic generalist, William Everdell, who has taught in the Humanities Department at St. Anne’s School (yes, a private high school) in Brooklyn for the last forty years. There’s something about the passionate amateur that I’m perennially attracted to. I don’t think we have enough of them. 

“The First Moderns” is good not only for what it covers just as well as other related books of intellectual history, but also because it covers a lot of relatively new territory. We know the usual suspects: Einstein, Rimbaud, Whitman, Russell, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Picasso, and several dozen others. The names of Edwin Porter, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Valeriano Weyler, however, usually don’t make it into books of this kind. Do people even recognize these names anymore? Everdell also widens the scope of the book by covering not only names, but topics that usually don’t get mentioned. We are used to hearing Modernism defined in terms of music, philosophy, and the visual arts. Very rarely do we see mathematics and science discussed, let alone the invention of the concentration camp. 

The theme into which Everdell successfully manages to fit most of his vignettes is that of discreteness, continuity, and discontinuity. One doesn’t ordinarily think of something like mathematics as being potentially Modernist, but the discussion of Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege makes wonderful sense in this context. They explored topics like infinity (actually, infinities), set theory, and the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including questions like, “What is an integer?” All of this work blurred the traditional lines of continuity and discontinuity that earlier logic and mathematics had felt so confident with. We also get a wonderful and highly intelligent, though non-technical, account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and his defense of atomism. If matter is made of atoms – millions of them – how do we discover anything about a concept as abstract as “energy”? Everdell details the ways in which Boltzmann invented new mathematical tools to think about energy and entropy as statistical averages of extremely complex states. The work of Boltzmann and the people after him showed how, when multiplied by trillions and trillions, tiny, individual discrete atoms can have physical properties en masse like temperature, energy, or entropy (which are all, in fact, related to one another). Again, we see how the information about discontinuous atoms can in fact yield useful information about matter when thought of as continuous. 

And even when we get lessons from art history, or music, or poetry with which we are perhaps almost familiar, Everdell adds new contexts, new names, and new layers that enable each chapter in the book to potentially morph into a book of its very own. He gives a beautiful account of Seurat’s invention and exploration of pointillism, the “invention” of blank verse with Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue, and a whole chapter on Hugo de Vries’ discovery of the gene and Max Planck’s introduction of quantum theory.

Books like this, in their inexhaustible attempt to explain what a concept (like Modernism) might mean to wide swaths of human experience and creativity inevitably can be as a bit listy. “He was important … and so was this, but don’t forget her…” et cetera, and Everdell hasn’t fully escaped that here. But if that bothered me, I would never read this kind of book – a kind of book which I love very much. I read this sort of stuff to learn about new connections between ideas they already knew of, and I can handle the narrative jumpiness if the information is presented in an intelligent way, and Everdell is certainly the kind of intellectual cicerone who is going to teach you something fascinating. If you’re interested in this time period and intellectual history as a field, I would recommend William M. Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” To be honest, it’s dry as hay and not nearly as interesting as Everdell’s book, but his sense of curiosity and the amount of sheer information covered is truly impressive. It complements the information in here nicely.

Review of Lawrence Durrell's "Clea" (Volume IV of "The Alexandria Quartet")

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Clea,” the fourth volume of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” opens with several years having passed since the events of the first three volumes. Darley, the narrator, is living on a Greek island with the six-year-old illegitimate daughter Nessim fathered with Melissa. After running into Balthazar and his Inter-Linear, he eventually heads off for Alexandria again with the child, full of both trepidation and anticipation about the past and the people he knew there.

When Darley arrives in Alexandria, almost immediately he runs into his old artist friend Clea, and consummates a formerly Plutonic relationship, now that their circle of friends is unencumbered by the presence of Melissa, who has died, and Justine, who is under house arrest for the duration of the novel. More than in any of the others, this novel has several meta-fictional aspects: meditations on art, creativity, and the novel (especially as revealed with Pursewarden’s letters), and some of Clea’s ideas about painting. All of this is, as always in this tetralogy, tied in beautifully with Balthazar’s earlier analyses shot throughout the Inter-Linear.

Reading these four novels has been one of the more powerful set of experiences that I have recently had. Most readers will probably not enjoy this; it’s not action-packed and full of adventure. But if you admire writing that tries to capture the uniqueness of inner coruscating experience, the complexities of passion and romantic relationships, and realizes the inability to tell “the whole story,” even after nearly one thousand pages of trying, I hope you will appreciate this as much as I did. As I said in my review of “Mountolive,” I have simply run out of things to say about how much I loved this. Sometimes admiration must finish itself off in silence.

Review of Lawrence Durrell's "Mountolive" (Volume III of "The Alexandria Quartet")

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

In this, the third volume of Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” the narrative shift focuses, this time to Mountolive, a character who has perhaps more in common with the real-life Durrell than even Darley, who narrated both volume I (“Justine”) and will narrate volume IV (“Clea”). Both Durrell and Mountolive were born in India and later joined the Foreign Service abroad.

In this “sibling companion” to the other volumes, we find both more growing political intrigue and romantic machination. Just as “Balthazar” reconstituted and reframed the story of “Justine,” the entry of Mountolive as a major figure does much the same. He begins at the Hosnani estate of where Nessim, Narouz, their mother Leila, and ailing father all reside, and we quickly learn of Mountolive and Leila’s love affair. The jumps in time make it somewhat difficult to discern when this occurred (most likely well before the action of volumes I and II), but their relationship is handled every bit as well as the myriad other relationships, romantic and Plutonic, that have arisen. Mountolive takes a job as a British foreign service and hires Pursewarden, a more minor character from the previous two volumes, as one of his advisers. We also learn of a gun cartel that seems to be affiliated in some way with Narouz, whose political influence and rhetoric is becoming too strong for his own good. Mountolive’s knowledge of the gunrunning plot, along with the corruption the Pasha both accepts and participates in, let him leave Egypt, but not before becoming thoroughly disillusioned.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who read my reviews of the first two novels that I have utterly enjoyed “Mountolive,” too. And since I know longer know how to gush about Durrell’s gorgeous, fantastic writing in an original way, I will do what I did in those reviews and leave you with a snippet from the opening chapter detailing Mountolive’s entry into the British Foreign Service and his involvement with Egypt:

“As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting has the fish-drive become.”

How can you not love this stuff?

Review of Christopher S. Celenza's "The Lost Italian Renaissance"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

For some reason, I have lately been the lucky recipient of numerous academic catalogues, especially from university presses that are having sales with as much as 75% off. One of the more recent ones, from Johns Hopkins, had this in it, and for a mere five dollars. It might have been better-suited for someone more thoroughly steeped in the formal study of the Italian Renaissance than I can admit to being, but what it had to say about the current state of study in this area was interesting. It certainly couches many of the problems of contemporary Italian Renaissance studies in interesting ways, and makes the reader privy to a lot of “insider” information. In this book, Celenza is mostly concerned with the formation and current state of Renaissance studies, and particularly the effects that certain sources (or lack thereof) have wrought upon that study.

“The Lost Italian Renaissance” is more a series of interconnected essays on a group of related themes than it is a book with a continuous argument. The first essay argues that twentieth-century Italian Renaissance studies seriously suffers from a lack of sources that were originally written in Latin for a number of reasons, but mostly because scholars from the previous (that is, the nineteenth) century thought that non-vernacular languages were of at most secondary importance (mostly because of the rise of nationalist conceptions of history, like that of Herder). Because of this, many of the most important sources in Latin have still not been sourced, recorded, and critically edited for the sake of posterity. The second chapter discusses two contemporary scholars in the field, Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller, their approaches to comparative historiography, and how they each contributed to a rediscovery of these important Latin manuscripts. 

The rest of the book tries to construct an approach to the Italian Renaissance by looking at philosophical approaches to history including the synchronic and diachronic and looking at the way individual thinkers, including Claude Levi-Strauss and Richard Rorty, have thought about these problems. The last chapters try to build case studies in model intellectual history upon the ideas he has offered. He uses one essay to compare Lorenzo Valla to Marcilio Ficino, and the next to look at how traditional ideas of honor in the Italian Renaissance were tied to notions of masculinity and gender construction. 

I would recommend this to anyone with a formal, academic interest in this area. I felt that I definitely would have learned more had I been more familiar with some of the problematic aspects of what Celenza was talking about, including the contributions of Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller. 

Review of Wayne A. Meeks' "The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Constructing the moralities and ethical sensibilities of people is always difficult, especially when you’re at a remove of about twenty centuries, yet this is what Wayne Meeks, Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies at Yale University, does in “The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries.” 

Some of the things Meeks looks at won’t surprise people, but the depth and breadth of the readings that he can bring to the conversation is striking. He discusses conversion and how it always emphasizes both the personal and the communal, breaking away from a wider community and joining a more “select” one. He looks at some of the conversion stories, like Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho,” as a way of trying to concretize this change of a primary reference group. By emphasizing the world from which they turned, new Christians (mostly Jews, but later Gentiles, too) also serve to provide exhortatory stories of the morality of the new group itself. 

Another common topic in early Christian morality is whether we should come to love or hate the world. By looking at a variety of texts, including Gnostic, Pauline, and Johannine, he shows how they all give different advice about how connected we should be to the world. In John, for example, the goal was not what Meeks calls “philosophical high-mindedness,” but the cultivation of “a passionate, sectarian, practical love that binds members to the group exclusively to one another and to the God they believe in” (p. 61). Gnostics, on the other hand, were often accused of being ascetics who hated the world because of the way they wanted to escape the creation of the Demiurge. 

Meeks includes a fascinating section on the specific language of Christian obligation, and how those took certain literary forms. Christian moral practice took a number of shapes, some of which were quite simply lists of dos and don’ts, while others included gnomes (gnomia in Greek, sententiae in Latin) which were collected aphorisms or witty maxims. Still others were moral imperatives (precepts and commands), or discussions of certain topics and commonplaces (like “on friendship” or “on the family”). Meeks composes a grammar of moral obligation through these forms and how they are connected with some schools of Hellenistic philosophy. He goes on to discuss similar topics in the following chapters, including “The Body as Sign and Problem,” “A Life Worthy of God,” “Senses of an Ending,” “The Moral Story,” and “History, Pluralism, and Christian Morality.” 

I really took a lot away from this book, and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the first two centuries of Christian ethics, especially with an emphasis on the development of moral communities. It’s a scholarly book, with no hint of an agenda that we usually associate with books on subjects like this. As you might be able to tell from my discussion above, Meeks arranges his discussion topically, making use of the appropriate texts as he goes along. He also writes in the best of ethnographic traditions, with a thorough, rigorous knowledge of the material and an objective, concerted effort to better understand his subjects.