WayWords, Episode #4

Jentacular (adjective) -- Of or relating to breakfast, especially a breakfast taken early in the morning, or immediately on getting up.

Review of Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus"

[The above 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.]

There are classics – and then there are Classics. These are the books that you can really pat yourself on the back for finally putting behind you – or should I say “completing,” since books like this never really leave you. This is definitely one of the latter. It is full of everything we associate, good or bad, with the word: meditations on philosophy, art, mortality, music, and everything else under the sun. Needless to say, this isn’t for everyone. In fact, if you even have the slightest hesitation about reading something like this, don’t. If you think you might like it, read the first fifty pages and if you like it, you’ll love the rest because the stylistic pace never changes. I happen to be one of those readers who doesn’t mind traveling glacially if I’m given a lot of things to think about, and in that respect, Thomas Mann never fails to deliver.

“Doctor Faustus” takes the form of a biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, the most illustrious German composer of his day, written by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom. Adrian’s intellect and capacity for ideas are truly astounding, making one wonder whence his interest in the bright yet otherwise rather not very noteworthy Serenus. At a very young age, Adrian makes a pact with the Devil in return for a promise of many years of heightened creativity and inspiration. After purposefully contracting syphilis to add to the allure of romantic genius associated with insanity, he becomes obsessed with the themes of Apocalypse, damnation, and Schoenberg’s achromaticism in his music. In the final scene of the book, Adrian summons all his friends and acquaintances he has made throughout the book and shares his lifelong secret about his satanic pact; the reactions range from revulsion to denial to undying support. Adrian lingers in a syphilitic paralysis for several years until the onset of World War II, at which point Serenus visits him one last time, and he finally dies.

Mann interlards his narrative with German political history from between the wars. He began his life as an ardent conservative, but by the time he wrote this novel in the late 1940s, his faith in the goodness and purity of the German spirit qua German spirit was severely diminished, and he lets this show through the voice of Serenus. He has, as he should, seering words for Hitler, the Third Reich, and what they were doing to his beloved country. One of Mann’s main points, however, is that this political decadence doesn’t remain wholly within the political sphere; it seeps into cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic life. Mann was horrified by the direction Germany was taking in the thirties, but he very well have been more horrified the ramifications this had for the possibilities of German art and thought. As Gyorgy Lukacs mentioned in his book of essays on Mann’s novels, the historical standpoint from which the novel is written – Serenus writing right after World War II – gives the novel a particularly striking sense that German history, maybe History itself, is running headlong into a catastrophe from which even it cannot save itself.

It cannot be stressed enough the degree to which this is truly a novel of ideas. Mann’s knowledge of philosophy, theology, and especially music are on full display. At one point earlier in the novel, he goes on for several pages about why Beethoven’s last piano sonata, No. 32, Op. 111 has only two movements, and the profound philosophical implications this has for the history and direction of music. This is my manna, but I realize it is an acquired taste. For those who love humoring the playful intellect of someone like Mann for over 500 pages, this is pure mind candy.

Review of Pascal Bruckner's "Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism"

[The above 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 was a powerfully argued, in many ways persuasive, intelligent book that I thought I would end up disliking because of Bruckner’s reputation as a political gadfly in Europe. The subject of the book would also put off a certain kind of American reader who might openly identify with the terms “liberal” or “progressive.” In a time when the French thinker can sometimes be more identified with the obscurantism of someone like Jean Baudrillard, Bruckner much more closely resembles someone like Raymond Aron – which would position him, politically at least, as a moderate in the United States, and on the far right (especially in academic circles) on the Continent. 

At the heart of Bruckner’s book, he makes claim that is not meant to provoke so much as it is to get people thinking: Europe has spent too much of the twentieth century apologizing for its mistakes (fascism, the Holocaust, the horrors of Communist) instead of carving out a new path for itself by learning from these mistakes. This apologizing, he says, can become pathologically debilitating. In a time of bracing secularism, Brucker argues that the guilt of original sin never really left us, but that it has been transmogrified – into guilt at the former atrocities of colonialism, slavery, racism, genocide, and many others. Condemnation has become a kind of new civic religion. 

Instead of doing the rational thing, which would consist of a dialectical consideration of both our past crimes and an ongoing effort to both correct for them and ensure that they do not occur again, the West (and he’s particularly talking about western Europe here) reverts to a kind of childish narcissism whereby the only way we can savage any shred of former international importance is to wallow in past atrocities. 

Whether or not you agree with Bruckner’s thesis, and I had the feeling that I would learn and appreciate it a lot less than I actually did – his writing, even the translation, is extraordinarily well-crafted and his writing convincing. A few of his more minor assertions – like his claim that Baudrillard was positively giddy at the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9/11 – struck me as dubious. The general themes, however, brought me on board more than I expected them to. This is said too often, and of too many writers, but its true of Bruckner: whether you agree with him or not, you’ll certainly come away from this book having been challenged – and done so by a writer who, while far outside the European political mainstream of the intelligentsia, eschews extremism and intelligently questions even his own assumptions.

WayWords, Episode #3

SACCADE (noun) -- (1) The act of checking a horse quickly with a single strong pull of reins. (2) The series of small, jerky movements of the eyes when changing focus from one point to another, as is often done in reading.

WayWords, Episode #2

CABOTINAGE (noun) -- Behavior befitting a second-rate actor: obvious playing to the audience; theatricality; hamming it up.

WayWords, Episode #1

RESISTENTIALISM (noun) -- The theory that inanimate objects demonstrate hostile, perverse, or spiteful behavior toward us.

Introduction to WayWords for Logophiles

Review of Julian Barnes' "Metroland"

[The above 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.]

I’ve recently read, and posted reviews of two other Julian Barnes’ novels, “The Sense of an Ending” and “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. “Metroland” reflects some of the same themes: obnoxiousness of young schoolboys who have read a few important books but not nearly enough, growing up, love, and memory. This being my third book by Barnes, I’m starting to get a feel for his authorial panache, and I can’t help being charmed by it. You get the sense that he’s always writing with a gentle smirk on his face, not unlike the one he always has on display on the back covers of his books. 

The story follows the narrator Chris and his best friend from school, Toni, as they grow up in the suburbs of London (the “Metroland” of the title). They both hate ordinary people, whom they contemptuously go around calling “bourgeois.” They profess to live for art and ideas, when really it’s just a kind of self-important high-mindedness they’re putting on. Part II sees Chris moving to Paris and growing a bit distant from Toni. While there, he meets and falls in love with a French woman named Annick and befriends three fellow art-lovers, one of them a woman named Marion, on a visit to the Musee Gustave Moreau. One day, he mentions to Annick rather heavy-handedly that he met Marion (with whom he has done nothing other than casually flirt), but Annick gets upset, leaves him, and is never seen again. 

And here’s where Barnes’ wonderful infatuation with irony comes to a head: he falls in love with Marion, has a child with her, takes on a mortgage and respectable job that he actually enjoys, and turns into one of those hideous bourgeois that he hated as a boy. However, he’s an adult now, and he’s come to find out that living a middle-class life can be full of the same happiness, stress, joy, and anxiety that even the life of an artist can. 

For a rough comparison, imagine two Holden Caulfields, except that Chris actually manages to make some moral and intellectual progress and crawl out of his teenage funk during the course of the story. Toni unfortunately doesn’t, and at the end of the novel is bitter that his writing hasn’t proven more successful than it is. Being a successful human being first helps, though – a lesson that Chris learned, by hook or by crook. 

This novel was published in 1980, and it resembles what you would expect Barnes then: the author finding his voice, a voice that still resonates in his later fiction - philosophical but not overbearing, witty but not caustic. For a debut novel, I thought this was very impressive. I didn’t find it as wonderful as some of his later stuff – “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” is still my favorite of the three – but it’s definitely worth checking out if you enjoy his other work.

Book Haul #12 (Part II) - From the Library Basement

I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.

Books discussed include:

Knowledge of Hell, Antonio Lobo Antunes

The White Peacock, D. H. Lawrence

A Theft, Saul Bellow

The Bellarosa Connection, Saul Bellow

Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser

The Locusts Have No King, Dawn Powell

The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson

A Mixture of Frailties, Robertson Davies

The Poetry of Chaucer, John Gardner

God and the State, Michael Bakunin

God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, Adam Nicholson

The Protestant Temperment: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious, and Self in Early America, Philip Greven

Book Haul #12 (Part I) - From the Bookstore

I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.

Books discussed include:

The Citadel, A. J. Cronin
Spook Country, William Gibson
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders, John Mortimer
Rumpole and the Primrose Path, John Mortimer
The Private Patient, P. D. James
Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl Schorske
Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti
Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, George F. Kennan
The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and his Battle with the Modern World, David Gibson
Islam, Alfred Guillaume
A Modern Instance, William D. Howells
The Muse Learns to Write, Eric Havelock
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Jay Lifton
Man and Nature in the Renaissance, Allen Debus
Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas