Review of Bruno Schulz's "The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories"

[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 stammer and hedge writing a review for this book in much the same way I did before other great artists of the short story, namely I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories” and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.” I read this over a period of time which was much too long for any short story collection – several weeks. Because of this, I lost the sense of the stories as a whole, even though there are themes which run throughout an allow it to resemble something much closer to a novel. 

The stories are weird, wonderful, dream-like, and fantastical. They center around a boy, his parents, especially his eccentric bird-loving father who sells textiles out of his house and who occasionally resembles a mystagogue crossed with an archimandrite crossed with a heresiarch, his sister Adela and various other family members that make periodic appearances throughout. If you follow the action of the stories in order, I think the father turns into a bird at least once, but apparently recovers his human form soon thereafter. Come to think of it, the stories themselves seem a little reminiscent of Singer and Carter themselves. There’s that fantastic element that isn’t quite magical realism.

Schulz is fascinated with seasons; five of the stories either have the word “season” in them or name a particular season, and he describes them with great enthusiasm. In fact, the only way to read them might be a couple at a time over a period of several days, not at long sittings. The language is too rich and there really is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The stories are littered with sentences like this, just to give you a rough idea: “You know that moment when summer, so recently buoyant and vigorous, universal summer hugging to itself all things imaginable – people, events, objects – one day sustains a barely perceptible injury. The sun still blazes dense and copious, the landscape still wields the classical magisterial flourish bequeathed to this season by the genius of Poussin, but, strange to report, we return from a morning stroll oddly weary and jejune…” (“Autumn,” p. 323). And another: “Everyone knows in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month. We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.”

The language is obviously beautiful, full of a kind of Kabbalistic essence of the things hidden beyond the limits of perceptual reality, especially in the character of the Father. But it can strike you sometimes as too much of a good thing.

Review of James Gleick's "The Information"

[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.]

Glancing over many of the other lower ratings of this book, I’ve found that most people have already hit upon the major points of why I found it such an unsatisfying reading experience, and there were quite a few of them. To begin with, the actual title and the informational content of the book don’t really seem to jibe. There’s too much biographical information here, and of too many people, for the entire book to cohere in any meaningful way. The connection that one chapter has to the next is tenuous at best. For example, Gleick starts out talking about the ways in which African drummers drum in order to retain the information in a message over long distances (an fascinating way to the begin talking about information as a broad subject), but then almost inexplicably jumps directly into a short history of early English dictionary-making in the next chapter, and follows that with a history of the work Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace did together, including the Difference Machine and the Analytical Machine. Connecting them is only the thinnest of threads – the work of Claude Shannon and the birth of information theory - which isn’t even substantively developed until halfway through the book. Because of this, the whole endeavor ends up being a mile wide and an inch deep.

Is it just me, or does most non-technical science- or technology-oriented writing “The Information” read this way? The narrative net seems like it needs to be cast so far and wide that even those readers who might be put to sleep reading about something like information theory (why are these people reading this book in the first place?) will be able to maintain their interest. It can mostly be avoided when the subject is narrowed to the life and/or ideas of one person, as in Gleick’s previous book on Isaac Newton, though I found that book a little unsatisfying for a different reason: I thought it was much too short.

To give off the sense that this book wasn’t fun to read would be unfair. If you’re broadly interested in the history of science, this provides as a good introduction to a number of topics: in addition to the ones already mentioned, Gleick discusses telegraphy, the birth of statistical mechanics in physics and the concept of entropy, and the rise and difficulties of quantum computing. It’s just that the star of the show, the history of how “information” has been treated as such, suffers tremendously.

I picked it up because 1) it was on the discount shelf at Barnes&Noble for a reasonable price (and if you can get it for six dollars, I would still say it’s worth investing in), and 2) I felt that my knowledge of information theory would be insufficient for a book that demanded a readership with more expertise. For those interested in something like the history of computing, this would be a wonderful place to start. Anyone expecting something more tightly focused on the likes of Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, their colleagues, and the development of fields like information theory and cybernetics will walk away wishing for something much more focused.

WayWords, Episode #8

Onomastics (noun) – The study of proper names or of terms used in a specialized field.  

Review of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"

[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.]

It’s been too many years since I’ve read Toni Morrison (“Paradise,” which was wonderful and “Sula,” which I don’t remember much about at all).  This one brought back to the fore everything that I loved about “Paradise” all over again. 

“Song of Solomon” tells the story of Macon (“Milkman”) Dead (far from the only peculiar name you’ll see encounter in this book), the son of a loveless marriage and an overbearing, despotic father, also named Macon.  Morrison presents the reader with a wide cast of characters early in the novel, all fully drawn out, but refuses to hint at which ones you should be following most closely.  There’s Macon Sr.’s sister, Pilate; her daughter, Rebecca; and Rebecca’s daughter, Hagar, all of whose names point directly to the kind of mythical, grand storytelling that Morrison is so invested in.  Not even the Nobel Committee could escape the language of myth when mentioning her in their citation: “The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games.  His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots.  This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.”

The action is centered around Milkman’s coming of age, and slightly resembles a Bildungsroman, though it’s so much richer and fuller than anything that word could connote.  The novel is full of disintegrating, rotting relationships – between Ruth and Macon Sr., Pilate and Macon Sr., Milkman and his erstwhile best friend Guitar, and Milkman and his girlfriend Hagar.  Without giving away too much, Milkman’s journey sets him on a path where he ends up learning about the circumstances of his own birth and his ancestors.

This was a spectacular novel, convincing me still again that Toni Morrison is a kind of American Homer, full of allegory and origins, an undiluted rhapsode always pushing for a deeper and more expansive and prophetic evaluation of our roots, our identities, and our borders.  As often as she’s called a black writer, an African-American writer, a woman writer (that especially grating nineteenth-century appellation that rings of male condescension), she seems like none of these to me.  She is American – as widely and deeply American as any of the other novelists who come before her. 

This is a truly impressive piece of work, and a wonderful place to start if you’re unfamiliar with Morrison’s oeuvre.

WayWords, Episode #7

Marplot (noun) – A meddler whose interference compromises the success of an undertaking.

WayWords, Episode #6

Barmecide (adjective) - Lavish or plentiful in imagination only; illusory, a sham; as in "a Barmecide feast."  (Usually used in reference to food or feasting.)

Review of James Cuno's "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over our Ancient Heritage"

[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.]

While still conspicuously ignorant of the subjects, museum acquisitions, museology in general, and the debates concerning (re)appropriation of “culturally significant objects” all fascinate me. James Cuno manages to cover all these bases in this book whose major question is: Do modern states have the right to demand the return of objects that may be deemed to have cultural, aesthetic, or national value? And if they do, what reasons validate this demand? 

Cuno’s short answer is that states don’t have this right at all. Instead, he sees the rise of these cultural reappropriation laws as a way of shoring up nationalist pretentions. His argument seems strong. Two of his chapters, “The Turkish Question” and “The Chinese Question,” examine this assertion in detail. For example, when the Ba’athists took control in Iraq in 1968, they adopted strict laws of cultural appropriation in concert with their virulently nationalist rhetoric. “Their intention was to create a ‘national-territorial consciousness resting upon the particular history of Iraq and, equally significantly, of what the regime, or a powerful circle within it, presented as the history of the Iraqi people.’ Central to this effort was an official drive to foster archaeology as a way of making people aware and proud of ‘their ancient past,’ including that of the pre-Islamic era. At the same time, the Party encouraged local folklore for the purpose of inspiring communities with a sense of internal Iraqi unity, and emphasizing Iraq’s uniqueness among the nations of the world at large” (p. 58-59). In other words, at least on the level of political propaganda, the purpose of these new laws was not to maintain and preserve ancient artifacts, but rather a proxy for a relatively new country to build a sense of cultural and national identity. 

Much the same thing happened to the young Turkey while trying to survive the birth pangs of early Ataturkism and subsequent westernization. “The emergence and the development of archaeology in Turkey took place under constraints that are deeply rooted in history. Confrontation between the traditional Islamic framework and the Western model, the endeavor to survive as a non-Arabic nation in the Middle East while the empire was disintegrating, the hostile and occasionally humiliating attitude of Europeans, and growing nationalism have all been consequential in this development … The pace that archaeology took in Turkey is much more related to the ideology of the modern Republic than to the existing archaeological potential of the country” (p. 83, a direct quote from Mehmet Ozdogan’s article “Ideology and Archaeology in Turkey”). In a similar way, the Elgin Marbles served as political symbols critical to the identity and “national spirit” of the modern nation-state of Greece, not just as archaeological artifacts. 

The claim to national identity is also a common one, and one that Cuno rejects with equal fervor. We are so used to the argument that this object or that belongs here or there because of the important part it plays in making a people who they are. However, these objects are often so removed in historical time that the number of things these artists shared with the supporters of cultural appropriation shared is vanishingly small. Look at contemporary Egyptians. They share neither a common language, a body of customs, a religion, or law with ancient Egyptians, yet we are still urged to believe that one is an integral part of the identity of the other – presumably because of geographical proximity. That dynamic thing we call culture has worked over dozens of centuries to produce these widely divergent changes. The claims of contemporary Egyptians on the cultural artifacts of ancient Egypt seem tenuous at best. The ever-presence of boundary-crossing and the impermanence of cartography both speak to the capriciousness that is “cultural identity.”

Cuno argues for what he calls “partage,” the provision of archaeological and historical expertise in return for the partitioning of important discovered objects. One of the only other alternatives would be to potentially let these objects onto the black market, where they would certainly lack the curatorial and historical expertise they would be afforded in a museum. 

While Cuno effectively cottons on to an important lesson of the last few centuries – that the modern nation-state will stop at nothing to traduce any obstacle that gets in the way of imparting its influence - he does go out of his way to paint many of these states as heterogeneous and uniform in their power, which is misleading at best. Not all nascent nations practiced nationalism, either on an ideological or pragmatic level, with equal vim and vigor.

As convincing as Cuno’s arguments were, I often found myself reversing the cultural tables and asking myself what I would do if, for whatever counterfactual historical reason, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution had found its way into the halls of the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. Could Americans who argue against cultural reappropriation laws have the intellectual courage to say, with a straight face, that it doesn’t matter that these objects are not permanently housed in the United States? Then again, we’re much closer in historical time – in language, heritage, culture, and mores – to the people that created this country than the contemporary Chinese are to Shang-era potters or the contemporary Greeks are to those brilliant artisans who created the Elgin Marbles, which may further complicate an already intricate argument. 

Whatever your opinion on the issues, provided you had one prior to exposure to this book, it will make you re-think how art, identity, cultural appropriation, and museum-building are all intimately connected. It does a wonderful job at raising intelligent questions about how these concepts are linked.

WayWords, Episode #5

Bouleversement (noun) – A violent uproar; a tumult; a reversal; a complete overthrow; disorder; a turning upside down.