The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

Mark Twain. Photo: skeeze [CC0] via Pixabay.

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was surprised by Mark Twain's views on women. I have become accustomed to nineteenth-century authors verging on the misogynistic, but Twain, at least from this collection of quotes, would appear to be the exception to the rule. For instance (p. 6):

No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.

This is a bit rich, of course, because Twain relied heavily on his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, although he seems to have worked hard to keep the family financially afloat. Twain writes (p. 6):

There is only one good sex. The female one.

Yet Twain was critical of humans (p. 5):

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah didn't miss the boat.

There are many other quotes on religion, nationalism, the liberal ideal (as it relates to monarchy versus a republic), and socialisation. For example (p. 54):

We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us.

Yet his pithy sayings are usually humorous (p. 54):

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

I did not know that Twain had to declare bankruptcy in 1894. I had assumed that he was successful and that was that. But his ironic wit may well have been a result of his financial trials and tribulations: he went on an international lecture tour to make ends meet (p. 46):

To be busy is man's only happiness.

It makes me wonder how he maintained his sense of humour when things went awry. Maybe that his wife owned the rights to his work helped, hence his admiration for her. He was also experienced in the attitudes of the world (p. 50):

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I have now read a few of these Dover Thrift Editions of The Wit and Wisdom of..., and although they are quite short, and are not truly "books", there is much to learn from an intense immersion in the highlights of the greats of the past, and Twain is no exception.

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On a mystical journey with Italo Calvino, Marco Polo, and Kublai Khan

Inside The Venetian Casino, Macau. Photo: jgmarcelino [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom writes that Invisible Cities is worthy of being read and re-read, and is one of the best short story works of the twentieth century by the "fabulist" Italo Calvino. Bloom suggests that Calvino is Borgesian and Kafkan. 

The connecting thread is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, with Polo describing the cities he has visited, so the Great Khan can know better his crumbling empire. Bloom says of Calvino's wisdom (a recurring compliment from the great critic) that:

Calvino's advice tells us again how to read and why: be vigilant, apprehend and recognise the possibility of the good, help it to endure, give it space in your life.

The cities described are apparently all versions of Venice, with Kublai Khan later recognising this and trying to describe instead the cities to Polo. An endless chess game becomes a vehicle to describe the cities using the pieces and the board as metaphors. 

A "fabulist" is "a person who composes or relates fables". What I found most interesting about these (at times) very short stories is the way they are arranged (or scattered, as Bloom writes) around themes of thin cities, trading cities, dead cities, the sky, even fanciful cities such as Brave New World and Yahooland. 

Within the descriptions, there are numerous anachronisms: motorcycles, aircraft, steamships, and so on. But these never interrupt the reader and provide a connection with the present. The combination of fanciful and mystical characters who appear in the cities (for example, a woman who milks the carcass of a cow) are echoed in Gabriel García Márquez's work, but there is a difference. 

Márquez was regarded as a "magical realist", whereas Calvino's Invisible Cities is less realist and more like a series of fairy tales. I noticed myself drifting off into fantasy with the mystical imagery and the slipperiness of time; not in the J.R.R. Tolkien sense of fantasy, but an older, classical, Brothers Grimm-like fantasy land that repeatedly connects the past with the present and indeed the future. 

This work is more serious in tone than Palomar or Marcovaldo, but it still has their mystical qualities. I must admit to experiencing a sense of peace while reading this work, and although some aspects have a darker quality, I couldn't help but think of Don Draper's pitch for Lucky Strike in Mad Men:

Advertising is based on one thing, happiness, its reassurance that whatever you are doing, it’s OK, you are OK.

Of course, Bloom (How to Read and Why, pp. 62-64) has more academic things to say about Calvino, but for me, one actually experiences his stories. 

In trying to articulate Calvino's style more clearly, I turned to the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel and found that Calvino is described as a "post-modernist", and that Le città invisibili has (p. 174):

...closer affinities to the allegory of the Middle Ages than to the realist novel.

An allegory is a story:

...that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.

I suppose this is what Harold Bloom means by the lessons we can learn from Calvino's wisdom. But even as an aside to read intermittently, the mystical qualities of the short stories provide sufficient space from reality for the reader to rejuvenate, to think, to imagine, and to dream; even just for a moment. 

This mystical quality is what I admire most about Calvino, and I am pleased to have stumbled upon Marcovaldo in a Shanghai bookstore a few years ago that led me to take this journey with the great post-modern Italian master.

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Taking the Mickey Bliss out of a Loved One

Coffin shop, Warsaw, Poland. Photo: FastilyClone [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia.

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am on a journey to read all of Evelyn Waugh's work and The Loved One is regarded as one of his best. Reviewing the book for the New York Times on 23rd June 1948, Orville Prescott wrote that:

Mr Waugh has never written more brilliantly.

I was surprised that an American reviewer found the work so witty because it is a critique of all the worst of Hollywood's excess. (Apparently, it was written after Waugh had been in Hollywood, trying to adapt his most famous work, Brideshead Revisited, for the screen.) 

The term "the loved one" refers to the dead, and the story takes place between the Whispering Glades Memorial Park (a mortuary and cemetery) and the Happier Hunting Ground (a pet cemetery which mimics its well-regarded neighbour). 

The mimicry of great monuments in Whispering Glades (built in modern materials with modern "improvements" to the originals) reminded me of The Venetian casino in Macau, where the inside is a wonderful replica of Venice, including canals, gondolas, singing gondoliers and random arias sung from the fake buildings that line the canals. (It is so good it is obviously fake, much like modern movies that use so much CGI they are more like cartoons than motion pictures.) 

The dark satire follows a bizarre love triangle and the various tragedies that occur are oddly humorous. Prescott suggests that Waugh's novella is short, but thankfully so, because:

At times the joke wears thin, the continued attack seems a little too much like beating a demonstrably dead dog.

The joke is not just on American excess, but on the British in Hollywood and their bizarre attempts to maintain a sense of empire, despite their empire all-but having fallen apart by the time the novella was written. Waugh's satire is very sharp. It isn't so much tongue in cheek or deadpan, but rather so real that you can tell it is false. Hemingway may well have approved. 

That Waugh was an admirer of Hemingway is evident in an interview with The Paris Review in 1963:

I think that Hemingway made real discoveries about the use of language in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I admired the way he made drunk people talk.

But the thing with Waugh is that one can never be sure. Is he taking the mickey or is he serious? The point is that he is taking the mickey, but from what I can gather of Waugh's work so far, there are some serious themes underlying the dark humour. As Hemingway wrote in Esquire in October 1935 (By-Line, p. 221):

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

I now see echoes of Waugh in Colson White's Underground Railway: you know it is fake but it is so well written it is entirely believable. Not like CGI, which is clearly fake, but in a way that one can suspend reality long enough to truly believe the story. Even if I do still shudder a little when I think of the goings on at the mortuary, the idea of fake presented as real is a key theme. 

Take, for instance, Waugh's protagonist, the failed poet Dennis Barlow, whose plagiarism is so good that it is largely undetected. Unless, of course, the target of his plagiarised poetry is too stupid to notice. Of Barlow's "girlfriend", Prescott wrote:

Her IQ was little above idiocy.

Perhaps this is closer to the point. The fakery is so real that we blindly accept stupidity as truth, yet we are too vain to notice the difference. Waugh was indeed brilliant, and that I am unable to tell when he is taking the mickey is probably more a case of him telling me that we are taking the mickey out of ourselves.

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An Encyclopaedia of Procrastination and Substance Abuse?

Mayan music and rituals: painting at Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo: Jacobolus [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is an encyclopaedia of daily rituals, rather than a coherent story. I found it to be interesting and useful in thinking about my own daily rituals. 

Many of the entries are of people I have not heard of before. This was useful because many of these same people had to find time between work and home life to practise their craft. 

One of the problems with looking for inspiration from great artists is that many of them had significant others who did all the daily chores. So many of the greats could shut themselves off from the world around them for long stretches of time - usually while someone else did the cooking and cleaning and laundry or else supported them financially in the early stages. 

For most people, having someone else act as a live-in personal servant is a pipe dream. That doesn't mean that the daily rituals of great artists are not useful when considering one's own rituals, but it does require some realistic adjustments. For example, almost all of the great artists' rituals recorded in this encyclopaedia relied heavily on alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, and/or drugs, with many of them not living very long at all. It seems almost like cheating; if artists were athletes, we wouldn't see their exploits as so remarkable. 

The book is good as an aside, and you can read one or a few entries at a time, but it is not a traditional read. There is an excellent list of references and notes at the back for further reading. I intend to put this book to good use to refine my own writing routine and there is plenty of food for thought about various ways to get work done and to overcome procrastination. Even without drugs.

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The Wisdom of Mr Palomar

Swallow Dance (1878) by Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Hiroshige III [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom mentions in How to Read and Why (pp.64-66) why Italo Calvino was one of the greatest short story writers and refers specifically to Calvino's "wisdom" (p. 64). Calvino's wisdom is not wanting in this collection of short stories centred on the life of Mr Palomar. 

Each section of the book focuses on a particular activity of Mr Palomar's in various locations, with each story within the theme based around a particular sub-theme. I have often read of literary "constellations" (p. 107), where literature in sum forms "an imaginary outline or meaningful pattern" not in the sky, but in the mind. 

At first, Mr Palomar appears to be suffering from some kind of introverted social awkwardness. Yet as the stories progress, Calvino's wisdom shines through as I began to identify with Palomar and to see his own wisdom beyond his apparent social ineptitude. What I discovered was that Mr Palomar was self-aware, to the point where he is conscious of his failings yet continues to deceive himself. Yet (p. 107):

The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot. The road left open to him is this: he will devote himself from now on to the knowing of himself, he will explore his own inner geography, he will draw the diagram of the moods of his spirit, he will derive from it formulas and theories, he will train his telescope on the orbits of the course of his life rather than those of the constellations.

Here is where I made the connection with Bloom. Bloom often writes of characters "overhearing" themselves, but Calvino makes Mr Palomar "overlook" himself, finding:

We can know nothing about what is outside us, if we overlook ourselves... the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.

This link between the individual and environment echoes James Allen's "environment is but his looking glass" (Calvino writes "The universe as mirror") when writing of the interaction between inner and outer life (but with a sense of manifestation of inward conditions on the outside). Palomar laments that he is not like this (104):

To the man who is friend of the universe, the universe is a friend.

Recently, I have been learning more about induction versus deduction in terms of my academic work. Here, Calvino outlines how Mr Palomar is a deductivist (p. 98), rather than an inductivist, and how Palomar likes to construct models of principles and experience, and to force things into the model when experience fails to live up to his model.

Yet for all Mr Palomar's attempts to remain aloof, his models never fit, and when he looks away from the rational geometric designs of his models, he sees human suffering, much like a person who tries to deny their emotions until the pot boils over and the emotions spill out. I came to see much of myself, and dare I say much of all of us, in Mr Palomar. 

The stories seem to grow like a human, from childhood to adolescence, to age and wisdom. My fondness for Mr Palomar grew as his journey progressed. There is much material for introspection in this work, and I found that my selfish desire to introspect through, rather than with, Mr Palomar, was forgiven by Calvino at the conclusion. 

A remarkable work with a tenor that does not, to the best of my knowledge, exist anywhere in Anglophone writing.

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Road Pricing and Provision: Solving public policy challenges

Photo © Depositphotos.com/toxawww 

Today I delivered a presentation to the ACT Economic Society of Australia at the Griffin Centre in Canberra. The slides from my presentation are available below:

Road Pricing and Provision: Solving public policy challenges from University of Canberra

Walter Benjamin's Oeuvre: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Sketches of Walter Benjamin. Credit: Renée [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] via Flickr

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Walter Benjamin's work fascinates me, and his chapter "The Flâneur" in his unfinished tome, The Arcades Project, was the inspiration for my research philosophy (or how, as a political scientist, I can work while being disillusioned with contemporary politics). 

This collection consists of three essays translated by J.A. (Jim) Underwood: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death; and Picturing Proust. I have not read Proust's work, so the third essay felt a little like name-dropping, and I was the uneducated who had no idea who Benjamin was talking about. I am somewhat familiar with Kafka's work, so the essay was enlightening and provided an interesting background on Kafka. 

The first essay, which gives its name to the collection, I found to fit the theme of much of my experience with social media, and I was comfortable with the content. That is not to say that I didn't learn anything, however, as Benjamin's ideas would easily be revived today as "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction". 

My immediate thought was to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, one of the most over-rated tourist attractions, according to Techly's Joe Frost. I tend to agree. I was surprised how small it is. 

But here Benjamin comes to the rescue: Mona Lisa has an "aura". With the invention of film, the aura disappears. The camera becomes the audience. Stardom replaces the aura - fans are in awe of the film star, rather than being in awe of the event. 

Social media does something similar. It is more about creating an aura around the holiday for others, rather than enjoying the viewing in the moment. While I don't pretend to know anything much about Walter Benjamin's work just yet, I am already a fan. 

But as the camera hides all of the apparatus of film-making beyond the lens, unlike the theatre which forces us to ignore the reality that surrounds the stage, so too is social media. But in terms of marginalia, I found myself most out of my depth with the knowledge of Benjamin's endless name-dropping. Had I a clue who most of these people were (contemporary art, film, and literary critics, I presume), I would have a better understanding of the essays. 

One thing that I have learnt, especially in attempting to understand an author's oeuvre, is that a sound knowledge of the author's times and contemporaries is essential. Reading Hemingway, I discovered Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, et al. Reading Calvino, I realise I have much to learn. 

Reading Plato, I am pleased that my reading of the Stoics, Heraclitus, Homer, Hesiod, and even Virgil have given me enough of this knowledge not to gloss over names as I might with non-English phrases, but to feel like I know something about what I am reading. Whether I am missing Mortimer Adler's point is another story, but I feel that if one wants to study another's oeuvre, one must study more than just the author's work. 

And that is what makes my latest ventures into Italo Calvino and Walter Benjamin so exciting. I am leaving my Anglophone shores far behind as I paddle off into the unknown. Where I land I do not know. 

But I do know I enjoy Walter Benjamin's work immensely. Whether I can bring myself to tackle The Arcades Project's 1,000-odd pages anytime soon remains to be seen.

And while I was hoping that my fascination with Benjamin made me somewhat original, I was saddened to learn that, once again, I am simply late to the trend!

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Learning Italo Calvino's Literary Oeuvre

Il Duce. Mussolini in Mailand, May 1930. Photo [CC-BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia.

Into the War by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Calvino wrote these three short autobiographical stories despite his criticism of autobiographies. The works were written in Italian in 1954, and only translated into English in 2011. 

The stories tell the tale of Calvino's youth in Mussolini's Italy at the beginning of the Second World War. Calvino was too young to serve when war broke out, and by the time he was of age to serve, he avoided the Fascist draft and become a partisan. 

A few things stand out for me. Life in the early period of the war seems to have been quite mundane, especially for a teenager. The usual goings-on of teenage life seem to fit, relatively unchanged, into the backdrop of war. Even a trip to the newly conquered French town of Menton provides mostly a backdrop for what a teenage boy might do. 

At the same time, a subtext of the Fascist movement is ever-present, and subtle hints at the Fascist's glorying in their conquering as if re-imagining a Roman past appear in the actions and words of the adults who direct the boys in their guard and sentry duties. 

In his translator's introduction, Martin McLaughlin mentions Calvino's relationship with his father, and how the father concludes the three short stories by walking off with his dog to do his normal duties as if nothing else was going on. While the likes of Mortimer Adler have suggested not reading introductions before embarking on a new book, I find it increasingly useful when I am in the early stages of reading an author's works. 

This is only my fourth Calvino work, and I am yet to grasp the nature of his oeuvre. I found the same when first reading Hemingway, but after learning more about his life and other non-literary background readings, I came to better appreciate his work as I read it. 

I found the introduction useful with Calvino and I was able to follow the subtle hints to the backstory of his father that I may have otherwise missed. The translation seems to work well, and if anything is lost in translation I can only imagine how brilliant Calvino's work must be in the original (if I could read Italian, that is). 

Already, I am surprised by the diversity of Calvino's work, especially when compared with Hemingway, where almost all of his work (except perhaps Garden of Eden, although it is somewhat the antithesis) is a variation on a theme. I am intrigued by Calvino. 

Whether it is reading someone other than an Anglophone I am not sure, but I have the same experience of reading Walter Benjamin or even Harold Bloom. This makes me think that Calvino's literary work is brilliant. And that's it.

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The Republic: Religion rules, recipes for today's kitchens, and ¿Qué?

The Allegory of the Cave, Book VII. By Corpalma, 2011 [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia.

The Republic by Plato

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Three things struck me about The Republic. The first is the incorporation of theology into philosophy. For all the goings on about religion in recent times and the apparent "victory" of science, Plato's philosophy begins and ends with Heraclitus' God. Almost none of the philosophy makes sense without the soul or a higher purpose for humans, and an intelligent deity that has ordered it all to be so.

Second, The Republic is a handbook for politics. Hardly an idea has escaped tyrants or politicians. Parts of the work are basically a program for political action. Of course, the examples provided from ancient times are not necessarily the equivalent of the polis today, but there is certainly an element of prediction that cannot be ignored. 

And third, the art of translation has a significant influence on the readability of classic texts, and this translation by Desmond Lee is fascinating. Lee includes extensive notes throughout the text. Many of the notes relate to the various translations by others, and Lee often admits when he is not sure of his translation. 

After reading Benjamin Jowett's translation of Meno, I was disappointed with how annoying Socrates appeared in the dialogue. Nonetheless, the dialogue in The Republic is so contrived as to make me wonder why bother having the interjections from the audience (who always agree with Socrates even when the logic is obscure?). 

Of course, dialogue is a literary and political device, but the differences between the various translations are significant, as they are with Homer's epic poetry. My marginalia is too extensive to write up in this space, but I have kept notes on pedagogy, the reliance on God to make sense of the philosophy, numerous other readings to complete, and Plato's various ideas that make this work timeless. 

One quote relating to teaching struck a chord (p. 300):

The teacher fears and panders to his pupils, who in turn despise their teachers and attendants.

As did the many references to democracy leading to tyranny brought about by a popular champion. Once again, I find that a complete reading reveals so much of my education that did not make a direct link to the original source. 

The allegory of the cave appears in almost any undergraduate degree in politics, but in such a cut-down version as to make the entire idea in relation to the allegory of the Sun and the Line and the division of knowledge into its levels of "truth" disappear. It makes we wonder how much has been lost by perpetually drawing on secondary sources in education. 

Again, translation fascinates me and I regret not having learnt more than one language when I was young, so I can only trust that Lee's translation does the original work justice (no pun intended). If I had known the impact a complete reading of this work would have on me, I would have attempted it much earlier. 

Having said that, without having read Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, and the Stoics, I think much of The Republic would have gone straight over my head. I have since commenced reading The Laws while I am in sync with Platos' dialectical dramatisation.

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