Appreciating Ted Hughes

Hawk Roosting: Feet or foot? Photo: Summerdrought [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia

Lupercal by Ted Hughes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I sat down to write about my first reading of this collection of poetry, I drew a blank. I knew nothing of Ted Hughes until he was mentioned in a comment about my reading of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, along with Sylvia Plath. I'd heard of Plath! 

I didn't hate the poetry, nor did I like it. But it seemed strange. I knew it was about animals, but that was the extent of the experience of my first reading. So I took to some research and made some enlightening discoveries.

Hughes was the UK's Poet Laureate, just like Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There had to be something I was missing.

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1995, Hughes mentions a number of issues concerning "The Art of Poetry", such as the differences in drafting verse in handwriting versus typing. In response to the question "Is a poem ever finished?", Hughes mentions a struggle he has had with the singular or plural in the middle of the poem, "Hawk Roosting". Neither worked satisfactorily.

So I start there:

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

And he's right. Swap feet for foot and back again, and neither works grammatically. But it works as it is in the poem.

I tried another poem, "Urn Burial". On the first reading, my mind was clouded by seeing some of the oldest remnants of human urn burials in Bahrain on a visit during my sabbatical in 2009. All I could picture were the skeletal remains curled up in the large stone urns. No animals in sight.

Then, like a 3D picture, the symbolism became clear: Oh, it's a weasel! (It even reads "weasel", but I was off in another dimension.) It started to make sense.

This was not entirely my own doing. I had to digress with Hughes' ars poetica, "The Thought Fox". Hughes basically tells me how to read his poetry. It's very clever, but maybe a little more academic than I was expecting.

Hughes' fascination with animals came from his childhood experience. His older brother, ten years his senior, loved to hunt. Hughes acted as his older brother's retriever and this continued for something like twenty years. Hughes is also famous for his children's books.

Like many readers these days, I had fallen victim to the general decline in reading poetry for fun. (Except epic and didactic poetry such as Homer, Virgil, and Hesiod.)

This year I have read Frank O'Hara, Sir Walter Ralegh, T.S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I am now a convert. I also read Nietzsche's The Gay Science and I am currently reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, both works about poetry. It makes more sense to read poetry more than once, and with some study in between. (Hughes said this in his Paris Review interview, too.)

Had I not read up about Hughes, I would have been none the wiser. And I would certainly be missing out.

The icing on the cake was the name of the collection, Lupercal, is derived from an ancient Roman pastoral or fertility festival, Lupercalia, held annually on my birthday. This made more sense of the numerous classical references that had confused me in my first reading. (The birthday bit gave a surprising personal connection!)

Perhaps I am now a Ted Hughes fan.

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Tennyson: Art imitates life and proves me wrong yet again

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower. Keswick, Gunning 25th December 2018. Photo by Michael de Percy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Alfred Tennyson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Stoics were happy to be proven wrong so that they might root out their own ignorance. Only recently have I begun to really enjoy poetry, and a visit to the bookstore at a time my mind was open brought me to this selection of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1850 following William Wordworth's death. He wasn't the first choice. Not knowing what the position of poet laureate even meant, my class self-consciousness went off on its usual tangent. Typical, an "appointed" artist. State-contrived creativity. What nonsense.

I once felt the same about Hemingway. Americans uber-promoting their own as the best in the world, without considering anyone else, anywhere else. And then I read Islands in the Stream. Wow. And I have since devoured all the works I could find written by Hemingway. He is my favourite author.

So when I purchased this book, I thought I'd give it a go. And then my class-self-consciousness kicked in. Until page 4:

        Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

of the mouldering flowers:

       Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; 

Before reading the book, I had been out preparing the garden for the ensuing heatwave. An enormous sunflower had opened up, the biggest I have ever seen. Then it began to droop.

I added a longer stake to keep the flower upright. But after I put the stake in, I realised that the flower was not drooping for lack of water or support. It was solid, bent over in the position shown in the photograph above.

A few hours later I read page 4 of Tennyson's Song. And in it was all the beauty and reason of my broad sunflower in its present condition. A work of God. 

My Damascene moment instantly converted me to Tennyson. Once again, my own bullshit had been called and I was wrong. 

The rest of the works are an absolute delight, and I made an interesting discovery. Tennyson used the phrase "a handful of dust" (p. 48). Evelyn Waugh had borrowed the phrase as the title for his novel, from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Waste Land is what got me into poetry in the first place, so the miracle of life continues, the circle of literary learning turns, and I live and learn.

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On Love: Turgenev Style

The statue of Mumu in front of her eponymous café in St. Petersburg. Photo by Grant Schutz [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia.

First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is something about Turgenev's work that distinguishes him from other famous Russian authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. His tone is masculine yet romantic in a forlorn way - maybe he had his unrequited love, married opera singer Pauline Viardot, in mind. It seems to convey a darker, Russian version of saudade. 

Hemingway said that for him, writing fiction was like boxing with Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal. There are certainly some similarities in Hemingway's work.

I am just getting in to War and Peace and I would compare Tolstoy to Virginia Woolf. That's how different the two famous Russian authors convey their stories. Both great authors, but very different in style.

I enjoyed Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album (A Sportsman's Sketches), but I only knew of this book because Hemingway mentioned it in one of his non-fiction collections I have read.

First Love and other stories is very different from either Sketches or Fathers and Sons. I have  not read Torrents of Spring yet. (Hemingway's first novella had the same name.)  I discovered this book because either Harold Bloom or Italo Calvino (I cannot remember which one) said that 'King Lear of the Steppes' was one of the greatest short stories (or is it long-form?) of all time.

Each of the stories are brilliant. Each has a sense of gloom about them. Not in the annoying way, but in that untranslatable saudade way. Not gloom, but so close to life. Something akin to that feeling that you have when you remember a past hurt.

You wouldn't go back to it - indeed, you had forgotten all about it until one day it just appears in front of you while you are watering the garden or doing the laundry. But there it is, and you feel sad for a moment, and then laugh, and then move on. 

But you remember the hurt, it just doesn't hurt so much anymore. (Unless of course you are on a complete downer, so don't do that.)

There is something about Turgenev that makes his long-form hard to read. I didn't find this with Fathers and Sons so much, but I found the same thing with Sketches. When I reflect on the stories, every one of them was enjoyable, but all of them require a bit of effort.

I don't know how to explain that effort, but I had the same experience with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. When I look at the book now, it is tiny, but it took a while to get through, even though I thought it was brilliant and I have since watched the movie starring Dirk Bogarde a few times. This then sent me off to read Bogarde's work (which I find easy and enjoyable to read).

Turgenev requires effort. In the way that going for a run requires effort. Once you have the miles in your legs, it is splendid. If you haven't run for years, it is almost impossible. I find that Turgenev requires a clear head and a commitment to read, but it is worth every effort.

Just don't turn to Turgenev when you are looking for a light read. It's a bit like going for a sprint when you haven't run for years. Same difference.

The Futility of Buying Life to Escape Death

El Tres de Mayo (The Third of May 1808) by Francisco Goya, 1814. Photo: [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

This novella by Graham Greene was written in 1944 (first conceived in 1938) as a screen play that was somehow discarded and lost in the MGM archives. Greene was unable to make a living from writing books and took a contract with MGM to write screenplays, and before the main story, the book includes a couple of screen sketches. In 1983, the story was found and MGM sold the rights to a publisher, hence this book.

Reading other's unfinished work is a great learning experience, and it is useful to see how the plot and structure of creative writing emerges from different authors. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a book I wish I had read while writing my PhD - the thought process is clear, but the details are still being threshed out. Seeing how Fitzgerald did this has left a powerful impression on me.

In the first part of Greene's book, he tells the story of what he was doing before and after the war, and how the story came about. He then introduces two film sketches that remained unfinished. It is interesting that in just a few pages, the outline of a movie appears. Greene added the film sketches because he had largely forgotten about The Tenth Man, thinking it was only (p. 10):

...two pages of outline but [it was] a complete short novel of thirty thousand words.

He then went through his own archives and found two other sketches - although less complete - that he had also forgotten about. (Wouldn't it be lovely to have written so much one had forgotten some of it?)

The main text, The Tenth Man, reads as a complete novella - there is certainly nothing undeveloped there. But the introduction sets out how the novella began as a few sentences outlining an idea. The two film sketches, which are incomplete, provide a bridge to Greene's process from a few sentences to a complete story.

As for the story, the cover blurb says it all: a rich man in a German prison draws lots to see who will die. (The Germans are going to execute 1 in 10 prisoners, and the prisoners have to decide who it will be.) The rich man loses, but offers all of his wealth to stay alive. Another prisoner, thinking of his family, takes up the rich man's offer.

I recall from reading Hemingway's letters and various articles how he developed a story out of a simple idea. For example, The Sun Also Rises is a story to answer the question, What would happen if your penis was shot off during the war? Greene's story follows a similar process: What would it be like to pay somebody else to die for you, if you gave up everything to live?

The story isn't so much Faustian, for the poor prisoner insists that the rich man sticks to the deal (after the rich man has an attack of conscience), and there is much more to the story after that.

In many ways, it addresses questions of life and death, and whether we control our fate or whether it matters or not. Or indeed, if we think we can thwart destiny, think again. Maybe the moral of the story is amor fati?

I've been reading and thinking a lot about death lately, especially the idea that all fear can be reduced to a fear of death, and, because we all die, there is nothing to be afraid of - it is a given. Perhaps it is not a topic Australians discuss in any philosophical sense, unlike what I have read by the Stoics, Albert Camus or what is explored in Mexico's Festival of the Dead. 

I think this aversion to thinking about death is philosophically limiting. But rather than Camus, which might be a little confronting for the uninitiated, Graham Greene deals with the topic in a way that makes it hard not to reflect on one's values, the purpose of life, and, I suppose, that death accompanies life.

It is certainly macabre, but there is much to learn from this novella. The story was made into a TV movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins in 1988.

To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Masterpiece

Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall, the inspiration for Woolf's lighthouse at the Hebrides, where the "unstory" takes place. Photo by Chris Combe, 17 February 2015 [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite two short introductions to the book, I was not prepared for the psychological - or ethereal - or cerebral - or emotional? - context of this modernist novel. Now I have read a few commentaries about the novel, my lack of preparation could have been overcome with a bit of investigation. But the backstory on Woolf's style of prose and her role as a modernist gatekeeper is fascinating.

Whenever I think of Virginia Woolf, I immediately think of Hemingway for two reasons. 

First, Woolf's prose is the exact opposite of Hemingway's. Hemingway's prose is brief and clear and fine. 

Whereas, if one were to turn one's thoughts into one's sentences, if one might have, one day when thinking about writing prose, an idea about how a thought could be put into a sentence, which is silly because thoughts are always put into sentences - especially in novels, even people's speech is spoken in sentences, usually - but if one could imagine what a sentence might look like if it were to resemble a string of thoughts, or at least our inner monologue while thinking, while simultaneously appearing as if it was dialogue by a character, yet it wasn't, it was the inner monologue practising or speaking without actually verbalising the words, then that is as close as one might get to Woolf's prose.

And that really is it. This is a story about the thoughts and feelings of a group of people who surround a family but with the gap of a decade (which includes the Great War), and the actual story is more like an "unstory". There is no real plot - there is a location, there is socialising and limited action and dialogue.

Most of the story is built upon the inner monologues of the characters. I was hooked. It was almost like reading a book about my own mind at a dinner party or with a party of people, especially where I am concerned with either being hospitable or polite or else socially acceptable. And that is what Woolf's characters do.

Second (if you had forgotten I had a first, then I am merely mirroring Woolf's style), I knew from my reading of some of Hemingway's work (and work about Hemingway) that he took issue with Woolf's review of his short story collection, Men Without Women.

In her review, entitled An Essay in Criticism, Woolf basically says, Hemingway, you are no modernist. So I thought Hemingway then went off to hate on her a bit, like he did with so many of his so-called friends from the Paris years.

But no, Hemingway was stung by Woolf's criticism. In my copy of the three-volume The Letters of  Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge), Hemingway tells his publisher Max Perkins and his friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald that he can't write because of the criticism, he just wants to be left alone but the criticism won't let him be. And here was me thinking that Hemingway was thinking, Get in the ring, Woolf! But no.

Why so much about Hemingway when writing about a novel by Woolf? Well, Woolf was in effect a modernist gatekeeper. And this novel, to me, represents Woolf at the height of her modernist powers, even more so than in Mrs Dalloway. 

Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of creatives and artists who lived elite lifestyles and often gave support to young artists. Hemingway notes this in his letters, but also notes that he is not one of them, and rather than give him a leg up, Woolf was standing on his neck.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927; so was Men Without Women. Hemingway was on the rise (he was younger than Woolf), Woolf was at her peak. Both would die by suicide. Despite their differences in style of prose, the similarities outweigh the differences if one scratches the surface.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf does what Hemingway doesn't do, except in his letters. That is, to give life to the life of the mind, without the need for heroics or even a substantial plot. I find her work sits well with T.S. Eliot's modernist poetry. 

I regard this novel as Woolf's masterpiece. It captures the life of the mind and the inner monologue that we rarely share with others (unless we wish to be snubbed, It's called an inner monologue for a reason). But I daresay others will identify with the thoughts that fly through our minds when in company, and Woolf gives us insight into the life of the various minds of her characters.

That she is able to create a story out of her characters' private thoughts is marvellous, and, for me, certainly captures the spirit of modernism as far as I understand the concept.

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": Pound for Pound

Gunning Golf Course, 4th December 2018. Photo: Michael de Percy [CC BY-ND 4.0].

The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the title of which is derived from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem, The Waste Land, I was compelled to read the poem and to learn more about Eliot. Up until today, my knowledge of Eliot was limited to what I had gleaned from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I have read all around Eliot, including Djuna Barnes (whom Eliot admired)¹, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Andersen, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. But I have shied away from poetry until only recently.

After reading the poem, I listened to the BBC's In Our Time podcast episode, "The Waste Land and Modernity". There was much interesting discussion about the original book version of Eliot's poem. Apparently, the poem itself was too short to be a book and the publisher asked Eliot to pad it out.

Eliot added a bunch of notes to the poem, many of which turned out to be superfluous. The poem had also been cut down considerably by Ezra Pound, which took away the various signals of the several stories that emerge in the poem.

I listened to a reading of the poem on YouTube (below), partly read by Eliot. In the In Our Time discussion, they mentioned that the poem was published at the same time BBC Radio began, so in many ways the poem lends itself to a radio reading. It is interesting how listening to the poem being read makes the different voices more obvious, whereas this is somewhat obscured in a first reading (to oneself).

In sum, an issue that constantly strikes me is that the more I read, the less I know. And in many ways, based on my reading around The Waste Land, and from the discussions on the In Our Time podcast, Eliot meant to show how we don't or can't know everything; indeed, we may not need to know everything.

Even the different interpretations by American versus English critics revealed different interpretations of common English sayings highlighted in the poem. And of course, there are many references to the classics and so on which I hope to discover by obtaining a copy of the original (pre-Pound) version of the poem, and also the published version with the superfluous notes added by Eliot.

The poem apparently took Eliot one year to write, and he was quite upset by the paltry sum first offered to him for its publication. Yet it is now regarded as the most influential poems of the twentieth century.

Like all great works, the poem deserves several readings. But if you want to really hear the different voices, the recital of the poem will bring this to the fore.

Notes:

1. Fleischer, G. (1998). Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: The Politics and Poetics of "Nightwood". Studies in the Novel, 30(3), 405-437. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533280.


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Evelyn Waugh's exploration of cause and effect: Unto dust shalt thou return

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, 18 April 1935. Photo: NOAA George E. Marsh Album [Public domain], via Wikimedia.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of Evelyn Waugh's most famous novels, A Handful of Dust is the story of an aristocrat and his wife and their dissolving marriage during the inter-war years . Like most of Waugh's work, this novel is satirical but it incorporates an element of despair that makes the story less humorous and more - I am struggling for the word here - hopeless? As if no matter what one does, there is no hope.

Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics referred to this hopelessness not as something unfair - Waugh messes with the reader's sense of justice - but as the  logos - the logic that governs the universe, the power of destiny that we have no hope to overcome.

The entry in The Daily Stoic for 30th November provides an analogy of a dog leashed to a moving cart. The dog has freedom of movement to the extent of the tether, but ultimately it will be pulled along at the whim of the moving cart. From this analogy, one can either fight the logic - that is, be pulled along painfully by the cart - or go with the flow and experience the bounded freedom.

This edition of the novel is interesting in that it has extensive notes. Some were superfluous, but others provide context for the various editions of the story. After the conclusion, an alternative ending is provided. 

In many ways, this reminded me of Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, an unfinished work, but perfect in its incompleteness. The story ends abruptly with Fitzgerald's own death, and the remainder of the novel is pieced together from the author's notes and ideas about how the story would progress. It is truly a glimpse into the mind of a genius.

What I read into the alternative ending is the possibility of outcomes that escape our conscious choices, or better yet how our choices, with the benefit of hindsight, provide alternative endings that we could never have foreseen.

Had the alternative ending been the first ending, I would have been disappointed. It would have been a complete cop-out. But the first ending is tragic, yet somehow improbable.

Waugh travelled to the Untied States and used this experience to produce The Loved One, and in A Handful of Dust he used his experience of travels in South America to inform parts of the story. It is interesting that the novel was constructed around a short story Waugh had written about the protagonist trapped in a remote part of Brazil (I think it was), with the alternative ending replacing the original short story.

In many ways, the novel is incomplete if read in conjunction with the notes and the alternative ending. One gets the feeling that Waugh was indecisive. However, if I had read the novel without the notes and the alternative ending, I would not be having such misgivings.

The way this book is presented provides a glimpse into the mind of Waugh, and it is clear that he is not just a sentimentalist who pokes fun at the last hurrah of the English aristocracy. There are many comparisons with Waugh's satirical stories about the English aristocracy, with Downton Abbey being an updated take on the 1981 television series Brideshead Revisited.

I recall the Earl of Grantham, in the finale of Downton Abbey, saying:

We never know what's coming, of course. Who does? But I'd say, we have a good chance.

Little does he know that the Great Depression is just around the corner. For Tony and Brenda Last (Waugh's protagonists), this period is already in the past, but if Downton foresaw the end for the aristocrats, Brenda and Tony are living on borrowed time. Or as The New York Times reviewer, Anatole Broyard put it, Waugh is commenting on how:

...the English upper classes are leading a rented life.

But Boryard reviews only the story and the characters, perhaps without the assistance of the alternative ending and numerous notes provided in my version of the book. If one were to read only the review, one would think that the story was simply about the demise of the English upper class.

Once, I would have read fiction only as a form of entertainment, and I had a strong preference for non-fiction. Nowadays, I find myself gaining through risk-free experience. I find myself asking of the characters: What are they thinking? Why are they doing this? How did circumstances effect their choices? What can I learn from this telling of others' lives through the author?

My high school self would have laughed at such nonsense, but now I see how my arrogance and ignorance set me up for a long waste of intellectual time. Is it fair to put so much responsibility on Waugh? Well, yes. If one only read Waugh for entertainment, the story is entertaining.

But if one studies the author, reads their work in its entirety (as much as is possible in terms of what has been published), key themes begin to emerge across their oeuvre.

At the risk of over-inflating what I perceive to be Waugh's intentions, I am seeing the theme of choices made by individuals, but not so much as in cause and effect, but in terms of the limits of freedom. Tony Last is presented with two choices and Waugh explores each choice in the context of destiny. No matter what choice Tony makes, he is still dragged by the cart.

Here, too, I see what the first episode of Mad Men explored as the "death wish", or rather, our choices about life and death. Should Tony have made the second choice? If he had, Waugh's satire would have been complete. Yet if Tony went with the choice of the first ending, he rises above the lunacy of his rented life.

To sum up, what I get from this novel is that we are all born with a death sentence. And the choices we make have little effect upon how our story ends. Sure, our vicissitudes may be different, but the power of the choice itself is not about it causing an effect in our story. Our end is already decided (Genesis 3:19):

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

If we live by our principles, we may die sooner but live better. Or we may live longer and kid ourselves that life is just fine. But what I really get from Waugh is that it really doesn't matter. Not the doom and gloom of the nihilist proper, but an acceptance that we are leashed to the cart and our choices are inconsequential. Oh, and the English upper classes were really starting to sweat by the 1930s. Amor fati.

Addendum: Waugh's title is from the second stanza of T.S. Eliot's long poem, The Waste Land, and the notes indicate numerous references to the poem:

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Tsunamic Climax in Korean Novel

Chatting at a well at night. Painting by Hyewon, circa 1805 (late Joseon period). Photo: [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

No One Writes Back by Eun-Jin Jang

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel was recommended to me by a friend (who is of Korean descent), after discussing my enjoyment of Han Kang's The Vegetarian. The Library of Korean Literature brings modern Korean novels to an English-reading audience (much like the Japan Library). This novel was translated by Jung Yewon.

The protagonist reminds me of the main character in The Rosie Project, but this is a more serious work. The paragraphs are numbered, and I found the structure to be unusual.

I recall in high school English how we would map the trajectory of a novel's plot, from the build up to the climax and the anti-climax. This novel builds up slowly, and I recall thinking it wasn't very good. The basic story line is a seemingly autistic man in his thirties who has broken up with his girlfriend, quit his job as a postman, and travels randomly from town to town with his late grandfather's seeing-eye dog who is old and blind. 

As he meets people on his journey, the protagonist asks them for their address, he then assigns them a number (he is much better at numbers than names), and sends them a letter during his journey. He meets a woman he wishes to be rid of but he helps her sell her novels on the various subways and they stay in motels as they both travel around. He will end his journey when one of his travelling numbers writes back.

After a while, this becomes a bit tedious, but interesting in that one has to know where it is going. The lead-up to the climax is long and drawn out and in the last few pages, the climax brings a tsunami of emotion that still haunts me. I was stricken with sadness, grief, bliss (in the religious sense), and wonder.

Had I given up on the novel, I would have missed out on a wonderful story, the likes of which I have never read in Anglo literature.

I am pleased that organisations such as Japan Library and the Korean Library of Literature are bringing contemporary works from these countries to English readers. There is a long list of other contemporary Korean novels that I am sure are worth a look.

It is not so much that there is much difference in the lives of Korean towns (indeed, I often thought of similar experiences in places like Hong Kong), but the way the story unfolds. It edges towards suggestive at times, but is never lewd, it is close to grunge but not in a dark, Bukowskian (or even Carverian) way, it touches on poverty, but you never feel the characters lack anything.

The more I think about it, the lead up to the climax is all middle ground. There are no real humps or bumps, it just flows along like a three-year long journey. But when something brings the journey to an end, all is revealed in a matter of pages. 

It is like being lulled into a false sense of security that is suddenly pulled out from under you. Like a flash flood or an unexpected tsunami. This is a powerful story, and the second contemporary Korean novel I have read. There is much to be gained from reading outside of the Anglo-European tradition, and from what I have read so far, Korean literature is fast becoming a new favourite genre for me.

Raymond Carver's Grunge Iceberg

Raymond Carver. Photo by Anthony Easton [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this collection of short stories had me thinking of two other authors: Hemingway, for his iceberg principle; and Bukowski, for his grunginess. Not like Kerouac, for there is a definite late 1960s/early 1970s feel to the characters and situations, and not quite as grungy as Bukowski, but certainly Hemingway-esque in the way the story doesn't leave you for some time after reading. I think, too, that Carver's work does to the imagination what Hemingway's iceberg principle does, but on steroids.

Hemingway left enough for the imagination, and at times I would read commentary on his work and discover something I had missed. But with Carver, I have read commentaries that envision his stories as they are written. In many, I found my imagination unresolved, wondering what happened next, what was meant, but delightfully bewildered all the same.

I knew little about Carver and chose the book because I like the Vintage Classics series. After reading, I went to The Paris Review and the Poetry Foundation to see what else I could learn about Carver. From his late interviews, he appears rather Stoic (as opposed to stoic) in his philosophy, and humble in that he worked for most of his life and only achieved fame much later.

I was also impressed by his gratitude towards his partner, fellow poet Tess Gallagher, who would read and provide feedback on Carver's work after the fourth draft. Gallagher is now in her mid-70s and has a book of poetry to be released in 2019.

I recall Scott Fitzgerald commenting that nobody wanted to read about poor people, but Carver writes about lower-middle class people who end up realising that they won't ever really get ahead. I could feel the grunge from my 1970s childhood in his stories, even though geographically I was on the other side of the world and so young.

What I like about Carver's work is that it takes me back to a time that is somewhat familiar, and much harder to glorify. Conversely, Hemingway's era was so long ago that it is all new. Carver's era has a touch of sentimentality (for me), but his subjects are such that there is less nostalgia, more "things are different now yet somehow the same".

Carver's subjects are not rags to riches or riches to rags stories; they are people striving to be more than they are and then becoming bankrupt or divorced or alcoholic or just downright strange as they do what they do. There is no real political statement in his work, rather a social commentary, stemming from his own upbringing.

These are wonderful stories and I enjoyed the way Carver makes my imagination work, even to the point of frustration. I also like that there is no way to find out what he really meant - he meant for the reader to reach their own conclusion.

This work would have made my day in high school English. Whenever we were asked what the author meant in a particular work, I would become frustrated with the teacher telling us and say something like "How are we supposed to know that. Did you ask them?" I've heard this same rot from my students! 

But there appears to be an absence of hidden meaning and morality in Carver's work. In his own words, literature is "superior amusement", and maybe with a hint of spirituality. I found the grunginess of the stories frighteningly familiar, as if all of my embarrassing failures in life had been recorded and put into a collection of short stories.

That, I believe is what Carver does best. He captures the lives of ordinary battlers and uses his experiences and the stories he has heard from others as the baseline for a work of fiction, fiction that is true enough to be real but fictional enough not to be true.

If ever there was a genre that combined Hemingway's and Bukowski's styles, then this is it. Apparently, Carver didn't like his style being referred to as "minimalist". I wonder how he would feel about "grunge iceberg"?

Alexander's Afghan Campaign: Learning History from Fiction

The marriage of Alexander the Great with Roxana of Bactria (in 327BCE), painting circa 1670-1733 by Gerard Hoet (1648-1733). Photo: [CC0] via Wikimedia.

The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Steven Pressfield is one of my most favourite contemporary authors of fiction. I have read Gates of Fire and Tides of War and learnt much about history as a consequence.

The Afghan Campaign is a gripping read and it doesn't end how one might want it to. I respect the ending more so than if it had been Disneyfied (even though I secretly hoped it would). 

Pressfield does not offer a political commentary on the Afghan campaign, but, as in his other works of historical fiction, places a fictional individual in the midst of history's great people (in this case, Alexander III of Macedon). The format works well and gives enough creative licence to enable a ripping story to emerge from a background of recorded history.

Pressfield's historical research is admirable. I read Gates of Fire before I began writing personal notes about every book I read. But before reading Tides of War, I finished Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This meant that  I was able to be reminded of key events covered by Thucydides in Pressfield's account of Athens' Sicilian Campaign.

While I have not done so yet, I intend to read Robin Lane Fox's Alexander the Great soon to see how this novel stacks up. But I don't think it matters.

Pressfield is certainly brilliant, and I must admit to liking the way he has worked hard to overcome his own demons. He gives me hope that I can do the same.

I also like that Pressfield is a bit of an underdog. His work is brilliant - I enjoy his work more than Wilbur Smith's (who has also written the odd historical novel or two). But there is something more philosophical about Pressfield that grabs my attention. On his website, he has this to say:

We can’t control the level of talent we’ve been given. We have no control over the nature of our gift. What we can control is our self-motivation, our self-discipline, our self-validation, and our self-reinforcement.

In 2012, Pressfield started his own publishing house, Black Irish Books, with his agent, Shawn Coyne. I have been critical of literary entrepreneurs in the past, but Pressfield is no "spring chicken", and claims to have written for 27 years before anything he wrote was published. This counters Einstein's view that:

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.

Anything that goes against Einstein's view  is a winner for me. Although some suggest Einstein didn't quite mean it this way, I have heard so many others use Einstein's words (without acknowledging him) and even judgements about people based on their age, that Pressfield's example gives me some comfort. (Some studies suggest that the age peak is now much older because one couldn't even catch up with the existing literature by age 30, let alone discover new knowledge.)

So this book has it all: a gripping story from an author with a back story that defies the odds. And it is based on historical research that provides an increase in historical knowledge as a side effect. What more could one want in a novel?

Logocentrism and Deconstruction: What's the Différance?

Jacques Derrida, painted portrait. Photo: thierry ehrmann [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr.

Introducing Derrida by Jeff Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon, p. 73):

To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.

Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating"(p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (below) useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice.

Learning About Values from a Potty Mouth

Echo and Narcissus, 1903, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the end of the year approaches and I am on track to achieve my reading goals, I have been reading some pop psychology books. I do like Mark Manson's work, even though its crassness makes it somewhat less scholarly than most of the books I have read thus far.

Manson writes how I sometimes speak, so I am not taking the moral high ground here, but it does mean that I tend to take his content less seriously. As I approach 50 I can reflect on my own experiences from my twenties and early thirties, and I must say I am impressed by the depth of reading of the likes of Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday, and Paul Colaianni and their ability to explain how they think about values, virtues, and finding the logic to guide their daily practice and actions.

But I have some concerns about what I call "literary entrepreneurship", and whether my time would be better spent on the classics.

I have recently been thinking about the idea of "endlessness". During my long service leave last year, I experienced a sense of endlessness where there were no deadlines (at least until the next semester of teaching began) and I could do whatever I wanted each day. I chose to journal, read, and blog, and this enabled me to establish a daily routine which I maintain to this day. I started with Homer, and I have been slowly working through the great books and works by the likes of Camus, Calvino,  and Nietzsche. I often get nervous about wasting time on contemporary books when I have so much to learn from the past.

Because of my own reading program, Manson's examples from literature were all familiar, including Bukowski, Buddha, Tina Gilbertson's idea of "constructive wallowing", the Milgram experiment, and so on. But I wonder whether these pop psychology books (for want of a better term) have sufficient depth?

Many of the self-improvement books I have read refer to historical and personal examples, and there is much to learn from how others think about the same problems I face. For example, Manson's approach to determining one's values fits well with what I gained from my reading of Paul Colaianni and Tina Gilbertson.

But I also see how these books are commercial products with a particular aim in mind. I often get the feeling that the authors are reading as a form of "mining" for information, much like the approach I might take when writing an academic paper (sans the referencing). 

From my own experience, a complete, cover-to-cover, slow reading of each work brings to light much which is lost through simply mining the content. So I wonder how much value I gain from reading Manson, compared to, say, reading Benjamin Franklin? (Of course, Franklin had his own financial reasons for lecturing and writing.) But when I read Franklin, for example, there was much that escaped me in the detail, and further reading revealed much of what I could not gain from the original text.

When I reflect on my reading of the likes of Manson, I often wonder how much I can gain from such literary entrepreneurs. Not that I don't like the book, but I wonder if I gain as much from this book as I might if I had prioritised my reading of Plato's The Laws, for example. 

So when I sum up the lessons learnt from Manson, much of these are in the reiteration of things I already know: if in doubt, act (p. 157); achieving meaning in one's life requires the rejection of alternatives (p. 165); excess is not good for me (p. 165); but establishing boundaries is good for me (p. 174).

One part I enjoyed is where Manson discusses the idea of endless values (p. 151) and mentions the "honest expression" of Pablo Picasso. The idea of honest expression is to provide a metric (p. 74), or a way to measure the implementation of one's values, in a way that does not "end'. For example, if one wanted to achieve "freedom" through work, once a job that provided such "freedom" had been achieved, then there is a sense that the value is "accomplished" and there is no sense of motivation. An "endless" value such as honest expression  is something that can be achieved repeatedly - it never ends.

However, as I know for a fact that I don't know everything, I did learn some key lessons about defining personal values and better ways to measure (metrics) these values; the paradox of choice (and how this promises the good life, but leads to inconsistency and confusion); and a better relationship with the idea of death (Quoting Mark Twain, p. 202):

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I also have a better understanding of "unconscious resistance", which often gets in the way of me doing things I believe I actually want to do.

My "struggle" (see "suffering" p. 208) with my reading is best summed up by Harold Bloom (How to Read and Why, p. 21):

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest... but eventually you will read against the clock... One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change is universal.

When I read the work of the present generation of literary entrepreneurs, I really feel that clock ticking. But after reading Manson, and despite my "unconscious resistance",  I think there is some value in reading about how others think about philosophy, and then applying that approach to my own thinking. Even if it is an exercise in thinking, rather than a definite plan for action.

Fear of Death is Overrated

Kunstmuseum Basel - The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - detail. Photo by Carnival.com Studios [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr

The Overwhelmed Brain: Personal Growth for Critical Thinkers by Paul Colaianni

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this book as a birthday gift from my sister earlier this year. It is by the host of the podcast The Overwhelmed Brain. It is not a book I would have picked, but I found it immensely useful. 

In the first section, Colaianni outlines a way to work out one's values. This is something I have visited time and again but have not had much success with over the years. Not so much that I don't know what I value, but how to think about what I value and then how to use these values as decision points.

Sure, I have done this strategically for military and business operations, but when it comes to myself, there is so much mental chatter and confusing and (apparently) conflicting values that it is difficult to develop little more than ideas about values, rather than specific tools for making decisions.

Colaianni's work begins with the general career-oriented approach but then "drills down" into relationships.

Time and again I find I am task-focused, and although an extrovert and annoyingly talkative at times, I am finding it increasingly difficult to establish meaningful relationships. I often get so caught up in my own stuff that I lose focus on important relationships.

Although there are some parts I found a bit "hokey", the fact that Colaianni uses the word "hokey" made me take note. For example, when I teach leadership classes, I often tell my students that some of the things they are learning tend to be a bit "hokey", but they are worth trying as a means of self-analysis and self-examination.

The book has a number of exercises to complete. These are mostly self-reflection activities, but I found these useful. An interesting theme that emerges is that being vulnerable and exposing one's vulnerability is a good thing. It is interesting that the other book I received from my sister was Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and Manson begins with a similar theme, though less hokey and more in your face.

The other lesson I take away from Colaianni is that all fear can be reduced to a fear of death. To over-simplify, death is inevitable, so fearing death is pretty silly. If all other fears can be reduced to a fear of death, then these fears are therefore silly, too!

I took my time reading the first part of this book and waited until I was in the right mood to attempt the values exercise. This is one of the most useful I have tried, and I learnt much about myself. I only used it to look at values in my work, and the next step will be to undertake the exercise in other areas of my life.

Colaianni is honest and exposes his vulnerability in the way he outlines his life experiences and how he has come to terms with his nature. Much like Mahatma Gandhi's maxim (apparently derived rather than spoken word for word as per the bumper sticker), Colaianni argues that, rather than trying to heal others, one should heal oneself. The many gems in this book are worth the hokeyness.

Lessons from the Dalai Lama: Practise the Logic

Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet. Photo: Antoine Taveneaux [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia.

How To Practise: The Way to a Meaningful Life by Dalai Lama XIV

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was with some trepidation that I thought I might adapt some of the Dalai Lama's ideas about "practice" to my own daily routine. I find the Dalai Lama to be more than charismatic; there is something about him that permeates the television. I was rather pleased when I read (p. 223):

Though my own knowledge is limited and my experience is also very poor, I have tried my best to help you understand the full breadth of the Buddha's teaching. Please implement whatever in these pages appears to be helpful. If you follow another religion, please adopt whatever might assist you. If you do not think it would be helpful, just leave it alone.

So, I have decided to adopt some things, and to leave others alone.

Things to keep:

I am impressed by the extent that Stoicism mirrors Buddhism in terms of logic and practice. I wonder to what extent Zeno of Cition (the founder of Stoicism) was influenced by Buddhist thought? Buddhism had reached the Seleucid Empire, and Zeno was apparently of Phoenician decent, so it is quite possible. 

According to Leesa Davis and Matthew Sharpe of Deakin University, it is not uncommon to see parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, but there is not much in Western academic literature about it. I suspect this is because the boastfulness of "Western" thought would crumble once facts overcome pride. But I digress.

First, the "practice"of Buddhism is about changing ourselves (p. 9):

Individually we have to work to change the basic perspectives on which our feelings depend. We can only do so through training, by engaging in practice with the aim of gradually reorienting the way we perceive ourselves and others.

For the Stoics, this is based on the logic of what we can and cannot control (see Epictetus' Enchiridion), and then managing our impressions (or how we judge external events). Marcus Aurelius, often referred to as a "cosmopolitan", extended this to how we treat and respond to other people, reflected by the Dalai Lama, thus (p. 10):

The essential objective of daily practice is to cultivate an attitude of compassion and calm - a state of mind particularly crucial in human society today for its power to yield true harmony among nations, races, and people from diverse religious, political, and economic systems.

Second, the Dalai Lama confirms my approach to daily reflection, echoing Benjamin Franklin's Book of Virtues (p. 40):

Examine your motivation as often as you can. Even before getting out of bed in the morning, establish a nonviolent, nonabusive outlook for your day. At night examine what you did during the day.

The idea of examining my motivations is new to me, in that I rarely do this deliberately and certainly not every day.  Yet the idea of reinforcing the logic of the philosophy/religion is key. In my practice of Stoic philosophy over the past two years, I have found that if I do not constantly return to the logic, I act unconsciously, thus the maxim on my desk reads "avoid unconscious reaction, find the logic, create good habits".

The Dalai Lama says something similar, echoing Socrates (p. 38):

It is important to diminish undisciplined states of mind, but it is even more important to  meet adversity with a positive attitude.

I find here some divergence from Stoic practice. Arguably, this highlights some of the weaknesses of the Stoic idea of the "common good". The Dalai Lama is more utilitarian in his outlook (p. 39):

...ingesting [others'] negatives is not much of a problem for me, but it lessens their problems. I do this with such strong feeling that if later in the day in my office I hear of their atrocities, although one part of my mind is a little irritated and angry, the main part is still under the influence of the morning practice; the intensity of the hatred is reduced to where it is groundless.

Moreover, he sees hope as important, whereas the Stoics would see hope and fear as want and worry; things to be abandoned as beyond our control and therefore not worth pursuing. But for the Dalai Lama (p. 39):

Under no circumstances should you lose hope. Hopelessness is a real cause of failure. Be calm, even when the external environment is confused or complicated; it will have little effect if your mind is at peace.

Both Buddhism and Stoicism agree that anger is useless. This quote from the Dalai Lama could equally apply to the Stoics (p. 41):

Analyze your life closely. If you do, you will eventually find it difficult to misuse your life by becoming an automaton or by seeking money as the path to happiness.

Third, the idea of choosing how we react to external events lends some credence to the idea that, with practice, we can control how we react to our emotions, and not encourage emotions that are not useful (or at least prevent useless emotions based on our misjudged perceptions) (p. 42):

Regularly evaluate the possible negative and positive effects of feelings such as lust, anger, jealousy, and hatred. When it becomes obvious that their effects are very harmful, continue your analysis. Gradually your conviction will strengthen. Repeated reflection on the disadvantages of anger, for example, will cause you to realize that anger is senseless. This decision will cause your anger to diminish gradually.

Here is confirmation of the idea of finding the logic, and for me, it necessitates what religious and philosophical practice has preached for centuries. 

The key point is that once we have found the logic, when we can believe that the logic is true, there is no switch that enables a rational re-alignment of our behaviours from then on. The belief in the logic has to be reinforced, over and over again, through daily practice, so that we achieve what Paul Colaianni in The Overwhelmed Brain says is "congruence" (p. 29):

...aligning your intentions with your behavior (congruence).

This is no easy task and it requires reflection (morning and night at a minimum), judgement (of ourselves, not others),  and practice (the doing). But unless we can recall the logic (memorise it) and believe in the logic (in effect, remembering the logic and remembering to believe in it), then congruence readily remains aloof.

Things to consider:

The idea of "the middle way" was interesting, and echoes to some extent Aristotle's idea of the "golden mean" of virtue. But that is a rather flaky comparison. For example, the Dalai Lama writes of three categories of non-virtues (physical, verbal, and mental), and that virtues are the opposite of non-virtues. The non-virtues are:

• Physical: Killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct.
• Verbal: Lying, divisive talk, harsh speech, and senseless chatter.
• Mental: Covetousness, harmful intent, and wrong views.

But the idea of the "middle way" is more about a sense of logic. This is difficult to achieve and explain, but it is basically a process of being (p. 169): 

...pulled from one side to the other... [between] how phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions... [and how] persons and things appear to be so solidly existent, to exist in their own right, to exist inherently... the true middle way takes time to find.

Things to leave alone:

Of course, I have my own religious beliefs, so the religious practices of Sutra and Tantra are not for me. Not that it wasn't useful learning about Buddhist religious practice, and the Dalai Lama did this with such humour, at one point I burst out laughing (p. 124):

A yogi's meditation transforms [sex, delicious meat and drink, even human excrement and urine] into real ambrosia. For people like us, however, this is beyond our reach. As long as you cannot transform piss and shit, these other things should not be done!

Generally, the Dalai Lama suggests that a Buddha has no use for alcohol, drugs, or sexual intercourse (p. 195). There are many parallels between various religions, and the Dalai Lama does not shy away from speaking at or to other religions.

Reflections:

One thing I found interesting counters a critique by a Salvation Army preacher I once heard. He said that the Buddhist idea of meditating on nothing was dangerous, as the emptiness enabled the devil to enter. But the Dalai Lama says that a Christian could focus on Jesus. The idea of nothingness and emptiness are not the same, and that preacher knew enough to be dangerous.

The Dalai Lama speaks of ignorance thus (p. 44):

...ignorance is not just lack of knowledge but a consciousness that imagines the exact opposite of the truth; it misapprehends what is actually so. There are many levels of misperception, as in failing to understand what to adopt in practice and what to discard in daily behavior.

The biggest lesson for me is the importance of daily practice, especially as a way to cement a belief.  Religions and religious practice make sense in this regard. I don't mean that one should adopt a belief and force it upon oneself (or, indeed, others!). Rather, if there is a logic that one agrees with, then one must believe that logic.

The point is that unless we can turn to our logic in assessing events which we cannot control (in the Stoic sense), then how can we expect to behave rationally? If I have learnt anything from this journey into Buddhist theology and practice, logic and rational thinking rely on belief. But this is an examined belief, not one given to us, and it must be practised.

What I like most about the Dalai Lama is that he invited me to do so with this book and I am all the richer for it. And wouldn't it be wonderful if Stoicism has a direct link to Buddhism? The East-West divide perpetuated by ignoramuses would come crashing down in an instant!