How I Journal Now...

 

My current journalling regimen incorporates two key approaches from Ryan Holiday and Benjamin Franklin [Photo by Dr Michael de Percy].

After much reflection, a little therapy, and much deliberation, I have arrived at a new journalling regimen that has given new life to my daily reflective habit. I document my current journalling process below.

It is almost three years ago since I blogged here about my daily journalling regimen. At the time, I had been journalling on a daily basis for over a year, and, despite some major life interruptions, I continue to journal on a daily basis. 

My daily habit has not always been efficacious; not because of my journalling, but because my process became stagnant and the challenges I faced had changed over time.

Originally, I took the opportunity to journal using Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic as a prompt but also to develop a routine that reinforced Stoic logic, in particular Epictetus's Enchiridion, which can be summed up in the first three sentences of his work:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Like the ritualised practices found in organised religions, journalling is a constant reminder to defer to the source: my sense of reason, and, in particular, to continually assess what is in my control and what is not. There is power in the daily reminder which I find similar to the concept of daily (or regular) prayer or meditation found in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. 

Interestingly, my reading of many theologically inspired works confirms the ubiquity of Stoic philosophy's basic premises in many major religions and ancient philosophies.

My previous process began with free writing, followed by reflection on the daily meditations in The Daily Stoic, The Daily Stoic Journal, and the three-monthly program in Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal. I also added the morning and evening reflections from James Allen's As A Man Thinketh. 

(These days I generally journal only once per day whereas from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2019 I journalled each morning and each evening.)

For the final parts of my journalling I referred to various texts and reflected on a number of short passages of these texts on a daily basis. These included (among other works) La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the Qur'an, the Tanakh, the Holy Bible (yet again!), Patience and Gratitude: An abridged translation of ʿUddat as-Sabirin wa dhakhirat ash-shakirin, and the Shiva Sutras, and soon I will finish the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Slowly digesting classic texts this way is useful as it allows time for each morsel to make its mark, rather than racing through a book and forgetting soon after.

Ryan Holiday advocates reading slowly. And the point is that we should give ourselves time to do things for ourselves. Emerson¹ said it best:

Eminently thoughtful men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day, to meet their own mind and learn what oracle it has to impart.

While the paragraph by paragraph approach to reading worked over the last few years, I have started to lose interest in my old journalling process. Brett McKay from the Art of Manliness wrote about how he lost the journalling habit over time once his life settled down. I suspect this is part of what is happening for me, too.

But there is still this other part of me that needs to journal so that my monkey mind gets out of my way. Tim Ferriss says it best:

I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

This is key for me and if my journalling process requires too much effort I tend to only get to it piecemeal during the day rather than using it for its monkey-caging benefits.

I also found that my recent experience with EMDR was great but "checking-in" with my different "parts" and getting them to communicate (rather than running off when my adult self is on autopilot) stopped happening when I wasn't regularly checking in with the therapist.

EMDR, parts therapy, and internal family systems are really interesting and it is best to work with qualified practitioners. But for my personal record, and drawing on Rolf Potts' travel journal philosophy of my journal being for me, "an author and audience of one", here is my own "parts map" from September last year:

Dr Michael de Percy, personal "parts map" developed during EMDR therapy

Once I would have been afraid of exposing my vulnerability, but fuck it, I am over 50 now and I will do whatever I want with my own stuff, just as I did recently. And if Alain de Botton advocates psychotherapy, then who the hell is anyone else to judge?

Now to my most recent process. Once a day, I do the following:

1. Daily Stoic reflections. I wanted to make sure I reinforced the logic of Stoic philosophy as the first thing, so I have moved the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal as a combined first item. I have hand-written the questions from the Daily Stoic Journal into the pages of my copy of the Daily Stoic.
2. Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal reflections.
3. Reflections on a "Quote of the Day" (that I like or I look to one of my Cabinet of Invisible Counsellors).²
4. Check-in with my "parts" (or what I am grateful for if I have nothing to discuss). 
5. Free writing to clear my monkey mind. This can be long or short depending on how I am feeling. Speaking of which, Mark Manson provides some helpful questions in this regard: What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I feeling? What the hell are my blind spots?

So that is my latest attempt to reignite my journalling. It is still a big part of my day but it allows me to spend less time thinking and more time doing. It reminds me of part of a Hemingway story that Fitzgerald told him to leave out because it was too clever:

Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.

 I hope this article is useful for anyone keeping a Stoic journal.

Notes

1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Conrad, Charles; Books, Best Success. We Are the Builders of Our Fortunes: Success through Self-Reliance (p. 58). www.SuccessBooks.net. Kindle Edition.

2. I am still developing my "cabinet" but here is my go-to list for now:

• Work practices: Cal Newport
• Literature: Harold Bloom
• Political Science: Charles E. Merriam
• Teaching: Ryan Holiday
• Scholarly Tradition: John Wanna
• Virtues: Benjamin Franklin
• Individuality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Existence: Albert Camus
• Blogging: Walter Benjamin
• Motivation: Kyle Eschenroeder
• Music: John Adams
• Writing: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
• House and Garden: Dirk Bogarde
• Travel: Rolf Potts

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.

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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Lessons from Boy's Own Macabre: How not to be a twerp

Boy's Own Paper masthead, circa 1890s [Public Domain] via Flickr.

The Most Dangerous Game and Other Stories of Menace and Adventure by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes I fear reading short story collections like this are little more than entertainment. Masculine, turn of the century Boy's Own macabre entertainment in this case. But writing about one's reading has its own kind of spiral effect, where learning about the authors leads from one thing to another. 

I purchased this book online because it listed Hemingway as the author and I had never heard of "The Most Dangerous Game". This title piece is actually by Richard Connell, and reminds me of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". Hemingway's work was "The Killers" (with the racism appropriately edited out), which seemed somewhat out of place with the other authors' work. 

Five of the eight authors were all new to me, but I am pleased to own a copy of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" which I had only heard previously in a YouTube video narration.

Each of the stories has some form of inevitability as its theme, especially Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", the residue of which is still clinging to my thoughts. Kurt Vonnegut (another author I am yet to get around to) wrote in his 2005 work, Man Without a Country (p. 17):

Do you know what a twerp is? ...I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce.

In the same book, Vonnegut (p. 18) writes:

‘Socialism’ is no more an evil word than ‘Christianity.’ Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition.

He sounds like my kind of author.

H.G. Wells' "The Country of the Blind" was also new to me, but of course I have read his work previously. The others, which include H.H. Munroe (Saki), W.W. Jacobs, and Carl Stephenson are all freshly discovered and open up for me an entirely unexplored area of turn of the century literature.

Sometimes, taking a break from the classics and the odd tome is necessary to give me the feeling that I am getting somewhere with my reading. On writing about my reading, I find many lessons that I would have missed had I just consumed, rather than digested, the work.

The sense of inevitability that permeates this collection is not of the hopeless sense: sometimes we are just lucky. But the themes mirror a key Stoic lesson about luck. When someone else is unlucky, remember - Fortune was aiming at me.

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Lessons from my cat Desi, or: On not doing what we ought and continuing not to do it

Desi the Disaster is living up to his name.

My cat Desi has not been well. He suffers from a rare skin condition called skin fragility syndrome. It is a result of very little collagen production. His skin is so fragile he can rip himself open just by scratching.

There was a chance he would be put down recently (while I was teaching in Hong Kong). When my wife told me "Today was not a good day to die", I burst into tears.

Desi was a rescue from the Crookwell Veterinary Hospital. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him and he came home with me that day. I was never a cat person; now I always will be. As I sat in my hotel room in Hong Kong, all I could think about was Desi and what I could do if I was at home.

Ernest Hemingway loved cats. The words of Chapter 8 of In Our Time were burning in my brain as I thought about how I would feel if I went through all the anguish of being away, only to return and keep doing the same old same old.

Ernest Hemingway (1924) In Our Time, chapter 8, p. 12.

We have been researching ways to manage Desi's condition and help him heal. Our vet is on board. One journal article mentions that vitamin C can work, and so far it seems to be working. We will be adding yoghurt and hemp oil to his diet. I have learnt how to use VetBond (super glue) for first aid. But it is far from over.

As the Stoics would say, external events beyond our control provide us with opportunities to practise our virtues.

As James Allen would say, "Faith and the living of faith".

I didn't want to be one who "never told anybody". I can't go back to how I was. Desi taught me that.

Blixen on Living the Colonial Life

Jurij Moskvitin (middle) acompaning Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen (right) meeting composer Igor Stravinskij (left) at the City Hall of Copenhagen, 25 May 1959. By Jan Adelfeldt/Scanpix [Copyrighted free use], via Wikimedia Commons.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was surprised to discover that the book is nothing at all like the move starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. 

Written in English (Blixen was multi-lingual), there is no real hint of the marriage to Baron Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Fineck and their separation in 1920-21 and subsequent divorce in 1925. Nor is there anything more than a subtle hint of the affection for Denys George Finch Hatton (as portrayed by Robert Redford in the movie). 

And who could have known that Blixen suffered from syphilis, courtesy of her philandering husband?

This is an interesting work and reads in part like a diary. Various scholars consider the style and arrangement of the book into certain themes and chronological devices, but this didn't strike me as anything special. It was Blixen's obvious feeling and emotion and love for life in British East Africa (Kenya) that drives the stories. 

One cannot help but be sad when she leaves the farm. One can only imagine, too, what it would be like to live in that timeless place. 

Having said that, the attitude toward the original inhabitants of Kenya reads like any other historically-inspired work of the 1930s, with frequent literary comparisons - as opposed to overtly racist vilification - of some of the characters to monkeys and other animals of the area. Indeed, it is hard to escape the imperialist attitudes of the times and how, given the people had lived on the land for generations, Colonialism suddenly relegates them to the status of squatters (six months of labour in exchange for living on and utilising the uncultivated land of the white farmers). 

There is a much admiration for "the noble savage" that permeates the work, despite Blixen's obvious love for Africa. 

More interesting are the stories of Blixen herself - partly captured in the movie - and that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature several times, losing out to John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. 

Blixen was quite the character, and her other works might be worth investigating. But it is difficult to identify with her in her Colonial context. To be sure, the work captures the place and times, but living in the post-Colonial era, one can only wonder at the past.

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Aleksandar Hemon: On the smell of socialist grease and vinegar

Signs of Soviet decline, amusement park near Chernobyl disaster (occurred 1986).
Photo via PXhere [CC0]

Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I discovered this novel at a bookshop where I also purchased two other novels written (respectively) by Chinese-American and Cambodian-American women. After reading several international authors, in addition to the classics, I have recently purchased books by authors either translated into English or written by authors with English as a second language. 

This is one of the most recently-written novels I have read, published in 2002. What I find remarkable is that Hemon arrived in the United States in 1991, and began writing in English in 1995, echoing Nabokov (one of my favourite authors). 

The plot encompasses the experiences of Jozef Pronek, a Bosnian stranded in the United States by the war in the former Yugoslavia. (A refugee but not really a refugee.) The character comes from "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" in Hemon's first work, a short story collection entitled The Question of Bruno (which I haven't read). 

Different narrators take up the story of Pronek as he moves between an English course, working as a private investigator and a Greenpeace canvasser, with flashbacks between his experiences in Sarajevo and the Ukraine. The different narrators are an interesting device, providing different perspectives of Pronek. 

At times, however, I found this a little confusing, assuming the first narrator was the protagonist who would reappear sometime later in the story. Instead, a seemingly unrelated story of Captain Pick in Shanghai some 100 years earlier echoes the events of Pronek's experiences, culminating in a wonderfully layered finale. 

The subtitle of the novel, The Pronek Fantasies (which I didn't notice until after I had finished the novel), makes a little more sense of the unusual intertwining of plot devices. 

Before I wrote this, I checked reviews of this book from The Guardian and the New York Times. 

Maya Jaggi (The Guardian) points out the obvious economy of words and the interesting use of the English language. Gary Shteyngart (NYT) points to Pronek's broken English and Hemon's constant references to how everything smells. This I found most interesting. Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon, 1939, p. 225) was a master in describing the sensual experience. For example:

If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or the smell of the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave...

But Hemon captures the feel of the Soviet Union towards the end, with the train "much too salty" (p. 85), references to the smell of sweat and armpits, and the endless "socialist grease" (p. 94) on everything. 

But my favourite quote captures the imagination and (I imagine) what it was like immediately before the Soviet Union collapsed (p. 85):

I thought that if another revolution were ever to break out in the USSR, it would start on a train or some other public transportation vehicle - the spark would come from two sweaty asses rubbing.

It is true that you can actually smell this novel (more so than any I have read before) and for that alone it is clever. But on finishing the work, I had to sit and wonder. 

Both Jaggi and Shteyngart point to some of the novels shortcomings, and I have other reservations. But I was glued to the chair as I read the work, and elements of the iceberg theory are evident in that as I write I am still asking questions of the characters and the historical story. 

I can imagine the experience of being an immigrant, even though my mono-lingual self would struggle much more than Pronek ever did. 

So what did I get from this work? First, being competent in a language does not a story-teller make. Hemon proves this and I am envious. 

Second, there is something in such works that one cannot get from a classic novel written in a person's first language and culture. This is clear to me, and it is why I am broadening my reading horizons to capture much of the new work that is appearing from authors with immigrant backgrounds and also from international authors only recently being translated into English. 

For poor, mono-cultural me, this is the closest I can get without having to go through the experience myself. 

I think, too, that reading Hemon's first work would be useful, and I will endeavour to buy a copy of Bruno in the near future to test this theory. 

Otherwise, I enjoyed my break from St Theresa and her "vain modesty" trope, but I may need a little more before I can get back to the good saint's crystal castle. Hopefully with less of the olfactory saltiness of Prenok's past to haunt my nostrils.

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Mad Men: Poem Unlimited!

Learning to enjoy poetry with Don Draper

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of poems made an appearance in Season 2, Episode 1 of Mad Men, and concludes with the eponymous title for the final episode of the season. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sees a guy reading this book in a bar, and asks, "Is it good?". The guy says, “I don’t think you’d like it". Later, Don is reading the book.

I enjoy "discovering" literature through other books and media. One of my favourite discoveries was Lady Rose's Daughter by Mrs Humphry Ward, where a journalist visiting my home town in Gunning in 1905 tells of reading the book while waiting for a delayed train. I have since read numerous references to Mrs Humphry Ward, including in Downton Abbey. Both Downton Abbey and Mad Men include numerous cultural references that are worth pursuing.

Indeed, my fascination with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald began with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I first watched while finalising the submission of my PhD thesis. Since casting that monkey off my back, I have been reading great literature as often as I can in an effort to "catch up" (as Harold Bloom said, we often end up reading "against the clock").

It has taken me some time to come to enjoy reading poetry; my earlier hard work in reading Homer and Virgil stood me in good stead. Yet I recall a quote from The Big Short:

Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

At the time, I might have agreed. But after reading O'Hara's work, I had to think why, as someone who randomly writes poetry, that I would shy away from reading it. And then it all flooded back.

It was in 1981. There was a monsoonal storm outside the old Queenslander classroom in Cairns, Far North Queensland. I was sitting next to the window on the verandah and it was our Year 6 English exam. We had to write a poem. I looked out the window and I wrote a poem about the storm, as if it were a group of demons "playing their game of bedlam" and then moving on. (Bedlam was a rough game all the boys in the school used to play. It was invariably banned as we cycled through new variants of rough games that often ended in bloodied noses.) Debussy would have been proud (the memory makes me think of one of my favourite pieces - the "symphonic poem" Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune).

I was quite happy about the poem, went home, and thought nothing of it. The next day, Mum was called to the school, and I was accused of plagiarism. No child could write such a poem. After what I remember as the longest time, it was decided that my poem was indeed original, and I was awarded 100% for the exam.

But then it got worse. They made me read it out to the entire class - a combined class of about 60 eleven-year-old children. My reference to the game of "Bedlam" wasn't a hit. Kids today would have said that this reference was "lame". What I didn't know then was that the other kids were jealous. But after the whole experience, my thoughts were simple. Fuck poetry. Until I read O'Hara.

I hope the reader will forgive my indulgence in my pitiful primary school memories (channelling Turgenev here), but O'Hara's work brought all this back to me. But not just childhood memories. O'Hara refers to Greek mythology, botany, music, composers, artists (many I had to look up), but I could recognise O'Hara channelling Walt Whitman when I read a line in "Mayakovsky", the final poem in the book:

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea.

So now I find myself wanting to read poetry again. The first thing I did today was to renew my subscription to The Paris Review. (Today I received the last edition of my subscription.) I don't want to miss out on any more new poems, and I will go back and read my old editions. I might even start writing poetry again. All this from buying a book based on a cultural reference in Mad Men.

But one thing that struck me while reading Meditations was what voice would the author use if he were to read his own poems? Would it be lyrical and sweet? How would he pause, where would he place his emphasis? I was shocked to watch a few of Frank O'Hara's readings on YouTube. It was a bit like listening to Ernest Hemingway's voice in his Nobel Prize speech after listening to Corey Stoll speak the way we wished Hemingway spoke (in Midnight in Paris). Yet it gives me confidence that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Magazine and movie people might provide us with perfect images of the literary greats, but great literature is written by real people who live real lives and have foibles like the rest of us.

Why read poetry? I will need to buy Harold Bloom's book to find out in more detail. But for me, at least, reading O'Hara has opened up a whole new world of inner experience, sentiment, and beauty. His work makes me feel exactly as I do when listening to the work of Claude Debussy or my favourite American composer John Adams. It isn't sublime, it's magical. It makes sense of the term that up until now has vexed me: Poem Unlimited.

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This is why you should read the classics...

Luigi Silori and Italo Calvino (1958). Photo by Duccio55, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia.

Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the second book of Calvino's work, and the only of his non-fiction works, that I have read. The first was Marcovaldo, a collection of short stories about an Italian peasant who attempts to "reconcile country habits with urban life". I was aware that Calvino was regarded as something of a philosopher, and the title of this work intrigued me after reading Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. What I found interesting about Why Read the Classics?, which is effectively a collection of book reviews, is that Calvino covers from Homer to the present, adding a touch of personal insight into each review, and a depth that is still beyond my reading of the Great Books. Calvino does what I have been doing for some time now (albeit I do this nowhere near as well). I suspect that the individual essays in this collection were written as Calvino read or re-read these classic authors and their books. The first essay, which provides the title of the book, provides Calvino's list of fourteen definitions of a "classic book". In the introduction, the translator, Martin McLaughlin, uses Calvino's definitions to put forward an all-encompassing definition that I find useful in identifying "classic" works with more than just "old" works:

A classic work is a work which (like each of Calvino's texts) retains a consciousness of its own modernity without ceasing to be aware of other classic works of the past.

Of the thirty-six essays, only eleven of the essays had appeared in English before. This immediately strikes me as fortunate, yet, at the same time, somewhat saddened that there is so much that monolingual readers like myself will never have the opportunity to read. Calvino provides confirmation of Mortimer Adler's view on reading classic works, and justifies my own stance on using my time for a first-hand reading, even though I must admit that a good deal of my learning up until completing my PhD was based on secondary sources (beyond journal articles and historical texts). Calvino suggests that:

Reading a classic must also surprise us, when we compare it to the image we previously had of it. That is why we can never recommend enough a first-hand reading of the text itself, avoiding as far as possible secondary bibliography, commentaries, and other interpretations.

What I also find interesting is that Calvino explains what I feel when re-reading classic works that I may not have understood when I was younger. For example:

When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from.

This leads me to another of Calvino's definitions which rings true:

A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

I have experienced this many times before, however, it was most obvious recently when reading John Stuart Mill and Ruskin. In yet another definition, Calvino explains this further:

A classic does not necessarily teach us something that we did not know already; sometimes we discover in a classic something which we had always known (or had always thought we knew) but did not realise that the classic text had said it first (or that the idea was connected with the text in a particular way). And this discovery is also a very gratifying surprise, as is always the case when we learn the source of an idea, or its connection with the text, or who said it first.

Again, Calvino justifies my own approach. For example, he says that a "person who derives maximum benefit from a reading of the classics is the one who skilfully alternates classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material" (p. 8). That is not to say that I consider myself to be particularly wise. Indeed, Calvino tells me that my reason for alternating classics with contemporary materials might be "the result of an impatient, nervy temperament, of someone constantly irritated and dissatisfied". This is probably closer to the truth. In Calvino's essay on the Odyssey he discusses the nature of folktales. In this way he echoes Aristotle's Poetics. For example, he looks at stories of rags to riches or the more complex riches to rags and back to riches again and how these different types of misfortune are enjoyed by all because these represent "the restoration of an ideal order belonging to the past" (p. 13). In some ways, this explains why I like the classics, yet Calvino warns us that:

The contemporary world may be banal and stultifying, but it is always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either backwards or forwards (p. 8).

So Calvino is not simply a "stuck in the mud", but for me, he places the classics in an appropriate context. While much was familiar in these essays, there was also a good deal of work that was unfamiliar to me. Many of these authors did not produce their works in English, hence my unfortunate lack of knowledge. One such author, Stendhal, introduced me to the interesting idea that "liberty and progress... was suffocated by the Restoration" (p. 136), and that Pliny considered there to be a "tacit accord" reached between peoples about "three cultural facts". These include "the adoption of the (Greek and Roman) alphabet; shaving of men's faces by Barber; and the marking of the hours of the day on a sundial" (pp. 44-5). There are some familiar authors too, including Dickens, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that the behaviourist, B.F. Skinner, makes an appearance (p. 116), albeit briefly. There is little to be gained from going over each of the essays, however, I have kept notes that I can return to in accordance with Mortimer Adler's rules for reading. The concluding essay, Parvese and Human Sacrifice, provides an interesting response to politics that is relevant today:

...as though he were shrugging his shoulders because everything is already clear and is not worth expending any more words (p. 263).

However, it is "The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau", the second last essay, that concludes the work best for me, in that the written word need not be pompous and unwelcoming, where a writer could make the reader:

...feel on the same level as he is, as they were about to play a round of cards with friends... [yet such a writer] is in reality someone with a cultural background that can never be fully explored, the background whose implications and presuppositions, explicit or implicit, one can never exhaust (p. 246).

Calvino wrote many other works, including novels and non-fiction, and although I understand he was a very private person, his letters have recently been published. I think I shall read more of his fiction and non-fiction before I delve further into the his private life. But clearly, there is much to be learnt from reading Calvino.

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The Art of Letter Writing; or, Send a Letter, Post-Haste!

Letter writing is not entirely dead (just yet)

To the Letter: The Lost Art of Letter Writing and How to Get It Back by Simon Garfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quirky book about the lost art of letter writing. I started writing letters again a few years ago, writing to family and later friends. My family and I still correspond but no friends ever returned a letter. One gentlemen did email me, saying he was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter, but that he used email these days. I have a letter waiting to go to my sister as I write this, and she will respond in kind. Garfield (his name was Garfunkel but this was changed by his forebears during the war; Simon Garfunkel would have been novel) touches on the re-emerging cult of letter writers, but begins at the beginning with the letters of Ancient Greece, and later Seneca et al., and mentions a number of famous authors and artists and their famous collections of letters that exist to this day. I did not know about Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, nor many other letter-writing stories of old. The book is cleverly punctuated with letter from a soldier to a woman who becomes his pen pal/girlfriend during the Second World War, and the story of their growing love unfolds as does the history of the letter (and to some extent, the post). I found myself wanting to finish each chapter to get to the love story. It has inspired me to tackle a few of the as yet unexplored volumes of letters I have in my library: The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (three volumes), George Orwell: A Life in Letters, The Letters of John Keats, and, although not strictly letters, but The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. Garfield's work is well-referenced and provides a stack of further reading. This book was a gift, and while I may not have chosen it myself, it was an enjoyable and enlightening read, both from a historical perspective and also as one who might consider letter-writing, at least to my family, a form of hobby. I was surprised by the number of typographical errors in this book, typically words missing the plural where it was required and other words repeated other words repeated (like that), and while it is understandable that almost all but the longest surviving (and therefore most edited) works will have some typos, there were quite a few here. Nevertheless, there were many snippets of history I was completely unaware of, and for that alone it was useful, but as a complete package, with the love story intertwined, this is a delightful book and I am pleased to now have it in my collection.

See also: The Art of Manliness: The Art of Letter Writing.

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On Philosophy, Art, and Living the Creative Life with Margarita Georgiadis

The Muses Urania and Calliope by Simon Vouet (c. 1634). Image via Wikimedia.

I've been delving into ideas about creativity, discipline and living in accordance with one's nature. Steven Pressfield and Cal Newport make no bones about the discipline required to get the creative juices flowing. Ernest Hemingway famously said that you have to leave some gas in the tank so you can keep writing the next day.

But what about someone closer to home?

Internationally acclaimed Australian artist Margarita Georgiadis lives in the village of Gunning on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. That's my home town, and for this podcast I spoke with Margarita about philosophy, art, and living the creative life.

I have a keen interest in philosophy. Yet when I speak to students and even other academics, if I ask about the particular philosophy that underpins their actions, their eyes seem to glaze over. Yet it is clear to me that philosophy underpins all good work.

Margarita Georgiadis.
Photo supplied.

I had read somewhere that when Margarita Georgiadis decided to work as an artist, she turned to philosophy first. I was keen to ask, why? What insights did philosophy provide? And, to what extent does discipline drive her creativity? What routines does she use to drive creativity, or is it more a case of waiting for inspiration? 

And what about my favourite way to get the house clean: the dreaded Procrastination (with a capital P because it is a proper noun, you know, like Beelzebub)?

Living by one's philosophy and creativity can be hard work. I often wonder if the intrinsic pay-offs are worth it? And whether the creative life is an accident, or a design based on Epictetus' idea of living in accordance with once's nature?

Margarita addresses these questions and more in this fascinating glimpse into the creative life. If you want to learn more about Margarita, her story is in the recently released book, The Best School of All.

For more information on Margarita's work, visit her website. Or if you are in Gunning, drop in to the Picture House Gallery and Bookshop and check out some of Margarita's work for yourself!

You can visit the podcast here or below:

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Mount Kilimanjaro (1938) via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is drawn from other works and I have read all of the stories several times before either online or in other collected works. Rather than read in awe of the master, this reading had me feeling sorry for the depressing note to all things. While this makes the short stories art, it also hints at a fragility, but not of manhood, as Hemingway's critics often suggest, but of the absurd. And yet Hemingway had no time for the absurd, or at least, Malcolm Cowley with:

...a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement...

Yet here, in this collection, I couldn't help but think of the meaninglessness of life and Hemingway's enunciation of the absurd, building over and over in a collection put together, not by Hemingway, but by others. I suspect this is worth looking into further and a few re-reads of Hemingway's major works might benefit from a view through this lens.

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Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Virginia Woolf novel I have read, but I have read her work before, specifically A Room of One's Own, where Ms Woolf writes about writing and feminism, and I found this interesting, even though Ernest Hemingway, my favourite author, didn't like Ms Woolf, and I wasn't sure whether this was because she was a rival or because she was a woman, and given her feminism and her love of women, more generally, I was not surprised that Hemingway, in his obvious then-contemporary male chauvinism, might not like Ms Woolf's views, but of course this was before I had read Mrs. Dalloway, which really is an interesting work, and rivals Hemingway's themes, at least in terms of the psychological impact of war, but Ms Woolf also covers the "war and society" aspects that Hemingway tends to ignore, outside of his protagonists' meanderings through society, so in this regard, at least, Ms Woolf's work differs, yet tends to be gender-focused in its own way, and that is not to say that it is bad, for it isn't, or that I found it difficult to read, for it wasn't, but there was something about it that made it difficult to read in bits and pieces, and it would be much better suited to a long sitting, if one could find the time, because it tends to read a little like James Joyce, even though Ms Woolf and her husband (notice I use Ms as I am sure 'Mrs' Woolf would have done, even though the New York Times referred to her as 'Mrs Woolf' in her obituary, which was, interestingly, only a 'believed dead' obituary because of a suicide note and her missing body, which is also interesting given that Hemingway, who really didn't like her so much, also took his own life), Leonard, were unable to print Ulysses because it was too big for their printing establishment, known as Hogarth Press, and all this from reading what is, comparatively, a rather short book, almost a novella, but if I were to record what I gleaned most importantly from this book is not so much that Woolf was a good or bad writer, for surely her work is very good, but that the reason Hemingway didn't like her had nothing to do with their polar opposites in terms of gender and so on, for surely even in death they were alike, but the thing that is most striking is the difference in their prose, and it is for this reason, I believe, that Hemingway didn't like Woolf, not for the aforementioned issues, but mostly because her writing leaves one feeling rather frantic and out of breath, which may well be a deliberate technique, and it surely works, as in leaving one breathless, but what I am not sure about is whether this has anything to do with the content or the simple fact that Ms Woolf's sentences are just so bloody long.

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My Favourite Apps: TasteKid, Hemingway, and Vocabify

I would prefer this to an app any day, but I admit the apps reviewed here are good! (Flickr: Paul Townsend/CC BY-ND 2.0)

I don't normally like apps of any kind. I'd much rather use a browser and a website. But that is an attitude rather than a fact, and when it comes to apps that solve life's petty dramas, then I must change my tune. Here I give a quick review of TasteKid, Hemingway, and my latest app, Vocabify.

TasteKid (now TasteDive - WTF?)

By a random trial and error method, I have found various books, movies, and music by making connections between various media. For example, one of my pianola rolls is a foxtrot entitled The Flapper Wife, and this led me to the book, and then on to a series of movies and music of the period, by following the trail of authors, publishers, composers, and musicians. For several years now, I have been using TasteKid to do the same thing, but with considerably less effort. Is it just me or did TasteKid change its name to TasteDive while I was writing this? Now it makes me think of nasty tasting things from "down there". Oh, I am so annoyed! Semantics aside, the recommendation engine is good, and has helped me to discover lots of new music, books, and movies, based on the recommendations of others. For example, today I searched for a composer like Richard Wagner, and discovered the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Whether the similarities would pass scrutiny is not the point. The recommendations provide opportunities to look beyond our own bounded rationality, and for that, this is my favourite app. Oh, wait, it is a website. Oh well. But why oh why did they rename it TasteDive?

Hemingway

When writing for news media websites, there are a variety of text editors and readability measures that help authors to cut down superfluous, flowery, or woolly (I love that word) sentences to help focus on plain language. It is not my ideal way to write, but it does tend to force one into the journalistic style of writing, which is indeed a skill unto its own. My favourite author, Ernest Hemingway, was known for his iceberg principle, where he strips down his sentences to the bare minimum. This enables the reader to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. The app requires payment of a fee, but I do not mind paying for something that is useful. Think of it in terms of design (see Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars):

[P]erfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

Vocabify

Scattered throughout my travel and writing diaries are words that I am familiar with, but do not really know. I write these down, with definitions, but time and again I see the same words, and I ask myself, what is the definition of this word? Typically, I cannot answer, even though I might be able to use the word in a sentence. Then along comes Vocabify. There are a couple of words that it is unable to provide definitions for, and I provided feedback to the creator. I wanted to be able to add words. But this seems to defeat the purpose of the app, in that it attaches to databases with decent definitions, and one can only add words from these databases. Most of the words that I cannot find in Vocabify are technical jargon in either political science or philosophy. But the creator told me this in a quick response to my feedback, and it is only in beta form at present. The app operates via an add-in to my browser, and I can add words as I discover them (I have already combed my diaries for my lists of words and added these). The app then sends me an email each day with one of my words and its definition. The app works on the basis of rote learning, and frankly, for learning definitions or the spelling of words, much like tables of multiplication, there is no better way to learn.

So there you have it. Three "apps" that I use and enjoy on a regular basis.

Book Notes: "On Paris" by Ernest Hemingway

On Paris by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This collection of journalistic pieces was written for the Toronto Star in the early 1920s and focus on Paris. Hemingway's early work here is part travel writer and part gossip columnist. The style would seem out of place today and, from personal experience, editors are only to ready to "correct" such work written in the "your correspondent" third person. It is a shame, in that Hemingway's style is very readable and rather witty. I doubt articles written about a foreign city would be of interest today, but at the time, many North Americans were keen on the exchange rate with France and Paris, of course, was a major destination. Moreover, I doubt that the "Orientalist" approach to reporting on foreign countries would be so readily apply to today's France, although destinations that still remain "foreign" to most Westerners may receive this treatment as a matter of course. This is a short but fruitful read and I was particularly impressed by the format and the cover, which makes for a robust yet accessible paperback style. I rarely comment on this aspect of a book but the cover style is remarkable.



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Book Notes: "Hemingway on War" by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway on War by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Although I enjoyed this collection of works I have read many of the collection's stories and sections of Hemingway's books before. It was worth reading again and a few of the pieces of journalism were unfamiliar but the collected works released by Hemingway's family are more like homages to the great man than when reading a Hemingway work for the first time. As I have completed almost all of Hemingway's major published works I have little choice but to work through the themed collections of Hemingway on War, Fishing, Writing, etc. While previously unread works are few and far between it is still worth the effort but not as good as a Hemingway original.



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Book Notes: "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't help thinking that "A Moveable Feast" is a kind of Facebook into Hemingway's Parisian past. Hemingway writes of himself and in particular, Scott Fitzgerald, as if he were posting on social media private details about a recent event. I don't mean to cheapen the work by comparing prosaic Facebook with Hemingway's genius but the raw public openness is analogous. I felt Hemingway's poor and happy nostalgia marks the end of his innocence and the very ending made me tingle all over - at once identifying with him while hoping it is all in the past. In short, a masterpiece.



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Book Notes: "Hemingway on Fishing" by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway on Fishing by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an enjoyable collection of Hemingway's many descriptions and depictions and also his knowledge of fishing. Although many of the passages are from Hemingway novels and novella I have already completed, the Nick Adams and various Esquire, Vogue and Holiday magazine articles dating from the 1930s through to the 1950s are well worth having in one collection. I was particular enthralled by the Esquire article where Hemingway outlines the story of the Old Man and the Sea, back in 1936. It makes sense of his theory that the best writing is based on truth but it is completely made-up. Regardless, this book has inspired me to go fishing more often, and I have decided to learn how to fly-fish at the next opportunity.



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Book Notes: "Death in the Afternoon" by Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This work has challenged a number of my views about life and death and culture and globalisation. Regardless of one's thoughts on the topic of the book, Hemingway's ability to weave dialogue and stories into a polemic while creating a historical document is almost classical. This book is rather like reading a history of the ancient events of The Colosseum written first-hand. The only difference with this book is the photographs.



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Book Notes: "Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway

Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've never been a fan of short stories, but Hemingway is surely the master. "Fifty Grand" is my favourite. I was reading it while walking around. I couldn't put it down.



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