Book Notes: "The Authentic Swing: Notes From the Writing of a First Novel" by Steven Pressfield

The Authentic Swing: Notes From the Writing of a First Novel by Steven Pressfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this work, what might be called a pamphlet, Steven Pressfield tells the story of how he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. The work is interesting on a number of levels. First, it explains, in some detail, how Pressfield conceived of Bagger Vance and recreated the Hindu scriptural epic, Bhagavad-Gita. The protagonist, Rannulph Junuh, is also based on a character in the Hindu text, Arjuna (recreated as R. Junuh). Second, the work tells the story of Pressfield's love of golf, and his idea about "the authentic swing", something "remembered" rather than learnt, and recalling Saint-Exupéry (de) Antoine:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

This process of stripping oneself away to reveal the true self recalls James Allen and Kempis Thomas, but Pressfield presents this in an accessible form. Third, the work provides guidance for writers, specifically of fiction novels, but the process can apply equally to any style of writing. While the work is short, and there are entire pages devoted to only one short paragraph (making the book thicker than it need be), there is much below the surface of the iceberg that can be easily missed if this is the only work of Pressfield's one has read. It pays to have read Aristotle and the other aforementioned authors, not because one needs to to understand Pressfield, but because Pressfield brings it all together like a folk song. Read James Allen and then Kempis Thomas and one will see the connection. It is not the same, not just copied, but enlivened. That is what makes this pamphlet, and, indeed, all of Pressfield's shorter works, worthwhile.

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Book Notes: "Eva Luna" by Isabel Allende

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title, the name of the protagonist, belies the intricate web of various stories woven into one coherent piece. The style is known as magical realism. I can hear one of my favourite professors now: "You are too discursive, my son, you need to focus on one thing and unpack it sufficiently". Eva Luna covers religion, politics, gender-bender, sexuality, morality, revolution, spiritualism, the old and the new, multiculturalism, and "indigenous affairs", and so on, yet still manages to bring together a gripping story. Not what I expected but thoroughly enjoyable. And proof that one can be discursive if the weaver is skillful.

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A Summary of Stoic Philosophy: Zeno of Citium in Diogenes Laertius Book Seven

A Summary of Stoic Philosophy: Zeno of Citium in Diogenes Laertius Book Seven by Charles Duke Yonge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me a while to get into this book. It was recommended by one of the Stoic websites I have visited. I was a little confused when I first picked up the book. It was published by Lulu, a self-publishing platform, and for a time this put me off. But this is actually an annotated work of an original Greek work written some time in the early 3rd century CE, and then translated into English by Charles Duke Yonge in 1853, and then re-worked by Keith Seddon in 2007. The original author, Diogenes Laërtius, has, in effect, written a literature review of some of the major Stoic philosophers, and listed their various works. Unfortunately, only fragments of the original work, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, of which the present work is drawn, from Book 7, have been recovered. Once I had the provenance under control, I appreciated Seddon's work in resurrecting a Stoic classic, and then the knowledge of how much I don't know began to flow in. Without Diogenes Laërtius' work, the existence of many of the Stoic works would be unknown, as it seems that none of these other works has survived. These Stoic authors wrote on logic and ethics and physics and so on, and were far more sophisticated in their philosophy then simply not budging when somebody punched them in the face. As I am currently reading Aristotle's Rhetoric, there is some congruence with the basic elements of the philosophy that all piece together as I read more of the classics. What surprises me most is that much of my knowledge of the classics, gleaned as it was from the formal education system, is a facsimile of a facsimile copied and recopied and passed on through the ages until what I have been given barely resembles a mere trace of the original. There is too much in this for one reading, and it really is a study piece rather than a work for easy leisure, pointing to further studies to be done more than a standalone piece of literature (as one would expect of a literature review). That scholars were so sophisticated 2,000 years ago makes me wonder how humanity went so backward and has arrived today at what is barely an echo of the wisdom of the past. It haunts me in that if it happened before, it can and will happen again, so our present circumstances could easily dumb things down, if it is not already too late. And all this from reading a book published on Lulu. It is enough to change my opinion of the self-publishing platform!

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