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

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

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An allegory is a story:

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

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

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

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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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Learning Italo Calvino's Literary Oeuvre

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

Into the War by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If on a post-modern novel Italo Calvino

If on a winter's night a traveller marathon.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This would have to be one of the most unusually good books I have read. It is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories, organised in an unusual way. It is partly written in the second person (Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was my first second-person novel) and on several occasions, the author speaks directly to the reader (a literary technique known as "authorial intrusion"). 

The main story is structured using numbered chapters, interspersed with the beginnings of several books (with the relevant book names as chapter headings) that relate directly to the main story. It is rather complex in terms of its structure and I couldn't help thinking it is very much a "post-modern" novel. But it works. 

I am often surprised by the number of books that are about books and authors, a bit like 42nd Street - a musical within a musical. But this book is very clever. While at times I couldn't help thinking that Calvino had turned a number of "false starts" into a publication, it is too good to have been written so perfunctorily. 

Two stand-out parts work for me. First, Calvino addresses two types of writers (pp. 173-4):

One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller - the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodological confidence... [The productive writer] feels [the tormented writer] is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where... and he is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, but also envy; because he feels how limited his work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.

I certainly feel like each of these authors depending on the type of writing I am engaged in. That self-consciousness is part of the process is something that Calvino weaves into the plot perfectly. Second, Calvino picks up on how I read (p. 254):

Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation.

What I find most interesting about this reflection is that Calvino's work, or at least the several of his works I have read so far, all seem to play to the discontinuous and fragmentary reader. The structure of this work, much like Invisible Cities and Mr Palomar, suits a style of reader who is unable to read in large chunks of time. 

While not being able to read long and uninterrupted is far from ideal, Calvino's work is presented in convenient and memorable chunks that suit the fragmentary and disrupted peace of the post-modern worker. 

There is still a little more of Calvino's work for me to read, but I have now covered his most famous works. And I am delighted to have "discovered" Marcovaldo in a Shanghai bookstore which introduced me to one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century only a few years ago.

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The Wisdom of Mr Palomar

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

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On Taste, Sound, and Smell: Calvino's unfinished business

Skunks rayé ou mouffette. Photo by Tomfriedel [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia.

Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My experience of Calvino is quite limited, but after reading his Why Read the Classics, learning more about Calvino's influence from Harold Bloom, and more recently purchasing The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, I have decided to immerse myself in Calvino's work. 

In Under the Jaguar Sun, Calvino begins what was planned to be a novel on the five senses. Unfortunately, Calvino died before he was able to complete sight and touch, but the three short stories on taste, sound, and smell survive and work as stand alone pieces, or pieces on a theme. 

The first story (the title piece) covers taste and tells the story of a couple of gastro-tourists discovering the link between taste and ancient Central American human sacrifice and cannibalism. 

The second piece, "A King Listens", had me shivering with imagery so vivid as to be on the edge of surreal. 

The third piece, "The Name, the Nose", was my favourite, although I can barely work out what was meant to have happened. This is, so far, the most gritty of Calvino's work I have read. 

It reminded me of Bukowski crossed with Thomas Mann. The language seems suited to the 1980s (when it was written), but after mostly reviews of classic works and Marcovaldo, I wasn't ready for Calvino to be so grunge. 

Cynthia Ozock's review in the New York Times of 23 October 1988 suggests "The Name, the Nose" was not a success. 

But I found it interesting in the way it echoes Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story. Or rather, having previously thought of Calvino as a late-nineteenth early-twentieth century writer, "The Name, the Nose" is more like Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where you get the sense that the characters and setting are of another time, but not as in the "on steroids" Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo and Juliet. 

I am often amazed at how good short stories can fire up the imagination in such a way that the work takes some time to digest. "The Name, the Nose" has left its residue, and while it may not be regarded as one of Calvino's best, I am pleased to discover that his range is not as limited as I first thought.

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Book Notes: "Marcovaldo" by Italo Calvino

Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino




This is a rather intriguing work, but I fear much is lost in translation. Touches of mid-century Italian comedy are evident, but I daresay there is more than meets the eye. A better knowledge of mid-century Italy would be useful to better understand the subtle messages of urbanisation and the peasant mind. Calvino was rather prolific so with a little research and some more reading, I hope to glean the deeper purpose of this author.



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Chekhov: You've gotta laugh or you'd cry!

Desk of Anton Chekhov at Melikhovo estate museum. Photo taken in 2008 by SiefkinDR, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

Chekhov: The Comic Stories by Harvey J. Pitcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chekhov is mentioned by Harold Bloom (How to Read and Why, p. 36) as one of the short story authors who had:

...achieved something like perfection in their art.

Bloom sees the lineage from Shakespeare to Turgenev to Chekhov to Hemingway, which stems from their:

...affinity with their landscape and human figures...

It is interesting that Mortimer Adler (How to Read a Book) doesn't mention Chekhov (or Turgenev), yet Bloom and Italo Calvino (Why Read the Classics, p. 185) see Chekhov as focused on:

...the relationships between the facts of existence... [and his story The Steppes was] the prototype for so much modern narrative.

I wonder if this is the result of Adler's focus on the Western canon (in its narrowest sense of the term)? The interesting thing about this particular set of short stories is its relatively recent translation into English, and its focus on comedy. Calvino mentions The Steppes, while Bloom mentions several other stories, none of which appear in this collection. So there is more reading of Chekhov for me to do. Yet this collection is funny.

I wondered whether Oscar Wilde had anything to say about Chekhov. Surprisingly, it was Stephen Fry (who played Oscar Wilde in the 1997 movie Wilde) who puts the two together in an interesting way. Fry writes:

Chekhov is probably better known in Britain for his plays than for his prose. For many, however, it was his short stories that mark the high water of his genius. It might at first glance be hard for those not used to his style of narrative to see what the fuss is about (and fuss there is: for most authors and lovers of literature Chekhov is incomparably the greatest short story writer there ever was): these tales appear to be about nothing.

Fry also says (and I quote at length):

Anton Chekhov is a case in point. Grim. Russian. Gloomy. Stark. Bleak. Melancholic. Sorrowful. Suicidal. Tragic. Well, I’ll give you Russian. He was that all right. As for the rest. Grim? Chekhov? Bleak? No, no. Chekhov was the foremost comic artist of his age. If by comic we mean something more than slapstick, farce or revue. There are satirists, like Swift, who cannot hide the fact that they believe humanity in all its forms from the grandest king to the lowliest serf to be nothing short of pathetic, ludicrous and disgusting; there are others, like Chekhov who find it just as hard to conceal their sympathy, kinship and fellow feeling.

Having read almost all of Hemingway's short stories, Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, and Guy de Maupassant's A Parisian Affair, I see similar assumptions of human nature, and indeed a similar philosophy and aesthetic with Chekhov picking up from where Turgenev (channelling Shakespeare) left off. Whether I could put this correctly in a theory-of-literature perspective is another thing, but certainly the brilliance is obvious. 

Some of Chekhov's stories could easily be adapted to the social life of Canberra, Australia's capital, and its concentration of public servants. Maybe less so now, but certainly in the 1990s and early 2000s. And stories of musicians, doctors, and emerging technologies (such as the telephone) retain their humour despite more than a century's passing. 

The test of good literary work is its ability to stretch beyond ephemera. Chekhov achieves this, and his sense of humour is not lost on a contemporary audience.

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

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

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Turgenev: The End History and the Last Serf: or, A Satirical Sketch of Sherwood Anderson

Illustration for the short story "Lgov" by Ivan Turgenev (from the collection A Sportsman's Sketches) by Pyotr Sokolov, circa 1890s [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Turgenev was born into two aristocratic Russian families. His mother had inherited some wealth before marrying, which offset his otherwise titled but broke father. As a young man he lived on the family estate, and this collection of short stories, published in book form in 1852, encompasses his experience with people and places as he hunts throughout Russia during the twilight years of serfdom.

I have read many instances of people claiming that these works are his masterpiece, and that the sketches brought to light the plight of the peasants, ultimately leading to the end of serfdom in 1861. Whether the works had such significance I will leave to the experts, but when I teach social movements as a process of institutional evolution, a key text (such as Martin Luther King's speech during the American civil rights movement) usually motivates the masses towards some form of social change, which concludes with a change in institutions.

Clearly, Sketches played a part in motivating social change, and I use this book as an example of the impetus for the social movement that led to the emancipation of serfs. I also understand that Turgenev adopts the "Russian realist" style in that the narrator is "uncommitted" to the other characters in the work, and this is true of the Sketches in general.

This translation is by Constance Garnett, and I must say that it reads well. Having read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons a few years ago, I recognise the clarity of the prose that I also found in my first reading of Chekhov. My limited reading of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, however, suggests that these two authors have become somewhat dated, at least in translation. Hemingway said as much about Tolstoy's War and Peace in "Old Newsman Writes" (see By-Line, p. 188). Which leads me to all sorts of interesting comparisons I have mentioned previously in my review on Chekhov's comic stories.

Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino saw the relationship in style between Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant, and Hemingway. Having now read each of these authors, I feel that way about their prose technique. But while reading a little about Turgenev, I discovered that Sherwood Anderson "echoed" Turgenev (according to Ridout), and that Turgenev had also written a short work entitled The Torrents of Spring. Now I see the greater part of the humour in Hemingway's novella The Torrents of Spring, which was written as a parody of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I immediately purchased a copy of Turgenev's Torrents to see what else I can learn about this interesting clash of egos.

Given that Sketches is now 166 years old, and has well and truly stood the test of time, I can see how it is a classic of the highest order. That other brilliant Russian author, Nabokov, rated the great Russian authors with Tolstoy first, Pushkin and Chekhov second, and Turgenev third (ahead of Gogol and Dostoevsky). According to Nabokov, of the Russian authors, Pushkin loses the most in translation.

What I find most interesting is not so much the actual reading of the book, which of course is worth every moment, but how Turgenev and this particular work fit into my bumbling reading scheme. I met a man just recently who had an achievement style he coined "Managing by bumbling along". It seemed to work for him, and, in my reading, at least, it seems to be working out quite well. While there does seem to be a logic that a smarter reader might follow, I do enjoy the various surprises I discover while reading back and forth between the classics, the early twentieth century authors, and the present.

Turgenev gives an eye-opening account of life during the end of Russian serfdom. One imagines it was eons ago, but one only has to consider that the transportation of convicts was still in full-swing in 1850s Australia to understand that this period in history was far removed from life in the Anglo democracies today. Without Turgenev's work, we would lack many primary sources into the life of the Russian peasant. That one can read and still enjoy reading such works today is remarkable.

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Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

Literary Japan: Kōji's Introduction to Japanese Classics

"Great Wave Off Kanagawa" (circa 1826) by Katsushika Hokusai [Public domain] via Wikimedia.

Words to Live by: Japanese Classics for Our Times by NAKANO Koji

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At the International Political Science Association's World Congress 2018 in Brisbane this July, I stumbled upon the market stand for Japan Library, a Japanese publisher focused on translating great Japanese books into English. 

Not knowing what to expect, I bought two hardcover books priced at $25 each. I have read a few translations of various novels and I am rarely disappointed, but this book seems more along the lines of Harold Bloom's and Italo Calvino's works on classic literature, with a focus on Japanese poetry written by Buddhists monks in medieval and pre-industrial Japan. 

The physical book is beautifully presented with a hardcover, dust jacket, ribbon book marker, and paper that is of obvious high quality. The readability of the translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter is superb, and although there may be some things lost in translation, to an amateur like me, you couldn't pick it. 

What I enjoyed most about the work is that Kōji is humble yet powerful in awakening me to classic Japanese literature. Recently, I have had a similar experience with classic Japanese art and music, and I now enjoy the art of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and listening to the koto music of Yatsuhashi Kengyo (1614–1685). 

I discovered these two from Sid Meier's Civilization VI, of all places. But that is not unusual - I discovered my most favourite composer, John Adams, as part of the soundtrack of Civilization III. (It is the only computer game I ever play. If anyone is willing to let me work on the cultural/historical aspects of future releases of the Civilization game series, do let me know! I first played Civilization in 1994 and have occasionally played it ever since. I have learnt more about art, music, architecture, science, warfare, and history from that game than almost any other source. If only I could incorporate the game into my teaching, I could find an excuse to play it more often.) 

I hoped this work would give me a similar experience; and it did. 

The text flows in straight-forward prose, outlining the work of six Japanese literary greats, interrupted by poetry from each of the authors, with commentary by Kōji that never "got on my goat". If anything, Kōji's explanations and personal observations enrich what is already a very rich literary experience. (Kōji was 77 years old at the time this was published. An interesting aside - I know someone who gives their age as the year they are living, rather than the most recently past year. Apparently, it was Japanese custom to give the age of a child as 1 year old in their first year, so I have been forced to accept that this person, who went to primary school in Japan, is not incorrect!) 

There is so much conveyed in this work, it is difficult to give a summary without writing a series of maxims that would rival La Rochefoucauld's. Suffice it to say, my favourite poet from the collection is Saigyō. 

At first, I was not impressed by how the moon and cherry blossoms sent his heart off into the ether, only to return of its own will some time later. I thought this all a bit over the top, but then (p. 173):

Master Mongaku despised Saigyō... If he ever ran into him, he often said, he'd break his skull.

One day, Saigyō turned up at Master Mongaku's temple. His disciples worried what he would do to Saigyō, but the meeting went cordially. Afterwards, Mongaku's disciples asked why their master had gone back on his word:

"You idiots!"Mongaku scolded. "Was that the face of someone I could possibly beat up? It was the face of someone who could beat me to a pulp!"

I, too, was surprised that this ex-warrior, samurai turned Buddhist monk, could be such a poet. It just seemed to be the work that belonged to a sickly, weak yet beautiful man who couldn't hurt a fly. This is what makes Saigyō's literature more remarkable, and Kōji presents the work and the backstory in such a way that the book resonates long after the reading is over. 

I also learnt much about traditional Japanese poetry. The haiku is familiar to most people, but I knew nothing of the other traditional forms, many of which appear in this work, including the various haikai and waka forms. If I were to take a crash course in Japanese literature and Zen Buddhism, this book would be the place to start. Of particular interest is Tsurezuregusa or Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō. The ideas about happiness, solitude, life and death, and, most importantly, the Buddhist concept of the "here-now" were enlightening. 

What I like most is that Nakano Kōji learnt about his own culture late in life, after focusing on Western literature (particularly Kafka), and has an ability to make comparisons of Japanese thought and philosophy with the ideas I am more familiar with. This made it easy to appreciate the wisdom of the various Buddhist monks without needing a solid grounding in Buddhism to make sense of it. Indeed, the works are far from religious, but are certainly "spiritual" in a universal sense. 

I daresay I will be returning to Japan Library to discover more classic Japanese literature, and I am inspired to try a Japanese novel (translated into English, of course) soon. My next Japan Library work is Self-Respect and Independence of Mind: The Challenge of Fukuzawa Yukichi, a biographical work on the Meiji Restoration-era intellectual.

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Oscar Wilde on Contradiction: Learning Unintended Lessons Through Art

Cartoon depicting Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit to San Francisco, from The Wasp, 31 March 1882. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Intentions: The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison, the Critic as Artist, the Truth of Masks by Oscar Wilde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of dialogues and essays demonstrates Oscar Wilde's aesthetic, but also his vast knowledge of the classics, Shakespeare, and other great things in nineteenth-century Anglo art, literature, architecture, and theatre. Three pages into The Decay of Lying and one has been exposed to Aristotle, William Morris, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He uses a form of the "iceberg" principle (later perfected by Hemingway) that demonstrates his knowledge without appearing to be name dropping. It is one thing to mention Aristotle, Morris, and Emerson as part of Vivian's critique of nature; quite another to append one's own aesthetic to the name dropping that leaves no doubt as to the author's learning. For instance, William Morris once said:

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

Wilde, in discussing nature versus art, mentions Aristotle (p. 3):

Nature has good intentions, of course, but as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

Vivian is discussing his preference for the indoors, and says (p. 4):

Why, even Morris' poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat then the whole of Nature can... If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to open air.

This first part of the introduction is then neatly wrapped up with reference to Vivian (p. 5) writing the word "Whim" over the door of his library, echoing Emerson doing similar in his famous essay Self-Reliance. What does this all mean? It sets out several themes that thread through these five dialogues and essays. First is the interaction of art and nature in the human spirit. Second is contradiction. Vivian doesn't want to go outside, until he does. Vivian thinks writing is a waste of effort. But he is writing an article. In the final paragraph of the collection, Wilde writes:

Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism, attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

Third is the rhythm of life and the pursuit of human excellence. Wilde's characters in the dialogues go from contradictory point to contradictory point. In the essays we learn how ill-discipline and ignoring our intuition can lead to trouble (for instance, the poisoner leaves his ground-floor curtain open and is instantly recognised from the street); how Shakespeare used architecture and costume to make a point (as opposed to the theatrical archaeologists who point out Shakespeare's character's anachronistic raiment); how one moment we are focused, the next bored, even depressed, but we can be humorous, witty, intelligent, and dull. The dialogues read like a moment of intense thought that begins out of boredom and ends in boredom with thought. An indoor conversation is the scene of energy, but after talking "long enough", the outdoors beckons:

Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life.

It is unsurprising that Oscar Wilde is so well-read and witty. After all, he was a graduate of Oxford at a time when only the elite or those with elite patronage could dream of studying there. Yet there is an intense use of Plato's form of dialogue, an interesting blend of self-reliance and pompousness, intensity appearing indoors (even within Shakespeare's Globe Theatre), and the outdoors being a place of leisure (for the well-to-do, at least!). Yet the point of contradiction is not to be dishonest, but, through art, to bring to Nature the human experience:

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

I recall in high school, when studying English literature, the teacher would ask: "What does the author mean by this or that?" to which I would say, "How should I know? And how do you know if you didn't ask them?" Logical to an egotistical teenager, to be sure, but hardly intelligent. And now? It would take several re-readings of these dialogues and essays and some intense study into Wilde's life at the point in time of writing these works to discover more. Yet, armed with the knowledge of reading given to me by Harold Bloom, Mortimer Adler, Italo Calvino, and Theodore Roosevelt (to name but a few), I think I can safely tell my teenage self that, contradictory to what I thought then, one can interpret and learn from the writings of others, even if the lessons learnt were never intended. And if Art cannot deliver such lessons, what other medium can?

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Meta-cognition: How I Read Bloom and Why

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill by Pieter Claesz  (1628).
Pieter Claesz [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read of Bloom in The Paris Review article Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1. I took particular note of his relationship with his teacher, William K. Wimsatt, whom Bloom "agreed to disagree" with on matters literary. In my academic work, I hear this phrase often, and again only recently. For Epictetus, we should thank those who point out our faults so we may change ourselves. Bloom, however, suggests that we can bring about self-change on the basis of self-overhearing. A number of coinciding readings and experiences led me to self-consciously self-overhear myself. For Bloom:

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

This book outlines "how to read and why", and focuses on a handful of Bloom's chosen authors of short stories, novels, plays , and poems, and how and why to read them, in particular. Bloom's (p. 21) thesis is:

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.

Further, Bloom quotes Sir Francis Bacon's advice on reading:

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

When I found myself recently forced to "agree to disagree" with a few people who like to argue for the sport of argument, and who, rather than to learn and change, prefer to find themselves persistently correct and take the final word as some form of noble victory, I found myself overhearing myself. In a case of reading "with an overt urgency" (p. 21), I stumbled upon the concept of meta-cognition in the literature on "self-consciousness". And, thanks to Bloom, a new horizon is visible from the scaffolding of my inner citadel.

Alexander Pope, in the first stanza of Part 2 of An Essay on Criticism, tells me that ignoramuses have the strongest biases, and they let pride prevent them from changing (or "growing"). Instead, our power of reason should drive away pride, so that we can see our faults - not through ourselves, but through friend and foe alike. In effect, we can use feedback from others to correct our knowledge, but only if we can learn to "overhear" ourselves.

The concept of overhearing ourselves, as in being able to hear what we are saying almost as an independent observer, is what Bloom meant. But when I first read it, I immediately thought of it as hearing ourselves too much. When I think of "agreeing to disagree", I see an un-shifting opinion, where facts are "false news", where it is no longer about knowledge, but about some sense of superiority, one over the other. For a very long time, for me this has been a form of "class self-consciousness". Not false consciousness, nor class consciousness, but of being simultaneously conscious of one's class and of one's position in one's class. (I must point out that I mean the class one inhabited as a child, rather than the class one may have "moved to" since.) It is often that I hear from silver-tails and dyed-in-the-wool working class comrades this inability to use reason to develop knowledge.

Pope (and later, Mortimer Adler) wrote that being educated and having read widely are not guarantees of wisdom. Indeed, many well-educated people I have met, particularly those who love to argue for sport and "agree to disagree" when they cannot beat down their opponent with their own sense of righteousness, may properly be referred to as "bookful blockheads, ignorantly read". Given Bloom's focus on the "Western Canon", I wondered how much he was of the Huntington creed of imaginary belonging to some mythical people who span half the globe and much of recorded history. I suspected at first that I might have to acquiesce and accept; to agree to disagree. Yet Bloom doesn't take it there at all.

I meet these people (too often), who, whenever they speak of democracy, are "extremists" who think that democracy is the source of all good, and all political alternatives are the sources of all evil. I don't mean Neoconservatives, but a form of non-violent insistence that "democracy is good for you even if you don't know it" - a form of Western pride. While I am not suggesting that political and economic circumstances are irrelevant, I am of the democracy "deserves two cheers, not three" camp. And I am open to learning more.

So as I "overhear" myself when ambushed by such projected pride in an ambiguous and abstract idea of where I belong in the "Clash of Civilisations" thesis, I feel class self-consciousness, rather than a sense of who is right or wrong. And this is why I read. But how?

Bloom paints so many pictures of literary theory, especially concerning Shakespeare, that focus on the concept of the "will to change". For Bloom, literature is of either the Shakespearean or Cervantean (of Don Quixote fame) modes. Shakespearean characters change when they overhear themselves, as if it were someone else who had spoken.

The Cerveantean approach is where we "learn how to listen to one another" (p. 195) as the basis of change. Further down page 195, Bloom suggests that the solitary reader is more likely to learn, from reading, how to talk to herself than to others. To put these two literary modes in context, authors in the Shakespearean camp include Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Proust, Jane Austen, and Stendhal. In the Cervantean camp reside Italo Calvino, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Guy de Maupassant. I suppose this is why my mind expands when I read the latter, because the mode is less Anglo. And this is where I find Bloom confusing. Is he talking about the Anglo (Shakespeare) versus the Continental (Cervantes) philosophical approaches? Or is there some mystical, mythical, "other" Eastern Canon, as opposed to the Western Canon? In the final pages, it seems more likely that Bloom means the West in all its Abrahamic glory. This makes more sense, hence my refusal to agree to disagree with Bloom. (And thank God I did not imagine Bloom waving a flag with Huntington's nonsense.) Which all leads to my own experience with overhearing myself, and the concept of meta-cognition in relation to my class self-consciousness:

The term “meta-cognition” typically refers to the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive states, and is manifest in one’s judgements (or feelings) concerning one’s own learning and consequent level of certainty or confidence (J.D. Smith 2009; Beran et al. 2012; Proust 2013; Fleming & Frith 2014). The suggestion is that if a creature is able to monitor their own level of confidence, they are to that extent self-conscious.

So, how to read Bloom and why? There is genuine wisdom in his work, and, if one will only listen for oneself while reading, the reader may just "overhear" herself speak. Unless, of course, you prefer to agree to disagree. But I suspect if that is what is happening for you, you might be "overhearing" yourself in the manner of hearing yourself too much. The former helps us to change, the latter helps us to "harden the categories". Or at least that is what I overheard.

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