In my second decade of planned reading (2007-2016), I read all of Plato’s surviving works and almost all of Aristotle. For the third ten-year schedule, I decided I would simply read through my extensive notes on all these philosophical works. I thought this exercise would just remind me of the main points and the flow of argument, but some other interesting things have happened.
Take the Republic, for instance. I had read Plato’s blueprint for utopia twice in my life and had some clearish memories about how the dialog felt, how Plato’s version of Socrates got from point A to point B. Some of that flavor made it to my notes, but for the most part I had just recorded main lines of argument and the points stated. As I read through the notes on books I-V ten years after writing them, without the deceptively connective tissue, the arbitrariness of some of the features of Plato’s model society was clearer, the veneer of deductive logic almost transparent. Rulers must come from the military class? Slaves can’t act in plays? (People have to be slaves?)
The genius of Aristotle, on the other hand, seems to shine through no matter how much I condensed his words. In the Prior Analytics, Plato’s most famous student pretty much invents the formal study of logic and then begins to show how to use it in argument before the assembly. His advice covers a wide range: from analysis of your opponent’s syllogisms to knowledge about the psychologically best time to spring your conclusion on the audience. Plato would have dismissed it all as machination in the cause of power rather than truth, but then that’s why he and Aristotle are arguing in Raphael’s painting.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of my favorite books of philosophy. Just in books VI-X, which I reviewed this month, he covers many vital topics. He shows me why I sometimes do things I don’t want to do. He outlines the three prototypes of Dickens’s villains (a topic I’ll have to devote a whole post to some time!). He describes various kinds of friendship and helps me understand when and how both to forge a relationship and to break one. He explains why marriages fail (and by extension, how to make them last). His explanation of what a happy man gets out of true friends suggests the reason God, who needs nothing, wants happy people. And if, when Aristotle says in book X that happiness is the virtuous act of contemplation, a Christian recognizes the Triune God as the ultimate object of contemplation, Aristotle’s ending simply becomes a theological treatise on the purpose of creation and life. No wonder Dante gives Aristotle the most honored position among pagan philosophers in Limbo.
Now, to prepare to write this post, I went over the notes I just took this year: notes I took after reading the notes I wrote ten years ago. And now you’re reading my notes about my notes about my notes. You’re so far from actual Aristotle, you should stop looking at my blog right now . . . (hmmm, still here, I see) and read the Ethics for yourself. Of course, what you find there will be a translation of what scholars believe were students’ notes of the master’s lectures. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Top Three
I can’t agree with Stranger Things’s Dustin about the Three Musketeers candy bar. “It is Top Three for me,” he says to his buddies on their Halloween quest for free sugar rushes. Dustin loves his nougat. Me? I think a Three Musketeers bar is a Milky Way that forgot its best part.
The Three Musketeers the novel, on the other hand, I love. It has both the nougat of historical fiction and the caramel of broad comedy, and with the deliciously grim brooding of Athos, it becomes not just a Milky Way, but a Milky Way Midnight Dark. Yum!
A big part of my current list is meant to recapture the passionate engagement of my adolescent reading, and rereading Dumas’s rollicking tale of D’Artagnan and his friends certainly fulfilled that mission. Of course, the experience wasn’t the same as it was forty-two years ago: I’m not the same person I was then. I loved it this year just as much as I did then, but now I think I understand much better why it moved my teenage self so deeply.
In 1976, the characters of Athos and D’Artagnan especially revealed to me a whole new depth of life I didn’t know was possible. I saw in these heroes a nobility that had (I know I understood this even then) nothing to do with their wenching and their drunkenness. As immoral as the Musketeers are in many ways, at their best moments they act by internal principles. Athos especially avoids reacting viscerally to almost all present circumstances; he acts according to the inner man, a core somewhat shaped by past circumstance, yes, but internalized nonetheless. D'Artagnan on the other hand responds in the heat of the moment most of the time, but he can always explain his knee-jerk reactions as following lessons his father taught him or obeying the code of bravery.
As an adolescent, I didn't really know any philosophy of life, any ethic. My Christianity consisted of believing the right things about events commemorated by major holidays and generally feeling pretty good about not making graven images, murdering, or committing adultery (pretty easy to avoid for a seventeen-year-old suburban kid). My daily, hourly, minute-by-minute conduct, however, reacted to circumstance based on feelings, and both the feelings and the reactions were almost entirely out of my control. Of course, I could (and often had to) justify my actions by some quick moral reasoning. But that was all after the fact. These two characters showed me, maybe for the first time, that there is such a thing as character, deliberate character, shaped and honed by adherence to principle and followed by determined practice until it becomes second nature.
My favorite scene in the book was and still is the lunch at the bastion at La Rochelle. The four companions, needing to work out some plans where the Cardinal’s men can’t possibly hear them, wager their comrades in the attacking forces that they can eat lunch in a rocky ruin in the middle of the battlefield. Their compatriots see the escapade as a daft bit of derring-do, but the Musketeers go to their noisy repast in full assurance of ultimate success. This is not the confidence of adolescence: the irrational sense I had at the age of my first reading that nothing could kill me (except rejection by a girl). It’s trust in training. It’s mature knowledge of one’s own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. It’s mastery over fear. This scene has stuck with me and provided a model of courage many times in my life – not all of which, I’m afraid, found me faithfully following the model.
As book lovers know very well, reliving an experience is not always the best way to capture a cherished memory. We reread our favorite books over and over, but that activity can’t rebirth the unique moment of seeing Rivendell or meeting Captain Cuttle for the first time. Books in a series, though, provide the next best thing. Why I didn’t read the sequels to The Three Musketeers when I was seventeen, I can’t tell you. But they’re on my list to read now. We’ll pick this topic up again in 2020, when I’ll read Twenty Years After, and by which time, I hope, we’ll have two more seasons of Stranger Things that I can enjoy for the first time.
The Three Musketeers the novel, on the other hand, I love. It has both the nougat of historical fiction and the caramel of broad comedy, and with the deliciously grim brooding of Athos, it becomes not just a Milky Way, but a Milky Way Midnight Dark. Yum!
A big part of my current list is meant to recapture the passionate engagement of my adolescent reading, and rereading Dumas’s rollicking tale of D’Artagnan and his friends certainly fulfilled that mission. Of course, the experience wasn’t the same as it was forty-two years ago: I’m not the same person I was then. I loved it this year just as much as I did then, but now I think I understand much better why it moved my teenage self so deeply.
In 1976, the characters of Athos and D’Artagnan especially revealed to me a whole new depth of life I didn’t know was possible. I saw in these heroes a nobility that had (I know I understood this even then) nothing to do with their wenching and their drunkenness. As immoral as the Musketeers are in many ways, at their best moments they act by internal principles. Athos especially avoids reacting viscerally to almost all present circumstances; he acts according to the inner man, a core somewhat shaped by past circumstance, yes, but internalized nonetheless. D'Artagnan on the other hand responds in the heat of the moment most of the time, but he can always explain his knee-jerk reactions as following lessons his father taught him or obeying the code of bravery.
As an adolescent, I didn't really know any philosophy of life, any ethic. My Christianity consisted of believing the right things about events commemorated by major holidays and generally feeling pretty good about not making graven images, murdering, or committing adultery (pretty easy to avoid for a seventeen-year-old suburban kid). My daily, hourly, minute-by-minute conduct, however, reacted to circumstance based on feelings, and both the feelings and the reactions were almost entirely out of my control. Of course, I could (and often had to) justify my actions by some quick moral reasoning. But that was all after the fact. These two characters showed me, maybe for the first time, that there is such a thing as character, deliberate character, shaped and honed by adherence to principle and followed by determined practice until it becomes second nature.
My favorite scene in the book was and still is the lunch at the bastion at La Rochelle. The four companions, needing to work out some plans where the Cardinal’s men can’t possibly hear them, wager their comrades in the attacking forces that they can eat lunch in a rocky ruin in the middle of the battlefield. Their compatriots see the escapade as a daft bit of derring-do, but the Musketeers go to their noisy repast in full assurance of ultimate success. This is not the confidence of adolescence: the irrational sense I had at the age of my first reading that nothing could kill me (except rejection by a girl). It’s trust in training. It’s mature knowledge of one’s own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses. It’s mastery over fear. This scene has stuck with me and provided a model of courage many times in my life – not all of which, I’m afraid, found me faithfully following the model.
As book lovers know very well, reliving an experience is not always the best way to capture a cherished memory. We reread our favorite books over and over, but that activity can’t rebirth the unique moment of seeing Rivendell or meeting Captain Cuttle for the first time. Books in a series, though, provide the next best thing. Why I didn’t read the sequels to The Three Musketeers when I was seventeen, I can’t tell you. But they’re on my list to read now. We’ll pick this topic up again in 2020, when I’ll read Twenty Years After, and by which time, I hope, we’ll have two more seasons of Stranger Things that I can enjoy for the first time.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
In Which I Use the Word “Mobius-Strippy”
During my second decade of planned reading (2007-2016), I began every year with Greek drama. To begin this year – year 2 of my third ten-year plan – I stayed on the stage but moved forward 2400 years and read some plays by Tom Stoppard. I had read The Real Inspector Hound and The Invention of Love and seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare in Love and enjoyed every postmodern, mobius-strippy twist of dramatic logic. So wanting to experience more of Tom Stoppard’s special brand of surreality, I decided, in some way that I’ve since forgotten, to explore Arcadia and The Real Thing in the first few days of 2018.
I hate to be curtly dismissive of the work of an award-winning playwright and critical favorite, but compared to the others I had liked so much, these two plays just didn’t work as well in my view, as much as I again appreciated the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The Real Thing, for instance, primarily seemed to ask, What is the real thing in relationships? But even the character who believes in romance and commitment divorces his wife and leaves his child. (Maybe romance and commitment aren’t entirely compatible principles.) It's a play about deep moral issues with no foundation other than feelings and ill-trained logic to build on. Living in a post-Christian world is tough for the ethicist, but surely we can’t accept the abandonment of children as the Real Thing.
I liked Arcadia much better, partly because its characters seem more genuinely concerned with the questions it asks: does love intrude on Newtonianism, for instance. But the play offers few answers. It struck me in the end as though Stoppard wanted to delve into the old conundrum of free will and determinism and tried to make it sound original simply by replacing “determinism” with a more specific scientific term (i.e “Newtonianism”). But no less august body of scientists than the Royal Institution named it one of the best science-related works ever written, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In any case, the non-interacting interaction of characters from different times (Click the timey-wimey link and watch that Dr. Who scene again if you’d like; I’ll wait. —Back? Good, I’ll finish my sentence now. —Yes, I thought so, too.) culminating in a scene in which characters move across the stage like the feet in a cosmic waltz makes me want to see the play in the flesh.
It occurs to me that I’ve liked Stoppard most when the object of his characters’ lines are, recursively, characters and dramatic lines, objects that Stoppard knows very well. Who, ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is writing their lives? Are we watching a play, ask the critics of The Real Inspector Hound, or actually in a play? I have more Tom Stoppard planned for year 5 and year 8 (more details on this page), and I’m curious to see if the pattern of my reaction continues. If only I had my Tardis right here, I’d let you know today.
I hate to be curtly dismissive of the work of an award-winning playwright and critical favorite, but compared to the others I had liked so much, these two plays just didn’t work as well in my view, as much as I again appreciated the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The Real Thing, for instance, primarily seemed to ask, What is the real thing in relationships? But even the character who believes in romance and commitment divorces his wife and leaves his child. (Maybe romance and commitment aren’t entirely compatible principles.) It's a play about deep moral issues with no foundation other than feelings and ill-trained logic to build on. Living in a post-Christian world is tough for the ethicist, but surely we can’t accept the abandonment of children as the Real Thing.
I liked Arcadia much better, partly because its characters seem more genuinely concerned with the questions it asks: does love intrude on Newtonianism, for instance. But the play offers few answers. It struck me in the end as though Stoppard wanted to delve into the old conundrum of free will and determinism and tried to make it sound original simply by replacing “determinism” with a more specific scientific term (i.e “Newtonianism”). But no less august body of scientists than the Royal Institution named it one of the best science-related works ever written, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. In any case, the non-interacting interaction of characters from different times (Click the timey-wimey link and watch that Dr. Who scene again if you’d like; I’ll wait. —Back? Good, I’ll finish my sentence now. —Yes, I thought so, too.) culminating in a scene in which characters move across the stage like the feet in a cosmic waltz makes me want to see the play in the flesh.
It occurs to me that I’ve liked Stoppard most when the object of his characters’ lines are, recursively, characters and dramatic lines, objects that Stoppard knows very well. Who, ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is writing their lives? Are we watching a play, ask the critics of The Real Inspector Hound, or actually in a play? I have more Tom Stoppard planned for year 5 and year 8 (more details on this page), and I’m curious to see if the pattern of my reaction continues. If only I had my Tardis right here, I’d let you know today.
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Book Awards – 2017
In keeping my tradition of wrapping up the year with a list of awards (and of course the world doesn’t have enough annual awards), I’ve cheated slightly and favored things that I didn’t blog about earlier in this slim year for posts. Without further ado (you won’t catch me spelling the wrong word there), here are my awards from Year 1 of my Third Decade reading plan.
Author Who Is with Me in Spirit at My Elbow: Charles Dickens
I always make a special place for Charles Dickens in my awards and then let someone else win the fiction award. Dickens doesn’t mind it as long as he gets to play Master of Ceremony. I listened to the marvelous Mil Nicholson reading Nicholas Nickleby in the car driving to and from work in the early months of this year, and I read A Christmas Carol yet again in the last week of the year. Needless to say . . . . (I want to use that phrase honestly for once.)
Best Reread: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
I remember loving this book the first time I read it, but I had forgotten 99.9% of the details. In a celebration of minds that have breakthrough moments (some of which have shaped our world and some of which have been mostly forgotten), Boorstin tells the story of Su Sung’s twelfth-century astronomical clock, of Santorio Santorio refuting the dichotomy of hot and cold by marking temperature on a continuous scale, of Aldus Manutius numbering the pages of the books he printed, and of the scientifically untrained Christian Thomsen intuiting three anthropological ages by looking at artifacts of stone, bronze, and iron. Amazing! Of course Columbus and Galileo and Gutenberg and William Harvey are there, too.
Weirdest Reread: Tie – Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Verne, Hector Servadac
I didn’t like either of these books as much as I did when I was fourteen. And yet, according to my faulty memory, my adolescent self was smart enough to get the main ideas from each. It’s hard to say whether I truly enjoyed reading them again since I spent so much time asking myself, “Did I understand that? What did I think about that? How was the translation I read forty years ago better? Worse?” And on and on.
Best New Read, Religion: Mark Noll, America’s God
This book may have been about religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, but it sure explains a lot of things about today.
Best New Read, Fiction: Galsworthy, A Man of Property
It’s a good thing I liked it, because the other eight novels of The Forsyte Saga are all on my plan. I don’t know what possessed Galsworthy to devote so much time to exposing these eminently flawed people, but I know a Forsyte or two, and clearly he knew whom he was writing about.
Best New Read, History: Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland
Living in Knoxville now, I found this Southern perspective on the Civil War especially interesting. The western armies fought over this heartland (essentially Tennessee) because of its natural resources and because Confederate loyalty didn’t blanket the state. I live in a section that was Union sympathetic, and I’ve driven several times on the Andrew Johnson highway, named for a southern man who stayed in the U.S. Senate even after secession and toured eastern Tennessee recruiting Union soldiers. Slightly comforting.
Best Off-List Read: Margo Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures
OK, so the movie collapsed calendar time quite a bit: those victories did not all happen during the planning of John Glenn’s mission. Still, everything in the wonderful film was essentially true. But why didn’t it mention the fact that the computer calculations Katherine Johnson double-checked for Glenn came from equations that Johnson had herself developed earlier? And how could it not tell the story of Mary Jackson’s son winning the Soap Box Derby and then telling reporters he wanted to grow up to be an engineer just like his mom?
Read Leading to the Most New Reading: Brown, History of Victorian Literature
I have always thought of nineteenth-century novels as the Real Thing, and the introduction to James Eli Brown’s history explained why: the social forces of the time grew and shaped the middle-class that became both the central subject matter and the new audience for the surging literary form. It also helped that Great Britain finally nixed that Stamp Act that we got so angry about, thus making paper – and novels – cheaper. Now they’re electronic, and, after buying computers and paying for the internet, all those Victorian novels are free. It’s a good thing, because I put at least forty on a list that will form the core of my Fourth Decade.
Most Ludicrous Not-So-Great Book: Burroughs, Pirates of Venus
A lot of my Third Decade list is designed to help me revisit my adolescent reading experience. If Dumas and Verne didn’t write capitalized Great Books, I can at least say that these authors put research and skill into their books. Edgar Rice Burroughs, on the other hand, wrote pure fantasy based on an error-laden misunderstanding of science and geography. But I have fun even thinking about the mistakes. Am I really supposed to believe that Carson Napier is smart enough to build his own rocket for a trip to Mars and yet could forget the gravitational pull of the Moon in his trajectory calculations? And then am I supposed to believe that his mistake would conveniently land him on Venus instead? It would have been a better book if Napier had just aimed for the Planet of Love to begin with, but it wouldn’t have been as enjoyable.
Most Comforting-yet-Disturbing Read: Durant, The Reformation
I love Will Durant’s history, as the briefest survey of my past posts will show, and his elegant prose, nose for memorable detail, and flair for inspiring analysis provided five weeks of lunch-time comfort during a frustrating semester of teaching. On the other hand, reading about the political perversions of Christianity that led to so much bloodshed didn’t exactly improve the digestion of those lunches.
Belated Award for Most Satisfying Moment: Will Durant, re: Charles V and Francis I
I’m terrible at memorizing quotations. I often can’t even remember who said them. So when I want to sound learned, I’m left having to say something like, “Someone important once said something along the lines of this . . . .” I’m not even sure I’m quoting myself accurately there. Pathetic. For decades, the most frequent example of this total lack of the skills of scholarship involved me saying, “Somebody, I think it was Napoleon, said that the greatest enemies have to agree on one thing: they have to agree on the value of the thing they’re fighting over.” I even said it once here in this blog. Well, in Year 9, while reading Will Durant, I came across what I’m sure was the original that I had heard many winters ago. It was Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who said, and I quote verbatim, “King Francis and I are in complete agreement; we both want Milan.” Perfect.
So there you have it: all the awards for 2017 and even one from 2016. I promise nothing about the coming year, but I might find myself putting up the list for my Third Decade of planned reading. And I may end up publishing awards for Year 2 next December. In any case, that’s it for 2017, so without further adieu (wink), may your 2018 be filled with entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring reading! Happy New Year!
Author Who Is with Me in Spirit at My Elbow: Charles Dickens
I always make a special place for Charles Dickens in my awards and then let someone else win the fiction award. Dickens doesn’t mind it as long as he gets to play Master of Ceremony. I listened to the marvelous Mil Nicholson reading Nicholas Nickleby in the car driving to and from work in the early months of this year, and I read A Christmas Carol yet again in the last week of the year. Needless to say . . . . (I want to use that phrase honestly for once.)
Best Reread: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
I remember loving this book the first time I read it, but I had forgotten 99.9% of the details. In a celebration of minds that have breakthrough moments (some of which have shaped our world and some of which have been mostly forgotten), Boorstin tells the story of Su Sung’s twelfth-century astronomical clock, of Santorio Santorio refuting the dichotomy of hot and cold by marking temperature on a continuous scale, of Aldus Manutius numbering the pages of the books he printed, and of the scientifically untrained Christian Thomsen intuiting three anthropological ages by looking at artifacts of stone, bronze, and iron. Amazing! Of course Columbus and Galileo and Gutenberg and William Harvey are there, too.
Weirdest Reread: Tie – Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Verne, Hector Servadac
I didn’t like either of these books as much as I did when I was fourteen. And yet, according to my faulty memory, my adolescent self was smart enough to get the main ideas from each. It’s hard to say whether I truly enjoyed reading them again since I spent so much time asking myself, “Did I understand that? What did I think about that? How was the translation I read forty years ago better? Worse?” And on and on.
Best New Read, Religion: Mark Noll, America’s God
This book may have been about religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, but it sure explains a lot of things about today.
Best New Read, Fiction: Galsworthy, A Man of Property
It’s a good thing I liked it, because the other eight novels of The Forsyte Saga are all on my plan. I don’t know what possessed Galsworthy to devote so much time to exposing these eminently flawed people, but I know a Forsyte or two, and clearly he knew whom he was writing about.
Best New Read, History: Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland
Living in Knoxville now, I found this Southern perspective on the Civil War especially interesting. The western armies fought over this heartland (essentially Tennessee) because of its natural resources and because Confederate loyalty didn’t blanket the state. I live in a section that was Union sympathetic, and I’ve driven several times on the Andrew Johnson highway, named for a southern man who stayed in the U.S. Senate even after secession and toured eastern Tennessee recruiting Union soldiers. Slightly comforting.
Best Off-List Read: Margo Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures
OK, so the movie collapsed calendar time quite a bit: those victories did not all happen during the planning of John Glenn’s mission. Still, everything in the wonderful film was essentially true. But why didn’t it mention the fact that the computer calculations Katherine Johnson double-checked for Glenn came from equations that Johnson had herself developed earlier? And how could it not tell the story of Mary Jackson’s son winning the Soap Box Derby and then telling reporters he wanted to grow up to be an engineer just like his mom?
Read Leading to the Most New Reading: Brown, History of Victorian Literature
I have always thought of nineteenth-century novels as the Real Thing, and the introduction to James Eli Brown’s history explained why: the social forces of the time grew and shaped the middle-class that became both the central subject matter and the new audience for the surging literary form. It also helped that Great Britain finally nixed that Stamp Act that we got so angry about, thus making paper – and novels – cheaper. Now they’re electronic, and, after buying computers and paying for the internet, all those Victorian novels are free. It’s a good thing, because I put at least forty on a list that will form the core of my Fourth Decade.
Most Ludicrous Not-So-Great Book: Burroughs, Pirates of Venus
A lot of my Third Decade list is designed to help me revisit my adolescent reading experience. If Dumas and Verne didn’t write capitalized Great Books, I can at least say that these authors put research and skill into their books. Edgar Rice Burroughs, on the other hand, wrote pure fantasy based on an error-laden misunderstanding of science and geography. But I have fun even thinking about the mistakes. Am I really supposed to believe that Carson Napier is smart enough to build his own rocket for a trip to Mars and yet could forget the gravitational pull of the Moon in his trajectory calculations? And then am I supposed to believe that his mistake would conveniently land him on Venus instead? It would have been a better book if Napier had just aimed for the Planet of Love to begin with, but it wouldn’t have been as enjoyable.
Most Comforting-yet-Disturbing Read: Durant, The Reformation
I love Will Durant’s history, as the briefest survey of my past posts will show, and his elegant prose, nose for memorable detail, and flair for inspiring analysis provided five weeks of lunch-time comfort during a frustrating semester of teaching. On the other hand, reading about the political perversions of Christianity that led to so much bloodshed didn’t exactly improve the digestion of those lunches.
Belated Award for Most Satisfying Moment: Will Durant, re: Charles V and Francis I
I’m terrible at memorizing quotations. I often can’t even remember who said them. So when I want to sound learned, I’m left having to say something like, “Someone important once said something along the lines of this . . . .” I’m not even sure I’m quoting myself accurately there. Pathetic. For decades, the most frequent example of this total lack of the skills of scholarship involved me saying, “Somebody, I think it was Napoleon, said that the greatest enemies have to agree on one thing: they have to agree on the value of the thing they’re fighting over.” I even said it once here in this blog. Well, in Year 9, while reading Will Durant, I came across what I’m sure was the original that I had heard many winters ago. It was Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who said, and I quote verbatim, “King Francis and I are in complete agreement; we both want Milan.” Perfect.
So there you have it: all the awards for 2017 and even one from 2016. I promise nothing about the coming year, but I might find myself putting up the list for my Third Decade of planned reading. And I may end up publishing awards for Year 2 next December. In any case, that’s it for 2017, so without further adieu (wink), may your 2018 be filled with entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring reading! Happy New Year!
Thursday, November 30, 2017
The High of Reading
When I first learned music history, way back in a previous millennium, my teachers and books essentially taught me about the pieces that still get sung and played in symphony orchestras and university recital halls today. Since that time, musicologists have begun to approach music history from a different angle: as a study of what musical life was like at a given time and place. One thing this change means is that students now learn about people that have mostly been forgotten. I learned nothing about Meyerbeer in my classes, for instance, and yet he was the most popular composer in Europe in the 1830s. The old method taught the 1830s by talking about what we like from the 1830s; the new approach teaches the 1830s by examining what people in the 1830s liked. The second result of this shift in perspective is that composers are no longer the only interesting figures in music history. Now we study – among others – performers, publishers, instrument makers, concert audiences, middle-class families who bought pianos for their teenage daughters, and “waits”: medieval wind bands who roamed the streets at night ready to play a rousing tune any time they saw criminal activity. The new way is so much better!
The first book I read that follows this new approach was a book from the Music & Society series on the early Romantic era. I got excited when I read stories such as the account of how the London Philharmonic decided to have a conductor. (A guest composer conducted a rehearsal and had the orchestra stop and redo difficult passages. The group agreed that they sounded better when someone actually made them correct their mistakes. Go figure.) So I put all the the volumes of the series on my Third Decade plan, one book per year, hoping for enlightening and entertaining reading.
Sadly, though, the volume on ancient times and the Middle Ages mostly just describes the surviving music. I guess we don’t know a lot about the invisible slaves who played music at Roman parties. I was hoping to hear more about what music instruction in cathedral schools was like, but again, I suppose there isn’t much documentary evidence. The waits at least got mentioned once. Disappointing, yeah. But maybe the installment on the Renaissance, on my list for 2018, will be better.
Also disappointing this year was Sandburg’s Lincoln. My dad told me when I was, maybe, twelve that I would need to read this mammoth biography someday. Dad, I’m sorry it took 45 years for “someday” to come. But I’m not sorry I chose to read Sandburg’s one-volume abridgement of his four-volume original: even the one book was too long and not as good as other Lincoln biographies. The story read like a medieval chronicle: it told what happened without much analysis of the reasons for what happened, the rejected alternatives, or the reactions to what happened. The book got much better near the end, though; the poet found his inspiration in the death of the great President. And he found special joy in poking fun at all the bad poets across the country (thousands of them!) who sent in dismayingly similar elegaic verses to their local newspapers. Come to think of it, I wish thousands of poets sent works to local papers today. Even the bad ones might be worth the occasional gems.
For people like me, reading is an addiction – a wholesome addiction, I have to believe. But like some drug addictions, it starts when the user tries to recapture an experience of euphoria. As a youngster, I experienced the high in reading aloud the delicious rhymes of Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, in finding out how different Baum’s Wizard of Oz was from the movie, in finally finding myself old enough to read all of Lanier’s King Arthur, and in discovering the complex depths of power and beauty in A Tale of Two Cities. As an adult with a ten-year reading plan, I’m partly just trying constantly to recover that high. It definitely happens sometimes, as when at last I started reading Orlando Furioso. But of course I’ll have some disappointments, as I did with the music history and Sandburg’s Lincoln.
But my other major reading for November brought no disappointment. I first read Helen Hooven Santmyer’s . . . And Ladies of the Club (how does one format this to show that the ellipses actually start the title?) when I had a fever – or at least I started the gargantuan novel in my delirium. I loved the book but felt very hazy about some of its details. So on this clear-headed reread, I enjoyed the book even more than I had before. The social forces that criss-cross through four generations of inhabitants of Waynesboro, Ohio, fascinate me: social class, economic class, religious denomination, political affiliation, intellectual level, interest in art and drama, and relative love for or suspicion of books all combine in surprising ways. The book reminds me that a human being isn’t simple or predictable even if some overt personal characteristic is, and it challenges me to find common ground with people who seem incompatible with me on the surface.
Ladies of the Club actually mirrors and comments on my reading for November and my thoughts about it today. (It’s just too weird to start a paragraph with ellipses and a conjunction.) Some of the women in the Waynesboro Ladies Club share my addiction to books; others meet every other Wednesday afternoon mostly for the socializing. Some find occasional disappointment in the readings assigned by the group's vice president; one or two find their lives drastically challenged and altered by books given to them by a friend or passed down by a parent. One character even writes a rather bad poem and submits it to the town newspaper.
As I think about it, Santmyer wrote the kind of history I was hoping to find in the Music & Society Series. I know the books from the late nineteenth century that our college classes like to teach and our bookstores tend to sell. But Santmyer tells me what books they liked in the nineteenth century, who was reading them, and what they thought of them. Santmyer’s picture of the time and the bookstore’s picture of the time are quite different.
Except for Dickens. Of course, they liked Dickens.
The first book I read that follows this new approach was a book from the Music & Society series on the early Romantic era. I got excited when I read stories such as the account of how the London Philharmonic decided to have a conductor. (A guest composer conducted a rehearsal and had the orchestra stop and redo difficult passages. The group agreed that they sounded better when someone actually made them correct their mistakes. Go figure.) So I put all the the volumes of the series on my Third Decade plan, one book per year, hoping for enlightening and entertaining reading.
Sadly, though, the volume on ancient times and the Middle Ages mostly just describes the surviving music. I guess we don’t know a lot about the invisible slaves who played music at Roman parties. I was hoping to hear more about what music instruction in cathedral schools was like, but again, I suppose there isn’t much documentary evidence. The waits at least got mentioned once. Disappointing, yeah. But maybe the installment on the Renaissance, on my list for 2018, will be better.
Also disappointing this year was Sandburg’s Lincoln. My dad told me when I was, maybe, twelve that I would need to read this mammoth biography someday. Dad, I’m sorry it took 45 years for “someday” to come. But I’m not sorry I chose to read Sandburg’s one-volume abridgement of his four-volume original: even the one book was too long and not as good as other Lincoln biographies. The story read like a medieval chronicle: it told what happened without much analysis of the reasons for what happened, the rejected alternatives, or the reactions to what happened. The book got much better near the end, though; the poet found his inspiration in the death of the great President. And he found special joy in poking fun at all the bad poets across the country (thousands of them!) who sent in dismayingly similar elegaic verses to their local newspapers. Come to think of it, I wish thousands of poets sent works to local papers today. Even the bad ones might be worth the occasional gems.
For people like me, reading is an addiction – a wholesome addiction, I have to believe. But like some drug addictions, it starts when the user tries to recapture an experience of euphoria. As a youngster, I experienced the high in reading aloud the delicious rhymes of Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, in finding out how different Baum’s Wizard of Oz was from the movie, in finally finding myself old enough to read all of Lanier’s King Arthur, and in discovering the complex depths of power and beauty in A Tale of Two Cities. As an adult with a ten-year reading plan, I’m partly just trying constantly to recover that high. It definitely happens sometimes, as when at last I started reading Orlando Furioso. But of course I’ll have some disappointments, as I did with the music history and Sandburg’s Lincoln.
But my other major reading for November brought no disappointment. I first read Helen Hooven Santmyer’s . . . And Ladies of the Club (how does one format this to show that the ellipses actually start the title?) when I had a fever – or at least I started the gargantuan novel in my delirium. I loved the book but felt very hazy about some of its details. So on this clear-headed reread, I enjoyed the book even more than I had before. The social forces that criss-cross through four generations of inhabitants of Waynesboro, Ohio, fascinate me: social class, economic class, religious denomination, political affiliation, intellectual level, interest in art and drama, and relative love for or suspicion of books all combine in surprising ways. The book reminds me that a human being isn’t simple or predictable even if some overt personal characteristic is, and it challenges me to find common ground with people who seem incompatible with me on the surface.
Ladies of the Club actually mirrors and comments on my reading for November and my thoughts about it today. (It’s just too weird to start a paragraph with ellipses and a conjunction.) Some of the women in the Waynesboro Ladies Club share my addiction to books; others meet every other Wednesday afternoon mostly for the socializing. Some find occasional disappointment in the readings assigned by the group's vice president; one or two find their lives drastically challenged and altered by books given to them by a friend or passed down by a parent. One character even writes a rather bad poem and submits it to the town newspaper.
As I think about it, Santmyer wrote the kind of history I was hoping to find in the Music & Society Series. I know the books from the late nineteenth century that our college classes like to teach and our bookstores tend to sell. But Santmyer tells me what books they liked in the nineteenth century, who was reading them, and what they thought of them. Santmyer’s picture of the time and the bookstore’s picture of the time are quite different.
Except for Dickens. Of course, they liked Dickens.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
From One Line to Five Hundred
As much as I tried to make my reading list for the Third Decade shorter and lighter than the schedule for the Second, of course it ballooned almost out of control. Part of the problem is that I thought I’d be spending the horological abundance of the retired on this new project, when in fact I took on, for my last nine months of labor on this Earth, a job busier and more tiring than any I’ve had since I was a peppy whippersnapper. But many years ago, I learned to take at least an hour at lunch to forget about work and read a book, and I still do it. If I feel rushed to get through lunch these days, at least the reading has been good this fall.
Part of my bloated reading list for the Third Decade includes rereading my notes from ten years ago, and I was amazed to recall that I had taken only one line of notes about Will Durant’s Story of Civilization in 2007. This year I wrote over 500 lines of information I’d love to remember. His march through the annals of western history has become one of my favorite assignments each year, which is why I schedule it in the fall as a reward for some of the tougher reading of the earlier months.
Durant goes back and forth smoothly and logically between giant personalities (Mary Queen of Scots, for instance), political movements (e.g., the English Civil War), cultural descriptions (this year it was the morals and manners of France during the religious wars of the sixteenth century), and criticism of art and literature (Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, Velázquez, and Bernini). Of course his historical prose gets bogged down in a density of detail at times, but he rarely repeats himself and only occasionally explains things out of order: not bad for a monument of 6000+ pages. But every page presents something new, something striking, something to change the habitual perception of a reader doomed to live in his own era.
And Durant has a flair for witty observation. (I suspect that these moments actually come from the mind of his wife, Ariel, whom he eventually made co-author of the last few volumes.) In saying that people like the way Shakespeare says things as well as his stories, he quips, “Shakespeare’s audience came for his plumage as well as for his tale.” About the artist Domenichino, he says, “He . . . learned his art in Bologna and then sought the fauna and florins of Rome.”
That kind of educated pun is a lost art, I’m afraid. And of course, my notes are all dry lists of mere facts. But at least ten years from now, when I read my files from this first year of my third ten-year reading plan during Year 1 of the Fourth Decade, I’ll have plenty to remind me of the epic tale Will Durant sang for me in 2017.
Part of my bloated reading list for the Third Decade includes rereading my notes from ten years ago, and I was amazed to recall that I had taken only one line of notes about Will Durant’s Story of Civilization in 2007. This year I wrote over 500 lines of information I’d love to remember. His march through the annals of western history has become one of my favorite assignments each year, which is why I schedule it in the fall as a reward for some of the tougher reading of the earlier months.
Durant goes back and forth smoothly and logically between giant personalities (Mary Queen of Scots, for instance), political movements (e.g., the English Civil War), cultural descriptions (this year it was the morals and manners of France during the religious wars of the sixteenth century), and criticism of art and literature (Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, Velázquez, and Bernini). Of course his historical prose gets bogged down in a density of detail at times, but he rarely repeats himself and only occasionally explains things out of order: not bad for a monument of 6000+ pages. But every page presents something new, something striking, something to change the habitual perception of a reader doomed to live in his own era.
And Durant has a flair for witty observation. (I suspect that these moments actually come from the mind of his wife, Ariel, whom he eventually made co-author of the last few volumes.) In saying that people like the way Shakespeare says things as well as his stories, he quips, “Shakespeare’s audience came for his plumage as well as for his tale.” About the artist Domenichino, he says, “He . . . learned his art in Bologna and then sought the fauna and florins of Rome.”
That kind of educated pun is a lost art, I’m afraid. And of course, my notes are all dry lists of mere facts. But at least ten years from now, when I read my files from this first year of my third ten-year reading plan during Year 1 of the Fourth Decade, I’ll have plenty to remind me of the epic tale Will Durant sang for me in 2017.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Like and Unlike Tolkien
Year 1 of Decade 3 was a year of letters: Lewis letters, Dickens letters, Tolkien letters. In reading a collection of correspondence from the man who created Sam and Frodo and Legolas and Eowyn, I noticed many striking parallels between him and myself. I remembered from reading Tolkien’s biography several years ago that I saw myself in his habits of getting to class late and reading to his children. But the parallels run even farther.
• SNL’s Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey used to play a couple of friends who sat in the basement watching television and talked about huge projects they had in mind. After the description of every castle in the air, they’d look at each other, laugh, and say, “Aw! There’s another thing I’ll never do!” I had to laugh at myself in these characters, although I gave myself the consolation that I at least often began the novels and the game designs and the businesses that I only dreamt of completing. But Tolkien described my own desultory ways in calling himself a “notorious beginner of enterprises.” It took him twelve years to finish The Lord of the Rings; the book he worked on for fifty years, The Silmarillion, he left for his son Christopher to finish. How many other great projects did he merely begin?
• Tolkien complained sometimes of proofs and other extra bits of work coming at the worst time: when some large amount of grading was due. “Evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me,” he once complained, and I sympathize.
• After one of these intense periods of task upon task, Tolkien said, “I have been chasing lost days ever since.” For years, without exactly knowing it, I had been searching for this phrase to describe a feeling of dyssynchrony with the world. I once dealt with a family crisis the week before a school year began and felt one week out of step the entire semester. Now I know: I was chasing lost days. (I found them again at Christmastide.)
• Tolkien believed that no commercialism can defile Christmas unless one lets it.
• Tolkien wanted to teach young people elevated vocabulary by simply using words like (and this was his example) argent, which has a beauty of sound all its own and so does not mean the same thing as silver. See the last paragraph from my June post this year on the effect of such writing on me in my childhood.
• Tolkien loved quoting one of his old professors in characterizing Oxford University not as an institution of learning but as a factory that makes fees. Amen! But at least “Oxford U.” isn’t routinely taken to mean a football team. (Hmm, I wonder if any Oxonian has ever referred to that academy as OU.)
• Hoping to find the Church a place of solace in times of trouble, Tolkien instead had to admit it was “just another arena of strife and change.”
• Tolkien loved Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.
Of course, I also noted some differences. I, for instance, did not create the Misty Mountains from my impression of Lauterbrunnen and then include my mental creation in an influential, best-selling, genre-creating novel. Also, I actually like Dorothy Sayers’s mystery stories. And I love The Chronicles of Narnia. But I’ll let Tolkien have his odd quirks.
• SNL’s Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey used to play a couple of friends who sat in the basement watching television and talked about huge projects they had in mind. After the description of every castle in the air, they’d look at each other, laugh, and say, “Aw! There’s another thing I’ll never do!” I had to laugh at myself in these characters, although I gave myself the consolation that I at least often began the novels and the game designs and the businesses that I only dreamt of completing. But Tolkien described my own desultory ways in calling himself a “notorious beginner of enterprises.” It took him twelve years to finish The Lord of the Rings; the book he worked on for fifty years, The Silmarillion, he left for his son Christopher to finish. How many other great projects did he merely begin?
• Tolkien complained sometimes of proofs and other extra bits of work coming at the worst time: when some large amount of grading was due. “Evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me,” he once complained, and I sympathize.
• After one of these intense periods of task upon task, Tolkien said, “I have been chasing lost days ever since.” For years, without exactly knowing it, I had been searching for this phrase to describe a feeling of dyssynchrony with the world. I once dealt with a family crisis the week before a school year began and felt one week out of step the entire semester. Now I know: I was chasing lost days. (I found them again at Christmastide.)
• Tolkien believed that no commercialism can defile Christmas unless one lets it.
• Tolkien wanted to teach young people elevated vocabulary by simply using words like (and this was his example) argent, which has a beauty of sound all its own and so does not mean the same thing as silver. See the last paragraph from my June post this year on the effect of such writing on me in my childhood.
• Tolkien loved quoting one of his old professors in characterizing Oxford University not as an institution of learning but as a factory that makes fees. Amen! But at least “Oxford U.” isn’t routinely taken to mean a football team. (Hmm, I wonder if any Oxonian has ever referred to that academy as OU.)
• Hoping to find the Church a place of solace in times of trouble, Tolkien instead had to admit it was “just another arena of strife and change.”
• Tolkien loved Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.
Of course, I also noted some differences. I, for instance, did not create the Misty Mountains from my impression of Lauterbrunnen and then include my mental creation in an influential, best-selling, genre-creating novel. Also, I actually like Dorothy Sayers’s mystery stories. And I love The Chronicles of Narnia. But I’ll let Tolkien have his odd quirks.
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