• Category Archives Literature

  • A Confrontation About Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

    This week on the calendar I have on Monday through Saturday: pack, Latin. Thursday will be our state fair day. Other than that packing, Latin and work in the garden will occupy us.

    Today and until I’m done I will be packing the study in which I work every day. That means the sorting will get harder, green tape boxes outnumbering red tape ones. Probably by a lot. It also means the confrontation between time remaining (in my life) and the projects (intellectual and creative) that keep me excited will come center stage. I’ll try to sort out the ones I feel I can fruitfully engage over the next 20 years from the ones I can’t.

    That means I’m considering active intellectual and creative work at least into my late 80’s. That feels like a stretch, maybe, but one I believe my health and potential longevity justifies.

    Let me give you an idea of what I have in mind. Complete the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Write at least four more novels. Write essays or a book on Reimagining My Faith. Write and read much more poetry. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Enlightenment, liberal thought, modernism. Write essays or a book on matters related to the Great Work. Include in this work considered attention to Asian literature, art and thought, especially Chinese and Indian. Continue regular art historical research and write essays about aesthetics and particular art/artists.

    Why? Because I can. I’ve no evidence so far that my thinking is strikingly original or unusually deep, but my intellectual maturation has taken a longer time than I imagined it would. So the best may yet be ahead. Or so it feels to me. Under any circumstances such work will keep me alert and focused.

    As for right now. Where are those empty boxes?


    Anoka County Colorado Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature The Move Third Phase

  • Needful Things

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                                Most Heat Moon

    After coming back from the hardware and grocery stores, I cleaned our air conditioning unit coils. They get clogged up with cottonwood fluff. The fan pulling the air over the coils sucks the gray-white seed bearing plant matter onto the coils. If left on, it reduces the efficiency of the air conditioning unit considerably and can cause other problems.

    Put the oil in the lawnmower, tried again to start it. Nope. Checked the manual. It goes into Beisswinger’s tomorrow. I’ll get woodchips to finish off the deck while I’m there. Those sort of things that need to get done.

    I’ve been reading the Mysterious Benedict Society, volume 1, recommended by Ruth Olson. It’s not scintillating, but I can see why it’s an excellent kid’s book. It presents children as agents, effective in their own right. It also puts them into several different moral dilemmas, each difficult. The Society also captures a 10-12 year olds view of the adult world and in that serves as a good reminder to those of on the far, the very far side, of 12.

    Oh, and our tunneling crew has been active. This time they’re digging right in front of the shed, a hole deep enough that when I saw Rigel in it her front shoulders were below ground. Why do they do it? No idea.

     


    Family Literature Our Land and Home

  • Dragons and Corned Beef

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                                 Most Heat Moon

    The new Sienna (2011, but new to Jon and Jen) has been loaded. Ruth and I went to the grocery store to buy supplies for the road. There will be pumpernickel and corned beef sandwiches, dill pickle potato chips and Krave cereal for Ruth.

    Ruth and I had a talk about dragons and books about dragons on the way to the store. I recommended a recent read, His Majesty’s Dragon. She recommended back the Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s fun to have a grandchild old enough to share books.

    They will lift off tomorrow around 7 am, headed west, forerunners to our own, larger move, following in Jon’s now long ago wake. That means Kep, Vega, Rigel and Gertie and I will have the house to ourselves until next Saturday.


    Family Literature

  • Her and Journey to the West

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                          New (Most Heat) Moon

    By way of cinema reviews. Saw “Her” last night and “Journey to the West” tonight. Though very different culturally both encourage us to stretch our understanding of reality to include the fantastic, Her through science fiction and Journey to the West through very loose adaptation of Chinese classic literature.

    Kate found Her too slow, too odd, too much altogether and declared, “This isn’t holding my interest.” got up and did other things. In spite of the dorky ear plugs that signaled connection to the Operating System (btw: OS seemed like a bad techno-term for Samantha, the artificial person created through use of computers. Not sure why they didn’t go with program, but the oddness of the choice distracted me.) I found the questions raised by the movie intriguing.

    What would it be like to be an intelligent, feeling entity with no body? What it would be like to have a non-corporeal lover? What algorithm could cause us to fall in love? What would fidelity mean to such an entity? All these questions get raised. Ironically the main character, Joaquin Phoenix’s job is to write real letters, often love letters, for other people.

    Yes, it was a little slow at times, though I felt the time necessary to play with the idea of a computer/human relationship.  Amy Adams and Scarlett Johansson (voice of Samantha) added contemporary female starpower.

    Journey to the West was a major disappointment. It combined the sometimes entertaining but very broad comedy sometimes seen in Chinese cinema, think Kung Fu Hustle by the same director, Stephen Chow, with ridiculous set piece scenes and a remarkable lack of fidelity to the Chinese class, Journey to the West. The Monkey King is the key character in Journey to the West as literature, but here he comes in very late in the movie, well into the final third and he comes in as a caricature and not a good one.

    The original Monkey King is mischievous and unpredictable, but he also has a noble, courageous side that this movie ignores. The CGI effects were often very good, but used in the service of a juvenile script. China can do better than this with their own literary classics.


    Asia Cinema and Television Literature

  • 1001

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

    Usually I would do Latin in the afternoon after the nap since I spent the morning on the America Votes meeting, but instead today I began to nose around in another favorite locale of mine, the 1001 Nights.  I’ve read two different translations of the tales of Scheherazade, both entertaining, but I’ve learned through two new books in my library, “Stranger Magic”by Maria Warner and “The Arabian Nights-A Companion,” by Robert Irwin, that both of the translations have significant flaws.

    So I found two new translations, one with only 271 tales but the other, with an introduction by Irwin himself, that is three volumes long.  When I finish up with Malcolm X, I intend to get back into the Arabian Nights.  Between Ovid and the Arabian Nights the tales are endless and well told. There’s something profound in the types of stories a culture folds into itself, makes significant through reception. The same is true, I suppose, of individuals. I’ve had djinn and Dionysus running around in my head since high school.

    Then there’s that whole matter of the biblical stories, too.  The narrative lenses through which we come to understand our lives and the lives of others.  Those three: Bible, Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights are more key to me than most of the greats of Western literature, perhaps with the exception of Kafka and Hesse.  The other work that stands with these in my own inner world is the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

    This is the way my life goes lured by political change, entranced by stories of the divine and the magical, enfolded in the life of plants and dogs, wrapped up in the world of art. There are worse ways to live.


    Art and Culture Latin Literature Myth and Story Translating Metamorphoses

  • Emergence, Complexity and Augustan Rome

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

    Two projects are pushing themselves forward, aspects of work already underway.  After reading a recent batch of articles arguing against a crass materialism and insisting on looking at the world not only through reductionist goggles, I have decided now is a good time to reimmerse myself in the world of emergence.  Emergence is a concept that identifies emergent properties, things not predictable by the sum of a thing or processes immediately preceding a particular phenomena.

    (Garni_Gorge Symphony of the Stones carved by Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.)  wiki, emergence

    The example that is most familiar to me is culture.  Culture is that society based phenomenon that weaves language, place, kinship, food choice, divisions of work, art, music and play into a whole that shapes the individual, makes them part of something, a culture, larger than themselves.  Culture does not follow from an examination of an individual or even a small group of individuals, it only begins to emerge in a larger group over a period of time.

    Another and easier to grasp emergent phenomenon is the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Am I a butterfly or am I a caterpillar dreaming I’m a butterfly?

    This also relates to the complexity movement in science.  Science proceeds by breaking things down to their most basic components, then discerning law-like behaviors.  Physics is the paradigmatic science in this respect.  But there are many phenomena, like emergence, that appear not as things are reduced to their simplest parts, but as things combine to create more and more complex materials and organisms.  Science has historically ignored those areas because they are difficult to quantify and/or difficult to study using usual scientific methods.

    I’ve flirted with learning these two areas:  emergence and complexity theory, but have never devoted the necessary time to it.  It’s time.  This fits in my reimagining my faith project.

    The second is broadening the scope of my learning about Ovid, his time, the Augustan period, other tellings of the same myths Ovid works with, and Augustan poetry more generally.  This is in service of the commentary/translation I plan to begin in earnest after this growing season ends and of a big novel still forming itself.

     


    GeekWorld Latin Literature Myth and Story Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Science Translating Metamorphoses World History

  • Flood Narratives

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                          Seed Catalog Moon

    Hmmm.  I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.”  Ah. At least I’m not alone.

    Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors.  In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood.  Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.

    I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees.  Nice.  Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.

    There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e.  That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.

    Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat.  This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till.  It can also mean to cultivate land.  Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm?  Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.

    I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either.  This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.


    Latin Literature Myth and Story Translating Metamorphoses Weather +Climate World History

  • Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

    Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

    Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

    Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

    Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

     

    The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

    The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

    When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
    I found myself within a shadowed forest,
    for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

    This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

    (Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)


    Art and Culture Cinema and Television Humanities Latin Literature Myth and Story Photography Poetry Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • The Narrative Fallacy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

    Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

    Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

    I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

    This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

    This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

    (sarah fishburn)

    The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

    Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature Memories MOOCS Myth and Story Writing

  • Reading

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

    Two novels in the last couple of weeks:  The Circle by Dave Eggers and Lookaway, Lookaway by Winton Barnhardt.  Both are of recent publication and different in content though not style.  I would call them novels of manners, a description of a world and how it works, how it influences lives and fates.  The Circle is a left-coast, uncanny Silicon Valley story which intends, I think, to show the hubris of technology companies as they reach for world changing ideas.  Lookaway, Lookaway is a Tom Wolfe type story line of Down East North Carolingians in the new south financial mecca of Charlotte.  It’s about three-quarters entertaining and one-quarter should have been edited out.

    (Image from Guardian review)

    Novels, as a great line from Tom Clancy noted, (thanks to Bill Schmidt) are different from real life.  They have to make sense.  In the Eggers book, which I enjoyed, young idealists, bright and ambitious, confuse their ideals of a transparent world, knowledge of the most intimate nature shared with all, with a positive reality instead of the Orwellian, faux-fascist society it would create.  A body check to technological hubris it helps us step back from the hype, the Steve Jobs spin, the Google glass view of the world and see that technology is only a tool, a tool like any other, and one that needs to be evaluated on the basis of its results and effect as well as its gee whiz cool factor.  A good read.

    (NYT review image)

    Lookaway, Lookaway probes the family of Duke Johnston and Jerene (Jarvis) Johnston, using a Game of Thrones one person, one chapter point of view.  This allows for a close in look at the characters chosen for a chapter’s focus, but, as other reviews have pointed out, some of the characters just aren’t worth that much treatment.  The first half of the book finds us at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill through the eyes of freshman Jerilyn Johnston, then back in Charlotte through the eyes of her mother, a steel magnolia sort, Jerene Johnston, and later the view point of Gaston Jarvis, famed author of a series of Civil War romances.

    Barhhardt wrote a novel, the Bible, that I read about 30 years ago. It’s wonderful.  This one is less so, but still worth a read.


    Literature