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  • Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

    Beltane                                                                  Early Growth Moon

    Does Great Literature Make Us Better?  NYT article you can find here.

    I’ve read great literature off and on my whole life, starting probably with War and Peace as a sophomore or so in high school.  I’ve also read a lot of not great, but not bad either literature and have even written some myself.  And, yes, I’ve read some distinctly bad literature, but not on purpose.

    A formative experience in my reading life occurred in my sophomore year of college when I took a required English literature class.  Before taking the class I had given serious thought to majoring in English.  Then I had whatever his name was for a professor.  He told me what the books I read in his class meant.  He also claimed, proudly, to read Time Magazine from cover to cover each week as a form of discipline.  (That would have been discipline for me, too.  Punishment.)

    Whether he represented English literature professors or not I don’t know, and I suspect now that he probably didn’t, but at the time I decided I could do the work of an English major without putting up with anymore of that kind of instruction.  I would read.  And I did and I have.

    (Greuter Seven liberal arts  1605)

    [That’s how I ended up in Anthropology and Philosophy for a double major.  Though I did have almost enough credits for a geography minor and a theater minor.  The theater credits were almost all in the history of theater, which I found fascinating.  The geography business came about because I was interested in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser exent then, China.]

    Has reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Singer, Hesse, Austen, Mann, Kafka and all those others made me a better person?  Hell, I don’t know.  In the article quoted above I think the writer refers to an argument about liberal arts in general; that is, that studying the liberal arts makes one more able to think critically in a complex world and, therefore, to act with a higher level of moral sensitivity.

    That the liberal arts and reading great literature teaches critical thinking is, I think, established.  They do this by the comparative method, familiar to students of anthropology and philosophy and literature and theology.  How does it work?  In the words of blue book essay tests since time immemorial, you compare and contrast.  By comparing this culture to that one, or this writer to that one, or this book to that one, or this period of philosophy to that one or this theological perspective to that one, a sensitivity to the variations in argumentation, in problem solving, in abstract analysis becomes second nature.

    This sensitivity to the variations does not, I think, breed a more moral person, but it does produce a more humble one, a person who, if they’ve paid attention, knows that this solution or that one is not necessarily true or right, but, rather is most likely one among many.  This humility does not cancel out conviction or commitment, rather it positions both in the larger reality of human difference.

    So, in the end, I don’t believe the case for reading great literature is to be made in its efficacy or lack of it in creating moral sensitivity, but rather in great literature’s broadening of our horizon and in the concomitant deflation of our sense of moral righteousness, perhaps, oddly, the very opposite of creating a more moral person.

     


  • Coeptis

    Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

    Greg, my Latin tutor, and I have begun moving through Ovid with an eye to a possible commentary, noting where I have difficulty and where we both have trouble.  These are the kind of things that can be expanded on in a commentary, as both aids to future translators but also as educational tools to broaden an understanding of this particular work and Ovid in general.

    It’s difficult to describe my level of excitement about this.  After spending so long getting ready, we’re actually doing it and I’m a full partner, not as skilled as Greg at Latin but I’m focused on Ovid and have a lot bring to the conversation.  My translations have begun to raise fewer and fewer flags and my choices bring a fresh perspective to the work.

    It’s fun.  I know that must sound weird, but I really enjoy this.  It’s detective work, history, poetry, mythology, philology and straight out brain work.  Complex and a bit arcane, my favorite.

    At this point I can actually imagine translating all 15 books, 15,000 verses.  Who knows?  I’m also expanding my reading to Virgil and Horace, perhaps some Catullus, too.  I need to know other Augustan poets and their conventions to better understand Ovid’s work.

    Here’s another oddity in all this.  When I finish a session with Greg, every two weeks, I feel like I’m done with classes and all I want to do is relax, read something or putter in the garden.  This is an old, well ingrained feeling, put into place over many, many years of education.


  • Rainy, Gray, Blah

    Spring                                                                      Planting Moon

    Moved books and sorted files.  Finishing up that long study and file reorganization, clean out begun some weeks ago.  Went out for dog food and got a hamburger at Culver’s.  They make a good burger.

    Read some more Robert Jordan, now in the second volume of the Wheel of Time.  Watched three Supernaturals and one Danish show, The Eagle.  A lazy Sunday.

    Did get started on Book I of Metamorphoses.  Not far.  Verbs pulled out and conjugated.  I checked the Perseus (classics website) text with the most scholarly text available right now and there was one small difference in the first four verses.  Started a word list which will feed into the commentary.

    Needed a psychic bump today and Kate provided it.  What would I do without her?  I know it’s a canard; but, with buddy William Schmidt losing his wife Regina last year, it’s no longer something that has happened to others.

    This gray, cold weather has many Minnesotans in a bit of a grumpy place, all of us waiting for daffodils and sun.  As Garrison Keillor said today, “The snow will melt.”  You betcha.


  • At It

    Spring                                                             Bloodroot Moon

    Still reading through Missing, making notes, trying to integrate beta reader observations and questions.  It’s slower right now because I’m also trying to integrate lessons about description and pacing from Robert Jordan’s amazing The Eye of the World.

    The general plan for revision III has begun to take shape.  Some shifting of certain narrative threads to book II or to a book of their own, expanding the ending, putting the climax in earlier, making descriptions beefier, more lush and adding narrative in sections where what I wrote was, as Judy observed, outline like.

    How long will it take?  I have no idea.  As soon as I can finish it, but just how long that is, I don’t know.  Why?  Partly the removal of certain narrative lines will create disruption as well as clarification.  Partly because the climax I have doesn’t satisfy me and I’m not clear what it should be.  Partly because adding descriptive material is a whole manuscript task and a personal style changer, too, since I tend to be spare.  There will be a learning curve.

    Closing in on the last few verses of the Jason and Medea early story.  When I’m done with it, before Friday, and have checked and revised my work, also before Friday, I’m ready to go to Book I and begin the work I first decided I wanted to do back in 2008 or 2009.  That’s exciting.

    It’s exciting for more than the obvious reason; that is, that I can now do it.  It’s exciting in addition because it will feed a new work, one I will not start until all three of the Tailte novels are finished; but, a work I hope will utilize all I’m learning about writing and about mythology and Latin and Ovid and Rome.  Working title:  Changes.

     


  • The Past Is Never Dead

    Winter                                              First Moon of the New Year

    Saw “Midnight in Paris.”  Not much of a movie goer, I’m more of a movie bringer, so I tend to see things late.  I don’t mind.  Kate and I picked this one for our movie night on Friday.

    The professor teaching a class in contemporary art theory at the Walker, I took this class back in, what, March, gushed about this movie.  A post-modern film.   A love letter to the past and present of Paris.  A love story.

    She was right.  This is a wonderful film, a film that challenges our notions of chronos, that says, up front, that the past is never dead; it’s not even past, it’s right here with us.  A Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun.

    Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams play an engaged couple with very different priorities.  Hers is to live the rich life with a successful Hollywood screenwriter (Faulkner was one.)  and his is to find a garret in Paris and write his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop.

    A gateway opens to his golden era, the Twenties, when a fancy car from that era stops near him, just after midnight, its passengers hailing him.  He get in and discovers he’s riding with   F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.  Along the way he meets Hemingway and Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

    Later, another gateway opens for Owen and Adriana, mistress to Picasso, Hemingway and Braque.  This takes them to Adriana’s golden era, the Belle Epoch. There she meets Gauguin, Lautrec and Degas.  She decides to stay behind.

    Like Murakami’s 1Q84 I’m not sure if this is a great movie, but it might be.  It will need more time, more exposure.

    It’s lightness almost allows the more profound aspects of its structure to slip away in a froth of Hollywood champagne bubbles.  The easy transit between Paris now and Paris then, given physical content, a sense of this is now actuality, occults the truth behind a glittering persona.

    Any of us who read seriously, who attend to cinema for more than diversion, who haunt the   hallways of museums the world over, who wander ancient ruins or immerse ourselves in ancient languages or religions, who visit places like civil war battlefields or the Hudson Valley looking for the painters inspired by it or any well preserved neighborhood in any major city, those of us to take politics seriously know the truth of Faulkner’s observation.

    When wandering the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia, the Khmer kings live again, their great monuments speaking their story in the language of stone and symbol.  Walk the streets of Ephesus in Turkey.  You stroll with the Romans who lived there.  Head over to the amphitheatre where Paul spoke to the Ephesians.  He’s still there.

    Have you read War and Peace?  Then you’ve danced in 19th century Russia.  Steppenwolf?  You’ve been to the magic theatre.  Magic Mountain.  The life of a tuberculosis sanatorium.   Great Gatsby?  American Tragedy?   Romance of the Three Kingdoms?  You fought in the wars at the end of the Han Dynasty.  Monkeys Journey to the West?  A trek to India from the heart of Buddhist China.

    When I translate Ovid, I encounter him.  Words he wrote, arranged, gave meaning and sense and poetics.  He is there on the page and I converse with him.

    Walk the halls of any art museum and have an encounter.  Let’s say Rembrandt’s Lucretia at the MIA.  She cries in front of you, her heart broken and her spirit damaged beyond repair.  She bleeds, clutches the rope with her left hand.  All while remaining regal, somewhat aloof.  At this painting you stand in the room with her, at the end of the Roman monarchy occasioned by her grief and her violation while you also stand in Rembrandt’s studio, applying the last bit of paint, perhaps some varnish.  Remarkable, wouldn’t you say?

     

     

     


  • Why Write Novels At All

    Winter                                    First Moon of the New Year

    I’ll respond to this in another post, but for those of you interested in the novel, it’s worth a read.  You can reach the whole article through the central question link.

    The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?”*

    *The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have…

    The idea that “the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzen’s nonfiction, and in Wallace’s, and in Smith’s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, “Changing My Mind.” It also helps to explain these writers’ broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and students — a list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Safran Foer — and to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, “Here is a sign that you’re not alone” starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today…

    But will we be alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary “literary fiction” aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It’s just that, if the art is to endure, they won’t be quite enough.


  • Influence Peddlers

    Fall                                                Waning Autumn Moon

    What literature has influenced you the most?

    The Bible, various authors

    The Stranger, Albert Camus

    Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

    Novels of Herman Hesse

    The Trial, Franz Kafka

    The Trilogy of Desire and Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

    Metamorphoses, Ovid

    (temple of literature, Hanoi)

    Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

    Novels of Willa Cather

    Divine Comedy, Dante

    Dramas of Eugene O’Neill

    Poetry of Robert Frost

    Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke

    Poetry of Wallace Stevens

    Chinese classical poetry

    Romance of the Three Kingdoms

    War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

    The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

    The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

    A Glastonbury Romance, Copper Powys

    Short stories of Jorge Borges

    100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcia Marquez

    Divine Comedy, John Milton

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    Beowulf

    These are the ones I’ll admit to right now.


  • Exegesis and Hermeneutics

    Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

    “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

    While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

    Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

    Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

    It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

    We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

    Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

     


  • Text, Reader, Learning

    Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

    Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

    Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

    Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.


  • A Latinate Day

    Lughnasa                                                                     Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    A Latinate day.  The am found me back in Pentheus, a story in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  I remember the story from the English version, at least in part.  Pentheus gets torn apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes while they are in the grip of a Dionysian frenzy.  As I’ve been translating this story, it’s clear that Pentheus is a tragic figure from Ovid’s perspective, a man’s man faced with hordes of soft, sweet smelling boys worshiping a God of irrational behavior.  Romans were not much into ecstasy unless it involved warfare or the circus.

    They were orthopraxic in their religious views, at least most Romans were, that is, they believed that right rituals performed at the right time for the appropriate deity trumped everything else.

    I have begun, in a modest way, work on the commentary.  I set up some files in Notes but made no entries.  It’s difficult for me, right now, to know what makes sense, but I’ll figure it out.

    My next hurdle is to translate the Latin into idiomatic English.  Sometimes I can get there, often not.  To do that I need to have a solid understanding of the grammar–not yet–and a feel for how the Latin makes its meaning, not there either.  At least I’m no longer staring at the words on the page as if they were hieroglyphics.