Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

October 2008

Reviewing the Review: October 5 2008

Postmodernism
This weekend's New York Times Book Review promises much, with a Julian Barnes book on the cover and a rare Steven Millhauser essay titled "The Ambition of the Short Story" in the endpaper spot. I turned to this final piece first, ready to enjoy almost anything Millhauser might have written, but found the droll postmodernist serving up thoroughly familiar sentiments about the difference between novels and short stories:

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 12 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: September 28 2008.

Looking for J. M. G. Le Clezio, Nobel Laureate

 

So let’s say you wanted to read something by the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio ...

Awards,
French,
News
Kenyon Review asks:

So let’s say you wanted to read something by the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. You might go to Amazon, where you’d find that, aside from four books published by noncommercial presses -- including only two of his novels, Wandering Star, published by Curbstone Press in 2004, and Onitsha, published by Bison Books in 1997, along with The Round, and Other Cold, Hard Facts, a collection of stories published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003 -- there’s almost nothing available in the US.

Well, let's not forget Words Without Borders!

Big Thinking: Kundera and Image

Big Thinking,
Eastern European,
Fiction,
Politics

Milan Kundera's novels are punctuated by philosophical asides, and whether you agree with him or think he's full of crap (or fall somewhere in between), he provides plenty of fodder for keeping the hamsters running on the wheels in your brain. Like his other books, his novel Immortality contains several digressions. Or at first they seem like digressions, but in the end, they serve the whole in a maddeningly perfect way.

This article is part of the Big Thinking series. The next post in the series is Big Thinking: Tolstoy and Guerrophilia. The previous post in the series is Big Thinking: Wittgenstein, Language Games and Presidential Debates.

Reviewing the Review: October 12 2008

La Boheme,
Poetry

Every once in a while East Village poet Richard Hell gets invited to write for the New York Times Book Review, and when he does he usually shows the other critics how it's done. His unenthusiastic review of Edmund White's biography Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is witty, lush and elegant, especially when he ignores White's book and spins his own appreciations:

He learned very much from Baudelaire, and in many ways Baudelaire remains his master, but Baudelaire was a poet of ennui (and dreams), while Rimbaud reels with the most robust -- if often contemptuous -- vitality (and dreams).

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 19 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 5 2008.

Big Thinking: Tolstoy and Guerrophilia

 
Modern reenactment of the 1812 battle of Borodino
 

As unabashed guerrophile John McCain runs for President, some quotes from Tolstoy's "War and Peace" come to mind ...

Big Thinking,
History,
Politics,
Russian

John McCain's been taking a beating lately for, let's see, his choice of Sarah Palin, his impulsive behavior, his lack of a finely-tuned economic plan. I'm glad Obama's message is finally breaking through to a critical mass of voters, and I just pray the momentum continues until November 4, when we can rest easy in our choice of a stabilizing leader.

But none of the raging criticisms directed against John McCain address my own biggest beef with him. John McCain's most offensive trait of all is his unabashed love of war. He proudly describes himself as a former hot-dog Navy pilot in endless autobiographies and speeches, and if you read between the lines of these endless autobiographies and speeches you realize that he's still the same hot-dog today. He uses military metaphors constantly -- even five years in a Hanoi prison hasn't shaken the military out of him. He grew up in a military family, studied at a military school, and clearly likes to make decisions in an adrenaline-choked, sweaty "blood and guts" manner. This is why his speeches on the economy turn out to be such a mess.

John McCain is a guerrophile (a word I seem to have virtually made up, but it's a good word, and I plan to keep using it). Guerrophilia runs rampant in world politics. It's what George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden have in common. Saddam Hussein had a bad case of it, and Vladimir Putin's the newest member in the club. Extreme fondness for war is a trait George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Teddy Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Mao Zedong all had in common. To a guerrophile, war is exciting and wholesome. War builds profits, war builds nations, war builds character.

This article is part of the Big Thinking series. The next post in the series is Big Thinking: Plato and the Republic of Your Soul. The previous post in the series is Big Thinking: Kundera and Image.

Reviewing the Review: October 19 2008

Comix,
Politics
I sometimes enjoy Christopher Buckley's work more or less (usually less), but there's no doubt that he proved himself a class act in the public glare this week, coolly explaining how he found himself unwanted at the National Review, the magazine his father founded, after daring to present the cons

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 26 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 12 2008.

Big Thinking: Plato and the Republic of Your Soul

 
A city on a hill: a visualization of Plato's Republic
 

The idea, found in Plato's Republic, that each human being is a government resonates with many other psychological or spiritual models and ideologies. Jesus may have been thinking of something similar when he said "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden." Or, in Buddhist cosmology, one might say that the invididual desires that bedevil a confused person are like "citizens" that must be made peace with. An enlightened person governs his owns needs, goals and ideas with wisdom and care.

Big Thinking,
Classics,
Existential,
Politics,
Psychology,
Religion

Plato's Republic is often described as a book about politics, a philosophical discussion of the ideal state. It's an odd fact, though, that the book only uses politics as a metaphor for the individual human soul, and that the book is intended as a work of psychology rather than politics.

The Republic consists of several long conversations culminating in Socrates (Plato's mouthpiece) describing five different types of governments, and then describing the five personality types that correspond to each type of government. The book constructs, finally, a "republic" -- but it is the republic of your soul.

The idea that each human being is a government resonates with many other psychological or spiritual models and ideologies. Jesus may have been thinking of something similar when he said "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden." Or, in Buddhist cosmology, one might say that the invididual desires that bedevil a confused person are like "citizens" that must be made peace with. An enlightened person governs his owns needs, goals and ideas with wisdom and care.

Plato's Republic presents a model for the ideal human soul as a city-state ruled by a truly wise, loving and attentive "philosopher king". The concept of the "philosopher king" has been much quoted as Plato's prescription for good government, but in fact the actual text develops the idea only as a metaphor, and never states whether or not Plato or Socrates believe such a state to be possible or desirable in the real world. The concept of the "Philosopher King" describes Plato's (and Socrates's) prescription for being a good person, not being a good government.

This article is part of the Big Thinking series. The next post in the series is Big Thinking: Mill, Taxation and the Individual. The previous post in the series is Big Thinking: Tolstoy and Guerrophilia.

From The Music Man to The Wire: Ten Links

Fiction,
Language,
Lists,
Poetry

1. When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, we did a production of The Music Man. Before auditions I watched the movie and decided I wanted the part of Eulalie McKecknie Shinn, the mayor's wife, mainly because there's a musical number, "Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little" in which the ladies of the town go off on indecent literature, and there's the famous refrain, "Chaucer! Rabelais! BaaaaalZAC!" and the one who got to bellow "BaaaaalZAC!" was the mayor's wife. Plus she got to wear great hats.

Reviewing the Review: October 26 2008

Fiction,
Poetry
Ahh, Updike. He's the closest thing I've got to a favorite living writer, and yet I didn't bother to read his previous novel Terrorist and I'm not interested in his newest, the sequel Widows of Eastwick. I also don't care for his so-called "masterpiece", the Rabbit books, where he places his authorial voice into the body of a furtive and unexceptional suburban car salesman, nor the Bech books, where he parodies Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller by impersonating a famous Jewish-American novelist.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: November 2 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: October 19 2008.

Big Thinking: Mill, Taxation and the Individual

Big Thinking,
Economics,
Existential,
Politics

Taxation is an intense, emotional issue in the news and on the streets these days. I had an argument about it with a guy at work who advocated a flat income tax.

"But no politician, not even McCain, is calling for a flat income tax," I said. "The only person calling for a flat income tax is Joe the Plumber."

This article is part of the Big Thinking series. The next post in the series is Big Thinking: Jung and the Electoral Map. The previous post in the series is Big Thinking: Plato and the Republic of Your Soul.