The Philosophy of Oscar the Grouch: The World as Will and Idea, by Arthur Schopenhauer
If we should bring clearly to a man's sight the terrible sufferings and miseries to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror; and if we were to conduct the confirmed optimist through the hospitals, infirmaries, and surgical operating rooms, through the prisons, torture chambers, and slave kennels, over battle fields and places of execution, if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides itself from the glance of cold curiosity, and finally allow him to look into the starving dungeons of Ugolino, he too would understand the nature of this "best of all possible worlds." For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell out of it. But when, on the other hand, he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this...Every epic and dramatic poem can only represent a conflict, an effort, a fight for happiness, never enduring and complete happiness itself. It conducts its heroes through a thousand dangers and difficulties to the goal; as soon as this is reached it hastens to let the curtain fall; for now there would remain nothing for it to do but to show that the glittering goal in which the hero had expected to find happiness had only disappointed him, and that after its attainment he was no better off than before.
In my bitter, pissed-off, post-2016 existence, Schopenhauer is my kind of guy. I feel like joining him in a big Muppet Opera Box and heckling the world. He had me at the introduction, in which he put forth several conditions needed to truly understand him, such as mastering Kant and reading this book at least twice, and added, in effect, "...and if you don't want to do all that, but you've already bought the book, then too bad! But don't worry, even if you can't read it, it still makes a pretty conversation piece on your coffee table. Better yet, write a review."
I mean, after the deadly earnestness of Hegel and Goethe, how can I not love that?
Schopenhauer is full of thick metaphysics, but compared to other 19th century Germans, he's quite readable, and often funny. His main points are (1) we make our own reality--he means the title literally in that my world is MY idea, represented by my will--and that (2) it sucks. Schopenhauer is the opposite of Liebniz; he views the world as Hell on earth, and points out that mankind's supposedly unique ability to distinguish right from wrong degrades us below the animals who have not this capacity, because we have no excuses and choose wrong every time. Finally, borrowing a lot from far-eastern spiritualism, he says that (3) the best way to cope with all the suckiness is to lose yourself in one of those yogas that seeks to blank out the mind. Or vodka will do.
Your mileage may vary, but it makes perfect sense to me, now that Trump is President, and I find Schopenhauer's pessimism perversely uplifting, in a cranky, activist killjoy sort of way. Recommended to be read when you're in the mood to wallow with relish in rottenness
As Dreary as the Original: The Master, by Colm Toibin
"Women must live in Christian Humility," henry Senior said.
"Is that in the Bible, or is it one of the Commandments, or did you learn it in school?" Minny asked.
By suppertime the news had spread. Mrs. James, Aunt Kate and Alice had been alerted to the outrage which had occurred.
"She will not mind women cooking for her and keeping house for her," Henry's mother said to him as they met in the hallway. "She has not been disciplined and she has not been cultivated and we must pity her because her future will be grim."
I'm not all that fond of Henry James to begin with, and Toibin's fictionalized account of his life during the 1890s is not much of an improvement. James as depicted here is one of those brooding, solitary men who keeps a lot of pain in without talking about it or seeking help, with the distinction that we don't even get an action sequence of him stoically killing a whole lot of terrorists or whatever.
There are scenes in which he suffers, and in which he draws from life experience to create such gloomy tales as "The Jolly Corner" and "The Turn of the Screw". Several other James tales, as well as the pragmatic, deadly serious philosophy of his brother William, hang over the plot like a seasick whale...but it seemed to me that the biggest Jamesian influence, not stated out loud, is "The Beast in the Jungle", a pretty silly story in which a fool wastes his life brooding over some fancied impending disaster, and then discovers that the impending disaster was that he wasted his life and never once managed to feel an intense emotion. the story implies that he is fated to be the only one in the world to have nothing exciting happen to him, though it seems to me that there are thousands if not millions who have similar existences; and that that is why the story strikes a chord with enough people to make it famous. Toibin's James does that for way too much of the book.
I'll have to be reading some James in 2018 or 19, when I get to books from the end of the 19th century. The Master reminds me why I'm not looking forward to it.
Aubrey/Maturin: Post Captain and The HMS Surprise
The sloth sneezed and, looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. "Try a piece of this, old cock," he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. "It might put a little heart into you." The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.
Some minutes later, he felt a touch at his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog; growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying towards the door on its increasingly unsteady legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink(its tongue was too short to lap).
...the sloth seized hold of its rope with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep. Stephen looked sharple around, saw the decanter, smelt the sloth, and cried, "Jack, you have debauched my sloth!"
Volumes 2 and 3 in the amazing Napoleonic era sea adventure I started last month. i had fond memories of the series the first time, but had forgotten how wonderful the writing and character development is, with major and minor characters that one can love and identify with, and ache over their tragic aspects while simultaneously relishing the ridiculous side of the human condition.
Post Captain(my working title: "Exit, Disguised as a Bear") manages to be suspenseful even for those of us who know how this is all going to be played out. Much of the action results from Captain Aubrey bankrupt and pursued by debtor gaol, while trying desperately to win promotion to a full Post Captain rank (hint: The book is called Post Captain, and there another 18 books to come. What do YOU think will happen?), and the rest introduces the main love interests, Sophia and Diana, and the almost-deadly quarrel that Jack and Stephen have over their affections (hint: 18 more books to come, featuring both of them). Never mind. At the moment, I found myself wondering all over again if one of them would die in a duel, if the ship would capsize, if the entangled romances would ever go right. Further groundwork is laid in HMS Surprise, where Jack gets command of the ship that will take him deep into the series, sails to India in search of prizes from the French fleet, and romantic entanglements are sorted out. We also get further examples of the common running gag where Dr. Maturing, a naturalist, brings all manner of unnannounced animal life (venomous snakes, swarms of bees, a sloth, etc.) on board, to the consternation of captain and crew.
If there is a flaw in the writing, it is that plot developments are understated. While reading quickly for pleasure, it is possible to miss major details, such as that there is a dead body in the room with the characters, or that several life-threatening days have passed between the end of one chapter where Stephen is exploring birds on a rock in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and the start of the next, when the ship keeps its rendezvous to pick him up. Very high recommendations nonetheless.
Destroying Shit: A History of Warfare, by John Keegan
Politics must continue; war cannot. That is not to say that the role of the warrior is over. The world community needs, more than ever, skillful and disciplined warriors who are ready to put themselves at the service of its authority. Such warriors must be properly seen as the protectors of civilization, not its enemies. The style in which they fight for civilization--against ethnic bigots, regional warlords, ideological intransigents, common pillagers, and organized international criminals--cannot derive from the western model of warmaking alone.
The sections of Keegan's history, which focus on metals, the use of machines (from horses to tanks), fortifications, strategy and tactics, and explosives, and which all start at the earliest recorded times and go to the modern era before the next section starts at the beginning again, is like reviewing the military aspects of Sid Meier's civilization game. Discover bronze, and upgrade your warriors to phananxes.
A great deal of the book is spent chewing on Clausewitz's famous quote that "war is the continuation of policy by other means", which Keegan disputes by giving examples through the ages in which military conflicts have been no such thing. Keegan wants to believe that there are just wars, but he never quite discovers one (except, naturally, for the American Revolutionary War, WWII, and the original Star Wars trilogy).
BAW-AWL-ZAC: Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac
Accustomed to having every wish anticipated, good-looking young men enjoy the advantages of the selfish generosity that the world accords to those who amuse it, as one gives money to a beggar who appeals to sentiment and stirs the facile emotions. Many of these grown-up children bask in that favour instead of making use of it. They mistake the significance and the fickleness of social relations, they imagine that they will always encounter these deceptive smiles; but the moment comes when the world closes its doors to them, or leaves them neglected in a corner, like old flirts, shorn of their glory, without money or reputation.
Here begins my foray into Balzac, who wrote hundreds of stories and novels with interlocking characters, only a few of which I will sample this year. Balzac was a master storyteller and, surprisingly, not particularly salacious compared to Chaucer and Rabelais (admit it; you first learned of Balzac's existence from the River City Mayor's wife saying "Baw-awl-zac!" in condemnatory tones, didn't you?), and his books are generally exciting, fast-paced reads, but I have my limits.
Lost Illusions is one of the longer ones to start with, a suspenseful but light feast of youthful folly, elderly greed, and societal hypocrisy. We meet one young man trying to run a print shop and invent a better kind of paper despite the efforts of his own miserly father, one of the most venial grade-A shits to be found in the era's literature, to leech as much money as possible off of him, even at the risk of ruining the son; the young man's poor but giving wife, and (the major protagonist) the wife's brother Lucien, a naive country poet who moves to Paris and succumbs to the flattery of sophisticates who use him up, spit him out, and then guile him into doing wrongs that threaten him and the other protagonists with destruction. Especially shocking is the double-dealing lawyer who purposely betrays clients who trust him.
Country and city life are explored, with due attention to the rotting underbellies of both; and the overall impression (that I find with a lot of Balzac) is that the good and bad behavior of various characters is universally to be found in human nature.
The Torture Book: Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children (the ME Book) by O. Ivar Lovaas
There are some unusual problems that may occur when the child is taken out of the house and placed in different settings. Often the child fails to generalize or transfer what he has learned at home to the new situation. He may be obedient and respond correctly to instructions such as "Come to me" and "Hold my hand", at home, but this control may completely vanish in a store or a restaurant. This seems particularly true of the older children. In such instances the child probably thinks that he will not be punished for misbehaving in public; that is, he has the adult "over the barrel" so to speak, and he thinks he can get away with murder. We recommend that you take a little bit of "home" into the outside world, and that little thing from home might be the paddle. If he has been hit on the behind a couple of times at home for misbehaving, then all he has to see is the paddle in Mom's purse while they are at the market.
This is an educational text that I read at the recommendation of a neurodivergence activist. The book never references "applied behavioral analysis" (ABA) or autism, but it's apparently the main academic justification for subjecting children to a Skinneresque nightmare of beatings, shocks withheld food, and additional ways to motivate neurodivergents to stop fidgeting and follow directions. I was expecting a book arguing against ABA and urging a different program, but the pro-ABA Lovaas does a fairly good job refuting himself.
I have friends who were put through the Skinner box and suffered, and I may have been given some form of it myself at a young age, and so I'm not inclined to have academic discussions about the case for ABA here. Suffice it to say the book, with its discussions of "paddling' and "strong punishment", was quite uncomfortable just to read.
Poldark Next Gen: The Loving Cup & The Twisted Sword, by Winston Graham
"I dreamt that you and I were both dead. Lying on this bed together, beside each other. Or, almost dead but not quite...We were both lying beside each other, almost dead, but holding hands. Your right hand, my left. And I knew that so long as we continued to hold hands we should not die, should not quite die, just stay alive.And I thought, who will get tired first, him or me? Will I go first and let him die, just because my hand is clammy and I want to turn over and I am tired of holding on? Or will he? Will he get tired first and let me die?It's only a matter of time...It's only...a matter...of time..."
As the Poldark series winds to a close, we see the children of those Poldarks, Warleggens, Carnes and Enyses, most of them teens or preteens, making decisions that will shape their lives permanently, against the background of the end of the Napoleonic wars and the war of 1812, coming to a head with characters playing a peripheral role in the battle of Waterloo, and stunning deaths of major characters that I will not spoil you on by discussing here. Cameos and mentions of several political, scientific and artistic historical figures appear, some of them ashamed that their world-significant actions and discoveries may have such a wet blanket role in a set of young romances in Cornwall. Eleven volumes in and I'm still on the edge while reading it.
Continuing the Great Conversation: Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer
If you had something, something so wonderful that it seemed that it might...that, given the chance, it would make a better world for everyone, forever, so much better, but first there was a danger, a terrible, terrible danger that it could rip everything we have apart...would you destroy that better world to save this one?
The list of Hugo-nominated novels is out once again (six of them this time) and so once again I scramble to fit them all into my schedule and comment on them no later than the July Bookpost. I begin with Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning because I know the author from the filk community, where she writes near-operatic song-sagas from Norse mythology. Her songwriting style is worlds apart from mine, and I've maybe said hi to her a few times, so if it seems like I'm biased...I'm not really. But it's odd.
It's odd because I've spent the past six years and change voluntarily steeped in Great Works of History, and concentrated on the 18th Century in particular last year, and as of this writing I feel like I did all that to prepare for Too Like The Lightning. It was published last year, and my sense is that it is not so much a sci-fi novel as a new entry in the Western Canon. This is a scholarly work, and no more to be read for pleasure than The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, or Moby Dick...yes, there are some people who DO read those works for pleasure, but more commonly, we read them to study and think about fundamental ideas as presented in literature.
The world within the book is a future Earth in which several different and interdependent societies (called "hives" as opposed to nations) have each established a deep-rooted and lasting attempt at Utopia based on different values and world-philosophies. The exposition is dense, full of world-specific vocabulary, and the history, philosophy and religious constructs are laid on with a trowel. References to and from every Great Western Writer from Homer to Goethe are everywhere. The main narrator, writing in the style of an Enlightenment-era philosophe, and pausing frequently to tweak your, the reader's nose, is a formerly savage mass-murderer, now reformed by some Utopian rehabilitation program and dedicated to public service. His political intrigue mission requires him to visit leaders from all of the world's societies, which means large digressions as to their forms of government and the personalities of the world-powers. And the kid from the Twilight Zone is there, the one who can fuck around with reality with his thoughts, only here he's a good guy.
I haven't yet read the other Hugo-nominated novels, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have a dilemma in ranking them, a decision as to whether a "best novel" for Hugo purposes should be chosen for scholarly value, or for being entertainment.
The Early 19th Century Murders: Sins of the Wolf, by Anne Perry; Mrs. Jeffries Goes Forth, by Emily Brightwell
Oonagh left them, and for the next half hour Nora showed Hester the medicine case, which was as simple as Mary had indicated, merely a matter of a dozen small vials filled with liquid, one for each night and morning until she should return again. The dose was already prepared; there was no measuring to be done. All that was necessary was to pour it into a glass already provided and see that Mrs. Farraline did not accidentally spill it, or far more seriously, that she did not forget that she had taken it and repeat the dose. That, as Oonagh had pointed out, could be extremely serious, possibly even fatal.
--from Sins of the Wolf
No Barbara Hambly this month. The next one in her series, Graveyard Dust, is surprisingly backlogged out the wazoo. I'm considering skipping to the next one. anyone who knows the series and believes they need to be read in order should tell me now.
I did read another three-pack of the Mrs. Jeffries potboilers, which are starting to become more formulaic and less clever. This one contained the tired old tropes of the murdered vicious theater critic and the art forgery where the big reveal has to do with when the real and fake paintings were switched. Whatever. Sometimes Murder She Wrote is as much as my brain can handle.
Anne Perry, after three gold stars and one huge demerit for the first four Monk books, is back in fine form with a Scottish family full of skeletons in the closet, one of whom does away with the family matriarch in a way that frames the series heroine Hester Latterly. Probably would have gotten away with it if they'd picked a different nurse to be the scorch. Because of the way the crime was planned, the killer's identity is obvious, but the motive isn't detectable until late in the book. Backgrounds in Victorian prison conditions and the difference between English and Scottish trial law are provided.
Carnival of Confusion: Faust Part II, by JW von Goethe
Freedom and life belong to that man solely who must reconquer them each day. Thus child and man and old man will live here beset by peril year on busy year. Such in their multitudes I hope to see on free soil standing with a people free. Then to that moment I could say, "Linger on, you are so fair!"
See this January's bookpost for Part 1, which is understandably the better known half, as it is at least performable on stage. The second part, written over the course of several years, and at least twice as long as the first, is as much a work of philosophy as literature, taking Faust and Mephistopholes into the historical and mythological classical era and threatening to get lost. At one point, the action takes the two protagonists and an artificially created "homunculus" to an ancient Greek landscape painted by Bosch, in which they have separate interlocking adventures that together make the reader's head swim. Faust pursues higher love, art, Empire, and finally...public works, dying a centatoot in the midst of plans to drain swampland and develop it, which is apparently the Highest Good.
I am facetious. The theme, consistent with German Idealism, is that the highest good is the process of getting there, not a destination, which means that Man must ultimately die unfulfilled, but need never be bored, so there's that. I remain skeptical, as it seems to me better to stop for at least a while between projects and enjoy things, but then I'm one of those lazy entitled grasshoppers.
Here is where I bid farewell to Goethe and move on to cheerier things, thankfully.
All Gaul: History of Civilization in France, by Francois Guizot
Man, by the operation of his will, directs and modifies, exalts or debases his moral being, but he does not create it. He has received it, and he has received it endowed with certain individual dispositions, with a spontaneous force. The inborn diversity of man in the moral view as well as in the physical, is beyond dispute.
Guizot suffered from my encounter with him simultaneously with Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and after much better historical surveys by the giants Gibbon and Hume. Guizot is a third tier "great books" canon writer whose series of lecture-chapters on the history of France (really, about post-Roman Europe and feudalism, with a concentration on the former Gaul) is full of religion and broad ethical generalizations, takes pages to say things that could be said in a sentence, and covers mainly things said better elsewhere. I was not impressed.