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Wednesday, September 10th, 2003
On the train this morning, I started reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and loving it. And it serves well as a counterexample to my complaint about The Life of Pi -- from the first paragraph, the illusion is complete. I am inside their house, inside Alfred's senility, inside Enid's nervousness, inside Chip's discomfort. What does this betoken? Well, primarily excellent craftsmanship on Franzen's part, is what. And I just had the thought while writing the word inside, that maybe there is a tie-in to bicameral thinking and the nature of story-telling; but I am not up to getting into that right now. Anyway -- only 32 pages in but my hunch is that this is going to be a great book.
posted morning of September 10th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, August 28th, 2003
I finished The Life of Pi this afternoon (pity me, for I must return to work tomorrow...), it is a lot of fun to read. Different degrees of truth and fiction are woven together seamlessly, and you move with the narrators in and out of dream and fantasy. But Martel never loses himself in the book, I never got rid of the conscious apprehension that I was being told a story. In a way this seems a little picky; Martel went to some lengths after all to say that everything in the book is a story being told -- so why should I complain about him successfully communicating his point? But that seems like kind of a cheap way out for Martel -- the best thing that can happen in fiction (I think) and maybe also the most difficult, is for the story to emerge as a separate reality, seemingly independant of the narrative voice. That might have happened briefly in the middle of this book, in the early days of Pi's ordeal at sea -- but it was not sustained. If Martel is saying, as I think he might be, that he is trying to demonstrate that any authorial absense must be illusory -- well, that seems to me like an easy way out. It's a pretty obvious point that has been made by writers going back at least two or three hundred years; but the best of them have been able to make the point without destroying the illusion locally. (I'm not exactly sure who I'm thinking of here but I don't think it would be too hard to find examples. Some bits of Gravity's Rainbow would qualify.) Anyways... That's my only real criticism of this book and it is not a big problem. I'd recommend it highly.
posted evening of August 28th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2003
I'm backpedalling from my assertion that the author of whose voice Martel's reminds me might be Rushdie -- I think the only reason I seized on Rushdie is the India connection, well and maybe also the accident-while-traveling-from-Asia-to-North-America* connection. Now the echo I'm hearing is of Vonnegut; equally likely is that Martel has simply an individual, unique voice, one with echoes in it of many authorial influences. Thinking of Vonnegut leads me into a distinction I wanted to draw between The Life of Pi and Nuns and Soldiers -- Murdoch was annoying me more and more as the book drew on with her absolute refusal to leave anything to my imagination; she insisted on following every germ of description up through its fullness of flower and keep going until it was a withered husk -- I wanted her beautiful descriptions a little less baroque, wanted some hasty sketch in with the luxuriant detail. Martel (from my reading thus far) tends a bit toward the Baroque but reins himself in, lets me figure some of it out. And I'm going on a hunch here but I think -- if I were to sit down and catalog the books I have loved -- that I would find some inverse correlation between how much detailed description is in the book, and how much I like it -- and I realize as I am writing this that I am phrasing it wrong, I'm not sure just how to put what I'm trying to get at -- if you have a better idea for phrasing let me know. Vonnegut would be an exception to this rule in a funny way. "Baroque" I guess is not at all a good description for his writing -- but I think he leaves very little to the imagination in his description of his characters' motivations and the consequences of their actions. And yet he was for a long time my very favorite author and is still up there on my (vague) list. I'm not sure quite why -- I have some ideas which I'll try to develop for a post on Vonnegut sometime. -- *Update: And now I realize how long it's been since I read The Satanic Verses; I don't think Rushdie's accident even occurred en route from India to America. I'm pretty sure one of the countries involved was Great Britain. Oh well, disregard the whole Rushdie thing.
posted afternoon of August 12th, 2003: Respond
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I found an essay by Martel: How I Wrote The Life of Pi.
posted afternoon of August 12th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, August 11th, 2003
This morning I started reading The Life of Pi by Yann Martel -- my initial impression is that it is going to be a very good read, but probably not something to put on my list of "great books". I like all the characters I've met so far, I like the author's voice (though I think it seems a little derivative, of what I'm not quite sure but maybe Rushdie), the rhythm of syllables, the flow of words.
posted morning of August 11th, 2003: Respond
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Saturday, August 9th, 2003
So I finished Nuns and Soldiers yesterday and found it to be a bit of a disappointment. I was really getting into the story through Tim's character and really enjoyed it when he got back together with Gertrude. But then the last hundred pages or so were really downhill -- it seemed to be a lot of extremely self-conscious tying up of loose ends on Murdoch's part. I think the book was supposed to be about Ann Cavidge, whose character is not really too interesting; when Murdoch realized she had written a book more about Tim and Gertrude, she decided to write another couple of chapters to focus on Ann -- bad idea. The penultimate chapter in particular, in which Manfred and Mrs. Mount have their big conversation, was not related to the rest of the book in any organic way -- that is to say, it was tied in to the rest of the book by bringing up plot devices from earlier on -- ones which had not seemed particularly important at the time -- and revealing that Manfred or Mrs. Mount or both had played key roles behind the scenes -- which does not strike me as a very useful method of character development. And the last chapter too, with Ann searching for Daisy and hearing people talking about her, was out of left field.
posted evening of August 9th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2003
I have gotten further into Nuns and Soldiers and am enjoying it. The plot is pretty easy to follow thus far, as long as you keep track of where the flashbacks begin and end, and interesting. I like the prominence of Tim Reede in the section I'm reading now as I find it easy to identify with his character, moreso than most of the others. One annoying thing is Murdoch's tendency to break into the middle of a dialog with a long expository couple of paragraphs -- this is ok in moderation but she makes use of it way too often. Her descriptions are vivid and even moving; but when she is narrating a scene I often get a pretty clear picture of where she is going with it way before she gets there.
posted evening of July 29th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003
In regards to the LanguageHat post on translating Wittgenstein -- I posted in his comments a translation of a line of Rilke that I think is pretty good, and maybe better than the previous translations that have been made of that line -- it was not hard, I used what seems like a pretty obvious device that seems, however, not to have occurred to J.B. Leishman, A.J. Poulin, Steven Cohn, or William Gass. And also I had some interesting ideas about the line of Wittgenstein that is quoted. So this is where I get things out of order and say, "Hey, maybe I've finally found my calling! -- I will translate German literature!" But wait... what I translated was a single line, or half a line, out of the rather large Duino Elegies -- a work which I have not yet been able to make my way through. Perhaps though, some future exists for me as a translator of epigrams. I have had some fun over the years translating German stories and other stuff, with varying degrees of success. I would like to reproduce here my best effort thus far, coincidentally also a poem by Rilke: Der Novembertag Kalter Herbst vermag den Tag zu knebeln,
seine tausend Jubelstimmen schweigen;
hoch vom Domturm wimmern gar so eigen
Sterbeglocken in Novembernebeln.
Auf den nassen Daechern liegt verschlafen
weisses Dunstlicht; und mit kalten Haenden
greift der Sturm in des Kamines Waenden
eines Totenkarmens Schlussoktaven. The November Day Cold autumn can muzzle the day,
silence its thousand jubilating voices;
from the high cathedral tower whimper, so peculiar,
from the steeple whimper, so peculiar,
death bells in November's mist.
On the wet rooftops lies sleeping
a white fog; and with cold hands
the storm inside the chimney's walls strikes
a death-karma's closing octaves. It loses meter and rhyme which are, yes, rather important in the original -- but I think it communicates Rilke's image and feeling quite well. And I'm happy about preserving much of the word order and separation by line of images. By the way: is anyone else reminded very strongly of the end of Prufrock? -- I refer to the catlike fog which curled around the roof and fell asleep, I think is how it goes. Update: I changed "high cathedral tower" to "steeple" in response to an accurate observation by LanguageHat that the former was too long. The rhythm is a lot better now. Also I took out a "the" in the following line and replaced it with an "'s". LH does not like the inversion in "lies sleeping/ a white fog", but I do, it's staying in there. Update 2:I realize a potential major problem with this translation is, I have no clear idea what "a death-karma's closing octaves" means. If you have any thoughts in this regard, please let me know.
posted evening of July 23rd, 2003: Respond
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This morning I picked up Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch to read on the train. When I opened it, the first word on page 1 is "Wittgenstein" -- this after LanguageHat had linked yesterday to an essay on translating Wittgenstein by Marjorie Perloff, and quoted a statement (from Culture and Value) that I found most intriguing: "Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefa�t zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten." Hmm... So what do I think of the book? This funny coincidence aside, it does not seem particularly promising at this early point, 15 or so pages in. I'll stick with it a few more days though to see if it picks up. What I read today reminded me a bit of Caleb Carr -- overly mannered, self-consciously cerebral -- but without the action.
posted morning of July 23rd, 2003: Respond
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Monday, July 21st, 2003
I opened The Birth of Tragedy to the first page of the main text (i.e. not counting the Critical Backward Glance or the Foreword to Wagner) and read the following first sentence: Much will be gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly — rather than merely ascertaining — that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation. [emphasis added, except "ascertaining" is emphasized in the original] Well that sentence sort of knocked me for a loop. I will confess before I start laying this on you, that what I have come up with bears a bit of a tenuous relationship to this particular book, and is probably more pertinent (if still not that solidly so) to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I am going to assume that you have read the latter, or have some knowledge of Jaynes' ideas. What got me going is Nietzsche's formulation, "apprehending directly — rather than merely ascertaining" -- I have seen similar formulations before and never remarked on them -- the idea is pretty straightforward and familiar to me, and I would think to others as well. But look at the distinction -- what is implied is ('scuse me while I use my big words)1 a dualistic epistemology. There are two ways of knowing, at "first hand" and at "second hand", and the two are not necessarily closely related or part of the same process. And this is where I want to bring in Jaynes' idea of the bicameral mind. Ascertaining, "coming to know", is different from knowing because it involves the willful intervention of the conscious mind. If I did not treat my conscious mind as a separate entity, there would be no need for such a distinction. My thinking is that this conscious "other" is the modern vestige of the bicameral voice Jaynes wrote about -- and I believe this fits in with what Nietzsche is writing about as well; I will talk about that when I write about the text. What interests me right now, is dualism. I have felt for a long time that there is something wrong with dualistic metaphysics, and something right about monistic metaphics; but have never been able to explain to myself the common-sensical appeal of dualism. That is to say, both dualism and monism have attractive features but they will not fit together in the same box. But now I am realizing I can combine a monistic metaphysics with a dualistic psychology and end up with an extremely coherent world-view. (Why I should want such a thing is left open to question.) --- 1 I write about philosophy as a layman. Some concepts demand technical descriptions, which I use in the hope that I am not embarassing myself with misuse. Here are my understandings of terms I use here or plan to use in the near future: - dualism
- This needs an entry of its own, or several; but basically I'm talking about a worldview which splits the universe into two types of being, usually along the lines of "mental" and "physical". Think of Plato's theory of forms as a good representative.
- monism
- The opposite of dualism, the idea that everything in the universe is in one category or something like that.
- metaphysics
- A statement or group of statements about what matter the universe is made up of.
- psychology
- A statement or group of statements about what constitutes the human mind.
- epistemology
- A statement or group of statements about how the human mind can come to understand the universe.
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.-- Humpty-Dumpty
posted evening of July 21st, 2003: Respond
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