READIN

Friday, May 6th, 2005

Note on the below: "treating someone as a means rather than an end" is the same as "objectifying" the person, and the thought I am trying to develop about Ulrich can be rendered as that he "objectifies himself".

posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond

🦋 Bland Ambition

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious, and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception; he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him.

-- The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil: Chapter 8, "Kakania"

I have been getting my first inklings of sympathy for Musil's characters, I started to notice it around Chapter 14 -- specifically for Ulrich but also Walter and Clarisse. With Ulrich my thinking has run sort of like this -- that Ulrich, there's something weird about him... I have heard calculating people described as "treating others as means reather than ends" -- could that be applied to Ulrich? Maybe, but (a) I am not concretely sure what the phrase means (NPI), (b) Ulrich hasn't even interacted with that many other people yet (at the time I was thinking this, about Chapter 12, only 2 other characters had been introduced, both very briefly). Aha! But Ulrich has been relating to himself quite a bit in this story. Could it be that he is "treating himself as a means rather than an end"? That sounds promising, though with the caveat that I am still not so sure what I mean by it. But let's pursue...

I am feeling a good deal of sympathy for Ulrich -- could the point of identification be reducible to the (still not-well-defined) attribute of "treating oneself as a means rather than an end"? When I started sympathizing with him it was in connection with his desire to become "an important person" and cluelessness about how to achieve that -- such a vague, shapeless ambition has been characteristic of my Bildung. It is something I am really thinking I need to grapple with in approaching my Master's Degree.

posted evening of May 6th, 2005: Respond

Tuesday, May third, 2005

Okay the current Ulysses attempt is officially over -- it's just not moving me enough to be worth the effort. (Except for that "Calypso" episode, that one's really nice.)

Moving on... I'm flirting with the idea of reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I read the first 20 or so pages yesterday and found them funny and engaging. For some reason I am reluctant to commit to that book though.

posted evening of May third, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

Talking with Nathaniel on the phone tonight I mentioned that I am in the middle of Ulysses and he replied that he is too, for a few decades now.

posted evening of April 27th, 2005: Respond
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"Hades" -- I read half of this episode on the train last night and was having a pretty hard time following it. But this morning restarted the chapter and lo and behold, the story flowed quite smoothly.

posted morning of April 27th, 2005: Respond

Monday, April 25th, 2005

As I read Ulysses, I am finding that I enjoy the narrative chapters (so far, "Telemachus", "Nestor" (or about half of it), "Calypso", and parts of "The Lotus-Eaters"), the other ones (so far, only "Proteus" has been a real offender) put me to sleep. This morning while reading "Proteus", I was just finding it impossible to pay attention to the book and was thinking about putting the book down if it didn't draw me in soon.

But then this afternoon I started in on "Calypso" and I was back on track. This chapter is actually the one that made the most of an impression on me the previous times I tried to read Ulysses -- when I think of the book, the first thing that comes to mind is Leopold Bloom eating kidney. This afternoon my response to the chapter was to get very defensive about being submissive in relationships; as I realized what I was doing, I was able to let go of that somewhat.

posted evening of April 25th, 2005: Respond

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

Well having polished off (with mixed but generally positive results) Call It Sleep and Foucault's Pendulum, I turned my attention this morning to the king of the intimidating books, Ulysses -- a book that I tried to read when I was about 16 (and gave up after one or two chapters) and again when I was about 20 (and gave up about a third of the way in). The binding of the edition I owned back then crumbled, and when I turned 28 and was given a Barnes & Noble gift certificate by my parents-in-law, I bought another copy; which has been on my shelf ever since.

I was reading Chapter I on the train this morning and enjoying the back-and-forth conversation (actually mostly "forth", I think Buck Mulligan is much more talkative than the other two -- also he seems like a bit of a flamer, is my first impression anyways). A Frolic of His Own made me dig this way of representing conversation -- with dashes and no quotation marks -- and it seems pretty natural now.

posted morning of April 22nd, 2005: Respond

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005

The revelation (or summing up) at the end of Foucault's Pendulum really was excellent and made the book worth while. (Though I do wish he had spent a little less effort on putting together Belbo's journals -- there could have been half as much of that or less without negatively impacting the effect.)

I felt at the end much more in sympathy with Casaubon than I had been before and it makes good sense that I should do -- he is after all the narrator, and plus his relationship to Lia and his son made me flash on my own relationship with Ellen and Sylvia.

posted evening of April 20th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

Foucault's Pendulum was bogging down for me a bit in the last third or so but has picked up again near the end, as the narrative came into the present. I had found Belbo's character really sympathetic in the first half of the book but sort of lost my connection to him while wading through all the copies of his journals. Not sure what to make of this -- it makes me feel a little like Saure trying to listen to Beethoven...

posted evening of April 19th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, April 8th, 2005

🦋 The Experience of Reading Foucault's Pendulum

I have been reading Foucault's Pendulum for a week now. (I started it last Friday, when I had a long train ride, because I thought I was going to need a long period of concentration in order to get into it.) This is another book that has been on my shelves for years, taunting me and intimidating me. But guess what: it is not difficult to read. Quite the contrary -- it is difficult to put down! I was anticipating a Gravity's Rainbow-type of experience where I get a lot out of reading the book, but only after putting huge amounts of effort and concentration into it. But this book is like a clear pool of warm water on a sunny day.

Early in the book I was identifying strongly with Belbo and wondering how sincere that identification was. I am still not sure quite how to put into words, what my suspicion was -- somehow I was afraid that I was being conned into liking Belbo, that I was buying an incomplete characterization. I am not thinking about that as much anymore, since the section where Casaubon was in Brazil.

I am assuming that the citations at the head of each chapter are genuine though I don't know that I'll ever actually check that out. If they were inventions, that would be kind of disappointing.

I was thinking this afternoon, that reading the book is giving me a curious time-dilation effect, and that this effect is common to the books I have really enjoyed.

posted evening of April 8th, 2005: Respond
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