We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seemed to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer", but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.
Among the favourite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870", or "The Composer Rossini's Favourite Dishes", or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans", and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries", or "Psycho-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather", and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, "service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.
In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Zigenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and even drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.
As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation - it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles" describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassbourg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.
Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel 1943
It has been an embarrassingly long time since I read "real" literature (I will punt on providing a definition of such or what qualifies it's level of reality, I, ah, know it when I read it). The kind of book where it is a virtual guarantee that for every ten pages I read I will have to go back and reread at least three. The Glass Bead Game is reminding me why this is something I once voluntarily did for pleasure. Lately I have been feeling like my brain has been suffering from neglect. Getting softer. Time to get back into the jungle. Start talking about religion next.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Hasen
Another walk in the park, another year: my companion is smaller, and considerably less mobile and articulate. Up the hill where the railroad tracks run we encounter a rabbit, a normal occurrence, except that this rabbit is dying. As we walk past its hiding place it explodes out of the underbrush with the usual headlong pelt, but its running is a horrible, listing, splay-limbed parody of a healthy rabbit’s gallop. A dozen feet from us it loses it completely and wipes out in a rolling tangle, back feet still pumping uselessly, a jerky scrawl that suggests profound neurological decay.
Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.
Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.
But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies
Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.
Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.
But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies
end history
I will post one more from the archives of the Spirit of Salt blog, I think... I was going to put the whole archive on, but the essays seem progressively less relevant or interesting to me as they process into the further past. Or maybe I'm just sick of it or maybe those mean more or less the same thing. Having erected this site purely to host "the store" it seems to be exerting some inexplicable force on me to fill it with text, but that impulse is on the wane at least for the moment. If I'm feeling compelled to dump some by the by textualizing in public that does not fit over at Freelala I guess I'll leave it here. Hopefully I have now developed sufficient resources online to contain my wretched addiction to generating strings of written verbiage. Though I tell you, the way I feel right now, it may all (aside from the fairly secret songblog) mire in stasis in whatever state I leave it in today for a good long while. But of course I've felt done with it all many's the time past. I mean, why write this? Who gives a fuck? And yet here I am. Enough, anyway, for now.
With a gun
What I first take to be a squirt gun turns out to be a relatively complicated spring-action pistol of the type that fires those 6mm plastic pellets which frequently irritate me due to their ubiquity as outdoor litter.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
Sentiment
Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
Monday, February 7, 2011
stop kidding myself, wasting my time
A depression in three parts.
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Is there such a thing as an Atheist?
I decided to soften the title down from my original concept, “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” It’s not my intention to be polemical, or I should perhaps say it is my intention to not be polemical.
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
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