4 Book Reports!

From Penn's Private Blog:

Artemis: A Novel by Andy Weir – 210524 – I read his newest book and it really held my attention, so I brought this for all the travel to Budapest. And it worked. I read most of the book on the plane. It’s really easy reading and exciting and just enough thinking about “oh, I guess that’s how living on the moon could work.”  Not a lot of heavy thoughts. But it did get me thinking about empathy in writing and how that’s being frowned on. Andy is the kind of guy who would obsess about space travel and the lead character in the book is a young Muslim born woman. So, he’s writing from the POV of someone very different from him. This used to be what writing was, trying to be someone else, but the modern POV is that that’s very out of fashion. “What gives you the right to write about someone you’re not.” It seems that someone trying to think like someone else, is art. It’s empathy. And even when he’s off key in speaking through her, that’s also informative, right? I mean, I haven’t seen anyone bust him on this, but it got me thinking, that someone could say, “What gives him to right to write about a young Muslim woman,” of course, this is the definition of straw man, because no one said that, but it got me thinking about it.  I don’t see that as not understanding, I see it as empathy.  But I have trouble understanding cultural appropriation too. It seems good for art to go all over.  There’s something I just don’t get.  Okay.

It’s an adventure book that made a long plane flight more pleasant.  Not heavy, just science fiction, caper.

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell – 210605 – The publisher who chose NOT to publish my newest book (and has chosen not to publish others of mine, but did choose to publish “Sock,” so god bless her), said she was reading this and loved it, so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s a nutty book, it has a little Nicholson Baker to it.  The idea is to write about Montaigne as a “how to” book to live and also to write about his book changing through history as different generation, styles and individuals adopt his thinking. He kind of invented the personal essay and direct reporting on thoughts. I don’t know if I want to read Montaigne, but I loved her take on it. I was reading this slowly and so much of it resonates. Another book that I’m reading is about a lot of the same stuff about acceptance and here and now that I’m also thinking about with meditation. It all seems to conspire to have me think the same things. We make our habits and then they make us. I really liked this book. It’s scholarly but goofy and personal at the same time. It’s a nice combination. Like informally chatting with someone who knows everything about a subject. And what she pulls and talks about was really important to what I’m thinking now. I have another one of her books, on existentialists, that I will read soon I think.

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Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

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If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

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“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”

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Solum certum nihil esse certi

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“How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.

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The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless “stream of consciousness”—a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890, though it was later made more famous by novelists.

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the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which are trained to fly around all day calling “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now!”

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He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.

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He particularly avoided announcing a sequence of numbered points (“I will now discuss six possible approaches ...”) because it was both boring and risky: one was likely either to forget some of them or to end up with too many.

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Despite his father’s constant efforts to motivate him, he wrote, he turned out to be “so sluggish, lax, and drowsy that they could not tear me from my sloth, not even to make me play.”

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The Discovery of Slowness, which relates the life of Arctic explorer John Franklin, a man whose natural pace of living and thinking is portrayed as that of an elderly sloth after a long massage and a pipe of opium.

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“Forget much of what you learn” and “Be slow-witted” became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live.

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The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.

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Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right—controlling and paying attention—most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. So difficult are they that one cannot approach them head-on. It is necessary to sidle in from lateral angles, and trick oneself into achieving them.

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As the Stoic Epictetus wrote: Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.

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To borrow an example from Alan Bailey, a historian of Skepticism, if someone declares that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is an even number and demands to know your opinion, your natural response might be, “I don’t have one,” or “How should I know?” Or, if you want to sound more philosophical, “I suspend judgment”—epokhe. If a second person says, “What rubbish! There is obviously an odd number of grains of sand in the Sahara,” you would still say epokhe, in the same unflappable tone. In effect, you respond with the deadpan statement Sextus himself cited as a definition of epokhe: I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing. Or: I now feel in such a way as neither to posit dogmatically nor to reject any of the things falling under this investigation. Or: To every account I have scrutinized which purports to establish something in dogmatic fashion, there appears to me to be opposed another account, purporting to establish something in dogmatic fashion, equal to it in convincingness or lack of convincingness.

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The Essays are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as “perhaps,” “to some extent,” “I think,” “It seems to me,” and so on—words which, as Montaigne said himself, “soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions,” and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of “unassumingness.” They are not extra flourishes; they are Montaigne’s thought, at its purest.

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To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a “deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorized, what is mysterious.

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If a parrotfish is hooked by a fisherman, his fellow parrotfish rush to chew through the line and free him. Or, if one is netted, others thrust their tails through the net so he can grab one with his teeth, and be pulled out.

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Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.

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Montaigne: How we cry and laugh for the same thing.

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Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to Don Quixote, Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new.

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The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.

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As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”

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“Nothing costs me dear except care and trouble,” wrote Montaigne. “I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.”

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clever-clogs displays such as that of a man who tossed grains of millet through the eye of a needle from a distance.

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There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

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Rousseau wards off such accusations by writing, “I place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.”

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“The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.”

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There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

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As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance.

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Those living through the present assume that things are worse than they are, he says, because they cannot escape their local perspective:

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Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson: to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance. This is what the ancients did when they looked down on their troubles from above, as upon a commotion in an ant colony.

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respect. Just as you could seek mercy from an enemy forthrightly, without compromising yourself, or defend your property by electing to leave it undefended, so you could get through an inhumane war by remaining human.

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Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.

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It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification.

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Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, “Sir, then Your Majesty must like me”—because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same.

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amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

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There can be no really ambitious writing without an acceptance that other people will do what they like with your work, and change it almost beyond recognition.

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old Hellenistic trick of amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

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What he left behind was all the better for being imperfect, ambiguous, inadequate, and vulnerable to distortion. “Oh Lord,” one might imagine Montaigne exclaiming, “by all means let me be misunderstood.”

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nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.”

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“On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?”

Madball (Black Gat Books Book 20) by Fredric Brown – 210605 – My buddy, Eddie, reminded me about Fredric Brown (it was Eddie that got me to read him years and years ago). Eddie was reading this and told me it was all about the carny. I hadn’t read it before.  It really is that wonderful dirty, gritty, pulp writing that’s so beautiful. And it’s such a nice view of a time and place I never ever knew for real, but always in my heart pretend I was part of. And a kind of life that I always pretend to love, although in reality, there’s almost nothing about it I would enjoy.  And a bunch of people that I think I like, but in reality, don’t agree with on anything. I think that’s what a book should be. It’s so breezy and fun and wrong and gritty. Such fun. I’ll have to read some more of his stuff. I have to remember, I always enjoy it.

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The music Mack Irby heard wasn’t the merry-go-round’s organ nor the three-piece combo of the jig show; it was the overall sound of the carnival on a busy night, voices and laughter and the strident selling spieling grinding over p.a. systems and the crack of rifles in the shooting gallery and singing yelling shuffling, the thud of baseballs and the soft ratchets of fortune wheels and the bassdrum call to bally, try your luck, mister, pitch till you win, the big show just about to start, a few seats left, three balls for a dime, see the strangest people on earth, win a kewpie doll for the little woman, get ’em while they’re hot, pick your lucky number, and inside the little lady will show you, hurry, hurry, win an Armour ham, see the alligator boy, this is the show you came to see, naked and unadorned, every number wins a prize, the show’s about to start, step right up, try your luck . . .

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Whatever the thought that he’d been on the verge of thinking, it slipped farther and farther away.

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all he’d eaten all day was one hamburger sandwich around noon,

How to Do Things with Fictions by Joshua Landy – 210609 – This book was too hard for me. It’s written by a professor, and I think it’s a textbook and maybe one is helped a lot from classes around it. But there was a lot of stuff I was interested in. It’s a short book and more than half is footnotes. I read about 5 minutes a night, because it was so dense. But a lot of stuff about the parables of Jesus and a really different and smart viewpoint on that and lots about Robert-Houdin and lots of smart stuff about magic. I got lost in the Greek and Latin stuff, but I was interested in the Beckett stuff. I learned a lot, but it was wicked hard and took a long time to get through.

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By “propositional content” I mean an idea or set of ideas, expressible in declarative sentences; by “fiction” I mean a verbal performance in which the events depicted never happened, and in which everyone knows they didn’t. If I believe the story I’m telling and you know it’s false, I’m making a mistake; if you believe what I’m saying but I don’t, I’m telling a lie; but if neither of us believes it, and if both of us know that neither of us believes it, then the chances are that I’m spinning a fiction.

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As Franz Kafka so beautifully puts it, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

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We could do, in other words, with ceasing to talk about what a text “says”—if indeed there is such a thing—and beginning to talk again about what it does.

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It is precisely that state of mind, a state of quasisimultaneous conviction and distrust, that Robert-Houdin’s tricks and Mallarmé’s poems, with their paradigmatically proto-modernist reflexivity, require for their appreciation.

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Here one almost wants to say, with T. S. Eliot, that the lure of “meaning” is a kind of ruse perpetrated on the reader, a way “to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.”

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(Free indirect discourse

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mutatis mutandis,

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What we need is “virtue of character,” and virtue of character comes from habit, not from insight.

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In other words, meeting the demands of life requires above all a range of semi-automatic responses that we have cultivated by means of repetition.

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As Picasso put it, surprisingly aptly for your purposes, “to draw, you must close your eyes and sing.”

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Fictions, you are forced to conclude, preach to the converted alone.

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We should all just come out and admit it: “morally improving” is merely a compliment we pay to works whose values agree with ours.

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If we cannot be harmed by fictions, then we cannot be improved. Fictions, to repeat, preach only to the converted.

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Fiction cannot edify, but it can clarify.

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Worse still (from the point of view of the rhetorical theory), when the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables, the answer is not comforting. “For those outside,” he says, “everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11–12). This is an astonishing statement on the part of one who, by the standard account, strives for the salvation of all. The fact that the disciples fail to understand is not an accident, and not just a measure of their own shortcomings, but a deliberate strategy on the part of the master. Mark’s Jesus is quite unequivocal: the function of the parables is to prevent people from understanding them, so that they will not

convert to the correct belief, so in turn that they will not attain salvation. It is, in short, the very opposite of what Calvin and so many others have argued through the centuries.

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Whereas “the essence of prose is to perish,” says Paul Valéry, to be “entirely replaced by the image or impulse that it stands for,” poetry “is expressly made to be reborn from its ashes and to become once more, over and over again, what it has just been.”

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The reason, I want to suggest, is that there is something over and above the local deployment of metaphors for strategic or aesthetic purposes, and that is what we might call a figurative state of mind. If we move from coining the odd metaphor every now and then to cultivating a generalized love for the figurative—if we come to dwell in metaphor, as Emily Dickinson would say—then our stance toward existence becomes subtly but powerfully shifted: the world becomes less concrete and more abstract, less impersonal and more humanized, its components less monadic and more interconnected. And as everything we see begins to point sideways to what is like it, rather than backward to what preceded it or forward to what follows, we find ourselves released from the tyranny of time.

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forestall an impending coup in Algeria. In short, Robert-Houdin made good on his determination, explicitly stated in the 1858 autobiography Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, “to offer new experiments divested of all charlatanism” (159).

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And performers like Robert-Houdin, even as they demystified old superstitions, were simultaneously replacing these with new sources of enchantment—indeed disenchanting by re-enchanting.

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We could sum everything up by saying that in mid-nineteenth-century France, religion, science, and magic stood in a curious relationship to one another, as though in a circular relay race. Religion remained stubbornly tinged with magic; magic, for its part, became increasingly scientific; and science took on, for some at least, the appearance of a new religion. As a result, in performing his onstage “experiments,” Robert-Houdin was simultaneously contributing to the disenchantment of the world—attempting, via the non-illusionistic aspects of his performance, to extirpate the residuum of superstition—and to its re-enchantment, both via wonder and via the nascent hope in science itself as a “motive for action.”

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when Robert-Houdin performed his experiments, he contributed to the re-enchantment of the world via the illusion of wonder and the illusion of science itself as a motive for action. For the “ether” in his bottle was, let us not forget, nothing more than air. To be sure, Robert-Houdin wafted the scent of ether across the theater, and a part of the audience—the Renan type—must have taken the act for an actual experiment, just as a second part of the audience (children, Fiard-style clergymen, and dagger-wielding noblewomen) must have taken it for a palpable demonstration of diabolical dealings.

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In other words, the capacity crucially required for the full appreciation of a magic show—that which separated the “ordinary man” from the “homme d’esprit”—was, in Robert-Houdin’s estimation, the capacity to let oneself be deceived, knowingly and willingly. (As would be said about one of Robert-Houdin’s immediate successors, “he deludes the most watchful spectator, [even] as he lucidly explains, ‘that is how it is done.’”)

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Demon-hunting clerics and dagger-wielding noblewomen did not possess this capacity, since in their eyes magic was simply a reality; adherents to the religion of science did not possess it either, since for them the miracle of science was real; and cynics lacked it just as thoroughly, since, as they saw it, being deceived was the worst imaginable fate. Only those who were beyond universal cynicism had what it took to allow their world to be re- enchanted by Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.

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For his performances did not merely require the capacity for (quasi-) simultaneous conviction and distrust; they also offered the opportunity to hone that state of mind, to reinforce an aptitude for detached credulity—that very aptitude which would make it possible for everyday life to be re-enchanted. In the Ethereal Suspension, Robert- Houdin provided his audience with a model for the construction of a belief system that recognizes itself as illusory: even science can be a religion, he seems to have been hinting with a sly wink to those in the know, if you lucidly wish to believe it one.

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Like Nietzsche, Mallarmé leaves us with the hope that “one can endure to live in a meaningless world,” as long as one “organizes a small portion of it oneself.”

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Rhyme, as Mallarmé puts it, repudiates chance.

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Literature at large is nothing other than the relentless elimination of chance, the construction of a protected space over which randomness has no hold. The real world is full of haphazard, happenstance objects, people, events; the created world, by contrast, is one in which everything has a necessary place.

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do not really have power, since power is the capacity to achieve what is good for us, and acting unjustly is bad for us, more harmful to the perpetrator than it is to any victim.

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“To know nothing is nothing,” writes Molloy, “not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in”:

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primary goal of ataraxia, freedom from disturbance, enduring peace of mind.

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plausibility, I think, from the fact that there is something it feels like to know. It is the experience of a quiz show contestant with her finger on the buzzer: she has to know that she knows before she knows what she knows. There is something it feels like to know that we know. And correspondingly, there is something it feels like to know that we don’t know. And so we can, if we are lucky, bring thinking to an end after all.

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There is no suggestion here of “identity” in what has become today its most widespread usage, namely membership in a social, national, racial, or ethnic group.

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having begun from a desire to set their minds at rest by solving all puzzles and explaining all anomalies, thinking persons find themselves unable to decide between two equally compelling theories; they give up; and lo and behold, irony of ironies, they attain the peace of mind they set out to achieve.

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We fail again, but as Beckett would say, we fail better.

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No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Beckett, Worstward Ho

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“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”