Soothsayer says....

Soothsayer: "Beware the ides of March." 

Caesar: "He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass." (1.2)

               

Portia: "Thou hast some suit to Caesar, hast thou not?"

Soothsayer: "That I have, lady. If it will please Caesar/To be so good to Caesar as to hear me, I shall beseech him to befriend himself."

Portia: "Why know'st thou any harms intended toward him?"

Soothsayer: "None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance. Good morrow to you." (2. 2)

Caesar: "The ides of March are come."

Soothsayer: "Ay, Caesar, but not gone." (3.1.)

Jonathan Franzen Hates Facebook

Admitted [Jonathan Franzen]: "Very probably, you're sick to death of hearing social media [such as Twitter] disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds." But last year he also criticized Facebook where, he said, "we star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors." [from feature article in The Guardian] - Thanks J.F. I'm certainly guilty of this, but I'll take it under advisement.

Reaping the Whirlwind

I commiserate with writers and novelists these days who are frustrated, confused, annoyed - if also preoccupied - with the problem of how to describe what is happening in the world today, right now, in this pop-cultural milieu given the relentless, unending stream of headlines, tweets, updates, announcements, news feeds, hot topics, gaffes, quarrels, fights, publicity stunts, weather stats, sports highlights, best-sellers, musical top 10s, celebrity -marriages -divorces, -arrests, ups and downs, oddities, freaks, flash-in-pans, flavor-of-months. These "vanishing moments" - one on top of the other - year after year - are enough to make my head spin... So what gives....what dwells... what resonates ...what survives...what endures that is worth writing about? How is it possible to provide the salient details, when those same details keep morphing, shifting, changing, transmigrating into more of the same (only different) forms of detritus for the mind?

Thomas de Quincey - Prose Artist

A troubled life fraught with drug abuse and corresponding episodes of hallucination, euphoria, nocturnal wanderings, nightmares, paranoia, disorientation, hyper-activity, yet partially redeemed by an engaging, mesmerizing, effortless prose style:


"The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquility that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.” ― Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

"This too is vanity...and yet..."

The New Piety

"Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice."

 - Wallace Stevens

In the future there will [continue to] be new forms of piety. People will gather at coffee houses on weekends, read books, scan magazines, peruse newspapers - if any remain - scour websites and other outlets for snippets of "meaning" or "revelation." I call this "piety" although the words and gestures that accompany it are far different from the traditional brand of outward devotion or allegiance. Finding the old beliefs either untenable or unclear, feeling alienated from institutions in general, from ancient dogmas or doctrines, from group-think mentalities, from mega-churches, from scandal-plagued houses of worship (that's my category), growing numbers of people are cultivating other, more mundane involvements, which nevertheless, take on a more indispensable character - like portals providing entrance to the transcendental realm.  And people therefore - at least so goes my thesis - shall continue to infuse these ordinary practices with a new intensity. Serious habits will emerge from leisure time with requisite litanies and nouvelle rituals  - all necessary to create a space (perhaps) for IT to happen... that subtle, spontaneous almost imaginary moment which in retrospect earns the vague title: "That was IT!" because how else can one describe the sought-after "gift" before it occurs? Call IT guidance...call IT "oracle," "prophecy," "sacred imperative" for lack of a better term. And of course, along with these routines, the coffee drinking and brunch-making, and the strangely calm, strangely intense, reading habits and social tete-a-tetes that accompany them, there will also be (let there also be) outdoor exertions, art festivals, fairs and farmer's markets, sporting events, etc. etc. with their sometimes uncannily spiritual, religiously emotive, qualities connecting one season to the next, with cheerful socializing, mingling, sacred ceremonies, processions, uniforms, celebrations and quasi-holy sites, with ecstatic embraces, laughing, shouting, weeping, crying, gnashing of teeth, with rites of passage for the young and historic milestones for the old and middle-aged, a montage of worshipful moments via home-improvement, gardening, walking-the-dog, hiking, cycling and yoga - keeping occupied all those who would otherwise be confused about where to go, what to do. For we seem genuinely puzzled by worship these days, because the old explanations fall flat, fail to register, do not compute with the scientific paradigm we simultaneously embrace along with our spiritual longings; in moments of naked honesty, we cannot bring ourselves to understand the kind of "obeisance" that the higher power/higher intelligence demands - although this by no means lessens our desire to make contact with someone/something higher. At the same time, we feel a gap within our daily routine - brought about by this crisis of faith. (I would speak for myself alone here, but am I the only one?) It's not enough to sit quietly in one's own room; one must venture outward in search of some public instantiation - but the lack of definite parameters for what to worship and how, makes it difficult, when the meaning of authentic worship itself remains so elusive. Is it because we still feel haunted by entrenched habits of earlier generations and seek for ourselves some basis to continue the tradition, to keep the Sabbath - albeit "in our own way"? Or have people en masse become casual, well-meaning "infidels" who remain, nevertheless, haunted, perplexed amid their new-found secular selves? The new piety is out there, sure, but many resist the trend, you say. No doubt. Those disciplined church-goers and synagogue-attendees together comprising a strong but silent (?) strong but vocal (?) minority... And yet, amid such remnants, one could ask, will traditional belief ever regain its former foothold? But even so, assuming that "yes" be the answer in certain parts of the globe, is it not more than a little disconcerting, if not disorienting, to encounter those who naively continue on with the old piety - as if nothing had ever transpired to challenge it -  like someone wearing an old torn suit, which, when they attempt to button it, tears open even further? And do we not squirm uncomfortably whenever someone invokes the old orthodoxies with zest and fervor - as if no one had heard of them before! (or their dangers) - using words, quotations, invocations that are by no means comprehensible to a secular audience - such that the true believer stumbles about spouting his lines, like a bad actor inadvertently sounding dated and tone-deaf. So then... is all this new piety in fact only impiety masquerading as respectability (?) - with an edgy defiance, a brazenness lurking beneath its calm exterior? And if that is the case, have such "worshipful, non-worshippers" only succeeded in throwing themselves into new enthusiasms, lesser endeavors which, in the grand scheme of things, lack all hint of the sublime? Well...but seeing as we've been marching down this road for the past...what is it now... 100, 200, 300, 400 years - what would it mean to turn back? Can you simply turn back? I don't think it's that easy...

Great Prose Stylists, Old and New

Celebrated Prose Stylists (Old-Canonical Writers): Herodotus, Thucidides, Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch,* Tacitus, Cicero,* St. Augustine,* Clement of Alexandria, Nicholas of Cusa, Bonaventure, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Pascal,* Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz,* Pierre Bayle,* Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding*, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon,  Sir Walter Scott,* Edmund Burke*, Thomas de Quincey,* Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte,* Anne Bronte, * Elizabeth Gaskell, Honore de Balzac, Stendhal, Nathaniel Hawthorne*, Herman Melville,* Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, John Henry Newman*, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov*, Saki, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James,* Joseph Conrad,* Bram Stoker,  Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton,* Marcel Proust,* Franz Kafka,* Robert Musil,*  James Joyce,  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), H.L. Mencken, Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Lippmann, * (* denotes special commendation/personal favorites)

Impressive Prose Stylists (Contemporary Writers): Andrei Platonov, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller (for Catch 22 exclusively) John Updike, Shirley Jackson, Alice Munro, Fumiko Hayashi, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, Bessie Head, Alifa Rifaat, Naguib Mahfouz, Ian McEwan, Heinrich Boll, Karel Capek, Alberto Moravia, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Anita Desai, R.K. Narayan, Muzaffer Izgu, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Halberstam, Robert Caro, William Manchester, Barbara Tuchman, A.S. Byatt,  Julian Barnes,

Not-So-Impressive Writers, Overrated As Prose Stylists  (in my humble opinion): D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather,  Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Albert Camus, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy....

The conversation starts now...Feel free to agree, disagree....add names to the list!