Old School R&B - And the List Goes On...

Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, James Brown, Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, Billy Preston, Isaac Hayes, Mary Wells, Freda Payne, Eddie Kendricks, Billy Paul,  George Benson, Sister Sledge, Rose Royce, Harold Melvin and the BlueNotes, Sly and the Family Stone, Isley Brothers, Tower of Power, Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Four Tops, Temptations, Stylistics, Delphonics, Dramatics, Moments,  O'Jays,  Spinners, Whispers, Intruders,  Impressions, War, Tower of Power, Parliament, Stevie Wonder, Heatwave, Commodores, Earth-Wind-and-Fire,  Brothers Johnson, TSOP (Gamble and Huff), Jackson Five, Blackbirds, Roberta Flack, Donnie Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler,  Lou Rawls, Barbara Mason, Average White Band, Archie Bell and the Drells, Patti LaBelle, MFSB, Rufus (featuring Chaka Khan), Peaches and Herb, Ray, Goodman and Brown, GQ,  Dazz Band, Brick, Teena Marie...

Time Capsule - Record Heat

Record 100+ temperature recorded in several states...wildfires blaze in Colorado...wild storms knock out power to millions in the midwest and mid-atlantic states...Northern Florida is dealing with the aftermath of storms that dropped 20+ inches of rain...

John Roberts - Mystery Man

Well - it looks like John Roberts has recently made a name for himself writing the majority (5-4) decision in the case upholding President Obama's healthcare law (the "Affordable Care Act" I think is its official name). I'm trying to find out more about this youthful Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The only book I know of that contains some brief biographical tidbits, is called The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. Based on the title alone, and from what I've read, there's bound to be some hidden drama and intrigue surrounding this guy. Let's hope...

Paul Simon - Songwriter

What is America's favorite Paul Simon song? Any nominations? So much to choose from: "Sounds of Silence," "I am a Rock," "Kathy's Song," "Richard Cory," "April She Will Come," "Leaves that are Green,"  "A Most Peculiar Man," "Somewhere They Can't Find Me," "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall," "The Dangling Conversation," "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her," "Patterns,  "A Poem Written on the Underground Wall," "The 59th Street Bridge Song," "Homeward Bound," "America," "Old Friends," "Fakin' It," "Mrs. Robinson," "Hazy Shade of Winter," "At the Zoo," "The Boxer," "Baby Driver," "The Only Living Boy in New York," "Keep the Customer Satisfied,"  "Mother and Child Reunion," "Loves Me Like a Rock," "Kodachrome," "My Little Town," "Hearts and Bones," "The Boy in the Bubble," "Graceland," "Born at the Right Time," "The Obvious Child," "The Afterlife" - The hits just keep on coming...

Alice Munro - On Stories

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” ― Alice Munro

Chagall's Circus Horse Rider

Kierkegaard on "Infinite Absolute Negativity"

In Part Two of The Concept of Irony,  Kierkegaard begins by addressing Socratic irony once again, as if to underscore how this strange half-playful, half-serious attitude, so emblematic of the individual and his subjective awareness, is crucial to Socrates' spiritual mission. It is a curious, questioning tendency that exists out of respect for the daimon, a meticulous search for a Truth that lies beyond the whatever public opinion or historical actuality is able to express. Because it is so reluctant to affirm and to eager to expose inadequacies in speeches and logoi, Socratic irony, for some represents a destructive, nay-saying, atheistical force that mocks sacred, settled opinions; for others it heralds the beginning of a negative theology of sorts that is constantly testing the tradition, smashing idols as it goes, while making room for a divine logos able to embraces and explain the full complexity of the human predicament...

...irony [is] the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it.... Irony is a qualification of subjectivity. In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities .... But if irony is a qualification of subjectivity, then it must manifest itself the first time subjectivity makes its appearance in world history. Irony is, namely, the first and most abstract qualification of subjectivity. This points to the historical turning point where subjectivity made its appearance for the first time, and with this we have come to Socrates.... For him, the whole given actuality had entirely lost its validity; he had become alien to the actuality of the whole substantial world. This is one side of irony, but on the other hand he used irony as he destroyed Greek culture. His conduct toward it was at all times ironic; he was ignorant and knew nothing but was continually seeking information from others; yet as he let the existing go on existing, it foundered. He kept on using this tactic until the very last, as was especially evident when he was accused. But his fervor in this service consumed him, and in the end irony overwhelmed; he became dizzy, and everything lost its reality (p. 262ff.).

Higher than the Animals, Lower than the Angels, Yet Unhappier than Both...

When thinking about the problem of evil and suffering that philosophers and theologians commonly grapple with, I think also of animals and their lot in life (so memorably described in that poem by Walt Whitman (see below*), how little they complain despite all the "injustices" they endure on this earth, their constant struggle to survive, the harsh elements they're exposed to, their soon-forgotten pains and deprivations, their subordinate position relative to us, the hostile forces that that make them expendable as creatures, their scary self-reliance, locked in (as they all are) to the vicious cycle of predator and prey, forced to kill or be killed, lacking the comforts of technology and civilization. No matter how nightmarish their environment may seem, their limited, insular, brutish mode of awareness keeps them somehow "placid" and "self-contained" - even "serene" - as Whitman might say, while we humans, by contrast, emerging from the same environment, have taught ourselves (over time) the art of unhappiness - fueled by feelings of outrage, indignation, disappointment, regret - which we see as normal because we can imagine better outcomes unconstrained by fate or necessity; we have dreams and ideals, we build,  we create, we envision - thereby leap-frogging over our fellow mammals who never expect much more beyond than what already is. Our more restless form of consciousness -  wired as it is to visions of possibility and transformation -  seems like a major anomaly, the source of greater pride, dominion, feelings of superiority, but also greater misery.  Animals in general seem more normal and well-adjusted precisely because of their complacency; by contrast, we are the sick ones possessed by expectations that can never be fully satisfied, who make demands that defy plausibility, who measure ourselves against the status and privilege of others, who crave increased levels of power and control over circumstances, who "live for" improvements sometimes to no avail - and when our demands are rejected,  this lack of "progress" infuriates us,  embitters us, renders us,  by turns, angry or distraught, headstrong or hyped-up. But are we correct to react this way? Do we have rationality and morality on our side here? Isn't there something entirely needless and gratuitous about this tendency of ours to "make a stink" whenever anything goes wrong? Unhappiness seems unnatural. Because to be human (if it means anything) calls for us to reject the way of animals and seek for something higher. But by claiming this spiritual ground beyond what Fate or evolutionary biology has ordained for us, we cannot help but stumble upon a theology* of sorts in which some God or vision of God comes to mind as the goal - i.e. the model for the type of existence we are aiming at, as well as the invisible antagonist to our immediate demands. God's transcendence helps fill the vacuum, helps account for our human rebellion against the [harshly impersonal] "way of the world." One could look at this refusal of our lower animal nature in one sense as a necessary rebellion, born out of our first burgeoning awareness of this strange malady - our unique unhappiness, our sense of what might have been if only... our feeling of being out of joint as creatures within the natural horizon.  Out of such misery, there grows a desire for healing,  a demand for justice,  an inchoate faith, a search for answers, a quest for wholeness. As faith - it is a in fact a rational striving, a yearning to bring about whatever is intangible - i.e.  "not fully present" or "not fully actualized" "not fully humanized" in response to some sacred/divine prompting to "overcome" the world. Understood in this sense, faith would appear as our most basic human tendency - a secular tendency - the underlying attitude with which we project ourselves freely, defiantly and willfully into the future so as to negate the present set of circumstances/injustices. But if faith (so defined) does indeed represent a new stage of human development, a form of consciousness that is teleological - i.e. oriented toward a higher set of goals - released from the constraints of animal life,  then it would seem that the question about God (about who or what God is) would emerge simultaneously as a form of discourse relating to this self-conscious activity. Call it religion or religious speculation, or even mere story-telling or myth-making about God or gods. Such a discourse, as evidenced by a particular mode of civilization, is necessary to help us imagine that upper echelon of divine perfection, the ideal realm, which always relates by way of contrast to our present sense of identity. [Note: If at this point, you are tempted to interject: that this higher realm comprised of God, heaven, angels, etc. is a mere product of imagination and has no physical reality - i.e. science has no evidence of such realities - is it also the case that as an upper echelon of possibility - a category forever hovering above and beyond our present state of existence - that it has no ontological status? I'm not so sure we can simply dismiss this question - despite its metaphysical overtones.]

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman

Does Biology = Morality?

With sociobiology gaining credibility these days since its first debut back the 1970s, people have recourse more and more to their "evolutionary script" as rationale for various messy behaviors and random motivations.  Instead of "the heart wants what it wants," we have "natural selection made me do it!" This underlying biological imperative provides a logic as it were to what otherwise might be a simple appeal to instinct, passion or appetite as wildly impulsive drives holding the ego captive...

Incantation (of the Sacred Forest)

Incantation by Paul Serusier

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's amazing book is a hidden gem and arguably the most under-rated, overlooked, under-read novel of the 20th century - yet still very prophetic and timely...

How to Read the Bible by James Kugel

If you're looking to read a thought-provoking account of the Bible from an expert in the field (i.e. former Harvard professor) with  a very fine appreciation of ancient Hebrew and all its subtle nuances,  and if you don't mind having your complacent set of assumptions challenged somewhat, this might be the book for you. If you already know how to read the Bible just fine thank you - without any knowledge of ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek (for that matter) or familiarity with basic hermeneutics or reliance upon the vast field of biblical scholarship that has grown up over the past 200 years or consultation on the subject from people with first-rate minds, and you feel like just "going solo" as it were, relying on personal intuition or inspiration or external authority or sacred adamantine tradition,  then please let me know what your secret is... [I mean, what would you say in reply to what this author has to say? Is it possible to simply avoid what these scholars have said?] Alternatively, if you're feeling lost, disoriented, confused, spiritually empty, restless, aimless, longing for insight, guidance and direction,  willing to make your pilgrimage for even one drop of divine revelation, this might not be the book for you - because this book deals with how different generations of people going back to ancient times- understood the stories and edicts and prophecies of the scriptures - oftentimes at odds with we might wish as the "moral interpretation" of text.  It shows us the history of interpretation gradually altering content.  

Philip Rieff and the Curse of Modernity

"Rieff’s first book (his best, in my opinion) was a penetrating and imaginative study, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959). At the time, most people considered Freud an immoralist—a proponent of liberation. Morality was supposedly what made us ill, posing unreasonable demands on behalf of “civilization” and forcing our healthy instinctual passions underground, into the unconscious, from which they tried to escape by way of “symptoms.” These symptoms were strangled protests against the tyranny of culture over nature. The psychoanalytic cure was a protracted guerrilla campaign, aiming to take over one inner stronghold after another without provoking an all-out counterattack in the form of a nervous breakdown...The Mind of the Moralist was a vigorous dissent from this standard interpretation. Rieff’s point was not just that, unlike his noisier disciples, Freud was temperamentally conservative, rating order as highly as freedom and restraint as highly as expression. This stance could be (and regularly was) dismissed as reflexive Victorian/Viennese caution. On the contrary, Rieff argued, Freud’s caution was well-founded. He understood that he had not really explained away our primal, nameless sense of guilt, which lay beneath the more superficial and intelligible constraints imposed by culture, with the implausible hypothesis of a primal crime. And yet, for this resolute unbeliever, such guilt could have no rational basis—who, after all, was humankind accountable to?

Rieff’s explanation of what there is to be guilty about was repeated in many books over many years, with increasing urgency (and, it must be said, portentousness). Human possibilities are limitless; about this he seemed to agree with Freud’s liberationist successors. But what excited them terrified him—and, he claimed, everyone else, at least before the triumph of the therapeutic ethos. Our primal endowment—formless, destructive, uncontrollable instinct—paralyzes and isolates us. We cannot trust ourselves or one another until a firm structure of interdictions has been installed in everyone’s psyche. These must be expounded by an interpretive elite, ratified through a calendar of rituals, and enforced by stern authority. Every culture is a dialectic of prohibition and permission, renunciation and release. Freud would have agreed; but whereas his followers concluded that the original “yes” of instinct was silenced, or at least muted, by the “no” of repressive authority, Rieff countered that instinct was cacophonous and only the original, creative “no” gave it a distinct voice. As he put it in The Mind of the Moralist—his style, already a little melodramatic, foreshadowing his later, full-blown apocalyptic abstractions—the primal self is “in a panic to express the fecundity of its own emptiness” and must be mastered by “unalterable authority.” For if “everything could be expressed by everyone identically,” then “nothing would remain to be expressed individually.” Hence the “irreducible and supreme activity of culture” is to “prevent the expression of everything,” thereby precluding “the one truly egalitarian dominion: nothingness.”

For most educated (and even many uneducated) Westerners, however, all formerly unalterable authorities now lie in the dust, like Ozymandias. Science has banished the supernatural, technology has vanquished scarcity, and so, having lost its parents, ignorance and misery, morality is now an orphan. This is the triumphalist view of modernity, and Rieff shared it; only instead of a triumph, he thought it a catastrophe. The dimensions of this catastrophe dawned on him gradually. The last chapter of Freud is “The Emergence of Psychological Man,” a tentative sketch of what modernity had wrought. Until the twentieth century, in Rieff’s account, three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament." - from George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity" in The Boston Review.

Philip Rieff - Cultural Theorist

L.T. on Liberalism and Literature

"A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics." ... "But now he seemed convinced that every social and personal pathology, from revolutionary violence to narcissism, comes from the refusal to accept that life is conditioned—by the capacities we inherit, by the circumstances we are born into, by the people whose desires conflict with ours, by death." -from Louis Menand's 2008 New Yorker essay on Lionel Trilling

Poetry in America...

Crickets chirping...
Paint drying on walls...
A row of dusty pamphlets, unread anthologies in a lost corner of a used book store...
Corn growing silently under the Iowa sun like so many English majors who can't find work...
An empty gray warehouse, broken windows, padlocked doors - full of manuscripts inside - boxes and boxes stacked to the ceiling...
A large seep-hole eroding large chunks of that forgotten country road...
Bovine creatures in a meadow who fell asleep and never woke up...
Beautiful people, chatty, curious, interested in just-about-everything-mind-you-as-long-as-it's-not x, y or z, sitting there, sipping their coffee, fidgeting with their gadgets....
Mesmerized by the "echo chamber" of their own making...
Middle-class arbiters...opining, emoting, apprehending, taking responsibility...
hungry for knowledge, for a sizzling summer read, for some recent podcast, for the latest greatest advice bouncing from website to website...for whatever that alluring stranger at the next table is saying to the intimidating diva he is with...
So much news to digest apart from who will supersede Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin...
Stacks of unpublished odes... (ugh!)...
Sonnets that should never have been written or even attempted...
Pathetic strands of random words that could never hold an audience...
Rhymed stanzas filled with alliterative enjambments and allusive hyperboles...
Yawns, long stares, discomfort, animosity...
Full refunds never granted for time wasted...
Ecstatic children scribbling down their first words on colorful construction paper...
(A fluke, a total fluke, only a few more years and they will celebrate not caring so much...)
Sensitive song-writers who can't catch a break...
Prophets on strike...
Because we (the rest of us) just don't get it...
Because...c'mon now, I'm at a loss for words...
Because...don't make us do what we don't want to do...
Because sports highlights on ESPN are so-much-more-enticing...
Because when something grows stale, well then what can one expect?
Because when language departs too much from daily usage, it's sort of like reading hieroglyphics...
Because after being force-fed by garrulous authoritarians for years in school, we beg to differ...
Because we've heard it all before...it's all been said...nothing new under the sun except ...you can't teach a dog new tricks...apples and oranges...ducks and drakes...look before you leap...gotta think outside that box...so as not to kick the can down the road...a penny saved is a lesson learned...
Even if dictionaries as such will soon be obsolete...
Even if the global economy does not employ grammarians...
Even if the totality of ocean density cannot overwhelm the fishes...
Even if the Flemish painters of America have yet to reveal their hidden treasures...
Even if the infra-structure of Toledo leaves nothing to the imagination...
Even if amnesia strikes us at the very moment when we started to believe that something really really important had just flown by us like an entourage of vaguely pink seagulls...but then...when we looked again it was just that strange flying object or something important like that...
Even at a time in our history when song lyrics are fading from view...
Even if memory itself should go under...
(If not for memories, what do we have left?)
Hopes, dreams, desires - sure - but you see what I'm getting at...
Because I wanted to start a revolution...
Because I demand a stop-gap measure to halt the hidden regress...
Because I feel an irrational need to prevent the flow of emigrants into Nebraska...
Because I want to ask you a question: What do you see in those ink blots?
Do you see freight trains? dinosaurs? watches? typewriters? fondue pots? pet rocks? welders? artisans? stenographers? steel companies? friendly people traversing the east coast? canaries in coal mines? letters written in long-hand and then actually mailed out via the postal service?
Do you see a pattern developing here?
But I want others to do the heavy-lifting...everyone look over there for a second...
If you have something to say, then say it! Let it out - now - please!
In metered rhyme or else free-form like this if you want!
And you can even save the planet while you're at it...
What? Too busy? Not going there?
Well then... that reminds me of a flaccid poem I once wrote and stuck in the drawer underneath the green velvet notebook, just waiting for someone - anyone - to FIND...
(Cue crickets...)

Modern Art Anyone?

'

The Middle of the Journey

"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way." - Dante, Inferno, Canto 1

The Letter "T"

this
time
tadpole
tell them to
tag, tug, tear-at
the tedious tide
try, trudge, trim the trestles
trees are treasure troves tending
toward terra-firma, thorn and thistle
tawdry toads, tendentious trolls, tender twigs, thermal therapy
tame this treadmill,  traduce the tepid tranquilizers, traverse taxing toll-roads
tame the twins, the tins, the tons, the trout, the traps, the type-As tooling there and then
the thrilling thoroughfares, treasonous trainees, topping-off teen-angst tapping on telescopes
teach tough toads to train tripe, to teethe, to throw off timidity, to tread teasingly toe-to-toe

Cancer by Stanley Plumly

Cancer

Mine, I know, started at a distance

five hundred and twenty light-years away

and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth,

yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten

lying on my back looking up at the cluster

called the Beehive or by its other name

in the constellation Cancer,

the Crab, able to move its nebulae projections

backward and forward, side to side,

in the tumor Hippocrates describes as carcinoma,

from karkinos, the analogue, in order to show

what being cancer looks like.

Star, therefore, to start,

like waking on the best day of your life

to feel this living and immortal thing inside you.

You were in love, you were a saint,

you were going to walk the sunlight blessing water,

you were almost word for word forever.

The crown, the throne, the thorn —

now to see the smoke shining in the mirror,

the long half dark of dark down the hallway inside it.

Now to see what wasn't seen before:

the old loved landscape fading from the window,

the druid soul within the dying tree,

the depth of blue coloring the cornflower,

the birthday-ribbon river of a road,

and the young man who resembles you

opening a door in the half-built house

you helped your father build,

saying, in your voice, come forth. - Stanley Plumly

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

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Writers I Still Can't Appreciate...

Some writers that I'm still trying... and failing... to appreciate...my apologies in advance... include the following: Vladimir Nabokov (a compelling figure to be sure; people say he's such a great prose stylist and I suppose he is, but so many of his novels seem so inaccessible or off-putting or both; perhaps I should give him another try in another ten years or so); Saul Bellow (tried by could not make my way through Herzog or Henderson the Rain King or The Dean's December or Humboldt's Gift or Seize the Day;  Ravelstein was better, but has anyone noticed how practically the only subject in all these works is Saul Bellow himself disguised as various protagonists???); Ernest Hemingway (I'll give him The Sun Also Rises and a few short stories just for the existential attitude, but other than that I can't say that I really enjoy or understand the adulation that accompanies his pedestrian prose style); John Steinbeck (used to like him more, but now I find his narratives rather thin and one-dimensional; Of Mice and Men is great the first time around, but try reading it seven times and see it you don't notice the diminishing returns...The Grapes of Wrath is known as a movie first and a book second; ditto for East of Eden); John Irving (haven't really tried to read him ... might give A Prayer for Owen Meany another try, but he's sort of overtly political sometimes in a way that a good novelist doesn't really need to be); Phillip Roth (could not stand Portnoy's Complaint...how in heck is that book supposed to be funny???... The Plot Against America was an exercise in far-fetched hypotheticals and paranoia...It's usually all about you know you or a character who bears a striking resemblance to who know who and has all of the baggage associated with you know who....So should I try Goodbye, Columbus just to be fair?)... James Fennimore Cooper (don't think I could make it past the first page of one of his novels); Lawrence Sterne (Tristan Shandy sounds great in theory but it's kind of tedious waiting 400 pages for a plot to materialize...)

More Summer Reading Suggestions

#1 - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (story of a magical missing diamond)

#2 - Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (torrid love affair on the Heath)

#3 - Bleak House by Charles Dickens (legal system in Britain)

#4 - Black Boy by Richard Wright (coming of age of a rebellious writer)
#5 - The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope  (financial system in Britain)

#6-  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (a mysterious woman tells her story)

#7 - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (the looking-glass logic of life-during-wartime)

#8 - Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro (vintage Canadian coming-of-age stories)

#9 - The Castle by Franz Kafka (the ultimate spiritual-quest novel)

#10 - Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust (Proust being Proust)

#11 - The Ambassadors by Henry James (James being James)

#12 - The Power Broker by Robert Caro (a bio-history of New York City)

The World in Black and White

Some people see the world in "black and white." An either/or proposition, one might surmise, or, perhaps, a window on a whole other universe - parallel to ours yet more luminous, textured, definite and expansive... Well - I'll let you be the judge my fellow binary thinkers and amateur photographers... 

Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt

Can't resist a book with a title like this!

“A guided tour of ideas, theories and arguments about the origins of the universe…. Through discussions with philosophers of religion and science, humanists, biologists, string theorists, as well as research into the scholarship of days past—from Heidegger, Parmenides, Pythagoras and others—and an interview with John Updike, Holt provides a master's-level course on the theories and their detractors. The interludes find the author positioning himself as an existential gumshoe, but also working through the sudden loss of a pet and, later, the death of his mother. Holt may not answer the question of his title, but his book deepens the appreciation of the mystery.” (Kirkus Reviews )

It's Tuesday...time for...Weight-Training

It's that time again to get fit, grow some muscles and learn to feel comfortable inhabiting a mesomorphic body. Ah - sounds great in theory, but then you have to actually do the sets with all those reps! 

Immortal Songs of the 1970s - Woo! Yeah!

Ah, the 1970s. Breathe in, breathe out. I know. I know. It seems like every middle-aged person these days has some remote area of nostalgia/expertise that no one else on the planet really cares about or regards as anything but the most irrelevant minutiae...BUT... for better or worse...that was my decade.... the 1970s....Breathe in, breathe out. That wacky, wondrous, frizzy, outrageous, cheesy, gritty, sadly depressing, shockingly freakish time when all of the fallout from the 1960s suddenly started coming home to roost (for many of us who, at the time, were too young to know that we were the "guinea pigs" of a new age ...) Granted, the food was processed and unhealthy (we didn't know, we just didn't know), the air-quality (where I grew up) toxic and asthma-inducing, the hair-styles feathered and relentlessly blow-dried, the furniture inexpensive and amazingly drab, the carpet thick, plush and foot-friendly, the sporting events inspiring and quasi-religious, the schools regimented yet experimental (and filled to the brim with bullies, preps, jocks, smokers, stoners, rejects, social climbers, rebels and "sarcastic future bloggers"), the radio stations mesmerizing and oracular, the tv shows monolithic and insipid, the relationships (or should I say gender roles): fleeting and peripatetic, the drugs (or should I say "medications") sadly ubiquitous and entirely unoriginal (fie! fie! la bourgeoisie!), the clothing (or should I say "threads") loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the family units loud and somewhat dysfunctional, the political and economic trends dismal and not worth mentioning. But hey....we'll always have the MUSIC! Right? That was OUR DECADE - folks. Hello? Anyone? This may sound pathetic, but please understand. I'm not trying to win any converts here - you're either with us or agin' us as far as that goes. I mean, I could rattle off some obscure titles that time keeps on pushing into the fog: "Jive Talkin'... "Rainy Days and Mondays"..."I Saw the Light" ... "Sister Golden Hair"...."Babe"..."Funeral for a Friend"... "(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden"... "Disco Inferno"..."Cruel to be Kind"... "Bad Time"... "Ain't No Sunshine"... "So Far Away"... "You're So Vain"..."Time in a Bottle"..."Fire and Rain"... "Oh Very Young"... "Heart of Gold"... "American Pie"... "Vincent"... "Seasons in the Sun"... "Let's Stay Together"... "I Love Music"..."Saturday in the Park"..."Peace Train"... "Love Train"... "Jet"... "#9 Dream"..."This Masquerade"... "Another Star"... "Don't Let Nothing Get You Down"... "Low Rider"..."Superstition"..."Bad Sneakers"... "Oh What a Lonely Boy"... "Meeting Across the River"..."Could It Be I'm Falling in Love?"... "999 Arguments"... "It Never Rains in (Southern) California"... "Dust in the Wind"..."Love Will Keep Us Together"... "Let It Rain"... "Stairway to..." (what is the name of that song?) and you'd either nod your head in the affirmative or you wouldn't. It's that simple. So just for starters, I'm going to ask you to think of a song that you have probably heard at least on a subliminal level (in a store, an elevator, a car, a dental office, a rock-n-roll museum)... It's a song by ELO from back in the day.  ELO - for those of you who don't listen to oldies stations or classic rock outlets - stands for Electric Light Orchestra. A fact that none of our parents would have known or ever cared to know. But you remember. Or else you have an older sibling who remembers, or you have parents who remember, or a guidance counselor who remembers, or the old guy on the park bench who remembers! Good grief. I feel old. Now just follow me here. I want you to just start humming this tune gently to yourself. "Sun is shining in the sky/There ain't a cloud in sight/ It's stopped rainin' /Everybody's in a play and don't you know/ it's a beautiful new day/ hey-eh-yay." Great poetry, I know. But just keep going until you get to the chorus: "Mr Blue Sky/Please tell us why/You had to stay away for so long..." and see if IT (the song, the feeling, the decade) doesn't stay with you (refusing to leave your thoughts) for the next month or so. I myself can't get it out of my head!  (Another of ELO's big hits. Look it up.)

So This is Summer?

The guy who makes the weather nice!

Goethe said...

Goethe said that humankind could not endure a succession of fair days (i.e sunny weather), but looking out the window here, catching the first glimpse of what I hope will be that "endless summer" feeling, I beg to disagree...

Pierre Bonnard - Images of Summer

 It just wouldn't be summer without Pierre Bonnard.

The Way We Live Now

With all the current noise about Dickens, it would be easy to miss the fact that another Victorian is casting his shadow over today's literary landscape. Anthony Trollope's  The Way We Live Now remains the supreme example of the state of the nation novel, a sprawling tour de force with a huge cast of characters and a labyrinthine plot. The shifting viewpoints, keen engagement with contemporary themes, and use of London as a microcosm: this is the model upon which a number of important recent novels have drawn.

1. The Way We Live Now (Vintage Classics)
2. by Anthony Trollope
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

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1. Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book

With our robber-baron bankers, our financial panics, our privileged political elite and our disenfranchised migrant workers, it can feel as if we are living through a new Victorian era; certainly the narrative mode that Trollope established in The Way We Live Now has seen a renaissance in recent years, and specifically in a certain breed of sweeping, often sentimental London-based novel. While one can find traces of Trollope's ensemble approach to the capital in earlier books – Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Iain Sinclair's Downriver spring to mind – it has taken the boom-and-bust noughties to restore this particular novel to the forefront of our cultural consciousness.Trollope returned to England from Australia in 1872 and, disgusted by the unscrupulousness and greed he found in that particular period of irrational exuberance (one of whose features was easily secured mortgages), he wrote a satire attacking the shady financiers and those who kowtowed to them. The action turns around the banker Augustus Melmotte and some dodgy stock-price manipulation, the society dame-turned-trashy novelist Lady Carbury, the wide-eyed farm girl Ruby Ruggles, the upright young engineer Paul Montague, and a host of other characters who, over the course of more than 800 pages, fight and scheme and fall in love. In the end, the reader's sympathies are so firmly knitted into the narrative that it is something of a wrench to look up from the book and find that these are not our friends, but made-up characters. London novels have never gone away, of course, from Maureen Duffy's  excellent Capital (1975) to Ian McEwan's more recent Saturday. But as the credit crunch hit, with London at its heart, it became clear that few writers had engaged successfully with the financial and economic stories that filled the front pages of our newspapers. And it has turned out to be Trollope who provided the best model for marrying the seemingly irreconcilable worlds that make up a global metropolis like London. Foremost among the neo-Trollopians are Amanda Craig ( Hearts and Minds), Sebastian Faulks (A Week in December) Justin Cartwright (Other People's Money) and now John Lanchester  with his forthcoming Capital. The similarity in subject matter and formal approach of these four novels is uncanny. Each uses a cast of characters drawn from across the social spectrum; each has a racy thriller-ish subplot that hurries the narrative along; each is fascinated with property and money; each takes an essentially tribal approach to London, showing the isolation of the urban condition, and yet counteracts this structurally by using the intersection and (often romantic) coming together of the various strands to give London life a comforting coherence. These novels are beacons against the alienating multiplicity of city life. - Alex Preston (The Guardian 2-13-12)