If the number of books I read is any indicator of my leisure time (and I would posit that it is), then it should be obvious that I haven't been getting through much lately. Until now, that is. And it is alway such a delight to find that time, squeezed in between stops on my commuter train, or over a bagel at the breakfast table when I'm "home alone" at my London digs, or enjoying my "night off" on Tuesdays.
I made a conscious decision when we came back from Brazil to stop buying books until I'd made some headway into the large backlog of reading that I'd piled up as a result of ordering a massive list of books just before the birth of our second child. As our son has just turned three, that's a pretty good indicator of how long it's taken me to clear the shelves. Not entirely - I probably never will - but to the point where I sometimes struggle to find something that grabs me.
So it helps a lot that my housemate in London, where I spend three nights a week, has a very well stocked library with very little overlap to my own previous reading. I've definitely found a new source of good reads on the cheap (yes, yes, I've heard of the library).
I've just finished reading Shusaku Endo's Scandal, which I found hard to put down, full as it is of sex and death and insinuations of darkness. I'd heard of Endo before as a Catholic voice in Japan, especially his Silence, which is on my wish list, although I'd not read any of his work. And here were a couple of his novels right on the shelf.
Scandal took me back to the stretches I spent working in Japan. Long weekends in Tokyo hanging out with my mates in Roppongi, Harajuku and Kamata. Some of the very few times I've actually enjoyed clubbing, staying out all night until the first trains. Cold rainy streets and leafless trees. The decadence of the gaijin nightclubs stopped short of some of the excesses of Scandal but it was easy for me to form an image as a result. I'm looking forward to the next Endo, and then more from the shelves.
And then last night I had a really amazing journey up from London to the country where we live at the weekend. I was reading some of the Flannery O'Connor stories - A View of the Woods (which follows on extremely well from the Endo), The Enduring Chill, The Comforts of Home and Everything That Rises Must Converge. And I had Lucinda Williams on the iPod. And I was barrelling across the Southeast of England and in a reverie I was suddenly back in the US. The hot sweaty summer I spent living in Muncie, Indiana. One night, after a fight with a girlfriend, she threw a ring I had given her (not engagement, mind) into the White River. I was knee-deep in the river looking for the ring by moonlight.
One night when I was working in Lake Charles, Louisiana, my ex and I decided to go to out in the sticks toward Lafayette looking for some zydeco. We were hoping we might even come across Boozoo Chavis, but we didn't. However, we did come across a magical cajun hootenany of sorts. As the night wore on, we each got a turn on the triangle and some of the other percussion - I've never forgotten the comment, "The Cajuns are the only ones doing anything with the triangle these days." The name of the band has slipped my mind, my ex took the Boozoo CD, but the evening remains to be drawn out of my past on nights like last night.
Well, I have a little confession to make. I bought books. Two of 'em. Broke my own rules. But they're both more references than reading material, and I had my reasons.
First up, I bought Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat Book. Not being a big television watcher, I've never seen his River Cottage programmes, which some people find annoying and self-righteous, but I find it really hard to argue with what he has to say about raising his own food, particularly meat. I had seen a page excerpt from this book in the most recent issue of The Ecologist that 'exploded' a pig into all of its cuts of meat. I've been wanting something like this that demystifies the British cuts, because they have different names to the US cuts (and the Brazilian cuts), so it had that to offer, and it was 60% off at Borders.co.uk (yes, they use Amazon for fulfillment, but Borders gets a cut - the same applies in the US - and I'm a Borders shareholder). £10 instead of £25. This is a helluva book.
And second, I bought a copy of John Seymour's The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. This book had been in my Amazon shopping basket for some time, and with their requirement to buy £19 for free delivery, it was the one that most interested me to get my total over that target. So, I saved shipping costs (and 30% on this title) and the net result was 2 books with a cover price of £45 for £24 delivered. At least there was a measure of frugality involved.
Hats off, BTW, to Amazon. Against an estimated shipping date of 22 January, books ordered late on the 18th arrived first thing on the 20th, a whole day before I even received their shipping notification. I suppose it's a little secret of theirs - there really is no difference in their shipping modes, and they are anxious to book revenue, so if they're not busy, there's no point in paying for expedited shipping.
I've just finished reading Stanley Crawford's A Garlic Testament. Subtitled "Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm", this book follows its author, his family and his friends through the year of toil and reward as they live close to the land, growing garlic and a few other crops to be sold in local farmers markets and craft fairs.
Crawford's book is about much more than truck farming. Its chapters are snapshots of the seasons in context, of the rhythms of life on the farm. You follow as he experiments with garlic cultivars and techniques of cultivation (a crop for which little published information exists), learning both from his mistakes and his accumulated wisdom. Because he knows garlic, you learn more about it than you thought there was to know. You grow up; grow older with him as he takes a more circumspect view of his own life. How, for instance, he moved away from the hardcore organic farming he intended to practice when he "dropped out" in the early 1970s, through a more input-intensive farming, and then back to something not quite certified organic, perhaps, but both practical and natural.
You share his guilt for his own involvement in the march of progress, but also his remorse; his healing. "Here's what I've learned from my life", he seems to say, "and want to pass along - because it's worth passing along." Crawford may have dropped out, but this whole book is about his participation in his life and times.
I loved Crawford's account of mucking in with the annual maintenance of the acequia - the irrigation watercourse. It's not the hard work - it's the simple presence of the old acequia, held together by a sense of community; an appreciation of its utility - that makes this section so engaging. Crawford admits it may not be the most efficient means of irrigating his fields, but he writes from a place where tradition and community matter more than efficiency. I understand he's written another book on this subject, and I'm tempted to look for it as well, when the moratorium on new book purchases is lifted.
I must have bought this book when it was first published in 1992. I found my old bookmark on page 150 (the book is about 240 pages). I can no longer remember why I set it aside back then, but I wonder if it would have made any difference to the trajectory of my career.
I missed out on the final chapters, when you sense Crawford drawing in his experiences into some kind of a philosophy and celebration of the farming life. I doubt I was receptive in those days to his message of rootedness. I was a world traveller at the time, moving from project to project with my heart set on seeing the world. Rural New Mexico no doubt would have seemed a small place to me.
And yet here I am today, thinking along the same lines as Crawford. I've seen the world - it's big, it's out there. And I'm more ready now to find my own place in it and start growing roots like his. Thus the name of this blog...thus, the project.
Well, sort of. I've just finished reading Bernd Längin's Plain and Amish: An Alternative to Modern Pessimism. It's a wonderful profile of life in America's Amish Country (principally Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania).
I grew up in Pennsylvania, but didn't know much about the Amish apart from, well, Witness. There's a reason for that...the Amish keep to themselves, of course. The less the Englischers get involved in their lives, the better. We went out to "Pennsylvania Dutch" country on our last visit to the US, and I was intrigued enough to pick up this book.
In this book Längin, a German journalist who specialises in research of communities of ethnic Germans who live outside of Germany but maintain their German culture (and there are, interestingly, a good number of these), is given broad access to the Amish through his stay on an Amish farm in Indiana. He also travels to other Amish enclaves in the US and visits their homeland in Switzerland. His story intersperses chapters about all aspects of Amish life - faith, work, family - with chapters about Amish and Anabaptist history from its origins in the 1500s.
At times the book is a little more detail than you maybe wanted - long lists of German family names that are typical in particular regions of Switzerland or Alsace, descriptions of obscure early Anabaptist martyrs that even the Amish don't seem to know or care much about. But to make up for that you have some engaging descriptions of what daily life is really about. Life in a one-room schoolhouse. Gelding a horse. What it's like to sit through a 6-hour church service, or tough out a -40 degree Indiana winter (equally cold in Fahrenheit or centigrade). And the translation is excellent - a most readable book that doesn't get lost in esoterics despite its "about Germans, by a German, for Germans" framework.
Life is simple and the work is hard, but that's the point of being Amish. I can't say it made a convert out of me, but neither is it really that unimaginable - living a simple life with strong faith in the next life. The book makes the point several times that the Amish aren't really evangelising outside their faith - their own existence is their witness.
Via Metafilter, some wonderful news. The Paris Review is finally opening up its archive of more than 300 "Writers at Work" interviews, under the odd heading "The DNA of Literature."
Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come.
Wow...it's taken them a LOOOOOONG time to realise that the Internet might just make this cheap and easy, and even today the whole archive is not available - so far, only the interviews from the 1950s are on-line, but they're aiming to get the whole set up by mid-2005. And if it's not the whole PR archive, at least it's the most interesting part, and it fulfills a long-standing wish of my own.
Since leaving Brazil, I've been on a real downshifting kick. I've almost completely stopped buying books, for instance. We have too many unread for me to justify further filling the shelves. I've also stopped buying CDs for the same reason. It's time to get closer to the existing library. And I've been making some headway in that direction.
In that vein, I've just taken the decision not to renew my subscriptions to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. For the first time in more than a decade the relentless influx of magazines might slow down a bit.
This isn't the easiest decision for me. In a sense, I've always subscribed to the New Yorker. We had it when I was a kid, and as soon as I went to university, I entered my own subscription, which I've kept up all these years. And I've been taking the New York Review for a decade or more.
But as much as I have a history with these magazines, I also now have an enormous backlog to clear through. I probably have six months worth of New Yorkers and two years of NYRs. I've been trying to clear the backlog by reading the most recent first. It helps a bit - you can skip over huge swaths of election coverage (a long profile of Howard Dean, for instance) and cherry pick coverage of the Iraq war or Darfur. I want to keep current, but I also have to be a bit more judicious with the use of my reading time.
I have to say that this decision has been made easier by my recent displeasure with some of the New Yorker reportage. I find their editing to be slipping. An article by Bill Buford called "The Pasta Station" in the food issue was just indulgent and poorly structured (I thought he was an editor himself, but maybe he's stepped back). Bourdain did the restaurant scene in Kitchen Confidential to such at extent that I wonder if Buford hasn't bothered to read him, or if maybe he thinks imitation might help to sell more books.
There's also been a rise in unnecessary obscenity. Why "cow shit" and not "cow dung" in the text of an article - it wasn't a quote. And IIRC, Buford's article used the "F" word in a context where it was completely unnecessary, just salty (again, Bourdain gave us plenty of this).
The NYR is another story. I've just not got the time to plough through it any more. I'm taking the London Review of Books, which is a country cousin to the NYR. I can't claim to read it religiously (apart from the classifieds!), but I find it less important to do so. I think I've just lost my taste for "lit crit" or "book chat" or whatever much of it turns out to be.
These two magazines were pillars of my reading. They've brought me many hours of pleasure. My long summer in Syria I read them from cover to cover. I probably knew more about what was going on in New York that summer (1992) than most residents. But now I'm letting them go. It will save me nearly $200 per year. And on the bright side, I've still got a mountainous backlog to get through.
I've just received the last NYR, and the New Yorker runs out in January. ¡Adiós, amigos!
I've had a bit of difficulty this week shifting gears. The first week of my "sabbatical" is still consumed with its novelty value. That is, I'm still more on vacation than really off of work. Which is okay - this is the week of paid vacation, after all. Starting next week, it's a different reality. Maybe.
Still, if I'm not really unwinding, I am at least spending more time reading than I'm accustomed to. And as a result, I've put a few more notches on the nightstand. Well, so to speak.
I finished reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This took me longer to read than I expected - it was slow going, but valuable. At times it was like biology class all over again, and then she would just drop in profundities of creation and the great miracle of life. The spendthrift creator. Seeing things when you slow down to look for them.
After that I read CS Lewis's Mere Christianity. I found it dated. Interesting at times, but not the "timeless classic" I was expecting. I enjoyed his wordcraft, but still didn't find his exposition really talking to me. Early on, I was wondering how this would have gone down on the radio. Where were the natural breaks?
And then Ray Brooks's Blowing Zen. A successful young man loses his way...life becomes shallow and meaningless. After a long search, he finds a focal point in the shakuhachi "zen flute" while living and working in Japan. It's an enjoyable read for his portrait of ex-pat life in Japan - he captures what it's like without tripping over into rampant stereotype. For the most part, he steers clear of the outwardly zen side of things, but gives a good account of what's involved in grabbing hold of something passionately and giving it your all.
Now I'm reading David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. I think of this as my first real sabbatical read, since one of my goals is to take a look at what I've done and where I'm going with my career at its "midpoint". I'm more than halfway through the book and, well, I'm not sure I'm getting much out of it. I'll report back.
I've read Ulysses, and had the pleasure of reading part of it while I was in Dublin for a long, Guinness-soaked weekend of literary tourism. I wish I could have been there for the celebration - it's the kind of thing I would have gone out of my way for, but not hopped yet another continent.
Reminder to self: find a Guinness to celebrate. Irish Pub, anyone?
We're just back from a few days of vacation in nearby Paraty. Old Paraty is gorgeous - UNESCO-preserved streets full of enormous cobblestones; old churches; lots of arts and crafts shops; no cars!. We had a really relaxing getaway and I managed to get a fair bit of reading done. My most recently finished book is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.
Wow. I was not ready for this at all. It's sort of a wander through a life deliberately lived at a shallow level. How Binx Bolling coasts along, aiming to maintain a respectable surface while dodging the expectations of his genteel relatives, who expect from him a life of purpose - a life of doing as much as you can; of a sort of noblesse oblige. Binx is searching for something real in life; a way to avoid despair; an escape, but in life. I was reading along and suddenly a passage would just gut me.
Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
I'm still chewing this book over. Thinking about Bolling trying to avoid traps by refusing to engage them. The weight of expectations. Only feeling real when he is outside the realm of his everyday experience. The absence of certainty or faith in God.
Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of people believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics - which leaves not a percentage point for a seeker.
If you don't believe...if your whole being questions the program...how can you live? How can you stay sane?
It's been about 15 years since I read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, but in reading Percy it was crystal clear how influential he had been on Toole. I know that Percy helped to get Confederacy published. But in meeting Percy's characters, his New Orleans, I was reading right into Toole's influences.
After re-reading Lee Hoinacki's Stumbling Toward Justice, I decided I would also re-read his El Camino:Walking to Santiago de Compostela, in which he records his thoughts as he completed his pilgrimage through Spain in 1993. I enjoyed reading both of these books the first time and found new riches in them on a second reading.
A lot of Hoinacki's comments in El Camino deal with his discovery of real faith. His discoveries in the depths of the rosary, for instance, reveal a man who didn't have faith as a priest, but came to find it in practice on the camino at the age of 65.
But apart from Hoinacki's faith journey, he also finds fertile soil for comments on his critiques of institutions and modernity. I was thinking about this as I re-read my entry below on the future of engineers in the process environment. I'm not sure someone like Hoinacki would find anything of substance in that posting. Questions that have no meaning. Who cares if the engineering is done within a company or without? It's the inevitability of progress, of technique in Ellul's sense that might occupy Hoinacki.
He meets a man along the way who makes shoes for a living. The man, his age, and his father, run a small shop that will disappear when the younger man retires. Hoinacki laments the disappearance of honest work from the countryside; dignified work. The shoemaker's children have gone off to the cities; to the universities. What is to become of the village crafstman? The shoes will come from abroad, no doubt. Imported from somewhere cheaper, made by a more mechanised process. Economic inevitabilities will hollow out the meaning of local, convivial life.
There's a Todd Rundgren song called "Honest Work". It's not exactly related to the above, but it leaves a sense of the same sadness. I reproduce the lyrics below.
I'm not afraid to bend my back
I'm not afraid of dirt
But how I fear the things I do
For lack of honest work
My family is lost to me
They couldn't bear the hurt
To see the state their boy is in
For lack of honest work
I hold no blame for anyone
'Twas I who did arrange
To pay my union dues so I'd
Not have to learn or change
And when I was replaced was I
Who started down the hill
And drank away my savings 'till
I couldn't stop myself
The prophets of a brave new world
Captains of industry
Have visions grand and great designs
But none have room for me
They see a world where everyone
Is rich and smart and young
But if I live to see such things
Too late for me they come
I know I'm not the only one
To fall beneath the wheel
Such company can not assuage
The loneliness I feel
Too many are resigned to be
Society's debris
But I will be remembered for
The life life took from me
I found a version of it (not Rundgren's, which is great, but hard to find!) on iTunes. Worth checking out.
Have I confessed this before? I buy books I never read. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but maybe 2:1 (not read:read). I mean to read them. I flip through them, sometimes. I will read them. Some day.
Why own up to this? Because I already have, here in Brazil, more books than I could possibly read during the balance of our stay (now inside of 3 months). This includes an entire shelf of books in Portuguese - a language I can read, although slowly and with occasional need of a dicionário.
And now I've gone and ordered another stack of books for delivery by Amazon.com.
This ain't the cheapest pastime going. Shipping books here costs about $5 per title, regardless if it's a doorstop or a slender book for children. But the selection of English-language titles available in Brazil is pretty limited (usually mass-market, or "airport" fiction, and classic literature) and that, itself, is expensive when you can find it (as at Livraria da Travessa or at the wonderful FNAC bookstore in Barra de Tijuca, which might be the only good reason to go out there).
So, once again I've taken the plunge. Here are the titles Amazon tells me have shipped today:
The following items were included in this shipment:
A pretty mixed bag--er, box. And again, not possible I'm going to read all of this before we leave.
I recently came across the comment that we tend to read what reinforces our own world-view, rather than that which challenges it. I suspect this is true, especially given the above, although I do expect to be challenged by some of the titles on the list.
You can also glean the fact that I am itching to get back to my own home and my own kitchen and get back into the rhythm of the seasons I am more familiar with: cider-making, brewing - things you can't really do in the tropics.
I made a sort of commitment to myself that during Lent I would concentrate my reading on more spiritual subjects. I have never read the New Testament through, so that's on my reading list (I've read Matthew and Mark so far). I also intended to read some of the works of St John of the Cross. And while I've been doing a bit of that reading, I've also fallen back into the writings of Lee Hoinacki (see my Thinking Over page).
Hoinacki's book Stumbling Toward Justice is a recounting of a life spent rejecting conventional modes of living in search of a more authentic existence, outside the grip of institutions. Hoinacki calls the modern conception of progress "a lie, a terrible and cruel trap." At times he's a bit cantankerous and un-PC; bitterly critical of universities, medical treatment, transportation, agriculture, even modern childhood. To me, while his stated objective is to "sow doubt", his words ring with truth. He's a man who awoke to the gifts of his own upbringing as the son of a frugal immigrant in small-town America in a simpler time; who realises that America was not made for what it has become.
A sad but not unexpected passing, the BBC's Alistair Cooke has died, aged 95. I read a few weeks back about how Mr Cooke's ill-health had spelled an end to his weekly programme, "Letter from America."
I'll confess that recently I'd been a pretty indifferent listener to the programme. Every time I tuned it, it seemed to be about golf. I respect it more for the institution it had become. No one lives forever, but give Cooke credit - he carried on for 58 years and only missed three installments. He started his letters when he was my age (37), and carried it on for the rest of his life.
I'm not sure how well-known Cooke is in the US. I remember him from some films we saw in elementary school in the 1970s. That sort of puts it in perspective for me. He had a 30+ year career since then, and had already had one before that time. He seemed to genuinely love what he was doing.
While it's hard to imagine a more British voice, I guess from his "honorary" knighthood that he had accepted US citizenship at some point many years ago.
I have taken advantage of the long break over the holidays to clear through a backlog of reading and even move forward a bit. Some of these I finished in November and December:
Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life. The author, William Leach, takes as his thesis that mobility has destroyed the attachment of a people to a place. In a very American context, he points to the construction of a huge network of interstate highways ("palace roads"), air travel, intermodal shipping, the rise of the tourism and gambling economies, the trend in employment away from "jobs for life" to temporary work, and especially the impact that this dynamic has had on the academy. He cites these trends as representing an emerging culture of the "temporary" that has supplanted, what?..agrarian groundedness? He also suggests that this groundedness is a bit of a myth, since these people do not have deep multi-generational ties to the land, at least not to this land.
100 Days on Holy Island: A Writer's Exile - This book, by Peter Mortimer, takes my prize for the worst read of 2003. Actually, my least favourite read in a very long time. Okay...one of the worst books I've ever read. As I read further and further, I kept thinking, "There's something really wrong with this concept, and with its execution." He went for "a writer's exile", but he had no reason for it, didn't stay put on the island, and really never came to matter to any of the core of native islanders. He picked a "holy" place, but chose to prattle on shallowly about religion. He's hanging out in pubs, looking for companionship, mostly from other incomers. It seemed like an excuse to get away from his domestic situation, but he didn't make much of a book out of this acquired freedom. And the "error" he finds in a book by an American writer is no error if you know what you're talking about.
Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos- a book about a young French priest who carries on his ministry while his physical condition deteriorates due to progressing cancer. The priest carries his illness as a mark of a more universal suffering. While he wavers in his own thoughts, he never loses faith unto the end. The more he suffers, the more grace is present. A strong story.
My primary accomplishment over the holiday period was to put the Christopher Alexander books behind me. I had been hauling A Pattern Language around with me since August, as is evidenced by my bookmark that I bought on our trip to Belo Horizonte. This 1100+ page tome is not an easy read - it's about 250 short chapters about the different components of Alexander's somewhat-definitive pattern language.
After spending bits and pieces of five months reading A Pattern Language, I finished the third book in Alexander's original trilogy, The Oregon Experiment, in about 24 hours. It's a particular application of Alexander's philosophy as adapted to the ownership conditions of a large state university. It's not particularly helpful to the amateur, but I found its most useful contribution to be that it shows how the ongoing application of the philosophy would eventually result in an environment that has more of the "quality without a name", even if it did not start off that way.
The trilogy is an extensive work. Alexander's concept of a "pattern language" is credited in computer science circles with giving rise to object oriented programming technique. I'm not sure a computer science reader would actually take that away from an actual reading of the Alexander books - a precis would be enough. But what you do get from reading the trilogy is an introduction to the philosophy and a toolkit for the actual implementation in the built environment.
At times, I found the going a bit woolly. Some of the references cited are dated. Some of the patterns are a bit "out there". At times it seems a bit 1970s idealistic. But then, Alexander leaves you free to excerpt and to amend - the point is to come up with a pattern language that is right for you - there isn't just the one. It's also right to say that this is not a detailed "how-to" book for construction.
Still, the main text of A Pattern Language gives plenty of useful starting points, and maybe the most useful thing is that, once you've read down into the patterns deep enough, you start to see the point of the overall language - the inter-relationships. How, if you use the patterns, you pretty much have to design buildings that live. Some say it's an early application of hypertext. To the extent that certain patterns interact with higher- or lower-level patterns, this has a measure of truth to it, but I'm not sure you'd see it all the same way if you looked at it in hypertext, as some sites on the web have tried to do.
I also finished reading Bread in the Wilderness, by Thomas Merton, which is a collection of reflections on praying the psalms. Not what I was expecting. Somewhat less, rather. While I think I understand enough of what he said to take his points, I think I'd have taken more from this if I was more familiar with the psalms to start with.
My final book for 2003 was The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov. This was a gift and a "must read" from a friend of mine who was visiting here in Rio. It's remarkable for what it is - a snapshot of the uneasy cohabitation of the peasant capitalists and the Communists in the late 1920s. It's also an extremely funny book, and one I'd never heard of. Apparently it remained so widely known and popular throughout the Communist years that it was insuppressible, even though it leveled some charges and personified some types that would continue to plague the Communists for all their time in power.
And finally, since New Year's Day I've managed to get through Frank Moorhouse's Grand Days. It's a longish novel about the early days of the League of Nations, told through the eyes of a young idealistic Australian woman who was sent to work in the Secretariat. The history is interesting, although I'm not sure I found the main characters all that credible (hey, it's fiction!). Edith Campbell Berry has an earnestness and naïvetée that makes it at times pretty incredible she is at her position.
So now I've got clear shelves (still haven't made it back to the Portuguese books - a part of me thinks this will only happen when we've left Brazil). I am planning to start into the Kristin Lavransdotter trilogy by Sigrid Undset.
Actually, I've been reading a couple of books alongside Timeless: first, a (re-)reading of Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, for historical interest, rather than religious reasons.
Second, I am reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but I am reading it in Portuguese - Uma Vida Interrompida. My wife was reading it in
English at the same time (she started just after I did, but she couldn't put it down, so she passed me on the second day). Anyway, I am about 50 pages into that, about half-way home in Pagels.
And now I am starting Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which is the second volume in the series, but pretty much must be read integrally with The Timeless Way of Building. At slightly more than 1100 pages of practical information, this one could take a while (heck, it could take a lifetime) to choke down.
Last night I put the finishing touches on Christoper Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building. This is a long "sort-of manifesto" (my quotes) of Alexander's philosophy of architecture. Or better, of building. Alexander argues that anyone can build, and that the tools we need to understand the built environment are already there, and always have been. And that if we would look to them - to the "patterns" that define our surroundings, we can learn from them and incorporate them into our own structures, and that this is, in fact, the only way to build buildings, neighbourhoods, towns and regions that "live".
The essence of these patterns is "the quality without a name." The quality without a name is really a lot of qualities, rolled up into one, none of which are dominant. You play the game of looking for the name of the quality without one but it's pointless - Alexander's point here may be that we just do not have the vocabulary we need to talk coherently about what makes the built landscape live because we have not learned how to look at it.
I can't remember exactly what thread I was following that took me to his works. They are, perhaps, a bit dated. The ideas themselves are, indeed, "timeless". And he rejects the charge that he longs for an idyllic past, which might be easy to level if he hadn't gone out of his way to refute it, and then to say that what he does want is an egoless, "innocent" approach to building - maybe he means naive; vernacular. That the hand of the expert builder, improperly introduced, can build no "living" thing.
I felt at times: what is this? The Zen of Building? The Tao of Building? It does seem this way. And from what I've read around, he has many critics, and maybe even himself he rejects the original premise as impossible to quantify.
Alexander seems to have moved even beyond The Timeless Way to a more comprehensive, exhaustive explanation of the "quality" - The Nature of Order. I look forward to the release of these books, pricey though they are. It occurs to me that as a summary of the life work of an observant genius; you look at the price tag and you say, hmmm, pretty reasonable for what you get.
In the mean time, I aim to press on with the Alexander philosophy. I think that for a layman like me, they teach a lot about how to approach the search for a home that echoes and amplifies the life taking place around it - both outside and within.
I finished reading the Paul Elie book last night. Overall, an enjoyable read, although I got the sense that the end was a bit rushed. I guess with many of his main characters dead the technique of interchange between them disappeared and he was more intent on completing the game of musical chairs - one after the other being removed from the circle. He did a fine job at the end of summarising, and interpreting, what the life of each - Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy - had meant as a pilgrimage, and how they had interacted with the others (directly or not) to compose a moment that neither could be repeated nor would have been so meaningful if not for the others. Worth the effort.
And now I have a problem. What to read next. I took four books to bed last night: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sigrid Undset's The Garland (Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1), Nicholas Howe's Across an Inland Sea and the letters of Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller (1935-1980). Guess which I chose: none of them.
Yesterday Amazon brought me some more new books - this time (finally) some titles from Christopher Alexander. I received A Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment yesterday. I am still waiting for A Pattern Language, but since Timeless is first in the "series", I have chosen to read it first. I made it through the first 40 pages at lunch today.
I do not know much about Alexander - not more, anyway, than what is found on the web. He is well-regarded not only in architectural circles, but also in the field of computer programming, where A Pattern Language is regarded to have been a big influence on OOP (object-oriented programming). Since that subject interests me, and I am interested in some of his ideas about building, I have decided to invest (and invest it is) in his books. I have bought these three now, and if they make sense to me, I will step up to buy his next round of books, The Nature of Order, which look to be the life's work of a regarded multidisciplinary genius, currently struggling their way through the publishing process.
My most recent reading has been Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Elie interlaces the biographies of four American Catholic writers in the mid-20th Century, about the time when, he argues, American Catholicism was coming of age. The subject of the book is the "pilgrimage" these writers make of their lives, and the impact they had on the American conscience in the post-Second World War era.
I really bought this book as a follow-on to the Thomas Merton book I read earlier this year. I have seen lots of references in my browsing around on Catholic subjects to its other three subjects: Dorothy Day, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. One thing that caught my attention, obviously, was the fact that three of these four writers were converts to Catholicism. So far, an interesting read, made more so by Elie's technique of interspersing snippets of the lives of each, the tangents, the people they knew in common, even when their paths crossed.
I want to give Samuel Florman a minute's credit. He is a civil engineer who has enjoyed his career - a builder of structures who celebrates in the building the triumph of human ingenuity over nature. He is a passionate defender of the unpassionate profession of engineering. Engineers, in his view, just get on with it.
Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering was first published in the 1970s as a response to the anti-technology movement that features highly in my "thinking over" list. He argues that these critics (Ellul, Roszak, Mumford, etc) are wrong in vilifying technology as a standalone evil...technology, he argues, is the manifestation of man's desire for progress.
I first noted Florman's book in a Slashdot discussion back in April. I was pleased to see at least a few Slashdotters come up with an awareness of the issues surrounding the role of appropriate technology. I suppose that at least some engineers (myself included) ask these questions in spite of the unflinching acceptance of the role of technology (for better or worse) that the engineering establishment supposes as the raison d'etre of the profession, generally speaking.
Florman is well-read and considerate, and at moments I could accept some of his contentions. But largely, I could not. I felt that Florman was using technology, or technique, as a straw man, to skirt the major issue...the role of capital, and the need for growth, as a prime driver in the Western economies. Florman never arrived at the watershed...he acknowledged that sometimes technology went too far, but he never acknowledged its intrinsic need to do so, to move to the point where it became technology for technology's sake. I think the critics would argue that this is a natural progression, and that we may not be aware of it. But iatrogenic illness, teaching that does not educate - these are systemic failures of the advance of progress for its own sake. Illich in particular (not cited by Florman) calls attention to the mechanisms by which technique takes hold of the modern economy - we spend more effort fixing the ills caused by progress than we benefit from the marginal "progress" itself. We reach a stage (gradually) at which we can no longer distinguish the common weal from the noisy quest for economic advancement tied to financial gain.
I don't want to go too far with this. I think Florman makes an attempt to keep engineers from losing sleep at night, challenged as they might be by the anti-technology critics. But engineers are adaptable...it was ever thus. He writes of the golden age of engineering without ever acknowledging that this was quite possibly the age in which we reached the limits - the watersheds - of the need for advancing technology. I would argue that the continuing progress in engineering reaches a point of diminishing returns, but we, as an economic system focused on growth, don't have the frame of reference to know when exactly that occurs. We can thus founder on the rocks, thinking we are improving our lot when in fact we are making it worse.
I also don't want to seem a total Luddite. I am an engineer, and I respect a role for technology in today's world. I reckon we would be starving without it, but I also reckon we would not have been so careless with our population had we not had the crutch of better living through chemistry or biology or genetic engineering to keep us going this long. So it all comes down to a question of why. I think Florman argues that the engineer's role traditionally has not been to ask this question, but to serve it when it is answered by others - politicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs. He argues that we might do better as engineers to ask and answer the question for ourselves. Then, he suggests, we might equip ourselves with the tools and acquire the prestige we need to reach our destiny as engineers. But in the mean time, we exist, therefore we engineer...ours is not to ask such questions.
Do I buy it? No. I was glad to have a critical view. I still believe that there is a fundamental re-awakening that is overdue; that the key missing element is the dimension of the accumulation of social capital - common wealth
I saw a copy of Tracy Chevalier's novel, Girl with the Pearl Earring, on the shelf at a friend's house, and the picture reminded me of the Vermeer exhibit I saw in London a few years back. I saw a copy of the book at Heathrow and decided to give it a read. It's a quickie - a historical novel about the girl who posed for the picture, imagined by Chevalier to be a maid to the Vermeer family.
I finished reading Ellmann's biography of James Joyce at the end of June. I made a pledge to myself to get through it before we went home, since I didn't fancy hauling its immensity around the UK with me.
Joyce lived a complicated existence. I came away ambivalent about him...polyglot polymathic genius, to be sure. But also an irresponsible, unreliable, totally self-serving man whose family and friends both acknowledged his charisma and suffered his excesses and flippancy. I feel I understand Ulysses much better for having seen his milieu and his work practices. I also quite enjoyed reading about how he took his place in the literary circles. He was sensitive, a letter writer, a campaigner for his own views, and yet totally apolitical, even against the backdrop of Ireland's independence movement. I could identify with Joyce's sense of Irishness...you could never take the Ireland out of the boy, but you could not get the self-exiled man ever to come back home.
I spent the past weekend with my nose in the Ellmann book. It is hard to take it out, actually. Reading Joyce (and I've only read Ulysses) is a labour of love. It took me three tries (and two guidebooks) to get through Ulysses, but once you get up the momentum and get an idea of what is going on, it is an absolute treasure trove of detail.
Reading Ellmann, you relive Joyce's life in intense detail (I am up to about the age of 25 now), learning how his education, his lonely sense of genius and his needy and often quarrelsome relationships with his friends and family provided him with the raw material for his writing.
I was particularly taken with Joyce's decision to be an exile from Ireland. Ellmann writes of how he was neither asked to leave nor forbidden to return, but how he felt more at home outside of Ireland, living with a perpetual bone to pick with the intellectuals of the day. It made it hard for him to network, hard to earn a living and hard to get published, but it also forced him to apply himself through his own talent, repeatedly polishing his works until they shone.
I still have a long way to go. I hope to finish this month, and I can't wait to get to the section covering the writing of Ulysses.
I just went a bit mad today and ordered about 50 books on-line, all different, all for me. Most were from Amazon, although I bought about half a dozen from small used book dealers through the wonderful ABE Books. I ordered them delivered to the UK so that I can bring them back with me in July when we move to Rio. Mostly pent-up demand from my back-list. Here's hoping my baggage allowance survives this experience. I have no real idea how heavy these 50-odd items will be.
I finished reading Richard Powers' Plowing the Dark over the weekend. Compulsive reading - I was on the cusp of not being able to put it down (only the varying demands of fatherhood and husbandhood intervened). A wonderful confluence of art, technology and politics. A search for meaning in worlds of emptiness.
Here's another Powers interview from The Atlantic Unbound.
Next up is Victor Klemperer's diaries from 1933-1941, I Will Bear Witness. I've been wanting to read this for some time, and finally got around to ordering it. I should have ordered the second volume at the same time.
Finally, finally, I have finished reading Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. It has taken me nearly three months to get through it, interrupted as I have been by the stream of self-inflicted new titles pouring in from Amazon and ABE Books. Durrell played second fiddle a lot during these past months, but I kept him close enough to hand to make it all the way through (unlike Hobsbawm and Pessoa, still languishing over there on the "current reading" list, where I reckon they will linger a while longer yet).
I enjoyed the experience of reading Durrell, although at times I found it a bit frustrating. In the end, he twists you and pulls you so many different and (sometimes) far-fetched ways, you cannot help but think you are on an encyclopedic tour of the forms that love can take.
Toward the end, I actually found myself echoing Durrell (one thing he does quite well is put his first-person narrator, Darley, in the shadow of a superior writer called Pursewarden). Durrell reads Pursewarden's writing, and you start to see Pursewarden's style in Darley, but Darley still leaves some of the masterstrokes, especially of the established English tradition in writing, for Pursewarden's pen. Darley fears that, having read Pursewarden, he will never turn out to be a great writer. For myself, having endured Alex, I wonder if I will ever have the patience to sit down and produce something on a scale like this.
I say that, and yet the scale is quite intimate, so there must be (and is) something of a depth to the writing. Because he approaches the same story several times over, and each time it grows more profound (and twisted). But each pass tells you more about the characters until at the end - I wouldn't say they are surreal, but they are very human.
Maybe the only character that takes full form is Alexandria, the city itself. But one will never know. I found myself looking back in my memory for any semblance to the place that I visited. But I was only there a short time (a week) and I certainly never came to know and haunt a place like Darley's ex-pats. And, of course, the Alexandria of the late 1930s and 1940s exists no longer except in places like Durrell's quartet.
If I have one complaint, it's that the last volume, Clea seemed a bit stage-managed. There's the quote from Chekhov about introducing a gun in the first act and having to see it used. This happens in Clea. All of its scenes on the sandbar beach seem a bit contrived. And to keep the twists going, things do keep getting more and more twisted and interconnected (sometimes just a bit too coincidentally). Maybe this was because Durrell was revisiting this story over a long period of time and continued to need material to keep it fresh. I wonder if he'd thought of the plot of Clea when he was writing the first volumes, or if his points continued to evolve over the years.
I find myself very curious to read Durrell's correspondence with Henry Miller, which I understand was published. I wonder a lot about the isolation he endured in Greece - how productive that must have been for him. I'd like to read more about him and may pursue some biographical material, as well as read his last work, Caesar's Vast Ghost, about Provence and, eventually, finish (i.e., re-read) Bitter Lemons, the only other book of his I currently own.
Thomas Pynchon on George Orwell's 1984, courtesy of a brief link at The Sideshow.
I'm putting the finishing touches on reading three books. First, the previously mentioned Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, next the brief essay by Rachel Carson, enhanced with beautiful photographs and published as The Sense of Wonder, and finally, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.
Separately, each is a lovely book. Merton's story of his conversion to the Catholic faith and entry into a Trappist monastery has moved me beyond mention. I probably have more questions than answers about the mysteries of Christianity, but I suppose that Merton's book is more about taking the time to ask the questions than to let them remain unanswered. And throughout it is a sense of the world innately more valuable than as a backdrop on which to play out our modern lives. The book has its flaws, most of which are cited in the introduction. I reckon it is important to realise that this was the work of a young man just entering the monastery; just taking up his vocation. From what I know of Merton, the depth of his spiritual understanding continued to increase throughout his life, and I reckon he may have wished to amend the book later in life - perhaps his later writings serve as that coda - I have not read enough of them to know.
Carson's essay is adapted and apparently fleshed out from an article she published in a magazine in the 1950s. It makes the simple point that children need to be in nature to develop the sense of wonder, and that an adult who is aware of that awakening sense should accompany the child - both to "grow" more of that sense of wonder himself and to enable the child to expand as far as possible in a safe environment. My copy has a raft of beautiful photos taken in nature in the surroundings in which Carson lived and wrote this essay. It's a fit tribute and a message to the future, and has made me think more about the role I want to have in raising my child(ren).
Finally, Leopold's book starts as a study of nature as observed in a year on his farm in a poor, sandy part of central Wisconsin in the 1940s. Leopold's eye as a conservationist has evidently developed from his life spent close to nature and to wild places. He makes the point that the more we are educated, the less we know.
In truth, all three books tend to make this point. There is much more to life than an objective, scientific viewpoint. Maybe I am reaching the point where I think I have learned this lesson in theory and now need to put it into practice. I think that is what my seeking is about. I can't claim to be deeply religious or in deep nature or deep ecology - yet. But I feel strongly that these are areas into which I need to expand my consciousness.
I am fairly well convinced that the two go hand in hand, and that making my life, and my family's lives, whole will involve completing the cycle of coming back to knowledge of nature, and back to knowledge of God, and uniting the two.
The Pope wrote in his most recent encyclical about the pilgrim church completing its journey back to God. I feel the call of the land; the call to re-unite myself with it. I feel that in that the reconciliation of myself to the land, my need for spiritual fullness will also be completed. I guess what remains is but to take the first steps.
Of course we have just moved in the opposite direction.
I am in the middle of reading Thomas Merton's "autobiography of faith", The Seven Storey Mountain. I feel a bit self-conscious of writing about why I would be reading this book, but I found Merton writing about the same uncertainty in his own faith journey, so I feel that even though I may...no, I certainly will never reach the same point in the journey, I am in good company. What I mean is that I am seeking for something...but I am not yet sure what it is. I will leave it there for now and hope I might find a spark of something in Merton to help me bridge to the next level of understanding.
Via The Memory Hole, The Observer publishes a brief interview with Matthew Branton about his giving away his fifth novel for free on the web. Quoth reporter Miranda Sawyer, "I've read it. It's great.":
MS: Why are you giving away your work?MB:The deal in British publishing is supposed to be that the crap is published and put up with because it funds the good stuff. I'm afraid that I have to ask, where is the good stuff? To quote the Manics: 'Libraries gave us power.' Not any more they don't. They're stuffed full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell's novels, along with Tony Parsons's drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days.
[...]MS: Explain your take on British culture.
MB: The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as 'better living': young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let's-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn't make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they're all in Ibiza. No. We're in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don't hear about us because really, why should we tell you?
Stop it already! With the arrival of in-laws, visiting from the UK, two more books I have recently ordered - these, used, from ABE books. First up is a book by Eric Rolls called A Celebration of the Senses, which I first read years ago, and which I have been without since separating from my first wife. I don't think this book was ever released in the US (could be wrong), but it is still available in Australia, where its publisher calls it "a joyous testament to life, and a frank and powerful exploration of the five senses." Questing for a stronger attachment to place, it seemed appropriate to me to add this back to my resources.
Also arriving is Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce, another book I've been meaning to buy and read for a long time (I finished reading Ulysses in 1999). Whenever I get up to making an order through ABE, I always check the availability of editions, and finally found one that seemed reasonable in price, quality and shipping cost. My in-laws have gone the last mile (or so) by hauling it out from England to Brazil with them. Just remains to be seen if I take the time to read it here or haul it home and read it there.
After a lot of non-fiction of late (Hoinacki, Nearing, Glendinning), I'm returning my reading attentions to the world of fiction, with Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (no link - the US editions are out of print; I bought mine via Amazon UK).
I first heard of the Quartet in a guidebook about Egypt - it was regarded for its descriptions of the city. The guidebook said that although much had changed since the 1930s, you could still see the vestiges of Durrell's Alexandria in the modern city. I couldn't find a copy then (1994, when I visited Alex), but it has always stuck in the back of my mind to pick up a copy of the book whenever I came across it. I remembered to add it to my "to buy" list, and finally bought it in my book-buying frenzy just before coming out to Brazil. So now, ten years on, and thousands of miles from its former relevance to my life, I am reading these four volumes (together in one book).
I actually started reading it during Carnaval, in early March, but have put it aside a couple of times to make room for some of my recent non-fiction reading. Yes, of course I feel bad that I am here and not devoting more energy to my Portuguese studies (and reading). But I have a logjam of stuff that interests me just now, and unfortunately a lot of it is not published or available in Portuguese. Que pena!
Anyhow, I am presently about halfway through the third volume, Mountolive, and am enjoying the change for a more straightforward narrative approach. The other volumes are more personal, and the combination of a story told from three different angles sheds a lot of light on the motivations of many of the principal characters in the story. Definitely a "fun" read.
Mountolive begins with a sort of summary of the title character's career, as he makes a tour of the diplomatic postings he holds for the British up to the point where "gets his 'K'" and is named ambassador to Egypt. This evoked in me both a recollection of reading Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios and a desire to read more (or maybe even write) sort of pulpy 1930s detective fiction - probably more Ambler, to start. Some day.
So, with a long Easter break ahead of us, I hope to finish off Alexandria and then get back to Portuguese for the balance of our first year in Brazil, which will wrap up at the end of June. Not much travel forecast between now and then (quick trip to Rio for househunting). I am thinking to finish off the Hobsbawm book (I have a loooooong way to go, and then to read some Clarice Lispector. But who knows...I have an awful lot to choose from just now, and Amazon will be beating a path to my door one of these minutes with the new order.
At the weekend, I finally made it through My Name is Chellis & I'm In Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning. I have to say that I was underwhelmed.
I came across Glendinning by way of her Schumacher lecture, which I still think is worth a read. Glendinning has moved to the back country of New Mexico, where she lives in a small, more or less native, settlement. In her lecture, she says:
In order to re-map the dominant society, we must turn to this kind of awareness, to this kind of place-based sustainability. But because the wholeness and ways of our lives have been so fragmented by what is required to conduct the bigness of empire, we - like Rex Tilousi in a cold hotel room in Salzburg - are left with disparate parts disconnected from one another. What I can tell you, from a place where the earth is pink and people grow chili and hunt elk, is that we were right, and we are right. Living in land-based community, making the future with our bodies, knowing the seasons and the land is a better way. It feels better; it looks better; it politics better; it lives better. For myself, I am in a constant state of amazement that I have the opportunity to live my life, not according to a bird's-eye-view map of nonsustainability limited to visual cues but rather according to the cartography of a living, breathing, dreaming experience of sustainability.
I was looking to her longer writing as perhaps a more complete justification for breaking with a regular urban Western professional existence, making a transition back to the land, for finding a sense of place, which is what a lot of my own searching has been about. But I really didn't find much of use in this book. So I will accept that maybe my expectations were misplaced to begin with.
Still, I find this book flawed, and to me it seems those flaws arise from the conflict inherent between her emerging worldview and her prescription for healing. Her call for a return to nature and place-based sustainability really seems to argue against her psychotherapeutic practice and the framing of her own arguments in terms of the Western understanding of the mind.
To follow her argument, Western mankind has been suffering from a 10,000-year-old wound to its primal matrix caused by domestication and the severing of the link between nature and man's survival. All of the ills of the West can be traced back to settlement. Wars resulted from border skirmishes between more and less powerful settlements and the need for territorial expansion. The woman's role in society has been damaged by the division of labour that saw men become the breadwinners, women the homemakers, and a divide in the determination of the value of useful work. This has perpetuated inequality in all civilisation since. The entire Western world has been suffering this trauma and subsequent post-traumatic stress. The only way out is to heal the wound by taking a lesson from the native peoples of this world who have not lost their connection to the land and to nature.
So far, so good. That is her thesis. But then she starts down the slippery slope of using an academic framework to unpack these ills. She makes an introduction to a nature-based way of living, then is diverted by a long litany of the catastrophes of Western living. This happens more than once. Here's how it could be...here's how it is, see? And again.
Interspersed with these societal calamities are graphic tales of personal abuse. Abuse fueled, she argues, by the failure of our civilisation to reconcile itself with its traumatised past. She invokes the suffering of Viet Nam veterans and Holocaust survivors (which struck me as a bit text-book). She really goes over the top, casting far and wide to fill the existence of Western civilisation with so many traumas and tragedies, all tied back to the original break from nature, that to deny the trauma would then itself be a symptom of the wounding. Every Westerner is suffering from PTSD, she is saying. The weight of living with the guilt is making us all sick or crazy - just because millions are similarly deluded doesn't mean they are the healthy ones.
But then it takes a psychological (or eco-psychological) approach to get to the bottom of the trauma. And in the reading, it seemed more and more like a call for professional help. Help in coming to terms with the ills and traumas of the past 350 generations. It's a big task for a book, or even a lifetime of therapy.
So, this is not self-help, and as a prescription for other-help, it fell short. I'll be frank...I found her approach to be pretty touchy-feely (which may appeal to many who consider themselves 'damaged', I concede). At times I was thinking, "Why don't you just get on with it?" Because she seems to have sorted this out for herself, but it isn't the kind of message that transfers easily through to others.
But who is it for? The 6 billion souls that pack the world? What would happen if they returned to a state of nature, hunting and gathering in a world so damaged by the past? I wasn't convinced that this is what Glendinning was after. More a talking cure, a balancing of the self that better reconciles individuals to their own place in the world.
Am I wrong? Not everyone could or wants to drop what they are doing and head for the hills. I think it speaks to rather a few - the tuned-in - those who could be persuaded to bear the guilt of past generations; to conflate the injury of the world with their own "traumatic stress." I just don't see how any of this - the communing with nature, the sweat lodges, the treatments, the native sense of holism - can be expected to impact Western civilisation at a societal level.
At times I felt that "Beavis and Butthead" voice coming up inside myself "Feel your pain...huh-huh, huh-huh." There's a section where a woman talks with a cactus, and the cactus talks back, providing spiritual guidance. Communing with nature. It stops shy of tree-hugging, but not much (one reckons a cactus to be a slightly less cuddly familiar).
I don't have a problem with people who want to live this way, but I find it a bit rich to recommend this path over others as the road to recovery. Maybe I find the whole approach implausible...unlikely to lead where it proffers; more likely to bog down in the search for a catharsis that may or may not lead to a richer understanding.
Glendinning's idealisation of native peoples neglects, or rather does not mention, the problems in their own commnities (she would, no doubt, attribute these to their interaction with the West). What she really seems to be urging is to tap the religions of these peoples. That route to wisdom seems to me "other than psychology."
Beyond that, the book is a collection of nice quotes, warm fuzzies and shock-horror sequences. I felt that there were about four or five riffs in here, clumsily woven into a plea for healing. Not the justification for a place-based existence that I was looking for.
To me, it seems that there are other routes to recognising the ills of the modern world and addressing them in a meaningful manner. Collective trauma and healing sounds a bit like original sin; responsibility for the fall. It seems it may be one path, but a long one, to approaching a sense of place. We have "evolved" this way (Glendinning would argue that we talk of evolution on the wrong scale), but there is still room for forks in the way forward (even if they may prove to be dead ends).
It seems to me that Glendinning has found herself a place in the world; a place in the country, accepted by and in community with the native people she so respects. That I truly admire. For myself (and my family), I am looking for one of these forks in the road, and this book wasn't the guide I thought it might be.
As if I needed more books in English, here's a new Amazon order, scheduled to arrive in 13-21 days (the last is a gift for my Portuguese teacher, who is studying Japanese at the moment. The Kanji book is really beautiful for what it is - a reference on the most common Japanese characters):
"The Seven Storey Mountain" - Thomas Merton
"A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River" - Aldo Leopold, Charles W. Schwartz (Illustrator)
"From Sugar Camps to Star Barns: Rural Life and Landscape in a Western Pennsylvania Community" - Sally Ann McMurry
"The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" - Samuel C. Florman
"Plowing the Dark" - Richard Powers
"I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941" - Victor Klemperer
"Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon" - Jorge Amado
"Survival In Auschwitz" - Primo Levi
"Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System (Tuttle Language Library)" - Wolfgang Hadamitzky
Author Richard Powers, interviewed in the Winter 2003 The Paris Review:
Plowing the Dark started when I heard a lecture by Terry Waite, who told about his five-year captivity in Beirut. After the lecture, he took questions from the audience and someone bluntly asked, "What was the main thing you learned in being locked up for five years?" In the moment after my stomach lurched at the question, I ran through all the possible answers: "Love life while you can," "Never take people for granted again." But his answer was shocking. He said, "Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude."
As an aside, it's a shame that TPR is so protective of its back issues. For a small-circulation literary magazine with an absolute treasure trove in its archives, a lot of really useful and interesting information is kept pent up unconstructively, far from would-be writers who might find the information useful.
I pay $20 per year to access the on-line New York Review of Books. I don't look at it all that often, but when I do I have access to their complete archives in a searchable user-friendly format. TPR should consider something like this. Or is it a question of copyright?
I finished reading Helen and Scott Nearing's The Good Life today. The Nearings were two dedicated people - dedicated to their beliefs, and dedicated to living an austere existence consistent with them. If you subscribe to their theories, you could attribute their healthy longevity to their choice to turn their backs on a "conventional" life and trade it in for life of homesteading and organic farming.
I can't say I bought into everything that they were saying - they are pretty extreme on animal rights and husbandry, on their reasons for being vegetarian (which I am not), and on their diet (pass the raw oats, every day - yikes!). But what they have provided is a sort of how-to manual for making the break. Not detailed enough to make a go of things, perhaps, but enough to show that laypeople can do these things with a little patience and a little help.
If you read between the lines, you also get the sense that the Nearings didn't abandon the world when they moved to Vermont and then to Maine. They still maintained a busy schedule of travel, writing and lecturing. And they derived some support from this (although they suggest that most of it was channeled through a foundation). It's also clear that they had a leg up on breaking with the city - they brought with them, without apologies, enough cash to get started (Scott was almost 50 when they made the move). I cannot fault them for this - I would do the same.
After finishing Lee Hoinacki's El Camino on our holiday in Peru, I wanted to dive right into his other book, Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place. I finished reading it last night.
Stumbling is a different book than El Camino. Here, Hoinacki revisits key phases of his own life, reflecting on their meaning in his intellectual journey. Like El Camino, this is beautifully written, contemplative prose, demanding extra time to take in its richness. We are exploring Hoinacki's responses to patriotism, economic citizenship, family, faith and his own place in the world.
I was interested to read about his decision to turn his back on his career in the academy and adopt a lifestyle of subsistence farming. He cites as his influences to making this move Wendell Berry, Helen and Scott Nearing, and Ivan Illich. He writes of the sense of sickness he experienced when he realised that his attaining tenure, being a "made man", as it were, essentially admitted him to the fraternity of those who would perpetuate everything that he criticised.
I also wanted to know, and learned, why he gave it up. And how he came to continue his journey through life, and to deal with arriving old age as a man of faith and principle who has lived to avoid the trappings of wealth and privilege that would have been available to him had he chosen an easier course.
Ultimately, I think what Hoinacki captures best - the message I will carry forward - is in his comments in El Camino (p.218-9) about the limits inherent in humanness:
But because I am a mere creature, there must be some criterion of limit; limit is necessarily a defining characteristic of myself as creature. Only the intention and gift of the Lord are infinite, reaching out to touch all persons. I cannot presume to act in this way. I must search for the mode proper to me. [...] My intention can affect all those whom I have touched since my birth. These are the people whose lives I have entered, the people who are a part of my life. If intention is possible, if it can reach another, then these are precisely all those whom I can hope to affect.
This is what is real: what I can touch...my own flesh, the ground under my feet, the aura of this place, the young woman who befriended me today, my family, and all those whom I have known or who have known me. For me, this is the limit of the real. I cannot reach out to some hungry child in the confusion of Africa, to some drugged young man in the hell of New York, to a yuppie in the golden ghetto of Scottsdale. For me, all these are abstract chimeras; they are not real.
[...] I have already experienced an overwhelming plethora of graces, which increases each day. Now all my attention must be focused on the other, all the others, of my life. My intention must be directed to them, away from my self.
Posted by sagwalla at 07:27 AM | Comments (0)
Although it never made the current reading list, I finished reading Lee Hoinacki's El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela while we were away in Peru. For me, this was more suitable reading (read: lightweight) than The Alexandria Quartet while shuttling between Lima, Cusco, Pisco and Machu Picchu with only two backpacks and an overnight bag to support a family of three.
In a sense it was a strange choice of book to take to Peru - oughtn't I be reading to deepen my experience of Peru? History? Vargas Llosa? But I was hooked on this one from its arrival with the Amazon delivery, and a story of walking pilgrimage, with its shortish daily chapters, seemed a good way to steal a few pages of reading in the gaps between attractions and attentions.
Hoinacki writes beautifully. It's a serious, sober and reflective work about values and faith, but he communicates his sense of intellectual wonder without losing a lay or non-academic reader. He balances the revealed mysteries of his own faith journey with the aches and pains of the trail, the constant need to push on to find shelter or food, and the small joys of a cold meal, a room to himself, or a cup of cafe con leche.
It's hard for me. I am envious of a man with faith. But why? I enjoyed the read from outwith the lens of Christian faith, but Hoinacki himself says that if you're not on pilgrimage, you're a tourist. He meets a young woman on the trail who confesses to him that she is not Catholic. Can she, she wonders, go to mass with comfort? She is bothered by the words of the priest. People on the pilgrimage are privileged compared with those who cannot afford the time away. Is there room in the world for non-religious pilgrimage? Is there meaning or is it merely walking? I suppose these are questions for individuals to answer to their own satisfaction.
When I walked the West Highland Way in 2001, I met a woman who was researching pilgrimage through her own experiences of it. The WHW is not defined as a pilgrim's trail, but if you choose to make it so, any journey could be so, no? If you use the time alone, in nature, to reflect and to pray; if that prayer helps to guide you to the end; if it helps you to understand more about yourself, well, why not view it as a pilgrimage? That you do not reach a pilgrim's church at the end need not limit the way you think of the walk. Hoinacki reaches Santiago; he goes through the motions as have the thousands or millions before him, but the point is not in the arrival, it is in the journey; the point is not in the outward expressions of religion but in the inward discoveries of faith.
At times, I came to think of our journey in Peru in a pilgrim's terms. Of course it was not. But we came to churches; we reached Machu Picchu (via train and bus). We came to places that others consider to be holy. I could think of the journey required. We learned how the Spaniards gave thanks to Saint James the Killer of Incas (refer: Santiago Matamoros). There were parallels on our journey. The travel was arduous at times. It was a journey. I looked upon the beautiful churches at Cusco and Lima with a greater awareness than I have before.
My first (big) order from Amazon US finally arrived yesterday. Actually, since I had to go get it at the main post office, it had a choice of its arrival date (Caesarian delivery). We had a note that the post office tried to deliver, but was unable (for lack of my signature) and thus I had to go to the main post office, which is only open Monday through Friday from 9-5. Very convenient.
At least it wasn't that difficult to figure out what to do when I got there - a helpful man pointed me to the appropriate window, and in a few moments I was walking back to my car with a big box full of (10) new books. The other two are presumably en route and probably have the same fate ahead of them, as I am never home when the post comes. I was surprised they could not leave it at the gatehouse.
This frames what I will be reading and doing for the foreseeable future - probably until July, when I expect we will next visit an English-speaking country. I have to find a balance between Portuguese study, Portuguese reading and English reading. It is tempting with a box full of new titles (some of which I have been thinking about for a very long time) to put aside the old stuff. That's what I did last night (after my Portuguese lesson) - pawed through a handful of new titles tasting Introductions and first chapters. Still, I would be pretty impressed if I could manage ten more titles between now and July.
My Amazon order(s) finally shipped from the US. 12 more books on the way. What bothers me about this is that they kept sending me requests to authorise further delays, then they shipped them separately (apparently), one day apart. Somehow they must have partitioned my order by delays. But still, looking at the shipping and handling, it looks like the cost is not greatly increased. Overall, it costs about $5 per title to get books shipped to Brazil by their intermediate-speed method. So, looks like mid-March.
Jumping the queue (and even Hobsbawm), my next read will be in Portuguese. It's called Lagrimas na chuva by Sergio Faraco, and it's about his travels to Moscow in the mid-1960s as a student and guest of the Communist Party. I came across a review of this (in Portuguese) in the monthly literary review Rascunho, which my teacher usually brings to me to help me get more in tune with Brazilian writing.
I finished reading the Neal Ascherson book this weekend. Measured in terms of recent reads, this was something of a record. I just kept at it because it was so interesting. A reflection on how Scottish history has impacted modern Scottish culture and politics.
My main complaint was that this book about Scottish identity didn't really have a lot of Scots in it. The poltical and cultural elite, for the most part, and a few fleeting references to engagement with the people, but by and large it didn't get into how average Scots view their status in Britain and the world (the vote for a Scottish parliament serving as a proxy for this?). I didn't really sense how the reality of life in Scotland today, as lived out in the big cities, but also in the smaller towns, bore any relation to the past. How much of life in Scotland today feels uniquely Scottish, and how much seems generically British.
But that is surely a minor objection to this otherwise wonderful book that visits key moments in Scottish history and paints them into the landscape. It made me want to go walking, to visit the wild places where the Covenanter memorials are located; to climb Dunadd, ancestral seat of Scottish kings. To visit the parts of Scotland that are still "wild" Scotland; that aren't paved, measured, engineered, subsumed into the efficiencies of modern British life.
I have some Scottish heritage, but I don't really identify with it - it would be centuries old, as opposed to my more recent and tangible hyphenated American past. But just the same I could not help in reading this book to want to dig deeper into the connections of place to identity.
I attended a lecture not long ago on microhistory. A broader history told in terms of a smaller place. While reading Ascherson, I thought of Claudio Magris' Microcosms - an interesting realisation given that both are journalists and have written a similar sort of book. I'd be curious to read Ascherson's book on the Black Sea.
My English-language book is now Neal Ascherson's Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (review) (LRB Review (reg req'd)). I was sitting on the sofa, listening to Brendel play Schubert sonatas, reading about the Highland landscape I've walked through and thinking how very far from Europe we are and how much one American associates Europe with home.
My first read from the latest set of books ordered from Amazon was Small is Beautiful by Fritz Schumacher. Subtitled "Economics as if People Matter," the book has a reputation as one of the first texts calling attention to uncontrolled growth in pursuit of economic profit. In truth I found this book neither all that interesting or all that relevant.
I concede - this book is 30 years old, Schumaker is long dead and the nationalised British coal industry is not the meaningful example it once might have been. But the original book really doesn't seem as though it was aimed specifically to address the concern of its subtitle. The introduction points out that it is really a collection of essays edited together with a little commentary. In fact, there really isn't a coherence of the chapters.
The concept that sticks in my craw the most is that of intermediate technology. If you don't have heaps of money to buy the latest technology, and if you've got lots of manpower around, well, who needs the latest technology? But in order to compete on this basis, you need to take into account non-economic factors, which you can be sure won't be considered by all comers. Thus the only way to compete is not to play by the same rules.
From another angle, Schumaker writes that the sense of fulfillment gained from doing useful work is an important element of psychic wellbeing, and that economies with large unemployment could do better by allocating work more broadly, even if it means a reduction in efficiency and a lowering of average wages. Using a scale of technology appropriate to the work available keeps more people in work.
I suppose this is a reasonable objective in a population that lives modestly and sustainably. But at times I find it hard to fathom how you could ever do this in practice. You need to balance off the greed that destroyed the commons. And since the fulfillment of work is a relative concept (would people really be happy if they ploughed a smaller patch and earned a smaller packet? Depends on the haves and have nots, I gather), I had trouble envisioning how this proposal would work. Schumaker says he's not talking to me...he's talking about the majority world where so many people have no work. I dunno. I just dunno.
A final concept I'll mention here is the size of the workplace. A man should be able, working over time, to own his own workplace and means of production. This makes more sense to me. He's talking in 1973 terms, but he proposed that there be more £5,000 workplaces and fewer £50,000 ones. Less technology, more work. If only one could be happy and make a sufficient living using one's own means.
I don't want to totally slate this book. Interesting essays; thought-provoking at times, but it wasn't the call to arms I thought it might be. Maybe the title can be recycled.
As for my other Amazon order, I've recently received two e-mails asking me to approve lengthy delays for all but two of the titles. This can't be right, but I am not in a hurry, so decided to postpone rather than cancel. The main culprit seems to be a copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I would be mighty surprised if this was out of print.
I finally finished reading Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience over the holidays. A worthwhile read, although I found that it fizzled out a bit at the end. After two wonderful set pieces about his first affair and his time working aside his brother-in-law in a wonderfully underachieving business, the attempt at the end to wrap it back into the framing device of psychoanalysis seemed a bit of an afterthought, and didn't seem to work, entirely.
Svevo is credited with beiing an influence on Joyce (maybe even being a role model for Bloom). I have also seen comparisons of Svevo to Proust in the early history of stream-of-consciousness modern novels. I guess it is questionable whether Proust knew of or read Svevo (I've got two massive Proust biographies to read some day) - he was fairly unremarked in his day - but the comparison is reasonable - they both carry on a running commentary about the failings of others and their own neurasthenic miseries. It gives a real sense of feeling relatively better in a schadenfreude sense.
I'm back to my regular reading, Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo. My reading this year has been greatly curtailed relative to years past. I can offer three reasons:
1) Portuguese - we have Portuguese lessons two nights per week, and I spend (too little) time working on it outside of lessons. On our just-completed holidays, I actually read and understood an entire 300-page book in Portuguese. I won't name names, as it was written by my teacher, whose privacy I will protect, but I will say that it was a "real" book, published by one of Brazil's big publishers. I probably cruised along at >90% comprehension, and when I didn't know a word, I skipped over, rather than looking up, or tried to work it out solely from context. I left the looking-up as an exercise for later.
2) Commuting - since we moved to Brazil, I have been driving to work. For the past 5 years, my commuting was more regularly by train, with only occasional driving. This makes a difference of about 4 hours per week of reading time (and about 10 miles per week of walking, which I also notice). Sometimes I listen to the radio while I am driving to work (see #1, above), but I am always aware of what dead time this is relative to taking the train.
3) Fernando Pessoa - I made the 'mistake' of making The Book of Disquiet my primary reading, starting in September. I have read about 100 pages of this 'factless biography', but it isn't the kind of book you can just get lost in for hours. Any evening I took this one up, it was pretty much 'lights out' for me five minutes later. So I put it on the back burner and moved on to Svevo, which I am halfway through. It may be that this is the last book I make it through this year. It's not that I don't enjoy the Pessoa - I find in it a very tangible saudade and world-weariness that resonates in me - a lost-world sense of longing like that I found in WG Sebald's Austerlitz. I just need to take it in small doses.