Glimpse of a beautiful mind

A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.

However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.

Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:

I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.

He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:

I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.

I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.

Isn’t it ironic…

David Pogue reports in his blog that Amazon zapped two book from its’ e-book reader Kindle as “the publisher [had] changed its mind about offering an electronic version”. I.e. people who had purchased the e-book suddenly discovered that it had disappeared from their e-readers with money credited back to their account.

This is of course a bit strange and certainly provides much ammunition to the ranks of Kindle-skeptics and opposers of e-books in general. However, the otherwise silly and unfortunate incident acquires a whole new level of irony by the simple fact that the books so recalled happened to be Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. And the cherry on top of this hilarious situation is of course the fact that both books’ copyright has actually expired and the full text is available in many places on he internet (for instance here).

I mean… what were you thinking, Amazon?? In terms of PR blunder, this thing surely ranks at par with the recent news about Gazprom’s Nigerian joint venture.

Reflections from damaged life

Despite of having made myself a promise last year NOT to teach anything before I have the draft my dissertation finished, I agreed this week to doing a seminar in anthropology this fall in Tallinn. And although the idea is exciting right now I can already see myself wondering somewhere down the line in October that HOW THE HELL did I get myself into this once again. I guess my excuses are that 1) it is only two months and not the full semester, and 2) I was given a free reign to choose the texts and approach. Besides, it’s a graduate seminar so I really don’t feel that I’d need to overly restrain myself in choosing the reading material – both in terms of volume as well as difficulty. So I will pick three ethnographies (Jackson, Mahmood and Klima) and read them side by side with theoretical texts that have inspired as well as provided a structural framework for them (such as Adorno, Benjamin, Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Sontag). All this should amount to a fun and interesting experience, at least for those who are able to consider reading ethnographies, critical theory and philosophy as fun.

One of the texts I will assign is Adorno’s “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life” and thus I braced myself to re-read it with attention. I must say that, now having managed to almost completely detach myself from what would normally be my quotidian existence, this is probably the perfect book for me to read at the moment. It consists of short but incredibly rich and allusive reflections on everyday matters, something that results from a towering intellect such as Adorno taking a step back and looking at life in a critical yet almost Proust-like (who also gets a formal nod at the very beginning of the book), slightly nostalgic and deeply ironic way.

Here’s a small sample for you:

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, delibration, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations. What does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows to open, but only sliding frames to shove, no gentle latches but turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall around the garden?

Stroke of genius

Yesterday I finished The Loser – a story of devastating consequences of meeting with perfection by an Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I must say it was one of the most impressive books I’ve read recently. Bernhard has a very peculiar style of writing that some readers find very much disturbing. For one thing the whole 180 page book is written as a single paragraph. But this is not all – translator’s note at the beginning of the book warns readers as follows:

Bernhard’s sentences are very long, even for a German reader accustomed to extended, complex sentence constructions. Further, the logical transitions between clauses (“but,”, “although”, “whereas”) are often missing or contradictory, and the verb tenses are rarely in agreement. Bernhard’s frequent and unpredictable underlining also defies conventional usage. Sometimes he italicizes the title of Bach’s compositions, sometimes he treats them like a common noun. On the other hand, he often gives the names of restaurants, towns, pianos, and people an emphasis that conventional German or English ortography exclude.

This all has a very peculiar effect and in a suprising way it all makes perfect sense. It is almost as if Bernhard deliberately writes badly – in that sense The Loser reminded me of a movie by Aki Kaurismäki titled Mies vailla menneisyyttä where the actors perform as if they were in front of the camera for the first time in their life. The effect of it, however, is that characters appear somehow very vulnerable and surprisingly… real – with their insecurities, anxiousness and distinctive lack of witty punchlines. And same goes for Bernhard’s Loser – it has a level of intensity and intimacy quite unlike anything else that I’ve read.

Bernhard has been compared, among others by George Steiner, to Kafka, Canetti and Musil as one of the most unique voices in 20^th century German-language literature – or in European literature in general, for that matter. Bernhard had a very complicated relationship with Austria – being referred to as Nestbeschmutzer during his lifetime because of his less than flattering descriptions and critical views of his home country. However, this all was trumped by Bernhard’s very last text – his will – in which he prohibited the publication, performance or recital of any of his works within the borders of Austria for as long as the legal copyrights remain in force – a kind of a posthumous literary exile by one of the nation’s greatest writers.

A little shyness goes a long way

Salman Rushdie is a mean writer. He  writes books like very few other people can, positively shining on every page. But I somehow feel that he would be a very poor rapper.

It came to my attention through the blog of Austin Kleon of  the Newspaper Blackout Poems fame that Kanye West, a rapper, former college dropout and self-proclaimed proud non-reader of books, has… well, published a book, called “Kanye West presents Thank You And You’re Welcome”, sired in collaboration with a ghost-writer J. Sakiya Sandifer.

One should not judge a book by its cover so I braced myself to go and hunt it down somewhere in Palo Alto bookstores – a valiant attempt that was ultimately doomed to failure and caused some mildly embarrassing moments at Stanford bookstore when I was trying to explain a very helpful salesperson what exactly am I looking for.

Thus I have no alternative but to rely on the review above (and few more rather venomous reader opinions at amazon.com) – which is possibly no big loss as, apart from the covers, the teaspoon-deep book consists of 52 pages of “thoughts and theories” many of which are empty and even those that aren’t might as well be. Which is hardly surprising considering that the author – or should I say presenter – loathes books saying that “sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed”. Amen, brother.

I mean, it’s fine not to like books for them being so “wordy” and think that it is better to “get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life” – nothing wrong with that. But people who think that “being a non-reader is helpful when writing a book because it gave one a childlike purity” really should stick with rapping or whatever else they do and NOT write books for other people who actually like them being not only “wordy” but also not completely devoid of any meaning and content.

It is a situation in fact similar to a condition suffered unaware by certain new aspiring students of philosophy, who have somehow gotten an idea that philosophy is something best done on one’s own and preferably uncontaminated by the thoughts of people who have tried to deal with same issues in the past – as then the originality of the thinking would inevitably suffer. The result of such an endeavor more often than not carries a similar quality of “childlike purity” and while no doubt a source of much joy and self-realization for the person in question it causes a lot of embarrassment and torture to everyone else exposed to the eventual results.

Dedicating the book to his late mother, Kanye West is quoted saying “My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness. She raised me to be the voice to allow people to think for themselves, to find their own way.” Thank God that Mrs. Rushdie didn’t press upon little Salman’s flyness to the extent that he would have concquered his shyness to become a rapper.

Enormously pleased

So I finished not one but two books today – Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception that I had been reading for a couple of days, and Luis Ferdando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans that I started only yesterday. Agamben was rather exceptionally good and thought-provoking, and surprisingly readable at that – a rare treat among the good books of philosophy and thus comes highly recommended.

Regarding Verissimo’s little book: if you happen to be a fan of either Borges or Poe – or especially if you happen to like both – then do yourself a favour and get it. The whole book is a homage to those two writers (JLB in particular) and their different short stories, with plenty of others such as Lewis Carroll, H. P. Lovecraft, and a 17^th century occultist writer John Dee thrown in for a good measure, and further peppered with references to yet more characters, books and stories, both known and obscure. If you know all this stuff, it is great fun. Unfortunately this also means that if you don’t, you really need not to apply – I’m afraid that for someone who hasn’t read Borges, Poe or Carroll – or doesn’t like them – Verissimo’s short novel would probably be very silly and tedious.

I will have to be in LA by June 11th, so that leaves me almost two weeks that I have to make up my mind about. Main choices are 1) staying at Stanford, 2) going to Las Vegas for WSOP or 3) flying to Hawaii for a week – so I am open to suggestions!

Chatwin’s unbearably light touch

Now already more than ten years ago, when traveling in South-East Asia I noticed Unbearable Lightness of Being in the book-exchange shelf of a Bangkok hotel and traded it immediately for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game that I had just finished (and been rather unimpressed with). I had long intended to read Kundera’s famous novel and got started with it with a great enthusiasm.

For some reason the book never worked for me. I found it irritating, pretentious and even banal, and was constantly cringing whenever another lengthy description of terrible conditions of living in a totalitarian state came up on its pages – not to mention that in retrospect I also think that Kundera misunderstood Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return, but that’s a whole different story.  This is not to say that it’s a bad book the way Da Vinci Code is thoroughly and irredeemably bad, I just didn’t like it – quite the way I don’t like Coelho. I must say that this confession (i.e. not liking Unbearable Lightness of Being) has caused many raised eyebrows over the years – to the point that I have tended to start avoiding the topic altogether. For some reason, disliking this particular book seems to be something that has to be defended as one is almost expected to feel guilty for this, or at least have a pretty darn good explanation.

Anyway, I remembered all this because I just finished a book by Bruce Chatwin – Utz – that I enjoyed immensely. Chatwin wrote Utz in 1988, six years after Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness and just a year before his own untimely death, and just like Unbearable Lightness the novel takes place (mostly) in Prague. It is a story about Kaspar Joachim Utz, a man who keeps a fabulous collection of Meissen porcelain in his tiny two-room flat in central Prague. Although free to leave Czechoslovakia, Utz is unable to do so – being a prisoner of his own priceless collection that he can’t take with him.

A central theme in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness – indeed, the point that the very title of the book refers to – is that as we only live once, our existence is “light”, leaving no trace in its uniqueness. Or, as Tomáš muses at the end of third chapter: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”. But where the characters of Kundera’s novel collapse under the unbearable lightness of their own unique and ultimately meaningless existence, Kaspar Utz refuses to be weighed down by his inescapable predicament:

…the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn’t raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. With their silence they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.

Porcelain, a pure aesthetic substance which is at the same time fragile and eternal, is for Utz an “antidote of decay”. And so Utz would rather be stuck in Prague with his collection than loose in the free world without it. In the words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”. And ultimately it is giving up our unlimited freedom to “do anything” that enables us to become the persons we want to be – as for a human being this is never possible to accomplish alone on our own.

Chatwin’s Utz is a short and deceptively simple book – similar in that sense to Baricco’s Silk. Reading it carefully, however, rewards with many layers of meaning and reference. Ultimately, like Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness, Utz is a book about our freedom and what we choose to do with it – but Chatwin manages this with a touch a lot lighter than Kundera.

Fresh and frisky

Already for several years has there been a popular proliferation of books that brandish a designation of “Social History” on the bottom of their back cover. This is one of the obvious if somewhat delayed results of “history going total” in the vein of Marc Bloch’s famous book Apologie pour l’histoire, which marked a break with former view of history as something that deals only with important things. As Bloch, and in his wake a whole new generation of historians argued, everything has history and thus history is total.

Nowadays, one can find a book about the history of pretty much anything. One of the freshest – pardon the pun – books that draw upon this trend is FRESH: A perishable history by Susanne Freidberg, published by Harvard University Press last month and reviewed in TLS of April 17. There have been several pop-historical publications on food and eating recently, such as Salt: A World History by Kurlansky, Spice: The History of a Temptation by Turner, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World by Zuckerman, The True History of Chocolate by Coe, Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Abott, along with some older books that have acquired a status of something classic such as Mintz’s Sweetness and Power or Goody’s Food and Love - and I could go on and on. Fresh, while in one way firmly in the same tradition, is at the same time somewhat different. It takes a close look at our current obsession with “freshness” - an “idea that emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted from removing the site of production from the sight of consumers”. If we all grew our carrots, farmed our cows and caught our fish, there would be no need to ask “is it fresh?” – and actually the very same line could also be extended to the craze about organic food. It is precisely because we have lost our personal relation to the food we consume, and because we have it, collectively, in such abundance as never before in history that we have became obsessed over how exactly is it produced. We want it 100% natural in our stores and supermarkets that are anything but. We want to know that our apples have been grown by human sweat alone without any fertilizers, and we want to know that chikens we eat lived happy lives and died with no pain. Not only this – we also demand “permanent global summertime”, with all the fruit and vegetables being both available and fresh all year round.

The TLS review faults Freidberg for the “lack of conviction” and not taking her stance vis-à-vis all the issues she describes – which actually didn’t bother me much at all. There are plenty of books around that do that – Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is the first port of call for anyone looking for a political manifesto on modern American food, but there are several others. Freidberg’s book is an entertaining as well as enlightening view that plays on the old adage – you are what you eat – and as such we all may be a lot less fresh than we’d like to think.

Bring ‘em back!

As it’s Saturday I decided to have a library-free day, which in practice simply meant that I read outside rather than indoors. I have reached the Middle Ages with my research reading which is somewhat closer to the present day than what I read at Emory but still pretty far out in terms of everyday relevance – so it was refreshing to read some essays and articles from (and about) this century for a change.

One of the first things that caught my attention was this piece from National Geographic, which tells how scientists are getting close to cloning extinct species – trying to construct a mammoth out of an elephant DNA and such. This all evokes a lot of Jurassic Park themes, but the idea what struck me was that once something like this is possible why would anyone feel limited to simply recreating extinct species? Why not start from scratch? This way we could end up in places a lot more interesting and, in many ways scarier, than Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In addition to a short-lived Tamagochi craze, there have been computer games around for years that allow players to breed their own pets, at the level of rather simple crossing of virtual cats in Petz to tinkering with the DNA of “norns” in the cult game Creatures and seeing what comes out of it. Think of a lego set for grown men in white coats with the medieval bestiary was an inspirational manual. Or indeed, as the NG article also concludes – where do you draw the line, given that the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA is less than 1%? If you approach the DNA piecemeal, what can you use and what exactly remains off limits, as something surely has to unless we will want to end up with people bringing back their extinct grandmothers.

New Bookforum is out and there’s an article on Africa’s new literary boom – a topic that has interested me for a while. There seems to be a great deal of worthwile reading coming out of the continent in the wake of what would count as already “established authors” such as Achebe, Soyinka, Okri and Gordimer. This reminds me that today I also finished reading a book called Bazaar of the Idiots by Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal which was great fun along the lines of his famous fellow Columbian writer – and goes to further prove the point that it actually pays to dig a bit deeper than the front line of acclaimed writers of any given country or period. I will probably did write about it some lines in Varrak’s book blog.

Then, in terms of at least somewhat local news, it turns out that May is a National Masturbation Month in the United States – a tradition (a month, not masturbation) that apparently began in 1995 in San Fransisco. America doesn’t seem to cease amazing me.

Sideways

Helelyn left back for Europe last night and so I am alone once again. On Saturday we rented a card and had a fun day in scorching heat in Sonoma and Napa valleys. As I am in general not a big fan of Californian wines it was mostly a scenic drive with the final tally of alcohol consumed working out precisely two glasses of white wine. We did visit a number of vineyards, each of which had a separate building with a big “TASTING” sign on front and usually filled to the point of bursting by jovial white middle-aged men in shorts and their tipsy wives, swallowing rather than spitting their samples while listening attentively to red-nosed proprietor’s explanations on how to find this little hint of apple in the aftertaste of chardonnay or fully appreciate the velvety smoothness of the house reserve cabernet sauvignon.

Yesterday I moved to Palo Alto myself, closer to Stanford where I expect to spend the next two weeks. The town itself is very nice, reminiscent of downtown Berkeley with plenty of small eateries and cafes along tree-lined streets. I worked out the practicalities of gym/library/wifi access today and will get busy tomorrow after I’ve had my second meeting at noon. Walking around at Stanford’s faux medieval style campus this morning it occurred to me how similar the US universities are to medieval monasteries – which in itself is not such a surprising observation given that the genealogical roots of our institutions of higher education are precisely there. Like in monasteries in the medieval Europe, the US university campuses are self-contained centers of learning, homes to libraries and filled with people who view the outside world with certain disdain and compassion. All that being said, it can be a very pleasant and enjoyable environment.

I checked out the bookstore here which, while not nearly as impressive as the one at Harvard, is still pretty decent. I decided to leaf through recently published Susan Sontag’s diaries and was struck how different they are from the stuff that got published under her name during her lifetime. In that regard I’ve found it interesting to compare two big female American essayists of the 20th century – Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Sontag’s essays are very much NY-like: passionate but impersonal, hard-nosed and often cynical. Didion, born and having lived most of her life in California, in many ways shares Sontag’s intellect as well as an apparent sombre outlook and elegiac concern for the world, but writes very differently. Most of her essays are narrated in first person and involve a lot of personal details, feelings and memories. So in that sense it was very revelatory to also see the personal side of Sontag. Her diaries have this feeling of immediacy and privacy that is not present in her essays but can be found everywhere in Didion’s writings.

But tomorrow I will start another spell at the library – now that my eyes have recovered I’m already looking forward to it.