Brain droppings

[felonius]

*sigh* That's right. Of course. Exception noted, Mr. McBoo.

I'm talking about normal MORTALS here. Go steal a new piece of linen or something...you're looking a little tattered...

[felonius]

Anton Chekhov, from his short story The Lady With The Dog:

And, owing to some strange, possibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him - his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife - was on the surface. He began to judge others by himself, no longer believing what he saw, and always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insisted so strongly on the respect due to personal secrets.

[spiphany]

Walter Benjamin, from "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting":

Of all the methods of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method....Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books they could buy but do not like.

The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.

One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a whishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom -- the way the prince bought the beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights.

[laurie]

I can sure identify with this, though not by buying so much as inheriting my book collection:

All my parents' books (some I like, some not);
My grandmother's Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns books (like Burns, but only so-so on Scott);
My other grandmother's Agatha Christie and Zane Grey novels (not a fan of mysteries or westerns at all);
My aunt's Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen novels (she and I shared reading preferences very closely);
Various elderly neighbor's eclectic books (more "nots" than "likes").


Sometimes I think there's a standard "I hereby leave the following books to Laurie..." clause written into every Last Will and Testament.

[felonius]

The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.

Reminds me of one by Anthony Burgess:

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Something I do my best to avoid, pleased to say I can look at my bookcase currently and count more books read than unread, but not by a huge margin, and it isn't hard to see how easily the latter can become true.

I have a hard time visiting bookstores without making at least one purchase, even if I know I already have a backlog waiting at home - usually there's at least one whispering assurances that yes, I will enjoy it and take much from it. You just have to make sure they all do graduate from shelf ornament rank.

A better solution might be to stay away from bookstores and libraries entirely until completing everything at home - but then you miss out on the pleasure of being physically surrounded by them - a comfy chair between stacks is always a good place to get lost for a while.

Can see how inheritance is a whole other story.

[felonius]

Today Canada's own Margaret Atwood, from her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. The teenage narrator is discussing a favourite computer game:

Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul’s magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn’t know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years’ War, or The Flight Into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three.

You rolled the virtual dice and either a Rose or a Blood item would pop up. If it was a Blood item, the Rose player had a chance to stop the atrocity from happening, but he had to put up a Rose item in exchange. The atrocity would then vanish from history, or at least the history recorded on the screen. The Blood player could acquire a Rose item, but only by handing over an atrocity, thus leaving himself with less ammunition and the Rose player with more. If he was a skilful player he could attack the Rose side by means of the atrocities in his possession, loot the human achievement, and transfer it to his side of the board. The player who managed to retain the most human achievements by Time’s Up was the winner. With points off, naturally, for achievements destroyed through his own error and folly and cretinous play.

The exchange rates – one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids – were suggested, but there was no room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers – the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

George Orwell would be proud. Go Margaret.

[Ghost]

Today Canada's own Margaret Atwood, from her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake.

Thanks for the tip felonius - I'll have to look for this.

[spiphany]

from Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form":

The essay...does not let its domain be prescribed for it. Instead of accomplishing something scientifically or creating something artistically, its efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him. The essay reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say.

In such experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations. Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture.

It resists the idea of a masterpiece, an idea which itself reflects the idea of creation and totality. Its form complies with the critical idea that the human being is not a creator and that nothing human is a creation. The essay, which is always directed toward something already created, does not present itself as creation, nore does it covet something all-encompassing whose totality would resemble that of a creation.

[felonius]

It resists the idea of a masterpiece, an idea which itself reflects the idea of creation and totality. Its form complies with the critical idea that the human being is not a creator and that nothing human is a creation. The essay, which is always directed toward something already created, does not present itself as creation, nor does it covet something all-encompassing whose totality would resemble that of a creation.

This is great stuff - when was this written? You could correlate that viewpoint almost directly with Adorno's contention/conclusions in 1920-30s Europe that the unending search in Western philosophical tradition for one, absolute, transcendent truth had, in turn, led to the political domination of an absolute ideology in Germany. Makes you think, esp. considering our contemporary world.

Sticking to essays here though - is he claiming that they're the superior form then? Is the idea of a masterpiece undesirable and to be resisted? Makes you wonder how many works acknowledged as genuine "masterpieces" were originally undertaken by their authors with the intention of "writing a masterpiece." When people set out to write a poem, short story, novel, whatever - maybe what makes it so hard is that (learned? instinctual?) desire to make it "all-encompassing" for whatever area of existence they've set out to capture. To be as honest a witness as possible to one's own time, to include every aspect of relevance - rather than to simply tap into those aspects only where necessary, which is what I'm getting from him here.

I'm not sure this is what you had in mind when you posted this, but I thought it was interesting.

[spiphany]

This is great stuff - when was this written? You could correlate that viewpoint almost directly with Adorno's contention/conclusions in 1920-30s Europe that the unending search in Western philosophical tradition for one, absolute, transcendent truth had, in turn, led to the political domination of an absolute ideology in Germany.

It's from a collection Notes to Literature published in the 70s -- I'd have to check on the exact date of the piece, though.
Yes. The central point of contact is his philosophical argument that the concept is never adequate to the thing. Identity thinking does violence to the object by not acknowledging its individual qualities. In the essay form he seems to see a way of conducting thought without attempting to offer a complete or absolute treatment of the subject.
He writes: "The essay allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its nonradicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character."

Sticking to essays here though - is he claiming that they're the superior form then? Is the idea of a masterpiece undesirable and to be resisted?

Adorno frames his essay as simply a discussion of the form as it relates to the social context. He doesn't specifically suggest that it is superior, but there is the impression that he sees it as particularly suited for the methods of critical theory (because of its fragmentary nature, as above).

I'm not sure this is what you had in mind when you posted this, but I thought it was interesting.

I didn't have anything terribly specific in mind. I found it intriguing because he articulates very well some of the things which I've felt about the essay as a distinct literary form. It's not something we really think about much -- we don't tend to actively distinguish the essay from other forms of non-fiction -- but it has its own particular sort of pleasure.
I was also interested in the correlations with some things Benjamin says in one of his essays. I'll put up the quotes in a minute.

[Darb]

The central point of contact is his philosophical argument that the concept is never adequate to the thing. Identity thinking does violence to the object by not acknowledging its individual qualities. In the essay form he seems to see a way of conducting thought without attempting to offer a complete or absolute treatment of the subject.

He writes: "The essay allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its nonradicalism, in refraining from any

I'm a little late to the conversation, but that sounds somewhat evocative of the Buddshist theosophical concept/mindset of "Sansara".

[spiphany]

from Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller":

There is no story for which the question "How does it continue?" would not be legitimate. The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he writes "Finis," and in so doing invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life.

[Storytelling] does not aim to convey the pure "in itself" or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.

In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence, we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story.

[spiphany]

I'm a little late to the conversation, but that sounds somewhat evocative of the Buddshist theosophical concept/mindset of "Sansara".

Care to explain? I'm not familiar with that particular concept.

There is definitely a theological or utopian element running through the critical theorists' work, particularly in Benjamin, who was heavily influenced by Jewish mysticism, but to a lesser extent Adorno also. He references at one point the Jewish ban on pronouncing the name of God -- this has some relevance, I think, to the limitations he places on the knowability of objects.

[Darb]

Tomorrow ... not to cut into Ghost's thematic turf, but I'm 3 sheets to the wind at the moment. *Hic*

You'll like it - Sansara is both a theosophically simple, yet rather deep concept. A lot of surfers, for instance have an intuitive understanding of what it means, without every really being introduced to the concept.

[Darb]

It's inherently difficult to put something wordless into words, but here goes.

My understanding of the term "Sansara" is, in it's simplest form, is that it refers to the endless cycle of death and rebirth. However, there are deeper theosophical meanings and overtones involved. Think living in the moment - a sort of enlightened state of simultaneously heightened awareness combined with a sense of personal detachment, and an awareness of the universe (and everything in it, including oneself) spinning along in it's endless and infinitely interlayered dance of time.

If you've ever had a perfect moment doing something when you're simply "in the timeless impersonal flow of all things" ... simpling "BE-ing" ... I think you'll have an idea of what I'm trying to descibe.

Joseph Campbell calls this being in a state of Nirvana, or having a "peak experience".

In any case, inherent in this state of being/awareness is a de-objectification of all things ... because in order to be ONE with all things, you cannot, by definition, objectify.

I believe that ties in with the point I think you were raising earlier.

[spiphany]

Ah. I see what you mean. There are a couple of crucial differences, though, I don't think that's quite what Adorno is getting at -- Critical Theory is very much a product of the western philosophical tradition, including the basic subject/object dichotomy, even if it challenges certain directions it has taken. For Adorno, the emergence of the subject as separate from the external world is a historical development which cannot be undone. The best we can hope for is not unity but what he calls "determinate negation" -- knowledge achieved by revealing the contradictions in things and setting opposites against each other.

Critical Theory is concerned mostly with a couple of things: first, making clear that our knowledge and perception are in part historically determined (i.e., when we interpret a noise on the street as an automobile, it depends on our knowing what one is) and that the subject is always involved with the object of his perception (think quantum theory here) -- this in contrast with the view of science as being something objectively true regardless of the observer.
Second, in line with this, is a criticism of the process of abstraction involved in rational thought which takes the form of domination. By saying "this is a table" or "that man is a Jew", we replace the individual with the concept and ignore all the individual characteristics which are necessarily left out.

Not sure if that's clear. I'll post some more quotes on this later if I have a chance.

[felonius]

spiphany quoted Benjamin:

There is no story for which the question "How does it continue?" would not be legitimate. The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he writes "Finis," and in so doing invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life.

Yes yes yes yes yes. Exactly why ambiguous endings in books and film are (to me) so much more poignant and satisfying - apart from death, there isn't any true closure in reality - attempts to manufacture such in fiction are often clumsy and sabotage any good work the author has accomplished throughout the tale.

[Storytelling] does not aim to convey the pure "in itself" or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.

Potter metaphor is amazing. Not nearly as good, but colanders somehow entered my head - the storyteller takes the dripping pasta of reality out of the pot and strains it through her/his personal colander of subjectivity before adding sauce and serving it up, perharps with a little editorial parmesan.

Maybe that's a bit much. Just having fun - I've probably been reading Brad's prose for too long. Can see parallels you mentioned with Adorno clearly here though - novel vs. essay - essays are obviously filtered through an author's perceptions as well, but with the intent of illuminating a particular segment of reality, not trying to capture one absolutely.

n every cast the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence, we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story.

Wow. That beats the hell out of plain-old chicken and the egg. There's so much in that one I don't even know where to begin. Is the "communicability of experience" decreasing? A population increasingly weaned on the internet should suggest otherwise...but does it? I don't know. There's a lot of misdirection. Often the usefulness of any online community is inversely proportional to how many people there are involved - which is one of the internet's greater ironies. I don't think that's the case here though, good friends and neighbours.

I think I can say that fiction does give me counsel, or rather, it gives me counsel indirectly through its proposals. At least, I like to think it does.

Think living in the moment - a sort of enlightened state of simultaneously heightened awareness combined with a sense of personal detachment, and an awareness of the universe (and everything in it, including oneself) spinning along in it's endless and infinitely interlayered dance of time.

Brad - I always knew you were a raver. I think you put it into words quite well.

inherent in this state of being/awareness is a de-objectification of all things ... because in order to be ONE with all things, you cannot, by definition, objectify.

Something interesting to chew on in respect to the idea of a Creator - what does it mean for Something to exist outside of time?

For Adorno, the emergence of the subject as separate from the external world is a historical development which cannot be undone. The best we can hope for is not unity but what he calls "determinate negation" -- knowledge achieved by revealing the contradictions in things and setting opposites against each other.

He's right - it can't be undone. What we have to learn to do is to set those opposites against each other in a way that promotes more learning and less bloodshed. Tall order, I know, just saying.

By saying "this is a table" or "that man is a Jew", we replace the individual with the concept and ignore all the individual characteristics which are necessarily left out.

A spot-on breakdown of the "putting in a box" phenomenon. Once you assign certain characteristics to a thing, all subsequent judgement will be coloured, whether consciously or unconsciously.

My fingers hurt. Maybe more in a bit. Thank you both for stuffing this thread with amazing brainfood. Please keep it coming when you have the time.

[spiphany]

apart from death, there isn't any true closure in reality

Benjamin on death (from "The Story-Teller" (apologies for the translation - I don't have the English with me):

One cannot portray the essence of a character in a novel better than in this sentence. It says that the meaning of the characters' lives only emerges at their death. And indeed the reader of the novel seeks people from whom he can read "the meaning of life". He must therefore, in one way or another, be certain from the beginning that he will be party to their death. If necessary a metaphorical death, the end of the novel. But even better an actual death....That which draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life by [the flame of] a death which he reads about.

I like the colander metaphor; some more on 'traces', this time in a different metaphor (from Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility"):

The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician....The magician maintains a natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his hands, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse: he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body, and increases it only slightly by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs....Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enormously. The painter's is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its parts being assembled according to a new law.

[Darb]

Brad - I always knew you were a raver.

I think the image of a zen-surfer (who doesnt actually surf) would have been a more apt hip-culture reference.

Something interesting to chew on in respect to the idea of a Creator - what does it mean for Something to exist outside of time?

Not outside of time per se ... rather, de-objectifying. Zooming out, if you will, from our normally narrow, serial, discrete, self-centric view of it, and relaxing into the alternate perception of time, the universe as a whole, and our place within it as being part of an infinitely interwoven cyclical dance of all things across all eternity. THAT is the metaphor that the statues depicting the eternal Dance of Shiva, as his fingers tap out the beat of time.

Ganesha, the Hindu diety of literature and poetry, is sometimes portrayed dancing in similar fashion.

Speaking of time, I have to run ...

[Darb]

Here's an example of an experience that's evocative of sansara.

Moments like that have been too rare in my life of late.

[spiphany]

Adorno, from an essay on punctuation (again, apologies for the translation):

Theodor Haecker was justified in his alarm that the semicolon is dying out: he recognized this as a sign that no one can write a periodic sentence anymore. Included in this is the fear of page-long paragraphs which is encouraged by the market; by the consumer who does not want to exert himself and to whose taste first the publisher and then the author adapted themselves in order to earn their living, until finally they invented ideologies to justify this accommodation, such as lucidness, factual rigor, compact precision. In relation to such a tendency, however, language and content cannot be separated. With the loss of the periodic sentence the thought becomes short-winded. Prose is brought down...to the mere noting of facts, and as syntax and punctuation resign their right to articulate these things, to shape them, to criticize them, language has already prepared to capitulate before pure being before the thought even has time to eagerly perform this capitulation a second time of its own accord.

(The 'period' was the basic unit of composition in certain types of classical Greek prose. Essentially, it was the amount of time it took to express a complete thought, and usually took the form of long sentences with numerous balanced clauses. It is not quite the same as the modern paragraph.)

The sensitivity of the writer is proved by the way he handles parenthetical comments. The careful writer will be inclined to put them between dashes instead of brackets, because the brackets remove the clause from the sentence completely, creates a kind of enclave, whereas nothing which appears in good prose should be unnecessary; with the confession of such expendibility the brackets silently yield the claim to the integrity of the written form and capitulate to pedantic mediocrity [Banausie]. In contrast, dashes, which dam up the words out of the flood without enclosing them in prison, retain both relationship and distance equally. But Proust...worked with brackets unobjectionably, presumably because the large periods of his parentheses were so long that their sheer length would have annulled the dashes. They required stronger dams so as not to overflow the entire period and to create such chaos as each of these periods would breathlessly have caused.

In relation to punctuation the writer finds himself in a continual state of crisis....For the demands of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective needs for logic and expression can not be reconciled: in punctuation the change which the writer forces upon the language becomes a protest...At best one might suggest that one treat punctuation marks the way musicians treat forbidden progressions of harmony and voice.

[Darb]

Belated spelling error correction:

I was referring earlier to Samsara, but misspelled it sansara. A state of samsara is essentially a state of nirvana in the vajrayana and mahayana buddhist traditions.

[felonius]

Theodor Haecker was justified in his alarm that the semicolon is dying out: he recognized this as a sign that no one can write a periodic sentence anymore.

If for some reason I were ever asked to name my favourite punctuation mark, it would probably be the semicolon; it allows different aspects of a particular line of thought to be brought to full expression without the closure of a full-stop period. Of course semicolons can be abused; overly-casual and repeated usage starts to feel like the author is chattering without pause; prose nozzles remain uncapped and continue to spew; readers experience a sense of not being able to catch their breath as they struggle to absorb the full breadth of a multi-claused sentence; by the end they need to scan the page above in order to remember where the author began so they may understand the sentence they are presently reading; finally a period provides a temporary halt to regroup and then continue.

Included in this is the fear of page-long paragraphs which is encouraged by the market; by the consumer who does not want to exert himself and to whose taste first the publisher and then the author adapted themselves in order to earn their living, until finally they invented ideologies to justify this accommodation, such as lucidness, factual rigor, compact precision.

I thought of Tom Clancy and the 'tech-thriller' genre when I read this...

The careful writer will be inclined to put them between dashes instead of brackets, because the brackets remove the clause from the sentence completely

dashes, which dam up the words out of the flood without enclosing them in prison, retain both relationship and distance equally.

I'm firmly addicted to dashes - or hyphens, if you prefer - when I write. They're great because they allow written language to mimic the spoken, with all the little insertions - quick additions - people throw in while talking to each other.

If you read guys like Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, they take dashes to a whole different level by using them to replace quotation marks:

- Whas that he's sayin now, Tom?

- Dunno, was noddin off fer second.

- You wantin' that pint at yer elbow or shall I drink it, then?

- Go on.

But Proust...worked with brackets unobjectionably, presumably because the large periods of his parentheses were so long that their sheer length would have annulled the dashes. They required stronger dams so as not to overflow the entire period and to create such chaos as each of these periods would breathlessly have caused.

I've never heard parentheses described as dams before.

I think I should get this Adorno book.

[spiphany]

This (and the quotes from the essay I posted earlier) are from the first volume of a two-volume collection of essays called "Notes to Literature" which I think is out of print.

If for some reason I were ever asked to name my favourite punctuation mark, it would probably be the semicolon; it allows different aspects of a particular line of thought to be brought to full expression without the closure of a full-stop period.

What's also interesting about Adorno's comments on punctuation is that German conventions differ considerably at times from English-language writing. Oddly enough, German writers, for all their reputation for long sentences, avoid semicolons and use conjunctions or subordinate clauses instead.
The ancient Greeks on the other hand...well, for a long time they didn't use punctuation at all, but modern editions, which do, tend to be full of the raised dot (·) which serves as both colon and semicolon. I wonder whether he might not have had this in mind when he was writing.

If you read guys like Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, they take dashes to a whole different level by using them to replace quotation marks.

Bringing in cross-linguistic conventions again, this is actually how dialogue is typically represented in Russian texts. Intriguing, no? The same essay has a section on quotation marks which I didn't quote because he was referring specifically to the German angular quotation marks -- used »like this« -- which they call "little goose feet".

[felonius]

Simplified Chinese writing uses those "little goose feet" as well, but only to enclose book titles. For regular quotation marks they use cornered brackets.