Is there any such thing? Let's investigate—for good or ill. A blog about fiction and literature, philosophy and theology, politics and law, science and culture, the environment and economics, and ethics and language, and any thing else that strikes our fancy. (Apologies to Bertrand Russell)
If you find yourself asking "What's Jim H been up to lately?", I'm here to tell you. Deep in the cultural wasteland that is the American South, October has been a surprisingly busy month for me.
Saw the Patriots pretty much dismantle the Falcons on Sunday Night Football.
Sat right behind Bob Costas and the on-field crew
Saw Clayton Kershaw dominate the Braves. Got a sad.
Nothing more exciting than October baseball.
Saw Philip Glass (sorry, no pics) introduce Paul Schrader's film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, for which he composed the soundtrack. Saw it when it first came out in NYC in like 1985 or 1986. Remarkable how much I could recall after, what?, nearly 30 years. Here it is in full:
Attended opening night of the Atlanta Opera's presentation of Puccini's Tosca. Hadn't been to the opera in years. Used to go once or twice a year in NYC.
Bravo!
Here's a taste:
Spent the day with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama—along with another 8000 or so. He's a Distinguished Professor here at Emory University and gets down here every three years. Dude is a rock star. Topic was secular ethics. One panel he presided over included a couple of real heavy hitters: Franz de Waal whose work with Bonobos and chimps has uncovered surprising politics and even empathy and moral feeling among primates. Is doing for moral sentiment what Chomsky did for language—it's hard-wired, not learned. And Richard Davidson who has done research suggesting that infants humans are hard-wired to prefer generosity and helpfulness, and that compassion meditation (a Tibetan Buddhist thing, as opposed to contemplative meditation) produces neurological changes, causes people to extend their circles of friends and intensify the ones they have, and brings about a greater sense of well-being and, in fact, physical health. The Lama is giggly and awfully cute—for a theocrat, nonetheless a benign one. His heart's in the right place, though.
Oh, yeah "Gunga la gunga." Striking. Big hitter, the Lama.
Plus, gratuitous Sasha snaps.
If I weighed about 70 or 80 pounds more, I'd be eating you now.
Toy? What toy?
Oh, and thanks, you Bruces, for the Comments to my last post. Much appreciated!
Now, this is one Palin and one election I can endorse heartily: "As a long-distance traveller, [Michael] Palin has paid his dues, which is a fortunate position to be in for the prestigious role he has just taken up, as president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Python man is now the nation's [i.e., Great Britain's] First Geographer." Palin's brief is to try to bring some excitement back to the study of geography: "For some reason, geography is not seen as a popular subject in school. It's seen as very unglamorous. Yet when I was at school, I can remember geography offering me the chance to get out and go on field trips and go on walks, and I loved maps, I loved atlases, I loved learning about other countries and places where things were different from our own – and that's all covered by geography." (h/t)
Old Wizard presents us with a list of the Top Ten Philosophers of All Time. Now, we like lists as much as the next blog, but we've got some serious problems with this list:
What about Wittgenstein? Where's Aristotle? Hobbes? Mill? Locke? Leibniz (for goodness' sake!) Frege? Did philosophy stop in mid-20th Century? What about Rawls? Derrida? Rorty? or someone like Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Putnam, etc.
Let's ask the Pythons:
The Philosopher's Song (Monty Python) by Eric Idle
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya' 'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away; Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed!
"There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." James Wood starts off his central chapter with this bit of hyperbole. But we buy it because it's JAMES F'in WOOD fer chrissakes! And we read on. "We can tell a great deal from a character by how he talks, and whom he talks to—how he bumps up against the world." Do tell.
Wood, in How Fiction Works carves out an interesting middle-ground for his view of character:
A great deal of nonsense is written every day about character in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are : we should get to 'know' them; they should not be 'stereotypes'; they should have an 'inside' as well as an outside, depth as well as surface; they should 'grow' and 'develop'; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. ...In other words, artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of—or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them. On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear that characters do not exist at all.
And he goes on to insult again that bête noire of "aestheticism", William Gass.
So, Wood says, fiction works somewhere in the space between "I didn't like that book because I just couldn't identify with the main character" (the point of view I satirize in my review of Bernhard's The Loser), and "I didn't like that book because it wasn't really well enough written."
How? "My own taste," he says "tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows."
Understanding and defining fictional character is akin to understanding and defining the manifold and polymorphous human self. This seems to be Wood's point, though he is nowhere quite so explicit.
So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.
Vitality, complexity, opacity of motive: these are the values Mr. Wood holds dear with respect to character. Reader—and more particularly writer—take heed!
Btw: if you haven't read the book or the on-line article and are wondering why Monty Python and The Office top the posts about character, Wood traces a certain sort of self-theatricalizing British character he loves from Shakespeare "...and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais's David Brent." There is a method in't.
