67 posts tagged “books”
Rick Fields believes that the current trouble with authority in American Buddhism arises in part from the attempt to transplant an oriental monastery/temple tradition into an occidental setting of laymen and women, neither monks nor priests. By analogy, the troubles in American Hinduism might be seen to emerge from the transportation of a rigid system of caste and social role (in which 'householders' cannot be sadhus) into a society based on the rejection of the validity of such roles. But what of Islam, which has neither priests nor monks, and in which the ideal Sufi remains 'in the world'—family, job, etc.—'but not of it?' In Fields's theory such institutions would be relatively easy to adapt to Western 'democratic' social structures. Perhaps, however, the problem is not at root one of incomparable social structures or inappropriate institutions, but precisely a problem of authority. The oriental religions have looked for ways to implement a theory of virtually absolute authority in a social setting based on a culture that has passed through and been deeply changed by the Protestant Reformation, bourgeois and proletarian revolution, and so-called sexual revolution. As Foucault points out, these 'revolutions' only become articulated within the discourse of history at the very moment in which they 'disappear'—so that, in his paradoxical reading, our society is in fact post-Protestant, post-revolutionary, and post-sexual. The new 'authorities' created by revolution and reformation are themselves now seen to be empty. Even the 'experts' of the sexual revolution have proven themselves false prophets: we are not dancing toward an era of liberated desire, but lurching backwards toward some dark age of plague-fear and sexual hysteria in which all desire will eventually be experienced as 'abuse' or 'sin.' Thus within the American Roman Catholic Church we have cardinals who fulminate against every form of human pleasure in language as deeply imbued with hysteria (if not literary style) as Cotton Mather's—while at the same time vast numbers of priests are in trouble for 'abusing' various orphans or parishoners. Televangelism has lost much of its political i.e., financial, power since the 1980s in a series of sexual and fiscal scandals. In the 'Orient' adulterous women and homosexuals are stoned to death. There's a great deal less sexual freedom in the world now than in medieval times, perhaps even Victorian times. All the talk talk talk about sexuality (as Foucault says) has led only to new modalities of repression/oppression. . . .
Let me be clear: personally I do not disapprove of sexual intercourse nor of 'deviant' desire and pleasure. I do, however, disapprove of hypocrisy, power-tripping, and the self-aggrandizement of self-proclaimed avatars. I can even imagine erotic love as an integral aspect of spiritual/pedagogic companionship, but only on condition of its open consensuality. I reject (for myself) the moral/sexual codes of outdated and reactionary religious ideologies, but I accept (for myself) the best ethics I can imagine, based on a perception of the other as an aspect of self, so that my desire to some extent depends on the other's desire and not on the other's loss. If I can do this for myself, then I can demand of anyone who claims to be able to teach self-realization that he too follow this minimal ethics of mutuality. . . .
I suggest that many of the Oriental traditions have fallen prey to a guru-prinzip which makes the nearness of realization a kind of commodity, promised but never delivered, since deliverance would threaten the power-monopoly of the guru. . . .
Traditional power relations are tragically out of synch with our needs for connection and conviviality. . . . Spirituality is not a master/slave relation—it is not an "Oriental despotism." Not any more. Not now. Maybe it never was. Who cares? Here and now:—we need something different.
—Peter Lamborn Wilson in Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam
—David
Pablo Picasso was a poet and a good one, but it would be a tragedy if his literary work had somehow diverted attention from his achievement as an artist. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist and a good one, but it is in no way a tragedy that her book, Dictée, has, to a large extent, eclipsed her artwork. This is not because the artwork is unworthy of attention, but because the experiments with language (and also images) that became Dictée, a masterpiece of avant-garde autobiography, were not peripheral to her artistic practice, but of a piece with it. Indeed, the more closely one considers Cha’s artistic and literary work, the harder it is to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
That's the beginning of my review of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works
Read the whole thing here.
—David
Nice to have the sporadically clogged conduit flowing freely again. I added three books to the "Books I Finished in 2009" folder today.
—David
He's not one of these guys who just reads military books. He reads weird things, too. He's reading a book about Shakespeare right now.
—Major General Michael Flynn on General Stanley McChrystal.Quoted in this article.
—David
Finally someone writes intelligently about Thomas Pynchon
What Pynchon does is much closer in practice to recent painting than it is to the Quietist novel favored by the trade presses. Instead of telling contained stories, he offers us narrative tableaux & arcs that are themselves incomplete, but fit together collage-like across large sweeps of language. Day has nearly 48 named characters, at least a third of whom might be called “major” in that they are the focal point of some period of narrative herein. In a few cases – but not all that many – there are attempts (comic in the case of the Chums of C) at closing the loop on their tale, but mostly they come & go, their tales unfinished just like life itself. There are even some significant characters introduced for the first time in the last 30 pages of the book.
Read the whole thing here.
One reason Silliman, unlike virtually all of the book's earlier critics, understands what Pynchon is doing is that he didn't attempt to grasp the book in an afternoon. He gave himself twenty months. (It's no accident that, as Silliman points out, most reviews of the book focus on the first 100 pages.)
—David
Julian, commenting on my previous post, in which I quoted the film-maker Werner Herzog describing film as "the art of illiterates," wrote:
Movies the art of illiterates? Well, I suppose the same could be said about music. A more interesting dichotomy is how a story is told in novel and in film. As a friend pointed out to me recently, unlike a novel, good filmmaking can’t tell you what a character is thinking or feeling. In that way, it’s like poetry—calling on the reader/viewer to interpret and imagine. You love poetry, which makes your lack of enthusiasm for movies strange. But perhaps no weirder than my lack of enthusiasm for poetry and love of cinema.
Good points, all.
I suppose what it really comes down to is there are just not enough hours in the day, and that I want to devote the time I have to what I, without reservation, love: books and music. (I'm told that for some people days contain twenty-four hours. Mine seem to have six or eight at best.)
Music, certainly in the case of instrumental music (with the exception of a couple of odd limit cases), tells no story at all, and has no message. That few of us would agree on the story or message of, say, Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners even if we thought we had discerned such things, makes it clear that any message, any story, we find in a piece of music is only what we walked in with. Thus, comparing music with film or the novel, it's not that different art-forms tell stories differently. It's that some art-forms—music, some kinds of painting, some kinds of poetry—tell no story, have no message at all. I would call these forms not illiterate, but superliterate.
As I believe that stories are peripheral to art even in forms like the novel that do employ them, and that "the message" is not just peripheral, but often militates against art succeeding, I view dispensing with story and message as a good thing.
(Aside: Where do young people get the idea that the most important thing to do when experiencing a work of art is to attempt to locate a message that the artist has artfully (and apparently for no reason) concealed? And why, when they think they've located it, do they always tell you about it in sentences that take the form: "What Borges / Joyce / Ozu is trying to say is . . . ?")
Film, Julian says, because it can't tell us directly what characters think or feel, forces readers to interpret and imagine. That's certainly true of the best films (also of the best novels), and the best in any art-form are the ones by which the form should be judged. The problem is, however, that placing the best to one side, all too many films, far from leaving it to the reader to put the pieces together, are quite dictatorial with regard to what readers are allowed to imagine. (This one, for example.) I think, in fact, that a character's face screwed up in agony is if anything less subtle than symbols which, deciphered from a page, spell out agony. And don't get me started on film music, or the easy nostalgia that, ever since The Big Chill
Again, though, film, and every other genre, should be judged by its best exemplars, not its worst or even its so-so, but I fear that hammering-the-viewer-over-the-head lack of subtlety is now the norm in film-making. Other than Kore'eda—and he had to struggle to get his last masterpiece released outside of Japan—who now is making movies that don't hammer viewers over the head?
I don't keep up with film much, so that's a sincere, non-rhetorical, question. There probably are film-makers out there doing just that. Please let me know who they are. (Rohmer is, I believe, still working, but wasn't his last film a departure from his usual subtle approach?)
—David
I wrote earlier of how the conduit through which information about books, DVDs, and so on flows from Amazon to Vox, was broken, and that therefore we were unable to enter new items into our libraries. Vox announced today, through the Team Vox blog, that it would be up again on October 15. The odd thing is that today, September 12, the Amazon conduit seems to be working fine. I've entered several new items into "Books David Finished in 2009."
Go figure.
NC Tate: Time to tell us about something you've imbibed.
—David
It's not that I've stopped reading. It's that the conduit which allows VOX users to import information about books, CDs, DVDs, and so on from Amazon into their collections has been, for the last week or so, silted up, making it impossible to add anything new. If anyone would like to see what I have been reading, they can go here. (Scroll down to the bottom for the most recently read.)
—David
Readers are chaotic. I am, anyway. I read out of order: Franz Kafka before Mark Twain, Mary Shelley before Lady Murasaki. I read To Kill a Mockingbird at 45, Women in Love at 12 (not that I understood much of it, but I tried). A History of Literature based on my reading habits would be haphazard in the extreme. And I imagine that other readers behave much the same, hunting and gathering in libraries and bookstores, reading by whim, slowly accumulating an internal world, book by book.
and
—DavidProbably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and Folio press embossed hardbacks in the world are, culturally if not financially, worth less than a single bundle of 1960s Penguin Classics, and the line of low-budget purveyors of enlightenment is a worthy and laudable one. From the Everyman’s Library editions of the 1900s-40s, with their arts & crafts aesthetic, aimed clearly at autodidacts rather than scholars, to the more famous and, recently, highly fetishised Pelicans and Penguins of the 40s-70s, this is a story of profit, no doubt, but also of human emancipation through mass production. You can see this especially in the Pelicans of the late 1960s, where hot-of-the-press accounts of the ‘new French revolution’ would go alongside texts on scientific management, with Herbert Marcuse next to Frantz Fanon next to A.J.P Taylor, and all of this conflicting and intoxicating information in a pocket-sized form, on cheap paper and with impeccably elegant modernist covers. This tradition has started to make something of a minor comeback, perhaps as a result of the obvious intellectual vacuity of a now decrepit Thatcherism, and the most encouraging example of this is Verso’s Radical Thinkers series.
