Monthly Book Post, October 2016
Shit White Guys Say: The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell
He received me very courteously; but, it must be confessed, that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of cloaths looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.
"Boswell's Life of Johnson" is praised and lauded as one of the greatest biographies ever written in English. It contains 1200 pages of letters and conversations in which Johnson is praised and lauded as a great conversationalist. His biographer Boswell, who loved him enough to write the 1200 pages, gushes about everything from his large physique to his tender conscience. Everybody holds this man up as a wonderful role model in opinion, manners and behaviour. Pity the young man who takes them all at their many, many words today.
I accepted Samuel Johnson as a great man and role model early in my youth, tried to act like him, and wound up insulting people and driving away potential friends without really understanding what I was doing wrong (the same happened when I was even younger, with John Cleese's Basil Fawlty character, but that's a whole nother embarrassing story). In fact, Johnson SUCKS. Boswell sucks too. Their white-wigged bourgeoisie friend suck. They spend hours and hours sitting leisurely in parlors and public houses discussing how best to keep the poor from being too idle. They play devil's advocate for the sake of interesting conversation, one-up one another with cheap shots (Johnson, it seems to me, "wins" more due to his booming Brian Blessed voice than via actually being right), and just when you find yourself appreciating their mastery of rhetoric and the well-turned phrases, Johnson says something like, "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. One marvels not whether it is done well, but that it is done at all." and you want to unfriend and block the lot of them.
Johnson et al would thrive today in Internet comments sections. Not the death threats and doxxing, but the guys who show off their wits by saying, "Ah, your comment casts new light on the astonishing depth of your idiocy and your unfamiliarity with reason; might I suggest you cease to waste valuable oxygen and assume room temperature forthwith!" With the distinction that Johnson had a little guy at his elbow egging him on, trying to get him to spew some more memorable comments so he could write it all down for the big thick book he was planning.
But yes, I admit that there are still things about all that that I like, that tempt me, and that I sometimes, even at this reading, found myself thinking it would be fun to sit with them all at the Mitre and try to hold my own with the Master Baiter himself. I have All The Privileges. I would be welcomed and taken as one of them, where hundreds of clever people I know would be scorned and dismissed because gender or race or poverty. I would be part of influential social networking that became what it did because of the absence of many voices with important things to say.
The Life of Johnson embodies the type of "Great" dead white guy book that inspires modern activists to throw aside the whole canon in disgust and chant "Western civ has got to go." It is offensive, but it is important. I recommend it to guys like me, who have struggled, and still struggle, with toxic masculinity, as an example of behavior that looks witty and clever among one exclusive subculture, but that in fact is hurtful and exasperating. Read it, imagining that women, that the economically disadvantaged, people of color, are listening in too, and imagine what they would say. I say this would be an effective exercise because the style is far enough away from today that you can see the flaws and not identify with them and get defensive. After that, see if the way you talk around people who look like you has similar flaws.
Precursor to Austen: Camilla, by Fanny Burney
The dresses were almost equally parsimonious, everyone being obliged to take what would fit him from a wardrobe that did not quite allow two dresses a person for all the plays they had to perform. Othello, therefore, was equipped as King Richard the Third, save that, instead of a regal front he had on a black wig to imitate wool, while his face had been begrimed with smoked cork. Iago wore a suit of cloths originally made for Lord Foppington. Brabantio had borrowed the armor of Hamlet's Ghost; Cassio, the Lieutenant General in the christian army, had only been able to equip himself in Osmyn's Turkish vest, and Roderigo, accoutred in the garment of Shylock, came forth a complete Jew. Desdemona, attired more suitably to her fate than to her expectations, went through the whole of her part, except for the last scene, in the sable weeds of Isabella. And Amelia was fain to content herself with the habit of the first witch in MacBeth.
See back to my June 2010 and March 2012 for Burney's much more famous and better written novels Evalina and Cecelia, which feature young women without and with fortunes, going into the world to fend off predators of various kinds. Camilla is somewhat more tame, and despite the presence of an irresponsible uncle who ends up disinheriting a favorite niece because of an ill-considered religious promise (Camilla being much too good-hearted to mind), the story mainly has to do with several young siblings and cousins of varying degrees of purported moral worth, seeking to get properly married off despite unfortunate parental meddling.
Camilla and Edgar, who were of course meant for one another from the beginning, are the "good kids" who triumph despite several avoidable misunderstandings brought on by failure to use common sense. Most of the others have a prominent flaw, such as selfishness or profligacy, that lead them to the predictable situation from which they learn better. So it goes.
Big Fat Geek Wording: Shrill (Notes from a Loud Woman), by Lindy West
As a child, I was really more looking for an open position as, say, the burly and truculent woman at arms protecting an exiled queen who's disguised herself as a rag-and-bone man using cinder paste and some light sorcery. Or a flea bitten yet perspicacious motley urchin who hides in plain sight as a harmless one-man band jackanapes in order to infiltrate the Duke's winter festival and assassinate his scheming nephew with the help of my rat army. Is that hiring? Any overweening palace stewards (who are secretly a pumpkin-headed scarecrow transfigured by a witch) want to join my professional network on LinkedIn?
If you're noticing more feminist rant books on my bookposts lately, you can thank a certain candidate for President whose overt, sickening misogyny has driven me further into the Sisterhood, where women have consistently told me that that shit has been happening all their lives, and to another presidential candidate whose ascent signifies that women are claiming their rightful place in the leadership of this world, and that men like me would do well to listen to their concerns. More importantly, you can thank The Redhead, who has taken to forwarding me lists of Books By Women to make my reading list more inclusive. The result has been that, right when I'm immersed in the dusty, disjointed pontifications of 18th century white guys like Johnson and Kant, and becoming frustrated with just how poorly organized and meandering the thoughts of "Great Authors of the Past" can be (Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, Blackstone, Vico, Sterne, Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith all wrote huge, digressive tomes in dire need of editing, with possibly Fielding, Voltaire and Gibbon as examples of organized writing), they are juxtaposed with new, fresh female voices of today who speak in my vernacular about things going on in the here and now. Which set of writers do you think I'm more likely to come away from thinking "these are people like me"?
I cheated when I got The Redhead's list of Great Feminist Works, and looked in my local library catalogue for the ones with the most circulation. Shrill stood out as having many copies with many reserve holds, and so I went for it in particular. It is worth waiting for.
I struggled with whether it was a good idea to caption this one with "Big fat geek wording", before deciding it fit the spirit of the book. Among other things, Lindy West is a plus-size activist who shouts her weight from the rooftops and does not allow it to be forgotten. A good part of her memoir details the million microaggressions a fat woman endures daily, from being blamed for taking up space on airplanes that cram five seats where three should be, to assholes who think they're doing a favor by insulting and shaming on the theory that being made to hate your body will inspire them to transform themselves or something (see also: "Let's put Trump in charge so that people will HAVE to get up and vote for change!") to doctors who could be treating you for a gunshot wound and still say, "You should lose some weight.'
West also takes on rape culture in the stand-up comedy industry where she once worked; men who tell women to smile; gamergate and other Internet assholes; and 18 humiliating things that happened to her in life that gradually got her to the point where she became confident because she was out of fucks to give. At one point, she changes her tone to describe in moving detail her relationship with, and the death of, her father, followed immediately by a chapter about the troll who set up a social media account using her departed father's name in order to send her messages pretending to be her father, come from the grave to insult her for her weight. The catch is, after West blogged about how this made her feel, the troll--who met all the MRA stereotypes and who apparently had never even considered that there would be something not-OK about doing what he did--apologized and went several extra miles to try to make it right. Sometimes pigs can be taught to fly.
Lindy West is awesome, funny, clever, outrageous, and if you think she's too angry, she doesn't care. She has things to say that should be said and heard. Highest recommendations.
Past the Use-By Date: Staying On, by Paul Scott
"I used to think how marvelous it was that a letter typed in the office and posted in Chancery Lane just by me would actually find its way to a bank in Bombay and then to wherever Tusker was which wasn't always clear because the postmarks were sometimes smudged and although he used regimental notepaper there was no address on it except the one Tusker filled in himself which was always the bank. I got to know the insignia of the Mahwar Regiment so well that I could have drawn it by heart--the elephant with the huge tusks and the howdah on its back and the palm tree sprouting from the howdah. I didn't know it was called a howdah and I didn't know how to pronounce Mahwar properly, neither did Mr. Smith. But not knowing only added to the glamour. Amid all those dusty boring files and boxes and deeds which were nearly all about dead people it was this unknown young officer serving in India who provided the single element of mystery and romance in my life."
This short novel is sort of a coda to Scott's more famous Raj Quartet. It explores the culture shock when some snooty English remain in India following its independence from the British empire, and natives and English alike get used to the idea that the English are not masters of a subservient people but guests/tourists residing in a foreign country. The constant awkward moments range from funny to embarrassing to tragic, as one might have expected.
The 18th Century Murders: The Exile, by Diana Gabaldon; The Blooding, by James McGee; The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre
"You killed them?"
"Not immediately, no."
Lawrence's mouth went dry.
"We questioned them first..."
Lawrence stared at him.
"...then gave them to the women."
Lawrence didn't dare blink.
"Then we killed them. I'd never heard men beg before. And I do mean beg, literally.
--from The Blooding
"Free and equal!", growled Dr. Sam Johnson in high dudgeon. "All men, forsooth, created equal! What is to become of our proper order and subordination of society if such frantick leveling doctrines are to prevail? Free and equal! Signed, John Hancock. Mark my words, sir, we shall yet see this fellow's head spiked above Temple Bar!"
--from The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector
The Exile is a graphic novel (hence no quotation) that presents the original Outlander plot as seen by Jamie's godfather, Murtagh. The big problem with it is that, reading it after seven thick Outlander volumes, I have (as will most readers) a mental picture of what the characters look like, that is nothing like the way they're drawn here. Also, all the men are drawn with similar faces and hair, and it's hard to tell them apart.
The Blooding is the fifth and last so far in McGee's Hawkwood series, this time in the Adirondack/Lake Champlain area of New York and giving Hawkwood a Fenimore Cooper aspect. The narrative shifts between things that happen in 1780 during the American Revolution, and 1812 during a different war with the British. Interestingly, Hawkwood is about the same age in those two years as I was in 1980 and 2012, so it was easy for me to picture the differences in age perspective. As usual, the focus is not on detection so much as in getting out of scrapes and stopping enemies.
And then there's another Lillian de la Torre collection of short mysteries, with Boswell playing Watson to Johnson's Holmes, and gushing so much about how manly and clever and all Johnson is, that readers will be tempted to think them a couple, as is now fashionable to do with Holmes and Watson. They have adventures with ballooning, with Ben Franklin, and with Bonnie Prince Charlie, though the best story is a theatre murder called "The Banquo Trap", in which the ghost of Banquo turns out to be the corpse of the actor who played him.
Rambling: Works by Dr. Samuel Johnson
No passage in the Campaign has been more often mentioned than the simile of the Angel, which is said in the Tatler to be one of the noblest thoughts that ever entered into the heart of man, and is therefore worthy of attentive consideration. Let it be first enquired whether it be a simile. A poetical simile is the discovery of likeness between two actions in their general nature dissimilar, or of causes terminating by different operations in some resemblance of effect. But the mention of another like consequence from a like cause, or of a like performance by a like agency, is not a simile, but an exemplification. It is not a simile to say that the Thames waters fields, as the Po waters fields; or that as Hecla vomits flames in Iceland, so Ætna vomits flames in Sicily. When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swollen with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impressed with the resemblance of things generally unlike, as unlike as intellect and body. But if Pindar had been described as writing with the copiousness and grandeur of Homer, or Horace had told that he reviewed and finished his own poetry with the same care as Isocrates polished his orations, instead of similitude he would have exhibited almost identity; he would have given the same portraits with different names. In the poem now examined, when the English are represented as gaining a fortified pass, by repetition of attack and perseverance of resolution; their obstinacy of courage, and vigour of onset, is well illustrated by the sea that breaks, with incessant battery, the dikes of Holland. This is a simile: but when Addison, having celebrated the beauty of Marlborough’s person, tells us that Achilles thus was formed with every grace, here is no simile, but a mere exemplification. A simile may be compared to lines converging at a point, and is more excellent as the lines approach from greater distance: an exemplification may be considered as two parallel lines which run on together without approximation, never far separated, and never joined.
---from the Life of Addison
Sometimes I wonder how well known Dr. Johnson would be today but for the letters and conversations recorded in his biography. His most important work was a dictionary--and even I don't just read dictionaries cover to cover--followed by an edition of Shakespeare that was an important collation at the time but that, like the dictionary, has long since been surpassed. The works of his that I grazed over at the University Library included Rasselas, his only work of prose fiction and a poor imitation of Candide; a collection of "Lives of the poets" that does a lot of quoting other critics; and some of his editorial essays from "The Rambler", the best of which were already gathered and quoted at length in Boswell.
None of it really gripped me, not even as a supplement to the biography.
Cornwallish: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham
So he found that what he had half despised was not despicable, that what had been for him the satisfaction of an appetite, a pleasant but commonplace adventure in disappointment, owned wayward and elusive depths he had not known before, and carried the knowledge of beauty in its heart.
I would have started this historical novel series a little earlier, except that for some reason it is very popular at our local library right now, and I had to wait over two months for it. I'm similarly on a wait list for Demelza, the second in the series.THANKS OBAMA.
Enforced patience may be a good thing, as otherwise, I might be gobbling up the novels like too many cherries. It's very quick reading and the characters are vivid. The brooding hero Poldark, with the battle scar disfiguring an otherwise handsome face, stoically keeps his poker face as he returns from having served in the Revolutionary war to find that his true love thought him dead and is engaged to his cousin, while his father has died and his ancestral estate fallen into disrepair. Picking up the pieces, Poldark alienates some powerful members of snooty society in his small pond of a county by disdaining their feckless manners and coming to the side of the downtrodden poor, meanwhile finding eventual happiness in a surprising place. Very much a "to be continued" sort of story, and one which does leave one wanting more. Highly recommended.
The Blood of Angry Men: Citizens (A Chronicle of the French Revolution), by Simon Schama
The deconstruction of Marie Antoinette's image was a pathetic thing. She had stripped herself of the mask of royalty in the interests of Nature and Humanity (as well as her own predilections) only to end up represented as, of all women, unnatural and inhuman. When finally the "Widow Capet" was arraigned before the revolutionary tribunal, the conflation of sexual and political crime was made explicit. Insulted very much in the language of the libeles as "immoral in every respect, a new Agrippina"; accused of being in league with the Emperor and (before the Revolution) secretly smuggling two hundred million livres to him, she was finally accused by the editor of the newspaper Le Pere Duchesne and the President of the Paris revolutionary Commune, Rene Hebert, of sexually abusing her own son, the wretched ex-Dauphin, then about eleven years old. She and Mme. Elisabeth, her sister-in-law, were said (on the boy's confession) to have made him sleep between them "in which situation he had been accustomed to the most abominable indulgences." They had taught him to masturbate but not, Hebert thought, simply for their own pleasure but for even more sinister political purposes. Drawing on the grim prognosis of the effects of masturbation set out in Dr. Tissot's Onania, the accusation was that they meant to "enervate the constitution of the child in order that they might acquire an ascendancy over his mind."
The French Revolution is a staggering period in European history, and a frightening era to study right now. Everyone has an opinion on how it relates to the modern world. There are assholes who think it was great, and who want to do it all over again in America. There are even bigger assholes who say it was the natural result of trying to have a welfare state, and the problem was that we need to keep the peasants too hungry to get up and build guillotines. Others, like Thomas Piketty, illustrate it as one of many examples of what happens all over history when the concentration of wealth gets too high. Simon Schama focuses on dozens of individual figures and what they did.
It was striking to me that, according to Schama, the Royal Family started out quite popular with the peasantry, and the Aristocracy--the ones in court, anyhow, went to great lengths to introduce reforms to help the poor, that might well have staved off the revolution, but for the unyielding resistance of the NON-court members of the Second Estate (the One Percent), who insisted on retaining privilege and blocked them at every turn. Similarly, the peasantry mostly just wanted to get fed, and were stirred up, according to Schama, by an ambitious working class just above them in the hierarchy, whose main motive appears to have been to say "fuck you" to the King. This is an aspect I had not read before.
Marie Antoinette, in particular, appears in this version to have been Richard-the-Thirded by history, a devoted mother to her children, who cast off extravagances when she arrived in Paris, and who dressed mostly in modest linen dresses. How is it that such a woman ended up known as the spoiled rich "Let them eat cake" lady from Hell? According to Schama, political enemies just made stuff up, circulating cartoons in which her head was superimposed on the bodies of hideous monsters, and asserting the most malicious, hateful things imaginable (see the quoted part above) about her, with no foundation at all? Can you imagine anyone doing that to a female leader of today? Oh. right...
In fact, I had to go back and check that this book was written in 1989. The parallels between the people in Schama's history and the various political elites, asshole money-grabbers blocking progress, working class Trumpkins out for blood, and down and out people being kicked around like a European football are so striking that, had this been written more recently, I would suspect the author of pulling my leg, or of pointedly warning about what could happen here. Look--there is the Second Estate, sending their idiots to stop the King's party from saving their asses. Look--there are the police, taking the side of the ragtag militia occupying government land. Look--there are the liberals thinking they're going to get what they want when the peasants rise up, and ending up being the first ones whose heads join those of the One Percent in the deplorable basket! The pattern reaches out and hits the reader over the head.
And then, there are miniature portraits of the likes of King Louis and the Royal family, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Marat, Danton, Robespierre and all the other Beauxbaton equivalents of House Slytherin, all yelling "Liberty" as they climb up for their turn atop the ladder of ambition, only to drop to the ground again, completely silent. The book concludes with Robespierre ying on his own guilloutine--not the last to do so, but a good stopping point for Schama to cheerfully assert that 1789 was nothing more than 1793 with less blood. I'm not too sure about that, but I'm definitely unsure enough that I don't want another 1789.
Overthinking: Theory of Fictions, by Jeremy Bentham
By the priest and the lawyer, in whatsoever shape Fiction has been employed, it has had for its object or effect, or both, to deceive, and by deception, to govern, and by governing, to promote the interest, real or supposed, of the party addressing, at the expense of the party addressed. In the mind of all, Fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity--in that of poets, amusement--in that of the priest and the lawyer, of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition; and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
I'm not sure why Theory of Fictions made it onto one of the Mortimer Adler lists of Great Works. It's like chewing gum, going on in brief-but-dense, Francis Bacon style about all the sorts of things people say in society that are not true, that have little to do with one another, from poetry to fable to religious scripture to little white lies. He saves his biggest scorn for "legal fictions", saying in effect that a magistrate who can't get a particular result without the use of a legal fiction is a dirty rotten scoundrel, and that a magistrate who can get that result without it but uses legal fictions anyway is a stupid one.
I Kant Even: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
When we call into play a faculty of cognition, different conceptions manifest themselves according to the different circumstances, and make known this faculty, and assemble themselves into a more or less extensive collection, according to the time or penetration that has been applied to the consideration of them. Where this process, conducted as it is mechanically, so to speak, will end, cannot be determined with certainty. Besides, the conceptions which we discover in this haphazard manner present themselves by no means in order and systematic unity, but are at last coupled together only according to resemblances to each other, and arranged in series, according to the quantity of their content, from the simpler to the more complex-series which are anything but systematic, though not altogether without a certain kind of method in their construction.
It is said that Kant was "roused from his dogmatic slumbers" by the extreme skepticism in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (see Bookpost, February 2016), and the Critique of Pure Reason is the soporific he wrote to help him get back to sleep.
Some fog-enshrouded books of philosophy I skimmed over and summarized; this one I gave special effort to because so many Western Canon scholars identify it as the single most significant work of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, it is extremely rough going, and I found myself having to just STARE at many sentences trying to figure out what the heck Kant was saying. It seems to me that German philosophers pride themselves on being indecipherable.
I was grateful to have already read two centuries worth of navel gazing on epistemology by the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Liebniz) English empiricists (Locke, Hume) and people on the sidelines (Rousseau, Shaftesbury, La Mettrie), as Kant refers extensively to all of them. Additionally, an understanding of the debate prior to Kant is necessary to appreciate what all the fuss is about and what an enormous trick it was for Kant to do something that possibly settles it for good.
The big question at issue is whether it is possible to know anything other than by experience (what Kant calls "a priori knowledge", and where "transcendental" means "able to be derived a priori". Kant is full of terms like "transcendental analytic" and transcendental dialectic" used for concepts we might get more easily if Kant had used plainer words, or if he had been consistent in defining what they meant, which is my biggest issue with Kant). Descartes tried to jump from "I think, therefore I exist" to proof of the existence of God, and from there to the acceptance of thought as rightly guided by a higher power. Kant asserts the concepts of space and time as things that may be understood a priori, claiming it is impossible to imagine anything existing independently of any space or period at all (and yes, people continue to debate that). he further asserts "categories of understanding" such as divisions of quantity into one, many, and all; or quality into reality, negativity, and limited; as a priori conditions of understanding (and yes, people continue to debate that as well).
The second half of the book is devoted pretty much to "proving" that metaphysical questions (the existence of God; whether the universe is finite or infinite) are impossible to answer.
It is important stuff as philosophy goes, but barely readable. Non scholars might prefer a Cliff Notes version.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
He received me very courteously; but, it must be confessed, that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of cloaths looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.
"Boswell's Life of Johnson" is praised and lauded as one of the greatest biographies ever written in English. It contains 1200 pages of letters and conversations in which Johnson is praised and lauded as a great conversationalist. His biographer Boswell, who loved him enough to write the 1200 pages, gushes about everything from his large physique to his tender conscience. Everybody holds this man up as a wonderful role model in opinion, manners and behaviour. Pity the young man who takes them all at their many, many words today.
I accepted Samuel Johnson as a great man and role model early in my youth, tried to act like him, and wound up insulting people and driving away potential friends without really understanding what I was doing wrong (the same happened when I was even younger, with John Cleese's Basil Fawlty character, but that's a whole nother embarrassing story). In fact, Johnson SUCKS. Boswell sucks too. Their white-wigged bourgeoisie friend suck. They spend hours and hours sitting leisurely in parlors and public houses discussing how best to keep the poor from being too idle. They play devil's advocate for the sake of interesting conversation, one-up one another with cheap shots (Johnson, it seems to me, "wins" more due to his booming Brian Blessed voice than via actually being right), and just when you find yourself appreciating their mastery of rhetoric and the well-turned phrases, Johnson says something like, "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. One marvels not whether it is done well, but that it is done at all." and you want to unfriend and block the lot of them.
Johnson et al would thrive today in Internet comments sections. Not the death threats and doxxing, but the guys who show off their wits by saying, "Ah, your comment casts new light on the astonishing depth of your idiocy and your unfamiliarity with reason; might I suggest you cease to waste valuable oxygen and assume room temperature forthwith!" With the distinction that Johnson had a little guy at his elbow egging him on, trying to get him to spew some more memorable comments so he could write it all down for the big thick book he was planning.
But yes, I admit that there are still things about all that that I like, that tempt me, and that I sometimes, even at this reading, found myself thinking it would be fun to sit with them all at the Mitre and try to hold my own with the Master Baiter himself. I have All The Privileges. I would be welcomed and taken as one of them, where hundreds of clever people I know would be scorned and dismissed because gender or race or poverty. I would be part of influential social networking that became what it did because of the absence of many voices with important things to say.
The Life of Johnson embodies the type of "Great" dead white guy book that inspires modern activists to throw aside the whole canon in disgust and chant "Western civ has got to go." It is offensive, but it is important. I recommend it to guys like me, who have struggled, and still struggle, with toxic masculinity, as an example of behavior that looks witty and clever among one exclusive subculture, but that in fact is hurtful and exasperating. Read it, imagining that women, that the economically disadvantaged, people of color, are listening in too, and imagine what they would say. I say this would be an effective exercise because the style is far enough away from today that you can see the flaws and not identify with them and get defensive. After that, see if the way you talk around people who look like you has similar flaws.
Precursor to Austen: Camilla, by Fanny Burney
The dresses were almost equally parsimonious, everyone being obliged to take what would fit him from a wardrobe that did not quite allow two dresses a person for all the plays they had to perform. Othello, therefore, was equipped as King Richard the Third, save that, instead of a regal front he had on a black wig to imitate wool, while his face had been begrimed with smoked cork. Iago wore a suit of cloths originally made for Lord Foppington. Brabantio had borrowed the armor of Hamlet's Ghost; Cassio, the Lieutenant General in the christian army, had only been able to equip himself in Osmyn's Turkish vest, and Roderigo, accoutred in the garment of Shylock, came forth a complete Jew. Desdemona, attired more suitably to her fate than to her expectations, went through the whole of her part, except for the last scene, in the sable weeds of Isabella. And Amelia was fain to content herself with the habit of the first witch in MacBeth.
See back to my June 2010 and March 2012 for Burney's much more famous and better written novels Evalina and Cecelia, which feature young women without and with fortunes, going into the world to fend off predators of various kinds. Camilla is somewhat more tame, and despite the presence of an irresponsible uncle who ends up disinheriting a favorite niece because of an ill-considered religious promise (Camilla being much too good-hearted to mind), the story mainly has to do with several young siblings and cousins of varying degrees of purported moral worth, seeking to get properly married off despite unfortunate parental meddling.
Camilla and Edgar, who were of course meant for one another from the beginning, are the "good kids" who triumph despite several avoidable misunderstandings brought on by failure to use common sense. Most of the others have a prominent flaw, such as selfishness or profligacy, that lead them to the predictable situation from which they learn better. So it goes.
Big Fat Geek Wording: Shrill (Notes from a Loud Woman), by Lindy West
As a child, I was really more looking for an open position as, say, the burly and truculent woman at arms protecting an exiled queen who's disguised herself as a rag-and-bone man using cinder paste and some light sorcery. Or a flea bitten yet perspicacious motley urchin who hides in plain sight as a harmless one-man band jackanapes in order to infiltrate the Duke's winter festival and assassinate his scheming nephew with the help of my rat army. Is that hiring? Any overweening palace stewards (who are secretly a pumpkin-headed scarecrow transfigured by a witch) want to join my professional network on LinkedIn?
If you're noticing more feminist rant books on my bookposts lately, you can thank a certain candidate for President whose overt, sickening misogyny has driven me further into the Sisterhood, where women have consistently told me that that shit has been happening all their lives, and to another presidential candidate whose ascent signifies that women are claiming their rightful place in the leadership of this world, and that men like me would do well to listen to their concerns. More importantly, you can thank The Redhead, who has taken to forwarding me lists of Books By Women to make my reading list more inclusive. The result has been that, right when I'm immersed in the dusty, disjointed pontifications of 18th century white guys like Johnson and Kant, and becoming frustrated with just how poorly organized and meandering the thoughts of "Great Authors of the Past" can be (Hume, Montesquieu, Diderot, Blackstone, Vico, Sterne, Kant, Bentham and Adam Smith all wrote huge, digressive tomes in dire need of editing, with possibly Fielding, Voltaire and Gibbon as examples of organized writing), they are juxtaposed with new, fresh female voices of today who speak in my vernacular about things going on in the here and now. Which set of writers do you think I'm more likely to come away from thinking "these are people like me"?
I cheated when I got The Redhead's list of Great Feminist Works, and looked in my local library catalogue for the ones with the most circulation. Shrill stood out as having many copies with many reserve holds, and so I went for it in particular. It is worth waiting for.
I struggled with whether it was a good idea to caption this one with "Big fat geek wording", before deciding it fit the spirit of the book. Among other things, Lindy West is a plus-size activist who shouts her weight from the rooftops and does not allow it to be forgotten. A good part of her memoir details the million microaggressions a fat woman endures daily, from being blamed for taking up space on airplanes that cram five seats where three should be, to assholes who think they're doing a favor by insulting and shaming on the theory that being made to hate your body will inspire them to transform themselves or something (see also: "Let's put Trump in charge so that people will HAVE to get up and vote for change!") to doctors who could be treating you for a gunshot wound and still say, "You should lose some weight.'
West also takes on rape culture in the stand-up comedy industry where she once worked; men who tell women to smile; gamergate and other Internet assholes; and 18 humiliating things that happened to her in life that gradually got her to the point where she became confident because she was out of fucks to give. At one point, she changes her tone to describe in moving detail her relationship with, and the death of, her father, followed immediately by a chapter about the troll who set up a social media account using her departed father's name in order to send her messages pretending to be her father, come from the grave to insult her for her weight. The catch is, after West blogged about how this made her feel, the troll--who met all the MRA stereotypes and who apparently had never even considered that there would be something not-OK about doing what he did--apologized and went several extra miles to try to make it right. Sometimes pigs can be taught to fly.
Lindy West is awesome, funny, clever, outrageous, and if you think she's too angry, she doesn't care. She has things to say that should be said and heard. Highest recommendations.
Past the Use-By Date: Staying On, by Paul Scott
"I used to think how marvelous it was that a letter typed in the office and posted in Chancery Lane just by me would actually find its way to a bank in Bombay and then to wherever Tusker was which wasn't always clear because the postmarks were sometimes smudged and although he used regimental notepaper there was no address on it except the one Tusker filled in himself which was always the bank. I got to know the insignia of the Mahwar Regiment so well that I could have drawn it by heart--the elephant with the huge tusks and the howdah on its back and the palm tree sprouting from the howdah. I didn't know it was called a howdah and I didn't know how to pronounce Mahwar properly, neither did Mr. Smith. But not knowing only added to the glamour. Amid all those dusty boring files and boxes and deeds which were nearly all about dead people it was this unknown young officer serving in India who provided the single element of mystery and romance in my life."
This short novel is sort of a coda to Scott's more famous Raj Quartet. It explores the culture shock when some snooty English remain in India following its independence from the British empire, and natives and English alike get used to the idea that the English are not masters of a subservient people but guests/tourists residing in a foreign country. The constant awkward moments range from funny to embarrassing to tragic, as one might have expected.
The 18th Century Murders: The Exile, by Diana Gabaldon; The Blooding, by James McGee; The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre
"You killed them?"
"Not immediately, no."
Lawrence's mouth went dry.
"We questioned them first..."
Lawrence stared at him.
"...then gave them to the women."
Lawrence didn't dare blink.
"Then we killed them. I'd never heard men beg before. And I do mean beg, literally.
--from The Blooding
"Free and equal!", growled Dr. Sam Johnson in high dudgeon. "All men, forsooth, created equal! What is to become of our proper order and subordination of society if such frantick leveling doctrines are to prevail? Free and equal! Signed, John Hancock. Mark my words, sir, we shall yet see this fellow's head spiked above Temple Bar!"
--from The Exploits of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector
The Exile is a graphic novel (hence no quotation) that presents the original Outlander plot as seen by Jamie's godfather, Murtagh. The big problem with it is that, reading it after seven thick Outlander volumes, I have (as will most readers) a mental picture of what the characters look like, that is nothing like the way they're drawn here. Also, all the men are drawn with similar faces and hair, and it's hard to tell them apart.
The Blooding is the fifth and last so far in McGee's Hawkwood series, this time in the Adirondack/Lake Champlain area of New York and giving Hawkwood a Fenimore Cooper aspect. The narrative shifts between things that happen in 1780 during the American Revolution, and 1812 during a different war with the British. Interestingly, Hawkwood is about the same age in those two years as I was in 1980 and 2012, so it was easy for me to picture the differences in age perspective. As usual, the focus is not on detection so much as in getting out of scrapes and stopping enemies.
And then there's another Lillian de la Torre collection of short mysteries, with Boswell playing Watson to Johnson's Holmes, and gushing so much about how manly and clever and all Johnson is, that readers will be tempted to think them a couple, as is now fashionable to do with Holmes and Watson. They have adventures with ballooning, with Ben Franklin, and with Bonnie Prince Charlie, though the best story is a theatre murder called "The Banquo Trap", in which the ghost of Banquo turns out to be the corpse of the actor who played him.
Rambling: Works by Dr. Samuel Johnson
No passage in the Campaign has been more often mentioned than the simile of the Angel, which is said in the Tatler to be one of the noblest thoughts that ever entered into the heart of man, and is therefore worthy of attentive consideration. Let it be first enquired whether it be a simile. A poetical simile is the discovery of likeness between two actions in their general nature dissimilar, or of causes terminating by different operations in some resemblance of effect. But the mention of another like consequence from a like cause, or of a like performance by a like agency, is not a simile, but an exemplification. It is not a simile to say that the Thames waters fields, as the Po waters fields; or that as Hecla vomits flames in Iceland, so Ætna vomits flames in Sicily. When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swollen with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impressed with the resemblance of things generally unlike, as unlike as intellect and body. But if Pindar had been described as writing with the copiousness and grandeur of Homer, or Horace had told that he reviewed and finished his own poetry with the same care as Isocrates polished his orations, instead of similitude he would have exhibited almost identity; he would have given the same portraits with different names. In the poem now examined, when the English are represented as gaining a fortified pass, by repetition of attack and perseverance of resolution; their obstinacy of courage, and vigour of onset, is well illustrated by the sea that breaks, with incessant battery, the dikes of Holland. This is a simile: but when Addison, having celebrated the beauty of Marlborough’s person, tells us that Achilles thus was formed with every grace, here is no simile, but a mere exemplification. A simile may be compared to lines converging at a point, and is more excellent as the lines approach from greater distance: an exemplification may be considered as two parallel lines which run on together without approximation, never far separated, and never joined.
---from the Life of Addison
Sometimes I wonder how well known Dr. Johnson would be today but for the letters and conversations recorded in his biography. His most important work was a dictionary--and even I don't just read dictionaries cover to cover--followed by an edition of Shakespeare that was an important collation at the time but that, like the dictionary, has long since been surpassed. The works of his that I grazed over at the University Library included Rasselas, his only work of prose fiction and a poor imitation of Candide; a collection of "Lives of the poets" that does a lot of quoting other critics; and some of his editorial essays from "The Rambler", the best of which were already gathered and quoted at length in Boswell.
None of it really gripped me, not even as a supplement to the biography.
Cornwallish: Ross Poldark, by Winston Graham
So he found that what he had half despised was not despicable, that what had been for him the satisfaction of an appetite, a pleasant but commonplace adventure in disappointment, owned wayward and elusive depths he had not known before, and carried the knowledge of beauty in its heart.
I would have started this historical novel series a little earlier, except that for some reason it is very popular at our local library right now, and I had to wait over two months for it. I'm similarly on a wait list for Demelza, the second in the series.THANKS OBAMA.
Enforced patience may be a good thing, as otherwise, I might be gobbling up the novels like too many cherries. It's very quick reading and the characters are vivid. The brooding hero Poldark, with the battle scar disfiguring an otherwise handsome face, stoically keeps his poker face as he returns from having served in the Revolutionary war to find that his true love thought him dead and is engaged to his cousin, while his father has died and his ancestral estate fallen into disrepair. Picking up the pieces, Poldark alienates some powerful members of snooty society in his small pond of a county by disdaining their feckless manners and coming to the side of the downtrodden poor, meanwhile finding eventual happiness in a surprising place. Very much a "to be continued" sort of story, and one which does leave one wanting more. Highly recommended.
The Blood of Angry Men: Citizens (A Chronicle of the French Revolution), by Simon Schama
The deconstruction of Marie Antoinette's image was a pathetic thing. She had stripped herself of the mask of royalty in the interests of Nature and Humanity (as well as her own predilections) only to end up represented as, of all women, unnatural and inhuman. When finally the "Widow Capet" was arraigned before the revolutionary tribunal, the conflation of sexual and political crime was made explicit. Insulted very much in the language of the libeles as "immoral in every respect, a new Agrippina"; accused of being in league with the Emperor and (before the Revolution) secretly smuggling two hundred million livres to him, she was finally accused by the editor of the newspaper Le Pere Duchesne and the President of the Paris revolutionary Commune, Rene Hebert, of sexually abusing her own son, the wretched ex-Dauphin, then about eleven years old. She and Mme. Elisabeth, her sister-in-law, were said (on the boy's confession) to have made him sleep between them "in which situation he had been accustomed to the most abominable indulgences." They had taught him to masturbate but not, Hebert thought, simply for their own pleasure but for even more sinister political purposes. Drawing on the grim prognosis of the effects of masturbation set out in Dr. Tissot's Onania, the accusation was that they meant to "enervate the constitution of the child in order that they might acquire an ascendancy over his mind."
The French Revolution is a staggering period in European history, and a frightening era to study right now. Everyone has an opinion on how it relates to the modern world. There are assholes who think it was great, and who want to do it all over again in America. There are even bigger assholes who say it was the natural result of trying to have a welfare state, and the problem was that we need to keep the peasants too hungry to get up and build guillotines. Others, like Thomas Piketty, illustrate it as one of many examples of what happens all over history when the concentration of wealth gets too high. Simon Schama focuses on dozens of individual figures and what they did.
It was striking to me that, according to Schama, the Royal Family started out quite popular with the peasantry, and the Aristocracy--the ones in court, anyhow, went to great lengths to introduce reforms to help the poor, that might well have staved off the revolution, but for the unyielding resistance of the NON-court members of the Second Estate (the One Percent), who insisted on retaining privilege and blocked them at every turn. Similarly, the peasantry mostly just wanted to get fed, and were stirred up, according to Schama, by an ambitious working class just above them in the hierarchy, whose main motive appears to have been to say "fuck you" to the King. This is an aspect I had not read before.
Marie Antoinette, in particular, appears in this version to have been Richard-the-Thirded by history, a devoted mother to her children, who cast off extravagances when she arrived in Paris, and who dressed mostly in modest linen dresses. How is it that such a woman ended up known as the spoiled rich "Let them eat cake" lady from Hell? According to Schama, political enemies just made stuff up, circulating cartoons in which her head was superimposed on the bodies of hideous monsters, and asserting the most malicious, hateful things imaginable (see the quoted part above) about her, with no foundation at all? Can you imagine anyone doing that to a female leader of today? Oh. right...
In fact, I had to go back and check that this book was written in 1989. The parallels between the people in Schama's history and the various political elites, asshole money-grabbers blocking progress, working class Trumpkins out for blood, and down and out people being kicked around like a European football are so striking that, had this been written more recently, I would suspect the author of pulling my leg, or of pointedly warning about what could happen here. Look--there is the Second Estate, sending their idiots to stop the King's party from saving their asses. Look--there are the police, taking the side of the ragtag militia occupying government land. Look--there are the liberals thinking they're going to get what they want when the peasants rise up, and ending up being the first ones whose heads join those of the One Percent in the deplorable basket! The pattern reaches out and hits the reader over the head.
And then, there are miniature portraits of the likes of King Louis and the Royal family, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Marat, Danton, Robespierre and all the other Beauxbaton equivalents of House Slytherin, all yelling "Liberty" as they climb up for their turn atop the ladder of ambition, only to drop to the ground again, completely silent. The book concludes with Robespierre ying on his own guilloutine--not the last to do so, but a good stopping point for Schama to cheerfully assert that 1789 was nothing more than 1793 with less blood. I'm not too sure about that, but I'm definitely unsure enough that I don't want another 1789.
Overthinking: Theory of Fictions, by Jeremy Bentham
By the priest and the lawyer, in whatsoever shape Fiction has been employed, it has had for its object or effect, or both, to deceive, and by deception, to govern, and by governing, to promote the interest, real or supposed, of the party addressing, at the expense of the party addressed. In the mind of all, Fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity--in that of poets, amusement--in that of the priest and the lawyer, of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition; and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
I'm not sure why Theory of Fictions made it onto one of the Mortimer Adler lists of Great Works. It's like chewing gum, going on in brief-but-dense, Francis Bacon style about all the sorts of things people say in society that are not true, that have little to do with one another, from poetry to fable to religious scripture to little white lies. He saves his biggest scorn for "legal fictions", saying in effect that a magistrate who can't get a particular result without the use of a legal fiction is a dirty rotten scoundrel, and that a magistrate who can get that result without it but uses legal fictions anyway is a stupid one.
I Kant Even: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
When we call into play a faculty of cognition, different conceptions manifest themselves according to the different circumstances, and make known this faculty, and assemble themselves into a more or less extensive collection, according to the time or penetration that has been applied to the consideration of them. Where this process, conducted as it is mechanically, so to speak, will end, cannot be determined with certainty. Besides, the conceptions which we discover in this haphazard manner present themselves by no means in order and systematic unity, but are at last coupled together only according to resemblances to each other, and arranged in series, according to the quantity of their content, from the simpler to the more complex-series which are anything but systematic, though not altogether without a certain kind of method in their construction.
It is said that Kant was "roused from his dogmatic slumbers" by the extreme skepticism in Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (see Bookpost, February 2016), and the Critique of Pure Reason is the soporific he wrote to help him get back to sleep.
Some fog-enshrouded books of philosophy I skimmed over and summarized; this one I gave special effort to because so many Western Canon scholars identify it as the single most significant work of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, it is extremely rough going, and I found myself having to just STARE at many sentences trying to figure out what the heck Kant was saying. It seems to me that German philosophers pride themselves on being indecipherable.
I was grateful to have already read two centuries worth of navel gazing on epistemology by the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Liebniz) English empiricists (Locke, Hume) and people on the sidelines (Rousseau, Shaftesbury, La Mettrie), as Kant refers extensively to all of them. Additionally, an understanding of the debate prior to Kant is necessary to appreciate what all the fuss is about and what an enormous trick it was for Kant to do something that possibly settles it for good.
The big question at issue is whether it is possible to know anything other than by experience (what Kant calls "a priori knowledge", and where "transcendental" means "able to be derived a priori". Kant is full of terms like "transcendental analytic" and transcendental dialectic" used for concepts we might get more easily if Kant had used plainer words, or if he had been consistent in defining what they meant, which is my biggest issue with Kant). Descartes tried to jump from "I think, therefore I exist" to proof of the existence of God, and from there to the acceptance of thought as rightly guided by a higher power. Kant asserts the concepts of space and time as things that may be understood a priori, claiming it is impossible to imagine anything existing independently of any space or period at all (and yes, people continue to debate that). he further asserts "categories of understanding" such as divisions of quantity into one, many, and all; or quality into reality, negativity, and limited; as a priori conditions of understanding (and yes, people continue to debate that as well).
The second half of the book is devoted pretty much to "proving" that metaphysical questions (the existence of God; whether the universe is finite or infinite) are impossible to answer.
It is important stuff as philosophy goes, but barely readable. Non scholars might prefer a Cliff Notes version.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts