Titles

I learned today that the title of the fourth book in Proust's Search of Lost Time (Sodome et Gomorrhe) was translated in English as Cities of the Plain, same as Cormac McCarthy's novel, and that the expression comes from King James Version of the Bible. Looks like most novels in the English language borrow their title from the KJV (Yeats's poems are a close second, though).

I also found out that the title to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was inspired by Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Also, 60 years before Spinoza Robert Fludd wrote his Tractatus Theologo-Philosophicus, which is closer in title (although probably not in content).

Impresii despre Soldaţii de Adrian Schiop

Soldaţii. Poveste din Ferentari de Adrian Schiop. Editura Polirom, 2013

 

În 250 de pagini, Schiop ne prezintã o relaţie sentimentalã, de la începutul timid pânã la previzibilul sfârşit lamentabil. Mai important însã, el reuşeşte performanţa de a schimba treptat perspectiva, astfel cã la sfârşit nu mai este atât de clar cine pe cine exploateazã, iar implozia relaţiei nu decurge aşa cum am fi bãnuit la început.

Soldaţii este o poveste de dragoste, înainte de a fi o poveste din Ferentari sau una despre homosexuali. Aceste douã elemente, ca şi tensiunea dintre ele, sunt indispensabile acţiunii, dar — dacã e sã judec dupã multe recenzii şi reacţii — cred cã mare parte din succesul cãrţii se va datora lecturii în cheie socialã (ca o meditaţie pe tema homosexualitãţii în România sau pe cea a Ferentarilor ca vestigiu al unei perioade trecute).

Stilul este destul de brut, fãrã fraze şlefuite, cam prea în genul "Flori de mucigai", pe care nu îl apreciez foarte tare, dar care se potriveşte într-adevãr cu subiectul. Mai ales în capitolul No more parties, analiza socialã e desfãşuratã în fraze tãioase şi categorice, combinînd termeni tehnici sau erudiţi şi expresii de argou (à la Houellebecq). Partea aceasta mi s-a pãrut cel mai puţin convingãtoare.

Pe scurt, o carte care meritã din plin cititã, în ciuda unei realizãri destul de inegale (narativ şi stilistic).

Note to writers

I do not want to read about your personal history. Unless you have led a very interesting life (literary or otherwise) or you have such an uncommon talent that everything you write is captivating, no matter the topic, do not bother. To wit, if you are not Goethe (or Feynman, or Leigh Fermor) or Proust, your recounted experience had better stand for something larger than itself.

Tattoo printer

The tattoo printer sounds like the punishment device from Kafka's In the Penal Colony.

The influence of intellectuals: hubris and humility

Intellectuals (and I take the term in its widest acceptance) have often believed that their ideas could change the world. Some of them, from Plato to Heidegger, tried to influence directly those in power; others hoped for a posthumous effect (or at least for cultural immortality). Criticism of this belief is as old as the belief itself and has two aspects: a pragmatic one (attempts to influence the course of history through ideas usually fail miserably) and a moral one (knowledge engenders obligations and must be used responsibly).

Elias Canetti, in his short essay The Poet’s Profession¹, looks at this attitude from a very different angle: the responsibility of a writer not to humanity, but to words themselves, as tools of his trade. The true poet both understands the tremendous power of words and accepts his inability to change the world using this power.

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^{1. In Das Gewissen der Worte [The Conscience of Words], Hanser (1975). ↩}

Why good research is like fiction literature

It's not that it requires making things up. I mean this quote by David Foster Wallace:

"[A] certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal."

 After all, we must be convinced that we can discover something new and important, that nobody else has been able to find, but still remain lucid enough not to fool ourselves.

Mr K

Yet another story about Khodorkovsky (a little more critical of the man and his past than the usual articles). We learn that he thinks about returning to Russia and that even the even the perspective of replacing Putin is not completely out of the question.

Khodorkovsky's fall does resemble something out of Kafka. All the elements are there: the oppressive state, the lack of a real crime, down to the hero's initial.

However, it also reminds me of an older story: Faust makes a pact with the devil, reaps the benefits, and then complains about the stench of brimstone.

The place does stink, and the publicity for a high-profile victim may be very effective in raising the international awareness, but I cannot bring myself to empathize with Mr K. Not because he is still alive and rich, but because for a long time he has been a part of the problem he now decries. In fact, the only reason he became a cause célèbre is his former belonging to an international elite, and the only reason of this elevated status was the favor of the regime.

Intellectual dichotomies

When trying to understand a particular topic, a criterion for separating all thinkers into two (or a few) classes would be extremely convenient. Here are some striking distinctions:

• Naive and Sentimental poets (according to Schiller). Further applied to novelists by Orhan Pamuk.
• Foxes and Hedgehogs among intellectuals in general (Isaiah Berlin, borrowing from Archilochus).
• Mathematicians can be Birds or Frogs, says Freeman Dyson. 

I believe these categories are memorable because they relate to temperament and thus cut across cultures and ages, unlike more abstract choices, such as Eleatic/Heraclitean, realist/nominalist, ancient/modern (in literature), etc.

Circumspice

I usually do not link without commenting, but there is not much I could add to this:

Tom Stoppard: Information is light.

The Immortal

In his short story The Immortal, first published in 1947, J. L. Borges shows that those who cannot die cannot live, either: they retreat into a passive state of silence and inactivity.

A strikingly similar reflection appears in Elias Canetti's 1942 diary (published in The Human Province in 1973):

A land of unlimited eternity: one must walk it for days before finding somebody who so much as moves the little finger; the others, in contrast, sit around, silent as the Egyptians.

The need for a college degree

One needs a college degree "for getting even the lowest-level job", says Catherine Rampell in the New York Times. See also the ensuing discussion on Slashdot. This reminds me of Lino Aldani's story Complete technocracy where, in the future, one has to go through a rigorous examination in advanced mathematics and physics to get a street sweeper position.

Bookish drones

In the New Yorker, Teju Cole wonders whether literature makes us better and cites a number of literary heavyweights who –perhaps unsurprisingly– hold this point of view: Mario Vargas Llosa, Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson (another poignant but more nuanced example would be Elias Canetti's "The profession [or calling] of the poet".)

The main concern of the article is Barack Obama's actions as president and in particular his liberal use of drone strikes. The author is puzzled and disappointed, since he expected Obama to have more empathy than, for instance, G. W. Bush. He does ask the question "How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief?" but without even trying to answer it.

The easiest solution is to simply deny any link between literature and human qualities (Cole himself makes the standard reference to cultured Nazis, and there is no shortage of additional examples) but this is deeply unsatisfying in itself and at odds with another widely held opinion: that education is not strictly utilitarian, but valuable in itself for it yields better citizens.

An aesthetic argument against solipsism

In his short story The Other, from the volume The Book of Sand, Borges uses an artistic proof to convince his interlocutor (his younger self, actually) that their encounter is real and not a mere dream. He quotes a verse from Hugo (that the young Borges had not yet read), which is so striking that it could not have been dreamed up; the two then communicate across half a century.

This being a Borges story, things are more complicated than the summary above. In particular, the older Borges concludes that, although they had met, the younger one had in fact been dreaming. What I am interested in here is whether the story puts forward a successful argument against solipsism.

Such an argument requires demonstrating the existence of another person, who is:

• essentially similar, enough to achieve meaningful communication, and
• sufficiently different, so that it cannot be a figment of the subject's imagination

Does a successful encounter with a work of art fulfill these two conditions?