“The Aeneid” by Virgil

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

Strange to confess, but this is the first time I’ve read the entire poem cover to cover (in English, quickly – several decades ago I’d read it all in Latin over a number of weeks). It came out other than how I’d expected: firstly, more straightforward and easier to get my head round and understand, and secondly, clearly less good than Homer [as I’d always felt, but I’d hoped/feared that this Virgilian drenching might tip things the other way]. In addition, reading through quickly (six books a day for two days) provides a momentum which carries you through the knots, the bits where Virgil seems to be showing Aeneas in a bad light and the victims of Rome’s mission seem to be the true recipients of the poet’s sympathies. That doesn’t go away, it’s all still there, but somehow Aeneas’ mission stops you getting too concerned, and its strength has sufficient force to breathe vigour and interest into Aeneas’ character: he’s far less of a woolly priest than I’d remembered him. Part of the problem I think is teaching just books 2, 4, and 6 (with occasional bits of 1 and 12) – the focus is on the losses of Troy, Dido and Marcellus, and not Aeneas’ determination to do the right thing and win through. At the climax of Book 12 we feel a great sense of Aeneas’ success – he’s done it! – but also the preceding books have sufficiently Romanised our sensibilities to share Aeneas’ anger in killing Turnus for his slaying of Pallas.

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“A Maggot” by John Fowles

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

I’d no idea what to expect: I knew he’d written The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but had neither read nor seen that. I (still) don’t even know if he’s British or American. But this book is long-lasting in its effects for two reasons. First is the way it’s written: most of it is in dialogue form – transcriptions of interviews carried out by a lawyer (Henry Ayscough) in 1736, and these are biting and subtle; but the occasional pieces of straight narrative, including the lengthy initial scene, are in a style I haven’t met before: fabulously careful and detached accounts of every action and gesture, including the absence of actions and gestures, by the characters. As for the story itself, it’s an 18th-century thriller, involving disguise, deceit and, either time travel, aliens, or some seriously bizarre religious visions. It’s a shifting, clever, piece: who the main character actually is (in terms of which of the characters is actually the main one) emerges gradually, and we don’t really know for sure until the epilogue.

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“Jesus” by Humphrey Carpenter

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

One of Carpenter’s most well-known biographies, part of the “Past Masters” series of short books on influential thinkers.
Overall Carpenter seems to go as far as he can in sympathising and admiring Jesus, stopping short just at the point beyond which lies accepting something of the supernatural, whether it’s miracles, resurrection, fulfilment of prophecies, or Jesus’ status as some kind of representative or agent of God on earth (or, of course, God himself). He spends a lot of his time analysing Jesus’ teaching, coming to the conclusion that most of it points towards the message: “the Jewish Law is essential and should be obeyed, but it’s not enough – you need to use your consciences to follow its spirit, not just its letter, and to help you when the Law, either through ambiguity, contradiction or silence, cannot help you.” Carpenter is clear that Jesus’ teaching is interior to Judaism: all Gentilising hints are later interpolations.
He’s very good, at the start of the book, on the sources, explaining that Paul’s letters and teaching are earlier than the Gospels; this leads to some puzzlement later in the book, when Carpenter observes that although written later, they represent a tradition which runs counter to Pauline teaching – you’d have expected the later accounts of Jesus’ life to follow Paul more closely. The fact that they don’t lends them credibility. He describes Paul as not really being interested in what Jesus said, but more in him as a risen, and hence present, Lord, and, in his attempts to spread the religion to the Gentiles, is much more relaxed than Jesus about moving away from the Jewish Law. In fact Carpenter talks about other scholars’ describing Christianity as founded by Paul, not Jesus, and this makes real sense.
There’s good test-case discussion on what Jesus says about, for example, divorce, the poor, and the Sabbath, and on what he might have thought about himself: this last focuses on the phrase “Son of Man”, whose meaning seems to range from “human” to “agent of God ushering in the end of the world”: tricky. Carpenter appears to conclude that Jesus saw himself as something definitely special, perhaps close to contemporary ideas of “Messiah” (a new David-like king to bring the Jews their political independence), but more importantly someone who would free the Jews from their dependence on classes of interpreters of the Law (Scribes, Pharisees) and give them the confidence to apply the Law of Moses to their own lives themselves.
The book, as all Carpenter, is really well written – an easy read, but one which addresses and deals clearly with complex ideas and questions, and which distills and clarifies a large amount of background reading. Sometimes, however, because of the paucity of evidence, he attempts to explain the world of the Gospels by using itself as evidence: for example (pp 70f) he sets the scene for a discussion of the accounts of Jesus’ driving out demons by explaining that Judaism had incorporated dualist ideas of good and evil forces during its exile in Babylon. The evidence for this just seems to be the Gospel accounts he is seeking to explain.
So it’s a very impressive book – very (in an Enlightment-careful) sense balanced and “reasonable”, steering a path between what he would regard as unacceptable positions of superstition and casual dismissal.

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“A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” by Marina Lewycka

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

Fun. It’s written in the person of a Ukrainian-British woman, telling the story of her father’s disastrous marriage in widowerhood to a more recent Ukrainian immigrant, the well-named and warhead-breasted Valentina. It’s very funny, but succeeds mostly I think because of the strength of its characters: particularly the father Nikolai and his wife Valentina, but also the narrator Nadia, her sister Vera, and down even to minor figures like the English-rose solicitor Ms Carter. Then there’s the late arrival Dubov, and even Nadia’s husband Mike gets clearly drawn. The writing is similarly strong and clear – brisk – even the more literary passages convey this vital physicality: plants in gardens fighting each other.
Where I think she’s less successful (but it’s not a significant weakness) is in her running as a parallel to Nikolai’s comic affair Nadia’s gradual learning about her family’s past – the horrors her parents and sister endured in Stalin’s famine and the war with Germany. Many serious novels do this (I can think of D.M Thomas’ The White Hotel and Bernard Schlink’s The Reader/em>), but I haven’t seen it in a comedy before, and am not sure if the attempt at bittersweet counterpoint works as well as the writer might have hoped. Still, her accounts of what happened in the Ukraine and at the forced-labour camp at Dachensee do, in their sitting uneasily with the capers in Peterborough, make us realise how absolutely insignificant the things we moan about are compared with what went on in the darker periods of history. There are interesting links between the two periods: Vera and Valentina’s thefts, the role of wider family members in looking after each other, and perhaps at a broader level aspects of human conflict on micro- and macro-levels.

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“If on a winter’s night a traveller” by Italo Calvino

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

Unique (in my limited experience). A contorted and jerky tale which successfully breaks down the ‘fourth wall’: the protagonist is “you”, “the Reader”, who begins by beginning reading “If on a winter’s night a traveller” by Italo Calvino, and ends by saying he’s just finishing “If on a winter’s night a traveller” by Italo Calvino. Clever.

The basic structure is to alternate named chapters, each one the beginning of a different novel you are reading, with numbered chapters which describe your frustration that you are never able to get beyond the first chapter of these novels, because of things like printing errors. But it gets more complicated than that.

Often surreal, the novel reminded me in many ways of Alice Through the Looking Glass: the way stories start and end abruptly, the surreal elements (including a whole named chapter on mirrors), and the fact that the main subordinate characters are a pair of twins…

The whole thing, looking at theory now, is “about” “reading”, with all those inverted commas imply. A bit up itself, but lightly done and never over-serious. It’s a tad over-literary though, in pretending that “reading” is somehow special, and not just a special case of all our experience of the world: if the “reader” “creates” “meaning” from a “text”, and the “author” disappears like a Cheshire Cat, that’s how we find meaning when we’re not reading, as well as when we are.

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Tragedy and Comedy

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

Comedy comes from surprise, either from the breaking of a (moral) rule (e.g. a taboo) or from something unexpected (“boo!”) (or both – man-falling-on-banana-skin is unexpected and makes us laugh, naughtily, from the suffering of another).

And in Tragedy the hero’s fall must also be a surprise, at least to him, and must come from a combination of two reasons: if it’s caused by fate or ‘the gods’ it’s in effect a random event, unexpected; and if it’s their own fault it’s from their breaking a moral rule.

So both arise either from the unexpected or from moral transgression.

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“Hatton Garden” by Rachel Lichtenstein

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

A wonderful find: a personal and in-depth history of this part of London, ending with a breathtaking account of an official descent to and along the ancient and hidden River Fleet. An evocative and fact-filled book, making any visit to this area richer, as the layers of London’s past reveal themselves behind what you actually see. Her account of the Italian community’s ‘sagra’ led me to attend this year’s festival, and put it in the diary for next year.

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“The Illustrated Man” by Ray Bradbury

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

My first Ray Bradbury. Fascinating. As stories go they are like others I’ve read: really intriguing ideas, strong atmospheres, but ending weakly, either flattish, or with an ending that isn’t supposed to be obvious but is, kind of. Not that all stories have to have exciting twists or revelations at the end, but some kind of shift into the extra-story world, some kind of attempt to make you stop and think or feel for a while, as most poems attempt, is worth going for.

Fascinating for several reasons. Any sci-fi written some time ago is always interesting because of the accuracy their predictions of the future: the contrast of right and wrong generates its own literary hum. Here, by 2013, we get routine interplanetary space travel and robots indistinguishable from the real people of whom they are copies, but messages sent not electronically but printed on foil and whizzed through tubes.

Thematically it’s pretty homogenous: rockets are everywhere, hovering like darning needles, criss-crossing the sky over earth, landing on fields near Martians and quickly taking off again; all like post-war comics. More important are themes of social justice, particularly in “The Other Foot”, about a potential future revenge for American segregation laws, and the urban poor in “The Rocket”, but most prominent are lonely, futile fathers and hostile children, from the first story’s parenticides in “The Veldt” to the last story’s father’s fears for his son’s imminent miserable childhood making him swap places, via the (ultimately successful) useless father in “The Rocket”, and the Martians-invading-earth-by-turning-children-against-adults in “Zero Hour”. It all suggests a post-war America very unhappy: partly mesmerized by peddled visions of a technological future paradise, but grounded in the realisation that real-world problems of isolation and discrimination aren’t cured by engineers in labs. “The Last Night of the World” perhaps has Bradbury’s solution: a calm and beautifully resigned acceptance of disaster, a peaceful (and shorter – five hours) antidote to Bowie’s “Five Years”. It’s in this story, and brilliantly in “Marionettes, inc.”, that we find fuller treatment of women: often they’re ciphers – from the perspective of each story’s protagonist, but the Bradbury voice makes it clear that he has deeper sympathy, that here are suppressed voices.

The writing is plain and straightforward, with rare (over)bold metaphors and images. What’s interesting is how he’s structured the collection as stories illustrated on the body of a man he meets on the road. This modern ecphrasis, has, as does Achilles’ shield, moving pictures, but also a chilling blank space on the shoulder where, the Man says, a story about the fate of the viewer appears; Bradbury’s “Epilogue” describes what our narrator sees, and his sudden flight from the implied death. We’re left guessing.

These themes and the structure match each other: Bradbury’s illustrations illustrate Man, both homo – the species, how its bright future is compromised by its social flaws – and vir – the male adult, opposed, literally, to his women and children.

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The Woman in Black

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

All good fun. I’d seen the stage play many years ago with a school group, and had, as everyone else, jumped with shock as the lights revealed the ghost woman rocking furiously on her chair. I’d always been amazed how a stage play could be so frightening, more frightening, as it turned out, than the film version of the same story. Perhaps it was because Harry Potter was the hero, but it was rather that it seemed little more than a Scooby-Doo story – haunted house, everyone sceptical, gradually realise it’s real – but without the “It’s Mr Jones the caretaker!” moment. The child deaths (after each sighting of the Woman) made it, however, more painful to watch than just another ghost story, in that the ghost could actually do more damage than merely scare people; and the bizarre ending (changed for the film? I can’t remember: Google, dear reader) gave an ambiguous twist (happy ending or not?) which brought on the pensivity.

And it was great recognising the beach at Othona Bradwell (where I write these words).

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“Truth or Beauty” by David Orren

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Houyhnhnm

‘”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

(John Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, last lines)

A random website on this poem says “The exact meaning of those lines is disputed by everyone; no less a critic than TS Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem.” But away from the poem these lines do have force, and it’s a force which Orrell argues has misled western thinkers for millennia. It was at a recent talk at the school where I work that the visiting philosopher (Amia Srinivasan) pointed out, to me for the first time, that choosing the most elegant from a range of theories, applying Occam’s Razor, doesn’t actually make much logical sense [unless perhaps it’s inductively good practice? – something outside Orrell’s scope]. Anyway, that should explain the title: questioning the iff relationship between these seductive abstract nouns.

This is a good book. Its basic argument is:

Since the Greeks, and particularly Pythagoras & Plato, scientists have viewed simplicity, elegance, beauty as important criteria for assessing the strength of theories. So explanations which unify (e.g. Newton’s theory of gravity, which linked the motions of apples and planets), or display symmetry (e.g. anti-matter) are privileged.
But this has always been a little irrational (it has to be justified by a priori arguments), and has become a real obstacle to progress in the 20th century, with particle physicists getting bogged down in what likes a fruitless search for a Theory of Everything so simple it can go on nerds’ T shirts. Much of nature (e.g. planetary motion not being circular, evolution’s reliance on genetic corruptions to work at all, the asymmetry of the weak nuclear force) is messier and apparently resistant to “perfect” maths. Other, and more directly damaging, problems come from an over-reductive approach to predicting behaviour of complex systems (weather, genetic, economic): such systems operate in ways which are theoretically impossible to predict from just modelling the behaviour of their “atomic” constituents.
Therefore we need to approach such problems with more right-brain, creative, holistic ideas.

It’s also a really useful introduction to the history of science, especially physics and chemistry, taking the layman fairly gently from the Greeks to string theory.

What I don’t yet understand (as my italics above indicate) is how e.g. a weather system is not predictable from its constituents in theory, not just in practice. I can accept Heisenberg for electrons, but wonder what the justification is for similar claims for complex systems. Is it just quantum uncertainty blown up: the uncertainty with particles necessitates uncertainty in the systems they comprise? If so that’s OK as well, but if not then I’d like to know what does cause the unpredictable Democritan swerves, if it isn’t the behaviour of the systems’ components?

The other issue that I’m not sure fits snugly is Orren’s first arguing against using beauty as a criterion to assess a theory, and then arguing that asymmetry etc. can be beautiful, so it’s OK to select such theories…

Some things which need editing:

p23: Eudoxus was fourth century BC, not third century (he came between Plato and Aristotle, who died in 323BC).
p76: the radius of the nucleus is claimed to be 10^32cm – a missing minus sign I suspect.

Other notes:

p287: Aidan Andrew Dun’s statement about atoms and stories (“The world is made of stories, not atoms”) is attributed here to poet Maria Rukeyser.

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