flaws

It's been raining and I just looked out of the window at the backyard and, where there is grass, it is covered in fresh green blades with glistening droplets of water on them. It's beautiful and yet it's just an ordinary, everyday thing - water on grass. 

I wrote an essay once with the thesis that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature. I began with, 'beauty is the complication of a rule...' or something like that, and everyone I shared it with asked, but what is the rule?....you don't explain what the rule is. But I didn't have a particular rule in mind. What I was saying is that the complication of a rule (as a dynamic) is one way to think about beauty. I read some books....Ars Poetica by Horace, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, the poem 'Ars Poetica' by Archibald Macleish, parts of Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially the part about imagination, and a few others....I read all kinds of stuff, thinking about my thesis, and it seemed to me that a general theme was that beauty was the complication of a rule. 

I used to really like the idea that beauty is expressed through flaws. I remember hearing the concept of the 'flawed masterpiece' and I think the idea is that something is a masterpiece but it is flawed and the flaws mar it a bit but, because it's a masterpiece, the flaw(s) don't completely ruin it. But I like the idea that the flaws are what make it a masterpiece. I did an internet search just now, and the former seems to be the prevailing view. But I don't like that idea. I think that real masterpieces achieve a kind of perfection (which means that they are flawless), but perfection in this world is.....complicated. They're perfect in the same way that people can be perfect or an experience can be perfect - they're fully integrated and everything belongs in the picture. 

One of the things I had in mind in saying that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature, is 'the ruin'. And the reason why I was thinking about ruins (e.g. Wordsworth's Tinturn Abbey) is because the course for which I was writing the essay was about the treatment of nature in literature. Ruins were something of a preoccupation with the Romantic era poets and artists. So, I was thinking about ruins and it occurred to me that a ruin is a collaborative work between humanity and nature. People build something and then, over time, nature turns that building into a ruin. 

It seems like all the beauty is contributed by nature. Like, when I looked at the grass with the droplets on it, I wasn't doing anything to create that. But actually, my contribution was just as great, in a way. Because I was the one who saw the beauty. I might not have even looked or not had the thought about how beautiful it was, and then that instance of beauty would not have been....instantiated (I like talking like a coder these days). 

tbr

I was thinking about it and I think the reason I liked Stacy Schiff's The Witches so much, when I didn't really feel the same way about other books about the Salem witch trials, even though I'm fascinated by the subject, is because it unfolds as a story - it has a strong narrative arc. It wasn't just information bound together to support a thesis. That's part of the reason why, as I wrote about in another blog post, Schiff is able to write abut things that to the modern mind are impossible, as if they did happen. In a standard, traditional non-fiction text, or an academic text, such techniques would be out of place. 

My Vollmann reader (Expelled from Eden) arrived. I think I need to learn to read the way academics read - how they can read 15 books and 30 articles a week - because there are so many books I want to read. Rather than give a long list, here is a list of the categories of books I want to read, with some explanation and examples:

Books about people who don't comform to social norms

One book like this that I read and enjoyed last year is, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and one that I'm reading/ will be reading at the moment is My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

books by people who have very different views from mine

I never used to read books like that. But lately, especially in the last few months, I've become interested in reading and researching views that are different from mine. 

Difficult books

I want to read long, difficult (mostly philosophical) works, like the work of Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes. 

books of essays and literary criticism 

My favourite literary critics are, Harold Bloom, (more recently) Slavoj Zizec, Julia Kristeva (even though I don't understand most of what she writes....like, literally no-idea-don't-understand), Mikhail Bakhtin. For essays, I like Susan Sontag. I want to read more of Gore Vidal. I also like the literary criticism of J. M. Coetzee. I think because he writes literature himself, he knows how to make theory really sing. Or, to put it in terms of what I wrote at the start of this post, he knows how to tell it as a story. 

history books

I've got quite a lot of books about history, but two that really stand out to me and that I want to read are:

The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson and The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. 

And there are lots more - novels, books about psychology, memoirs and biographies, journals of famous people, history of science, books about religion and spirituality, poetry, plays....

something new

I just ordered my first William T. Vollmann book. It's a reader with excerpts from his novels, journalism, essays, correspondence, and poetry, so I'm looking forward to reading it. 

I hadn't even heard of him until recently, when I watched a video on youtube on one of my favourite booktube channels - leaf by leaf, which is surprising because literature is one of my main interests and apparently this guy is really, really good, he's been publishing books since the 80's, and he's extremely prolific.  Here's the leaf by leaf video where he gives an overview of Vollmann's work:
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. He has many videos about Vollman's individual works as well. 

....and I kind of cheated. Instead of waiting to receive the book in the mail, I bought one of his books as an e-book. I really like e-books. I've been exploring project gutenberg and finding free books in lots of other places...so I've compiled quite a collection of e-books...some I just keep the links in a document, some I have the pdf, some I get on my kindle (and at the moment I usually read on my computer using the kindle app). The great thing about e-books is that you can get a lot of them for free....not just from project gutenberg and archive.org, but you can often get pdfs or other formats of e-books of even quite recently published or renowned books from different websites. But even when you pay for kindle books through amazon, they're cheaper than the hardcopy and you don't have to wait for them. The other major advantage of e-books is they are searchable, so they're great for research and writing. You can find a quote and then you can copy and paste. 

Anyway, I got the e-book of Vollmann's, The Atlas, which, as the title suggests, is a compilation of his writings about places he's been and experiences he had in those places. One of the places he writes about is Redfern. So I'm reading that one first. He writes beautifully. I'm drawn in. 

I think the best writers have a kind of dialectical mix of transparency and materiality going on. They allow the story to flow through them. They don't try to own it or spin it or impose on it. But, at the same time, it's their story - their expression. 

the way

I heard a really good explanation of the verse in the book of James where he writes that faith without deeds is dead. This is the video: The Meaning of Faith Without Works, and How We're Saved: Looking at James 2:14-26. It's by Melissa Dougherty. 

That verse, and the epistle it's part of, has bothered a lot of people, including most famously, Martin Luther, because being saved or made right with God by our faith and God's grace was so central to his teaching. He actually said that the book of James shouldn't even be in the Bible, which is kind of presumptuous, but of course Luther was presumptuous....he directly challenged what was regarded as the true Christianity of his day. 

The problem Luther had, and the problem a lot of Christians have even today, with James's message, is that it seems to contradict other important teachings in the New Testament. Especially in the books of Romans and Ephesians, we're taught that it's all about faith. We're saved because we believe and trust and rely on what Jesus did. 

But, understood correctly, as the video explains, James's teaching doesn't contradict that. As Melissa points out in the video, James was arguing against a philosophical approach called antinomianism, which holds that, because we're saved by faith and not works, once we are saved, we can just do whatever we want - literally...there's no compunction at all. 

The book of James is very practical. A lot of it is about how we should speak and behave in our lives. When he says that faith without deeds is dead, I think what he's getting at is that, if you claim to have faith, but then you're always nasty and don't care about people and just do whatever you want even if it's immoral, there's something wrong - something is amiss. 

So, the way I understand that passage now is that....we're not judged by the standard of our works...what matters is our faith, and, as a simple matter of fact, if our faith is real, it will change the way we live...it will change our behaviour, conduct, relationships, etc. If there's no reflection in our actual life, that doesn't mean we're not doing enough and we need to do more - it's not about having sufficient deeds, it's about having faith. 

It reminds me of a quote that Harold Bloom gives from a Hebrew religious text called Pirkei Avot: 'You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.' 

serviceable analogs

you learn to explain things in terms that the people you want to understand will understand. It doesn't exactly match what you think and feel, but that doesn't matter...they get the general idea, and it's a way of talking about the actual thing, where the actual thing defies expression.

divided attention

I like having my attention fractured. I'm not a great believer in the idea that you can only be really productive by giving one task your full attention.

immersion and transportation

I was reading some old lists of publications and reviews from around a hundred years ago, and what really stood out to me was how, generally, reviews were a lot more restrained back then.

But then, when I looked more closely, I saw that the enthusiasm was there, at least to some extent, it was just in a different place. The reviewers back then were more enthusiastic about poetry. Their praise of even the best novels was kind of stilted and subdued, as if to say, well, yes, it's good but, after all, it's only prose fiction, not poetry.

Here are some example quotes about novels: ‘A story of exceptional interest that seems to us to be better than anything he has written of late.’, ‘Can be heartily recommended to all who care for cleanly, energetic, and interesting fiction.’, ‘The swing of the narrative is splendid.’.....they're positive assessments but not exactly rapturous.

Now, the novel is regarded as the work of literary art par excellence and reviewers have made an art form out of writing reviews. It's interesting to reflect on the reality that we probably value the great novels of the 19th century more now than they were valued in their own time.

The genre that I think is the most interesting now is the hybrid one formed by the combination of fiction and non-fiction. It's not an official thing, it's just something that's happening. There's been a realisation that everything is storytelling. Even non-fiction texts tell stories.

I really enjoyed The Witches (2015) by Stacy Schiff, and one of the things she did in that book was to tell parts of the story by recounting events which, to the modern mind are impossible but which people at the time believed happened - like witches flying on a broomstick. At times in her book, she recounts things like that as if they actually happened. The effect is to really immerse you in that world. That's something that I had never seen before in a non-fiction book.