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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Tuesday, August 6, 2013

IDLE THOUGHTS ON A TRIP FROM HARTFORD-BRADLEY TO RALEIGH-DURHAM


When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, more than sixty years ago, one of the members of the Class of '54 whom I knew casually was Paul Matisse, grandson of the great Henri Matisse.  Paul's father, Pierre, was, I think, a quite successful art dealer in New York, and Paul is himself an artist sufficiently well-known to make it into Wikipedia.  Paul's grandfather was apparently notoriously reluctant to give away any of his creations, even to members of his own family, but he had given Paul a pen and ink drawing of a young woman's head, on paper, that hung on the wall of Paul's Eliot House room [in a suite of rooms occupied also by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's grandson, and Sadri (Sadrudin) Khan, son or grandson of the Aga Khan.]

The drawing was scarcely more than a few lines, and must have taken Matisse only a few moments to do, but it was absolutely mesmerizing, capturing in some magical fashion the young woman's beauty.  I remember staring at it and wondering how Matisse could accomplish so much with no more than a few pen strokes and dots of ink.
 
I thought of that  painting yesterday as I was sitting on the plane coming back from Massachusetts.  I was reading J. K. Rowling's new detective novel, concealed for a brief moment under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  [If there is anyone in the blogosphere who does not know the name "J. K. Rowling," she is the author of the Harry Potter books.]  The novel, which I am enjoying enormously, tells a story about a down on his luck private detective Cameron Strike, who is hired to look into the supposed suicide of a supermodel.  It is pretty clear that Rowling has created this character with the intention of launching a series of Robert Galbraith novels, in the long and distinguished tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, and Josephine Tey.

Early in the novel, Strike hires a young woman, Robin, from a Temp agency, to handle what little office work his almost non-existent case load generates.  Rowling devotes very few words to Robin, concentrating most of her narrative on Strike's doings, and yet by the time I was one hundred pages into the novel, I was totally enraptured with her, rooting as hard as I could for a romance between her and Strike.  [I am only halfway through the novel, so hope is still alive.]

I found myself wondering, "How did Rowling do that?  Robin is no more than a few words on a page.  Unlike Strike, to whom Rowling has given an elaborate back story extending over many pages, we are told almost nothing about her, and yet the possibility of a romance between her and Strike is one of the things driving me through the novel."

It occurred to me that it would be a fascinating exercise to go back with a colored highlighting pen, mark every single passage in which Robin appears, and then read them seriatim in an effort to understand better just exactly what Rowling has done.  Since I am naturally lazy, I probably shan't do that, but it would be illuminating.  This is one of the many reasons why I am convinced that despite my facility as an expository writer, I could never write fiction.

4 comments:

James Camien McGuiggan said...

This post reminds me of this: http://www.art-prints-gallery.com/gallery/pablo_picasso/Taurus/img1.jpg

Howie said...

Marx is a better writer than Rowling by far

Robert Paul Wolff said...

James, I took a look at it. Lovely!

Magpie said...

I just watched Cloud Atlas on DVD.

It's an ambitious film, which not always achieves its goals.

Still, I enjoyed it, especially for the performance of a young Korean actress, named Bae Doo-nan (I had tears in my eyes when the character she played, a clone worker called Sonmi-451, made her last appearance on screen)

The soundtrack, too, is very good.

For what it is worth, I recommend it. In spite of evident execution problems, I found it intelligent and thought-provoking.