Monday, March 16, 2020
DESPERATION
In a desperate effort to/ fill the void of my life, I have ordered Piketty's new 1000+ page book from Amazon. I have seen or heard two reviews that incline me to read it: a positive one from my sister and a negative one from Paul Krugman. If I can push myself through it, I will report back from this self-imposed isolation.
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In a (pre-Covid-19) desperate effort to fill the void of *my* life, I have started reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The void is filled to overflowing.
The 18th century epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson are interminable. Just sayin'
Herodotus.
As I recall, even an abridged Clarissa struck me that way, too.
I'm less intellectually ambitious than you people.
I just bought a new biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir, by Kate Kirkpatrick. I saw it in a bookstore window (in Spanish translation) and I bought it on impulse. Stores are still open here, but schools and universities are closed and borders are closed to all non-Chileans.
I meant my comment about Finnegans Wake in a good way, by the way. If works of art can effect or at least marvelously simulate transcendence, then this book does it, much like Beethoven's late quartets.
Did you order the English or the French? Piketty is French I believe? Economists are terrible writers and their books tend to be awfully boring, except when they are trying to scare you needlessly. Just in general of course. 1000+ pages huh? Good luck with that one
Reading and rereading Kant's first Critique makes me almost glad I must isolate.
Dean,
I'd put Finnegans Wake more with Schoenberg than with Beethoven, early or late!
A few years ago, a reading group I belong to read it--that's my only time. When I bought a copy, I mentioned to the clerk that our group was reading Finnegan. He said, "Why?"
I'm feeling the itch to give it another try. Next time, however, I'll have a guide, something like Gifford's Ulysses Annotated, which I still have to consult frequently even though I've read Ulysses a number of times. It's my desert island book.
An indigent Samuel Johnson often applied to the charity of Richardson (so Boswell records). Johnson, in recompense, restrained the more corrosive tendencies of his critical tongue (and pen)---suggesting only that the tedium of Richardson's novels, rather than exasperate exclusively, might also prove a useful soporific. Good for you, S. Wallerstein, on your impulse buy. Still love Beauvoir's, "The Mandarins", as well as the second volume of her autobiography, "The Prime of Life". Dierdre Bair's biography I thought ill-written and hagiographic.
I agree with David Palmeter for once.
Beethoven is always communicating something, he's trying to change his listeners' heads or at least to get his listeners to somehow understand his head.
Joyce is almost pure form, word play. He has nothing much to say and his content is almost a pretext for his formal experimentation.
I admit to not having read Joyce since graduate school where I took a Joyce course and we did read Finnegans Wake and of course Ulysses. I listen to Beethoven frequently: he's my favorite composer.
The Mandarins is great. In fact, if I have to spend a long time in social isolation, I might reread it.
I recommend it first of all for the picture of French intellectual life in the years immediately following World War 2, with characters identifiable as Simone de Beauvoir herself, Arthur Koestler, Sartre and Camus. Second, there are interesting political debates in the book about the role of the left, about political compromise vs political purism and about many other still relevant topics.
I listen for notes, not for messages, and I read for words--their disposition on the page, their imagined (occasionally actual) sound--not for stories, and so the contemporaneity of Joyce and Schoenberg, while instructive, isn't compelling. Perhaps what prompts me to associate or compare FW with late Beethoven string quartets is the lateness. (Reminds me to look up Edward Said's incomplete post-mortem publication, Late Style.) Joyce is replete with word play, yes, but I don't take that as a symptom of having nothing to say. And Beethoven continued to experiment. He's one of my favorite composers, too.
Long ago, I read Ulysses a couple times. Would love to go for a third! But I'm also trying to catch up on poets I've neglected. Robert Browning, for instance, an odd bird.
I'm a long-time reader, and not (hitherto) a commenter; but the reference to Samuel Johnson has forced me to break my silence. When recovering from surgery nine years ago, I finally read Boswell's Life of Johnson. You should too: it will not notice your self-isolation amidst this humanity. Johnson strikes me as among the most lovable people in literature, second only to Montaigne. The great tragic flaw of the book is only that it ends.
I dip into Boswell now and then, but I've not read it through, for two reasons. First, my copy is an abridgement; second, I read just a handful of pages at a time with the intention of relaxing for a nap. It works, but not because the book is boring! It is a treasure. I enjoyed Walter Jackson Bates' biography of Johnson, too.
I was thinking of the Mandarins lately as well. Some interesting parallels with the world we are facing now...
Maybe we could form a Mandarins reading group.
Since people are talking about what they are reading (or have read), I'll briefly remark on a couple of things I've been reading recently.
1) Colson Whitehead's novel _The Underground Railroad_ (2016, pb edition 2018). Almost finished w it. It's good; I'm not entirely sure it deserved all the prizes it won, but that's not esp. relevant here. He also wrote a novel about a pandemic, _Zone One_, which I haven't read.
2) Have been dipping into Richard D. Altick's _Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature_ (1973). Happened to pick it up in a used bookstore a little while ago. Lively and well written.
I would take part in a Mandarins reading group!
My suggestion, if readers are looking for something truly huge, sure to get them through the whole crisis, I suggest Joseph Frank's 5 volume Dostoevsky biography. It's about 3000 pages, but it's absolutely absorbing all the way through. It basically does double duty as a masterful critical study of everything Dostoevsky ever wrote and an accompanying intellectual history of mid to late 19th century Russia. For extra points, read (or reread) all of Dostoevsky's major novels along with it.
I can't count the number of times I've bumped into that Altick book. Would love to read it.
A recollection of Samuel Johnson: in the late '80s I cataloged the secondary sources in the library of a collector in Pacific Palisades of Johnsoniana (i.e., not Johnson's books or his contemporaries', but subsequent books about Johnson). I'd leave UCLA in the afternoon and drive to his house, work from his library, and prepare the catalog, sitting beneath a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of Johnson. Not a print...an original portrait.
One day I'll manage Dostoevsky, assuming I survive the pandemic.
You know, of course, Piketty claims that the distribution of income and wealth is a deeply political matter. Rightly, let us suppose. And, he connects increasing economic inequality to the increasing political clout of the top 1%.
Thomas Piketty traces widening inequality in rich countries since the early 1970s to increasing shares of income claimed by the top 1%. This trend is decomposed into the increasing share of income accruing to capital ownership, and the increasing share of labor income claimed by corporate executives and financiers. And, he defines r, the return on capital, as the pure return to passive ownership (excluding returns to capital that could be traced to entrepreneurial activity or business judgment). It is, shall we say, -- it is evident that capital’s share of income is also undeserved.
Let us even suppose that the reality exposes the vacuity of ‘free’ markets and ‘deregulation.’ For example, what if I were to say that some degree of inequality is both unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the US isn’t very pronounced, anyway. But nevermind. As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic, the US had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They were just as nasty and rapacious as their European counterparts. And, long story short, wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. Suppose that what we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is *superinequality*, possibly such as the world has never seen.
So okay, your mileage may vary. You can probably decide if you like this, if he SPEAKS THE TRUTH, without actually reading the book at all.
At one point, I amused myself tracking down those who attempted to reproduce the data found in Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the 21st Century'. I'd like to be sure that Piketty genuinely intends to paint an accurate picture. But, there is a bigger issue -- one that perhaps, has led both defenders and critics of the book astray. Piketty uses the term 'capital'. perhaps he means, capital as classical economists understand it? As in, capital and labor. Or perhaps he means, land?
Well, it's not the same thing.
For example, I could stress how the optimal tax rate on capital is the source of great debate and a non-trivial number of economists place it at or around zero, but meanwhile, the optimum tax rate on land is the subject of virtually no debate among economists, and the consensus places it at 100 per cent or just shy for administrative reasons. But, why bother?
Well I wouldn't trust Krugman since his opening indicates he hasn't bothered to read Marx.
Boswell's, "Life of Johnson" has been a bed-book of mine for over twenty years. Boswell's four Journals, however, still compel. Never has open ingenuousness lent itself to such amusement. A casual and not a-typical entry might begin thus: "I lay in dire apprehension that my right testicle, which formerly was ill, was again so." Eat your heart out Rousseau.
"Eat your heart out Rousseau." LOL, as the kids say. I've always been tempted also to read Pepys' diary. I doubt I'll manage it.
I'll have to look up that Vendler title. I generally do not enjoy her commentary, at least not her analysis of particular poets (Shakespeare, Stevens, Keats). For me, the best introduction to poetry has been...poetry! Ashbery's As We Know, Dickinson, Frederick Seidel's My Tokyo, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Chaucer, Milton...
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