Waiting on the cleaning crew, three hours gone by, HLM still doing its West Wing marathon, and I am piddling with readings.
The Times Literary Supplement could get me to reading Henry James, again, with its The jewel in James II’s crown. Henry James is as problematic for me as Thomas Pynchon. I read them, I am impressed by them, but they always seem too much of a chore. I guess I am a philistine.
More sensationally: Coroner-Elect: Body Count Will Rise for One of Indiana’s Most Prolific Serial Killers. A story that still looms over the area.
10 Surprisingly Odd Food Names is a bit of fun from Merriam-Webster. Headcheese and mountain oysters.
Why is Writing Stuck in the Paper Age? by Danika Ellis raises some very interesting ideas. Before my arrest, I flirted with learning XML. I thought then there was a way to include what Ms. Ellis still seeks:
But setting aside ebooks for a second, why is it that almost all writing online is written exactly as if it was on paper? We have so many more tools available to us in this format. Online short stories could have an embedded soundtrack, perhaps one that changes as you scroll. (That sure feels like something we should be able to do by now.) Articles could include embedded polls, perhaps with a responsive article that changes with the results. While there are a few online articles that include interactive video and images that change as you scroll, those are rare, and they’re still fairly basic uses.
So why is it that our online writing is so static, when it could be formatted in an endless array of ways? Look at this post. I am writing this on a plane with no internet connection. But that’s fine, because I can just type away at a Word doc and copy it over later, maybe adding a few links then. The process is functionally not very different from writing on a typewriter, despite that it will find its home on the churning technicolor explosion of stimulus that is the internet.
Maybe arcane, but if the written word interests you, do read the whole article.
How to live well. Let me say destroying one's life, foregoing a planned suicide, left me without any choice but to ask myself how I was to go on living. I crawled back, thanks to Aristotle and Albert Camus and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Henry David Thoreau and the Orthodox Christian Church. Yeah, that is a strange mix. It is mine.
The TLS published This book could save your life: Three studies of self-help drawing on the wisdom of the ages, a review:
How can we live well? Three new books draw on the work of historical philosophers in the hope of finding an answer. In Growing Moral Stephen C. Angle looks to the work of five Chinese Confucians, while David Fideler, in Breakfast with Seneca, examines the thought of the first-century Roman politician-cum-philosopher. And in How to Be You Skye Cleary turns to the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.
These books share a common aim and a common format: each describes the life and ideas of their chosen subject, and each author motivates these ideas with the help of biographical details from their own lives. All focus on the subject of personal relationships, asking how we should connect with family, friends, lovers. And between them they offer a broad range of perspectives that illuminate our place in society, along with love, ageing, joy, anxiety and freedom. Without exception the books are engaging, thoughtful and worthwhile.
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Several chapters stand out. One entitled “Read in the Right Way” opens with Zhu Xi’s instruction: “The books you read should be embodied in your person”. He argues that what we study should be on our minds “at all times”; we should become “intimately familiar” with a text, such that we “personally experience” it “over and over again”. The chapter “Fake it till you make it” is particularly sharp. It opens with lines from the comedian Aziz Ansari. Speaking the night after President Trump’s inauguration, he imagines some people thinking, “We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racists anymore”. “No”, Ansari tells them, “please go back to pretending!” “I’m sorry we never thanked you for your service. We never realized how much effort you were putting in.” Angle’s message is that “pretending really matters”. Confucians hold that “some forms of pretending”, forcing oneself to act “correctly” or “conscientiously”, can themselves be valuable for moral growth. One reason, Angle explains, is “a sort of double-negative”: “the absence of rudeness means that conversations are not interrupted”, preserving “the possibility of learning from one another”. For the Confucian sincerity can come in degrees – and it is something we can improve at.
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Breakfast with Seneca includes chapters on how to overcome anger and worry, how to love and how to find tranquillity. Particularly striking is “Value Your Time: Don’t postpone living”, in which Seneca reminds us that we are “dying every day”. “Much of death has already passed us by, unnoticed.” In a chapter called “The Battle Against Fortune: How to survive poverty and extreme wealth”, Fideler recalls Seneca’s idea that he has “never trusted” Fortune, and that he sought to store his money and influence “in a place from which she could reclaim them without disturbing me”. Seneca advocates a life of “voluntary simplicity”, where you want only what is enough. Fideler notes that, because a simpler lifestyle reduces one’s expenses, it can offer greater personal freedom to pursue one’s own interests. I suspect this will chime with the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement that caught on in the 2010s.
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By contrast with Angle and Fideler’s accessible treatments of their subjects, Cleary’s book, despite its brightly hued cover, probes deeper and demands more on the part of the reader. Partly that is an unavoidable function of its subject matter. The book reminds us of the following grisly facts: worldwide, more than one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence. Family members kill twice as many women as men. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men. Pathetically fewer women than men run companies and countries – of whom only a small proportion are women of colour. Cleary discusses trans rights, abortion, contraception, age discrimination and sexual objectification. Our first two books start, moreover, with straightforward, grabby descriptions: the death, or near-death, of loved ones. How to Be You starts with abstraction: the concept of authenticity. Other challenging concepts follow, including gender, facticity, transcendence, intersubjectivity. There is much to admire in a book written for a popular audience that rejects simplification in its exploration of complex, politically sensitive issues.
Finally, the reviewer, Emily Thomas writes:
But why should we look for answers in the ideas of historical philosophers? Because, as these books implicitly argue, this is an underused resource that remains relevant. Sitting down to read them, I expected Beauvoir’s system to feel current, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the older philosophies did too. Angle ably illustrates ancient Confucian ideas using references from today’s popular culture, and much of Seneca’s prose could have been written yesterday. This passage on Roman excess could, as Fideler notes, just as easily apply to today’s celebrities: “Self-indulgent people want to be the focus of attention throughout their entire lives … Many of them drop large sums of money, and many keep mistresses. To make a name for yourself in this crowd, you need to combine extravagance with notoriety. In such a busy town, ordinary vices don’t get reported”. Sound philosophy remains sound through the ages.
Go for it. We can all learn to live better, for all the health aides and consumer good offered in TV advertisements. We can use the internet to learn.
Here is Confucius's The Four Books
The cleaning crew arrived. I took an early lunch. KH will not be coming by. I am taking a break. Probably go grocery shopping.
sch 11:19 am
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