Quote of the Day: The importance of reading long, difficult, serious books
I’m finally taking the plunge and getting an e-book reader, either a Sony Reader or a Kindle. My birthday is next month and I’m asking my family to contribute funds toward the cause. On a regular basis I read so very many things in electronic format, both for my professional writing activities and for my personal daily diet of articles, essays, blog posts, etc., that the ability to unchain myself from the laptop and do some of this reading in a more user-friendly format — nicer on the eye, more accessible in the moment (sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, for example); in a more traditional book-ish manner, that is — will be a blessing of biblical proportions.
That said, I still agree so very passionately with the following words from law professor and best-selling author Stephen L. Carter, whose full essay you really must read (see the link after the excerpt):
Books are essential to democracy. Not literacy, although literacy is important. Not reading, although reading is wonderful. But books themselves, the actual physical volumes on the shelves of libraries and stores and homes, send a message through their very existence. In a world in which most things seem ephemeral, books imply permanence: that there exist ideas and thoughts of sufficient weight that they are worth preserving in a physical form that is expensive to produce and takes up space. And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.
….A book matches perfectly the ideal of reflection.The tougher the text, the more reflective we must be in absorbing it. This suggests the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share. And if we are willing to work our way through difficult texts, we are far more likely to be willing to work our way through our opponents’ difficult ideas. An important lesson of serious reading is that ideas need not be correct to be important.
….Indeed, we might say that democracy in its modern form emerged from the idea of written-ness. Absent the codex [the ancestor of what we think of as the book], ideas would still be the province of a privileged priesthood. The Internet, by hypothesis, will spread ideas to everyone. But if the form of presentation no longer signals permanence and eternity, if we are no longer encouraged to work our way through difficult texts, then we will likely see the decline of democracy and the rise of something else.
– Stephen L. Carter, “Where’s the Bailout for Publishing?” March 17, 2009
The Evolution of Consciousness and the Alchemy of Language
Some years ago I started telling the students in my literature and writing classes that language has an alchemical power. I usually do this when we’re studying poetry, although I have applied the idea to prose as well.
This always necessitates a pause to offer a brief explanation of the word “alchemy.” Then, once that’s out of the way, I go on to explain that there’s a positively magical power in language, particularly in the poetic use of it, since language enables each of us to recreate his or her private thoughts and emotions in somebody else’s headspace and heartspace. This is particularly true when it comes to lyric poetry, I explain, because this type of poetry is specifically meant to capture and express the author’s state of mind and mood at a particular moment, and therefore a full understanding of a lyric poem entails not only an intellectual understanding of “what it’s saying” in terms of the words, concepts, and images, but an actual shared feeling with the author. When a lyric poem “works,” it actually recreates the author’s inner state in the reader (or listener, if the poem is spoken aloud), so that the author and reader are vibrating in sympathy, as it were, and the reader doesn’t just understand the poem “from the outside” but divines it “from the inside” by sharing the actual experience that motivated the poet to begin writing. It’s a veritably alchemical moment, since the poet acts as a linguistic alchemist who uses language to transmute the reader’s inner state into something else.
The basic model of interpersonal communication
I also point out that the same fundamental idea applies to all types of writing, and this sometimes leads to a brief discussion of basic communication theory, in which I sketch on the chalkboard or dry-erase board the famous diagram showing the basic parts of the communication process: sender, receiver, message, feedback, etc. My undergraduate major was communication, and I studied huge amounts of communication theory during that period, plus I used to teach public speaking, where this model proved extremely useful in helping students to understand what they were trying to accomplish in delivering their speeches (the recreation in their listeners’ minds of the message that they, the speakers, were laboring to present). Sometimes, this foray into communication theory actually helps to clarify and reinforce the point.
Of course, I don’t always get all of that properly said in class. The above description is a kind of idealized version of what I’d like to say. Sometimes it comes out better and sometimes worse, depending on the specific tone of the interaction I’m having with the specific group of students at the time. But the students never fail to find it interesting, and I never fail to find something interesting in their responses. I often use Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening” (which is both a lyric poem and a narrative poem, and is quite dear to me) to illustrate the point, and the alchemical explanation seems to help a lot of students gain a better grasp of what Frost’s poem is getting at with its apotheosis of a wintry longing for silence, solitude, and ultimate rest.
(By way of interjection, I recognize that this explanation of poetry’s and language’s effect extends well beyond the boundaries of literature alone, and has resonances with and implications for art as a whole, and also for lots of other things. In fact, see below.)
I bring all of this up at my blog right now because I just came from reading an interesting review of, or actually a kind of roadmap to, a new book titled What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited by Max Brockman. The review is titled “Top scientists predict the future of science” and was written for New Scientist online by Amanda Gefter. The book itself, as described by Gefter with the help of the book’s jacket copy, is a “captivating collection of essays, written by ‘rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science’s toughest questions and raising new ones.’ The result is a medley of big ideas on topics ranging from cosmology and climate change, to morality and cognitive enhancement.”
Click to read a brief and nicely informative review of this book at Playback:stl
What really caught my attention and reminded me of my alchemical explanation of poetry is Gefter’s tracing of the book’s focus on language and social interaction and the way these have probably exerted a decisive influence upon the evolution of the human species and therefore human civilization. The ideas she shares from the book’s assembled authors ping on my fascination with the alchemy of language in manifold ways.
For example:
We are a social species, and we have our brains to thank. As Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell writes: “The most dramatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of individual minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals.” Language allows us to do this in an unprecedented way — it serves as a vehicle for transferring one’s own mental states into another’s mind.
Or how about this:
We also connect to other minds via mirror neurons — those copycat brain cells that echo other people’s actions and emotions from within the confines of our own skulls. Mirror neurons allow us to learn from one another’s experiences and to see the world through foreign eyes — a neurological feat that seems to lie at the basis of so much of what it is to be human. Through mirror neurons, “our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture,” writes neuroscientist Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. “With the advent of language, books and television, this sharing becomes global, allowing us to exchange experiences across time and space.”
Color me fascinated. I have my doubts about whether these thoughts would prove interesting to most of my students, but they certainly grab me, and do so strongly enough that I may find it necessary to acquire and read this book, if only to revel in its confirmation of my own Beautiful Mind.
(That last comment is intended as ironic, by the way, a fact which I hasten to point out in case its tonal-alchemical intent went over like an untransmuted lead balloon.)
North Shore Art Throb: Launch of a Cool Arts Initiative — Right in Lovecraft Country
Many of my readers are die-hard fans, students, and spiritual children of H.P. Lovecraft, so with that in mind I thought I’d give a heads up about the launch of a cool and interesting new online arts publication in Boston’s North Shore, which is, of course, right where Lovecraft located a substantial portion of his fictional gothic-haunted New England landscape, including the “witch-cursed, legend-haunted city of Arkham” (probably modeled on Salem) and the achingly beautiful town of Kingsport (modeled on Marblehead).
I should also mention that there’s a nepotistic aspect to my highlighting of this project, since it’s being spearheaded by my sister, Dinah Cardin, who has worked as a journalist all around New England for the past decade and in Salem itself for the past several years (and whom you can read about at this link).
The project/publication is titled North Shore Art Throb and is self-described as “an independent publication and a collaboration of many talented writers and photographers” whose aim is “to chronicle the importance of art in our everyday lives” by offering “in-depth coverage of art openings, musical gigs, poetry readings, plays, films and such. Expressions of art, like the art of dating, of cooking, of travel and the search for spirituality. And also fairly comprehensive event listings across the North Shore.”
They went online a month or so ago and had their launch party just a few days ago (see the videos below). There’s a particularly timely aspect to the entire endeavor, since it both fills a general need for the North Shore arts community and culture and also capitalizes on the current and ongoing collapse of print journalism.
I’d find it interesting even if my sister weren’t involved.
Here are two videos about the whole thing.
First, a slick piece produced by Zingerplatz Pictures, whose mastermind, Joe Cultrera, is deeply involved in the NS Art Throb project. My sister is the one who starts talking at about 1:20 about the need for Art Throb in the era of a collapsing print newspaper industry.
Then there’s the official video of the Art Throb launch party itself. The resolution is a bit fuzzy but you can still sense the bustling excitement of the event:
An Economic Day of Reckoning for America’s Colleges
Interesting video from The Chronicle of Higher Education showing speakers and attendees at the Chronicle’s Leadership Forum, held on June 7-8 in Washington, D.C., hashing over the question of just how worried colleges ought to be about the economy, and how they ought to respond to the crisis.
Their bottom line: Brace for serious change.
The words of Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and popular blogger at The Marginal Revolution, are particularly noteworthy and compelling:
Even if the economy doesn’t get worse, for higher education it will get worse in two years’ time. If the economy gets even worse, that’s yet another problem. And I’m even assuming the economy stays okay.
The key is to make tough decisions in good times. When bad times come, your hand is forced. You don’t have that many easy cuts to make. When it feels like you don’t have to make cuts, that’s when you need the discipline.
….I think right now people are behaving as if everything will be the way it used to be, and they’re not putting enough aside in reserve funds, and they’re engaging in short-term behavior just like our banks were doing two years ago. And so there will be major cuts coming for 2011. Or even if we have another stimulus, that stimulus won’t last forever. It will only postpone this day of reckoning. And it will happen. Right now we’re a bit blind. Short-termism.
Also see my three-part series about the future of America’s colleges in a world that has entered a quasi-permanent and fully apocalyptic economic crisis:
The last generation’s successes become the next generation’s problems
An interesting recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that explains one effect of California’s epic budget crisis on its college system spells out a principle with much wider applications for our culture and civilization at large.
“California’s ‘Gold Standard’ for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times” (June 15) explains how the fabled California Master Plan for Higher Education, which was enacted in 1960 with the intent of handling the Baby Boomer surge by enabling and encouraging more people than ever before to attend college, “served as a blueprint for public systems across the country” but is now called severely into question by the state’s budget disaster. The end result for California’s colleges will almost inevitably be messy, chaotic, and destructive.
What really struck me as I read the article, though, were its closing lines, which dovetail with something said earlier in it to frame California’s situation as a virtual parable about the wider civilizational and cultural problems we’re all facing right now. A paragraph in the middle of the piece explains that the state’s current college problems “are a far cry from the ones California faced in 1960, when 90 percent of the population was white, the state was flush with cash, and the main challenge was designing a higher-education system that could absorb a tidal wave of new students in the baby boom.”
Then, after a number of meaty paragraphs exploring the specifics of the situation, the piece closes with this:
But even if the master plan were revised [says Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability], the document carries so much baggage that it might be better to come up with a new name instead. Solutions that made sense 50 years ago, she says, are now getting in the way.
“The last generation’s successes,” she says, “become the next generation’s problems.”
If that doesn’t capture the essence of an enormous portion our current economic and civilizational troubles, wherein certain programs and policies were enacted and pursued with abandon and hailed as huge successes but later revealed as having a short shelf life, after which they’re actually detrimental but still difficult to get away from because of their mythic momentum, then I don’t know what does.
I’m talking about things like America’s wholesale adopting of neoliberal economic policies, the complete financialization of our economy, our transition from a culture of savings to a culture of investment risk-taking (cloaked in the lie that such investments are inherently safe), our willing civilization-wide enslavement to fossil fuels and therefore to infinite military spending and neo-imperial expansion, our adherence to and reliance upon an economic philosophy of infinite growth, and so on. These and other moves resulted, on varying time scales, in huge material benefits for a lot of people, but they turned out to be predicated on a fundamental ignore-ance of the fact that such policies are not sustainable in the long run, or even, in some cases, in the short run.
And now there’s hell to pay.
Kunstler channels Lovecraft, or, Cosmic Decay in Upstate New York
How very, very fascinating to see James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand, and one of contemporary America’s most visible, forceful, caustic, and eloquent prophets of doom (via peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, and more), turning to none other than H.P. Lovecraft for a properly evocative literary reference in his most recent blog post about first-world economic and industrial decay.
Kunstler begins his June 1 blog post, “Shattered and Shuttered,” with this:
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, what’s good for General Motors really is good for the USA, then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free — while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they’re supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers. . . . Even though I’ve seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country — the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock — I’ve never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
He goes on to exposit this observation by describing his northward trip in the inimitably vivid Kunstlerian fashion, telling us that “The most striking feature is how all the things once so ‘modern,’ all the roadside business enterprises designed along ’space age’ motifs — the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations — all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at.”
He shares with us that “The most horrifying part of the trip was the old city of Watertown, a short hop shy of the Canadian border,” where post-industrial decay has set in with a vengeance, and where “The humanity visible on the downtown streets. . . looked like extras who wandered away from the latest Road Warrior location shoot — semi-hominid creatures with strange loping gaits, arresting hair-dos, and enough tattoos to qualify them for harpoon duty on Herman Melville’s Pequod.”
After reflecting on what this all means for the “American dream” and describing how things were, sadly, ever-so-much more pleasant north of the U.S./Canadian border, Kunstler closes with this:
My daddy bought Chevrolets in the 1950s, marvelously crazy-looking machines with winged tail-lights that handled like pontoon boats, broke down after 30,000 miles, and were tossed out every couple of years not on account of their mechanical failures so much as their obvious lack of up-to-the-minute styling. The post-war prosperity dazzled his generation with its democratic cornucopian bonanzas. The innocence of all that is truly lost now. There is a dark sense of things shifting out there now in a major way. The tectonics of history are taking us to a strange place. Maybe Mr. Lovecraft had it right.
For people like me, and also, I know, many of my readers, whose intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic sensibilities resonate so strongly with Lovecraft’s signature themes, this double invocation of two major Lovecraftian tropes — that of hereditary genetic degeneration and that of epic cosmic and historical cycles which dwarf the scale of human comprehension and horrify with their unfathomable impact on our lives — really thrills with its creative hitching to Kunstler’s signature focus on the long view of American history and industrial civilization, which he sees as having reached an economic, technological, and ecological dead end, beyond which lies a convulsive period of collapse and (temporary?) dystopia.
I can easily envision a type of horror fiction that would embrace the internal logic of this thematic hybrid as its inspirational core.
On another note, Bryan Alexander, at his interesting blog Infocult, points to this latest Kunstler piece in a post titled — perfectly — “The Lovecraft Economy,” and describes it as “Jim Kunstler channels HP Lovecraft.”
Bryan also linked last year to my own post about “The Frankenstein Economy,” in which I pointed to the many recent uses of the Frankenstein metaphor to describe current economic developments. Now zombies have gotten in on the economic act as well.
I guess it was only a matter of time before some smart chap recognized HPL’s usefulness in all of this.
How very, very fascinating to see James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand, and one of contemporary America’s most visible, forceful, caustic, and eloquent prophets of doom (via peak oil, economic collapse, climate change, and more), turning to none other than H.P. Lovecraft for a properly evocative literary reference in his most recent blog post about first-world economic and industrial decay.
Kunstler begins his June 1 blog post, “Shattered and Shuttered,” with this:
The dollar was up to its armpits in quicksand, and oil prices had crept stealthily into the death-to-airlines range, and if, in the old slogan, what’s good for General Motors really is good for the USA, then destiny was dealing a harsh lesson to The Land of the Free — while I made a drive on Thursday (in a Japanese rent-a-car) through the remotest ends of upstate New York State into the province of Ontario, Canada, to see what I could see. What I saw was pretty scary.
You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they’re supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers. . . . Even though I’ve seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country — the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock — I’ve never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.
He goes on to expos
[Reference and link to "The Lovecraft Economy]
Nietzsche: Loving existence even though it’s horrifying and absurd
A review of Keith Ansell Pearson’s How to Read Nietzsche (2005) at The Journal of Nietzsche Studies features the following paragraph, which, with its focus on Nietzsche and its description of a worldview based on tragedy and horror, is a quintessential example of the type of writing that has unfailingly arrested me with a hypnotic fascination for the past 20 years:
Noting that unlike Aristotle, philosophy for Nietzsche does not begin with wonder but horror, Ansell Pearson commences with a crucial and striking interpretation. Rarely is it emphasized and both analytic and continental commentators often neglect it. The tragic realization is that existence is simultaneously horrifying and absurd, and it is Silenus who utters the crushing assessment that it would have been best for us had we not be born at all, while to die as soon as possible would be the next best thing. Thus begins Nietzsche’s battle, which might be characterized as a lifelong agon with Silenus, who perhaps more than Homer, Socrates, or Christ had to be confronted and overcome. For even if Christianity is overcome, Silenus would still remain. He is the fierce specter haunting Nietzsche, whose philosophy in part is an antidote to Silenus’ exceedingly nihilistic vision of existence. From this pivot, and it is a decisive one to travel from, the journey through Nietzsche’s philosophy is initiated. It is philosophy as sublimity, thus one that requires great courage to live up to. It does not suffer optimists like Socrates but demands figures like Zarathustra or the Übermensch, free spirits capable of confronting the pessimistic dimension of existence and not being overcome by resignation, but loving life in its horrific and questionable entirety.
For more about Nietzsche on the horror of existence, see my post from last October titled, appropriately enough, “Nietzsche on the horror of existence,” which continues to draw a steady stream of traffic.
Also note that the first chapter of Pearson’s book is titled “The Horror of Existence,” which primes me, at least, to acquire a copy. Then there’s Philip J. Kain’s Nietzsche and the Horror of Existence — but good luck finding out much about it online.
- Nietzsche being attended to by his sister Elisabeth during his final 10-year illness/insanity
World Horror Convention 2011 will be in Austin — and so will I
June 19, 2009 at 4:32 pm (General Comments)
An urbane gathering at WHC 2002
I learned in the past couple of days that the 2011 World Horror Convention will be held in Austin, Texas.
This is wonderful news, since it pretty much guarantees that I’ll be able to attend — barring any unforeseen downward lurches in the economy or upsurges of political, social, and economic chaos, which isn’t at all out of the running.
I attended and spoke on panels at WHC 2001, 2002, and 2003, and they were some of the most rewarding experiences of my life, both personally and professionally. Publication of my Divinations of the Deep collection arose out of the fact that at the 2001 convention in Seattle, editor/anthologist John Pelan, who had already bought my story “Teeth” for The Children of Cthulhu, introduced me to Chris and Barbara Roden of Ash-Tree Press and put in a good word for me with them. (The collection was already set to be published by the ill-fated Imaginary Worlds, the failure of which ironically turned out to be a boon for me and my book.)
The same convention introduced me to Brian Keene, who, like me, was an Imaginary Worlds author with his first fiction collection still mewling and raw like a ruddy newborn. He later published two of my stories at Horrorfind and one in The Best of Horrorfind II.
And I met Mark McLaughlin, he of the quirky horror and gut-busting humor, with whom I soon wrote two collaborative stories, “A Cherished Place in the Center of His Plans” and “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” both of which landed handsomely in published homes, and the latter of which will appear later this year in my Dark Awakenings collection.
And I met Tim Lebbon, who later said such nice things about my work in a 2005 interview, and who proved to be a real kindred spirit (and a damned fine writer) with whom I could enjoy chatting at length.
I could go on about more valuable contacts and, more importantly, valuable friendships that I made at that and other WHCs — as in 2002, where I finally met Mark Samuels in person, and also Stu Young and a whole host of additional Brits who felt immediately like family. But the point is probably made.
It’s especially interesting to look back and note that we all met when our writing careers were at the budding stage, and that over the past eight years everybody I just named has achieved not only a modicum of literary and publishing success but a heaping helping of it. There was some very interesting Cthulhuvian dream-beaming going on in our respective and collective unconscious minds in order to bring us all together at such a stage in our individual careers, I’m telling you.
(Of course, it wasn’t all darkness and mystery, as evidenced by the accompanying photo above, which captures a scene at a publisher party at WHC 2002. That’s me in the upper right-hand corner, wearing the dung-eating grin and looking out from between the heads of Brian Keene and Mark Samuels. The photo is courtesy of Feo Amante and his page about WHC 2002.)
So anyway, barring the effective end of the world, I’ll be heading to Austin in late April 2011 in eager hopes of renewing friendships and making up for lost time. Maybe in the meantime, Cthulhu will once again be telepathically weaving a synchronicitous web of creative connections.
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