Marx on beginnings
“Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences.”
- Preface to Capital (1867)
“The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.”
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them. The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intellect. Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, 1947 Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment
Engels as Dan Brown
Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion.
Engels as Panza
But before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die Tat. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
- “On Historical Materialism” (introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892). That last proverb is just too much.
how to read (maybe)
[A]ll good literature ought to be read with simple and superficial enjoyment.
- GKC, Introduction to Little Dorrit
And I was worried about a Paradise Lost movie…
If you’re a fan of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, you might be disappointed with the game version. It’s not that it’s a bad game –judging from the demo, it’s crazy fun– but it doesn’t seem much like Alighieri’s seminal literary work. (Read it yourself here.) The Inferno section of the The Divine Comedy is a great read, but it’s more about the wages of sin than kicking ass –there are no boss battles, no nudity, really no action to speak of.
(G4)
(On the Milton movie, which according to IMDb may come out next year.)
Previous Post
When Andy (two and a half) doesn’t know the word for or name of an object, he uses the word “thing.” But he hesitates for a moment before doing so, as if searching for the right term. E.g., if he wants to pick up a screwdriver, he might say, “Pick up this…thing?”
Form as delimiter
In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem [posed in the octet] is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shift of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy.
- Paul Fussell, *Poetic Meter and Poetic Form*, chp 7
form as crucible
It is possible to think of scheme not as a mold of form into which meaning is poured, but rather as a sort of crucible in which trope is cooked and which then is itself consumed in the cooking.
- John Hollander, Melodious Guile, ch. 1
music
Carson Holloway’s recent “What’s Really the Matter with Pop Music?” disappoints. He begins the essay (a Part 2 of 2) by rehearsing the ancient and intriguing claim that “the music itself” –the rhythm, tune, etc.,–and not lyrics, are the more influential element of songs, in moving the listener toward good or ill. I’d have really enjoyed hearing him out on this point, but the remainder of the essay builds to the more familiar argument that the modern practice of censorship (e.g., replacing potty words with beeps or honks) only lowers our standards of what counts as “good”; and that instead, we ought to listen to music that “encourage[s] our pursuit of the highest goods attainable”: “reason’s enjoyment of moral nobility and theoretical truth.”
“When somebody is a little bit wrong…”
When somebody is a little bit wrong–say, when a waiter puts nonfat milk in your espresso macchiato, instead of lowfat milk–it is often quite easy to explain to them how and why they are wrong. But if somebody is surpassingly wrong–say, when a waiter bites your nose instead of taking your order–you can often be so surprised that you are unable to say anything at all.
- Lemony Snicket, The Reptile Room (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Second), ch. 5
theory and practice
When reading an ancient text…we have to start somewhere, and in the end, I’m not sure that it matters much where. Should we begin with the contexts and assumptions of the ancient world and work our way towards the present situation? Should we begin with present forms of understanding and work our way back towards the ancient text’s lifeworld? Though we are accustomed to the idea that readers need to be governed by the right hermeneutic, in fact theory and method mean next to nothing in reading. [...W]e may not have as much choice [about the "tools we bring to the task of reading"] as we think we do anyway.
- Alan Jacobs, “The Genesis of Wisdom,” an essay on Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, originally in First Things, but reprinted in Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans, 2004). My emphasis.
realism
If we examine more closely our ordinary notion of reality, perhaps we should find that we do not consider real what actually happens but a certain manner of happening that is familiar to us.
- José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote (1914)
Eusebius of Caesarea, Occidentalist?
The impostor of whom we have been speaking [Simon Magus], as though his mind’s eye had been struck by a divine miraculous flash of light when earlier, in Judaea, his mischievous practices had been exposed by the apostle Peter, promptly undertook a very long journey overseas from east to west, and fled precipitately, thinking that only so could he live according to his inclinations. [...] Close on his heels, in the same reign of Claudius, the all-gracious and kindly providence of the universe brought to Rome to deal with this terrible threat to the world, the strong and great apostle, chosen for his merits to be spokesman for all the others, Peter himself. Clad in the divine armour, like a noble captain of God, he brought the precious merchandise of the spiritual light from the East to those in the West, preaching the good news of light itself and the soul-saving word, the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven.
- The History of the Church, 2.14 (G.A. Williamson’s translation)
Nickleby
This may sound like an odd thing to say about a 900-page novel, but doesn’t Nicholas Nickleby end rather abruptly? I just finished listening to a fantastic production by Blackstone Audio, so the end of the last track may have seemed especially sudden to me. But beyond this factor of the medium, the story itself left (uncharacteristically for Dickens) several strands unwoven into the denouement. We never learn the particulars, for example, of the “conspiracy” for which Mr. Squeers the Schoolmaster will be tried upon his return from Australia. We know his crimes, of course, but in which of those was he found out? Nicholas promises to describe the details to the Browdies, but never mentions it in our hearing again, and neither does the narrator.
Similarly, Sir Mulberry Hawk’s vague threat about Nicholas being attacked in a day or two is never referred to again. Even after the “serious Catastrophe” of the duel between this Falstaffian villain and his onetime pupil, I expected some attempt to be made on Nicholas’s life. Hawk is too cunning and wicked to have been emptily boasting.
Another lacuna: we never meet Ms. Madeleine Bray (pardon the misspellings, if there are any in these few lines – I listened to the story in my car, and had no dramatis personae to refer to as each new character’s name was first pronounced). Of course we learn her story as mediated through the “doll Cherrybles” (Chesterton’s phrase), and we overhear the eleventh-hour conversation between herself and Nicholas about her imminent marriage to Gride. But the narrator does not open up her mind to us as he does with so many other characters. Why is this? Perhaps because she would seem too similar to Kate Nickleby (both strong-willed, humble, poor [until the last], young ladies) to warrant her own depiction. And we do know Kate.
But what a treasure of a novel: Newman Noggs, the Brothers Cherryble, Mr. Mantalini, Mr. Lillyvick (“_____, sir?”), Smike, Tim Linkinwater and the former Mrs. LaCreevy, Victor Crummles and company – even Ralph Nickleby – these are unforgettable persons. And though they deserve much more thought and writing than this, I’ve got other homework to do.
Eucharist as sacrifice
By the end of the fourth century, there is a strong sense in some writers that the worshipper at the Eucharist stands in the presence of Christ sacrificed. John Chrysostom, for example, speaks of ‘the most awesome sacrifice’ and of ‘the Lord sacrificed and lying there and the priest bending over the sacrifice and interceding.
- R. J. Halliburton, The Study of Liturgy, Pt 2, ch 3.7, “The Patristic Theology of the Eucharist”
a hopeful sign re: academic criticism
Moreover, the seemingly automatic assumption that “sophisticated” works such as Rushdie’s somehow pack a potent (if nebulous) political punch is closely related to the assumption, by now thoroughly ingrained in the discourse of Western literary studies, that complexity is by definition a good thing, a clear sign (and for that matter, a prerequisite) of “genuine” art and thorough thought.
…. But there is a certain value in clarity…
- M. Keith Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War,” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.), 284. I’m not (yet, anyway) sympathetic with Booker’s Marxist commitments, but I was delighted to read this earlier tonight.
Early English broadsides resource
Here: the English Broadside Ballad Archive, no subscription required. The archive contains high-quality digital versions of the ballads collected in five volumes by Samuel Pepys. It also includes what they call “facsimile transcriptions” – digital representations of the broadsides which attempt to retain the feel of the original, while replacing the text with more legible, modern type.
Wow.
Piozzi on the young Samuel Johnson’s first reading of Hamlet
…he was just nine Years old when having got the play of Hamlet to read in his Father’s Kitchen, he read on very qu[i]etly till he came to the Ghost Scene, when he hurried up Stairs to the Shop Door that he might see folks about him. This Story he was not unwilling to tell as a Testimony to the Merits of Shakespear.
- Hester Lynch Piozzi, Dr Johnson by Mrs Thrale: The ‘Anecdotes’ of Mrs Piozzi in their Original Form (1786), ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto & Windus; The Hogarth Press, 1984), 6-7.
Samuel Johnson lived in another world
But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.
- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)
Flutter
Hehe. Wishing WordPress could handle the video HTML code, I must instead send you away from the blog. But it’s worth the trip.
Sir Philip Sidney on the Bible
The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.
- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.
