Baseball

Having just seen Field of Dreams, the less brilliant rendering of Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella, I have since rekindled my love of baseball. Enjoy this graphic I found on Edward Tufte's Website (NOTICE: It is not a graphic by Edward Tufte, he just put it on his website because he thought that it was a good graphic):

JPC

Simone: The Movie

"An Interview with Simone Weil" is a film which was released last year. Here are three trailers:

Short trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKFzgIRmZeU

Medium Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6eHAkn8DuA&feature=related

Long Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLGrwf9TIek&feature=related

I do not know yet if it's been released on DVD, though I'm very interested to see it.

I also came across this link:

"Stretched out with Christ: Martin Luther and Simone Weil"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ryXVdXs8s&feature=related

All about Simone Weil and Martin Luther's views of pain and suffering, both the hardship they bring and the necessity of pain.

JPC

The Questions of Internet Censorship

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_GOOGLE_GOVERNMENT_DEMANDS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-04-20-19-39-15

Story from the AP feed about Google and Internet censorship. I've been following the Google/China censor debate for some time--even once or twice halting all use of Google as a search engine for curbing to government pressure. However, I greatly approve of the way in which they have now handled the situation.

They have posted a page on their website (a screenshot of which is available in the link to to AP article) which describes which governments have requested Google to censor something (except for China, due to the material being kept a "state secret" for now) and how often it's happened. This is, in a way, kind of the backfire element of the Patriot Act. Originally, the Patriot Act allowed the government of the United States to spy on citizens without warrant--thus causing many people to conjure up a "V for Vendetta" scenario--and without their knowledge. Now, Google is making people aware of what the government does and what they choose to investigate. Google is saying "They came to us for personal information about our users" though without any great detail. The result is that now we have the ability to watch the watchers.

JPC

David Foster Wallace

Working my way through a series of books by David Foster Wallace, (1) a writer so talented that he makes me want to give up writing fiction. Let me rephrase that. He makes me want to give up writing altogether. He makes most writers look weak, even though he did not publish many books during his lifetime. The books he did publish stand on a much higher plane than the books of most other writers.

Currently reading "Host" from Consider the Lobster which is a typographically intriguing work, featuring many blocks of text connected by arrows, constantly interrupting each other (2). It's one of the reasons I loved David Foster Wallace.

It is interesting to see how he was one of the very few literary authors I can think of to have a truly dedicated fan base, almost making him into a rock star. Indeed, in the photo below, you can almost picture him as "the brooding one" from any band(3):

JPC

***

Footnotes:

(1) Beginning with Consider the Lobster, moving to Oblivion, The Broom of the System, The Girl with Curious Hair and Infinite Jest over the summer.

(2) It pulls the reader aside in the middle of a conversation, causing the said reader to go in circles, almost, trying to figure out what is what before jumping back to the conversation.

(3) Of course, to say that unintentionally adds an insulting tone. I realized almost as soon as I wrote it that it would need to be clarified. Therefore: Wallace was a brooding writer, in the sense that he was asking what "tasted right" (to use his words from a Bookworm interview w/ Michael Silverblatt). Unlike the "brooding one" in the band, he actually had a reason to brood and produced something from that brooding.

The Importance of Being Simone (Part One)

I have always had a fondness for Simone de Beauvoir.

It's interesting to see how many people would agree with the above sentence. Indeed, more and more people who study the French philosophers are now saying "No, it was not Sartre, it was de Beauvoir who was the real influence on the people." Now, perhaps in retrospect de Beauvoir was responsible for more social change than Sartre. However, one cannot forget the importance of Sartre in the very beginning of existentialist philosophy. Albert Camus might be the one who gets you into existentialism (despite the fact that he protested all his life that he was an "absurdest") but Sartre was the one who really explained all of it to the world. Pulling from various philosophers and editing where he saw fit, Sartre created a new form of philosophy which had only been just glimpsed at before him. After him, there were many young Sartres running around, just as after Freud and Jung there were many young Freudians and Jungians running around the psychoanalytic world.

(Indeed, there still are cases of therapists dying their hair gray, shaving off part of it to make themselves bald at the front, putting on glasses, lighting up a cigar and saying "So, how eezz it you feel todaii?")

However, lets not overlook Simone de Beauvoir. In the long run, because she did not become as radical as Sartre did (his apartment was bombed twice) she was able to create more change, rather, she was a more influential thinker. But the question remains: Who was more important in the long run?

People have begun rejecting Sartre more and more since the 1990's. I'm not blaming the 1990's, mind you, I'm just saying. In an odd way, certain philosophers have developed apologists (I'm thinking mostly of Heidegger here, the unrepentant Nazi). Who will apologize for Sartre? The only person I can ever think of who disagreed with him and yet said "Let us not reject him" would have been Simone de Beauvoir. And she's been dead almost twenty years.

To be continued (sometime)

JPC

Orlando

Reading Orlando for an upcoming book discussion. My copy is littered with sticky-notes and tags, underlinings and notations in the wide margins (thank god that it's almost a facsimile of the original edition). I'm the only one (I think ) who's read the book before, or any book by Virginia Woolf. So I've been researching again.

The problem of Virginia Woolf as biographer, and this has been made a point by several critics, is that her stream-of-consciousness style of writing does not meld easily with the art of biography. The result is that in attempting to sound biographical, in attempting to sound like the academic, she comes off as a parody, at best, of the academic history.

I can see this leading to arguments.

Orlando is her strongest biography, even though it is a novel. And I think the reason it's so strong as a biography is because it is a novel. Flush suffers from the limitations of being told through the point of view of a dog. Roger Fry suffers from the fact that it was her only strict biography (the life of her good friend and fellow Bloomsbury group critic, Roger Fry, now mostly forgotten). "The rules of biography do not sit well with Mrs. Woolf" I remember someone having written in a review of the final tome. In attempting to cross fictional techniques with a person's history, she tragically cannot stop herself from embelishing the tale with the things which make her writing her writing.

And is this such a bad thing? Who's to say. It's not my place. I'm only a reader/reviewer.

JPC

A Message for Helen DeWitt

Hello, Ms. DeWitt,

I'm very sorry to hear of your troubles with publishers. I'm having trouble with publications too. It would appear, too, that almost every author is having trouble with publishers right now (except that bloody James Patterson with his "book-every-eight-minutes" schedule". I'm writing because your debut novel, "The Last Samurai" was one of the most interesting books I've come across in years. Finally! A book which doesn't offer easy cuts and simple solutions--something which was never made for the Nora Roberts crowd. And yet entirely readable; completely worth any effort you need to expand upon the book.

Have you considered going to an independent press? Or maybe seeing if you can get in contact with Grove (publishers of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs among others) or New Directions (Roberto Bolano, Tennessee Williams, Anne Carson [who, it seems to me, shares your affinity for all things complex, though more linguisticly than statisticly]) or even Milkweed editions (David Rhodes, Susan Straight)?

Or why not take the Virginia Woolf route and publish through your own press? Or pull a Stephen King and publish a serial via the internet, with a 'suggested donation' price (though that didn't work for him in the long-run). Or try Lulu.com and sell through the internet, with no restrictions on your work. Maybe a great patron will come along and finance you. I'd do it but I'm strapped for cash myself.

But whatever you do, please know that your fans (including myself) will support you. We love your books. This is why I write.

Adoring fan, much love, hope things will get better, etc.,

JPC

Simone Weil

Is there anyone out in cyberspace who reads Simone Weil? If so, please answer me this. Is her life a story to be admired or to be feared? Was her death from self-starvation preventable or was it going to happen no matter what? And, by the way, which is your favorite work of her's?

I was introduced to Simone Weil via the short biography of her produced by Francine du Plessix Grey, which came out of Penguin's "Brief Lives" series (along with the somewhat amusing and informative introduction to Marcel Proust by Edmund White and an intriguing look at Virginia Woolf via her lover's son, Nigel Nicholson.) I connected with the tale of a woman who was all too aware of the suffering of others. The question was, "did that awareness kill her?"

It takes a lot to pay attention to suffering. It is difficult to see suffering without politicizing or misunderstanding it. One must care about suffering, however one must worry over two things: Why is there suffering? and Who (or what) is causing the suffering? That is the starting point from which every effort must begin.

Simone Weil made me want to be a better person, though she also almost destroyed me. To read her and fully understand her, you become burdoned with guilt--you realize so much of what you're doing is wrong. But this is what makes her such a great writer. She moves you in a way mystics usually cannot.

JPC

Rein it in

Recent updates on the obvious by the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/business/economy/15fed.html?hp

"US Must start to Rein in Deficit, Bernake Says" by Sewell Chan.

Now if that headline had run six years ago, with Greenspan in charge; with Greenspan's name attached, it might have gotten people to wake up to our economic troubles. But no, alas.

JPC.

Christie and Chatterton

Finding many things confusing about this new tech, having to wonder how people do some of this stuff. Anyway, welcome to the blog. I'm not going to get into all this stuff about what I like and don't like, you'll catch on to that soon enough. I'm not looking for love, so don't ask me on a date. I really don't have the time. Writing and reading and researching eats everything up.

Reading today about Agatha Christie. I grew up reading her books as a young man (even though the school I went to banned them--too many curse words apparently) so I'm interested to see how she plotted out her books. I'm enjoying it so far, though I still have some doubts about how it's possible that one woman could have written so many delightful murder stories.

Last night I read all about Thomas Chatterton, the young poet of the 18th century best known for his forgeries and his death (suicide) at the age of 17.

(portrait "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis)

Chatterton was a most ingenious young man and it is a pity that he didn't live longer. When I first heard of him, I was seventeen. It was disturbing to look at the volumes of his work in the library, realizing that he'd written all of that before he was my age and that he'd died when he was my age. If I'd died that young I'd have left nothing behind except one or two very bad short stories.

But then he was a genious, a prodigy, wasn't he? I'm not. At least I don't think so.

JPC