Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

“moral opacity” is wrong. it’s the tone of moral theology - the working towards a moral framework, that is grounded in a mixture of logic and mysticism, that i find tonally fascinating (and genuinely interesting, but it’s an abstract game and doesn’t often sum up to real world ethical problems. like, theodicy is interesting but it doesn’t much help with the notion of eg genocide afaict. it’s more like genocide critiques religion and even writing that sentence makes me pull a face.

Theodicy as a defence of genocide (and other crimes), interesting, never thought it that way!

imo thoughts were very lazily written and ofc theodicy is not a defence of genocide but at the same time if your response to tangible evil such as genocide is “how do we fix religion so it works here” then well.

I wonder if you might like xpost Gilead, which does have its reveries, but more working toward and in ethical framework of speculative response to experience, incl. of thinking---in a personal history of a pastor, son and grandson of a pastor (who was a radical abolitionist and giver away of his and family's stuff, running back to the ghost of Bleeding Kansas long after/"after" the Civil War)--so, post-visionary, going toward post-dogmatic Christianty, no-frills flights (what CS Lewis meant by Mere Christianity,seemed like, but this is more robust, poetic---also, things keep happening).

"Jumping on the mimetic desire bandwagon"

Was this a joke?

i'm afraid not, pinefox, sorry.

clustering around the dynamics of social media, the vocal presence of the radical right, and heightened by the White House mob, bloggers/commentators have been looking at Girard's theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire as explanatory mechanics for the dynamics of social media:

Who is Rene Girard
Mimetic Desire 101
Preliminary Theory of the In-Group Contrarian

You'll be excited to know I was going to start a thread bucket for structuralist (mainly bricolage) and mimetic desire thinking in this space, and relieved to know I couldn't be arsed.

There's Peter Thiel angle here as well, and I don't think the whole thing is free of... i don't know what to call it? That Silicon Valley/Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist? There must be something snappier there. Still, Girard himself is definitely an interesting thinker, though, but at base i'm most sympathetic to Empson's 'mucking about with other people's sex, always a disgusting business of course' view of the desert religions.

The desert religions? Is that Christianity, Judaism and Islam?

Does your comment on Empson mean: these religions interfere with people's private lives, and that's bad, but Girard disagrees?

I don't know Peter Thiel. I haven't heard of "Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist" either.

The bandwagon was unknown to me. It's possibly amusing or pleasing that what seemed like a joke from you is actually serious.

yes apologies pf- it’s partly because i’m just doing v rapid posts in short gaps i get at work which i recognise is leading to an unhelpfully compressed or telegraphic style.

the overall area is technology and culture.

ycombinator is a tech start up funding forum, peter thiel is a tech venture capitalist (wholesome companies like paypal, palantir and facebook and bankrupting gawker), slate star codex now astral star codex is a forum for hyperrationalist types who are generally on the neoliberal end of an extremely positivist approach to technology and progress. all of them share something which i find morally and aesthetically unpleasant but which i haven’t put my finger on. they are also not without insight and interesting frameworks for analysing new technology dynamics and the application of notions like epistemology to social media and online spaces.

there are genuine progressives in this area - someone like Adam Elkus, who i’ve mentioned before, includes a knowledge of modern warfare and also a playful sensibility that thwarts and defeats the “silicon valley” progressivism through a fascination with virtual glitching and disruption in the information flow of digital spaces to create a new aesthetic (mainly built around memes).

Geoff Shullenberger is a professor in comparative literature and has been foremost in applying girard to online media.

Would read your desire thread, fizzles.

i saw shullenberger give this talk about thiel and girard (first 15 minutes of this, not the whole thing), which was quite good iirc!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3DgIX_WL4

ah cheers caek i haven’t seen that. i’m not a *massive* shullenberger stan, but conversations and pieces around the topic have been sufficiently interesting to want to read more. hence the girard.

it’s all got a bit of publicity yesterday after a ross douthat :/ piece in the nyt on foucault which cites shullenberger. who has been tweeting his response.

The risk of Girardianism is that an emphasis on the dangers of the mob becomes an alibi for unjust institutions that claim to protect us from it; the risk of Foucauldianism is the opposite: a systematic anti-institutionalism that underrates the dangers of the mob./8

— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) May 26, 2021

i like his recent coinage "theorycels", although i'm not sure what it means tbqh

Jesus, if I'm going to have to read Girard and Foucault to understand Twitter, I should just cancel my account now.

i’m kind of generally inclined to say as i have no idea what i’m talking about that theory is just a game - fun or not depending on what puts powder in your breech - where you try to find maximum levels of baroque complexity for minimum amounts of explanatory force.

ofc that’s flippant of me, cos there’s plenty of good work that’s gone into anthropology, philosophy, political theory etc that underpins theory buuuuut yeah, it’s largely just a game with categories. that’s not to dismiss it, that playing around with the building blocks in different conceptual ways is a crucial route to generating understanding.

and apologies pinefox, yes, “desert religions”: judaism, christianity, islam and their various wild and wonderful heresies and unorthodoxies. i guess you should probably include zoroastrianism and the druzes but let’s not complicate things further.

and chinaski - thanks! maybe i will cobble together my notes one day, tho i’ve got several threads i *want* to start above this one and equally am not getting round to :(

Fizzles: I think that's a good way to see those religions. People often seem to talk as though Christianity, in particular, is home-grown to my country or even the US, rather than an exotic implant from places with different climate and customs.

Read some shorter things before another big-ish book:

Beowulf (tr.Heaney)
Guillevic - Selected
Fleur Jaeggy - Sweet days of Discipline
Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human

The last two are page after page of suffering of differing varieties. The prose in the Jaeggy is more clinical in its clipped shorter sentences but the Dazai has a bigger timespan and ends up more squalid.

Finished musician Flora Yin-Wong's 'Liturgy,' which was an astonishing and at times frightening book of sensorial exploration of myth, ritual, disease, God, monsters, death, and the limits of knowledge. Highly recommended.

Also finished poet Josef Kaplan's latest, 'Loser,' which is a two-poem book that goes hard in its takedown of both our current sociopolitical situation and our responses to it, but in a way that is original and interesting and *rich*, not at all polemic. Great book.

People often seem to talk as though Christianity, in particular, is home-grown to my country or even the US, rather than an exotic implant from places with different climate and customs.

Well, Christianity as it exists in most of the world today is a product of millennia of symbiotic development with European culture. I don't think either would be recognizably what they are today without the other. This excludes maybe a few small Middle-eastern Christian sects such as the Copts.

Christianity is a sprawling religion, within which one may find everything from Trappist monasteries to Pentecostal snake-handling.

btw, I have begun reading World Light, Halldor Laxness. This one may take me a while.

One useful term I've heard for grouping Christianity, Islam and Judaism is as the "revealed religions". V.S. Naipaul uses the term. It distinguishes the Western religious traditions which trace their founding back to a direct revelation from the Deity to a chosen prophet at a particular time and place, which is considered to be basically complete and infallible, from other Eastern traditions which allow for more of an ongoing process of revelation from observation of nature and study of things as they are.

I hadn't heard of Dear Cyborgs, but I was intrigued by the idea of something that sounded like slight fun but ended up better than that, and I was blown away by it. Thanks for the recommendation!
― toby, Thursday, May 20, 2021 12:24 AM
glad that you enjoyed it--it's still rattling around in my head. and thank you, pinefox, for further coe reflections.

big fan of sweet days of discipline, which seems like the best jaeggy of what's been translated (though i've yet to try proleterka). recently have gone through: outline by rachel cusk, the last resistance by jacqueline rose, & house made of dawn by n. scott momaday, the cusk long overdue and the momaday excellent. not quite sure where to head next.

Love Momaday.

Finished Jackie Ess' "Darryl" today. Recommended for fans of Dennis Cooper and Delany's sexier books. Excellent debut novel, highly recommended.

he risk of Girardianism is that an emphasis on the dangers of the mob becomes an alibi for unjust institutions that claim to protect us from it; the risk of Foucauldianism is the opposite: a systematic anti-institutionalism that underrates the dangers of the mob./8
— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) May 26, 2021 Foucuald himself not too worried about mobs o' pedophiles, for instance, judging by his take on the laws---so, continuing with the neat short formulations, inclined to respond, "Duh."

The points made above about religions are convincing.

But a fact remains: when eg: Europeans or North Americans recount the stories told in the books of Christianity, they are talking about events in a very different part of the world. It's not as though, with all the symbiosis, we now hear "Joseph and Mary came to Newport in South Wales, and could not find room at the inn", or "Jesus created a miraculous amount of food and drink by Lake Erie, in OH". The stories and characters remain unmistakably very foreign.

Eastern religions were mentioned. As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live. "The Buddha sat under a banyan tree and ate a bowl of rice", etc.

As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live.

Don't think this is quite true - is India really closer to the experience of a Japanese buddhist than the Middle East is to a European?

I don't know enough about those faiths to comment - have no idea where the Buddha is supposed to be from - so your question is probably valid.

I suppose I assume that some people, in some places, have religions that are pretty much from that place. Hindus in India? Inuit with whatever their historic religion is? But perhaps even this assumption is mistaken.

Fair play to Daniel Rf: I now see that Buddha is from Nepal, so yes, that's another foreign implantation when it gets to the Far East.

I read a curious little book: Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop, which fictionalises the fraught years of the first breeding pair of little ringed plovers in the years after WW2. Allsop was an observer at the time and the recreation of a largely vanished space is vivid and beautifully rendered (the area is lightly disguised but is essentially the gravel pits and sewage farms around Wraysbury, Staines and Windsor, near Heathrow). It ends up somewhere between Tarka and JA Baker's The Peregrine, without ever reaching Baker's dizzily transcendental heights or entering Williamson's vivifying zone. A pleasant - if whimsical - read.

Finished Broc Rossell's "Alameda," started a few poetry books but believe I'm going to continue on my Liz Waldner run with a book that arrived in the mail today, "Dark Would (the missing person)"

I'm reading James Salter's Light Years. He's a writer I've heard so much about. He writes beautiful sentences but, despite this being written in the 70s - about the quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - it feels about 100 years old. I want everyone in it to die.

Heh. I like him a lot, but I know what you mean.

Maybe try debut The Hunters, based on his experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War: reading it after Light Years, I was struck by the relative tautness, with highflown impressionism appropriately timed, streaming by and through the professionalism (he did this 'til he was thirty-one, pretty old for aerial combat, and the lead is no spring chicken; it's not a boy's initiation etc.). It became required reading in some training programs. There's a second edition, but somebody on a previous WAYR said it's not that different.

Cassada was a significant rewrite of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh and also has to do with flying. But yeah, he did do something to The Hunters as well, not sure what.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/reviews/010211.11maxlt.html

Thanks! Will have to check the versions of that one too. Here's an appealing take on second ed. The Hunters, and comparison to Light Years in context of his career POV:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/23/the-hunters-2/

I like the sound of Chinaski's ADVENTURE LIT THEIR STAR.

Yesterday at last I finished Gail Honeyman: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. It was odd for me to read such a popular / bestselling novel, but I realised that I really enjoyed this - maybe if I spent more of my time reading such books, my life would be more enjoyable?

The prose was mostly just serviceable, but with better moments of imagery occasionally. It's all narrated by office worker Eleanor, who is very odd and very isolated. There is an odd combination of a fiction of banality and the mundane ('I do like Tesco's pink wafer biscuits', etc) and a kind of buried Gothic trauma, relating to a tragic past involving her mother. The novel contains a very late twist which I don't think helps. Its celebration of kindness and sympathy for the lonely is welcome, but it can tip too far into sentimentality simply by *too often* repeating statements like 'He reached across and touched my hands. I found it warm and comforting. This must be what it is like, to be comforted by another human being!'.

I suppose the oddity of the book is that the heroine is sensible in so many ways, but also makes bizarre choices of a kind that nobody would - like fixating on a person she's never met and earnestly saying that she's going to marry him. The level of oddity and naivety here doesn't really fit with the character's perceptiveness in other ways, and doesn't exactly seem clearly explained by her tragic past.

I enjoyed it, but it's an incongruous mixture.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it. I found the narrator, Herzog, more relatable this time around, not something to be particularly proud of. In some ways, which of course he ruthlessly dissects, he is a pathetic creature. It amazes me that this book was a bestseller in the '60s. There's not much in the way of story, but somehow enough, as Bellow mostly gets over on his splendid style. Herzog is really the only fully fleshed out character, and for all the time spent trying to capture the character of his ex-wife, she remains mostly a cipher. This is not a book that gives you any perspective outside or above that of the narrator. In a sense the book is the narrator's mental life - in some ways closer to something like Robert Lowell's poetry than to a typical novel. I wouldn't be surprised if "Life Studies", published 4 years before "Herzog", wasn't an influence.

rereading stephen dobyns' 'the wrestler's cruel study' because i'm so old that i can't remember anything beyond liking it 25 years ago. it is good; we too should be fighting in the streets over gnostic interpretations

Yesterday I read 3/4 of Ian McEwan's ON CHESIL BEACH. I like it. It's very readable, interesting, poignant. It carries certain elements of enigma and understatement that may or may not be resolved. It seems to contain a few repetitions that might possibly indicate poor editing or that one more draft would have helped to streamline what's already, to be sure, a very slim volume.

i read ed sanders - the party (oof) and relatedly ws merwin - the lice
been reading mathias enard - compass
also robert walser - the assistant

I'm glad I stayed with the Salter (and thanks to JamesRedd and dow for the recommendations). Light Years is a fairytale really, a (mostly) consequence-free fairy tale, full of elisions where everyone floats free of the tides of history. There's a sequence where the main character loses her father; it roots everything, briefly, and is so sparely and beautifully rendered that I almost forgave everyone.

Maybe this is TMI, but if the Macho Men writers of his generation he is one of the few I can (still) stand, there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere. There is something he wrote in Burning the Days about how he felt whilst engaged in a noontime dalliance and watching the Apollo 11 that sort of brings together the two main sides of writing that would be gross coming from pretty much anybody else.

You talk about a loss, one thing he writes about not so often but then very carefully is the loss of his daughter, who might have been electrocuted in a tub or something.

But don’t take my word for it: look for the pull quotes from Michael Ondaatje and Susan Sontag that bedeck Burning the Days.

It's not entirely fair to isolate sections of writing but sometimes, often when he's writing about women, I have to stop and have a quiet 'ffs!' to myself.

She had a fuller figure than Nedra and a somewhat cruel mouth, the lips soft and self-indulgent, the smile irresistible, sly. Her face had the sullen resignation of girls who are studying subjects they see no use for, girls betrayed by circumstance, forced to work on Sundays, girls in foreign brothels. It was a face one could adore.

Salter is the master of prose that shimmers like winter sunlight; he's the closest to Cheever without Cheever's fablist overtones.

Okay, that quote just made me change my mind.

Cheever, Bellow, Salter, Updike -- all terrible creating plausible women.

B-b-but what about Roth?

there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere.

I actually find this kind of thing a lot in old school macho types, Hemingway for instance. It's like establishing their macho credentials gives them an excuse to be sentimental without getting called on it.