What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of Karl Marx, born in Trier, Prussia (1818). His main theory was that the economic system was a perpetual conflict between those who controlled the capital and those who provided the labor. He believed that the conflict would never be resolved peacefully, because capitalism was too volatile.

Marx wrote about his ideas in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, but after revolution broke out in France, Italy, and Austria, Marx was forced to flee Belgium where he was living. He moved to London, where he worked on his last book, Das Kapital (1867). He slowly sank into poverty, having to avoid creditors, pawn his furniture, and fight off eviction. When one of his children died, Marx was so poor that his wife had to borrow money from a neighbor to buy a coffin. When he died in 1883, only 11 people came to his funeral.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further Marxist reading available at Amazon.com

It’s the birthday of Niccolò Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469). He grew up at an extremely unstable period of Italian history. Italy wasn’t even a country at the time, but just a collection of city-states that were constantly at war with each other. By the time he was 30, Machiavelli became the secretary to Florence’s governing council, which meant he was the most influential bureaucrat in the city.

But at the height of Machiavelli’s career, the influential Medici family took power in Florence, overthrowing the elected city council and purging the government of enemies, including Machiavelli. He lost his government position, and then the authorities arrested him and threw him in a dungeon, where he was tortured for 22 days.

Machiavelli was eventually released from prison and sentenced to house arrest. He decided that the only way to get his life back was to offer some kind of gift to the Medici family, and the thing he had to give was his knowledge of politics. So he holed up in his tiny villa just outside of Florence and set out to write a handbook, incorporating everything he knew about being an effective ruler in a dangerous and volatile world. It took him just a few months to complete his book in 1513, and that was The Prince, the book for which he is remembered today.

Machiavelli’s main point in The Prince is that an effective ruler should use whatever means possible to keep his country secure and peaceful. He wrote, “Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge.”

Despite Machiavelli’s hopes, The Prince didn’t win over the Medicis. A few years later, a new republic was established in Italy, but Machiavelli’s name had already become so associated with evil and violence that he wasn’t able to get another government job for the rest of his life. Today, the word “Machiavellian” has come to mean “marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.”

Niccolò Machiavelli said, “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further machiavellian reading available at Amazon.com

It’s the birthday of Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She’s the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), a novel about a girl named Scout growing up in Alabama during the Great Depression. She, her brother Jem, and her best friend Dill spend all their time trying to uncover the mystery of Boo Radley, the recluse who lives down the street.

Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, which had a population of about 7,000, and it was the model for the town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee wrote, “It was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

Today, To Kill a Mockingbird sells about a million copies every year, and it’s sold more than 30 million copies since its publication. In 1963, just three years after its publication, it was taught in 8 percent of U.S. public middle schools and high schools, and today that figure is closer to 80 percent. Only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Huckleberry Finn are assigned more often.

Poem: “The Art of Disappearing” by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. © The Eighth Mountain Press.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

It’s the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell, born in London (1930). One of the most celebrated mystery novelists of all time, she’s best known for her mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. But she also writes novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and some critics consider these books to be her best work. Her parents had a difficult marriage, and Rendell spent a lot of time alone when she was a kid. She started writing in her teens, and she was remarkably ambitious. She managed to write an entire novel in verse about a first-century British queen when she was just 15 years old. As a young woman, she began writing dark, literary short stories, but she couldn’t get anything published.

Then, just for fun, she decided to write a detective novel. She had no intention of publishing it, but when a publisher turned down another novel and asked her if she had anything else, she decided to see what he thought of the detective story. He loved it. And that was From Doon with Death (1964), the novel that introduced Inspector Wexford. But while most of her Wexford novels are relatively straightforward mysteries, Rendell has also written books that examine how ordinary people could become murderers.

Rendell has averaged about two novels every year for most of her career. Her routine is to write every morning for five hours, and then she always eats the exact same lunch: bread, cheese, salad, and fruit. She also likes to move a lot. Since her writing career began, she’s lived in 18 different houses, entirely by choice. She said, “It’s a kind of hobby, I suppose. … I like the whole business of [moving]. And I love the first night in the new place.” Her most recent book is End in Tears (2006).

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further mysterious reading available at Amazon.com

It’s the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). Austen is the only novelist who published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. Although she never got married herself, but she is best known for books about women who do get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: she told her fiancé that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.

…There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place…

Austen’s first two books, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were great successes in her lifetime, but after that her readers grew less enthusiastic. Neither Mansfield Park (1814) nor Emma (1816) was as popular. It was only after her death that she became one of the most popular novelists from the 19th century. After the First World War, Jane Austen novels were prescribed to shell-shocked British soldiers for therapy, because the psychologists found that Austen helped them recover their sense of the world they’d known before the war. Rudyard Kipling said, “There’s no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you’re in a tight place.”

Tagged by GirlZoot

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions

Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest, then tag three people.

Consider yourself tagged.

My problem is that I never put anything away, I just put it down when I’m done. It seems to be a genetic thing in my family, we spent three days cleaning out Grandma’s house and a similar amount of time in Great Aunt Margaret’s. When I go, i imagine it will take weeks to clean out the accumulation of stuff I have. In any event the closest book I have happens to be the last that I read.

Harpur, Tom. 2005. The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. Walker & Company. ISBN 0676975739.

[Link to post]

Samson in Hebrew means “solar”, and he is plainly a sun-god figure (as the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church suggests and Kuhn affirms). Delilah, whose wiles eventually stripped him of his prodigious strength, is linked by Massey with the feeble, waning aspect of lunar light - the dark of the moon - a sign of the sun’s weakening each month. In the saga, she shears off Samson’s hair, symbolizing the sun’s loss of its halo of powerful rays.

It’s the birthday of Aldous Huxley, born in Surrey, England (1894). Huxley’s own grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was one of the great scientists of the previous century, a man who helped popularize Darwin’s theories of evolution. Huxley’s grandfather is believed to be the man who coined the word “agnostic,” and he argued that all areas of knowledge would one day come to be understood through science.

…An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex…

Huxley considered becoming a scientist himself, but when he was seventeen years old, he came down with a disease of the eyes, which rendered him almost blind. He learned to read Braille and said he loved it because he could read in bed without getting his hands cold. But since most of his schoolbooks had never been translated into Braille, he had to finish his education by reading everything with a giant magnifying glass. Despite that, his friends all agreed that he was the best-read guy they knew.

His first successful novel was Point Counter Point (1928), about a group of artists and intellectuals who don’t realize that one of the men in their company is a budding fascist revolutionary. Point Counter Point was Huxley’s first best-seller, and since it had been so ambitious a book, Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells, and thought it might be fun to try to write some science fiction.

The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered. It was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

Aldous Huxley said, “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

For me the summer vacation is a time for reading and reflection. I absorb fiction and non-fiction. This week I’ve just finished off this work;

Harpur, Tom. 2005. The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. Walker & Company. ISBN 0676975739.

Right of the mark, if you happen to be a dyed in the wool ultraorthodox fundamentalist, you are going to hate this book. You are going to hate this book large. Harpur’s main thrust of argument, is that in the third and fourth centruies, Chrurch Fathers made a conscious decision to interpret the Christian message as a literal historical occurance rather than as a spiritual allegorical experience. They conducted a great suppression of information that would be contrary to their literalist ideal. Harpur sites the destruction of the Library of Alexandria by Christians, the elimination of “heretical” writings and their authors, as well as the purging and termination with extreme prejudice of any remaining pagan thinkers and institutions like the academies of philosophy in Athens. Granted, they were tough times for the nonbeliever.

Harpur’s more compelling arguments arise from information that historical research has brought to light through archaeology. While the Church Father’s were on the rampage of information censorship, they did not erase all conflicting evidence, and it is this evidence that Harpur brings for evaluation. Namely, how the story of the Christ and the Eygptian Horus, are nearly identical down to the virgin birth, the death and resurrection. How key passages in the New Testament bear no corroboration in non-christain sources of the same period despite being at a time when documentation of events was well established. How Church Fathers acknowledged in their own correspondence that they were playing fast and loose with the actual account, “What profit hath not this fable brought us?” How the archeological record simply does not support the story.

Harpur’s stated intent is not to destroy Christianity, but to take the path not travelled. He proposes that the literal historical view that holds sway today, be replaced by what he describes as the allegorical spiritual Christianity of the earlier Church as represented in the writings of St. Paul and others. He proposes that the discovery of the Christ in ourselves is the basis of a Christain renewal and hopes for the future.

Harpur’s book gives one a lot to think about, and the information he brings forward and the questions he raises certainly will poses some difficulties, but as the Pagan Socrates says, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, so too as the Christain Elton Trueblood tells us “the unexamined faith is not worth having.”

Every revolution has a manifesto. A document which outlines the principles under which the fight was joined in the first place. The Americans had Paine and Jefferson, the French had Rousseau, the Russians had Marx. All elegant wordsmiths to be sure. My revolution is based on this book.

Honore, Carl. 2004. In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed. Vintage Canada. ISBN 0676975739.

Our society is moving way too fast these days, so fast that we often wonder blankly how we ended up where we are. The reason is that we are too caught up in living for the future moment that we can’t even really see any more. We believe that if we stop and enjoy the moment that we will run out of precious nonrenewable time, and as we all know, time is money.

This book is a liberation. This book is hope, this book is the promise of actually living in and enjoying the moment now. It is a compelling argument for self regulation of time and priorities in order to achieve a better balance of life, a better quality of life.

Two chapters into this book and I quit my job at Gigantic Concrete with no where to go. Your mileage may differ, but for me it was the only thing that finally made sense. Long live the revolution.

Lately, I’ve found myself wading through nonfiction. I have liked nonfiction since I was a boy. I spent a great deal of time reading Greek and Roman history, and as I aged, by enjoyment of nonfiction has come with me. I’m currently enjoying and Orwellian take on my nonfiction reading and so I’ve just completed this gem.

Orwell, George. 2004. Why I Write Penguin Books. ISBN 0143036351.

The book is a collection of essays by Orwell published between 1931 and 1946. It is composed of Why I Write(1946), The Lion and the Unicorn(1940), A Hanging(1931), and Politics and the English Language(1946). They recount his view that progressive socialism was the only way to defeat Nazism. That capitalism was a sham of the professional managerial class, and that English, as a language, was in peril from the perverse forms it was being molded by - advertizing, political language, and slang. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Words to think about even now.

For the past few months I’ve been reading the pre-Dune series of books by Frank Herbert’s son. I first read the novel when I was in High School. I immediately fell in love with its complexities and rich portrayals of a future that was starkly different from any other science fiction vehicle at the time. The Novels by Frank Herbert were astounding, impressive, masterful, and above all literature.

…Thank goodness I got them from the library…

They say that the apple does not fall far from the tree, however, in this case the apple caught a bad bounce, rolled down a hill and fell into a twenty thousand foot abyss. The offereings of Brian Herbert are in no way comparable to the mastery of his father. Characterizations are shallow, motives are obvious, plots are contrived. All that was fine and noble about the original series, is squandered in these endeavours.

They are instantly forgetable after completion, like a made for TV movie. In the books by Frank, we traveled the desert but our thirst was quenched, in these volumes we are parched from start to finish. Thank goodness I got them from the library and not the book store.

They are in chronological order;
The Butlerian Jihad
The Machine Crusade
The Battle of Corrin
House Atreides
House Harkonnen
House Corrino