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Monthly Archives: December 2010

Snow.

December 12, 2010

The wicked white path, softened by its appearance which disguises its harshness, gives me the illusion of travel as I …

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This work by S. R. Kraaijeveld is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://esarkaye.com/.

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What if (some of) the moral intuitions that we (sometimes) feel turn out, upon reflection, to be unjustified? That's a question with which I've been grappling for a while. I'm actually attempting to answer it in a paper one which I'm currently working; it's not directly related to my PhD research, so I'm writing it outside of office hours (like here, now, on a Saturday). I've almost finished it, which feels great. I just need to wrap up the last section, in which, among other things, I'm drawing on something that Heath suggests in Enlightenment 2.0, which is why I'm keeping it close at hand. I'm sorry that I cannot share more at this point (trust me, I'd love to go caption-happy and write it all out here), but I promise I'll share more when I can. 🤓

Coffee and Balint. || Before he died, Kafka asked Max Brod to burn his remaining manuscripts. As we all know, Brod ignored that request, and instead devoted the rest of his life to editing, publishing, and canonizing his friend's work. In a sense, he thereby saved Kafka twice: from physical destruction of his words, and from the obscurity that might have resulted had his work not come into print. I find the question of whether or not Brod was justified in disregarding Kafka's wish fascinating not just from an ethical perspective, but also from a more personal perspective, convinced as I am (and as you know) that Kafka works exemplify some of the greatest literature ever produced. There was a further dispute about Kafka's legacy, however, beyond Brod's decision, which I knew less about: the international legal battle between those who believed that as a German writer, Kafka's papers should rest in Germany (where three of Franz's sisters died in the Holocaust), and those who believed that as a Jewish writer, his papers should be considered part of the cultural heritage of Israel (a state that did not exist at the time of his death). Balint's book centers on the notion of legacy by taking Kafka as a case study; he provides a biography of Kafka and Brod that focuses on what happened to the former's manuscripts when the latter rescued them—from Kafka himself, and from the Nazi's when Brod fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. Ultimately, and an another question in which I'm particularly interested, Balint asks to whom, if anyone, Kafka's legacy belongs—and whether any nation state can (:should be allowed to) claim ownership of a writer's work at all.

Coffee and Faulkner. || I finished Huxley's Island; my review will be on Goodreads soon. A fascinating read, even if it wasn't a particularly great work of fiction. Anyway, it has become a tradition for my girlfriend and me to read Faulkner together at the beginning of the year. After The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, we decided to read Sanctuary next. I'm excited. 🙉

My girlfriend rules—she got me this amazing very recently published history of Russian literature that I didn't even know existed! She knows me so well. ☺️ I thought I'd post it now, since it links up nicely with my last post. At 900+ pages, with a bunch of illustrations in color, I can tell you that it's a thing of rare beauty. There are very few good (that is: comprehensive and well-researched) histories of Russian literature; this one, published by Oxford University Press and edited by four prominent scholars, looks like it'll be a landmark publication in the field. "Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day. The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs and 'case studies', in-depth discussions of writers, institutions, and texts that take the reader up close and. Visual material also underscores the interrelation of the word and image at a number of points, particularly significant in the medieval period and twentieth century. The History addresses major continuities and discontinuities in the history of Russian literature across all periods, and in particular bring out trans-historical features that contribute to the notion of a national literature. The volume's time-range has the merit of identifying from the early modern period a vital set of national stereotypes and popular folklore about boundaries, space, Holy Russia, and the charismatic king that offers culturally relevant material to later writers. This volume delivers a fresh view on a series of key questions about Russia's literary history, by providing new mappings of literary history and ...

Here they are! My Russian literature shelves in the living room. From top left to right, there are Dostoevsky, Tsypkin, and Tolstoy (continued below), then Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev (continued below), Lermontov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Saltykov-Schedrin, Goncharov, Babel, then a little poetry section with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky, then one row down there is Grossman, Sinyavsky, Shalamov, Sholokhov, Gorky, Pasternak, Bely, Odoevsky, Sokolov, Leskov, Nabokov to the right, and some works of Russian history. I had some space left, which I decided to fill with Eastern European literature—like Hrabal, Borowski, Kundera, and Hašek. I decided to include my Norton Anthology of World Literature. Finally, the rows on the bottom toward the right I will use for books that I'm currently reading/just received, kind of like a temporary holding spot. I thought that the new shelf would allow me to clear my kitchen table of books entirely, but alas, I had too many of them. I did manage to clear the table, though, so I can work there again. I simply moved a bunch of the books upstairs, double-stacking where necessary. All in all, I'm very pleased with the new setup. ☺️🤓

Guess what? Today, I finally added another shelf to my living room! I spent the day putting it up. I actually changed the layout of the room in order to combine the two shelves and make them the centerpiece. All my Russians together, at last! The thing is, by the time I was done, it was too dark to take a good picture. So I'll take one tomorrow and share it—maybe even more than one. Here is a picture that I took while I was getting things set up; stacks of Russians on the floor, next to the roses that I got for my girlfriend. 🌹📚

Lazy Sunday. 📖🍤

Happy New Year everyone! ✨ Sorry for the slow start to 2019. I had to finish up an article, after which I took a little time off from everything. Here are the books I read in 2018, minus a couple that I left at the office and several that I either borrowed or read in electronic form. Journal articles not included, of course (poor things). I didn't read as many books as I did last year—I would say sadly, but then I started my PhD this year, so I should be and am very grateful that I got to read as many as I did while still managing all my work. If I can read at least 50 books each year for the next couple of years—while completing my dissertation and all other requirements—I'll be very happy. So here's to that! 🥂 Also: stay tuned for a bunch of sweet new books coming right up.

Coffee and Wilson. || I finished Pretentiousness; my review will be on Goodreads soon. Honestly, as I was reading it, I became increasingly impatient for it to end—which probably best sums up my experience. The important points were made by others (Taylor, Trilling, Goffman, and so on) and much more convincingly, while the examples Fox chose felt very selective, too often presented in list form as opposed to as part of a more substantial discussion, and, most damningly, most were not particularly interesting (to me, anyway). Which is a shame, because with regard to pretentiousness there is so much fun stuff to be taken from literature. Anyway, I've been trying to finish some books that I began earlier this year—Chomsky's Who Runs the World, for instance (review is on GR), and now this. I taught a couple of chapters from Strangers to Ourselves during my philosophy master's while I was a TA. Wilson presents a bunch of evidence from contemporary research on the unconscious mind to show that it is much more powerful than we realize, capable of a much higher degree of 'thinking' than has been allowed by behaviorist and Freudians. "Capable of everything from problem solving and narrative construction to emotional reaction and prediction, the adaptive unconscious [how Wilson calls his view of the unconscious] is a powerful and pervasive element of our whole personalities. Indeed, it may be the primary element of our personalities, controlling our real motivations, judgments, and actions…" I really like his discussion of lottery winners, who aren't as happy as we think they would be. The notion of hedonic adaption, which I think is very important, plays a much larger role than we think: we tend to get used to situations, both negative and positive, very quickly, and return to a kind of hedonic baseline (a level of happiness, if you will). So that, for instance, winning the lottery doesn't (in the long run) make us that much happier than we were, nor does, for example, gaining a disability or suffering a loss make us that much unhappier than we were (again, over time). I could go on an on about this—it's one of my favorite areas of research—but I'll leave it at this.

Thanks to @obviousstate for bringing this book to my attention! I ordered it months ago, but didn't get around to reading it until now. For me, 'pretentiousness' has a fairly wide range of associations, from the very negative (I'm thinking of those politics students in my undergrad classes who would put on the cringeworthiest artificial British accents) to the more positive, like the desire to improve oneself—for instance, by learning more complex vocabulary and trying to apply it. I think pretentiousness matters in this sense: when we try to better ourselves—or, in Nietzschean terms, when we try to become who we are. After all, we are always being-someone; there is no reason why trying-to-be-someone-better should be a negative thing. Anyway, those were some preliminary thoughts. I just read the first chapter and I'm a little doubtful about how good this is going to be (I had high expectations—I think that the subject is an important one). There are so many perspectives from which to approach the subject: philosophically (notions of self, relations between self and others, self-creation), social psychological (cognitive and behavioral aspects of self, especially in relation to others—like social comparison), sociologically, historically, aesthetically, and so on. Some of these areas Fox seems to want to cover, although he hasn't focused on any in particular. What I gather from the first chapter is that the theater, literature, and the notion of authenticity will be important. Granted, Fox isn't an academic, and this isn't supposed to be an academic work. I've also only read the first chapter—still, it promises to be a rather 'loose' work, because for such a comprehensive subject, you have to either go into it very deeply from one perspective, or you have to write a tome that covers all of the most relevant perspectives. To treat the subject from different angles in <140 words, without a clear thesis, seems like a recipe for fleetingness. Although maybe I'm just being pretentious here. (Now let's see if and why that would matter).

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