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Occasional literary links, amusements, culture, politics, and rants

Bertrand Russell on the implications of Protestantism

September 4, 2012 | Comments Off

“The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman… In Catholic doctrine, divine revelation did not end with the scriptures, but continued from age to age through the medium of the Church, to which, therefore, it was the duty of the individual to submit his private opinions. Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.

The effects of this change were momentous. Truth was no longer to be ascertained by consulting authority, but by inward meditation. There was a tendency, quickly developed, toward anarchism in politics, and, in religion, toward mysticism, which had always fitted with difficulty into the framework of Catholic orthodoxy. There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there were philosophers; not, as in the thirteenth century, one Emperor opposed to the Pope, but a large number of heretical kings. The result, as thought in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation from spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily toward a personal isolation inimical to social sanity.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of everyday common sense.”

– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

Stories I love, in the mail to you quarterly

August 14, 2012 | Comments Off

Putting together my first package for Quarterly Co. feels a lot like assembling the cards and songs and books and other objects I used to send friends and boys in college, except with 100% fewer stickers: Here’s this thing I’ve been reading! Here’s this other, related thing! Here’s a long, gushy letter telling you all the reasons I am sending them to you — and oh, yeah, here’s this other thing that suddenly seemed so important and connected, I had to unseal the package and shove it in there, too. There are even post-it notes.

Jason Kottke described Quarterly — “a subscription service for wonderful things” — as a cross between a store and a magazine. Sasha Frere-Jones called it the future, but with a post office. The Wall Street Journal journal explains how it works, and makes me wish I had a 3D skull of my own design to include.

My shipments, which Quarterly sends out at $25 each, will be all about storytelling. Here’s how I described my focus for the site.

As a child I lived in novels as much as I did in the world, stumbling around hunched and dreamy, tearing through my alloted seven library books and then begging my mother to take me to check out more. Nowadays the challenge isn’t getting my hands on books, it’s finding stories that excite me, as a reader, writer, and critic.

My passion for unusual, well-told stories sends me foraging not just through bookstores — though I do spend a ridiculous amount of time circling the staff recommendations tables at McNally Jackson — but all kinds of media: TV, movies, magazines, blogs, apps, whatever. I still love books best of all, but it took me a while to know that for sure after devouring The Wire.

My Quarterly objects will be books and other great stories that I hope will make you cancel plans or miss your stop or ignore the doorbell. Sometimes they’ll be juicy and suspenseful; other times they’ll be weirder, less about sinking into a story than thinking about the way we tell them. Occasionally they’ll be both, so you can experience them, and ponder them, and then experience them again.

If you’re interested in signing up, I’m told the window for the first shipment closes this Thursday, the 16th.

A young Bertrand Russell guards his time

July 3, 2012 | Comments Off

On September 3, 1894, Bertrand Russell wrote to Alys Pearsall Smith, his wife-to-be, concerning the importance of creating an environment in which he could cultivate his talents. (She was a Quaker, thus the “thee.”)

And (I must confess it) horrible as such a thought is, I do not entirely trust thee to back me up. I have a passion for experience, but if I am to make anything of the talents I have, I must eschew a vast deal of possible experience, shut myself up in my study, and life a quiet life in which I see only people who approve of such a life (as far as possible); I know myself well enough to be sure (though it is a confession of weakness) that if thee insists on my having a lot of experience, on my seeing a heterogeneous society and going out into the world, and perhaps having episodes of an utterly different, worldly sort of life, my nervous force will be unequal to the strain; I shall either have to give up the work my conscience approves of, or I shall be worn out and broken down by the time I’m 30. In short, I know my own needs, much better than thee does; and it is very important to me that thee should back me up in insisting on them. Casual experience of life is of very little use to a specialist, such as I aspire to be; good manners are absolutely useless. Thee has a sort of illogical kindness (not to call it weakness), which prevents thy seeing the application of a general rule to a particular case, if anybody is to derive a little pleasure from its infraction, so that thee is quite capable, while protesting that in general thee wishes me to lead a quiet student’s life, of urging me in every particular case to accept offers, and to go in for practical affairs, which really are a hindrance to me. Both of us, too, are in danger of getting intoxicated by cheap success, which is the most damning thing on earth; if I waste these years, which ought to be given almost entirely to theoretic work and the acquisition of ideas by thought (since that is scarcely possible except when one is young), my conscience will reproach me for the rest of my life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they later divorced. Russell married three times more.

See also The orangeless childhood of Bertrand Russell and Bertrand Russell’s terror of madness (both based on passages from his autobiography, where the full text of this letter appears), and E.B. White on the tricky valuation of a writer’s time.

Rocking chairs and strokes: the solidity of Texan family

June 26, 2012 | Comments Off

My great-grandfather, Zone, the Texan communist carpenter and lothario, made this rocking chair a hundred years ago, give or take. It was good to sit in something so solid (and so tailored to short people) while visiting my mom for her birthday over the weekend.

I planned the trip several months back. And then, a few weeks ago, my mom had a stroke. She did not allow my stepdad to tell me immediately and wouldn’t want me to dwell on the details, so I’ll just say that she’s recovered with characteristic speed and finesse — by dint of sheer will, as her people do. When caregivers were dispatched by the hospital to check on her, they couldn’t believe she was the one they were coming to see.

I could. It was hard to leave when the time was up, and yet it seems impossible that there would ever come a day when my mother would cease to exist in this world.

Photo by Max, of course.

Laurie Anderson imagines her dog’s life after death

June 21, 2012 | Comments Off

Laurie Anderson imagined her terrier’s adventures in the Tibetan Buddhist afterworld and committed them to paper in “Lolabelle in the Bardo,” a series of enormous drawings showing at the Vito Schnabel Gallery in SoHo through Saturday. Earlier in the year, Anderson talked with Amanda Stern for The Believer about the very specific kind of grief she felt when the dog, her constant physical companion, died.

She was my best friend. When you’re very physically attached to something — not so much mentally, but physically, something that is always at your knee, you know — it’s very different when they evaporate. So in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for forty-nine days you’re in the Bardo, and it describes in a really fascinating way how you lose your senses and how your mind dissolves as you prepare for another cycle. At the end of that forty-nine-day period, you are born in another form, and, in my dog’s case, what was at the end of that forty-ninth day was my birthday. I’m kind of a believer in magic numbers, in a way. So I wanted to study that particular Bardo, and then I found that that’s only one of the many Bardos. The other Bardo that is happening is the Bardo that we’re in right now — in which we both believe we’re having a conversation in a studio by the river when, in fact, we’re not.

What attracts her to Buddhism, she said, “is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist — that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.”

Max took this photo at the gallery yesterday.

Talking with Kate Christensen at McNally, June 12

June 11, 2012 | Comments Off

Tomorrow night at McNally Jackson, I’ll have the great pleasure of interviewing Kate Christensen, a friend whose writing I loved even before I came to love her, about her latest novel, The Astral. We spoke about the book (and male muses and inner dicks) last year at The Awl. This will be a continuation of that conversation.

“It’s been two years since I finished The Astral,” Kate says. “The things that strike me as relevant and interesting about the book now are the paramount importance of place to a novel, the creepy, borderline-incestuous relationship between characters and novelist, and the intensity of writing about a disintegrating marriage while in the midst of a disintegrating and totally different marriage.”

Practical city living #13: U-Bahn versus NYC subway

June 6, 2012 | Comments Off

In Berlin the week before last, my friend Jessa mentioned that people on public transit there are completely okay with staring. It’s not just fine to stare, she said; it’s expected. If you don’t look at people, you’re the weird one.

For me, longtime rider of the New York City subway that I am, this idea was hard to wrap the mind around. Even making eye contact more than once on the train here is practically an aggressive act.

On the U-Bahn with her the next day, I remembered what she said, but couldn’t bring myself to look around at fellow passengers long enough to confirm it. It felt too intrusive. I kept glancing away.

“Oh, but they were staring at you,” she told me, when I mentioned this later.

“So what do people think when a New Yorker stares at the floor?” I asked her. “Are they just like, oh, she’s not from here?”

“No.” She smiled the excellent smile she breaks into when appreciating the unintentionally ironic. “They think you’re evasive,” she said, and recommended sunglasses.

I followed her advice. Max snapped this shot of my sort-of-but-not-really brother Jordan and me riding the U-Bahn to Karl-Marx-Allee. As Anna Wiener said when she recommended we stroll along it, “the changes in architecture so starkly reflect the political shifts in Berlin’s history, and it’s wild to imagine people moving into this showpiece promenade.” It was my favorite walk in Berlin.
 

Prior practical city living posts are here.

Join authors, the public, at the 24-Hour Read-In

June 6, 2012 | Comments Off

As a rule I don’t duplicate posts from my Tumblr, but this is important enough to make an exception. If you’re able, I hope you’ll come out this Saturday to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for the Read-In to protest the Mayor’s enormous proposed library budget cuts, which if enacted would effectively dismantle the New York, Queens, and Brooklyn Public Library systems as we know them.

Most of the protest in support of New York City libraries these days seems to revolve around pending changes at the NYPL’s flagship Schwarzman branch, where the research and circulating libraries are under threat. It’s a very unfortunate and arguably outrageous plan that could hobble one very important library in the wealthiest borough of our fair city, and I’m as concerned about it as anyone who’s ever done research there.

But let’s not let our opposition to (or acceptance of) that proposal distract us from the Mayor’s even greater, and far, far more wide-reaching, threat to literacy and to everything else our libraries help provide. As novelist (and friend of mine) Alexander Chee said when he signed on to the Read-In, “This is reprehensible — no library recovers from acquisitions cuts.”

And we’re not just talking reduced hours and fewer books in circulation. According to a 2010 New York Times story, the Queens system alone is  “the largest public library in the country, measured by circulation volume,” an innovative institution that has shown other libraries how to operate as “community hubs for job seekers, teenagers who are looking for a safe and comfortable place to study after school, students of English and people who cannot afford to own a computer but want to use the Internet.” All of the “city’s public libraries  are increasingly serving as makeshift employment centers,” part of a “surge in demand for libraries’ free goods and services that is typical during economic downturns.”

Over the past few years, Urban Librarians Unite and others have put up such fierce resistance to threatened cuts that money has quietly been restored, giving readers and employment seekers citywide a false sense of security. If we don’t protest, the Mayor and City Council don’t know what’s important to us, and the next time you show up at your library to pick up books on a random weekday afternoon, you just might find its doors locked. 

Anyone can sign up to read, and I hope you’ll join a wide range of writers, some of whom will actually be reading, some of whom are away and can only be with us in spirit, by signing up for a slot to read at this year’s protest, or just by stopping by.

Those participating and supporting so far include Megan Abbott (The End of Everything and Dare Me), Eric Banks (President, National Book Critics Circle), Josh Bazell (Beat the Reaper and Wild Thing), Phil Campbell (Zioncheck for President), Alexander Chee (Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night), A.N. Devers (WritersHouses.com), Jason Diamond (Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Flavorpill), Lauren Grodstein (A Friend of the Family), Will Hermes (Love Goes to Buildings on Fire), Evan Hughes (Literary Brooklyn), Jesse and Zoe Karp (Those That Wake), Julie Klam (Please Excuse My Daughter and You Had Me at Woof), Victor LaValle (Big Machine and The Ecstatic), Michelle Legro (Lapham’s Quarterly), Andrew Losowsky (Huffington Post), Ann Napolitano (A Good, Hard Look), Anna North (America Pacifica), Austin Ratner (The Jump Artist and In the Land of the Living), Rosie Schaap (Drinking with Men, and Drink columnist, New York Times Magazine), Elissa Schappell (Use Me), Lizzie Skurnick (Shelf Discovery), Amanda Stern (The Long Haul), Sadie Stein (The Paris Review), Emma Straub (Other People We Married and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures), and Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief and One-Story magazine). And especially for kids on Sunday morning: Melanie Hope Greenberg (Mermaids on Parade), Ryan Sias (Zoe & Robot), Javaka Steptoe (In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall), Charlotte Jones Volkiss (Madeline L’Engle’s granddaughter), and Paul Zelinsky (The Wheels on the Bus).

The 24-Hour Read-In gets underway Saturday, June 9, at 4 p.m. and runs through Sunday, the 10th, at 3:59 p.m. You can read your own work or (except during family time on Sunday morning) whatever you like. If you’re interested in signing up, email savenyclibraries@gmail.com.

If you don’t feel like reading, you can just join us for a little while to show your support. I’ll be there Saturday until at least midnight and again early Sunday morning. Please introduce yourself so I can shake your hand.