A history of philosophy so skeptical that it doubts the existence of philosophy is the most philosophical thing I can imagine. So I knew I would like The Dream of Reason: Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance and its sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, as soon as I read the first line: “The last thing I expected to find when I began work on this book,” Anthony Gottlieb says about his history of philosophy, “is that there is no such thing as philosophy. Continue reading “Anthony Gottlieb’s History of Philosophy”
A Sonata in 20 Parts
This month marks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. There’s a lot of writing floating around about Thoreau right now, much of it variations on the same few themes: civil disobedience, living in the woods, wildness, the neckbeard. Usually unsaid is Thoreau’s extensive scientific work as a naturalist, his journalism for some of the most prominent papers of the day, his tireless (and effective) abolitionism, and his career as one of the best pencilmakers in American history. He could play the flute, conduct a land survey, and build a house. He read Homer in the original Greek, could quote Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita. Continue reading “Hound, Bay Horse, Turtledove: Thoreau and Guy Davenport”
I have designed my own epitaph:
de EASTON PIERS in Agro Wilton
Arm: Regalis Societatis Socius
Infra situs est
John Aubrey was born in 1626 at Wiltshire County, England and died 1697 with nothing to his name but his considerable debts and a poorly-received anthology of hermetic philosophy. He never married, had no children, and held no titles or estates. He was educated at Oxford, but never earned a shilling or had a real job in his entire life. In the confined world of 17th century English aristocracy, he had a reputation as an incorrigible gossip, an eccentric bookworm, an impractical dreamer, and a genius of cadging money and booze from his friends.
Aubrey left nothing to the world—nothing, except for his collected papers and notes.
The Return of Munchausen by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a magnificent little book in every sense. Joanne Turnbull’s translation is excellent, reproducing Krzhizhanovsky’s loopy, punning Russian into loopy, punning English modeled on Chesterton and Poe (an inveterate Anglophile, K. himself was hugely influenced by these two). Her very readable endnotes, made in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov, open up the text’s labyrinth of references to readers who can’t tell Omsk from Tomsk, besides being a neat little catalog of early Soviet ephemera in its own right (did you know the Bolsheviks bankrolled a hypnotist for a while?). The physical book is beautifully produced and set, although anybody who’s ever leafed through a book published by The New York Review of Books Classics could guess as much. Continue reading “Mendace Veritas”
This writer has never quite bought into that old American idiom, “stranger than fiction.” The idea that fiction is the yardstick by which our weirdness is measured doesn’t give enough credit to reality: does any fictional invention baffle as much as quantum mechanics or the Voynich Manuscript? To be more blunt, reality tends to surprise us when fiction–even the really good stuff–has to follow rules and combine its constituent parts in a way that produces pleasing harmonies. I say this by way of introduction to a strange moment in history where reality is not stranger than fiction, but as strange as fiction; that is to say: a bit too on the nose. Continue reading “There is No Literature Cure: Books, the U.S. Presidential Election, and Other Wastes of Time”
I love it when a hunch pays off. I’ve seen The Grand Budapest Hotel many times in the last three years, and have never lacked for things to say about it (principally: it’s a modern classic that deserves attention, respect, and love). But it was only on a recent viewing where I had a thought, as I often do. I made a note of it, as I often do, and then went back to watching the movie. And when I was flipping through old reviews of the movie, as I often do, I saw my odd thought—or something like it—under somebody else’s byline. Writing for Roger Ebert’s old site, Glenn Kenny says:
An odd thought occurred to me a few hours after I saw writer/director Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” for the first time. It was that Anderson would be the ideal director for a film of “Lolita,” or a mini-series of “Ada.” Now I know that “Lolita” has been filmed, twice, but the fundamental problem with each version has nothing to do with ability to depict or handle risky content but with a fundamental misapprehension that Nabokov’s famous novel took place in the “real world.” For all the authentic horror and tragedy of its story, it does not. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” Humbert Humbert, the book’s monstrous protagonist/narrator, writes at the end of “Lolita.” Nabokov created Humbert so Humbert might create his own world (with a combination of detail both geographically verifiable and stealthily fanciful), a refuge from his own wrongdoing.
Alright, not precisely the same thought, but Kenny and I were on the same track: we were thinking about narrative and realism while watching The Grand Budapest Hotel. Kenny was thinking about Nabokov; I was thinking about the shape of Mexico. More on that in a minute. Continue reading “Notes on The Grand Budapest Hotel, Reading, and the Visual Imagination”
This is the second part of my essay “Trees.” The first part can be found here.
Kiidk’yaas—the Ancient Tree, in Haida—was a spruce tree in Haida Gwai, British Columbia,with a rare genetic mutation that tinted its needles yellow. The tree was felled in 1997 by the logger Grant Hadwin as an act of protest against Canada’s timber industry, although his unusual method of complaint found no sympathizers. His trial was scheduled on the island of Haida Gwai; distrusting of public transit, Hadwin decided to take his own kayak from the port of Prince Rupert and paddle himself to court. Haida Gwai was 60 miles to the west; he was last seen paddling 25 miles north of Prince Rupert, heading towards Alaska; his kayak was found another 50 miles north, although there was no sign of Hadwin, whose fate remains unknown. A guitar dedicated to Canadian history was made using pieces of wood from Kiidk’yaas, Pierre Trudeau’s favorite canoe paddle, a ballet costume owned by Karen Kain, and Paul Henderson’s hockey stick.