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Perhaps the real golden age of philosophy is quite recent.Perhaps it is a mere "bag of shells" into our living past. My thesis is that the real golden age in (western) philosophy occurred between the years 1880 and 1920. Between two Dayton brothers' receipt of a patent on the cash register in the former year and consolidation of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia with their Civil War victories of the latter year. ["Western" above very much includes Russian. It does not include Japanese, though, so the works of Kitaro Nishida, though written within this period, and discussed on this blog not long ago, will not be highlighted on the list below.] Here are some of the outstanding works of philosophy and of philosophy-adjacent intellectual and creative fields, published in this forty-one year period 1880 - 1920 within the West. Most are books, some are poems, articles or lectures. I have not made any typographical distinction among them. Each seminal work is named i...
A character in the novel Clementine is said to have dreamed "of his own ship -- and of the clouds, drafts, and passages over the Rockies. He dreamed briefly of Seattle, the walled city filled with gas and peril, and of the giant Andan Cly who had tried to help retrieve the Free Crow when first it was stolen. He also dreamed of a skittering of black birds, shifting their weight back and forth on a tree branch, their tiny claws gripping and scrapping the wood." In the next paragraph we learn that the sound those birds were making was an intrusion into the dream of a real world event, one to which the dreamer awakens. There's a lot going on in this passage, and it's deftly done. Clementine is part of the Clockwork Century collection of novels by Cherie Priest. Its an alternate history based in part of the notion that dirigibles became a key means of transit across the North American continent in the second half of the 19th century, while the Civil War waged on...
Certainly it is easy to create a literary aesthetics of brevity. The haiku and the aphorism have their admirers. Ernest Hemingway is widely thought to have invented a perfect short story in the form of a classified ad: "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Edgar Allen Poe famously developed a theory for why short stories are superior to novels. His explanation of that theory was, IMHO, longer winded than it had to be. The point, though, was that a story should have a unitary impact and this could be achieved best with a work that could be read in a single sitting. Yet one shouldn't let the aesthetics of the short haul have the last word. The world has room for Melville's and Tolstoy's and Victor Hugo's novels, and creating a Reader's Digest version thereof will never be the same. As for Hemingway's six word story? He didn't really write it. It is the work of a playwright named John deGroot who created a one-actor play about "Papa...
On my mind today is Mildred Pierce, a 1941 novel by James Cain, set in the ten years leading up to the date of publication. No, I didn't just refer to the movie star best known for playing Sonny Corleone. That's James Caan. I'm thinking now of the novelist James Cain, born in 1892. Although his reputation is in eclipse now, he was quite well known for a time as a writer of "hardboiiled" crime fiction, a peer of Chandler or Hammett. Cain wrote Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. , both memorably adapted into classic Hollywood films. Mildred Pierce was somewhat different, an effort at offering a naturalistic portrait of southern California suburbia. Anyway, Mildred Pierce was also made into a movie in 1945, and became a television miniseries in 2011. The title character has two daughters: Veda (11 years old when the story begins in 1931) and her little sister Ray (7 years). The photo above is of Veda, as portrayed by actress Morgan T...
On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation. I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once." It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time. One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He could h...
On the off chance that anyone cares, I've taken a Myers-Briggs thing, and it classified me as: Intraverted, Intuitive; Thinking; Judging -- Assertive. Or INTJ-A, also known as "The Architect." Intraverted by a wide margin, and Thinking over Feeling also by a fairly wide margin, but the margins involved in the other three binary categories were smaller. Apparently, people who like applying the Myers-Briggs test to fictional character have decided that this designation applies to both Professor Moriarty (in the Sherlock Holmes canon) and Dr. House (of the eponymous television series). Do real psychologists still care these days about Myers-Briggs?
What I especially like about the passage I quoted is the use of indirection. When Zeke identifies by name two of the three men in the room, he adds a third name with a note of inflection in his voice. We hear this from the PoV of Rector, as is the case throughout the novel. (This is in contrast to the earlier novel, in which the PoV swung back and forth between the two protagonists). Anyway, we draw the inference about Zeke's incomplete knowledge ourselves, and then read that Rector has done the same. So we our on the same page with our protagonist, so to speak. Only after that do we learn that Rector isn't sure he understood Zeke properly. He isn't sure who is who yet even as to the two names which Zeke pronounced with confidence. Yet it tells us something about Rector's developing state of mind -- as someone trying to free himself from the influence of a powerful drug -- that he notes his own uncertainty. He knows what he does not know. Finally, the brief passag...
I've blogged a bit recently here about BONESHAKER, a steampunk-fantasy novel by Cherie Priest, set in an alternative-history late 19th century Seattle and its outskirts. That novel set off her CLOCKWORK CENTURY series. Most of the other books in the series are only loosely related to BONESHAKER. They take place in other parts of the alt-history US, have little overlap in characters or plot with the original, etc. But THE INEXPLICABLES is a true sequel. We're back the northwest, mostly within the city wall (yes, in these stories there's a tall wall around Seattle, although enterprising folk can and do get in and out), and the character/plot overlap is large. The protagonist of THE INEXPLICABLES is Rector Sherman, a young man who has just been kicked out of the orphanage in the Outskirts of Seattle after having reached 18. He was a minor character in BONESHAKER. Rector is neither a hero nor an anti-hero, though somewhat closer to the latter than the former. He is a ...
The following comes from the recent biography of the great novelist, John Updike, written by Adam Begley: Among the other twentieth-century American writers who made a splash before their thirtieth birthday (the list includes Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon), none piled up accomplishments in as orderly a fashion as Updike, or with as little fuss....He wasn't despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn't alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one. In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers. even his neuroses were tame.
On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation. I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once." It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time. One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He could h...
A personal letter, sent on July 1, 1925, from Burguete, Navarra: Dear Scott -- We are going to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda? I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt—havent drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably [be] an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows. To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I wo...
I bought a memoir by Joyce Carol Oates not long ago. Why? Well ... I knew her name. She has a considerable reputation as a novelist. I had never read any of her novels, and thought this might be a way to sample her abilities. It was a mistake. As noted in the first sentence above, the book I bought, A Widow's Story is not a novel. It is a memoir. And it is a thoroughly depressing memoir about her husband's death and the early months of life alone after a happy marriage of decades. This passage, from early on in the book, represents about as far as I managed to get before giving up. -------------------------------- Your husband's heartbeat has accelerated -- we haven't been able to stabilize it -- in the event that his heart stops do you want extraordinary measures to be used to keep him alive? I am so stunned that I can't reply, the stranger at the other end of the line repeats his astonishing words -- I hear myself stammering Yes! Yes of course --...