Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Jack sat down at the PC. It was one of a line of them in the local library. He took out his keychain, which had  small "library card." (This was not like the old sort of library card that he remembered from school days -- this was a smaller thingy suited to a keychain, presumably to make it had to lose.) The card was there along with other convenient little items that have nothing to do with the act of entering or starting a car, including a card of roughly the same size that got him discounts at the local Shop & Grab store. So he entered a longish number into the PC -- thinking it was the library card number. A box in the screen informed him that number was not active. He entered it a second time, being more careful about his typing this time. He got the same error box. He moved over to the next computer at the bank. That seat was also unoccupied. While he was getting himself settled, by habit, he stuck the keychain back in his pocket. When he realized this, he f...

"The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years  ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” That's Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums.  It is carefully structured to seem structureless, a purposefully channeled stream of consciousness. The aim of this sentence is to convey the sense of a lot of different thens coming together in a now. I'm passing this woods, I could be passing another wood, one near by grandmother's home. Or one I passed last week in the course of performing some grown-up errand Each wood is particularly itself, yet each looks like it could be the lost form of another, or any of those many others. But ...

I wrote something about the first Falcon Lord book last month, here.   I would now like to add a few words about the sequel, the title of which also serves as the headline to this blog entry. I can't be as enthusiastic. We return to the same familiar island and meet the old gang again, and the plot is handled well -- a nice mix of the new the old, and some twists on the elements that are carried over. BUT ... Metrov's command of prose style seems to have left him. I'll give just one sentence by way of example. In the midst of the climactic battle of good and evil, when all his epic machinery comes together, Metrov writes this: "The fighters became pawns in a dizzying ballet, a symphony, cacophonous and head-splitting, orchestrated by a devil's baton." There are lots of ways in which I hate that sentence. Let's start with the end: "orchestrated by a devil's baton." An orchestra might be conducted by a devil, and by a natural me...