The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

So every so often I read a book that is so creepy that I don't really know why I read it in the first place. This was one of those. Arthur Machen was, according to Wikipedia, which knows All Things, a mystic as well as a writer, and this is a well-known novella of his published in 1890. The scene begins, as so much Victorian fiction does, with a scientist who is all arrogance and know-it-all-ness. He has raised a young woman on whom he performs an experiment designed to 'open the mind to all things.'  The scene in which he describes his 'right' to do this is appalling to a  modern reader. I wonder if it was to Victorian?  Either way, she comes out of her reverie both physically and mentally damaged. The rest of the story centers on the panic and pain that this experiment unleashed in to the world.

I can't write any more without some serious spoilers, so I'll stop, but let's just say it's all freaky and worth reading if you like things that make you lose sleep because a) wondering what the heck happened in this story and b) still being scared out of your bejeezus even though you never quite figure out (a).

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, edited by Thomas Pangle

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic  Dialogues has some hyperbole about its in the title.  I don't really think these dialogues have been forgotten, per se. They have been contested, and the point of introductory essay by Thomas Pangle. In it, he describes all the form criticism that has gone to trying to figure out if these minor dialogues really are Plato's.  He makes the sensible conclusion that ancient compilers included them in Plato's corpus, and that probably should be good enough for us.  The other bit of over-reach in the title concerns the idea that these somehow are the root of political philosophy. That's not the over-arching theme of the book; only one of the essays--the one by Christopher Bruell on The Lovers, really tries to make the connection between political philosophy as a practice and the Socratic dialogue here.  But, it's Socrates, and he's root enough for political philosophy for me.  The Table of Contents is always useful:


HIPPARCHUS translated by Steven Forde
The Political Philospher in Democratic Society: the Socratic View by Allan Bloom

MINOS translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Minos by Leo Strauss

LOVERS translated by James Leake
On the original meaning of Political Philosophy: An interpretation of Plato's Lovers by Christopher Bruell

CLEITOPHON translated by Clifford Orwin
On the Cleitophon by Clifford Orwin

THEAGES translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Theages by Thomas L. Pangle

LACHES translated by James H Nichols Jr
Introduction to the Laches by James H Nichols Jr

ALCIBIADES, translated by Carnes Lord
On the Alcibiades I by Steven Forde

LESSER HIPPIAS translated by James Leake
Introduction to the Lesser Hippias by James Leake

GREATER HIPPIAS translated by David R Sweet
Introduction to the Greater Hippias by David R Sweet

ION translated by Allan Bloom
An Interpretation of Platos Ion by Allan Bloom

I'm not a very well-disciplined reader of Plato; Aristotle is a huge struggle for me and I always carefully plod through, but I generally find Plato to be playful and often very funny in the way that he depicts all these characters in the dialogue, and while you are probably meant to browse and pick and choose in a book like this, I honestly couldn't tell you what to skip. I read straight through.  I found a great deal of interesting things in the Cleitophon and Clifford Orwin's discussion of it, as well as the commentaries from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In fact, I found Bloom's essays so useful I'm rather tempted to read his polemic The Closing of the American Mind to see if it's more than just a standard polemic about the cannon and the various threats to it.

Pearl Harbor by Roberta Wohlstetter: Signals, Noise, Unimaginable/Improbable?, Entrepreneurship and Japanese Thinking

Originally published in the early 60s, RW accounts for the surprise of PH by the noise that overwhelms the signals. Retrospectively, all is clear. Prospectively or in actual time, all those breadcrumbs are mixed in with crumbs from seven other bakeries and a thousand passersby.

Just because something is unimaginable does not mean that it is improbable, is the message in Schelling's forward.

My take is about entrepreneurship: You have an idea, and figure that you must succeed in something like two years. You feel that if you don't pursue it, you have lost your mojo. You also know that your competitors will doom you if you don't succeed in those two years, for they might well catch up. You will make your major announcement now, for you are ready--and you tell yourself that the competitors might cede some of the market to you. But that is just telling yourself. But that uncertain longer term is not going to stop you from trying. In other words, you don't think in terms of real options.  

(Japan is the entrepreneur; the competition is US, UK, the Dutch; the idea is the Greater Asian Prosperity Sphere; the announcement is PH (albeit you have made earlier announcements, as in Manchuria, but no real competition is present then); mojo is Japanese honor and also the anti-mojo is Japan becoming a tenth-rate power, unable to follow the West's imperialist model (the UK is also a small island state); catching up is awakening the US's industrial military might; you are ready since you have extended the range of your bombers to 450 miles but really need 500 miles and hope the pilots are careful with their fuel, the torpedos have been adapted to PH's low-depth; and no one really thinks through what might follow if success does not happen in the first year, for to do so is to violate a taboo and to be dishonorable.)

If I am not reading books, I am reading articles--usually sent to me by Peter Gordon.

See my blog, http://scholarssurvival.blogger.com  for discussion of some of these.

MK

Tana French, Benjamin Black detective novels in Dublin, Irish miseries

French: I've read 2 1/4 so far of them. Set in Dublin, often with the miseries of Ireland in he background. Somehow I just keep reading, although at times skipping over longer paragraphs. The second in the series features a woman detective, with an annoying boss; the third features the boss (who is not at all annoying here) with an annoying colleague; the fourth is the colleague (who is not at all annoying here) but not yet sure who is his problem. I've not read the first.

Black: again set in Dublin, main character is a pathologist, miseries everpresent.

Lots of drink, smoking, relatives, and detailed geography in each. Marriage is rarely bearable. Poverty everpresent.

The Last Coin by James Blaylock

James Blaylock apparently has a bit of a cult following, and while I have read several of his books and enjoyed them all, I've enjoyed none as much as The Last Coin.  His stories follow a template for speculative fiction: light-hearted coastal California romps with quirky heros and heroines,  lots of animals, and some mythic goings on. In this case, we're in Seal Beach (awesome! I want to move there now!) with the 30 gold coins paid to Judas Iscariot.  These coins have a supernatural element to them; they are meant to be scattered; if they do come together, bad things happen to the world.  We have dueling senior citizens and sinister but (thankfully) not torturing evil villain, and a hero that sticks with you because he's terribly likable despite what would generally be considered pretty serious character flaws. He's financially irresponsible, pursuing one silly scheme after another; he mooches money off an aunt who lives with them and keeps too many cats in her room (there is a reason for this; she's not a crazy cat lady). He leaves much of the work on restoring the house they've turned into a boarding house to his wife, whom I would describe as long-suffering, but she doesn't appear to be suffering despite the face that she often bears the brunt of his silly schemes and does far more real work than he does.  She's almost zenlike her placidity and willingness to roll with his silly nonsense.  It's hard to capture just how charming their relationship is.

Much better for light reading than Inferno, which got boring and draggy and depressing with all its plague to save the world ish,  "I'm a genius with meanius" themes; and slogs through art museums.

Inferno by Dan Brown

By far, the best commentary I have ever read on Dan Brown came from John Scalzi, who had a book come out on the same day as Dan Brown's recent book, Inferno: 

This would be the place to say something snarky about Brown, but I have nothing snarky to say about the dude. I read one of his books; it was entertaining and I was entertained and if there was anything about the book that was supposed to be deeper than that it went right past me. Being cranky about a Dan Brown book not being high literature is like yelling at a cupcake for not being a salad; it’s really missing the point. You don’t want the cupcake? Don’t eat the cupcake. Apparently lots of people like cupcakes. They don’t care that you want them to eat salad. You eat salad, if it’s so important to you.

 This quote has gotten a lot of play around the webs as a means to take some of the stuffing out of the lit-rary snobs out there, whom I've never really met, and I've met a lot of snobs in the general sense. I once got in grave trouble saying that The DaVinci Code is a terrible book--it really is, by just about any standard of a novel. But what I assumed everybody knew (but didn't) was that it's possible for a book to have a terrific and entertaining story (which the DaVinci Code has) and still be rather an exasperating piece of writing. Dan Brown is an irritating writer: and no, it's not because I'm seething with envy over his success.  He doesn't trust his reader so you have to sit through boatloads of dull expository dialogue, lots of reminders of what happened just two, teeny tiny chapters before,  and viewpoints that shift so often you KNOW you are reading a book that is actually meant to be a movie.   The danger of all those shifting story lines is that many of them in Brown's book just aren't as interesting as you'd hope.  I didn't need to read pages upon pages about the albino zealot in DaVinci and we've got similar problems here in Inferno.

That said, Scalzi's quote  is much more apt than the 'sticking it to the lit-rary snobs' interpretation of it might suggest.  Yep, cupcakes are yummy. But a steady diet of cupcakes is really bad for you.  And the point is to know the difference between cupcakes and salads, when you can moderately consume one or the other and be a happy and indulged and also healthy and growing at the same time. It's not good to conflate salads with cupcakes just because the latter is more fun and sells better than kale. And it's not good idea to conflate an entertaining story with great literature, which challenges and changes us in addition to entertaining us.

So Inferno suffers from much of the same problems, and it has many of the same virtues, as DaVinci Code did. Virtues: I love international thrillers, and it's got lots of great scene-setting in Florence, Venice, an Constantinople. And OMG there's a proffie who is ACTUALLY THE HERO and not just a bit-player scumbag archetype who only became a professor to predate on his nubile undergrads.  Woo! Just like with DaVinci, this might get people interested in Dante's Inferno, which is all to the good in my book.  The problems are still the problems. The characters are one-dimensional super-characters--we find out his love interest has an IQ of 208 in the first 10 pages or so (I can't tell on pages; reading on iPad) and has been an acting prodigy! learns languages in a single month! and is (GASP!) a bit naughty rebel girl in her lissome athleticism! Good lord.  There is every cringe-worthy
cliche possible: there is the scary lesbian-y man-woman assassin, the Sinister Corporation doing the bidding of the wealthy and privileged worldwide, there is a mad scientist who wants to RULE THE WORLD.  Well, no. He actually just wants to wreck it and have his video shown.

Another point in its favor: one evil person is called the provost. Hee! I love evil people named after upper administrators I fear.

Anyway, all very entertaining, and I think Brown may be working with a better editor because the prose is a step above The Lost Symbol or the DaVinci Code--far less repetition and less expository dialogue (not all gone, but waaaaay less than lectures delivered in DaVinci.)