Disraeli Gears album

A classic from 1967, Eric Clapton composed the music based on lyrics by Martin Sharp...one of the first rock uses of the newly invented wah-wah pedal for electic guitar.  Mining the early Greek classics for psychedelic gold.

Elizabeth Mackintosh

A Scottish novelist who passed away in 1952, her detective stories in particular were popular for the next twenty years, after which they became almost forgotten.  Writing under the name of Josephine Tey, she created the character of the detective Alan Grant.  Her most famous work is The Daughter of Time, which investigates the supposed wicked deeds of King Richard III.  She did not believe he was hunchbacked, thinking it was later Tutor propaganda.  However just a few days ago a hunchbacked skeleton was supposed to be scientifically proven to be that of Richard III. 

Kind of gruesome...Arguments claiming Richard III did not murder the two princes in the Tower of London are examined in her book.  However most historians follow the theory of foul play at the hands of R III, who had custody of the boys.

More Worldly Wisdom

Some texts giving further explanations of maxims cited here:

127.  Grace in Everything
’Tis the life of talents, the breath of speech, the soul of action, and the ornament of ornament. Perfections are the adornment of our nature, but this is the adornment of perfection itself. It shows itself even in the thoughts. ’Tis most a gift of nature and owes least to education; it even triumphs over training. It is more than ease, approaches the free and easy, gets over embarrassment, and adds the finishing touch to perfection. Without it beauty is lifeless, graciousness ungraceful: it surpasses valour, discretion, prudence, even majesty it-self. ’Tis a short way to dispatch and an easy escape from embarrassment.

253. Do not explain too much.
Most men do not esteem what they understand, and venerate what they do not see. To be valued things should cost dear: what is not understood becomes overrated. You have to appear wiser and more prudent than he requires with whom you deal, if you desire to give him a high opinion of you: yet in this there should be moderation and no excess. And though with sensible people common sense holds its own, with most men a little elaboration is necessary. Give them no time for blame: occupy them with understanding your drift. Many praise a thing without being able to tell why, if asked. The reason is that they venerate the unknown as a mystery, and praise it because they hear it praised.

294.  Be moderate in your views.
Every one holds views according to his interest, and imagines he has abundant grounds for them. For with most men judgment has to give way to inclination. It may occur that two may meet with exactly opposite views and yet each thinks to have reason on his side, yet reason is always true to itself and never has two faces. In such a difficulty a prudent man will go to work with care, for his decision of his opponent's view may cast doubt on his own. Place yourself in such a case in the other man's place and then investigate the reasons for his opinion. You will not then condemn him or justify yourself in such a confusing way.

Art of Worldly Wisdom - more

98. Write your intentions in cipher.
The passions are the gates of the soul. The most practical knowledge consists in disguising them. He that plays with cards exposed runs a risk of losing the stakes. The reserve of caution should combat the curiosity of inquirers: adopt the policy of the cuttlefish. Do not even let your tastes be known, lest others utilize them either by running counter to them or by flattering them.

141. Do not listen to yourself.
It is no use pleasing yourself if you do not please others, and as a rule general contempt is the punishment for self-satisfaction. The attention you pay to yourself you probably owe to others. To speak and at the same time listen to yourself cannot turn out well. If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others. It is a weakness of the great to talk with a recurrent "as I was saying" and "eh?" which bewilders their hearers. At every sentence they look for applause or flattery, taxing the patience of the wise. So too the pompous speak with an echo, and as their talk can only totter on with the aid of stilts, at every word they need the support of a stupid "bravo!"

158.  Make use of your friends.
This requires all the art of discretion. Some are good afar off, some when near. Many are no good at conversation but excellent as correspondents, for distance removes some failings which are unbearable in close proximity to them. Friends are for use even more than for pleasure, for they have the three qualities of the Good, or, as some say, of Being in general: unity, goodness, and truth. For a friend is all in all. Few are worthy to be good friends, and even these become fewer because men do not know how to pick them out. To keep is more important than to make friends. Select those that will wear well; if they are new at first, it is some consolation they will become old. Absolutely the best are those well salted, though they may require soaking in the testing. There is no desert like living without friends. Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil. ’Tis the sole remedy against misfortune, the very ventilation of the soul.

Number 98 sounds cynical but it can also be an exercise in limiting the ego in that we do not indulge ourselves with bothering everyone with our opinions, thoughts and tastes.  Chogyam Trungpa urges the adaptation of "inscrutability" as one of the traits of what he calls a warrior.

Number 141 also tends to undermine the ego, we don't try to double check ourselves when it is only necessary to be natural and at ease.

Number 158 starts off sounding cynical but then turns rather cuddly for Gracian.  He recognizes man as a social creature who needs the give and take of true friendship.

The Unknown Frances Trollope

This English writer who was famous in her day (1779-1863), especially for her travel books, is now relatively forgotten and only her most notorious book is still published, Domestic Manners of the Americans, which came out in 1832 and made her reputation.  She was forced to make a living at writing due to the incompetence of her husband who seemed to torment everyone.  It is a shame her books are pretty much unavailable now except a few in OCR versions that are full of mistakes.  She was quite the outspoken observer who knew how to write humorous stories that beguiled the public of her day.  However after her novelist son Anthony disparaged her output in his autobiography, her reputation sank as his continued to rise.

Aside from many true insights about American culture of the early 1830's, she also wrote a witty novel called The Widow Barnaby that combines comedy with realism.   It would make a great TV show or movie.  There is a careful analysis of it here.  Her novel about American slavery probably inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.  She wrote the first novel about child labor in the factories of England which caused an uproar leading to the Factories Act of 1844.  While personally pretty hard to get along with, she nevertheless saw though the absurdities of revivalism and slavery and could not make a living in Cincinnati because of that.  When she was on her way back to England through Virginia  she stayed with a slave-holding family.  When a black slave girl accidentally swallowed poison and was dying, Frances gave the girl mustard and water as an emetic saving her life, and then held the girl in her arms and tried to comfort her.  She noticed the white members of the household were amazed at her actions and even laughed at her concern.  Just goes to show how twisted cultures can become.

Quotes from Gracian

Number 152
Never have a Companion who casts you in the Shade.
The more he does so, the less desirable a companion he is. The more he excels in quality the more in repute: he will always play first fiddle and you second. If you get any consideration, it is only his leavings. The moon shines bright alone among the stars: when the sun rises she becomes either invisible or imperceptible. Never join one that eclipses you, but rather one who sets you in a brighter light. By this means the cunning Fabula in Martial was able to appear beautiful and brilliant, owing to the ugliness and disorder of her companions. But one should as little imperil oneself by an evil companion as pay honour to another at the cost of one's own credit. When you are on the way to fortune associate with the eminent; when arrived, with the mediocre.

Number 192
Peaceful Life, a long Life.
To live, let live. Peacemakers not only live: they rule life. Hear, see, and be silent. A day without dispute brings sleep without dreams. Long life and a pleasant one is life enough for two: that is the fruit of peace. He has all that makes nothing of what is nothing to him. There is no greater perversity than to take everything to heart. There is equal folly in troubling our heart about what does not concern us and in not taking to heart what does.

#152 above seems to indicate a certain ruthlessness and conniving activity, why should it matter if a companion is flashier or smarter than ourselves?  I suppose we should look at it from the outsider's point of view, as in a movie, in this way we would see the other guy or gal soaking up all the attention of the people we have to live and work with, giving them the impression we are less capable by comparison.  So if this sort of association is continued for a long time, we are sure to lose the respect of others who matter most in our life, even if it is unfair and absurd.  

#192 shows  a Stoic bent, that is to say, let us not worry about that which we have little or no control, but concentrate our attention on that which we have some measure of power to effect the outcome.  It is also Stoic in its emphasis on the value of peacefulness and tranquility.  So here we have a softer side of Gracian's ideology.

Great Expectations

This novel of Dickens should be well known to most people, as it usually is assigned in high school, until recently perhaps, when more "socially relevant" literature has been substituted for that old imperialist trash.  The 2011 BBC production is quite good, although it has become foolish to expect even the BBC to create a faithful version of a venerable British work of art.  But they try.  David Suchet as Jaggers the imperturbable lawyer, Douglas Booth as Pip.  It occurred to me that Pip could have avoided a lot of verbal abuse if he just used his real name Philip instead of the ridiculous Pip. 

For some reason I keep thinking Pip is kind of a nonentity, as a character he seems to lack any identity of his own, he seems to need other people to define himself,  I don't know if that is a fair assessment as I have not read the book in quite some time.  Of course the character of Miss Havisham is over the top, and hardly realistic, but merely an exaggeration of how some people may have behaved in the face of disappointment for a while.  And it is hard to believe Pip would have continued to yearn after cold-hearted Estella for so many years, yet love can be quite absurd.  It is also hard to believe it so difficult a task to arrange for Magwitch to leave an England teeming with millions of people, with many available ports and thousands of ships going hither and thither all the time.  But I guess it has to be made difficult since the plot demands his capture and termination from the proceedings.  

I suppose one of the lessons Dickens wishes to convey here is the fruitlessness of pursuing the career of a gentleman if not backed up by an actual occupation.  That is to say, hey, get a job you snobs, like myself, your inherited money won't last long.  That may seem obvious to us today, but perhaps in 19th century England it was not.

Balthasar Gracian

A Spanish Jesuit, Gracian wrote at a time when the glorious days of Spanish supremacy were coming an end.  He was already looking backward to the exploits of such as Hernan Cortes whom he admired for his flexibility and boldness in unfamiliar and trying circumstances.  In 1637 he wrote a book of maxims often translated as The Art of Worldly Wisdom.  These aphorisms and their accompanying short explanations may seem quite barbed as well as sneaky.  However, whether at a corrupt Court of his day or today's office politics, these sayings still ring true.  A few examples: 

    5  Make people depend on you.
    7  Avoid outshining your superiors.
  19  Arouse no exaggerated expectations when you start something.
  75  Choose a heroic ideal.
  97  Obtain and preserve a reputation.
117  Never talk about yourself.
127  Grace in everything.
163  Never--out of sympathy with the unfortunate--involve yourself in their fate.
172  Never contend with someone who has nothing to lose.
187  Do pleasant things yourself, unpleasant things through others.
228  Do not be a scandalmonger.
238  Know what is lacking in yourself.
253  Do not explain too much.
278  Avoid notoriety in all things.
282  Make use of absence to make yourself more esteemed or valued.
294  Be moderate in your views.
297  Always act as if others were watching.

One could go on and on, at first one wonders, is this guy totally cynical, or is his attitude actually realistic?  One gets the impression that here all ideals are internalized and in the outer world one sees oneself pitted against unscrupulous as well as ignorant and self-indulgent characters who would treat one as trash if they could get away with it.  One has to know oneself as well as others without illusion to survive. 

The New Utopia

I finally found a readable website copy of this 1891 document written by a popular writer of the times, Jerome K. Jerome  (here).
This was before H. G. Wells story "When the Sleeper Awakes," and must have been known to Wells.  It uses the premise of a Rip Van Wrinkle figure who awakes to find a few centuries have passed by, and his sleeping body has been protected and taken care of by the authorities.  

Wells by the way went on to revise his story later in 1910 and called it simply The Sleeper Awakes.  Despite being riduculed for some of his other crazy socialist utopian novels, this one follows a more dystopian path, and the lot of the workers is just as bad or worse as in the evil days of capitalism.  So we have to give Wells credit for being able to look at a subject from opposite points of view.   It would appear The New Utopia's dismal forecast of a socialist world order influenced the famous socialist Wells into imagining just how far things could go wrong when the power of the State is unchecked.

Jerome's short story draws some conclusions from egalitarian socialist theory: the majority decide everything and the minority have no rights, everyone has to dress and eat the same, superior physique or intelligence is stunted to prevent superiority, families are banned, babies are raised in public nurseries and schools until age 14, and everyone has to live in barracks so no one is better off than anyone else.  The incentive of parents to work hard to create  better circumstances for their offspring is seen as a great evil now overcome.  

What is interesting is the many similarities found here with Zamyatin's We (1921), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931), and George Orwell's 1984 (1949). It is believed Zamyatin's benighted socialist future was directly influenced by Jerome's story, as it follows many of its ideas.  Huxley could have been influenced by We, and Orwell certainly was.  In all of these works, the State is all powerful, individualism condemned; stark regimentation is the order of the day, and freedom of thought suppressed.  Huxley supposes a society dosed in epicurean pleasures will make people surrender their liberty, while Orwell presupposes a harsh North Korean-like society soaked in fear will do the trick.  

These works show the direction social engineering projects are headed.  The nanny state concept that today results in ridiculous actions as suspending a 6 year old from school for pointing his finger like a gun and saying "pow" is a recent example.  An endless list of such absurdities is on display at NannyState.com (here).
 

Warming up to Kindle?

I notice some college has started an experiment with putting the reading list of a few courses on Kindle and enabling all the students to obtain a device.  I was wondering how long it would take someone to do that and see what happens.  In this case, many of the students seem to be negative about the experience. 

I purchased a Kindle2 mainly to download book collections, especially from Mobi which has inexpensive collected works of famous authors.  I'm not interested in reading newspapers or blogs for a fee on Kindle.

So far I have downloaded enough to last a couple lifetimes.  Some of the collected works have 30 to 100 books and stories in them.  That does not mean they are really the complete works of that author, for example, the Hawthorne collection has only selections from his Italian, French, British and American Notebooks.  I guess they got bored with Nathaniel's detailed observations and psychological analysis of his children's antics around the house found in the American Notebooks.

So this is my fairyland of literature and history caught inside a white carapace:

Thousand and One Nights -- Richard Burton translation
Complete Wizard of Oz books
Complete William Shakespeare
Diary of Samuel Pepys
Discourses of Epictetus
Divine Comedy - Dante, English and Italian
Emerson's Essays
Essential H. G. Wells
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbons
History of the Pelopennesian Wars - Thucydides
Illiad and Odyssey - Homer
King James Bible
Lectures and Interviews - Robert G. Ingersoll
The Prince - Machiavelli
Varney the Vampire - Thomas Preskett
Works of: Dumas; Dickens; Defoe; Poe; Chaucer; Maupassant; Melville; Balzac; Conrad; Verne; Lewis Carroll; Twain; Hawthorne; Robert Lewis Stevenson; Kipling, Sir Walter Scott; and last but not least, H.P. Lovecraft.

So far I have resisted the temptation to reread the works of Jane Austin, Dostoevsky, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or to wade into the ocean of prose created by Tolstoy or Henry James, with whom I am less familiar.  I am beginning to wonder how much space could be left on my machine, since each work takes up many times the space of the average novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Remembered

I thought I knew my Nathaniel Hawthorne stuff but upon rereading The Blythedale Romance I discovered to my chagrin that the story was nearly new to me after all these years...but it was great to finally nail it down and figure it out once and for all...I used to think the town of Blythe, California, on I-10 on the Colorado River was named after the novel...no such luck, it was named after a gold prospector...oh well, another unverified fantasy exploded...anyway, to get back to The Blythedale Romance, I was originally attracted to it as a historical study of one of the mid-19th century utopian communes, Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was the treasurer for a while apparently. There is a great blog commentary on the novel located at

http://zhiv.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-blithedale-romance-nathaniel-hawthorne/

One of Hawthorne's contributions to psychology is his study of Hollingsworth, a monomaniac who resembles the True Believer Eric Hoffer went on to describe a hundred years later. Zenobia is an interesting study of an early feminist leader, erotic and assertive, who, however he dooms to self-destruction unrealistically. She was a bit airy-fairy, lightweight intellectual, and that bothered him...although one gets the impression such strong women frightened him. Not that he was adverse to creating strong female characters as Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter.

It is rather touching that Hawthorne was one of the first tree-huggers, he was virtually the only person of the day to oppose the building of the Erie Canal in New York for the sole reason that it would destroy the forest. And in The Blythedale Romance we find his protagonist climbing a pine tree to get away from it all in a treehouse made by an enveloping grapevine...this guy really was a tree-hugger. He was also very human in his patriotic appreciation of General McClellan's grandiose military parades at the start of the Civil War, thinking like the other Northerners that such a great organizer and disciplinarian would soon rout the Rebels...of course it turned out McClellan was not only an idiot, coward and traitor, plotting to remove Lincoln, and then trying to lose the Civil War altogether by planning to allow the South to secede and become independent...but old Hawthorne cheered him on in 1861 or 62, who can expect an old literary genius to be a good judge of generals???

So the Blythedale Romance has very little to do with utopianism, merely a few wry comments about his inability to be creative after working so hard at farm labor all day...he actually does defend his unnamed companions as having the best of motives to create something new and just to contribute to the world community, but leaves it at that and concentrates all his attention on the triumvirate of Hollingsworth, Zenobia and Priscilla...when you come down to it, rather ordinary people, except for intimations of Zenobia's wild side, which is never shown...so the plot just goes on to show how these three suffer the consequences of having rejected the protagonist: Hollingsworth who tried to bully him into becoming a mere follower, is reduced to social and political impotence at the end, Zenobia, who failed to appreciate our hero's ego and ideas, kills herself, and Priscilla, who fails to favorably react to our hero's attentions, has to become a mere emotional crutch to a broken Hollingsworth. Our hero is really both jealous of and afraid of Hollingsworth, it is said H is merely the combination of 3 or more real persons of the day such as Horace Mann and Emerson, but I think he has to be based mainly on one real person Hawthorne knew during his Brook Farm period, given Hawthorne's intense emotions describing this character...not sure who yet...

Lists of books one should read (a beginning)

Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en…about 1800 small print pages, available in English finally from Chinese publisher...the ancient Chinese Buddhist classic about a crazy monkey with supernatural powers who brings havoc to the court of the Jade Emperor and has to be subdued by the Buddha himself, later released to provide aid to an old Chinese monk who has taken on the impossible task of traveling to the West to obtain precious Buddhist manuscripts unknown in China...based on a real historical journey...

More Neal Stephenson novels, series starting with Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon pretty interesting, hard to stop reading though long (1100 pages)

Robert Sheckley detective stories, did not know he even wrote any, such as: Draconian New York, Soma Blues, The Alternative Detective. Sheckley has been ill lately, he should be considered one of the most innovative science fiction writers of the 20th century...it is sad so few of his imaginative stories have made it to the silver screen...7th Victim comes to mind...but there are scores more worthy of being made into film...

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels...apparently a novel of the battle of Gettysburg, which has always fascinated me

Ulysses S. Grant by Geoffrey Perret...Grant was the first modern President and did a good job despite the hatchet job done by liberal historians

A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss...cannot resist historical novels about England apparently

How the Scots Invented the Modern World...Arthur Herman...at least making a stab at this one...seems logical to me, even though I don't have any Scotch ancestry that I know of

Marking Time, The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, by Duncan Steel...so detailed it scares me, but accurate to a microsecond

The Spanish Ulcer, A History of the Peninsular War, by David Gates...to provide more solid background to Spanish/British resistance to Napoleon's invasion and occupation of Spain...after finishing The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes by Mark Urban, a real humdinger

Did I say this was only a beginning?

Don Camillo books by Giovanni Guareschi

These books of short stories about a village priest in post-war Italy and his nemesis, Peppone, the Communist mayor, are always good reading. Never doctrinal or shrill, Don Camillo is street smart and wily as he maneuvers against the latest absurd power grabs of the local Italian Communist party. There is one moving story called “Christ’s Secret Agent” in which Don Camillo sneaks into an Italian Communist tourist group visiting the Soviet Union. Peppone cannot expose him without getting himself into trouble, so Don Camillo gets to see the reality of the Worker’s Paradise of Russia for himself. In this particular story he secretly performs Catholic rituals for a Catholic family on a commune, in particular an elderly Polish grandmother, in violation of Soviet law of course.

That such simple and harmless acts are considered high treason in a totalitarian dictatorship is highlighted. One recalls the Soviet occupation of Mongolia and the subsequent extermination of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns, to know that this was standard practice in all Communist countries. This is the type of anti-religious program converts like Che Guevara relished and tried to duplicate. Even today Buddhist activity is severely limited in Vietnam, for example, and China regularly clamps down on Christian priests, while putting on a smiley face to the rest of the world.

This site has many Don Camillo stories online.

Another good site on the author of the Don Camillo books.