Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Sunday, July 29, 2012

O Brave New World

Pablo Picasso
Women Running on the Beach, 1922


I've read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World many times. Only recently, I found out that he derived his title from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

From Wikipedia:
Brave New World's ironic title derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Summer Reading

Cover illustrations by James and Ruth McCrea

Summer is a time when I do most of my fiction reading now. Below is an unpublished blog I did on Ernest Hemingway a couple of years ago. I don't know why I didn't post it, except that I was hoping to do more of a literary critique of his books, and especially of The Sun Also Rises, which I recently started to re-read, marking the pages that affected me. The Sun Also Rises was one of my favorite books when I was in university - in graduate school to be exact - when I was was studying endless scientific research papers to fine tune my thesis. I would read just a few pages of the lovely script before embarking on journal articles. If I read too much, that would be the end of my "serious" studies, and I would spend the rest of the time on the book.

Here's what I wrote in my unpublished blog:
Summer Reading

Hemingway was a favorite of mine, back when I used to carry fiction books with me wherever I went. I don't do that as much now, but I do keep up with my fiction reading. I’m often re-reading older classics. Jane Austen's Emma and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina are perennial favorites. Contemporary fiction writers leave me unsatisfied. I can see their talent (of the talented ones, that is), but their stories are imbued with their personalities, as though they cannot shake off their egos as they write. Their stories also have macabre, strange, or nihilistic endings, and I come away bewildered or depressed.

Cover illustrations by James and Ruth McCrea

I've read four of Hemingway’s books: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls. And his collection of short stories: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories and Men Without Women. I'm not a literary critic, so I don't really know how to start analyzing Hemingway's writing - it's already been done ad infinitum anyway by experts and laymen alike. But, his stories are accounts of unrequited love in many ways. The characters, which he brings to life so clearly, are very modern people who enter all kinds of debacles, yet they come out surprisingly pure and unblemished despite their weaknesses and failures.

Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Eroll Flynn
in a 1957 film adaptation of The Sun Also Rises
Directed by Henry King

King also directed Ava Gardner in 1952 in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, another Hemingway adaptation
Cover illustrations by James and Ruth McCrea

What surprised me reading Hemingway this time around are the long, unending sentences that Hemingway uses at times, producing an almost trance-like meditative quality. This goes against the hard simplicity of his prose that many analysts have described about his writing. His description of places, whether it is a cafĂ© in Paris or the Spanish (and Italian) countryside resonates in my mind – always has – and urges me to visit these vivid locales.

[End of original (unpublished) blog entry.]
Here's an excerpt from The Sun Also Rises as Jake Barnes, who is the narrator and protagonist, describes their entry into Spain:
Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In the back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.

[Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954. pp. 93-93]
But looking at the stamp in my (worn) The Sun Also Rises, I find this:
Paper Back Junction
343 East Main Street
Lock Haven, PA 17745
So I was a fan of Hemingway even as an undergraduate in the small Pennsylvania college where I was a busy biology student!

The first pages of the book has these two quotes:
"You are all a lost generation"
- Gertrude Stein in conversation

- "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever...The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose...The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."
- Ecclesiastes
The nihilist, modernist, Stein is juxtaposed with a biblical account of the fullness, continuation and eternity of God's creations and of life. This odd, disconcerting juxtaposition is partly what makes The Sun Also Rises a masterpiece: people never quite give up on life, and on love, despite the devastations many have been through.

Below is a photo of Hemingway in Pamplona in 1925, which I blogged about here. Hemingway first edition of The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
Left to right Ernest Hemingway with Lady Duff Twysden,
Hadley Hemingway, and three unidentified
people at a cafe in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925.

[Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph
Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
and Museum, Boston.]

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

"An Aristocracy of Incompetence "


I wrote the post below on June 28th, but I refrained from posting it until the July 4th holiday was over. The article "An Aristocracy of Incompetence" was the subject of my post, and was published in The American Thinker on June 24th. Below is my critique/review of the article.

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Here is an article at The American Thinker titled: "An Aristocracy of Incompetence" by Keith Reiler, who euphemistically writes:
[T]oday's liberal aristocracy has embraced intention-cloaked incompetence as a respectable explanation for each failure, avoiding accountability and substantially lowering the bar for quality public service.
But Reiler ups his ante when the "intention-cloaked incompetence" by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the recently disgraced Anthony Weiner are revealed to be ideologically tainted . He ends up calling Nancy Pelosi a liar because the "incompetency" label, which may have some truth to it, doesn't work on its own.

He says similar things about Obama's evasion of reality and his joke about "shovel ready" projects. The billions wasted that Obama references may be in part due to incompetence, but a good part of the problem occurred because liberals like Obama and his administration think that their method, a type of expansive Robin Hood equalizing project, is what would solve the problems of the economy.

Liberals may be incompetent (to some degree, but that is simply a technical criticism and incompetence can be corrected), but they don't make bad decisions because they're incompetent, rather because they're following an ideology. Ideology can be corrected (i.e. changed), but it is often as deep-seated as religious belief and often needs a dramatic conversion to change it.

So, I think Reiler underestimates, and scorns, his liberal subjects. That is probably the most common, and the most lethal, mistake that conservatives make when analyzing liberal behavior. They think it is stupidity (which they translate as incompetence) that feeds the recurring theme of liberal policy failures. And for that, liberals are to be scorned. But the leading liberal elite, which determines liberal thought and behavior, behaves the way it does because it believe in its message of equality for all. It believes in the ideology. Of course, the smart(est) liberals realize that equality is not for everyone, and they run to the hills and live in their elitist gilded cages to escape mundane equality. But, they are also ultimately delusional that all these failures will somehow correct themselves over time because the belief (the ideology) is good and correct. In building this utopia, liberals are as likely to destroy themselves as everyone else, and gilded cages are no safeguard. Still, the smartest of the liberals must understand this, but dare not contemplate it in the privacy of their honest thoughts.

Once conservatives realize this, then they will understand that it is a war that has been waged by liberals. More precisely, this is a civilizational war, right to the last gottesdammerung, with the intention of undoing our thousands of years of history and culture, and replacing it with a world organized around equality.

The lessons of modern history, especially the failed socialist and communist experiments, and even those planted by Nazis and Fascists, haven't made a dent in liberal perception and understanding of reality. And one wonders how even the more practical liberals simply don't look around and realize that based on this premise of equality, the world is disintegrating under its own edifices. So, the more destruction there is, the more gilded gates and fascistic jackboots liberals implement, without batting a hypocritical eyelid, in order to protect their exclusive edens.

And like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations, who sits in her dust-coated room in bitter reminder of her jilted wedding day, liberals will sit and behind their crumbling edifices, numb and actionless, when their great experiment fails.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Ides of March



Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March

Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 15–19