Reflection on Week 5 (Jan 29-Feb 4)

 Link to this week's readings

This was a better week!

Quick review on this week's readings:

29nd Voyage of The Beagle by Darwin: 4/5 Intense racism/Euro-supremacy aside, this was really interestingly written. Write about the real world like it's weird, a fantasy, culture, etc. is a common enough writing prompt, but Darwin does it better. 

30th Antigone by Sophocles: 4/5 It's a play about stealing your brother's body, with strong writing and a genre savvy henchman. Written in 440 BC.

31st Don Quixote by Cervantes: 4/5 It's a novel about a crazy guy who thinks he's in a romance novel and his suffering sidekick that plays it completely straight.

Feb 1st Le Morte d'Arthur by Mallory: 2/5 This is like a series of blurbs to actual King Arthur stories.

2nd Hamlet by Shakespeare: 3/5 Hamlet is a good play. It (and most of Shakespeare) plays way better than it reads though. Unlike Sophocles, who works pretty well on paper.

3rd The Alchemist by Johnson: 3/5 Insult humor and a heist! Also kinda meh on paper, but I'd like to watch it. Maybe it's just an Elizabethan drama thing.

4th Characteristics by Carlyle: 3/5 We do best when everything works together and we don't have to think about it. Not wrong as a thesis, but reaching a little in some places and a bit rambly.

Weekly average 3.29 Again, this probably says more about how much I like prose fiction than anything else. Cervantes and Darwin (whose travelogue is almost enough to make me believe in Creative Non-Fiction) are carrying, with some help from Sophocles. I think that if I switch to watching plays instead/in addition to reading them that Shakespeare and Johnson would both move up some. I'm going to have to go back and read another section/translation of Mallory. I hear nothing but good things about it, but I feel like this chunk was a glorified Wikipedia summary. Carlyle fell for the classic trap of taking a short essay and stretching it out too long without enough material.

Overall Thoughts on The Project:

    We're heavy on fiction this week (and got another one on the 5th, which I read before writing this) and I want to take a minute to appreciate that, since I don't think I did. Yes, it's cool to read founding documents. Yes, I appreciate that I now know that it's possible to read philosophy that isn't, "everything sucks." Yes, some of the essays have been thought provoking. But fiction is just fun, and I still think there's value in having a shared cultural story pool to draw from. I read an article once that said if you read a certain 50 or so stories that you'd have the source of 90% of plots, allusions, etc. That's really cool, and worthwhile to learn about. I think the pool is getting a little wider now as more works exist (and more cultures are represented) but I don't think it's impossible to do. We can probably prune some of the older stuff that's referenced less to help keep it from totally growing out of control. Really, that's true of the canon as a whole. The old stuff still needs to be tested from time to time, just as new stuff should be accepted if it's good enough.

Feb 5– Sinbad excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights, translated by EW Lang

 We did the authentic choice last time

New week; new doc!

Feb 5– Sinbad excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights, translated by EW Lang

Summary: Sinbad's crew forgets him on an island, he hitches a ride on a roc to a valley full of diamonds, and then hides under a sheep (very Odysseus) and has a vulture carry him to safety.

Commentary: Fairly short and straightforward to start the week. I think the most interesting part of this is the descriptions of the animals he encounters. First, he compares the size of everything to elephants (like football fields!) Second, he describes both Rocs (a mythological bird many times larger than any bird that's ever exists) and Rhinos (a real animal). The Roc is basically just described as big scary bird; big enough that the babies can eat elephants! This is a great use of the elephant detail. You could say it had a 50 meter wingspan or whatever, but that's much less tangible. The Rhino gets a couple detailed sentences comparing it to other animals. It's interesting to see a definitely real animal described like it's weirder than a probably mythological one. On the other hand, I guess once you say "big bird" you've pretty much summed up the Roc, where as there's not a lot you can directly compare a Rhino to, so you need more description.

Feb 4– Characteristics by Thomas Carlyle (1831)

 No Music

Reading

Feb 4– Characteristics by Thomas Carlyle (1831)

Summary: "The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick." The less conscious you are of something, the better you are.

Commentary: I'm just going to paste in this line, and the overlong comment I already wrote about it.

Is it the skilfulest anatomist that cuts the best figure at Sadler's Wells? or does the boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis?

    This is one of those things that's interesting to look at today, with all the information that's available.

    In chess (for one example) we now have names and win rates and all kinds of things for all the openings, and many people comment that we know too much, and too much time is spent on learning that. But does Magnus Carlson actually memorize all that? Is he just really good at calculating out combinations quickly and far ahead? Does he have a gut instinct, born of talent and honed by years of practice? I expect it's all 3, and that study/knowledge does have value, but there are certainly people who are extremely knowledgeable about a given sport, game, skill, etc., but who aren't great at it.

    They're probably still better than average for the studying though. 

Feb 3– The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)

 FMA OST

Reading

Feb 3– The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)

Summary: This is mostly two dudes insulting each other. Eventually they go to do a heist/con together.

Commentary: This is also part of "Elizabethan Drama" with last night's and the page numbers are continuous between the two volumes. Fun!

I think plays are the hardest thing to read here. We can never get a full one (script takes up so much page space) and they're really intended to be viewed, not read. With poems/songs, you can at least read them out loud to yourself. Maybe I should look into finding videos of all the play sections in the readings. 

Tonight's in particular feels like it "should" be better, but mostly just reads as a lot of gross/insult humor.

How many plays, books, etc. titled The Alchemist are there, anyway? Looks like around a dozen if you count variant spellings.

Bonus Post: How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society

 NY Times Link

This column came out a week or so ago in the New York times. I'm not generally a huge fan of David Brook's stuff, but I think he's on the money here. I'm not going to write a ton of commentary (I lied), since I'd just wind up repeating him (and probably some of my own earlier notes), but I'll pull out a few favorite quotes.

   Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription, “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It’s a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Or to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?

Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days a lot of people seem to doubt it.

    This is, in a quote and a couple sentences, the big question/goal of this entire exercise. Will spending 15 minutes (or longer most days) help me see the world differently? Does doing that help me to be a better (however we define that) person?

   

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

    This is an interesting spin on social-capital theory. In addition to the value of just spending more time with "culture" I also wonder about the value of shared culture. If 3/4 of a community sees the same movie, reads the same book, listens to the same song, etc. that gives them a shared frame of reference. That obviously has value, but we also have to look at what art that is, and where it comes from. I don't want my great grandkids to have to read all the same books I did because someone declared them cultural keystones, but they probably should read some of them.

I went to college at a time and in a place where many people believed that the great books, poems, paintings and pieces of music really did hold the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them carefully and thought about them deeply, they would improve your taste, your judgments, your conduct.

Our professors at the University of Chicago had sharpened their minds and renovated their hearts by learning from and arguing against books. They burned with intensity as they tried to convey what past authors and artists were trying to say.

The teachers welcomed us into a great conversation, traditions of dispute stretching back to Aeschylus, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Clifford Odets. They held up visions of excellence, people who had seen farther and deeper, such as Augustine, Sylvia Plath and Richard Wright. They introduced us to the range of moral ecologies that have been built over the centuries and come down as sets of values by which we can choose to live — stoicism, Buddhism, romanticism, rationalism, Marxism, liberalism, feminism.

The message was that all of us could improve our taste and judgment by becoming familiar with what was best — the greatest art, philosophy, literature and history. And this journey toward wisdom was a lifelong affair.

    Overlong quote here, but there wasn't a lot I could trim. The idea of The Great Conversation is something I don't ever remember hearing about, despite the fact that I managed to pick up two English literature adjacent degrees. Most of my professors weren't passionate about the authors they were teaching, it was just what was on the syllabus, or a blob or words to practice whatever school of criticism they wanted to talk about. On the occasions that they did care about them, it was mostly vaguely creepy fanboyish adoration. I'm convinced my Am Lit II prof wanted nothing more than to screw Emily Dickinson (after which she'd probably kill him). The idea that studying these works would help us be better people, that artists throughout the ages built on each other, and that we could possibly do the same wasn't mentioned. When I was in undergrad, we couldn't be smart enough to do that, because we were sitting there as students (and therefore idiots), and all human progress had stopped 20 or 30 years ago (conveniently around when most of them had gotten their doctorates...)

   In grad school... I don't really think anyone thought any art was great in grad school. Art was a vehicle to make money, or to reinforce a political viewpoint. The idea of art for art's sake, or even for the sake of trying to look at humanity as a whole, would be like saying you were going to try to better understand humanity by being a telemarketer: possible, but not the primary goal.

   The universe is a silent, colorless place. It’s just waves and particles out there. But by using our imaginations, we construct colors and sounds, tastes and stories, drama, laughter, joy and sorrow.

    I don't have anything to add. This is just a great quote. Maybe I'll print it out.

    Again, the single best part of T5FSOB is the idea that anyone, with a little work, can become a better person. So much of our society today seemingly exists to prove that you're a piece of shit just for breathing, and anything that counteracts that is worth sharing.

Feb 2– Hamlet by Billy Shakespeare (~1600)

 Music (and a joke!)

Reading

Feb 2– Hamlet by Billy Shakespeare (~1600)

Summary: Hamlet's girlfriend's family tries to convince her not to go with him, his rival gets some advice from his evil dad before leaving, and Hamlet goes to talk to his dad's ghost.

Commentary: Kind of weird seeing Shakespeare in a volume titled "Elizabeth Drama" instead of just himself. Weirder still that it's just him and one Marlowe play, and it's not even Doctor Faustus!

After a lot of complaining about selections, I am glad that we got 1.5 here. "Murder most foul" is great stuff. Plenty of other classic and quotable lines here. Honestly, I don't think there's much to say about Hamlet that hasn't been said, and I don't really have any new revelations (probably since I've read it so many times). It's a good play!

Feb 1– Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory, edited by William Caxton (1485)

 Music

Text

Feb 1– Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory, edited by William Caxton (1485)

Summary:

Commentary: I considered swapping this one for a more modern translation (and I think Eliot should've), but I decided picking my way through it would be good for me or build character or something. Overall, feels kind of summaryish. Less like an actual telling of these stories and more like a 15th century Wikipedia entry or something. I dunno. I read it, I put some Monty Python jokes on it, the end.