Venice and the idea of permanence

•Charles Shere : Venice : and the idea of permanence.
Healdsburg : Ear Press, 2015
ISBN 978-0-990-75889-1
pp. 176  illus.  $16.95
Available : lulu.com, http://tinyurl.com/kzcmj8j

Eastside Road, March 19, 2015—

AS ALL THE WORLD must know by now, I hope, I have written a few books in my life, spurred at various times by small publishers (Fallen Leaf Press, Center for the Book) or, more insidiously, by some small hope of proving myself to my parents and grandparents, who had perhaps an exaggerated opinion of the value of books.

Of course that was a different time. Books were still regarded — I'm perfectly serious here — as having an aura of mysterious authority. Naturally it was known there were cheap or vulgar or even downright mendacious books, but even they contributed to the generally awed attitude toward books, for they were commercialized sinful things. Most books were honorable, appearing regularly in the mail from The Literary Guild or The Book-Of-The-Month Club, with covering pamphlets conveying an Authority's seriously considered and carefully expressed appreciation of the work.

As late as the early years of my own adulthood, in the late 1950s, The Reader's Subscription continued this tradition, bringing Finnegans Wake and Proust and such to our seventy-five-dollars-a-month duplex apartment. And much more recently, and to this day, the Library of America provides me with a two-volume Gertrude Stein, a convenient Wallace Stevens, the novels of Willa Cather and Henry James and Herman Melville.

My own contribution is not worth mentioning in this context, but if you think that's going to stop me, you're wrong. My publication history begins in 1995, after my retirement from journalism, when Berkeley's Fallen Leaf Press brought out Thinking Sound Music, my biography of the composer Robert Erickson, who had been my teacher years before. The next year the same house produced Everbest Ever, a slim jeu d'esprit containing correspondence between the composer Virgil Thomson and four Bay Area friends of his, mostly concerning mundane details of daily life and mutual visits.

I liked working with Fallen Leaf, whose products were nicely designed while indulging some of my own suggestions, and whose publisher, Ann Basart, was indulgent in the extreme of my eccentricities of prose style. In fact you could say she spoiled me: and this, together with intrinsic laziness, is why with one exception all my other titles have been self-published. (Regrettably, Fallen Leaf Press went out of business ten years ago or so, but those two books live on at Rowman & Littlefield.)

The most recent to appear is the one depicted here, Venice: and the idea of permanence, printed, like nine previous titles, at the online publishing company Lulu.com. For reasons some of which will be obvious, I think online self-publishing can transcend the conventional classification of "vanity press." I think it is, rather, an instance of a new corner of the capitalist economy, one merging artisanship, small business, niche market, and global technology, and facilitating an individual producer's seeing his work through the various steps of creation, production, and even distribution according to his own taste and values.

For example : I like a little space before a full colon, as you have just seen. I even like it before semi-colons. And I like a double space, or a space and a half, after full stops. I just think a printed page is more easily read with such spaces : and designing my own book makes it possible for me to insist on this practice, which, I think, no commercial publisher would countenance.

But that's only one reason for my self-publishing habit. Years writing for a newspaper — and in those days that meant writing thousands of words a week — formed the habit of considering experience through a linkage of fingertips and the mind and memory. I enjoy so many aspects of daily life — admittedly not shrinking from enhancing daily life with good food and drink, with travel, with reading, conversation, and the contemplation of art — but I enjoy them more fully when I consider them.

Early in the Internet Age, when e-mail became generally available, I began to share these considerations and contemplations with a few friends who seemed to enjoy reading them. By the time of our first month-long stay in Venice, in the summer of 2001, the list had grown to over a hundred, and hotel Internet providers had begun to suspect me, limiting the number I could send these "travel dispatches" to. But many of my readers, though they could deal with e-mail for some reason, resisted subscribing to a blog : and anyhow the blog itself had begun to develop associations with vanity. (Since then, of course, it has attained a more honorable state.)

Enter Lulu.com and the idea of online publishing. The present subject, Venice : and the idea of permanence records impressions gathered during two month-long stays in La Serenissima, in June 2001 and May 2011. I was curious to see how my thinking, my observation, and Venice herself may have changed in the lapse of those ten years, but I certainly wan't about to apply literary criticism to myself — why not just gather the original items in a single volume and let the reader, if one should happen to appear, come to his own conclusions?

So here it is. The cover's in color, as you see, but the interior photos are in black and white. There have been three previous similar gatherings, Roman Letters, Mostly Spain, and Improvised Itineraries, the last of which covers walking in the Low Countries and driving across France. (Another, Walking the French Alps, records a month-long hike from Lake Geneva to Nice.

I prepare these books on my desktop Macintosh, laying out the pages (and, separately, the covers) using Apple's "Pages" word-processor, converting the results to .pdf files, and uploading them to Lulu. They take over from there. I suppose each book takes me a month or so of work (apart from the writing), a few hours at a time — and, since I'm by nature careless, a number of trial printings. I set the price myself — let me know if you think it too high! — in order to make a very modest profit from the sale of each copy. If I like the result, and I generally do, its simple presence on my bookshelf is reward enough.

If something displeases me in the final result, I have only myself to blame.

Epicurus

•Daniel Klein: Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life.. New York: The Penguin Group, 2012. 164 pages. ISBN 978-0143-12662-1.

Eastside Road, January 18, 2015—

NEARLY TWENTY YEARS ago I was handed a serious diagnosis and an appointment with surgery. I was already retired, but barely sixty years old, not really ready to face mortality. On arriving at the doctor's office to discuss scheduling a nurse noticed I was carrying a small book with me.

The nurse was slim, tall, rather elegant, probably in her thirties; clearly of Ethiopian stock, with that beautifully chiselled brow and nose that I associate with the heritage. I see you're reading Epicurus, she said. Good. Especially read the Letter to Menoeceus. Oh: and be kind to your wife, who is suffering, and who will work hard for you.

The surgery was successful; the recovery took only a month or so; I'm still living with the diagnosis; I've treasured Epicurus ever since. I think it one of the great tragedies of human history that Christianity did such a solid job of shouldering Hellenism aside — co-opting what it could distort to its ends, of course. In this no doubt I am influenced by my mother, who was a stoic and an agnostic, and who subtly shaped me in the only way that made any sense to her.

Last month at Christmas Lindsey and I played the O. Henry game, giving one another the very same book, Daniel Klein's Travels with Epicurus. We will be eighty years old this year, and we're aware of the lessend span ahead of us. It's time to begin putting things in order, setting aside vain thoughts of works and legacy, enjoying the rich though simple pleasures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, daily routines, the table, contentment.

Epicurus believed that the purpose of life was pleasure, and that pleasure lay in the avoidance of pain — by renouncing commerce and industry as far as possible, and complex and costly tastes, and ostentation and concern for position. According to Klein's refreshing, easily read narrative, Epicurus treasured above all a simple life, eating from the garden, with friends of all backgrounds (women as well as men, exceptionally for his society), with conversation at the center of daily activity.

Klein is an interesting author, a man with one foot in philosophy and the other in humor. He's written half a dozen mysteries, a couple of plays, and three novels, as well as a series of little books aimed at presenting the parade of western philosophy to the general public. Last month I enjoyed a quick read through Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, which he wrote with Thomas Cathcart.

Travels with Epicurus finds the 72-year-old Klein spending a few weeks on the Greek island of Hydra, where he's gone with a few books and the intent to ccome to terms with the great conundrum of post-career life: How To Live Well (in the face of the Grim Reaper). The books on his his list are on my own reading pile — the pile of Books Currently (or Constantly) Being Read, be it understood, not Books To Read Some Day. They are Montaigne, William James, Erik Erikson. Also a couple that have been on the To Be Bought list for years: Huizinga, Lars Svendsen, Eva Hofmann.

Reading them confirms what is learned more readily by the simple observation of life on this apparently relaxed island, where there are no motor vehicles, where old men spend their time eating simply, drinking ouzo, playing cards, and conversing gently about not very important but eternally rewarding mundane things. Oh: and occasionally dancing — seriously, intently, ritualistically.

What emerges is a short course on practical philosophy:

…the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.

Travels with Epicurus, p. 26

…pleasures are to be aoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

Montaigne, quoted in Travels with Epicurus, p. 32

…[to want to reactivate] one's libnido… amounts to wanting to want something you currently don't want

ibid., p. 89

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, smiles, and says yes.

Wm. James, The Variety of Religious Experiences, quoted in Travels with Epicurus, p. 116

We must not expect more precision than the subject-matter permits.

Aristotle, quoted ibid., p. 159

You get the idea. The book is calm, persuasive, sensible, friendly, easily read, easily kept at hand for late night re-reading. It should be given to every retiree.

Strayed

•Cheryl Strayed: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. 336 pages. ISBN 978-0307-476074.

Eastside Road, January 14, 2015—

THIS BOOK has gathered decidedly mixed reviews, even in my own family: some of us dislike the author's tone and style; others are sympathetic with her story and her emerging character.

Abandoned by her father early, raised with a brother and sister, in poverty, by an unconventional mother and stepfather, Strayed reacted to her mother's early death (at 45) by falling to pieces, experimenting with drugs, seeking comfort too casually with too many men, until finally a chance encounter with a trail guide on the bookshelves of a sporting good store led her to an almost whimsical decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail — or, at least, the section from Mojave, California, to Ashland, Oregon.

It's a mistake, I think, to believe she did not prepare. She clearly put in a fair amount of research as to equipment and planning. That contrasted, though, with an almost casual approach to physical preparation, in terms of preparing her own physique, rehearsing the pack, even carefully choosing the shoes. Further, she had the bad luck to pick a heavy snow year for her trek, requiring a bypass of the high Sierra (and consequently extending the original itinerary to the Columbia River).

This curious collision of preparation and impetuousness characterizes almost every aspect of the young Cheryl Strayed: intelligent, well read, thoughtful, but clueless about so many aspects of rational living. It's easy to explain this by her upbringing, not only her father's abandoning her but also her cheerfully impoverished mother and the unconventional childhood in a rural setting where material comforts were denied in favor of blithe free-spiritedness: but you can also read that upbringing, in the 1980s, as symptomatic of the times, of a fundamental schism in American society.

The book has been made into a film (which we saw the other night) that's been criticized for its irritating and frequent intercutting. The book itself proceeds by flashbacks, alternating between description of the trek and memories of the childhood and the crisis. Like others, I found this intercutting mannered at times. I'm not fond of the writer's prose rhythm, which alternates extended paragraphs with choppy single sentences; and like others, I found the book's final pages rushed.

But having done a little long-distance walking of my own, though without carrying tent or stove, I recognize the tedium, the meditation, the pain and what can only be called the transcendence of her experience.

…what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable day. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That's what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what Iknew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

Wild, p. 207

Although she hiked alone, a good-looking young woman under a ridiculously big and heavy back-pack, Strayed apparently met with few really scary situations — although she was conscious of risks. She had very little money, and describes the hunger and thirst, in many senses, that accompanied her. She also describes, beautifully, the alternating desire for companionship and solace of solitude that comes to many on the trail — or, perhaps, drives them to it.

More than once I thought of Patti Smith's marvelous book Just Kids, describing her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. Whatever you may think of casual sex and drugs, there's a sweetness in both these accounts, a wistful innocence that I think expresses the awareness that something is seriously lacking in the mainstream contemporary American address to life; that in the absence of conventional family structures damaged adults, discontented with the cult of the individual, emerge craving affection, affirmation, companionship.

I think this is an important book in spite of its flaws, a provocative, dogged, generous narrative of things that go wrong, of damaged children and lost adults, but also of daily kindnesses and, ultimately, the lofty, uncaring, objective serenity of the Nature we must all confront, whether disease, privation, discipline, death, or sublime beauty. It makes me want to hit the trail again — finally, perhaps, alone, and with a tent and a stove.

Evidentiary realism

•Juan José Saer: Nothing Nobody Never. Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. London and New York: Serpent's Tale, 1993 ISBN 218 pages

Eastside Road, January 4, 2015—

THERE IS SO MUCH I have neglected: among it all, the literature of Latin America. This can be attributed to the late Gabriel García Márquez, whose Hundred Years of Solitude were, at least when I tried them decades ago, decades too much for me. Let me disclose my prejudices: I am not fond of escapist literature, of science fiction, of fantasy, of Magic Realism. And so I have treated Latin American Literature as I have treated Chinese Cuisine: rather than investigate it, finding the channels that conform to my taste and exploring those that may lead to unsuspected pleasures and perhaps even insights, I have excluded these huge continents wholesale.

But I know this is wrong, and try to correct myself from time to time, though there's increasingly little time left for voyages of discovery. So when I read an interesting review of a new translation of the last (and unfinished) novel by the Argentine writer Juan José Saer, and particularly when I read that his work stands apart from Márquez, I looked for him in a fascinating little bookshop (Alley Cat Books) that we ran into last week in San Francisco; and there came across a second-hand copy of an early novel of his, one not mentioned, as far as I recall, in the NYRB article.

Nothing Nobody Never (the original title is nadie nada nunca, cited without capital letters in the frontmatter of this translation) is a beautiful little novel, set in a hot, dry, riverside community, a village really with unpaved dusty roads, in Argentina, where the two principal characters, Cat and Elisa, presumably like the other villagers, go through domestic routines while uncanny crimes are committed around them. The crimes, like everything else — weather, cuisine, conversation — are presented simply as present facts, not plot devices. There is plenty of story here; the novel is certainly narrative; but nothing is meant to go anywhere; everything is simply present.

When, on opening a novel, I see phrases like "he said," or "she countered," or "X thought," I usually close the book immediately and set it back on the shelf. Dialogue-driven fiction in which the characters' thoughts and motivations are known and describe by an omniscient author no longer interest me. I'd rather not know what happened, or be promised that I will know what will have happened. As I admire Chekhov, Stein, and Henry James, so I prefer to be presented with an event, or a situation, or even a character or two, with no obligation to pretend to understand them. Such understanding I feel is impossible. Further, I think a good deal of mischief has resulted from the belief that life and individuals can be known and "understood."

Don't get me wrong: the observation and analysis and speculation of such things, which is the province of writers par excellence, is interesting and ultimately beneficial. In the hands of really good writers, and Saer is certainly among those, the result can even be gripping during the reading and memorable at the close. More is learned about humanity, I think, from reading really first-rate "fiction" than through any other means, though conversation can come close.

Saer's style, at least in this early novel — the only one of his I've read — is calm, steady, looping, realistic yet fractured. He writes in his own version of Gertrude Stein's "continuous present," a

strange, nameless state, in which the present, which is as wide as the whole of time is long, seems to have risen, from who knows where, to the surface of who knows what, and in which what I was, that in and of itself, in no way amounts to much, now knows that it is here, in the present, knows it, without being able however to pursue its knowledge any farther and without having sought, in the fraction of a second prior to that state, by any means whatsoever, to catch a glimpse of it.

Nothing Nobody Never, p. 86. Italics in the original.

The novel makes me think of Stein, though it is more accessible than, say, Lucy Church Amiably, because of its extraordinary clarity, its lucidity. It makes me think of early Perec — Things and A Man Asleep — because of its neutral observation. It brings Robbe-Grillet to mind, and I'm glad to be reminded of the French New Novel now, fifty years later. More than any other novelist it makes me think of the Catalan Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring, similarly haunting, stifling, cuddling, and watery.

"The thing is that everyone" — I hear myself say — "seeks in his or her own way, and finds, a particular thing that thereupon becomes impregnated with its own magic. Don't you think so?"

Nothing Nobody Never, p. 83.

The narrative I rarely appears in the book; does so only, I think, in an attempt — largely successful —- to allow the reader's mind, momentarily, to fuse with that of a character, usually Cat but occasionally (and most movingly and successfully, I think) Elisa. There are other characters, and given the author's unwillingness to play God with their minds and motivations it is remarkable how immediate their presence is, how well we feel we know them. The Beach Attendant, for example, who once remained afloat in the river for seventy-two hours, and who hears, over the course of several pages at almost the center of the book, from a previously not present informant never really fleshed out, the narrative of the crimes, a simple description of them as inexplicable events, but who then returns — the Beach Attendant — to the endlessly but focussed present moment in which continuous action, even that by which light reveals objects, or sound reveals events, is broken, fractured, into

a sort off whirlpool of twinkles when the line of light broke up, and which made him drowsy. And at a certain moment — in his memory the beach attendant could not say wen —, the line did not become one again: in the light of memory, one could rationally argue that the sun, which the beach attendant had ceased to see, had doubtless risen slightly higher in the sky… What is beyond question is that all around him the surface of the water had turned into a series of points of light, indefinite in number and perhaps infinite, very close to each other but not touching each other as was proved by the fact that despite their continual twinkling an extremely thin black line could be seen between one and the next.

Nothing Nobody Never, p. 118.

The book is, as you'll have gathered, extraordinarily visual, full of light and modulated light and shadow, colors and blacks and whites. Even the clouds of dust raised by occasional cars are granular and physical, existing without doubt because seen and thus able to be described — not with adjectives, though Saer doesn't methodically avoid the use of adjectives, but with the patiently repeated statement that they are there. One never sees motion; one sees evidence of motion. The novel is evidentiary. I can't wait to read the ones that follow.

More — much more — on Juan José Saer: a fine essay by Marcelo Ballvé online at The Quarterly Conversation.

Manzoni: I Promessi sposi

Alessandro Manzoni: I Promessi sposi, translated as The Betrothed by Bruce Penman. Penquin Books, 1986.

CHRISTMAS WEEK is for reading, as far as i’m concerned, and last month I gave that week to a book I’ve long meant to get to, Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi sposi.

What a book! On the first level simply a long, somewhat rambling historical novel about Milan and its surroundings in the seventeenth century, written two hundred years later, the book — virtually Manzoni’s only extended prose work — admirably integrates historical scholarship, personal observation of character and place, and political philosophy.

The “promised spouses” (the Italian formula for “affianced”) of the title, Renzo and Lucia, are peasants living in a village on Lake Como, near Lecco. Their marriage is prevented by one of the local nobles who has his own designs on Lucia. After a failed attempt to circumvent that, the couple separate: Renzo goes to Milan, is caught up in bread riots resulting from poverty and drought, and escapes to his cousin in Bergamo; Lucia takes refuge in a convent, is abducted…

But enough of plot: I do hope you’ll read the novel, and part of its interest of course is in the suspense. Only a small part, though: those reading the book as a romantic historical novel about a pair of lovers may lose patience with what I think is its true subject-matter, and its intricate interest and importance.
Manzoni begins with a foreword it would be wrong to skip, opening in flowery archaic language purportedly quoting an ancient author:

History may truly be defined as a famous War against Time; for she doth take from him the Years that he had made Prisoner, or rather utterly slain, and doth call them back into Life, and pass them i Review, and set them again in Order of Battle.

After a page of this sort of stuff, set in italics, the author lays down his ancient text and speaks for himself, noting that History too often loses sight of the ordinary men and women who lived through the eras historians deign to consider. He notes, too, the turgid style of the original, alternating between lofty rhetoric and crude dialect. He gives up reading the thing, but quickly thinks

“Why not take the sequence of fact contained in this manuscript,” I thought, “and merely alter the language?” There were no logical objections to this idea, and I decided to follow it. And that is the origin of this present work, explained with a simplicity to match the importance of the book itself.

So immediately Manzoni’s book takes up a number of contexts:
• it was written in 1820-1825 about events of 1620-1630, nearly two centuries earlier (and I read it in 2013, nearly two centuries later)
• It attempts to re-introduce the common man into a context generally restricted to elevated historical figures
• it attends to appropriate language and style


And underneath these evident and acknowledged contexts there is another agenda, not particularly well hidden. The book’s action takes place in a politically eventful moment, when Milan and its duchy are controlled by Spain; Bergamo is part of the Venetian Republic; Austria is threatening from the north and northeast; and France has designs on Monferrato in neighboring Piemonte. Furthermore, the action involves the closing years of the long wars between Catholics and Protestants. And, most importantly, the close of the feudal era when lawlessness and exploitation was an accepted aspect of daily life, and the poor but generally honest and respectable contadini and villager was at the mercy of the rich, powerful “nobleman” in his castle on the hill, and his band of thugs and stooges — the “bravos” who do his dirty work.

I was drawn into the book first by Manzoni’s marvelous description of its physical setting, the mountains and riverbanks to the south and east of Lecco, country not that different from terrain I’ve spent weeks walking in, fifty or a hundred miles to the west., A poor man, Renzo walks when he must go from Lecco to Milan, from Milan to Bergamo. The parish priest rides a mule; ladies are carried in litters; noblemen ride coaches. In every case the tempo is quite different from ours in the 21st century, and climate, physical nature, and observation of the faces and characters of those one meets are taken more slowly, more contemplatively, and therefore more objectively, at a pace giving time to correct immediate impression, prejudice, and habit.br>'

The book should be read at a similar pace, I think; and should be considered while reading and afterward, letting the book bloom in the mind, responding to our time and its own, as a good wine is allowed to bloom in the glass and the mouth, and afterward in sensual memory.


The characters in the novel are memorable and attractive, even the villains — stock characters, all of them (young lovers, parish priest and his housekeeper, Cardinal, ruffians, evil nobles), but individuated through description and dialogue. The settings are evoked sometimes through meticulous description, sometimes arresting observation — the Milan cathedral, for example, seen from miles away, at a time when the city was still contained within its walls.

The historical events are exciting and resonant: war, famine, plague, all recounted with both mesmerizing immediacy and resonance that inescapably suggests World War II, the Balkan wars, today’s events in Africa and the Middle East.

And then there’s the language. Manzoni published the novel in 1827, but within a dozen years revised it out of its original dialect of Italian into the Tuscan dialect centered on Florence — thereby cementing that dialect as standard contemporary Italian. The revision seems to involve mostly simply substitutions of vocabulary, with a few additions or clarifications of text, and virtually no cutting.

I haven't yet found what exactly the dialect of the original version is called: it's not Piemontino, though it shares with that dialect certain leanings toward French. "Equal," for example, is eguale in the first version, uguale in the revision. I know this because I found a fascinating edition of the novel online, a facsimile (not e-text or digitized text) of an edition (Milano: Domenico Briola, 1888) of the revised version, with the original text inserted in smaller size between the lines.

Years ago I bought a fine copy of an old edition of I Promessi sposi, and it turns out to have an interesting history of its own. It was published at Firenze in 1845 by Felice Le Monnier, who based the text on the 1832 edition by David Passigli e soc.. Le Monnier was noted for his contempt for author's rights, and merely pirated the Passigli edition, heedless of Manzoni's subsequent revision into the definitive text. Manzoni sued and was eventually awarded a substantial award. I don't know how large the 1845 edition was, or how the copy I have came to whatever used-book store I bought it in — though a recent New Yorker article on such matters does give me some pause.

I read Penman's translation with both the Le Monnier and the interlinear edition at hand, comparing often enough to get the distinct impression that this is a fine translation, idiomatic in English, respectful to the original style, and faithful to the text.

Some have characterized the book as a romantic epic, along the lines of Tolstoy's War and Peace — a book I'm embarrassed to say I haven't (yet) read.  It would be wrong, though, and perhaps disappointing, to think of it as primarily a narrative about the betrothed Renzo and Lucia: instead, it is — as another reader suggested the other day — an epic, a narrative description of the general state of the soul of a nation. I'm hard pressed to think of another prose example, and I wonder if Manzoni weren't channelling such older epics as Aeneid or Chanson de Roland or Orlando furioso. Whatever, I Promessi sposi is essentially Italian; it speaks from an honest and good heart; it is ample, intelligent, poetic, philosophical, evocative, good-humored, and inventive, and I consider it one of the greatest novels I have ever read.

Einstein, Poincaré, and the drift toward Relativity

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. By Peter Galison. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.

MOM ALWAYS LISTENED to a radio program on weekday mornings — some kind of news commentary, I think it was. It came on at nine o'clock sharp, and always began with the stentorious announcement that "It's High Noon In New York." Hearing that, I'd always look at our clock, which would read something between 8:45 and a few minutes past nine. It always fascinated me, this difference in times. I knew that anything said on the radio must be true, especially if it came from far away, yet my brain told me that it was nine o'clock, though our clock was rarely so sure.

Local time, Daylight Savings Time, Standard Time. Growing up in the country even a kid was aware of all these things, with that dim awareness kids have of such things. Except for school days, time was measured by sun and stomach: but school required promptness, and you wouldn't want to get there too early but you couldn't be late, and it was, oh, a good forty-minute walk.

These uncertainties prevailed even among urban adults until well into the 19th century. In spite of its title, chosen I think more for merchandising than for accuracy, Peter Galison's book is about the history of the synchonization of clocks in the Western World — as that history affected the gradual emergence of Einstein's theory of relativity, it is true. A photograph in this sometimes maddening book shows the Tower of the Island, in Geneva, which about 1880 had three prominent  clocks indicating the time(s): 10:13 here in Geneva, 9:58 in Paris; 10:18 in Bern. Six years later two of the clocks had been taken down, as time was now sychornized all the way from Paris to Bern, and beyond.

The problem, of course, is that the earth rotates on its axis (which is on the whole a very good thing). I look up at noon: the sun's as high as it will climb today, though probably in the southern sky. In New York, though, that happened three hours ago. 

There were a number of reasons the 19th century wanted to standardize time and synchronize clocks. It was a logical concomitant of the Industrial Revolution, of the Enlightenment. And therefore its history is grounded in that of England and France. Galison's hero, in this book, is certainly Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), the French polymath, graduate of the École Polytechnique, that quintessentially French institution born of the Revolution.

One forgets the essentially Rational nature of the Revolution, which replaced the superstition- and religion-obsessed Monarchy (which was positioned on  the Great Chain of Being, leading between the lowest worm and God,  just below God Himself) with a Republic grounded in the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. One of the major points was to replace arbitrary verities emanating from divine revelation or regal whim with equally arbitrary verities determined by groups of scientist-philosophers. The Metric System, for example, was developed by the Polytechnique, for the practtical reason of facilitating trade throughout the nation through standared weights and measures: a bolt of cloth woven in Nîmes should be measured the same as one woven in, say, Paris. 

(Another factor: the importance of bringing every corner of the nation under the administration of a central authority in Paris. The history of local-versus-capital tension is long, complex, and fascinating.)

Galison's story is significant and absorbing, but his editors and publisher have not done him many favors. There are odd lapses in grammar and even odd errors — in one case, for example, a confusion of starting and ending positions in an account of signaling between positions. The book is rich with detail, ranging from Poincaré's forensic investigation of a coal-mine explosion to the survey of meridians in Africa and the Andes. The poltics of scientific research would be a rich enough subject for a history all its own, and Galison valiantly brings it in, as well as the comic-opera argument between England and France over the decimalization of time measurement (France lost) and their joint research into the precise distance between the Greenwich meridian and that of Paris (England seems to have yielded). 

Galison's study is a chapter in the history of ideas, and a measure of the difficulty of writing such a chapter is itself a central aspect of his book. Early on, he describes the nature of this complexity, calling it "critical opalescence." He is so fond of the metaphor, and the reader needs so much to keep it in mind, that it's worth a long quote to show his method:

Imagine an ocean covered by a confined atmosphere of water vapor. When this world is hot enough, the water evaporates; when the vapor cools, it condenses and rains down into the ocean. But if the pressure and heat are such that, as the water expands, the vapor is compressed, eventually the liquid and gas approach the same density. As that critical point nears, something quite extraordinary occurs. Water and vapor no longer remain stable; instead, all through this world, pockets of liquid and vapor begin to flash back and forth between the two phases, from vapor to liquid, from liquid to vapor—from tiny clusters of molecules to volumes nearly the size of the planet. At this critical point, light of different wavelengths begins reflecting off drops of different sizes—purple off smaller drops, red off larger ones. Soon, light is bouncing off at every possible wavelength. Every color of the visible spectrum is reflected as if from mother-of-pearl. Such wildly fluctuating phase changes reflect light with what is known as critical opalescence. 

This is the metaphor we need for coordinated time. Once in a great while a scientific-technological shift occurs that cannot be understood in the cleanly separated domains of technology, science, or philosophy. The coordination of time in the half-century following 1860 simply does not sublime in a slow, even-paced process from the technological field upward into the more rarified realms of science and philosophy. Nor did ideas of time synchronization originate in a pure realm of thought and then condense into the objects and actions of machines and factories. In its fluctuations back and forth between the abstract and the concrete, in its variegated scales, time coordination emerges in the volatile phase changes of critical opalescence.

(Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, pp. 39-40)

Galison's discussion traces the development of time standardization and coordination through a fascinating period, the century-plus leading from the French Revolution (1789) to the publication of Einstein's first papers on time and space — in the history of ideas, from the disastrous triumph of Rationalism to the cubist fragmentation of Relativity; from the displacement of divine and regal authority by that of republican committees to the eventual triumph (or disaster) of unbridled democratic individualism and the provisional, negotiable structures that follow.

The only hope for truth or certainty, given the "critical opalescence" of the philosophical, political, and even scientific landmarks along this historical path, lies in some kind of reasoned abstraction defining an intellectual framework within which to negotiate the numbers assignable to the objects we contemplate: time, distance, justice, value, administration. It's too much to hope for a clear presentation of this problem, let alone a clear discussion of the concepts and illuminations brought to the party by such minds as Poincaré and Einstein — and a number of others mentioned in passing in Galison's book. 

I wish he'd had better copy editing. I wish someone had asked him to resolve repetitions, to clarify arguments, to provide timelines. I wish the index were more detailed. But I thank him for giving us a book worth setting next to Ken Alder's The Measure of All Things, and for including copious notes and drawings and photos and an extensive bibliography. Written toward a popular audience, it's a book worth keeping and ruminating over. 

The Dutch-American historical connection

From the vault: this was written last January, but for some reason never posted to the blog. It still seems to the point.

YESTERDAY I READ A BOOK confirming and explaining the connection I've long felt exists between Netherlands and the United States — a common mentality, you might say, a societal posture differentiating them from other nations. Not all other nations, perhaps; and not entirely: but a special orientation enabling a societal organization — "political," in fact — that underlies the social responsibilities enabling a social contract, written or not.

The book is in fact a pair of short essays by Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, 1609, The Forgotten history of Hudson, Amsterdam, and New York, published in 2009 in a handsome bilingual edition by the Henry Hudson 400 Foundation. Hudson arrived in New York harbor on his ship the Half Moon in 1609; the book was published as part of the events celebrating the 400th anniversary of that event.

Hudson was English, not Dutch, but he sailed on a commission from the Dutch East India Company, who hoped he would find a short route to Japan and China by sailing along the north Russian coast where the long summer days, it was thought, might melt the polar ice. He was four centuries too soon for that, as we know now, and before rounding the north cape of Norway turned back, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed to what is now Virginia to visit his friend John Smith in the colony there; then looked into first the Delaware river, then what's now the Hudson, hoping for a passage through the North American continent to the Sea of Japan.

(Not as ridiculous as it seems today, Shorto points out. At the time most navigators and cartographers thought that Ptolemy's ancient estimate of the size of the earth was correct; this would have placed Japan about where Ohio is.)

Hudson sailed up his river as far as present-day Albany before the river proved entirely fresh water, not salt, dashing that hope. But he explored the banks, and reported back to the Company that the fields were fertile and well-supplied with game. Before long the Dutch were sending colonists to stake out their own territory north of England's doomed Roanoke colony, and New York was Nieuw Amsterdam until 1664, when the English finally claimed the city at gunpoint.

By then the city had begun to develop qualities that characterize it still, qualities that early set it apart, Shorto writes, from "Boston, Hartford, or any other city in English North America." And what were those qualities? "Free trade and an immigrant culture," the features that enabled Amsterdam's rise in the late 16th and the 17th century as the most important, richest trading city in the world. The shipping companies were owned by a Dutch innovation, stock companies, not a monarchy; risk was shared as were returns; and the co-operation this necessitated was underwritten by a relatively liberal, tolerant view of differing social values.

Amsterdam, with its busy seaport, had already been attracting refugees from the religious wars in Germany and France, and the suppression of the Jews in Spain. "In an age of religious strife, it was almost universally held that a nation should be of one people and one faith," Shorto writes.

Intolerance was thus official policy in England, Spain, France… but not in the Dutch nation. There, tolerance became a topic of political and religious debate. Tolerance was adopted as a policy — not as a grand ideal, but as a way to deal with the mixed character of the population.

The Union of Utrecht, for example, declared as early as 1579 that "each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and that no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of their religion."

As a result, Shorto argues, the Dutch colony in New York was a mixture of ethnic and religious strains from the beginning, approaching common problems and decisions in the spirit of common consent. "Even as early as the 17th century," Mak writes,

the Dutch had an uncontrollable inclination to assemble and to "polder" or debate until consensus is reached. This inclination based on the collective decision-making they were accustomed to as they worked together to reclaim their wetlands… Everything revolved around the art of persuasion, convincing others through debate.

The technique has its drawbacks, of course: it requires an educated, articulate, and probably fairly small body of discussants; and it takes time to arrive at its consensus. But it's a commendable procedure, and no doubt served as a model to the "Founding Fathers" as they themselves debated the form of the new government to follow the American Revolution.

Home is Here

Home is Here. By Sidney Meller. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941.

Eastside Road, October 6, 2013—

I POSTED HERE the other day — well, a month ago, I see now; time does get past me — some comments on a novel by my favorite English teacher, Sid Meller, a man who taught me what to look for in novels, and who encouraged me in my own juvenilia. Meller's first novel, Roots in the Sky, was a "chronicle novel," rather a sprawling one brought to rather a sudden and arbitrary conclusion aided by a sudden street accident. The narrative hung on the immigrant orthodox Jewish subculture in San Francisco, from say 1910 into Prohibition.

I recently read Meller's second (and last) novel, a more successful book to my mind, written I suppose in the late 1930s, perhaps as late as 1940. It is another novel about an immigrant family, but more the opposite corrective to the earlier novel than its similar. Unlike Rabbi Drobnen in Roots in the Sky, the Alano Dorelli is eager to assimilate, or at least to take his place in the thriving, upwardly mobile milieu he finds on Telegraph Hill just after the 1906 earthquake.

It takes a year or two and perhaps forty pages for his wife Lucia to arrive from the shores of Lake Como, and she is never as sanguine as her husband about leaving the traditions and the simplicity of their earlier paisano life — but by the book's end it is she who has beat yankee exploitation and crass politics, leaving him finally respectful of her reluctant determination.

The plot hinges on her quarrel with the owner of the sandstone quarry whose scar still shows on the eastern and southern flanks of the Hill. One house after another has tumbled into its maw as his operations have continued, following his father's and grandfather's work stretching back to the Gold Rush days. Much of the novel concerns the different responses to the problem among the Italian, Spanish, and Irish immigrants forming a sometimes uneasy community.

As in his earlier novel, Meller also investigates the differing visions of the younger generation, the first-generation Americans, as they respond to changing social and technological conditions and to the sometimes fixed, sometimes bewilderedly floundering doings of their parents.

A site on the always surprising Internet has yielded four reviews of Home is Here. I particularly liked that of Henry C. Tracy, published in Common Ground:

…it is in Lucia's mind and spirit that the drama of this finely-wrought book emerges and moves toward a climax—a spirit often weak and fluctuating, a mind often foolish but essentially sound. It is her night school teacher, a bit stilted but wise, who tells her that "America is becoming."
  No author has better told the inside story of neighborhood groups of new Americans from Lombardy, Genoa, Sicily, Grenada, with some Irish and Yankee stock intermingled, sinking differences in he American way…

Home is Here is aware of the more skeptical, perhaps even cynical views of America in such books as The Grapes of Wrath, but takes a completely different view of things, preferring challenge to problem, enterprise to despair. I remember Meller assigning Modernist titles in his class on the novel — it was here I first read Joyce — but he included Robert Nathan's One More Spring as well. Home is Here would have made a fine Frank Capra movie, though I don't see Henry Fonda as Alano.

World War II changed everything, of course; the ease and the fun and the grass-roots power available even in hard times, through the simple efforts of a people forced to rely on themselves, gave way to the stress and distractions in a society controlled by faceless corporate forces. The novel is long out of print, but copies are available at online used-book sites. It will strike many contemporary readers as quaint, I suppose, but its quiet optimism and good humor are qualities we'd do well to recover in the social and political climate of today's America.

A Time in Rome

NOT LONG AGO we spent two weeks in Rome, first a few days with one couple of old friends, then ten days with another, finally a weekend with a third. I meant to write more about the visit, but in the end only came up with three posts, two on street performers, another on Shostakovich's opera Nose.

I may revisit that visit. Looking at the dozens of photos, many impressions come back to mind. Of course many are old friends of impressions, by now; this was our third extended visit to the city, and previous impressions were written up at the time — January and November, 2004 — and subsequently found their way into my book Roman Letters.*

My way of visiting Rome is essentially irresponsible and self-indulgent. We've avoided most of the museums and failed to explore the Vatican. Of course we've been to the major sites, and return to some regularly: I wouldn't visit Rome for a day without stopping in at San Giorgio in Velabro, for example, or crossing the Ponte Sisto into Trastevere. But on the whole we prefer trams to tourguides, back streets to boutiques, cafés to cathedrals.

The perfect illustration of this attitude, and these preferences, jumps out at me in this week's reading. I'm still bogged down in Robert Hughes's history Rome; I may never finish it, and will write about it later, if ever. But I just finished Elizabeth Bowen's marvelous A Time in Rome (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), and can't wait to share it with you.

It is neither guidebook nor history. It's a meditation on Rome, by a gifted observer and writer spending three months there, mid-January to mid-April, mid-20th century. There are extended passages descriptive of streets, quarters: the Forum of course; the via Giulia; the cemeteries. At other times a paragraph or two will be enough to suggest Testaccio, say, or Ostia Antica, or what she still refers to as "1942," Mussolini's architectural fantasy projected for an international exposition, now known as EUR.

There are lengthy explorations of historical periods and the personalities behind them: the Julio-Claudian emperors and then the Flavians; Benvenuto Cellini; Pope Sistus V; a contemplation of Augustus's wife Livia; a detailed account of the end of St. Paul's career.

There are wonderful little insights, often witty in their expression: On political correctness, evidently as irritating mid-century as now:

I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier, and more busybody than the Victorian. Deplore the past if you wish; you cannot do anything about it, other than try to see it does not recur.

or poetic: the description of a

great ripe Sicilian blood orange … in a class by itself: the peel, mottled satin outside, white velvet in, curls away under digs from the thumbs, gladly; the delicate-membraned sections fall asunder like petals, firm flesh not spilling one drop of crimson juice till one bites into them. Such oranges deserve to be eaten as I ate them, in infiltrated sunshine, with wine to finish.

Often of course she contemplates Art. On ancient wall-paintings, for example, like those at Pompeii and Herculaneum (though she does not write about those sites):

Nothing about these paintings, minute and sensuous, releases one into the air of art: if anything, their effect might be claustrophobic. The aim was not to enlarge existence but to flatter it.

Later she touches again on the ineffable enlargement of existence art can engender:

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art. In Rome, I was more drawn to statues than to paintings. But, whether it was a statue or a painting, I came to recognize first a disturbance and then a lessening of the confusion within me as I beheld. Partly there was a liberation from the thicket of the self…

She doesn't flinch from facing the difficulty of writing about Rome:

Attempts to write about Rome made writers rhetorical, platitudinous, abstract, ornate, theoretical, polysyllabic, pompous, furious… Language seldom fails quietly, it fails noisily.

or about the fugitive essence of much of its population — especially its ancient population:

'Average' existences, at whatever level, are probably the hardest to conceive of, when they are other than one's own.

Yet some of her most fascinating insight is trained on the underclasses of ancient Rome: slaves, mechanics, women.



She writes about her approach to a description of the Forum:

My route, I have so far found, does not correspond with any recommended by an authority… Mine corresponds with my sense of order: the taking of things as one comes to them, one by one, placing them by their relation to one another. My approach to the Forum was visual rather than historic — even though 'seeing,' the greater part of the time, had to be an act of the mind's eye (or better, that of directed imagination.

and reveals thereby her greater intention: to direct that mind's eye (a particularly penetrating one, I think) to the entire scope of Rome, spatial and temporal, enlarging the reader's existence through her art, not with mere factual information but with gentle encouragement to the reader's own mediations.

Writing about Rome, she necessarily mediates on time and memory:

I wanted to establish the Forum monuments' nearness to or distance from one another in time as well as in space. Clearly some are the seniors, other he juniors. Many of them were one another's contemporaries — for how long, and when, did they share the same term of time?

We are drawn to Rome and its past because, unlike the past we studied as children in history class, fixed with precise dates and determined by sequence and succession, the Roman past attested by its living ruins is a continuum. Wars, assassinations, births, and treaties are momentary affairs, however long the moment may be: but the past that is Ancient Rome encompasses a thousand years; where the Coliseum was built in Hadrian's day (CHECK THAT), and stands still today, swans floated on Nero's lake a century or so earlier.

In the face of such contemplation a certain elegiac note is hard to evade.

The Forum, I said, leaves one with little to say — I could have as easily said, with nothing. Silence seems the only possible comment on finality. I do not think you or I feel less, but we feel, because more resignedly, more calmly.

(One thinks of Wittgenstein: "Of that we cannot speak, we must be silent.")
Though certainly not intending to write a History of Rome, she is mindful of her responsibility to History:

One must be on guard against misconceptions, when trying to grasp the movement of the history of Rome — untruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.

Yet she is willing to abstract, to generalize, to interpret; often through the novelist's method of construction from observation. She recalls an April in 1939, when she was enjoying an afternoon on the Palatine:

The idle yet intense air smelled of honey; Rome shimmered below with hardly a stir, and bluer than the sky were the Alban hills. There was a harmony between the distances. I was sitting on a broken ridge, reading and sometimes not reading a book. Low but clear voices, coming across the irises, told me that a couple who had been wandering ad set down behind me — students, by their serious young tones; friendly lovers or loving friends, familiar with one another as with the Palatine. If not born Romans, they had acclimatized. They talked metaphysics, for whose discussion the lucid Italian language is so perfectly framed. 'This beautiful house of sensation in which we live…' he said.

('Questa bella casa di sensazione in qualie viviamo…') The words made me their neighbour: I looked round, to see, stamped on the air, his profile intently turned, her full face abstract and calm with thought. Since, what has become of him? I must not forget him. Killed in the war against us? (Soon after that April, the war came.) If he still lives, I hope he still finds the house fair. It is still here. Is there so great a gap between the pure in sense and the pure in heart?It is a haunting book, A Time in Rome, and I'm grateful to Giovanna for directing me to it.

__________
* Roman Letters: available at Lulu Press as a paperback or an e-book; it is also available at the iTunes bookstore.

Kathan Brown: Know That You Are Lucky

THIS IS AN IMPRESSIVE book, and I don't say that merely because it has forced me to rethink a number of opinions I've held for a number of years — though that alone is something of an accomplishment.

Kathan Brown is the founder of Crown Point Press, the San Francisco press that has for fifty years now been printing and publishing etchings, engravings, aquatints, photogravure, woodcuts, and occasionally monotypes by some — perhaps most —- of the most significant artists working during that period, ranging from Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn to John Cage and Sol Le Witt.

She is also an accomplished writer. In 1976 she published her first book, Voyage to the Cities of the Dawn, a strangely moving, evocative meditation, through words and photographs, on time and perception, suggested by a trip she had taken to ancient sites in Yucatan and Central America. A number of titles followed that related more directly to various of the artists and the methods occupying her attention at the press: of those titles I know only the ones relating to John Cage.

In 2004, though, she published The North Pole, perhaps a companion to Voyage to the Cities of the Dawn: a description, with copious photographic illustration, of a voyage she took across the Arctic Ocean on an icebreaker. And now she has given us Know That You Are Lucky, her memoir of the years at Crown Point Press; of the method and mantra, you might say, of printmaking; of the exceptional men and women with whom she has worked.

In a little over three hundred pages, divided into twenty chapters, Know That You Are Lucky is a quick and compelling read: it proceeds mostly chronologically, looping occasionally when a subject warrants further consideration, then resuming the narrative. The book reads at times almost like a novel, whose characters — the artists — are sympathetic, entertaining, delightful even; and whose plot — the constant change, growth, consolidation, removals, and adjustments of the business that is Crown Point Press — is a constantly intriguing parallel to the author's speculations on art, the making of art, and the significance that surrounds it.

The book is itself a sort of metaphor of the printmaking process, which — done well — transcends distinctions of art and craft, inspiration and dedication. She quotes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

who talks about the "flow" of doing something "with intense concentration on the present," so much so that you are "too involved to be concerned with failure." … "getting into the flow" is satisfying because, once you are in it, you overcome obstacles gracefully. Obstacles enhance the possibility of flow, and eventually of creativity, which flows from "flow."

Know That You Are Lucky, p. 97

This is a good description of the printmaking process, of course; it also describes the effect of Brown's writing. The first two artists she considers at length are Cage, whose method always seems so fluent, and Diebenkorn, whose method always seems so procedural. Each in his way fully represents Csikszentmihalyi's point, intensely concentrating on the present — the moment, in Cage's case — and on the procedure, with uniquely graceful results.

Among the many dialectics in Know That You Are Lucky, which is often a very philosophical book, is one involving energy and tranquility. Again, the concept flows naturally out of consideration of Diebenkorn and Cage; but also out of the nature of printmaking, of contemplation of the Zen gardens in Kyoto, of meditations on the nature of Mayan pyramids. Brown often seems to be mulling over object, context, impingements, and extension, literally when discussing imagery or methodology, figuratively when discussing the significance and the value of art — which she does always with great circumspection, never dogmatically.

She rarely writes about critics or criticism; she rarely makes what you might call critical judgments. She follows a reference to the editor Minna Daniel, who worked with both Cage and Elaine de Kooning:

I must have mentioned that I wanted someday to write about the artists I had been working with, because later I got a letter from her with advice: "Don't, for heaven's sake, ramble," she wrote. "And, if possible, avoid evaluations, which you may want to make, but they are bound to get you into a peck of trouble."

ibid., p. 172

and then goes on to reveal, through a delicious anecdote revealing her personal knowledge of biographical information clarifying the matter, that Willem de Kooning's late work, painted when his mind was compromised, nonetheless "reflected the person I met at dinner in 1985: open, smiling, graceful, glowing, without the bitter, desperate edges shown in his paintings from earlier times."

On the next page she quotes Elaine de Kooning, who "felt a tremendous identification" with Paleolithic cave painters because they proved that "art was a very important part of the thought processes of the human race" before "we did go off into the left brain, codified, rationalized."

Twenty-five pages later we are in China, where Crown Point artists are working with Chinese printmakers, and we are thinking about rocks.

Rocks like the one in the hotel garden were considered enchanted in ancient China, I read later. Currents of favorable forces were thought to run through the earth and escape through places of beauty, which focused luck on those who were in contact with them. The Sung dynasty… hen the Chinese invented printing by creating the first woodblock prints, was also a time of high intellectual and aesthetic refinement that included the building of many rock gardens.

ibid., p. 201

Brown is slowly, imperceptibly building a persuasive argument that the making of art involves a process through which we connect to basic sources of energy and awareness that pre-exist ourselves, our society, our culture. The argument took a surprising turn, for me, when it turned to Robert Bechtle for its evidence. A characteristic image of his, of a suburban residential street, painted with Chinese watercolor on silk, was turned over to Chinese printers to translate into a wood-block print.

To the Chinese printers, not only was this an unfamiliar scene, but also Bechtle had used unfamiliar ways of placing forms tight together and unfamiliar flat brushes to paint the forms. The craftsmen at Rong Bao Zhai had carved forty-two blocks, and they were piled up on the printer's table when we walked into the shop. We handled the blocks as if they were toys, finding a bit of a tree here, a car taillight there. We couldn't keep our eyes off the proof, it was so lively. To see the cars sitting so securely at an angle on the street, to find the light on the tree so naturally rendered — the whole thing was a real achievement. The printers and carvers stood waiting. There was nothing to do but extend our congratulations.

"I really couldn't think of anything that could make it better," Bob told me later. "I found the whole thing rather emotional. There was such a powerful sense of place, and the character of the people was so strongly present."

ibid., p. 205

I quote this at length partly to present Brown's graceful narrative voice, but more particularly to explain the rethinking it has caused me to undertake. Until now I've been unimpressed with Robert Bechtle's work: the technique, color, lighting, and composition are unarguably masterly, but the imagery — the "subject matter" — had always seemed inert. Same objection to another Crown Point favorite, Sol Le Witt. But when Brown returns to John Cage — whose work I have always found meaningful and inspiring — she brings me up short, forces me to confront my prejudice.

He named [the print Smoke Weather Stone Weather ] for the weather, which, as he said, "remains the weather no matter what is going on." He said he "didn't want to have an image that would separate itself from the paper."

ibid., p. 241

Exactly. It's not a matter of imagery, of subject matter, of personal judgments about energy or relevance or inertness. The taillight, the banal street, have the intelligence and the energy of the Chinese rocks — or the rocks, for that matter, that Cage uses in so many of his prints. A few pages on Brown is telling us about the Danish artist Per Kirkeby, a geologist incidentally as well as painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer, who

has said that painting is "the real reality" behind the "so-called reality" of our everyday experience. "We only see it in glimpses."

I understand the notion of seeing reality in glimpses, and I like the idea that Per Kirkeby (like John Cage and a few other artists we have published) has been successful in more than one line of work. But I am not sure that any one reality is more real than any other. I like looking at art, and the realities I absorb from art influence the life that I, myself, live.

ibid., p. 257

The life that Kathan Brown, herself, lives, has been devoted to both Art and Business, and her accounts of the articulating moments in the fifty-year history of her business are of great interest. Earthquake, renovation, staffing crises, national prosperity and recession, the foibles and fashions of the retail art business — these have an important place in her narrative, tethering speculations on perception and philosophy and aesthetics to "real-world" considerations of employment and compensation and community.

And no narrative of the second half of the twentieth century can neglect significant changes in the way we deal with art, reality, business, perception.

I told [the artist Brad Brown, born in 1964] Cage's story of an argument he once had with de Kooning in a restaurant. There were bread crumbs on the paper-covered table and, drawing a line around them, de Kooning said, "That isn't art."

"But," John explained to us, long ago at Crown Point Press, "I would say that it was." In his eyes, de Kooning had made the bread crumbs art by selecting them and framing them, but in de Kooning's eyes he had made a point, not art. I said to Brad that to me Cage and de Kooning are essentially incompatible. Brad said he hoped to adapt both of them to his own ends. This is different from how my generation learned to pursue knowledge. Ideas come now in bits and pieces, not in a continuum where one idea leads to another or is necessarily compatible with another.

ibid., pp. 290-91

Brown refers to Tom Marioni's idea of "a collective reality," and, a few pages later, to

The Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest printed book, [which] was found in a cave at Dunhuang. It was printed in 868. Here is a stanza from it:

This fleeting world is like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

ibid., p. 301

She quotes the photographer John Chiara, who says of his long-exposure work with a huge camera he invented and built for himself, "There's a noise in the process that I think is revealing and meaningful… It's like the failure of memory."

She wonders, near the end of this haunting book,

In 2012 we are only slightly into our new century. What does each of us need to know in order to survive as long as possible, however tenuously? Is three a common denominator that artists are searching for? If so, could it be, as Laura Owens has said "an aura of acceptance of whatever has happened"? Could it be hopefulness?

ibid., p. 307

which returns us to a quote she presents near the very beginning of her book, from Montaigne: "The most manifest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness."

I have quoted very extensively here from Know That You Are Lucky; this is less a "review" than a "reading through," and I hope Kathan Brown won't mind. The book contains much that I haven't touched on, of course. To me it deserves a place next to Carolyn Brown's magnificent memoir Chance and Circumstance, which I touched on a year or so ago here but have yet to deal with properly. (Perhaps one day.) Memoir is by its nature retrospective and even, in these two books, a little bit valedictory — though I wish these authors long futures; they still have things to tell us.

As I've said in other contexts, one of the most impressive things about their work is its great generosity. Long careers, full lives, great dedication, methodical application, vision, insight. Wisdom beyond words.

•Kathan Brown: Know That You Are Lucky. 376 pages; index; forty-seven color plates.
San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2012; ISBN 978-1-891300-24-0

The Sense of an Ending — and of momon, irony, and recursion

WHAT IS IT with all those online reviews of Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, anyway? Is it simply that "irony," so much in the air these days, is so often used erroneously (hence the scare quotes), that Barnes's recursiveness escapes these quick-to-comment readers?

The book is a novel, told first-person, whose plot hinges on the narrator's attempt to understand, forty years on, the events set in motion by an early love affair as it intersected with youthful friendships. Both the point and the method of the narrative are described in a jocular definition of "history," offered by one of those friends in a history class:

"'History is that certainty produced at the point when the mperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.'"

—The Sense of an Ending, p. 18

History — from Greek ἱστορία - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation," ever-helpful Wikipedia tells us — is a particular example of "understanding": an approach to an awareness of the significance of past events as they relate to one another and thereby to the present (including, by extension, the future as it may be inflected by the present).

The Sense of an Ending is a parable of the historical process, written three years after Barnes's memoir-contemplation Nothing to be Frightened Of, which meant a great deal to me when I read it a year ago, as my blog post at the time indicates:

Barnes loops gracefully through confrontations with these four principal themes (death; dying; God; religion; remember?) and more; interweaving funny stories about his childhood and his philosopher brother (who, oddly, lives at the near geographical center of France in order to teach in Geneva); and considering similar confrontations by a number of minds of the highest ranks.

["Loops"; "memoir-contemplation." I have always enjoyed Francis Ponge's mediation on what he calls momon."Texte qui inclut sa propre critique," says Larousse;

…toute œuvre d'art comportant sa propre caricature, ou dans laquelle l'auteur ridiculiserait son moyen d'expression. La Valse de Ravel est un momon. Ce genre est particulier aux époques où la rhétorique est perdue, se cherche.

says Ponge (Le Savon (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967), p. 42-3.)*

The momon, a concept significant enough to be incorporated into English, hence no longer to be italicized here, is the intellectual attitude of our time, which is reeling still from the discoveries of Modernism, which depended on dispersal, acceleration and dispersal; and so lapsed into the kind of apparent chaos every generation perceives in its own context. Earlier generations found refuge in such chaos in religion, in Enlightenment, in mechanics; my generation found it in the momon.

And I just notice now that "loops" is "spool," backward: it is not true, ironically, that no loops spool on.]

The method of The Sense of an Ending involves momon, and recursion; it is a literary form of what Wikipedia calls "Droste effect" and heraldry refers to as mise en abyme, where abyme means not really "abyss' but something closer to "vortex": in fact, center. I first noticed this effect when I was a little boy, seeing the label of an evaporated-milk can, whose picture reproduced itself. Later, of course, another version of mise en abyme struck me in the barber shop.

I think every observant child, and aren't they all, discovers mise en abyme, and that the event and its effect are significant in the shaping of the growing consciousness. (Interesting to speculate on the result of the delay of such awareness in societies lacking mirrors or evaporated milk.) And as the first awareness of this kind of recursion comes early in life, the particular sort of reflection on its significance often comes late in life… "when rhetoric, being lost, seeks itself," as Ponge says (or "dying, examines itself," in Dunlop's thoughtful translation).

Many of the online detractors of The Sense of an Ending fixate on the personalities of the principal characters and overlook the meditation Barnes centers on them — they don't see the label for the cow, the mirrors for the image reflected by them. Of course the danger of any rhetorical figure, whether or not perdue, is that it will distract its audience from the meaning the figure is intended to convey. I suppose it's the irony of our time that so many no longer understand the meaning of "irony," and take it to mean merely a state of being hiply flippant.




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*"…any work of art including its own caricature, or one in which the author was to ridicule his means of expression. The Waltz of Ravel is a momon. The genre is peculiar to periods in which rhetoric, dying, examines itself." Ponge: Soap, tr. Lane Dunlop (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 33.

Bellavista's Middle Way

Eastside Road, January 7, 2013—

•Luciano De Crescenzo: Thus Spake Bellavista: Naples, Love, and Liberty. Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

WHY HAS IT TAKEN over twenty years for me to find out about this marvelous book? Oh well, quit complaining, Charles, and thank you, Giovanna; my eyes are now open.

De Crescenzo is well enough known in Italy, I'm sure; I'll have to look him up in a couple of weeks when I'm haunting Feltrinelli. I have the provisional feeling that he may have made a big splash with this book when it appeared in 1977 (as Così parlò Bellavista, a best seller in Italy); he followed it up with a number of sequels, and a film of the same title appeared in 1984. (Gotta look that up, too.)

The book's an interpenetration of two: one, a series of funny anecdotes of life in Naples — misunderstandings, thefts, arguments, jokes, and the like, many of them funny enough to have caused me to laugh out loud in the reading. To cite only one, the epigraph to the seventh chapter:

"Put that cigarette out!" shouted the bus conductor.
"But I've only just had coffee."
"Ah, that's different."

A. SAVIGNANO

Two, a series of philosophical dialogues, Platonic style, in which the Socratic method, lubricated by bottles of decent rosso, explore a fascinating view of the good life, essentially based on Epicurus.

I don't think it's giving too much away to mention Bellavista's main argument, which doesn't appear until that seventh chapter, "The Theory of Love and Liberty": might there be some organizing principle that can guide us toward that good life based, as Epicurus taught, on the moderate pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?

Bellavista, a patient and good-natured fellow who discusses these things with a group of intelligent but relatively ill-educated and intellectually unambitions buddies, has just such an outlook, which he atributes to "a friend of mine in Milan, Giancarlo Galli, who may or may not be the journalist, writer, and economist profiled in Italian Wikipedia — another type to look up at Feltrinelli.

Bellavista's theory rests on the two basic human desires: for Love and Liberty. The first

is the feeling that impels us to seek the companionship of our fellows, and the acts of love are all the things we do in the attempt to share our joys and griefs with others. This reaching out to our fellow men is instinctive.

Thus Spake Bellavista, p. 41

Straightforward enough. Liberty is a more recalcitrant of definition, but Bellavista does pretty well:

For some people liberty means democracy, for others it means anarchy, so at this point I shall have to spend a couple of minutes explaining exactly what I mean by liberty… I would define liberty as the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.

ibid., p. 107

Since both Love and Liberty have their opposites, Bellavista then lays his idea out on a coordinate system, as I mentioned here the other day, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. This results in four quarters, which I can't help but link to R.H. Blyth's four classifications of literature: objective objective, objective subjective, subjective objective, and — you guessed it: the worst of the lot, "wailing like a saxophone": subjective subjective.

Bellavista populates these quadrants with a number of familiar characters, depending on where they fall in these quadrants. The type fully committed to Love and neutral on the subject of Liberty (and it should be noted these qualities are necessarily in constant irreconcilable tension) is the Saint; his opposite is the Devil. The type fully committed to Liberty, on the other hand, and neutral on Love, is the Hermit; his opposite is the King. A "bad" King, who is driven by Hate, is the Tyrant; a "good" one is the Pope. Their opposites are the Sage and the Rebel.

In general of course we prefer those in the upper right-hand quadrant. The Scientist is a little more concerned with Liberty than with Love, the Poet reverses that tendency; both flank the Sage as nearly ideal types. What Bellavista argues for, in his sweet practical way, is a middle way, precisely the Sage's way, avoiding the complications attending the desire for Power and giving in to the seductions of Love, because, as Epicurus teaches us, one must love others if one is to be loved, and one must give others their way if one is to be allowed one's own.

I read Thus Spake Bellavista hard on the heels of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, by John de Graaf and Steven Batker, discussed here the other day. They make a perfect pairing: De Crescenzo supplies the theoretical element, entertainingly and persuasively; Batker and de Graaf the history of engineered society's attempt to institute (or, lately, evade) political approaches to achieving that element.

I increasingly believe the besetting problems with American society — from violence to pettiness — are grounded in an increasingly present antisocialism among individuals. Different people will supply different theories as to the reasons for this: breakdown of the family, institutionalization of education, defeat of organized labor, fractionalization of religious cults, glorification of individualism: the list can go on forever.

In the rage to find sources of this antisocialism, in order to institute corrective action, so far only De Crescenzo, in my experience, has brought the matter down to comfortable daily-life observations. It doesn't hurt that he leavens the investigation with a good deal of humor. I wish I could spend an evening with these two books, President Obama, Robert Reich, and a bottle of good red wine.

The Right Economy

Eastside Road, January 3, 2013—

•John de Graaf and David K. Batker: What's the Economy For, Anyway? (Bloomsbury Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-60819-510-7>

This is a fine book, I think. It's entertaining, informative, and provocative: you can't ask for much more than that. The authors base their discussion on the assumption that a national economy exists to provide, in the words of one Gifford Pinchot,

the greatest good, for the greatest number, over the longest run.

This assumption is married quickly to another, found in the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence:

…all men are created equal, … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

No one, it seems to me, can deny that this means that the federal government is therefor under orders to provide our physical security and a social context in which we remain individually at liberty, free and enabled to pursue a happy life.

The objections will come quickly, and they have to do with definition, that cliché of a devil lurking in all details. "Liberty": I'll let Luciano De Crescenzo define that:

the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.

Luciano De Crescenzo (tr. Avril Bardoni), Thus Spake Bellavista (Grove Press, 1989), p. 107

(I'll get to a discussion of De Crescenzo's equally fine book next time.)

But what did Thomas Jefferson mean by "the pursuit of Happiness," capital in the original? Maybe he was influenced by John Locke, whose formula was at various times "life, liberty, and estate"; or "life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things." (I find these quotes here.) Theories of the organization of civil society were much in the air in the last third of the 18th century, when monarchy was giving way to democracy, and intelligent, educated men — they were nearly all men, in those days — read, discussed, and reformulated their ideas concerning civil society and its government thoughtfully as well as passionately.

Far back in history, near the beginnings of such discussions, stands always the shade of Epicurus (341-279 BC), whose philosophy famously argues that a contented life depends on freedom from fear, absence of pain, moderation in pursuit of pleasure, and common sense in place of superstition. Epicurus's teaching was quickly given a bad reputation by the early Christians, because he directly attacked the idea of god-determined influences on human activity.

(The persistence of beliefs in the supernatural is one of the besetting evils of our time, like all other times; but that's a subject best left to another discussion.)

Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson clearly considered Epicurus's teaching carefully in their own discussions of civil society, which led to the (literally) revolutionary idea that it should be governed not by divine right but by the people themselves, as stated famously in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

(or, as Lincoln later formulated it more concisely, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".)

Tranquility, welfare, pursuit of happiness: they, it's argued, define the "good" component of Pinchot's formula; and a national economy exists to provide for it. Not to provide it; to provide for it, by regulating economic systems so as to allow individuals to engage in their own individual pursuits of happness.

De Graaf and Batker investigate the concept of societies directing themselves to providing for happiness, turning to Bhutan's implementation of Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product as an index of the state of the economy. GNH is measured, to the extent that as subjective a quality as "happiness" can be measured, by requesting individual citizens to respond to carefully written and weighted surveys.

The survey measures responses to thirteen "domains":

Overall Satisfaction With Life
Positive Affect
Mental Well-Being
Health
Time Balance
Community Vitality
Social Support
Access to Education, Arts & Culture
Neighborhood
Environment
Governance
Material Well-Being
Work

You can see one of these surveys, and take it yourself (thus contributing a tiny bit more to its statistical value), here. I took it: my own scores range between a low of 54 ("Governance") and 90 (Social Support), making me happier than the average U.S. respondent on all but two Domains (Access to Education, Arts & Culture and Neighborhood, probably because I live in a rural setting), but below the international average in only one Domain (Time Balance: a typical American complaint).

It turns out an individual's happiness, as defined by spontaneous definitions gathered from great numbers of people living in greatly differing societies, has a lot to do with security, health, freedom from stress, and availability of community. (De Crescenzo neatly lays this out on a coordinate system, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. But that's for another day.)

Now you can object that all this is subjective, unquantifiable; that the whole point of Economics is that it's the study of something inherently measurable, quantifiable. But the argument of this book is that to the extent that that is true it deals with only the materialistic aspects of organized society: while government should unquestionably address the organization (and, ahem, regulation) of quantifiable components of the public good, it must not neglect other ones less easily defined or measured.

The evolution of democratic society has been characterized by its address to the increasing complexity and opacity of the systems impinging on individual liberty and the public good. Technology, finance, corporate trading, transportation and communication have all contributed to this increased complexity and opacity, and the great increases in population and in the physical size of nations have contributed further.

This of course has led to a quandary: a society organized and governed for the greatest good for the greatest number, and over the long run, can only be achieved in so complex a context through a great deal of social engineering — engineering and maintenance of finance, health, housing, security, agriculture, occupation and leisure activity, education, the arts.

This can be achieved to an amazingly successful degree, though it has proved easier to achieve in relatively small and ethnically (or culturally) simple societies. Bhutan, the Scandinavian countries, and Netherlands do pretty well, de Graaf and Batker find.

The United States began to address these matters seriously in the early Twentieth Century, though you could argue that Lincoln's pursuit of the Thirteenth Amendment was an earlier declaration of "greatest good for greatest number" as a governmental obligation. President Taft, of all people, argued — in July 1910! — that

The American people have found out that there is such a thing as exhausting the capital of one's health and constitution, and that two or three months' vacation after the hard and nervous strain to which one is subjected during the Autumn and Spring are necessary in order to enable one to continue his work the next year with that energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.

Source here

It took the Great Depression to begin a real effort to train the national economy more toward GNH than GDP, through FDR's New Deal. The most compelling pages of What's the Economy For, Anyway? are its last three chapters: "When (or How) Good Went Bad," the first of these, traces the attacks on and erosion of the institutions of New Deal social engineering, singing the familiar litany of Senator McCarthy, Vietnam, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate, Reaganism, and Clinton's misguided economic policies, and deregulation.

Chapter 12, detailing the crisis of 2008 in housing, banking, and finance, is pretty depressing reading, but as clear and at times even entertaining as these gifted popularizers can make it.

But the real value of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, I think, is that it ends with a practical and optimistic list of specific acts that could resolve both the present crisis and the continuous problem of instituting "an economic Bill of Rights," rights specifically listed by President Roosevelt in an address on January 11, 1944:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Source here

De Graaf and Batker list 41 specific actions, distributed among ten general areas*, that could and should be addressed by government. Some are simple, like mandating three weeks' paid vacation for every working American, ensuring physical education classes for students, banning corporate campaign contributions, funding railroads. (Simple to define and execute; not necessarily simple to arrive at through the political process.) Others are more complex, like rewriting the tax code. But all are simply and coherently stated, and should be addressed by everyone engaged in the political process.

Addressing these points will not only move the country to a more just and prosperous society; it will also provide employment and, ultimately, lower the financial cost of governance.

Some of the 41 points might be best addressed at the State or local levels of government, though with Federal encouragement and funding; but most need to be addressed wholly at the federal level. Given the current political situation there's not much chance these points would be negotiated; given our present Congress, there's not much chance many of its members would even read them — though it's only the work of a quarter hour.

Still, we have to make the attempt. I'm going to try to condense this post to something the size of an op-ed piece; and I'm going to write President Obama and my representatives in Congress to see what they think of these points. I'll post any follow-ups here in the future.

(Thanks, Thérèse, for bringing this book to my attention)
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*The ten "general areas":

1: Give us time
2: Improve life possibilities from birth
3: Build a healthy nation
4: Enlarge the middle class
5: Value natural capital
6: Fix taxes and subsidies
7: Strengthen the financial system
8: Build a new energy infrastructure
9: Strengthen community and improve mobility
10: Improve governance