This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 DaysYears” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog a couple of times.

The plan was to read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning, although this plan got derailed–first by deadlines and teaching, then by having fallen out of the rhythm, despite my best efforts–including a photo-essay on Thoreau (#37). My new plan is to read and blog about the remaining volumes as I have time and hopefully finish by year’s end. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
by Thorstein Veblen (1857 to 1929)

Memorable Line
“It is worthy of notice that the possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account in the deliberate production of a cultured class.”

The Skinny
Veblen’s critique of capitalism and its more ridiculous follies has a dry quality to it that initially kindles ennui in the reader.

Relevance? Argument?
In a period when capitalism apes itself, celebrates its own excesses with an excess of satire that often entertains but rarely results in activism, Thorstein Veblen’s thoughts on “Status and Servants,” “Women, Luxury Goods, and Connoisseurship,” the “Uselessness of Education,” and other topics seem almost quaint. The gargantuan nature of the problem, the kind of super-viral form of capitalism that we feast upon and feasts upon us, almost seems to need something more colorful or more outrageous.

Veblen’s directness—rarely questioning, always stating, indulging in metaphor hardly at all—reinforces the abstract. I kept wanting something more concrete, even as I appreciated his various arguments. For this reason, chapters like “Canons of Taste: Greenery and Pets” perked up my interest more than the book’s core. An examination of the common lawn, in particular, struck me as more concrete, perhaps because I have a complicated relationship with the lawn. In short, I like weeds.

Indeed, I much prefer weeds and wildflowers, and the unkempt but more natural appearance they bring with them, to the sterile but more socially acceptable grass of your average lawn. For one thing, I like my environment to mimic my own state of mind (and my beard) while deep into the writing. For another, I am most at peace hiking and spending time in natural places. Having a reminder of the wilderness, even if it’s just a patch of sedgeweeds, honeysuckle, blue petals, and assorted other “intruders,” makes me happy. (I recognize that I diverge on this subject with the other members of the household, and thus the yard goes through periods of both civility and barbarism, each of us having a different opinion on which is which.)

Veblen puts forth the lawn as an example of how “everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class, as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary repute.”

The lawn, Vebren argues, appeals especially to the “well-to-do classes” and “in those communities in which the dolicho-blond [Aryan] element predominates in an appreciable degree.” The lawn has a “sensuous beauty” that “appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races” (a rather interesting generalization) but particularly to “the eye of the dolicho-blond.” Vebren claims this is because they had been “for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate.” Therefore, they find a lawn beautiful because they’re used to “contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land.”

For some reason, perhaps because it’s juxtaposed with fairly sophisticated verbiage, Veblen’s next line made me laugh: “For the aesthetic purpose, the lawn is a cow pasture.” He then more or less says that sometimes rich Aryans will get an expensive cow for their lawns to replicate, without the peasant squalor, a kind of genuine experience…and, of course, making an Epcot Center out of it regardless. Where a fancy cow cannot be found, a fancy deer will have to suffice, but in the heart of the Aryan this latter creature will create a lingering disappointment…that it is not a cow. Still, this disappointment at the insufficiency of the doppelganger—it’s shape being different from a cow, as well as its mannerisms—is more than compensated for by the exotic quality of the deer-substitute. In other words, “superior expensiveness or futility.”

It was while contemplating the relative futility of cow versus deer that I began to think that perhaps Veblen had more of a sense of humor than I had been giving him credit for; I also began to wonder if he might be more of a crackpot than I gave him credit for…both states (humor, crackpot) being qualities I admire in a thinker or a writer (those two states often mutually exclusive).

In any event, it’s this chapter, with its thoughts on lawns and public parks that opened up the book for me, and made me finally have an inkling of belief in the “withering satire” description on the back of the book. “Canons of Taste: Greenery and Pets” also re-opened the closed case file stamped “60 in 60–FAIL!”, as I had wrestled with the obsidian blankness of Veblen’s opening words from “The Leisure Class” for several months. If I’d only thought to start with the common lawn I might’ve resurrected this series long ago.

Conclusion
Now that I have my compass bearings, I’ll dive back into Veblen with a new appreciation. For this author, entry points may be the most important consideration for the interested reader.

Question for Readers
How do you like your lawn?

Next up, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus…

I’m glad it ground to a halt. It had become one of many brain-numbing tasks, and the initial rather stupid thrill of “how long can I keep juggling all of this” had faded into a dull ache of “why am I doing all of this?”

Now, today, I’m engaging the 60 in 60 for a different reason: because I want to slow down. I want to reconnect with reading books, after so many months of being involved with the process of having my own books brought out into the world.

I stopped writing on this blog and logged out of facebook in part to find the time to think about things, but also to read—and to read books not slated for formal review somewhere. I re-read Roberto Bolano’s 2666, not in the kind of ridiculous skimming speed read filled with interruptions and gaps that marked the first time, but taking a couple of days off just to read it for many hours in a row. What a novel idea.

The fact is, if I have the choice, I would much rather spend the majority of my time in the real world than in the virtual world. The virtual world, if I spend too much time there, irritates me almost pathologically, saps my strength, and stresses me out. It can make me someone I don’t like very much. So, once again, I’m trying hard to rearrange my life so that most of what I do gives me and my loved ones a sense of peace and of happiness.

Spending time with Ann makes me happy. Writing stories and books makes me happy. Editing projects and collaborations make me happy. Oddly enough, resurrecting the 60 in 60 also makes me happy. A lot of the rest of it doesn’t make me happy at all. So I’m going to try not to do it.

Part of this recalibrating means you may see slightly fewer posts on this blog, but what you do find will hopefully be more personal or more interesting and involving. Or silly, or fun—who knows?—but far fewer “Hey–here’s mah book, lookit this!” posts.

I’m also going to be reading this book, and writing about it here every once in awhile, because it fits nicely with 2666, and, well, I feel like it…

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–a Guardian’s book site of the week (back in the day) and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.)

For more on this beautifully designed series of which I am unworthy, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR
by Henry David Thoreau (1817 to 1862)

Memorable Line
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”

The Skinny
Thoreau’s account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods is a call to his fellow human beings to abandon their striving, materialistic existences of “quiet desperation” for a simple life of loud perspiration within their means, sparked by the sheer beauty of their surroundings.

Relevance? Argument?

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

This may be so, but it doesn’t feel like desperation at the trail head. It feels like adventure. It feels like you are about to test yourself against a task hard and worth doing, and even if you retreat from it back into the normal rhythms of your life, you will learn something about yourself in the process. Memories of dodging wild pigs, standing silent while a panther walked by you, and jumping over allligators–the stuff of tales exaggerated later over beers, and thus untrue even though true–melt away into another image: of having been disoriented and lost in a thunderstorm on these very same trails, and how that brought back childhood memories of walking on the reef at night in Fiji, with no way to tell sea from shore, and how, in some guise, you are hoping to recreate that experience that cannot be recreated, because in being lost in the natural world you actually feel more alive, more safe, than at any other time in your life. That’s how you start at least: in the abstract, and in your recollections, rather than in the moment.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Nowhere is this sense of urgency more apparent than in passing through the swampy forest that lies a mile or two in, with woods meeting a dank blackwater gutter, the place you’ve most often seen bear and heard things rustling in the darkness that the imagination assigns horrible forms to. Hiking alone is a different experience than hiking with someone. The pleasures of conversation distract from the still, standing water, from the reflections of cypress knees and the oppressive Southern Gothic feel to the air, the sky blocked by scraggly pine trees. This, too, is the corridor where wild pigs once charged, and while danger is minimal, the imagination magnifies it, and in the absence of company the mind exaggerates and finds ghosts where none exist. “Nature” in this context is something aggressive that wants to cause harm, even though it’s not true. Once through that gauntlet, you feel foolish, you feel dumb, you wonder why you bothered with the anxiety, or brought your senses to heightened alert. It’s just a walk in the woods.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it: but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

Then the trail becomes straight and long and bright, and you’re trudging across the sandy soil wondering how the Spanish invaders with their heavy hot armor ever hacked their way through the swamps. This section seems to last forever, and even as you remain vigilant, scanning the trail ahead for signs of motion, still your thoughts stray, time become elongated and porous. There’s the memory of each past experience traversing this stretch, and the awareness that you’ve come early enough to beat the biting flies for once, and then you’re somewhere else. You’re driving across Hungary toward Romania in a tiny car. You’re lost with your wife on a plateau in a park above San Diego, where the grass is the color of gold and reaches to your knees and the trees are blackened from fire. You’re hiking up a mountain in scrubland outside of Brisbane, each breath labored, every muscle in your legs protesting even as you’re possessed by a wild giddiness that keeps you moving past exhaustion. You’re back in the first year of college when you wanted isolation and walked the five miles from the campus home in utter silence every day, receiving the world through a hole in your shoe and knowing you weren’t lonely but just alone. These thoughts are an embarrassment to you later. They seem to give significance to the mundane, but heightened awareness combined with a strange comfort is a signature of being solitary in solitary places.

“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year…”

After having passed the unofficial gauntlet of bears and wild pigs, along with the stretch nicknamed “alligator alley,” your stride has achieved a rhythm, and your legs are no longer tight, and you can feel the muscles moving as you move, and you come out of the scrubland into the wetlands, with the freshwater canal serving as a buffer to the salt marsh and, ultimately, the sea. You’ve seen dolphins there, searching for food at high tide, before being pulled out again at low tide. You’ve seen otters and heard the call of curlews. The water means more life than anything the woods can support, in a myriad of forms. It’s also an area struck awhile back by hurricane, and you can still see the marks of that abuse, even though the water level’s long since receded. Once, this section was much harder to traverse because of that violence–you had to make your way through thigh-high water, always wary of that sudden tickle that might mean contact with an alligator. Now, though, they’ve filled those spaces in with concrete, and you’re vaguely disappointed. You’re now seven or eight miles out, and yet you’re confronted by this artificial bridge. No one is anywhere nearby, and yet there’s no escaping the fact people were here in numbers once.

“Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man.”

Finally, you reach the farthest-most point, beyond which you are but returning and returning still, feeling the pull of mile markers and the road beyond. But for that moment, you’re so remote that there’s no one for miles–and you feel that. You feel it strongly. You’ve gone from being a little on edge to being a little tired. And you’ve come out onto this perfectly still scene that looks from the light like Turner painted it. And you just take a deep breath and relax into the landscape.

“A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it is shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much more important.”

And so you walk along the shore of this lower heaven, in the middle of nowhere and are rejuvenated by its perfect stillness. Your legs for a time are no longer tired, and you are afraid of nothing, and you have no room for memory or thought or anything except this moment, and this one, and the next. If a place can be called perfect or pristine or timeless, this stretch of the trail has all of those qualities, and your peace of mind is absolute in its embrace of the sky’s reflection.

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.”

The present moment elongates again, ignited by the heat, once past still ponds and into the eleventh mile. You live in the present by dint of blistered feet and chaffed ankles and biting flies drawn to the sweat on your ears or forehead and the parched feeling in your throat despite drinking water from the canteen. The sun has decided to lodge itself behind your eyes and shine out so that the inside of your head feels burnt. Every beautiful thing you see ahead of you you know you’ve already seen at least once behind you. Eternity is found in the repetition of your steps and the constant way the light grips the ground and sends its heat back up at you. There’s no memory in you now. There’s no room. The present has filled you up.

“At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much…”

The larger things in this context fall away, until you revel only in small details–the dark line of a marsh hawk flying low over the water, the delicate fracture of the water where a snake bird submerged, and, between, the strangely satisfying long grass that cascades like hair from the ground.

“By the words necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.”

In the final miles, the sun is so bright and hot you actually feel a little delirious, even though you know this is a mirage–you have water and you’re still hobbling through your blisters and petty aches. How can the sun be so oppressive and yet the scene so unbearably beautiful? The final mile approaches, and you bend down to tighten the laces on your boot. There’s a tiny black-and-red grasshopper, symbolic as a scarab, beside your foot. From what seems like a great distance, you hear a scrambling huff from the marsh beside the trail. For an instant some odd, broad-shouldered marmot pushes its face through the reeds. Then sees you and hurriedly disappears with a plop into the water behind it–while you rise, startled, the grasshopper leaping onto your leg. Then you’re walking again, laughing a little, and in a few minutes more you’re back at the road and your car, everything pressed out of you except a yearning for water and a clean shirt. And you’re unaccountably happy, grinning even.

Conclusion
Thoreau’s meditations, philosophical arguments, and explication of the world through the details of its natural spaces makes a powerful argument to contemporary readers in the context of a polluted world already beginning to be punished by the effects of global warming.

Question for Readers
What’s the most profound experience you’ve had of the natural world?

Next up, Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption…

Colin Brush on the Penguin Blog has the cojones to suggest I’ve gone insane from doing the 60 in 60:

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public…[long garble about my insanity]…Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above). Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he’s soldiering on nevertheless.

It’s true the news that a fourth army of 20 titles is forthcoming put a momentary icicle through the part of my brain not yet numbed by my reading thus far, but I am not in any way insane.

To prove, it, I am posting selections from my Facebook status messages for the last day or so (along with related comments), since these should provide a valid snapshot of my state of mind. Proving, of course, that I’m just fine.

9:53am
MORD NEW TO FACEBOOK. MORD LIKE TO CRUNCH BONES. WANTS TO FIND OTHERS LIKE TO CRUNCH BONES. OR SKULLS.
>>Dave Hutchinson at 10:10am April 8: MORD NOT WOMBAT.
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 10:11am April 8: YOU LOOK LIKE YOU HAVE A CRUNCH SKULL. WILL YOU BE MY FRIEND…FOR AWHILE…?
>>Nayad A. Monroe at 10:17am April 8: Me curious about crunch bones. Never try yet, but think about sometime. Tell about bone-crunch good-times?
>>Mark McLaughlin at 10:25am April 8: Gracious! Mord sounds like a scoundrel and a rapscallion. I shall not be sending him an invitation to the debutante’s cotillion!
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 10:28am April 8: NAYAD–YOU GOT SPEECH IMPEDIMENT, TOO? SKULL DON’T LOOK CRUNCHLIKE. ALL BONECRUNCH GOOD TIME. MCLAUGHLIN–DEBUTANTES EXTRA CRUNCHY.
>>Elizabeth Vander Meer at 11:54am April 8: Jeff, remember when we watched The Plague Dogs (right after, both of us disappeared into our rooms to cry, waahh!)?
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 12:02pm April 8: MORD REMEMBER PLAGUE DOGS. MORD LAUGH LONG TIME. THEN CRUNCH BONES.

2:36pm
MORD HUNGRY. WANTS HOTPOCKET. AND BUCKET OF GUTS.
>>Chuck Gannon at 2:50pm April 8: Mord: hunt the designers of new FB, Mord! Consume their useless, guts, Mord! Eat, Mord, Eat!
>>Heidi Nordberg at 2:56pm April 8: Mord–like Mordred, Mordor?Death, murder? Or a cute muppet sort of thing?
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 3:25pm April 8: MORD MORD. CHUCK LOOKS LIKE HOTPOCKET.
>>Chuck Gannon at 8:38pm April 8: (Sighting) Chuck is hotpocket with M82 Barrett. Nice Mord. No kill I.
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 10:50pm April 8: MORD NOT HURT BY BULLETS UNLESS YOU’VE GOT A MISSILE LAUNCHER. MORD MAKES GODZILLA LOOK TINY. PUNY GANNON. BULLETS TO MORD LIKE CHOCOLATE SPRINKLES ON YOUR ICECREAM GANNON.
>>Chuck Gannon at 11:11pm April 8: Man, first Mord is small enough to see humans as hotpockets. Now he’s as big as Godzilla! This Mord must be a monster straight out of the non-Euclidean domains of–SQUIDPUNK!
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 11:33pm April 8: MORD HAS BUDDED MINIONS TO EAT HOTPOCKETS.

5:01pm
MORD GO TO PASSOVER SEDER NOW. EAT EVERYBODY. EVEN ELIJAH. MMMMMM, HOTPOCKETS.
>>Sharyn November at 5:17pm April 8: the hell? jeff, are you really going to a seder?
>>Erin Kennedy at 5:29pm April 8: jeff, the passover bunny doesn’t like you talking about eating elijah like that!
>> Jeff VanderMeer at 5:49pm April 8: OF COURSE I’M GOING TO A SEDER. THAT’S WHERE ALL THE MEAT IS. ERIN–I WILL POST THE PHOTO BURNING THE EASTER PEEPS. I WILL, I TELL YOU.
>>George Kenneth Berger at 5:56pm April 8: And don’t forget The Four Questions! Chag sameach!
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 6:00pm April 8: FOUR QUESTIONS: WHO EAT FIRST? WHO EAT SECOND? WHO EAT THIRD? WHO EAT FOURTH?

10:52pm
MORD BACK FROM SEDER. EVERYBODY TASTE DELICIOUS. EVEN DOGS. EVEN MICE. EVEN CROCKERY. EVEN WALLS. EVEN ROOF. EVEN FLOOR. EVEN ROCKING CHAIR. EVEN GRANDMA.
>>Linda Moorcock at 10:58pm April 8: Look, let’s get serious here … what did Mord REALLY eat??hmm?
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 11:32pm April 8: BEFORE I DEVOURED ALL THE HUMANS, I PARTOOK OF THEIR HEROSES (?), THEIR FISHBALLS, THEIR BRISKET, THEIR TURKEY, THEIR MATZOH SOUP, THEIR DOGS, AND THEIR CHOCOLATE. THEN I DRANK THEIR DUTCH COFFEE, PISSED ON THE CARPET, AND TRASHED THE PLACE. THEN I GOT REALLY BIG, SMASHED THE ROOF, FLATTENED THE SURROUNDING HOUSES WITH A MONSTROUS FART, AND FLEW OFF INTO THE NIGHT.
>>Edward Morris at 12:14am April 9: Yay! And Mord Smash Happy Ever After…
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 12:27am April 9: MORD REMEMBER A TIME WHEN HUMAN. MUCH SMALLER. NOT EAT MEAT AS MUCH. HAD A JOB. USED TO WATCH BIRDS NOT SNAP THEM. LONG TIME AGO. NOT HAPPIER THEN. JUST DIFFERENT. DIDN’T HAVE TO SPEND TIME PICKING BITS OF MEAT OUT OF FUR. TORSOS ARE THE WORST. GET TANGLED. THEN THERE ARE THE ONES WHO TRY TO LIVE THERE. REALLY HARD TO CLAW OUT. YOU ONE OF THEM, MORRIS?
>>Edward Morris at 12:37am April 9: Nope, I live in the basement with the shroom people, and speak their papery language by this point. When I can see through the smoke…
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 12:43am April 9: COME OUT OF BASEMENT. MORD NEED SNACK. MORD NOT HURT MORRIS. JUST WANT TO TALK ABOUT…ABOUT…BASEBALL…MORD NOT EVEN WAITING RIGHT OUTSIDE OR ANYTHING. COME OUT MORRIS. TALKING ABOUT…BASEBALL…IS FUN.
>>Edward Morris at 12:47am April 9: PIRATES NOT GOING TO DO SHIT. AGAIN THIS YEAR. MORRIS COME OUT OF BASEMENT MORRIS HAVE FLAME NEED PORK RIBS. SLAUGHTER SMALL LOCAL ANIMAL. MAYBE NOT CAT. OK SWEET N SOUR PORK RIBS. BUT NOT MY CAT. TOO HARD TO CATCH…
>>Jeff VanderMeer at 12:49am April 9: OKAY, BASEBALL BORING. SHUT UP. CLIMB IN MOUTH PLEASE.

As the above photo shows, I’ve been preoccupied with shooting down deadlines. The 60 in 60 on the Penguin Great Ideas series should resume next week–who knew I meant 60 books in 60 years–but in the meantime, I’ve been prepping by reading the back covers and first page of each one (cheating? who knows). To give you a preview based on my gleanings, here are my three-line non-trad haikus on each. Prepare to be horrified.

#37 – Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Hippy words
Talks to trees
Dirty yellow toenails

#38 – Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption

Buy useless things
Be damned
But I breathe the same air

#39 – Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sysyphus

Roll that rock
Revolt against gods
Suicide is vexing, dude

#40 – Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann and the Holocaust

Pulls trigger
Pats grandson’s head
Same hand

#41 – Plutarch’s In Consolation to His Wife

My love
My love for the living
Outweighs that for the dead

#42 – Robert Burton’s Some Anatomies of Melancholy

Drunken sadness
Love and beauty, but pray tell:
What is the quality of your meat?

#43 – Blaise Pascal’s Human Happiness

Live in balance
Boredom is one with anxiety
Man, flies really suck

#44 – Adam Smith’s The Invisible Hand

It pusheth one nobly toward the right
One cherry tree becomes an orchard
Look how well that’s worked this year, idiot

#45 – Edmund Burke’s The Evils of Revolution

Freedom doused in blood
Is too red to recognize itself
A smile across the neck never lasts

#46 – Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature

Hippy words
Talks to trees
Dirty yellow fingernails

#47 – Soren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death

Despair is sin
Except when it isn’t
Winter comes to all eventually

#48 – John Ruskin’s The Lamp of Memory

See the artistry of that mansard
Or the filigree of that balcony
God lives there

#49 – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Man Alone with Himself

Facebook status deep and brooding
I am angsty devil can bullshit good
…Wanna come back to my place and look at my cock?

#50 – Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession

The Master can be found there
Sit with Him beneath
The shade of many trees

#51 – William Morris’ Useful Work vs Useless Toil

Beggars and burghers alike
Have eyes in their heads
An unexpected rose in the gutter

#52 – Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Too large an expanse
Self-sufficient down-to-earth
A thousand strip malls

#53 – Marcel Proust’s Days of Reading

The flicker of light
From the third floor window
Pages opening onto a conflagration

#54 – Leon Trotsky’s An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe

No one can be happy
When blood turns to gold in your veins
Look up, sheep, to your fleecing

#55 – Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion

I use words
Like others use French horns
Through the din: clarity

#56 – Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Replicate me please
Replicate me please
Why all these eyes?

#57 – George Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes

Five pence for a pack
Ash stains on the armchair
A curl of smoke from the page

#58 – Albert Camus’ The Fastidious Assassins

Look up, sheep, to your fleecing
Gold turns to blood in your veins
But a smile across the neck never lasts

#59 – Frantz Fanon’s Concerning Violence

Things fall apart
Heart of darkness
Isn’t it enough?

#60 – Michel Foucault’s The Spectacle of the Scaffold

Horrifying end
Drawn and quartered
Nothing left, but took too long

Here’s the list of what’s remaining for me re the 60 in 60:

#38 – Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption
#39 – Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sysyphus
#40 – Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann and the Holocaust
#41 – Plutarch’s In Consolation to His Wife
#42 – Robert Burton’s Some Anatomies of Melancholy
#43 – Blaise Pascal’s Human Happiness
#44 – Adam Smith’s The Invisible Hand
#45 – Edmund Burke’s The Evils of Revolution
#46 – Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature
#47 – Soren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
#48 – John Ruskin’s The Lamp of Memory
#49 – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Man Alone with Himself
#50 – Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession
#51 – William Morris’ Useful Work vs Useless Toil
#52 – Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History
#53 – Marcel Proust’s Days of Reading
#54 – Leon Trotsky’s An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed Etc Etc
#55 – Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion
#56 – Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
#57 – George Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes
#58 – Albert Camus’ The Fastidious Assassins
#59 – Frantz Fanon’s Concerning Violence
#60 – Michel Foucault’s The Spectacle of the Scaffold

Nothing would have pleased me more than to continue the 60 in 60 on schedule. However, life and circumstances are trumping dead philosophers. (I’m sure Marcus Aurelius would approve…or more likely be indifferent.)

I’ve accepted an offer from Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia, to teach week 6 of their workshop, from February 8 through 14. They have a sudden need for an instructor and, after weighing all of the pros and cons of accepting a gig with so little prep time, it seemed I could be of use. Week six is the last week, the students are usually exhausted, and they need not only support but strategies and approaches for the return to their “normal” lives.

Unfortunately, Ann ’s schedule permits her from being part of it–our teaching these days is usually inextricably woven together–but she will be reading some of their manuscripts as time permits so that they also get the advantage of the careful eye of Weird Tales’ fiction editor. (I’m going to have to make it up to her big-time for missing Valentine’s Day.)

Now, the only problem is there’s only so much time in a day, and I have a deadline of early February for Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for 21st Century Writers. (Which turns out to be perfect timing-wise for the Clarion South students, since I’ll make the book in draft form available to them; they can even test out bits if they want.)

But the only way to meet my deadline and to make sure the book is as good as I want it to be is to get rid of the next biggest time expenditure…which is the 60 in 60.

To preserve the concept, Ann’s keeping the books in a secure location until my return. I will still be reading one a day until I finish them, but the series will resume around February 18 or 19. There will be no break this time between sets, either. Thanks for your patience. (It’s a mere speck of time compared to how long some of these texts have been around.)

That said, these three, which I’ve read in the past, are coming with me to Australia, as they’re all energizing and yet calming:

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Fear & Trembling
by Soren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855)

Memorable Line
“Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.”

The Skinny
Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction that we must all create our own nature; in this work he argues that a true understanding of God can only be attained by making a personal “leap of faith.”

Relevance? Argument?
Reading Kierkegaard is like being swept away in a strong river headed for an endless sea–except you can bail from the experience any time you want to just by closing the book.* It’s exhilarating on one level and terrifying on another. I read Kierkegaard in college, but I do not remember this level of lyricism–almost as if some other passion is driving the book beneath the surface, something that breaks through almost continually in the spaces between the words.

This aspect of the book caught me by complete surprise, and it quickly became clear that reading 150 pages of Kierkegaard in one day–and digesting it–would be the equivalent on the fiction side of doing a speed read of Proust or Joyce. It’s not so much that Kierkegaard uses a similar style in his work. Instead, it’s the passion, the thickness of it, and the weight.

So I decided to focus just on a small portion of the book–the first segment, which includes pieces titled “Fear and Trembling,” a preface, “Attunement,” and “Speech in Praise of Abraham.” Of these sections, “Speech in Praise of Abraham” had the most effect on me–I was quite simply stunned by the emotion emanating from the page. “Existentialist” to me has meant, in excerpts and from second-hand accounts, something dry and brittle and minimalist, not this outpouring from the heart; not this febrile, pulsing, living prose.

I have to quote this at length because it quite frankly blew my brain out the back of my skull when I first turned to it:

If there was no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond united [hu]mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of the birds in the forests, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches–how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!

God, that’s beautiful, and yet maddening. Because Kierkegaard is describing a condition that is, to me at least, utterly comforting: to be part of a series of generations that rise up “like the leaves of the forest”** and “succeed” each other “as the songs of the birds in the forests.” What good Deist (with an eye on the Thoreau by my side) wouldn’t long for that kind of continuity? Says Sir Thomas Browne “…few have returned their bones farre lower than they might receive them; not affecting the graves of Giants, under hilly and heavy coverings, but content with lesse than their own depth, have wished their bones might lie soft, and the earth be light upon them…,” and even his coda returning to religion cannot compete with that image.

Nor, for a time, does it seem as if Kierkegaard can compete with the natural cycles of the world he has conjured up with such eloquence. “But for that reason it is not so [that everything is a thoughtless whim],” he continues. “God has created man and woman [and] so too he shaped the hero and the poet or speak-maker.” Yet such figures seem somehow small and lacking in grandeur next to the vastness of what Kierkegaard has already described.

A short soliloquy to the role of the hero follows, with a note that “Therefore no one who was great shall be forgotten” and then this interesting idea: “No! No one shall be forgotten who was great in the world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.” The individual who loves himself becomes “great in himself.” The individual who loves others becomes “great through his devotion.” But the greatest of all are those who love God.

The reasoning here is perhaps not typical of what you’d hear in Sunday School. To Kierkegaard, greatness exists in proportion to “his expectancy.” Which is to say, a man who loves himself expects the possible and a man who loves others expects the eternal (community?), but by believing in God you are believing in the impossible–and the magnitude of that act makes you great.

What, then, would be the “magnitudinal expectancy” of believing in a world in which humankind becomes dust and wind, and “one generation succeeded the other as the songs of the birds in the forests”? Kierkegaard doesn’t say, but you can hear Browne mumbling an answer from below rich peat and moss. Wouldn’t a belief in the truth of one’s own ultimate dissolution–trusting in the world over oneself–be just as much a belief in the impossible?

The final if/then put forth by Kierkegaard concerns what a man strove against, whether himself, others, or God. And, as a more-or-less Deist, and someone who gets a sense of spirituality from both the natural world and the act of creation, I began to wonder whether Kierkegaard should have sub-divided out different types of the first kind of greatness. For example, does a person who offers themselves up to their work–to, for example writing or art or sculpture–really love themselves, expect the possible, and strive against him- or herself? I’m not sure that’s true. I’d suspect that person is actually having to give up a part of themselves, for one thing. So I’m not sure these categories don’t get muddied and warped and intertwined in ways that would be inconvenient for Kierkegaard’s main thrust.

That thrust has been aimed at reaching a point where he can offer up Abraham from the Bible as “greater than all,” “great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self.”

What follows is a detailed discussion of Abraham’s relationship with his God, his son, and his wife, for he is deeply concerned about the ethical and moral dimensions of Abraham’s famous decision. These sections are impassioned and vibrant, and perhaps more compelling than anything I read in Revelations and the Book of Job as an argument for the power of the Bible.

At times Kierkegaard makes statements that inadvertently express why I have such a suspicion of the Christian Right’s attitude toward the world we have: “But Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. Yes, had his faith only been for a future life it would indeed have been easier to cast everything aside in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong.” (Alas, the counter argument goes, there is no other world–only the invisible worlds inside each element of the world we have.)

At other times, Kierkegaard makes statements I love him for, like “[Abraham] believed the ridiculous” or “Thousands of years have slipped by since those days, but you need no late-coming lover to snatch your memory from the power of oblivion.”

I can be disappointed by Kierkegaard dismissing the import of the natural world and natural cycles with such ease and so quickly, but we are so within his vision looking out that he’s more or less rewiring your brain to his specifications as you read. You have to trust in his hyperbole because it seems well-earned, even as you can imagine Plato and Marcus Aurelius exchanging smiles and saying to Kierkegaard, “Come inside, friend, and let’s have a look at that thorn in your soul. But first, some wine, some good food, and some good company.”

Kierkegaard lies when he says, “I am not a poet, I only practice dialectics.” Sometimes in this series, a philosopher makes plain how desperately real their writings are–that the issues they wrestle with are a personal burden and a torment. Kierkegaard is one of those philosophers. Whereas in Browne this secret oozes up through the bog, through the ash that comes from flame, in Kierkegaard it’s as if he tore open his chest and tried to show you his heart.

* Alas, it is not so easy to jettison mild food poisoning; thus the delay in posting this entry.

** Leaves rising up is either a mistake on Kierkegaard’s part or a clever way of making the reader think “down” simultaneous with thinking “up”, since most of us think of leaves as falling.

Conclusion
There’s a secret wound in Kierkegaard that I can’t quite make out the shape of without reading more of his work.

Question for Readers
What do you think of when you hear the word “Existentialism”?

Next up, Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I Lived For…

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

On the Nature of War
by Carl von Clausewitz (1780 to 1831)

Memorable Line
“We say therefore that War belongs not to the province of Arts and Sciences, but to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better, instead of comparing it to any Art, to liken it to business competition, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities… ”

The Skinny
An excerpt from On War, these classic thoughts on warfare still inform military theory and opinion.

Relevance? Argument?
Reading von Clausewitz is like reading the crunchy, vines-and-ruins version of Sun-tzu. The text is more practical than The Art of War and it’s also more eccentric in its teachings on strategy than something like Machiavelli’s The Prince. I first encountered his work through another book (which I highly recommend as one of the finest military accounts ever written):

In The Campaigns of Napoleon,* David G. Chandler writes, “[another] contemporary authority, the Prussian von Clausewitz, incorporated a great deal of the essence of Napoleonic warfare into his famous three-volume work On War…although he completely misunderstood the significance of the crucial manoeuvre sur les derrieres,” or action against an enemy’s communications. (p. 134) And later: “As Clausewitz wrote soon after the Berezina [a decisive battle in the Russian campaign], ‘Bonaparte had escaped with about 40,000 men, as if some higher power had decreed not to destroy him on this occasion. He had been forced into a situation in which it appeared he must be lost.’” (p. 847)

I bought On War, then, as additional context on Napoleon. But I soon came to appreciate von Clausewitz for his own sake, and in much the same way as I appreciate Edward Gibbon. Von Clausewitz seems to me to be a kind of eccentric, mixed in with much that has a practical application. Thus, you get curt dismissals of subjects such as the effect of weather on warfare: “Still more rarely has the weather any decisive influence, and it is mostly only by fogs that it plays a part.” Unless, of course, if you’re Spanish, you have an Armada, and there’s a sudden storm.** (It must be noted that Sun-tzu, discussing types of terrain, often includes the effects of weather in his assessments–and, indeed, on the very next page of On the Nature of War, von Clausewitz includes “frost” and other such elements of “weather” in his own thoughts on terrain.)

The reader also receives such rough elegance as:

War is, therefore, not only chameleon-like in character, because it changes its colour in some degree in each particular case, but it is also, as a whole, in relation to the predominant tendencies which are in it, a wonderful trinity, composed of the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity, which may be looked upon as blind instinct; of the play of probabilities and chance, which make it a free activity of the soul…

You won’t find anything like that in Machiavelli or Sun-tzu. There’s a real enthusiasm for war in von Clausewitz that is bracing and genuine–even more so when he’s dispassionate (which strangely reads here like a form of passion rather than its negation). The text may at times seem blood-thirsty to a modern reader, but to me it seems appropriate. If you are going to enter into something as devastating as war, then you should prosecute that war with the enthusiasm that comes from wanting to do something well. Half-measures and regrets only kill more people.

However, von Clausewitz does also contain echoes of Sun-tzu, and some of the same subtle qualities–for example, when he discusses causes of suspension of action on one side or another. “A complete equilibrium of forces can never produce a suspension of action,” von Clausewitz writes, “for during this suspension he who has the positive object (that is, the assailant) must continue progressing; for if we should imagine an equilibrium in this way, that he who has the positive object, therefore the strongest motive, can at the same time only command the lesser means…” In his continuing description of forces teetering on the edge of conflict, and a kind of push-me pull-me idea of shared momentum, he begins to evoke The Art of War’s chapter “Empty and Full,” in which Sun-tzu writes, “The Skilful Warrior stirs and is not stirred. He lures his enemy into coming or obstructs him from coming.”

Von Clausewitz can also be deathly dry, as in the section on “Criticism,” where he writes, “The influence of theoretical principles upon real life is produced more through criticism than through doctrine, for as criticism is an application of abstract truth to real events, therefore it not only brings truth of this description nearer to life, but also accustoms the understanding more to such truths by the constant repetition of their application.”

I suppose pointing out the different tones and emphases running through On the Nature of War is another way of telling you that von Clausewitz is well-rounded–an admittedly charitable interpretation.*** Even in the dry sections, I find him fascinating to read.

“War,” writes Chandler, “has always been one of the most unpleasant and least rewarding forms of human activity.” “War,” writes von Clausewitz, “is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will…This is the way in which the matter must be viewed, and it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s own interest, to turn away from the consideration of the real nature of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.”

* The Campaigns of Napoleon isn’t just comprehensive–it is exhaustive, and yet Chandler manages to make that exhaustive quality a plus. The book never feels slow or ponderous. You can always fully visualize the battles, and he provides plenty of context off the field of battle as well.

** To be fair, von Clausewitz is mostly talking about land warfare here.

***von Clausewitz calls his own book “seemingly weakly bound-together,” preferring to “give in small ingots of fine metal his impressions and convictions.”

Conclusion
War, like boxing, excites passion as much by the beauty of its strategic and tactical structure as by the immediacy of its reality.

Question for Readers
Have you ever had to conduct a manoeuvre sur les derrieres? How’d that go for you?

Next up, Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling…

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series–the Guardian’s book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

On Suicide
by David Hume (1711 to 1776)

Memorable Line
“…the lives of men depend upon the same laws as the lives of all other animals; and these are subjected to the general laws of matter and motion. The fall of a tower, or the infusion of a poison, will destroy a man equally with the meanest creature; an inundation sweeps away every thing without distinction that comes within the reach of its fury. ”

The Skinny
A series of essays that helped liberate philosophy from the “superstitious constraints of religion” and used a healthy skepticism to discuss life, death, and tragedy, among other topics.

Relevance? Argument?
It is hard for me to find much to say about David Hume’s title essay, “On Suicide.” Logical, measured, and humane, his argument seems largely in keeping with modern liberal views: that suicide can be the only way out for a mind or body that cannot continue; and, further, that government and religion should not stand against the act of suicide. It’s only in the generalities that Hume seems to fall down, as it seems false to me that every suicide has sufficient justification. Nor can I see suicide outside of the context of terminal illness as anything other than selfish to those left behind. Still, I remember how angry I was after Kurt Cobain’s suicide when many in the media mocked his death or called him weak. There is something about the act of suicide that is both cowardly and brave. As Hume says, our terror of death is strong that the decision to take one’s life certainly doesn’t derive from “small motives.”

But I’d rather talk of life and movement today, especially because the best essay in On Suicide is actually “Of the Standard of Taste,” which I recommend to every creative person. In attempting to reach consensus on a series of aesthetic elements, Hume provides much of interest to writers. It’s not so much where Hume winds up, but the brilliance of the journey.

In tackling this subject, Hume wrestles with the same issue that, in a more banal context, ruins editorial meetings and makes communication on the internet often so calamitous (and gives absurdists such as myself much fodder for satire about the human condition):

There are certain terms in every language which import blame, and others praise; and all men who use the same tongue must agree in their application of them. Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy. But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. In all matters of opinion and science, the case is opposite; the difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars, and to be less in reality than in appearance.

It may irritate or confuse some, but there really is no objective reality when it comes to writing. That which was out of fashion in one generation is lauded as genius by the next. That which was popular is now seen as shallow or silly, or both. Sometimes, now, this happens within a few months or a year rather than a decade due to the instantaneous nature of our society.

But, still, Hume attempts to create a consensus reality, or at least to explore the possibility (he’s too nuanced a thinker not to set out counter-arguments, and sometimes seems convinced by them): “It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”

The counter-argument is: “…a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right; because no sentiment represents what is really in the object…Beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” “To seek real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter” because depending on the person’s sense of taste “the same object may be both bitter or sweet” (unless it’s a lemon?).

Yet Hume argues that this “axiom…passing into a proverb” is not necessarily true: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.” Hume argues that critics who do equate his examples as equals are mocked by the majority.

I would make a counter-argument for the modern age, however: that readers and critics are (1) blinded by the speed of our world and thus must admit that we must step back even further from the point of creation/publication to really understand what is classic and what is not and (2) the blogosphere, by erasing certain forms of hierarchy, creates a confusion between what opinions do matter and which should matter, experience no longer being as much of a core value to our online selves.

Hume then continues on with an interesting discussion of the subjectivity of applied technique in writing, and how sometimes we value a work despite certain deformities in it–and in praising the whole, we thus also praise the defect. (Something you often find, too, in business, where a successful project leads to codifying both what made it successful and what could have made it fail; this is then presented as The Ideal.) Yet, many of these deformities, in the context of art rather than an area such as science, are indeed strengths, and Hume admits as much when he writes, “Many of the beauties of poetry, and even of eloquence, are founded on falsehood and fiction, on hyperboles, metaphors, and an abuse or perversion of terms from their natural meanings.” Therefore, “To check the sallies of the imagination, and to reduce every expression to geometric truth and exactness, would be the most contrary to the laws of criticism.”

But Hume does indicate that writing must still “be confined by the rules of art.” Which is to say that structure gives words the conduit to reach the reader in a coherent way. As I read this passage, I thought to myself: “Creators are a bunch of half-mad louts drunk with words, who gain power and strength through constructive expression of their irrationalities.”

The rest of the essay seesaws back and forth between the subjective and objective in a fine display of holding opposing ideas in one’s head–something every writer must do–and discusses the nuances and foibles of the reader receiving the writer’s work. Hume does clearly believe you can establish a standard of taste, but puts a lot of the onus of doing so on readers and critics being educated, careful, patient, and nuanced in their exploration of a particular piece of writing. This feels right to me, perhaps because I tire of seeing hasty readers blame their haste on the writer. Should we not strive to create the best possible work, with the best possible reader in mind, whatever the form that work, that reader takes? A reader or critic who lacks the background or the prior reading to appreciate a particular type of work should, perhaps, at least have the good sense to admit this, in my opinion. (However, a writer who, having found that perfect audience, has his or her work repudiated should also recognize that perhaps “negative deformity” has entered their writing.)

Taken as a whole, the essay is a fascinating conversation about the nature of creativity. That said, I am not sure that Hume’s ending is as strong as his opening–it feels like the essay just stops–but perhaps this is part of the point; the nature of such a discussion is that it must be ongoing, despite any conclusions drawn by Hume.

Conclusion
Hume represents a synthesis of strong, nuanced writing with strong, nuanced thought that achieves a rare balance of readability and deep content.

Question for Readers
If you had to create your own personal Standard of Taste, what would it include?

Next up, Carl von Clausewitz’s On the Nature of War…