Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Diary

I've made a little progress in the book I'm reading on Milosz, but not enough to comment at length. I have been thinking about why I am interested in him, and it is probably because he seems more admirable to me than most, and I may have some similarities to him. His family structure was vaguely similar to mine when he was growing up. His mother's side was gentry, with a bucolic country estate, but without much money; my mother's family wasn't gentry, but they were well-off for a time and better-educated than my father's family. As in my family, Milosz was an introvert and his parents were extroverts. Like me, he identified with his mother much more than his father, who, like my father, tended to be frivolous. His mother, like mine, was a flirt. This is only background information which may explain why I have an affinity for Milosz, and the more interesting parts should occur much later in the book. I have always felt that my life could have been enriched somewhat if I had known someone like Milosz, but I never ran into anyone like him, and, at this stage, I probably never will. I find nearly everyone in the U.S. shallow and superficial, and my own generation tends to be narcissistic. Generally, I have not encountered people who have had many thoughts beyond their careers, hobbies, social status, material acquisitions or family activities. Even academics and intellectuals seem to set very low standards here, and I have not found any solace within that group. You have to look to Europe or elsewhere to find adults with a grasp of human history.

In this vein, it is rather depressing to observe the current political attempts in the U.S. to reform the tax system. If you examine the rhetoric, it's hard to see any underlying ideas, but, as has been the case since the 1980's, the Republicans, exactly in accordance with the work of Thomas Piketty, are attempting to distribute more wealth to the rich. There is little or no concern about the long-term consequences of the legislation, and I think that Congress and the president may as well be a group of chimpanzees. I have also been reflecting on this article about how only thirty-six percent of Americans know where North Korea is located. It is no coincidence that actual Americans elected the current members of Congress and the president, and I continue to ponder why, exactly, people think democracy is such a good idea. Fortunately, there are a few intelligent, informed people in the world, and I remain somewhat more optimistic when I think about CSER, the organization which is nicely explained in this video. Unsurprisingly, CSER is not headquartered in the U.S.

My mouse-elimination campaign has been more time consuming than in most years. I've made several trips to the roof and cut a hole in a wall in order to access one of their entry points (which was created by poor carpentry a few years ago). In this round I have blocked two definite entry points and several other potential ones. However, they may still be gaining access from somewhere, though I can't be sure yet because I don't know exactly how many were in the house at their peak. At this stage I have begun to escort all caught mice to Cobble Road, about three miles away, where they can live out their days with their kin near the edge of a quarry. Whether or not I eliminate all of their existing points of entry, they should all soon be out of the house for the winter. Deer mice prefer to live outdoors during the warmer months, and it may take them several generations to find any entries to the house once the current invaders are gone. I think that with two warm winters in a row there may currently be a local mouse population explosion, which has caused the mice to seek new nesting areas nearby as the mouse ghetto expanded.

I also seem to be spending increasing amounts of time on equipment care as my property maintenance arsenal grows. Prior to moving here, we had only an electric lawnmower and an electric string trimmer. I now have all-gasoline equipment, including a lawn tractor, a lawnmower, a string trimmer, a regular chainsaw, a pole chainsaw, a backpack leaf blower, a snow blower and a power washer. These all require maintenance, some annually. And I have to install my snow tires before we get a heavy snow.

I hope to take up less mundane topics on my next post.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Diary

I've decided that the reason why I'm so picky about what I read is that the authors available, no matter how touted they may be, tend to be deficient in one of several areas that are of importance to me. Not only must they be eloquent, but their writing must also be informative and thoughtful, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. In fiction, my main obstacle is usually related to the author's limited life experience, which, even when coupled with eloquence and thoughtfulness, is not enough to make their writing compelling to me. This problem comes up with career novelists whose novels seem contrived as soon as they move out of their comfort zone, and their comfort zone itself may be too narrow to sustain my interest. To repeat the example, I think D.H. Lawrence is pretty good in his novels set in England, because that is what he knew best, and when he pushed himself to write about other places in which he lived later in life, some of his original authenticity and purpose evaporated. Or, in the case of Proust, he remained in his comfort zone in all of his novels, and I eventually found his writing claustrophobic, because he seemed to repeat the same point of view with an inadequate amount of reflection on his subject. I am not finished with evaluating Krasznahorkai, but even though I think he has an effective style and a psychological acuity stronger than that of most writers, there is a sameness in bleakness and absurdity that seems to follow him from one book to the next. In his case, though he is expressing a particular vision effectively, I question whether that is all there is to it and suspect that it is not, because there is a conspicuous absence of certain kinds of characters in his work. I don't know how much more of him I'll read, but he seems to obsess about gloomy, abject life in rural Hungary and then, by living elsewhere – Berlin, New York City or Kyoto – only manages to come up with variations of the same theme, possibly without making use of the cultural contrasts available to him.

When it comes to nonfiction, the specificity of the subject matter adds another dimension to whether or not I'll like a book. Obviously, if it is technical or scientific, one would not expect it to be emotionally satisfying, but eloquence and thoughtfulness can still add to its value beyond its informativeness. Thus, I preferred books by E.O. Wilson and Jared Diamond to books by Daniel Kahneman and Robert Sapolsky, because they are more expansive about the implications of their work. In Wilson's case there is also a palpable passion for protecting the biosphere. In nonfiction, narrowness of research often has an effect roughly comparable to narrowness of experience in a novelist. Doing research in a narrow field can result in ideas that seem to have limited applicability, while an author of fiction who has led a circumscribed life in a homogeneous environment is unlikely to have much of value to say about the broad conditions of the world in which we live.

One kind of nonfiction in which I've had mixed results is biography. I've read seven biographies of George Eliot and found four of them bad, one fair and two good. Of the two good ones, Frederick R. Karl's was by far the most thorough, but it exhibited the qualities cultivated by a professional biographer, and I sensed that he had limited interest in his subject, which, for me, gave the book a dutiful, mechanical quality. The other good one, by Rosemary Ashton, I thought, did a better job capturing the spirit of George Eliot, and it must have helped that she had a strong identification with her subject. There is a general haphazard element to biographies exacerbated by the fact that they require both good subjects and good authors. For me, there are hardly any people whom I think merit a biography, and that limits the field considerably. G.H. Lewes, D.H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka were interesting, but not extremely so. The lives of most literary figures aren't spectacular, but there is always an academic somewhere to write a book about any one of them. Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and Ludwig Wittgenstein strike me as more interesting than most. However, even a good biographical subject can be ruined when placed in the hands of the wrong biographer. My next reading assignment is a new biography of Czeslaw Milosz. To say that he led an interesting life would be an understatement, but I can't be sure that the author will be able to capture his essence in a manner that I'll find satisfactory.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Diary

I had been planning to write about The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, but after thumbing through it decided that a careful reading is not worth the time. It is one of the first books written by an American academic which criticizes American culture in a broad swath. However, it was published in 1899, and practically everything in it is either unsupported by actual research or applies primarily to the Gilded Age in which he lived. While many of his descriptions of wealthy Americans still hold up if one makes adjustments for the passage of time, he overreaches and unconvincingly attempts to apply his theory to multiple cultures over long periods. Anthropology, sociology and psychology were in their infancy when he wrote, and many of his claims would not pass muster now in academic circles; in fact, Veblen's academic reputation was quite shaky while he was alive, not because he lacked the credentials, but because he was a nonconformist.

Veblen's interest to me arose through the terms and concepts that he popularized in the titles of some of the chapters of this book: "Pecuniary Emulation," "Conspicuous Leisure," "Conspicuous Consumption," "Pecuniary Canons of Taste," etc. I think conspicuous consumption is still one of the hallmarks of American society, but the way it manifests itself now isn't exactly the same as in 1899. For one thing, in relative terms, the rich in those days were richer than most of the rich today, and, for another, as an emerging economic power, the standards of behavior for the rich were undefined, and there was a tendency to copy wealthy Europeans, particularly the English. Because of changes in social norms since 1899, I don't think Veblen's precise model of the idle rich is currently in vogue among the wealthy. You can see vestiges of it in the Rockefellers, Kennedys and Roosevelts, but it has mostly died. Quite possibly, because of competition, there is more of a sense now among America's wealthy that they can never have enough money. More importantly, Americans have always liked amassing fortunes, and since American culture has to some extent come to dominate the world's imagination, those who are wealthy feel empowered to behave according to their own preferences. Rich people have a new boutique of wealth-appropriate behavior from which to choose. At the low end you have people like the Trumps, who revel in gilt interiors, steaks and daily golf; in the middle you have the Koch brothers, who think that their conservative views are the right ones for the country: they attempt to steer the political system their way; at the high end you have Bill Gates, who has become a major philanthropist, perhaps for lack of a better idea of how to spend the remainder of his life. Warren Buffett simply loves business for its own sake, and he continues to enlarge one of the largest fortunes in the world without demonstrating much interest in spending it or showing off. Buffett is a good indication of the changes since Veblen, in that making lots of money is acceptable as long as you're ethical about it and eventually give it all away. There are also younger billionaires in the tech industries who claim to want to use their wealth to make the world a better place; since they tend not to have the knowledge or insight to do that, it remains to be seen whether they will be able to succeed.

I was exposed to conspicuous consumption growing up in the late 1950's and early 1960's in a suburb of New York City. The nouveaux riches in the the U.S. had a heyday after World War II. Golf was extremely popular among the wealthy, and some of the houses in my town were in the Tudor style. The wealthier people went skiing every winter and sent their children to camp during the summer. Some of my friends and acquaintances went to prep schools during high school, probably more for their status value than for their educational value.

These days, the wealthy seem to spend their money on multiple high-end residences, with some in exotic locations, along with the associated interior decoration, wine connoisseurship, etc. Some of them are interested in high-end art, but they tend to focus on its market value rather than its aesthetic characteristics. Since they no longer have to put on an appearance of idleness, they are freed up to continue working, and one might conclude that high-income work and higher net worth have come to replace the aura of leisure as the end goal of the wealthy. Money itself has taken on so much importance that there is nothing that supersedes it. This subject could be interesting for further exploration in an anthropological or sociological context, but its scope is well beyond the resources that were available to Veblen at the time.

Friday, November 10, 2017

The Last Wolf

The third and last story in the László Krasznahorkai collection that I've been reading is quite different from the others but continues on the same theme. It was first published in 2009 and is stylistically postmodern, consisting of one long run-on sentence, in which a failed German philosophy professor sitting at an empty bar in Berlin recounts a story to the Hungarian bartender regarding an assignment he had received to write an article. Having little income, he had accepted an offer from an obscure foundation that had requested him to visit a remote region in Spain and describe the circumstances of the death of the last wolf to be found there. All of his expenses were covered, including a driver and a translator. The narrative is dotted with elements of farce, absurdity and despair. The bartender barely pays attention to him and at one point falls asleep. His translator in Spain considers him an idiot. The professor, who is the narrator describing himself in the third person, exhibits a mental state that can hardly be called upbeat:

...how could he describe what so weighed him down, how could he explain how long ago he had given up the idea of thought, the point at which he first understood the way things were and knew that any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum, to the end of time...

As the story unfolds, there is confusion about the actual moment and location of the death of the last wolf. Finally it is determined that the remaining pack of wolves had been hunted by a lobero, or wolf-hunter, until there were only two wolves left, a young male and female. As in the other stories, the lobero becomes a wolf-sympathizer and begins protecting them from farmers rather than hunting them. However, the female wolf, which became pregnant and was consequently slowed down, was hit by a car and died. The male wolf was not seen for some time and was thought to have fled to Portugal, but was later found and shot, never having left the area. The narrator's guide, José Miguel, a local warden, says that a shepherd, Alexandro, came across the last wolf and shot it. At the end, José Miguel contritely attempts to confess something in private to the professor, but he is rebuffed: perhaps he was the driver who hit the female wolf, perhaps he was the one who shot the last wolf, or perhaps it was something else. Krasznahorkai leaves this open to interpretation, and, as in other writings of his that I've read, he seems to prefer an element of uncertainty in his stories. The narrator never writes the article and continues to meditate on the events. Perhaps this is his report.

Unlike the "Herman" stories, The Last Wolf displays sympathy for the hunted animals by several characters, including the lobero, José Miguel and the translator. The nature of the narrator's sympathy is ambiguous, though he is deeply affected and becomes anxious. There is a greater sense than in the other stories of the injustice associated with man's alteration of the environment to suit his preferences, but Krasznahorkai doesn't clearly evoke an environmentalist's sentiment. The last two wolves are portrayed in a heroic, noble and tragic light. Possibly, besides the wildlife motif, Krasznahorkai is highlighting the absurd situation in which a writer is hired as a journalist under the auspices of a literary organization. No doubt he has been in this situation himself: he may be commenting on the absurdity of the expectations that are placed on artists, or perhaps this is an allegory about the diminished role of the artist in the modern world. Since the narrator seems to identify with the last wolf, artists, one might say, are being driven to extinction. At first I wasn't sure whether I would appreciate Krasznahorkai's chosen style, but I found the narrative very well-executed and satisfying in the end. Because the three stories are included in the same volume, it is tempting to think of them as variations on a theme, in which the author experiments with a subject in much the same manner that a composer might. The style of this one evokes a visceral feeling of stream-of-consciousness to capture the state of mind of the narrator, whereas the other two are more conventional "tales." Although I don't think I'll ever like short stories as much as novels, Krasznahorkai is such a good writer that anything written by him is worth a try. The Last Wolf is easily one of the best short stories I've ever read. If you want to read Krasznahorkai without committing much time, this would be a good choice, and if you like short stories, I doubt you'll find one much better than this.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Herman the Game Warden/The Death of a Craft

I'm reading a very small volume of short stories by László Krasznahorkai. Two of the stories are about Herman, a game warden in a rural Hungarian town. In the first story, Herman the Game Warden, prior to his imminent retirement he is assigned to remove unwanted predators from an area known as the Remete woods. He goes about the job methodically, having special traps made by a local blacksmith and using esoteric trapping techniques known only to experts such as himself. He easily captures, kills and disposes of feral cats, wild dogs, foxes and other species that have been deemed inappropriate by the authorities. Then suddenly he has a change of heart, almost a religious conversion, that causes him to believe that he should not be killing these animals. Rather, he decides, the townspeople are the problem. He stops trapping animals and instead begins setting up traps in town, which injure the residents, who subsequently search for the culprit. Eventually they find him, and Herman is shot. In the second story, The Death of a Craft, the same basic story is retold, with some of the facts changed, from the point of view of a sybaritic group of officers and their girlfriends who have arrived in town to visit a dying mother and engage in a short winter excursion to stifle their boredom. When the visitors learn about Herman, they become engrossed in his capture and join search parties in his pursuit. The ending of this version is different, with Herman leaving a trap near the altar of the local cathedral and then disappearing:

The disquieting question, whether "Herman" had intended the trap for those approaching the altar or perhaps for Christ descending from the cross, was to remain unanswered, because the demon, the ever tormenting, absent antagonist to our heroic struggles, had most likely left town early that morning, never to be heard of again.

These two stories were first published in 1986, early in Krasznahorkai's career, and, as short stories, are less complex than his better-known works. Herman the Game Warden seems heavily influenced by Kafka, with a description of a specific kind of insanity and a narrative with a claustrophobic focus on one person's obsessions. I don't find it particularly interesting and see it as an early experiment in writing, though it does show Krasznahorkai's interest in the macabre and his respect for Kafka. The Death of a Craft is of greater interest to me and demonstrates some of Krasznahorkai's skills. As in his longer works, it shows how he can shift gears and take a completely different perspective on a series of events. This allows him to produce richer fictional environments, because each character is seen to inhabit a different reality. In ordinary fiction, there is usually a presumed collective reality that the characters agree on, but this is not the case with Krasznahorkai, and it enables him to convey a complex realism with overlapping perspectives that don't fully converge. In The Death of a Craft, you get numinous hints of how Herman perceives the world, along with the perspectives of scared townspeople and some visiting adventurers.

In a sentence-by-sentence comparison between Krasznahorkai and Kafka, it is difficult to reach a conclusion regarding quality, since they are writing, respectively, in Hungarian and German, and I am reading English translations. Moreover, in this volume, Krasznahorkai has two different translators. My sense is that George Szirtes is one of the best translators of Hungarian into English, and I'm not so sure about the other, John Bakti. In the translations I've read of Kafka, his writing always seems extraordinarily precise compared to most writers, and I'm not confident that Krasznahorkai reaches that level. In any case, I consider Krasznahorkai the better writer of the two, because his use of multiple perspectives is beyond the scope of Kafka. Kafka himself knew that there was something seriously wrong with his work, probably because he recognized that it was constrained by the kind of mental illness that precipitated it. Krasznahorkai may also have some psychological baggage, but, if he does, it is less debilitating to him than is the case with Kafka.

The main problem that I have with Krasznahorkai so far is that, in what I've read, he is confined to rural Hungary and poorly-educated people. His use of multiple perspectives could be put to better use in a more-developed country with a better-educated population, which would be much more challenging but could possibly produce more spectacular results. However, as I've said, no writer is omniscient, and Krasznahorkai, like any writer, is limited by his background.

The reason why I appreciate the use of multiple perspectives is that it is uncommon now in a time when it is more relevant than ever. In a politically polarized era, it would be useful if people were more aware of how their worldviews differed from those of others. In many American towns there are people living right next door to each other who have completely incompatible perspectives. One household may consist of liberal atheists who support economic equality and the protection of the environment, while detesting Donald Trump; their neighbors may be conservative Christians who attend church regularly, believe in American exceptionalism and love Donald Trump. These two households may have nothing in common, but you would never know it from the appearance and proximity of their houses. Furthermore, there are several factions, including corporations, special interest groups, political parties, religious organizations and the Russian government, which have focused specifically on manipulating people's worldviews to serve their interests; unity of thought is being undermined constantly today. I think it would be beyond the capability of most writers to write a novel that realistically portrays both liberals and conservatives on their own terms, without taking sides, though such a book could be original, insightful and sardonic if a talented enough writer were around to execute it. I am often amused by disparities in outlook when I watch PBS NewsHour, and Judy Woodruff routinely acts flummoxed by the latest random shooting, terrorist attack or political imbroglio, even when it takes little imagination to sense why someone might do something that you wouldn't. The news media pretend that there is one narrative that fits everything, but, if there is, they certainly haven't found it. You don't have to dig very deeply to see that the world is far more complex than we are led to believe.

There is one more story in this book, and I'll write about it later.