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Down and Out with George Orwell

2012-02-10T12:06:00.003-05:00

As I have continued my reading of early 20th century British authors, I've moved on from Evelyn Waugh to George Orwell, and from satirical fictions to very down to earth memoirs and essays. One thing Waugh and Orwell have in common is mastery of English. Orwell's style, however, is much crisper and more modern. There are no frills or self-conscious embellishments. It is immediately apparent why

Yossarian Slept Here

2012-02-04T11:48:00.001-05:00

I took a few days off from my reading of early 20th century Brits to read Erica Heller's memoir of life growing up as Joseph Heller's daughter: Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22. I'd read a couple of reviews that made the book sound interesting, and when I saw it at the library, I figured "why not?" -- and it does fit in with my

The World According to Waugh

2012-01-23T13:14:00.004-05:00

My reading continues apace. I've just completed two early Evelyn Waugh novels, Decline and Fall and Handful of Dust. I last read both of these for a course in modern fiction I took as an undergraduate English major back in the mid 1960s, and my memory was pretty foggy on all but a few details, so my experience this time was almost that of a first reading. But as I read I did begin to remember why

Crome Yellow

2012-01-14T13:00:00.001-05:00

I was a huge fan of Aldoux Huxley when I was in high school. Of course, the first of his books I read was Brave New World. I thought of it as the flip side of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and where I found Orwell somewhat depressing, Huxley's vision of the future struck a chord. (It turns out they were both prophetic, but that's material for another post.) After reading BNW I went on to other

Children of the Sun

2012-01-10T15:50:00.004-05:00

I finally finished reading Martin Green's Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918, in which he examines the emergence and eventual dominance of a certain temperament among the young men (and a few women) who came of age just after the first World War. His thesis, which he demonstrates at considerable length and depth, is that this generation rebelled against the

Welcoming the New Year: 2012

2012-01-03T09:05:00.001-05:00

I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that this will be a big year for me. In this first full year of retirement, I'm hoping to begin feeling more retired and less like I'm on permanent vacation. I don't yet know what that means, but I've heard that most others who retire also have a period of adjustment. Being productive in retirement is different from being productive at work, where

Reading in 2011

2011-12-31T12:50:00.001-05:00

I can see that in retirement this blog is turning into a reading journal, which is fine. Reading has always been my main vocation. Now two of my favorite pastimes are reading and playing my guitars. However, of late, guitar playing seems to have plateaued. I probably need the stimulation of playing with friends to get me moving in a more ambitious direction. In relative isolation I think I've

Boxing Days: Summing Up

2011-12-30T12:30:00.001-05:00

This year Boxing Day was a genuine holiday in the U.S., but only because Christmas Day was on a Sunday, so Monday was officially a holiday for all federal workers and others who would normally have a Christmas holiday. Many others, I presume, were at work as usual, although I noticed while I was out walking last Monday that the crews working on our condo's massive water sealing project had the

Calm of Mind, All Fashion Spent

2011-12-16T12:52:00.004-05:00

I've never been accused of following fashion, especially in the way I dress. My approach has always been to blend in as much as possible while remaining comfortable. This probably began when I was a child. My mother used to make most of my shirts. She would have made the pants too, but they were a little beyond her skill level. It wasn't that she couldn't sew well. She actually did a pretty good

"Publishing" in the Electronic Digital Void

2011-12-14T10:53:00.003-05:00

As an online author, I have been guided, for better or worse, by two somewhat contradictory notions of publication. One is derived from a French critic I used to read and admire quite a lot, Roland Barthes, who once suggested that we write for the pleasure of reading ourselves. And I would have to agree that one of my early pleasures as a young writer was seeing something I'd written published.

The Great War and English Literary Culture

2011-12-13T11:58:00.004-05:00

It's probably the approaching centennial, but something seems once again to be focusing cultural attention on World War I. My own recent interest, I suspect, has something to do with looking backward, which I seem to be doing more of these days. As I have already mentioned in previous comments about my current reading program, I have developed a rather serious fascination with the first half of

Sense of an Ending

2011-12-10T12:30:00.002-05:00

As I have remarked previously, I seldom read current or contemporary fiction. I'm not sure why this is, except that I have only a limited amount of time and attention, and such as I have I seem to have given over to a fairly serious study of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. But from time to time something will catch my attention, e.g., William Boyd's Any Human Heart and

Science and Religion, or Why I Still Like Christmas

2011-12-08T11:52:00.001-05:00

I'm a great follower of science programs on television: programs like Nova, especially those about the cosmos and the universe, and life on earth. I'm no longer much of a church goer, and I give little thought to religion in any but the most general sense, but I'm still interested in those big questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What's the meaning of life? I haven't a clue so far as

Deep Future: Further Thoughts

2011-11-29T11:30:00.004-05:00

The scale of time that Curt Stager considers in Deep Future, while it remains essentially human, in that he focuses primarily on the time that human-like primates have inhabited the earth, is nevertheless vast in comparison to any individual life. Even allowing that a normal life span is now approaching 100 years, that is nevertheless a relatively brief moment in the history of the planet, or

Enemies of Promise: Then and Now

2011-11-19T12:22:00.003-05:00

Although in Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly never puts it exactly in these words, the greatest enemy of promise is death, and after death, probably birth. At birth we all (or most of us) have promise, great expectations, optimism backed by nothing more than a blank slate and a fresh start. With a little luck we soon begin to show those early signs of talent that Connolly refers to, but much is

Deep Future

2011-11-10T12:00:00.002-05:00

Curt Stager's Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth is one of those good news/bad news sort of books. Taking the long view he observes that the good news is human generated global warming has most likely already prevented the next ice age, which would not be due for another 50,000 years or so anyway. The bad news is that if we don't do something to bring a halt to the carbon

Random Thoughts on My Reading Program

2011-11-07T11:43:00.001-05:00

I've begun a more or less disciplined program of reading books I've long known about but never actually read. I was prompted to do this while reading Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a very thoughtful essay on reading and writing (and book collecting). McMurtry mentions a number of books that I have always intended to read, and I decided I should go about this in a more

Reading: My Life-Long Vocation

2011-10-31T11:44:00.002-04:00

This is really the second part of my previous post about staying in school too long. When I first went off to college, I didn't really go very far. My initial plan was to become an architect, something I'd been encouraged to do while still in what we used to call junior high school. I enrolled in the local community college, what we then referred to as a junior college, and began taking the first

Too Long in School

2011-10-28T10:26:00.002-04:00

The title of this post alludes to something Larry McMurtry says in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. McMurtry remarks that he was "of the generation of American writers that stayed in school too long." His comment resonated with me not so much because I am a writer of any sort (although I have spent a good deal of my life scribbling in one way or another to earn a living), but because I suspect

House of Leaves: Finally Finished

2011-10-23T11:35:00.003-04:00

A few years ago I came across a reference to this strange book by Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves, about a photo journalist and his family who move into a mysterious house in Virginia that seems to have these nearly infinite spaces behind walls and closet doors. But the book is not just about the house; it's about a movie, The Navidson Record, that the photo journalist made about these

Google Wallet Works

2011-10-01T17:33:00.005-04:00

Here I go again. When my HTC Hero was starting to show its age, I decided it was time to look into replacing that first generation Android phone with something more up to date. I spent a few days looking at the various options, originally assuming I would upgrade to the HTC Evo, or perhaps switch to the Motorola Photon, but then Sprint offered me a deal I could hardly refuse on Google's Samsung

Television: Then and Now

2011-09-28T11:09:00.002-04:00

I still remember our first television. It must have been sometime early in the 1950s. San Antonio had two stations broadcasting by 1950, WOAI (primarily NBC) and KENS (primarily CBS). Later, around 1957, KONO (which became KSAT) signed on as an ABC affiliate. Although stations had network affiliations, they tended to broadcast a wide range of programs from other available networks and sources.

On Reading: More Random Thoughts

2011-09-26T12:14:00.002-04:00

As September draws to a close, I feel a mild compulsion to record something about my reading over the last few weeks. After finishing Bellow's Letters, I picked up a copy of Eileen Simpson's Poets in their Youth, which Bellow commented on, and which we happened to have a copy of in our much too extensive library. I've been reading this and catching up on back issues of TLS and the most recent

Letters

2011-08-19T10:28:00.002-04:00

I wasn't sure I would read the recent edition of Saul Bellow's Letters edited by Benjamin Taylor, but I saw it at the local library the last time I was there and decided to check it out. (That's what I like most about public libraries: you can read the books you don't want to buy.) Letters fall into the larger category of biography, autobiography, memoirs, and personal essays and journals that

Entropy Update

2011-07-29T13:50:00.004-04:00

I was thinking about entropy again, and I realized that I hadn't posted anything about this topic since November, 2006. It's not that I'm getting more optimistic, quite the contrary, I'm more resigned than ever to the inevitable. First, a reminder: what is entropy? There are several definitions. For example, in classical thermodynamics, entropy is the amount of energy wasted in heat when energy