Thursday, June 30, 2005

More goodies !



The Diaries of Franz Kafka

This site came via Matt

who had a surprise for me:

Barbellionblog

Can't find my ragged Peguin/Pelican paperback to check if this is real or a spoof. This guy moved me regardless of what th critics did or didn't say: sad end, quite a bit of a genius. Read him about 10 years after graduating in biology: inspiring and a shame it had not been when still a student. At that time I was straight-jacketed into science when in my heart I wanted to roam free, intellectually. If I had been educated in the States it might have been a different story: short-courses on anything you fancy.

In this country rarely do tertiary science students come out with anything but a technical education, which is a great shame. It was true in the 50 and 60s and has become increasing true as biologists, for example, come out with 2:1s in genetic engineering! They will probably not even have done any evolutionary theory beyond A level. How can this be possible? What are they being trained for except to be technicians. What is the point, say, of doing genetics without grasping the relevance of evolution to the the immune system.

The odd few science undergraduates with natural breath of interest and reading come out as they ought with a something like a liberal education: not from courses they took, but their own efforts. Their peers in the arts suffer the same deficit in science, philosophy of science, history of technology, et al. They at least have the means to try to understand the world about them having been better trained (hopefully!) to research and write good essays.

My college did make an attempt to give us something more by a compulsory 2 hour slot a week in non-science: I chose Marxism [duty, not inclination...] and was dumbfounded, as were the rest of fellow science students in my group, by beardy-type reading out great tracts from Das Kapital, which presumably he assumed we understood and were, therefore, in a position to discuss! We mostly listened - occasionally turning to each other with rue smiles and grimaces - and departed, none the wiser, in complete silence. I never picked up any books on Marx outside this course. Though, later, when I was visting Norwich catherdral, of all places there was an interpretation display which said Darwin, Marx and Freud where the three pillars, so I set out to to learn a bit more abut Marx within this framework.



Work in progress








Found this while gardening the other day. Fixated, since, on the guy who worked this then threw it aside because the end broke off. Trying to think of the word which sums up one's excitement at such a personal, unexpected discovery - but it won't come. I'm right there (well, if it's a stone, it's Stone Age..I'm not the expert) with the man who worked this with the, "He stood here where I'm standing" frisson. This will make the place where it was found always different and special. Hallowed ground comes to mind. I will be constantly on my guard for further evidence, while ostensibly pulling weeds and sifting stones. Its not just a veg patch any more.

My thought was that the inspiration to write (as per previous post) need not come from another set of writing, though in reality it usually does. Here, with a simple stone, I can go back to several ideas I had quite a few years ago when some kids burnt down a couple of 20 foot birch trees: the following year they regenerated as if they had been pollarded at ground level. I stood on what is in essence a plateau (a Second World War airfield was built here) looking to far horizon under a typical Norfolk sky (mostly sky with a sliver of ground at the bottom) and felt some sort of story emerging. Having made this rather uplifting discovery of an large, worked flint, something more has been added to my previous imaginings in a way that has gone over the threshold into 'write mode'.

And, not surpringly, coming to mind is William Golding! Quicky check of his oeuvre, to get some handy hints and tips....



Monday, June 27, 2005

Life and Art





This is in no way complete or free of typos: check and add to later.

{amended/ appended 28.6.05}


Reading this and that in blittworld, came to an oft thought: frequently more interested in the creative person's life and how he tries to create his words or paintings or photographs, {and the world he wants to have in which to do all these things [28.6.05] } than in the work itself. Wood's Lot mentioned Rilke and fragments. This gathered my attention, not because I know Rilke's works - admit freely and without embarassment his poetry is a closed book to me (so far), {though am learning slowly, piece-meal about who he was, how he thought and his mileau [28.6.05] } - but that to start with he took my interest simply because he had stayed and written in a place I, too, had visited. That was Ronda and The Spanish Trilogy {No idea if it is one of his good works because can't find a complete text by Googling! [28.6.05] } Trying to find out more about his stays in Ronda made me learn more about him as a person and a writer. { He lived for a month or so at a time for several years at a hotel there which retains his room as a museum of sorts which can be visited by appointment [28.6.05] } I was, still am, trying to find out why creative people flocked to Ronda, and instead simply learnt more, genrally, about the people themselves. Rilke's story is fascinating even if you never read or read and never understand his poetry. I am fascinated by the millieu and the creative processes or should one say stratega (-ums sounds better), neuroses and complusions of the writer.

I now know what it was that drew them to Ronda, but not especially from anything I read. It was because I went out into the country surrounding the town and saw what they probable saw from the back of a burro as intrepid Victorians tended to do. For example: a few miles down the road, the Cuevo de Pileta with its massive complex of tunnels and Gaudi-esque caverns with paintings supposedly going back 25,000 years, including an at least 18" long fish which looks vaguely reminiscent of a whale. A few days after visiting the caves it dawned on me that they lived most of those long winter days in total darkness (how else could they have made their fuel and oil last?) and that their wall drawing and painting was a reflection of this dark world, occasionally lit for necessity or ritual. Indeed, as my imagination ran riot, I saw them deliberately drawing, with light of course, in order to have something to comfort and entertain when they did light up on rare occasion during the day or night. One other thing: as many prisoners know, and which has a long and distinguished literature attached to it, it is the difficulty in keeping tab on the passing of the days or to know when it is night or day.

There is a lot more to the cave art and their creators than that. But this to illustrate how writers and artists need inspiration and often get it by walking about, coming across interesting things by chance which spur their imagination and will to create. Common to all humans, certainly, not just the greatest creative minds. To be human is to be creative to some degree or another. What is so surprising to those who find the creative urge so predominates their lives is that others who they know, or assume, must have some similar urges in them at some times, seem in the main to have it squashed out of them so easily by modern living. An occaisional visit to an art gallery or play is not the same as engaging oneself, and not half as fun. it doesn't have to be writing a novel or painting though. Iit could be designing the ultimate deck-chair, or a home book-case system that works like those basement picture holders which slide alng the ground on massive rails. Technology is a creative act.

Trying to write something and faltering before the end, I stopped writing the beginning of this piece, feeling I had lost where the final threads lay, only to switch on after a short nights sleep BBC Radio 4 to catch almost all of the Something Understood where there was much more erudite discussion of the creative process, which turned me back to my fragment: realising I had a long way to go in finding something new or original to say, but nonetheless happy that I, too, had thought through similar things and played with a few notions.

Then, opening the sunday paper, a review by John Carey of At Days' Close: A history of Night-time' by Roger Ekrich, in which Carey begins:

"Artificial light destroyed half of human reality. In the centuries before we learnt to banish darkness simply by pressing a switch, night-time developed a separate culture with its own beliefs, customs, rituals and fears...."

He mentions the use of the electric light coincided with Nietzsche's declaration: "God is dead!"

Although the early train of arty types probably didn't roll into Ronda specifically because of their interest in speleology, or Stone Age men - though the limesone experience is special - visiting another country, which happens to have a very different, long and well-established culture, is always a spur to new thinking.

They knew their
books and their books told them about the 700 years old Islamic Spain and
thinkers such as Maimonidies. They wanted to suck in the same air.

According to Wikipedia:

'The first complete English translation was "The Guide
for the Perplexed", by M. Friedlander, with Mr. Joseph Abrahams and Reverend H. Gollancz, in 1881'.

The educated people who came to Andalus in the 1890s
and early 1900s will have read it or commentaries on it { and of course were still very much theologically well-read knowledgeable }. It is post Origin of Species generation we are talking about.

Knowing a bit about Muslim Spain before setting foot on it, I then visited some of its artifacts. When clambering, semi-lost, up Rio Secos, find little orange groves at heights of 1000 metres, miles from the nearest village, and the neat little irrigation canals that seem to be lined with clay hard as rock, it is at this point, with some of the read facts already to hand, that the people who lived and died here and what their accomplishements were, exactly, came to life. Their magnificent architectural achievements do this for you too, but a simple water channel or two half way up a mountain did it as well.

As the old, but still serviceable, cliche goes: 'travel broadens the mind'. Even today, Andalucia is visited and loved by many because it is deemed to be somehow more interesting, more authentic, even if, and because, backward economically.

I have become a bit a topographically fixated myself on this area, for about a year: thinking the other day about what was so special about this newly visited set of rocky outcrops over those of my own country, which are pretty fine and were inspiring enough to the likes of Wordworth and Coleridge. Though of course they all did their European cultural tours, too.


.....

Returning to Rilke: the idea of fragments both in themselves - incompleteness (in life or art) is so tantalising - and as a part of the literary process, appeals to me. Although probably just a proclivity, it may be a reflection of both how my mind works as much as in the notion itself. I have already mentioned most of my writing and drawing or designing tends to accummulate - would be seen by the outsider - as fragments rather than wholes. Not even the greatest writer has no fragments. Their archives show this. Proust's has words and phrases on scraps, choice words being tried out for letters which were probably not sent and maybe used later in dialogues.

People can and do create in wholes. I tend to believe ( said several times in these posts) the fragmentary nature of much or most creativity does mirror the brain's working and is universal amongst writers and artists. Though novels and works of art do get finished, in the main the creative process on any one thing is often a patchwork of ideas over time and is in no way guaranteed of completion. Being facetious, we might define a novelist as not one who writes a novel but one who has written one. So all you budding writers can say "I'm writing a novel", but won't won't be novelists till finished, read by someone and/or published. Don't think of putting 'novelist' in your passsport till you've actually produced one, says this argument. Though you are on safer ground with 'essayist', because of its etymology.

From time to time searching files for a unfinished writing on a topic without knowing the file by name - my genus/species/variety naming system precludes the necessity for or losing texts in subfolders and makes for easier scanning - I open files along the way to the ones searched for and before arriving at them, open a few old ones to find myself continuing pieces which might have been started years before, often as if I had only left them yesterday. Coming across ten lines without an obvious ending - it might be three or four sentences with the final sentance incomplete - in the right 'writing mood', it often seems pretty easy to carry on the argument or dialogue as it had never been left. In a proper sense you are going through your fragments.







Lev Nussimbaum





Put a link to this character a few months ago - another one of those chance finds. Now there is a book by Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West.

The review by Philip Marsden in The Sunday Times gives pretty much the same sort of detail that I found Googling this, then unknown to me writer of Ali and Nino, which seems for the person with a orientalist bet, to be a must. I particularly like the story about Steinbeck visiting Positano 10 years after N. died there in pain and penury. He was told of "the Muslim who had come to the town to die"
(...shades of Aschenbach) and was "buried with his feet towards Mecca". As Marsden says: "Nobody told JS - because nobody knew - that the "Muslim" had once been a famous writer like himself, author of a great number of acclaimed books and one in particular, Ali and Nino, with all the ironic charm and poignancy of his own Cannery Row."

There is a link to an intro to LN's book at:

reading group guides





Saturday, June 11, 2005





Homer

"To speak about everything, to say everything, is the act of the silent man"








Monday, June 06, 2005

Two Cultures Revisited?



Many intellectuals or academics denigrate scientific discoveries and, by sneering implication and imprecation, the scientific paradigm, for one simple reason: dislike of the way reality is investigated by scientists. Their preferred method is philosophical. To posit an idea, necessarily simplified to be able to test, then having to prove or disprove it by a strict protocol - the scientific method - seems wrong or at least pointless to them. The sneering, if that is what it is, is similar to intelligent design (creationist) attacks on evolutionary theory. "You are crazy to think these results further our understand of ourselves" would be a reasonably summary of this type of weltmerz. They fail to preface their unscientific remarks with a necessary recognition: science does tend to break things down but it also systematises as philosophy did. Science has provided many of the analogies which novelists and artists use in their creative works. Novelists such as David Lodge frequently take on scientific ideas without the sneering ignorance.

The debate in a new group website Long Sunday http://long-sunday.net
- with a hint of obtuseness and smidgin of chuckly superiority - on the latest research reported at http://www.bbc.co.uk claiming to show sarcasm is modular qua brains, illustrates perfectly the sort of stance that the ignorant and or truculent non-scientist can take. "How can we possibly take this type of research seriously? I can find a quote from Shakespeare that will answer all the questions you may have about sarcasm and human life in three seconds". No doubt.

What is the great divide in this perennial attitude? Is this The Two Cultures Revisited? Not nowadays, surely? People read all sorts and think in all sorts of ways: philosophy, religion, literature and science. A much more holistic approach. There is not the compartmentalisation there used to be; there is more open-mindedness. The reason this seems to be so in much creative writing is academics and intellectuals are, de facto, seemingly in toto, and certainly ad nauseam, arguing a single case - through specific examples they find in their reading - for the superiority of their specialised subject's academic approach to life's problems - and thus the case for art over science.

It ought to be possible to take scientific research which studies people with brain damage - why not the sarcasmless? - and make use of it in an artistic or literary sense. Anyone who knows his canon - I don't but can look it up with the best of them - will find just taking the bare-bones of this latest neurophysiological finding about sarcasm and run with it in a constructive, less negative, more productive way, cn produce a variety of results.

Autism, which is mentioned in the BBC report of the Israeli scientists work on sarcasm, is a fascinating subject for anyone if they have imagination to grasp its significance. Rain Man covered the ground to an extent: though mostly from the savant angle. Have we been living amongst autists (not artists) all these years and not known it? I consider people who cannot talk about anything except their own obsessions and achievement to have something akin to autism. It must be a spectrum of mental disorder. If the artists and writers refuse to even listen to what I say because it does not fit into the narrow world view they were born with and learnt, they are suffering from a sort of deliberate, obtuse blindness, too. You know the sort of thing: you talk long and hard about some interesting discovery you have read about. They fall asleep. You then say," How's work? How’s the novel coming on? How’s the bank balance? How's the family?", they suddenly perk up, giving a long and boring dissertation/ analysis on every aspect of their lives in the last 24-48 hours, which will probably have little added value. The point is their inability to see this. Despite a few new situations they describe, there is nothing exceptionally startling new in their descriptions - metaphors, models, analogues - about what it means to be human. It will in essence be another species of spiritual vacuity mascara ding as intellect.

The same applies in large part to what many fondly believe is right and good: in art, music, literature, in the supposedly rigorous formal, academic thinking. A poem ,for example: difficult, perhaps incomprehensible to anyone but the poet - who happens to be flavour of the month, say - but due according to this type of academic or free thinking intellectual much thought and consideration.

Science is an easy target. There are many millions of genuinely inane, idiotic research projects to attack. In the main science is an integral part of what made for progress. Many arty intellectuals are even ignorant enough to fail to understand the import distinction between science and technology. They probably did no history of science courses. If they had done they will have understood that though science is not technology, they are inextricably intertwined, like hardware and software. This computer analogy is apt: hardware, a product of technology and science, is very different from software, which is based in logic. Hence the word ‘language’ for the various programming tools, which are not science but logic based.



Felibrige




Felibrige

Frederic Mistral: not a name I was familiar with. A friend said she was keen to visit this summer's 50th. anniversay of Felibrige in the Perigord: not a festival I knew anything about. Volunteering to look up some information on where and when, we struck up a conversation about culture. I suggested that we in the UK had retained less of the old traditions. Anyone who has been to France or Spain sees pretty quickly that the old ways are still celebrated grassroot.

In these places there is a richness and variety of culture we learn about and admire: perhaps one could use the word density. Being a biologist, the ecological / evolutionary analogies and metaphors spring to mind. Habitats. Ecological niches. In different regions different ways have evolved to the degree that a small village has a set of traditions which is absent from the next, ajoining one. Why this should be so in France, Spain and maybe Germany, say, but seemingly not in Britain is interesting. The point is there are a few cheese rolling and Morris Dancing rituals in some parts of the country, but these few scattered remnants - disjecti membra poetae (Horace) - are nothing in comparison to the great everday cultural richnesses of other European countries.

The homogenisation - British culture in the organic, bottom-up sense - is explained traditionally by the Enclosures Act: what amounted to forcible removal of the peasant from the land and his exodus into the factories. We would certainly been a different country if the man who ploughed his master's furrow and had a few pigs and a cow (while the wife did her spinning and weaving) of his own for the lean times when there was little work, had continued to have such 'freedom' up until the beginning of the 20 century.

What I am talking about it not that there is not a richness of culture in Britain but that it is historical, whereas the French, Spanish and Italians, for example, live their traditions in minute detail in the present, religious or no-religious. A white village in the Sierra de Nieves in Andalucia has a talcum powder throwing day - purity? - just as tomatoes are thrown about in Italy. All have roots in something significant and meaningful to the participants. They take time and effort to take part in annual festivals. And yet this does not produce espcially super-cultured (in the intellectual sense) peoples: they admire us for our few genius poets and playwrites more than we admire them for their buckets-full of painters and theologians.




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