Gunter Grass
It would be a gross derelection of duty not to link to Daniele Johnson's two Open letters to Gunter Grass.An Open Letter to Gunter GrassAn open Letter to Gunter Grass Part II::I won't be the only one to go over what Grass I have read. Two things came to mind before getting to the bottom of the first page of the first letter: remembering listening to a radio adaptation of The Tin Drum, which was impossible to listen to in one sitting because of the screeching (silent in the novel, which is novel and ironic); and (as Johnson eventually does) thinking of Mann. Darran Anderson {2} in Literary Kicks did a long post on Gunter grass and The Tin Drum on 9 April 2003, which quite a few people might find a good way to revise this.
Never before had a country needed someone as much as Germany needed Gunter Grass. You could, if you were feeling especially pretentious, go so far as to say if Gunter Grass had not existed it would be necessary to invent him.
I'll put a few links to other Grass here:
Not an open letter by Elizabeth Kiem, 22 August 2006, Morning News
Briefing: has Gunter Grass been discredited? by Roger Boyles, Berlin correspondent
Who can be saved? Daniel Silliman, Clayton Daily News, 16 August 2006Gunter grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compassJohn Irving, Guardian 9 August 2006John Berger: The denial of true reflection Guardian, Monday August 21, 2006Christopher Hitchens: Snake in the Grass, Slate 22 August 2006Eric Rentschler's review of Volker Schlöndorff's filmBookRags Book Notes on The Tin Drum." 20 August 2006study guide with chapter substantial chapter summariesExcerpt from The Tin Drum from Nobelprize.org
Beginnings
People endlessly write offering the advice that you must never start a novel with a description of the weather. I think this might be a ploy to make sure you don't get a better weather description than the one in one of their imminent concoctions!
What
better way to begin? The Man Without Qualities is often criticised for this. What greater analogo-metaphor? The meeting of fronts warm and cold; occluded fronts; cloud formation: cirrus, cirro-stratus, cumuls, cumulo-nimbus; changes of wind direction and speed; winds at different altitudes criss-crossing each other to create confusion in the mind of the observer; rain; snow; humidity; temperature.
One knows a film version would start with the camera angled up on the sky, slowly cranking down onto the city below, and finally zoom in on individuals.
There was a depression over the atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, towards an area of high pressure over Russia, and still showed no tendancy to move northwards around it. The isotherms and isotheres were fulfilling their functions. The atmospheric temperature was in proper relation to the average annual temperature, the temperature of the coldest as well as the hottest month, and the a-periodic monthly variation in temperature. The rising and setting of the sun and of the moon, the phases of the moon, Venus and Saturn's rings, and many other important phenomena, were in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The vapour in the air was at its lowest. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty satisfactorily, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.
The Man Without Qualities, Wilkins and Kaiser trans., 1952
To get it one must include the first four paragraphs as the beginning. This man was an engineer and scientist by training, don't forget.
Compare this to The Magic Mountain:
An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit.
Lowe-porter trans. Martin abnd Secker, 1928.
It seems descriptions of the countryside and journeys are perfectly acceptable (especially from train windows) but not weather!
One thing leads to another
Read Niall Ferguson last week on plastic pollution in the sea, with his reference to the
tragedy of commons. He described it thus:
The tragedy is that an area of open pasture will tend to be depleted and eventually destroyed if the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, while the costs of exploitation (what economists call the 'negative externalities') are shared.
Not a new idea:
For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. (Aristotle: Politics, 1261b34)
Something is leading me to comparing tragedy in this sense (widely applicable and broad meaning) to tragedy which is the font of much literature. Nothing coming at the moment. The reason for this is my abysmal lack of knowledge of the classics. Who is worst off? Me with some understanding of philosophy and science and a smatttering of the best fiction or the person who has only literature to refer to?
This by
David Brin says something to me but I 'm not sure quite what yet.
Other mentions:
The Tragedy of the Commons (links)
The Tragedy of the Commons (MeatballWki)
The Prisoner's Dilemma (Stanford U. Encycl.)
'Lucky-duckies' and the Tragedy of the Commons (from Books & Culture)
A simpler way to tackle this would be to ask what literature includes mention of the tragedy of the commons in some form or another. I can't answer that question (see above).
Murray Bookchin - and some thoughts on science writing
Wiki: Murray Bookchin 14 January 1921 - 20 July 2006 Interview with Murray Bookchin Murray Bookchin's writing e.g. Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
Municipal Dreams: A Social Ecological Critique of Bookchin's politics - - John Clark Wiki: Deep Ecology I never read this guy before but know his name from other books. Thought I would put a few links to him here for ease of retrieval, and in case someone else might be curious.The essential argument seems to be with the deep ecologists. Everybody should have an inclinging about this. Know the difference between communtarianism and communalism?
Well of course people who spend their whole lives reading novels to the exclusion of everything else can't think along those sorts of lines. They want plot and more plot, character and better charactisation, style, the phrase just, another novel by the same writer. Many novels are full of ideas, too. But what ideas? Is society reflected in the novel? Do novel readers care? Do they prefer to be submerged in a fictional world whether it reflects reality or not? In a life such as Bookchin's, there is the same sort of change and persistence to be found in the characters in a novel. For the reader, the same sort of questions that might arise out of a character in a novel turning away from his beliefs, changing his philosophy, can be asked of a man like Bookchin. Why did he turn away from anarchism? Is Crime and Punishment more instructive than the history of anarchism or libertarianism?
::
One thing that occured today (10 Aug) was simply about clarity of writing. Anywhere. Scientists vs. Novelists? Well you can't exactly do that can you? But you can say there are plenty of novelists who are pretty hard work and quite a few scientists or science writers who are an absolute pleasure to read. Something else too: while some litbloggers seem to be tackling the canon with a sense or what could be termed existential urgency, they are not writing about science books they know they must or ought to read.
I am currently re-reading with much greater attention than the first time, John Gribbin's, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (Corgi,'84), first published by Wildwood House 1984. He is renowned for good science writing. A book on quantum mechanics is the ultimate test for the non-science reader! I want you lit. folk who keep on saying you must read some science to get this book and read it for pleasure. Novels - any good writing: essays, short-stories,plays, jounralism - give you that special frissant and so can a book like this because it deals with the spectacular genius of real people.
I firmly expect many who take my advice on this book choice to say they couldn't sustain it or found there was a barrier to understanding. The way I look at it is that you will not understand everything about such an abstruse subject as quantum mechanics anyway but you should be getting the same sorts of reactions and thoughts as from a good novel because of the quality of the writing and the desciption of how clever people make discoveries. Can't put it plainer than that.
