Month: March 2009

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of physiognomy

It takes Montaigne 22 pages to bring physiognomy into Of physiognomy (pp. 964-992), but Socrates’ ugly mug looms over the entire essay.

M. uses the essay to stress his desire for natural virtue, for living within one’s nature, for allowing death in its time. Law and religion should “perfect and authorize” this virtue, but we should focus on that which “sustains itself without help.” To that end, he praises both Socrates’ plain-spoken style — “His mouth is full of nothing but carters, joiners, cobblers and masons” — and the lives of the peasants.

Peasants, M. tells us, don’t spend their days worrying about their end. They work, and they get old, and they die. It’s not so easy for us. Learning is a vice, bringing us anticipation and anxiety toward death. M. contrasts

I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour. Nature teaches him not to think about death except when he is dying. And then he has better grace about it than Aristotle, whom death oppresses doubly, both by itself and by such a long foreknowledge.

with

What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new defenses against natural mishaps, has imprinted in our fancy their magnitude and weight, more than the reasons and subtleties to protect us from them?

It’s a messed-up way of looking at things, to my modern eyes, because it portrays the peasants as animals, not people. But then, some of us do the same thing when we characterize poor people and goof on “Wal-Mart America,” so hey. He proposes a school of stupidity, so that we can learn how to stop worrying about death.

(Last week, when I was walking to my car at lunchtime, I passed a Hispanic guy who was working on the landscaping crew outside our office. We made way for each other on the sidewalk, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge each other as people. In my car, I thought about M.’s sentimental/animal take on peasants and the lead character’s remark in Synecdoche, New York: “There are billions of people in the world, and none of those people is an extra.” I wondered what his life was like, what he does with it, and what he saw and thought when we walked past each other.)

Death, M. writes, so close to the end of his book and his life, “is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die.”

In the middle of the essay, M. digresses from the subject of learning and readiness-to-death to discuss the civil war and plague that has racked his region. It seemed out of place to me, but shortly after, M. quotes a page-long passage from Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates addresses his judges in Athens. His unwillingness to argue with the judges, tacitly accepting their death sentence, contrasts with the civil war of M.’s time: the philosopher of the ages will let his city put him to death because his defense argument would overthrow the authority of the city itself. Better to trust the gods to put things straight.

It was difficult to keep the pieces of this essay in front of me. It fragments wildly. As I mentioned, M. doesn’t get to the subject of physiognomy until page 22 of this 28-page essay. When he does, I’m not sure what point he’s trying to make. On the one hand, he tells us, “There is nothing more likely than the conformity and relation of the body to the spirit.” On the other, the two most beautiful spirits he cites — Socrates and La Boetie — were ugly men. “The face,” he writes, “is a weak guarantee.”

However, he concludes Of physiognomy with a pair of anecdotes in which his life was threatened, but his kindly demeanor and honest words saved him. “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm.”

(Good news! You only have on more of these insane, rambling posts to go!)

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Go fish

Michael Lewis’s cogent writing and commentary on the subprime collapse and the attendant economic meltdown are in huge demand. I’m reading Liar’s Poker, his book about working at Salomon Brothers in the mid-’80s, at present. I’m just at the point where the market for mortgage bonds is blowing through the roof. Written in 1989, it’s scarily prescient.

This weekend, I also read Mr. Lewis’ new Vanity Fair article/travelogue on the financial collapse in Iceland. I enjoyed that plenty, even though it was vague on the chain of events in 2003 that led to Iceland’s push into the world financial market. Still, it combines a history of the financial explosion (after that moment) with some entertaining observations about Iceland and its insular natives:

A nation so tiny and homogeneous that everyone in it knows pretty much everyone else is so fundamentally different from what one thinks of when one hears the word “nation” that it almost requires a new classification. Really, it’s less a nation than one big extended family. For instance, most Icelanders are by default members of the Lutheran Church. If they want to stop being Lutherans they must write to the government and quit; on the other hand, if they fill out a form, they can start their own cult and receive a subsidy. Another example: the Reykjavík phone book lists everyone by his first name, as there are only about nine surnames in Iceland, and they are derived by prefixing the father’s name to “son” or “dottir.” It’s hard to see how this clarifies matters, as there seem to be only about nine first names in Iceland, too. But if you wish to reveal how little you know about Iceland, you need merely refer to someone named Siggor Sigfusson as “Mr. Sigfusson,” or Kristin Petursdottir as “Ms. Petursdottir.” At any rate, everyone in a conversation is just meant to know whomever you’re talking about, so you never hear anyone ask, “Which Siggor do you mean?”

Go give it a read. And bully for Mr. Lewis! It’s nice to know that someone besides John Paulson is making a killing right now.

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David 0-fer Wallace?

It’s time for this week’s literary 0-fer! After laughing hysterically at the trailer for his biopic a week or so back, I realized that I’ve never read anything by . . . Truman Capote!

(Why did I find the trailer so funny? Because Philip Seymour Hoffman’s head is larger than Truman Capote’s entire body! I’m sure he nailed Capote’s voice perfectly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny to see him try to play Capote. It just seemed like a comedy skit, sort of like the first time you heard Mike Tyson’s voice come out of Mike Tyson’s mouth.)

I just downloaded a sample of In Cold Blood to my Kindle, so maybe I’ll give him a try sometime.

But the literary figure I thought I’d ramble about this week is author and recent suicide David Foster Wallace, who’s the subject of a long-ass profile (that I haven’t read: 0-ferriffic!) in the new New Yorker.

I read Infinite Jest when it came out around 1995/6, back when I was still interested in the “encyclopedic novel,” as I misunderstood it from my college years. This thousand-page novel centers around an eponymous movie so entertaining that anyone who views it has no interest in doing anything but viewing it over and over. The irony is that I found the book so unentertaining that I had no interest in reading any of Wallace’s fiction again.

That said, I did enjoy some of his non-fiction, but his footnoting and other attempts at hypertextual digressions wearied me. It felt as if he really needed an editor, but was stuck with enablers who believed they were publishing genius. They must’ve felt like “the footnoting thing” was Wallace’s brand or something.

Then the roof caved in when the smartest person I know told me, “I don’t think Wallace is as smart as he thinks he is.”

I’m sure there are people who got a lot out of his books, and some, like Will Leitch in this Deadspin post, seem to hold Wallace’s literary torments in adoration:

I have never been happier to reside in the Blissful Mediocre. DFW was so good that it wasn’t enough to say something no one had said before; he forced himself to try to invent an entirely new way of saying it. That’s the type of thing that will drive a man mad. It’s hard enough to even make sense, let alone try to change the fashion in which humans communicate, avoid saying something any other person has ever said and the way they said it. Christ. It makes my brain bleed just thinking about it. David Foster Wallace was the guy from Pi, only with words instead of numbers. (Though he was into numbers too.)

On the other side, we get this post by Michael Blowhard that places Wallace within the milieu of contemporary academia, and posits that he may’ve been better off if he got out into the world. And maybe trying to invent a new way of conveying human experience isn’t the best use of one’s time; write something with real characters and a plot!

Interesting to learn that DFW was also a proponent of the supposed virtues of hyper self-awareness. Hey, I was once a grad student, and I remember toying with that idea too. (Why are so many bright people with a certain kind of lib-arts education so convinced that hyper-critical mirror-gazing is a worthwhile thing to spend time doing?) Although I’m generally a cheery soul, during my time in grad school even I started having anxiety attacks. I took them as a sign that maybe the time had come to ditch the showing-off-and-hiding-away-in-grad-school thing and move along into real life.

Somewhere in the middle, we get Ron Rosenbaum, who mentioned Wallace in his new Slate piece about three new novels that he adores. You’ve heard me ramble about how little interest I have in contemporary fiction, so I was glad to get some recommendations (the new Bernie Gunther novel was already on my wish list), although I’m still thinking of applying Zeke’s 3- to 5-year delay on novels, to let any hype subside.

About Infinite Jest, Ron writes:

It’s a book whose repertoire of derivative, post-Pynchon, oh-so-tiring tricks made me furious. They diminished DFW. They made it seem that the less talented among the literati had convinced him that fiction was a higher form than the transcendent reinvention of nonfiction he was engaged in, convinced him that he should channel his far-superior talents into an exhausting performance in an exhausted form (the postmodern novel) that was an all-too-sterile strain at profundity that — despite its title — contained not one laugh. This, in contrast to the effortless inimitable joyful comedy of his nonfiction, which surpassed in pleasure (and profundity) many of his contemporaries’ novels.

I should note that Ron’s 3 book recommendations — The Silver Swan, A Quiet Flame, and Year of the Dog — are all detective novels, which circles back to Michael Blowhard’s point that you can do an awful lot of good writing in the ghetto of “genre fiction.” As long as they’re not bullshit “deconstructions” of detective novels, a la that awful Paul Auster book, City of Glass.

Anyway, Wallace wasn’t an 0-fer, but he’s a writer I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have started reading if his career began now.

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Curse of Cthulru

While I worked at home yesterday, Rufus helped fight off an extra-dimensional invasion!

Alternate caption: Meet Rufus’ new friend: John Calamari!

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ESPN The Gag

Two notes about the new issue of ESPN The Magazine.

  1. The Atlanta Thrashers do not have the second-worst attendance in the NHL due to “woes at the top” (read: their ownership battle); they have the second-worst attendance in the NHL due to the fact that people in Atlanta don’t give a shit about hockey. They barely give a crap about basketball, and the Braves couldn’t draw sellouts to playoff games when the team owned the NL East for a decade-plus. The only thing that would boost attendance to Thrashers games is if they signed Michael Vick.
  2. The coverline, “Exclusive: Michelle Wie sets everyone straight,” may be the first time the word “straight” was used in an article about the LPGA.

Thanks. I’ll be here all week.