Author: Gil

Posted on

Two new sites!

I just updated the blogroll, dear readers! It’s that “Sites To See” link over on the right side of the site.

First, Virginia Postrel, who blogs as The Dynamist, just added a new site based on her upcoming book. It’s called Deep Glamour. I arbitrarily put it in the Architecutre & Design section, although it could’ve gone into several other categories instead! VP is co-blogging with Kate Coe. I guess that makes it Coe-blogging, then.

Second, my old pal Jason G. just launched Eightiesology! Maybe he’ll let me guest-write a long-ass post on the virtues of Meet Danny Wilson sometime! Jason ends up in the Friends section of the blogroll. Keep writing!

Posted on

Monday Morning Montaigne: An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Take 1

It’s time for the long-unawaited return of Monday Morning Montaigne!

You ask, “What is MMM?” It’s me, working my way through the Everyman’s Library edition of Montaigne’s Complete Works (only the essays, which comprise 1,045 pages; I’m on page 450 right now). Every Monday, I’ll post about some aspect of one of the essays that I read in the previous week.

You ask, “Why Montaigne?” Because I’m a sucker for the personal essay and M. is the inventor of the form. Also, I never got around to reading him when I was a grad student at St. John’s College, and I feel bad about that.

You ask, “Why do I have to suffer?” If I had a readership of appreciable size, this would feel like the “Andy Kaufman reads F. Scott Fitzgerald” segment. Fortunately, no one reads this site, and you can always skip to the next post.

* * *

This week’s post begins my rambles about Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond. In 1484, Sebond published Natural Theology. M. translated the book for his father, and wrote the Apology around 1575-1580 (his father died in 1568). I haven’t read Sebond, but Donald M. Frame, the translator of my edition of M., wrote that he “argued that man could learn all about God and religion by reading in the book of God’s work, the world.” M. disagreed with this idea, so rather than an apology/defense of Sebond’s views, he spends his time exploring the limits and faults of human reason. In particular he criticizes the primacy of knowledge.

As with the rest of his essays, M. does this with great erudition, as well as with citations from myriad sources throughout history. Employing a massive library of poetry doesn’t exactly undercut his argument against the limits of reason, but I think it creates a tension when his explanation that man is no better than an animal relies on passages from Plato, Lucretius, Tasso, Juvenal, Virgil, Dante, Homer, Tibullus, Martial, Horace and, of course, Ovid.

Just because it’s contradictory doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining. M. takes on innumerable differences between man and beast and turns them on their heads, leaving man the poorer. “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” he asks, and we’re off and running. Honeybees, swallows, spiders, elephants, crabs, crocodiles, lions: over 30+ pages they all get to demonstrate aspects of human character that M.’s philosophical opponents would reserve for men alone. Even my greyhound gets in on the action:

That hare that a greyhound imagines in a dream, after which we seem him pant in his sleep, stretch out his tail, wriggle his legs, and reproduce perfectly the motions of running, is a hare without fur or bones.

M. even turns the idea of human beauty upside-down, contending that our need for clothes, makeup and the like show that humans are naturally uglier than animals. Ultimately, he shows that the wisdom that is supposed to separate us from animals is transient, that the great philosophers in history would gladly have traded it for health.

It all reminds me of a session on Aristotle’s Politics I attended during grad school. One of the students asked why we should take Aristotle seriously, since he was “anthrocentric.” The tutor (read: prof.) was puzzled by the student’s term. The student explained that A. was only exploring HUMAN relationships and society, but his view was incomplete because he wasn’t taking into account the societies of other animals. He added that we couldn’t learn too much from A. because he didn’t also write about dolphins and other primates. “What makes us so different from them?” he asked.

I held up my copy of the book and said, “Uh, THIS? Those animals may be pretty advanced, but as far as I know, they haven’t figured out how to write stuff down and pass it on to future generations. When they do, let me know; I’d love to read it.”

I have to admit that M.’s scorched-earth approach to man vs. beast — “[I]t is not by a true judgment, but by foolish pride and stubbornness, that we set ourselves before the other animals and sequester ourselves from their condition and society” — turned me off.

M. does seem to recognize that there’s a difference between man and animals, but it’s not our brains, our social structures, our dreams, or our use of clothes or artifice. Rather, it’s our belief — not faith, which is more involved and likely to lead us astray, from what I can make out of his argument — that sets us off, and I’m (presently) finding that a difficult pill to swallow.

Still, there are another 120 pages in the Apology, so let’s see where it leads. (The next segment is titled Man’s Knowledge Cannot Make Him Happy, so I don’t exactly have high hopes.)

Posted on

What It Is: 8/18/08

What I’m reading: Finished that book on Steve Ditko by Blake Bell, started When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein’s chronicle of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and am continuing with Montaigne’s essays (still reading his Apology for Raymond Sebond).

What I’m listening to: Boxer, by The National, Songs from Venice Beach, by Ted Hawkins

What I’m watching: Fourth season of The Wire. And, um, Enchanted. Listen: it was just starting and I thought there might be some neat art direction to contrast the mundane world with the cartoon-fantasy world. There wasn’t, but we still had some laughs over the way Patrick Dempsey’s hairstyle changed from shot to shot. We thought it would’ve been funny if he ended up with a high-top fade in one scene, then dreadlocks in another. And I thought it was a great idea to cast Idina Menzel in a movie with musical numbers but not give her a singing role! I’m going back to the Wire. Chris just beat a dude to death.

What I’m drinking: Cerveza de la Pacifica

What Rufus is up to: Still getting freaked out by thunder, still willing to walk up to anyone he meets, tail a-wag.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special, which is sad, since the summer is just about over.

What I’m happy about: That my wife made tongue tacos for lunch on Sunday (a process she began on Saturday)! And I did some manly-ass work out in the yard, ripping up forsythia and digging up some of my dad’s illegal dumping — including cinderblocks, carpeting, paint trays, metal pipes, airplane cable, something with vacuum tubes, and gas cans — to open up space around the big-ol’ rock in the backyard.

What I’m sad about: That I consider landscape work manly.

What I’m pondering: How Russia’s invasion of Georgia may have backfired.

Posted on

Georgia Rules

I haven’t written anything about the war in Georgia because I don’t know enough about the circumstances and history, and I figure there are plenty of other places you could go for uninformed ranting.

Over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, there’s a good piece by Matt Welch on how various commentators see the war through their own prism. While the cited examples are funny, my biggest laugh came from the comments section, where frequent contrarian commenter Joe remarked:

I agree, it’s irritating when people project their own ideological interpretation onto complex events.

OT, does anyone else think this whole episode could have been avoided if Georgia had developed a better system of light rail?

I really am easily amused.

Posted on

Morning Sun

It’s a comparatively slow day at the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth:

  1. a review of the new book by James Wood, How Fiction Works,
  2. a review of an anthology on New Criticism, and
  3. a brief history (with slideshow) of Art Deco.

So I guess I oughtta flip over to the NYObserver, which is more hit-and-miss in its Gilcentric writing:

  1. the decline of newspaper reporters in NJ, and
  2. an interview with Amtrak president/CEO Alex Kummant about transit plans in NY/NJ and the need for new rail capacity?

Looks like I have nothing to complain about.

Posted on

Victory!

I’ve never had to house-train a pet. Both of the dogs we had when I was a kid were kept outdoors, and my cats were strays, and they liked getting out of the house early and often. Rufus had a couple of accidents in his first week at home, but that’s pretty understandable.

Since we got him in March, I’ve been keeping him in his crate when I’m away at the office. I’ve felt bad about this, but was assured by a ton of people — including his vet — that it’s okay. Still, I figured that he’d be happier if he could meander around the house while I’m at work, instead of being curled up inside the crate, sleeping for hours on end, and then bursting with energy when I get home.

It’s true: I imagine that my dog actually does things when we’re not here. I mean, besides standing up on the loveseat to look out the living room window. I can just see him proudly trotting up and down the hall, selecting one toy, then another, before promenading over to our bedroom, where he promptly curls up and sleeps for hours on end.

As I mentioned in What It Is this week, I’ve been leaving him out of his crate for longer and longer stretches. I don’t let him go downstairs while we’re out, and he seems to have figured out from the first multi-hour session on his own that drinking a lot of water isn’t a smart move. I’ve tried to Rufus-proof the area, making sure there’s nothing edible around, and that our laptops are not in harm’s way.

Today, I took The Big Step and left him on his own for an entire workday.

I’m pleased to report that I came home to find no accidents, no shredded furniture, no commandeered laundry (the first time I left him alone for a few hours, in his second week with us, he tipped over our hamper and dragged our clothes over to his crate), no chewed electrical cords, no signs of pot-smoking, and one tail-wagging pooch!

I get to feel a tiny bit less angst when I go to work in the morning!

Posted on

Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!

I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay — the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond’s Natural Theology, which Montaigne’s dad asked him to translate — runs almost 180 pages and, though translator Donald Frame breaks it up into several sections, I couldn’t see how I’d make it through that essay and manage to convey anything of interest to the readers of this blog.

The second reason I gave up was that I convinced myself that nothing I’d written in my Monday Morning Montaigne posts was of any interest to the readers of this blog. I don’t think I expected a rousing conversation among commenters, few of whom likely have read more than a smattering of Montaigne, and none of whom were exactly going to read along or look back into the essays to counter my points. Still, there was so little response to it, I figured no one would notice it was missing.

As it turns out, my posts were more like timed charges. In the last year, I’ve been getting hits from different colleges and universities’ IP addresses, presumably by students who are looking to cheat on their Montaigne assignments. I mean, “who are researching various critical opinions of Montaigne’s essays online (in order to cheat on their papers).”

It struck me that I put myself in a position of responsibility with this project. Without Monday Morning Montaigne, these students would have no choice but to read one of the other two million google hits for “montaigne essay opinion,” and who knows what sort of perspective they’d cobble together? Who knows when they’d get around to finding my posts, but better they rely on my flawed, rambling viewpoints than those of someone who’s actually done some research into Montaigne! With half-assed misreading comes half-assed responsibility! Excelsior!

So I decided to dive headlong into the aforementioned Apology this weekend. You can expect the first installment on Monday!