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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the disadvantage of greatness

With Of the disadvantage of greatness (pp. 849-853), Montaigne counters Mel Brooks’ wisdom that “it’s good to be the king.” M. concedes that the actions and effects of kings are awesome, but the tradeoff is that they’ll never have a measure of themselves because of the deference of their subjects.

See, in M.’s childhood, his mates always took it easy on him in athletic events, because it wasn’t worth it to totally trounce him. Similarly, he says, princes will never know what they’re worth, because their subjects will do anything to let them win.

(Of course, you could try to “speak truth to power,” but as M. reminds us, “For Dionysisus, because he could not match Philoxenus in poetry, and Plato in prose, condemned the one to the quarries and sent the other to be sold as a slave on the island of Aegina.”)

M. extends this thought to Homer’s treatment of the vulnerability of the gods. He contends that Homer allows Venus (Aphrodite) to be wounded in battle in the Iliad because this “endows her with courage and boldness, qualities not found in those who are exempt from danger.” He writes:

The gods are made to angry, to fear, to flee, to be jealous, sorrowful, and passionate, in order to honor them with virtues which among us are built of these imperfections. He who does not share the risk and difficulty can claim no involvement in the honor and pleasure that follow hazardous actions. It is a pity to have so much power that everything gives way to you. Your fortune repels society and companionship too far from you; it plants you too far apart.

The passage reminded me of our Seattle trip two years ago, when I met up with a friend from grad school. He’d had some serious mental problems in recent years, mainly due to autoimmune problems. The conversation we had still haunts me.

At one point, I asked him about the Iliad, his favorite book. I was rereading it, and I asked him about the meaning of the gods in the poem. I always tried to reconcile the idea of them as “extensions of the psyche” with their overt actions within the battles. I don’t know if I really thought about the idea that they were imbued with flaws and vulnerabilities in order to magnify their greatness. I think I’d been coming at the problem from the other direction, the idea that the greatness of the heroes was in their inhuman qualities, with Achilles foredoom as the apex of this concept.

I mean, I knew that the characters’ humanity was critical to understanding them, but I never thought about transferring that principle to the gods. So this short essay by M. may re-launch me to Troy, along with the 1,000 ships.

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Note hideous gridded paper

I was going to put this Michael Bierut post among the week’s Unrequired Reading, but I thought it deserved its own entry. It’s all about the notebooks that Bierut has used for the past 26 years. He’s up to #85.

As anyone who knows me can imagine, I find this sorta thing fascinating. I love looking behind the curtain and seeing the processes and tools behind work. It’s the same reason that I enjoyed the Wrap-Up Show on Howard Stern (before Rufus chewed through the antenna cable of my Sirius unit in a fit of pique and left me radioless).

While he does explore his work process, Bierut also manages to discuss the significance of the notebooks as notebooks, without treating them as dreaded Art Objects. His stories of Never Leave a Notebook Behind reminded me of the brunches I spent with Chip Delany, who would invariably bust out one of his cheap spiral-bound notebooks to jot something down in mid-conversation. They were as much a part of him as his trademark Santa-beard.

I’ve never been good at note-taking. I do keep a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook in my Bag of Tricks, but rarely take it out anymore. I bring a second one with me to trade shows so that I can appear to be interested when companies give me long technical descriptions of their new products. At the office, I use notepads of employees who were fired. I find it kinda funny to take notes on phone conversations and write to-do lists on pages that bear the names of magazines that were shut down five years ago.

Still, it’s an effort for me to keep a piece of paper and a pen nearby when I’m reading those Montaigne essays. I do write down a line here or there in the Notepad of my iPhone, but they only seem smart at the time. I’m more likely to write down the beginnings of a post here in WordPress and save it as a draft. That way, there’s even less evidence of what my thought processes are.

But I digress (which is what you came here for; admit it); go read Bierut’s post nowish!

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Lost in the Supermarket: Amish Paradise

It’s against the law here in NJ to sell alcohol in supermarkets, so this installment is technically a cheat. Still, the liquor store happens to be right next to the supermarket, and hey, it’s my blog.

I saw this out of the corner of my eye —

— and was impressed that someone would target an Irish stout toward people headed into Rumspringa.

Then I realized that it read “BEAMISH” and not “BE AMISH”.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of coaches

As near as I can tell, this is Montaigne’s progression in Of coaches (pp. 831-849):

  1. I don’t like riding in coaches; I’m much more comfortable on horseback.
  2. Some ancient kings and emperors sure used some strange and extravagant means of conveying their coaches.
  3. Kings and emperors tend to spend their subjects’ money liberally and ostentatiously.
  4. People sure were inventive in the days of old, and the past is like a million foreign countries.
  5. Boy, have we committed some awful atrocities on the natives in the Americas.
  6. The king of Peru never used a coach, but was borne in a throne of gold by his subjects.

It’s that second-to-last section that M. focuses on, detailing a number of grotesque abuses that the Spanish inflicted on the natives in the new world. Reflecting on the ill treatment of the natives, he laments that America wasn’t discovered in the time of Alexander, who could have brought out the better aspects of their souls, rather than push them into darkness and war as the explorers did. I was caught up on that point, as it seemed to indicate that M. thinks the world would have been better off without a Catholic church.

Moreover, I was fascinated by the notion that, in his time, the Americas  really were a new world. I’m not sure I ever considered how Columbus’ discovery was understood in that era (the first century or so after 1492). M. writes:

Our world has just discovered another world (and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?) no less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines. . . . If we are right to infer the end of our world, and that poet is right about the youth of his own age, this other world will only be coming into the light when ours is leaving it. The universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be crippled, the other in full vigor.

I’m sure there’s some cutting remark to be made here, contrasting America with Europe, but I’m not the guy to make it.

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Location, Location, Location

Why New Jersey rocks:

New Jersey’s small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state’s deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning.

The jumble of contrasts is, on the contrary, the source of Jersey’s remarkable harvest of talent. It drives certain people to either build a unified artistic sensibility out of the divisions around them, or to create art unhindered by a narrow identity.

and why Billy Joel sucks:

I decided to make a serious effort to identify the consistent qualities across Joel’s “body of work” (it almost hurts to write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.’s “Greatest Hits,” one of which was a full disc of his musings about art and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I already had — Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose “Hickory Wind” is just ravishing—so the cashier might think the B.J. box was merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I couldn’t bear the sneer, even for your benefit.

And I think I’ve done it! I think I’ve identified the qualities in B.J.’s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.