The Dream of Scipio. Iain Pears. This is a brilliantly conceived and magnificently executed novel, both an historical novel and a ethical and philosophical puzzle.  It is also a gripping story.  The action takes place in 3 historical periods, all of which are times of cultural dissolution: the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century, the time of the great plague in the Fourteenth Century, and Vichy France.  Each story is interrelated by characters who, as scholars, have studied the other characters in the novel.  Each character must face parallel ethical dilemmas. The book asks whether action in the world that is imbued with ethical wisdom makes a difference. 

The Seven Ages of Paris. Alistair Horne.  Alistair Horne is one of the great historians of France writing in the English language. For the past 25 years he has devoted himself to writing this book, a history of everyone’s favorite city, Paris,  from the 12^th century to its liberation in 1945. As in all of Horne’s books  this work is imbued with a masterful narrative sweep.

Master of the Senate. Robert Caro. Caro’s Johnson is epic, larger than life,  great in his flaws, endlessly fascinating.  Just as the other great Johnson in literature was defined by the genius of his biographer, Boswell; so Lyndon Johnson will be remembered through the ages by this masterpiece of biography. This, the third volume in his story, takes us through the years in the Senate. It is as much a history of that great institution as it is of Johnson’s life. It is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for 2002. Also read the equally spellbinding first two volumes:  The Path to Power and Means of Ascent.

 Hotel Honolulu.  Paul Theroux. This is a funny, mesmerizing and touching collection of related stories about Hawaii.  The author has  created a character, a composite of himself and his imagination.  The stories all center around a somewhat long at the tooth hotel off Waikiki Beach.  Guests come and go. All  seek a kind of paradise, but inevitably bring their own flawed existences with them.  

 War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy.  This is arguably (unarguably) the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy’s epic of Russia during the Napoleanic Wars contains both grand historical sweep and minute psychological detail. The characters are so real and so compelling that they practically walk off the pages. It is both profound and accessible. When you have finished, read Tolstoy’s no less magnificent novel, Anna Karenina.

 The Name of the Rose.  Umberto Eco. The English friar, William of Baskerville (his name, a pun on the Conan Doyle tale), is called to a monastery to employ his mastery of Aristotelian logic to solve a number of perplexing murders.  The brothers in the monastery represent the entire range of medieval thought. This book is a brilliant novel of ideas, a profound recreation of an historical epoch,  and a superb who-dunnit.

 Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather.  This enduring masterpiece is Willa Cather’s greatest achievement. It is the story of the French cleric Father Latour, who is sent to convert the American Southwest to Catholicism. He eventually becomes Archbishop of Santa Fe. With elegant simplicity of prose, we follow the life of Father Latour for 40 years, during which time he struggles with derelict priests, a beautiful but forbidding land, and his own loneliness.

 .A History of Warfare. John Keegan.  In this time of war, we all seek to comprehend how the activity of war, which is at once so horrifying, can yet be so embedded in the human condition.  The world’s preeminent military historian has written a masterpiece.  There are no long and boring descriptions of battle tactics and no indecipherable maps with black and white squares.  Instead, Keegan examines the role of warfare in all cultures from stone age to atomic age.  He shows that the history of warfare is really the history of human nature’s darkest side. This book is an eloquent and absorbing work of cultural history.

 A Thousand Acres. Jane Smiley. This book, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature of 1992, is Jane Smiley’s greatest work. It is the retelling of the King Lear legend transposed to a contemporary American family farm and told from the point of view of one of the older sisters. Smiley interweaves mythic themes with issues of family dysfunction. Throughout we are dazzled by the work of a master literary realist.

 Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte.  Is this literatures greatest love story? I think so. It is the tragic tale of timeless love between Cathy and the magnificent and mysterious Heathcliff.  It is written with beautiful descriptive language of the moors on which the action takes place.   The story builds slowly in momentum and volume of emotion until it reaches the climactic doom  of Heathcliff. Be sure to keep some hankies at your side.

 Gone to Soldier., Marge Percy.  Marge Piercy has written a sweeping epic of the Second World War. It is not a blood and guts battle saga, but more a tale of the other war, the men and women who were not on the front lines but on the assembly lines, the food lines, and behind enemy lines.The Second World War gave birth to our own age. No book has demonstrated this so well as Gone To Soldiers.

The Walking Eye crew has a sit-down with the illustrious Luke Crane to discuss his games and gaming habits. We cover a fair bit of ground: a bit of rules theory, production strategy and the “unique challenges” that come with working with a licensed franchise. All in all this interview was a total blast and we look forward to a chance to do it again!

Relevant Links

• Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel
• Mouse Guard Comic
• Burning Empires
• David Petersen
• Independent Insurgency Interview with Luke
• The Blossoms Are Falling
• Chris Moeller
• Dictionary of Mu
• Blood Stained Stars
• Iron Empires
• Archaia Press
• Clinton R Nixon
• Realm Guard
• Black Flag
• Burning THAC0
• UberCon
• Gotham Girls Roller Derby
• Adobe InDesign
• Quark
• Weapons of the Gods
• Name of the Rose
• Vincent Baker
• kill puppies for satan
• Ron Edwards

Crunchy Bits!

• Interview 7: Luke Crane 1 Hour
• Intro music is from “The Ballad of Ivory Lass”,  Lyrics by David Petersen Music & Performance by Jesse Glenn
• Outro Music is from “The Plouescal Races” by Gaelic Storm.

Bumpers and Promos

• Spooky Outhouse

Menonton film The Hours kembali, yang pertama muncul di benak saya adalah: Sial itu Mrs. Dalloway!

Sungguh sial sebab entah berapa kali saya membacanya, saya gagal untuk menyelesaikan. Bukunya tipis, dan menarik sekali sesungguhnya. Tapi entah kenapa, saya tidak pernah sanggup berjalan lebih dari halaman 20-an.

Setiap membaca, saya akan kembali memulai dari awal. Biasanya, tidak selalu. Saya dapat saja membaca beberapa buku, berselang-seling, bahkan terkadang dijeda waktu sampai lama, berbulan-bulan, dan kembali ke halaman yang saya tinggalkan tanpa merasa terganggu atau kehilangan suasana. Yup, suasana langsung kembali saat itu juga. Tapi Mrs. Dalloway, saya akan kehilangan arah. Lalu mulai dari pertama lagi. Sampai pada adegan paling sialan dari seluruh buku, yaitu saat Mrs. Dalloway berada di toko bunga dan mendengar suara letusan kecil, yang sesungguhnya baru awal-awal cerita, maka saya akan tersesat.

Damn!

Tapi Mrs. Daloway bukan satu-satunya.

Suatu saat, saya membaca sebuah novel karya Thaha Husein. Pengarang dari Mesir. Dan itu sungguh gila, sebab saya tidak pernah dapat menyelesaikan. Bahkan sebenarnya, saya hampir tidak dapat membayangkan kisahnya. Sebagai apologia, saya memutuskan, mungkin karena Thaha Husein adalah seorang yang buta, dan buku yang say abaca tersebut adalah novel dan bukan buku akademis, maka saya kesulitan memvisualisasikan apa yang dia tulis itu. Padahal sesungguhnya, mungkin itu karena saya terlalu ndablek saja, hihi…

Kisah yang ditulis oleh Thaha Hussein sebenarnya, nampaknya, menarik. Tapi entah kenapa, saya tidak dapat mendapatkannya. Di kepala saya selalu adalah orang-orang berbicara tanpa saya dapat melihat wujudnya. Saya tidak dapat menangkap karakter para tokoh dan apalai konfliknya, sehingga saya tidak dapat menjangkaunya. Karena kesal, pada suatu hari, saya berikan buku tersebut kepada seseorang yang saya tidak kenal.

Lalu ada lagi Maya, yang juga tidak selesai. Entahlah apakah karena saya tidak begitu berminat pada Biologi Evolusioner, atau ada sebab lain. Yang pasti, dengan Maya, saya memiliki masalah yang sama dengan Mrs. Dalloway. Saya selalu kehilangan jejak, lalu saya akan memulianya dari awal lagi, sampai ke pada adegan berbincang-bincang dengan tokek sialan, lalu…saya kehilangan jejak.

Damn lagi!

The Graet Transformation, beritahulah saya! Penulisnya memang butuh 6 tahun untuk membuat buku tersebut, dan mungkin juga belum dihitung masa observasinya. Tapi, apakah butuh 6 tahun juga untuk membacanya?

The Name of The Rose, juga pernah tidak dapat saya selesaikan. Berkali-kali, maka saya akan mulai lagi dari awal. Saya akan membanting itu buku, saking kesalnya. Bahkan suatu kali, saya lempar, lalu tendang kuat-kuat, sampai nongkrong di kolong kulkas, bertengger di sana selama berhari-hari.

Saya mengambilnya kembali, tentu saja. Ada buku yang ketika saya membaca sampai suatu halaman tertentu, lalu saya memutuskan untuk tidak melanjutkan lagi. Ada buku yang begitu saya membacanya, lalu tidak dapat dilepas lagi sampai selesai dan bahkan terus terbawa suasana beberapa saat. Juga ada buku-buku, yang entah berapa kali pun saya gagal, saya akan tetap keukeuh sureukeuh berusaha membacanya kembali dan kembali. Entah apa yang memanggil saya dari dalamnya.

Adik saya yang membantu saya menemukan arah.

‘Harus tahan baca sampai halaman seratus,’ katanya. Merujuk kepada The Name of The Rose. ‘Umberto Eco bilang begitu. Kalau gak bisa tahan melewati halaman seratus, gak bakalan selesai bacanya. Seperti naik gunung, kalau gak bisa mengatur nafas, bakal turun lagi, atau mati.’

Saya mengerti. Membaca sebuah buku, itu haruslah kita menyesuaikan irama kita dengan kisah itu sendiri. Kamu gagal menyesuaikan irama, maka kamu akan gagal.

Jadi, saya, akhirnya, mampu menyelesaikan The Name of The Rose. Huooooo!!! Bangganya saya kepada diri saya sendiri.

Dan menyesal dulu memberikan Thaha Husein. Mencari lagi buku tersebut, sungguh hampir mustahil rasanya. Mungkin karena Thaha Hussein sendiri adalah tokoh yang kontroversi. Entah bagaimana dulu saya mendapatkannya, yang pasti, dicari-cari, sekarang susah.

Damn pula!

So, sekali lagi, saya berniat mulai membuka Mrs. Dalloway. Kali ini, lebih santai, tapi meneguhkan hati agar tidak menyerah.

Berhasil gak ya, kali ini?

Postingan iseng disela-sela mengerjakan rapot dan repot mempersiapkan acara Persami (Perkemahan Sabtu-Minggu).

They say that every rose has its’ thorn.

Now does it?

Who are you to point out by your common conception of life that beauty must somehow be harmful?

Who are YOU to speak for what others so fondly defend and cherish?

Who are YOU to speak evil of what some fragile little creature so dearly holds within?

Who are YOU to judge Creation?

The thorns upon which you lay and make a bed of once every other moon are those you see upon the Rose.

I stripped the Rose of all its’ thorns and thus I know now that beauty crawls within each drop of water.

I hold the Rose and grasp it fermly.

And in this way, now I dare say:

Let The Rose Have A Name!

You people are searching for Factcheck.com for some reason. Which is just a squatter site. I think you mean FactCheck.org. Not perfect, but they do reasonably good work. Check ‘em out.

You’re also searching for conscience of a liberal. Turns out, they don’t have one, but Paul Krugman (there you go with him again) does a pretty good job of pretending he does.

In My Own Worst Enemy, Christian Slater is a spy with a double identity. Seriously, he’s been programmed so his bosses flip a switch to toggle him between super-spy and cubicle-dwelling schlub. Then, those two world’s collide, and serial mayhem ensues on a weekly basis. I just say that because you folks seem to be spending a lot of time searching for Christian Slaters, and unless you’re all considering taking up stalking as a new past-time, it has to have something to do with the new television show.

If, like me, the first time you saw Christian Slater was in the Name of the Rose, you paid no attention to him, instead focusing on a bad-ass Sean Connery and Valentina Vargas as the semi-feral girl who deflowers Christian Slater’s pious apprentice.

Sean Connery. Bad-ass Medieval monk in The Name of the Rose. Don't ask me to explain why it's off-center.

I  wrote last week about Stephanie Meyer’s epically disastrous vampire novel Twilight, but I’ve been thinking more and more about the issue of bad literature and how it relates to schooling and homeschooling.

Despite my monastic moniker, we’re not homeschooling for religious reasons as much as intellectual ones.  In what’s probably an enormous act of hubris, we sincerely believed (and still believe) that we can do a better job instructing our child than Local Neighborhood School can.  Part of the reason we think we can do this better job is pretty simple: we have a better reading list.

The blog Flesh and Spirit recently referenced a compelling article about Harry Potter.  The author considers the accusation, often leveled against the Harry Potter books, that they are “dangerous,”
particularly to Christians or those who have a problem with magic.

Ultimately, the author concludes, the Harry Potter books are dangerous — just as any literature is “dangerous”:

To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous—and so is any other book he or she may read. But the best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas, but more of them; and the best defense against one book is a whole host of them. Being widely read, in other words, is the best inoculation against the dangers of literature. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton put it, to see through it.

Owing  a big debt to Alexander Pope – as he’d probably acknowledge — the author concludes that “literature is dangerous—except when taken in large doses.” 

A little learning, Pope advised, is a dangerous thing.  Drink from the spring of wisdom, and you risk mental intoxication.  The only cure?  To drink deeply. 

Too often, I think the texts that kids are presented, especially in school, are the equivalent of fast food given to starving people, but it’s given on the basis that any kind of “food” must be good.  For instance, on the reading list for the students at one high school I’m familiar with is Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.  Okay, I like myself a good airport novel as much as the next guy, and Jurassic Park is a great mind-distractor when the flight attendant is counseling you about the proper function of the overhead bins, but as literature, it stinks for much of the same reasons as Twilight stinks: the characterization is thin as tissue paper, the plot is pretty darn predictable (once the dinosaurs get loose), and the writing is just above serviceable.  At least J.K. Rowling, whose writing is only serviceable as well, enjoys the pun-fun play of language in her humorously Dickensian names — I’m still in love with the name “Dolores Umbridge,” a character who reminds me painfully and accurately of many school administrators and counselors I’ve worked with.

  Crichton never even gets that far.

Would someone tell me why this book is included on a high school curriculum?  If it’s because of the notion that this book raises ethical questions of tampering with nature, why not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?   I’m not even a science person, but even I can tell that the “science” in Jurassic Park  is merely an overlay of a Cliffs Notes-level version of chaos theory. 

This is one of the reasons we homeschool: because the spring of wisdom presented in many of the schools in our area, even the good ones, ain’t nearly deep enough.  It’s not that reading garbage literature will hurt you — that is, unless garbage is the main source of your intellectual meal.  To that end, I’d like to provide an excellent resource:  John Senior’s list of the 1000 good books you should read before you try the 100 great ones.  The book The Well-Trained Mind is an other outstanding place to go for an excellent list as well, or any college such as St. John’s which has a largely classical or Great Books curriculum.

Life’s too short to read fluff.

rose, originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

Further to the recent Dire Straits controversy, I decided to spend the 79 pence to get the 8.5 minute live version (from Alchemy). Most of the extra minutes on the recording are shockingly bad 80s stadium rock filler, so the core of the song itself is basically the same.

On my main points, I was essentially correct.

• First, he doesn’t mention the non-word streetsussed in either the first verse or the last, and there is no mistaking the fact that Romeo is, in fact, singing a serenade to or on the streets.
• On the question of keeping bad company, as some lyric sites (and the Guardian) would have it, he changes the line to say, “keeping rock ‘n’ roll company” which tends to confirm my belief that he’s keeping the beat and the band company.
• Finally, on the vexed question of Orion, it is absolutely clear in the live version that the word that finishes the line ends with an N consonant and not an M consonant. So, no, it’s not the (bewilderingly well-loved mishearing) bars of a rhyme, but the bars of Orion, which would be the upright bits in the constellation as opposed to the horizontal belt.

So, there it is. I’ve spent £1.58 on some compressed music and listened to it through an £800 pair of speakers, and I am now 100% positive in my correctiosity.

In other news, I finally got around to reading The Name of the Rose, which I picked up in the school library sale last year. It’s a nice hardback edition with a bookmark (needed) and an introduction by David Lodge (not really needed). It was brand new, bought by the school as part of a job lot and not required. I had never read this book before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I have seen the film of course, which cleverly picks out the murder mystery story and doesn’t dwell on the stuff about popes and emperors and the debate about Christ’s poverty, nor does it have much to say on Umberto Eco’s use of bricolage in constructing the book from fragments of other books.

So, having read it, I’m now puzzled as to its immense popularity and best-seller status. I have several theories. Theory number one is that people read it for the murder mystery (given away in Lodge’s Introduction, by the way, which is poor form, apart from the fact that everyone has now seen the film). The problem with that is, we know that mysteries and thrillers are popular, so did people really need this literary version of a mystery?

I’d have to conclude is that (the) people (who bought it in such large numbers) are incredibly pretentious, and though they enjoyed the murder mystery they would never have lowered themselves to read a proper example of genre fiction, so they lapped up this more respectable example because it made them look intelligent. Or so they thought. They could of course have hidden a Michael Connelly inside the cover of The Name of the Rose and achieved the same effect.

Theory number two is that people bought the book in large numbers out of curiosity but then didn’t get around to reading it, or started it and gave up after 100 pages. The effect for the publishers is the same. That nice Simon Mayo often talks about the 100-page rule or the 30-page rule, however strict your criteria are for deciding whether to read on. I rarely give up on a book myself, but Eco himself has said that he was aware that the first 150 pages or so were a real drag, so that only the truly committed would continue.

I like theory number two better for its Occam-like simplicity. Other best sellers in this vein include that Stephen Hawking book, A Brief History of Time, James Gleik’s book on Chaos Theory, and large sections of The Lord of the Rings. I’m convinced that no sane person can read that book without skipping the boring bits.

The Name of the Rose is full of lists, categories, long discourses that catalogue the world in mediaeval terms. Luckily the BBC Four series on the Mediaeval Mind was fresh in mine. But the long lists were dense, and very heavy going, eminently skippable, once you got the gist. Clearly, naming things is one of the major themes of the book, and the nature of signs (as in semiotics as well as the paranoid mediaeval style), is what Eco is really interested in, hence the title and the latin riddle that finishes the novel: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

This line, a quote, refers to the materiality of the signifier, the key differences between the thing itself, its name, and its meaning. There are various translations of the line, which you can read about in the Introduction, or on Wikipedia. Signs, according to semiotics, have two parts, but if you take into account the (literal) materiality of the signifier, they have three. This idea appeals to me because, as you know, I am fond of typography, and always pay attention to the forms of the letters, their shapes, as well as to the words they form and the things that the words mean.

Eco has said that he likes the idea of the rose, because roses are so heavy with symbolism (ironically , often used when introducing students to semiotics) that they’re actually fairly worthless as signifiers, because they could mean anything (like the colour red, in fact). But, you know, at least the rose, when it’s a rose, is a rose, whereas when the flower is gone, all we have left are words. Put in my terms, at least a beautifully designed alphabet is aesthetically pleasing, whereas often what is printed with them is fairly ordinary.

So everything comes in threes, including signs, and The Name of the Rose is three books in one. Not having had a classical education, at least one of those books meant very little to me. On the other hand, I was quite able to feel the sense of loss involved in the various layers: the lost volume of Aristotle, the dead (nameless) girl, the burned library, youth, and so on. I enjoyed the film a lot, and it’s a fairly faithful adaptation of the mystery part of the novel. I don’t dig literary fiction, I don’t remember any of my Latin from school, and so I found the book heavy going, but not so heavy that I gave up. In fact, once I got over the hump of the first 150 pages I quite got into it, and if I hadn’t been on holiday I would have gone scrabbling onto Wikipedia to look up the various historical events referred to in the novel.

I’m still left with the puzzle of the best seller. Why? Are we talking about vast numbers of people reading a quite difficult book for the pleasures offered by its mystery plot? Or are we talking about vast numbers of people turned on by semiotics? You have to wonder. Vast numbers of people appeared to think that the word “streetsussed” appeared in a song, so anything is possible.

======

P.S. You should know about me that as a theorist, I don’t go for the p*stmodern thing. P*stmodernism is the last refuge of the lazy student. Look closely enough at so-called p*stmodern art or literature and it turns out to be just more modernism. The Name of the Rose is a fine example of this. The Wikipedia article on the novel has this to say:

Umberto Eco is a significant postmodernist theorist and The Name of the Rose is a postmodern novel. For example he says in the novel “books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” This refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality

Do they mean ideal or idea? I don’t know. It’s Wikipedia, so it could say something different tomorrow. On the other hand, what I always want to say when people talk about books speaking of other books being a p*stmodern idea, is what about The Waste Land, then? What the fuck is The Waste Land, you donkey, if not a stream of references to and quotes of other texts? Those are pearls that were his eyes etc.

Nobody can ever convince me that p*stmodernism is an idea with any validity until they can answer the riddle of The Waste Land, which is not even to get started on Yeats and centres that cannot hold.

But what do I know? Well, quite a lot actually, but don’t tell anyone.

Yesterday was one of stark contrasts. One of my closest friends contacted me with some desperately sad news about her unborn son, and 30 minutes later, a friend of mine I believed to have died called me up out of the blue. It’s not a funny old world by any means but on occasion it can trip you up.

I spent another evening in the chasm of sobriety, I’ve quite a schedule over the next few evenings so two days away from booze seemed ‘sensible’. I found last night quite simple to deal with, once one has accepted one isn’t going to drink in the evening as soon as one awakes, thereby quashing any acceptation that the day is going to be anything other than fucking shite, it’s sort of alright living through it fully aware of the whole world about you in stark boring anti-climax.

The bright sunny evening and bike ride home cheered me though, it’s funny how putting myself in mortal danger in order to satisfy my lust for hard acceleration gives me such a thrill, I can see parallels between that and drinking too much or taking drugs, though the latter elements are slower of course. I was thinking about this with regard to the ban on advertising tobacco in motorsport, yes, smoking isn’t particularly good for your health but far worse would be to hit a fucking wall at 200 mph.

Following supper and a documentary on the Gutenburg Press which I knew more about than the documentary, though it was enjoyable enough to watch the arcane process first hand, I watched Name of The Rose. I’d not seen it for a while and had forgotten how utterly wonderful it is, it’s not aged (of course) and still has the emotional punch I recall when first seeing it some 20 years ago as teenager, it’s almost without flaw and as contemporary medieval thrillers go, it’s without peer.

The only irksome aspect of the evening was finding lumps of James’ stomach lining in my washed clothes. I’d thrown the vomit clad sofa bedclothes into the machine within an hour of their soiling and washed them at once in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I’d forgotten all about them until early evening yesterday when I went to fill the machine and found a huge pile of wet stuff quietly retting away.

I grabbed bundles of sheets, towels pants and other ephemeral items of clothing and pulled them onto the kitchen floor, but in addition to sweet smelling linen there were large dog-food like chunks scattered about the laundered clothes, back they all went into the drum, the floor was brushed of James’ lunch and I fired up the machine again. Two hours later the same thing happened, there were fewer lumps of Chum but enough to put the clothes back in to wash, the floor was brushed a second time and the machine switched on.

Third time lucky, well luckyish, after the Name of the Rose and before I went to bed to spend an good hour reading I found myself picking small lumps of someone else’s sick off my underpants.

Here is the first of the promised youtube discoveries from Friday night, fucking great stuff…

How odd it was, standing in a bookstore 7,500 miles from home and pondering the choices in a small but reasonably good English section of an airport bookshop. The most appealing books I’d already read: On Chesil Beach, The Golden Compass, The Name of the Rose (oddly enough, given that I’d read it on the first leg of the plane ride). The choices left dwindle to John le Carré’s* latest or Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. I take the latter, figuring that once I’ve read four or five of le Carré’s novels I’ve read them all. Earlier I described them as “trust no one and everyone, including you, is guilty of something, or would be in the right situation,” novels, and I eventually tire of their torrid, in-the-know sentences.

And so I chose The Other Boleyn Girl and came to a novel I dread writing about because it is awfully, unabashedly bad, filled with adverbs as egregious as the two I just used, and I was stuck with it for too many hours on a plane. Normally I would’ve stopped after a few chapters. Trapped as though in the Tower of London, I had nowhere to go but on with the story, reading endlessly of the narrator, Mary Boleyn, reminding herself of how she is a Howard, and having other characters constantly tell her that as well. Most of the characters speak in platitudes, as though aware of history’s spotlight on them, and yet the characters are simultaneously self-absorbed to a degree tiresome in anyone, including monarchs and their playthings.

Then there is the writing: on page six a “moment of pure envy swept through me,” and on 90 a horse is coiled like a spring. Adverbs proliferate like the plague and, worse for me, I just finished The Name of the Rose, a novel with a powerful, inflammatory inquisition scene that lights up like an inferno, while Gregory offers a brief, sputtering description on page 716 of my mass-market paperback. The theological discussions are similarly opposite, with The Name of the Rose like a gorgeous Ph.D. thesis and The Other Boleyn Girl like the musings of a pupil. There is much discussion of wit and little evidence of it, just as there is much discussion of what it means to be part of the family and little evidence of it meaning anything more than being part of a band of nitwit navel gazers.

There are bizarre anachronisms in the novel, as when characters use the term slut, which, as Geoffrey Pullum’s quote from the Oxford English Dictionary in this post on contemporary usage shows, slut has meant that “bad housekeeping, loose sexuality, general uppitiness and terms of endearment have been all mixed together since the middle of the 17th century.” The Other Boleyn Girl is set towards the beginning of the sixteenth century. Likewise, despite repeated references to skill in French and Latin, no characters display any knowledge of either language or its literatures; Anne’s linguistic ability extends to saying “Bien sur!” once. Indeed, the characters seem caught purely in their own times, as if history was absent and the future as well. No culture exists outside of mentions about Thomas More and jousting. If not for the device of the king and the mention of horses, this novel could be set in a frat house, or any number of contemporary settings.

All this is frustrating because The Other Boleyn Girl shows rare moments of genuine feeling, as when Mary acknowledges to her brother that she cannot wed the man she wants. These few evoking moments come amid the tedious descriptions of royal maneuverings that read like the post-season situation in basketball. By the end of the flight I wanted to take back all those snide thoughts about le Carré, who is by comparison a writer of tremendous greatness.

The title of this post may startle you, but there is a slim connection between a novel about sex and power in the sixteenth century and one about militarism and politics in the distant future.

I haven’t yet commented on The Name of the Rose, mentioned here, but that’s only because it’s so good that I both want to save the best for last and struggle to formulate something to say, as the novel is so vast that it’s hard merely to decide which aspects of it to discuss.

* For a fascinating essay on le Carré, see—as usual—B.R. Myers’ essay in The Atlantic.

MASS – (Fr Vallee) — In the darkest times, the Lord is with us.  [Guardian angel Rosary assistance].

AQUINAS – (Fr Vallee) — reviewed a general timeline after the death of Thomas Aquinas in 1250.  William of Ockham gave rise to Nominalism (minimized metaphysics, which is the link between philosophy and theology).  The movie “Name of the Rose” reflected his nominalist attitude.  In the 19th century, debates in the Church led to extreme responses like Rationalism (sola ratio) and Fideism (sola fide).  As opposed to Protestant extremism (sola scriptura & sola fide), the Catholic Church maintains balance between “faith & reason” as well as “Scripture & Tradition.”

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY – (Fr Santos) — reviewed characteristics of Modern Philosophy:

1)  Turn towards the “self” (anthropos becomes conscious)
2)  Turn toward “subjectivity” (reality + truth = function of the subjective)
3)  Renewed emphasis on the object (Scientism) (person = reduced to his material reality)
4)  “Fragmentation” of reality (cosmos = science, theos = theology, anthropos = philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc.)

An aside on Scientism brought discussion about genetically engineered mice that had their fear of cats removed via DNA.  A current example of how modernity influences our approach to solving life’s “problems.”  Scientific research + ethics + faith.

19th Century Philosophy … brought Hegelianism / Romantic Idealism that REJECTED the Kantian dichotomy between the noumenon & phenomenon … also brought a greater Kantian dichotomy in philosophy with (Marx) Dialectical Materialism, (Comte) Positivism, (Nietzsche) Nihilism.

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY – (Fr Vallee) — our final essay questions will deal with 4 areas for each philosopher … (1) Aporia (1st question & basic theme) … (2) Metaphysics (“What is?”) … (3) Epistemology (study of knowledge) … (4) Ethics.

WORKLIST (1:30-3pm) — starting next week, we’ll have new Wednesday worklist jobs and new house jobs.

HOLY HOUR (4:30-5:30pm) — intention for the seminarians at St Vincent’s (major seminary) on 5-day retreat as well as the Southeast Bishops on retreat.  Found a prayer for meditation … Invocations to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament:

Lord Jesus, through Your infant cries when You were born for me in the manger; through Your tears when You died for me on the Cross; through Your love as You live for me in the tabernacle, have mercy on me and save me.

None of our writers were on this list, so I’ve done my own hypothesizing. Can you guess which of our authors would be in which band?

Fur Waistcoats
Horrible Atmosphere
Moose Steak
Border Lords
Male Dress
Blindfolded Man
Dead Monks
Robust Anarchist

A nice quote from our crusty old Italian friend. I guess we can forget about sending him our messages.

This Friday we will be meeting at Luke and Terilyn’s abode to mull over The Name of the Rose and to choose our next six books.

For those of you who are familiar with the movie, I saw Malachi running out at the lake last Saturday. I think this is a good portent for our discussion.

The English translation of this website is not the greatest, so it’s hard to tell exactly what is going on here, but I think this photo is a neat illustration of the ideas of poverty and riches that preoccupy the monks in The Name of the Rose. The humble chapel is preserved by the opulent structure that soars above it, taunting it and saving it at the same time.

This Friday we will be viewing the movie The Name of the Rose at Brandon’s house at 7:00 pm. Contact me for more information.

Our discussion of the book and The Great Choosing have been changed to next Friday, March 16. Check out the list of nominations and let me know (by comment or by e-mail) if you would like to add any.

Umberto Eco chose the title – Il noma della rosa – as he says in his Interpretations and Overinterpretations (pp 79-81) in order to “set the reader free” from a mode of interpretations based on the supposed intentions of the author. The reader thus is free to draw relationships between the book and other uses of a “rose.” Ha. M.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is not an easy or straightforward read. What to expect?

Eco is a famous semiotician, hailed for his work. There are considerable passages in untranslated Latin, stories within stories, many, many references. Facts and fiction live happily together throughout the entire book, virtually impossible to be untangled. The solution to the murder mystery hinges on the contents of Aristotle’s book on comedy, of which no copy survives.

Eco himself has admitted that the first hundred pages were deliberately opaque, a sort of semi-permeable membrane that allowed passage to only the most dedicated readers. But despite all this, or maybe because of this, the book proved to be a phenomenon. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. M.

Do printed books still have a future in the age of internet and computers? One of our authors, Umberto Eco, beautifully explains:

A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatolij; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had War and Peace on a hyper-textual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable “War and Peaces,” where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert!

Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hyper-textual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.

This excerpt comes from a lecture that Umberto Eco gave at the opening of Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandrian Library) in Alexandria on November 1, 2003.

I think my favorite part of grad school was working with the secretaries/admin assistants. They kept that place going. Second would be getting a bag of Doritos for dinner (more often than I care to remember), riding that last bus #39 of the night to Jamaica Plain. JP >>> Cambridge. Third would be leaving grad school. I don’t think it was a mistake to go, I just think I took too long.

*****

Ditto for graduate school. Moving across the country is something of a traumatic experience. Being away from the friends and family that I’ve known for ten years or more has made me reevaluate my priorities in life, and realize that things only get more complex from here on out. No, you don’t need to deprive yourself of all the joy in your life to try to figure out what you really want out of it. It does seem to help me, though.

I had a nightmare last night. I was running around the BART trying to get to SFO on time for an airplane back to Boston, and having miserable luck, between a surly waitress, a horrific station scene, and a need to return some lost items.

I stopped by a restaurant in Berkeley on my way to the BART. I ordered some food (sorry, my memory is fading pretty fast), which arrived cold and bland-looking, so I tried to send it back, but the waitress insisted that it was still good and that I should eat it. One bite; ugh, awful. What could I do, though? I pushed the dish back and waited for the check to arrive. Hmm. Just a couple of hours left before my flight. And I waited. And I waited. (this sort of ties in to a recent restaurant experience I had, for the junior psychiatrists out there: the owner of the restaurant, who was also our waiter, served strange-tasting food, small portions, and argued with us about the merits of his restaurant versus other similar restaurants in the area. read into it what you will — residual guilt, maybe, for leaving a five percent tip?) The bill was outrageous and late, but so was I, so I threw down some cash and hurried over to the BART.

Groups of kids were clustered along the railways like birds on a telegraph line. Every so often, one would jump to the ground twenty feet below and mangle some part of their body in the impact. The details were fairly horrible and made me feel nauseous, which was compounded by the facts that Berkeley doesn’t have an elevated BART station, the layout of the station was completely mad (I had to walk along a catwalk directly behind the jumping kids to get to the train), and the faces of the kids disturbed me. It wasn’t until I got onto the train that I recognized them: they were the same people I used to hang out with in grade school, except that they were entirely the same, age and all. As the train pulled away from the station, the jumping kids began to swarm over the catwalks and the train police began to disperse the kids through brutally efficient contact between club and face, elbow and chest, knee and groin. Most of the kids fell back down to the ground below, though not of their own free will.

I looked away as quickly as I could, and already we were arriving at the next station (for some reason, I seem to be blending elements of the MBTA into BART). As the usual crowd pushed its way off, someone dropped a wallet and I picked it up and hurried after them, only to lose them in the crush and to watch the train sail off again, with my luggage and without me. I caught another glimpse of the person — whether it was some distinctive jacket or headgear, I’m not sure, but I remember being able to recognize them — getting into a bus, and by the time I’d gotten on, it was overcrowded and I couldn’t even breathe, let alone find the guy. I stationed myself on the right side of the bus to see where the guy got off, though. Ok, juvenile humor mode off.

The guy got off in front of an apartment complex filled with soaring wooden towers and narrow footbridges and catwalks lacing in between. Did I mention that I have a mild acrophobia, probably stemming from the times that my brother threatened to throw me off of a dam? Anyhow, it was like the final chase scene from In the Name of the Rose, winding through obscure passages and dashing across gossamer links trying to catch up to this mystery fellow; all I was trying to do was be helpful. I was resigned to missing my flight by then, as there was only half an hour left before the scheduled departure, to say nothing of missing my luggage (which had probably been dispatched to at least four different pawnshops by now), but I didn’t have an infinite amount of time to go traipsing off after this guy. At that point, my foot came down hard on a rotting board and my whole body jerked as I shook myself awake.

The narcissistic me says that this was entertaining, Mike, but what does it have to do with graduate school? Let’s look at it like a parable.

First, I was going back to Boston and having no luck in doing so. I’m beginning to think that coming here in the first place wasn’t such a hot idea after all. I wanted to challenge myself to shake off the ennui that’s gripped me during the last few semesters of my undergraduate life, but all it seems to have done for me is make me realize just how nice my life in the Bay Area was. I’m not saying that Boston is a terrible place; indeed, I think it’s a nice area (although something needs to be done about the humidity in the summer) but that it’s not for everyone, and it’s probably not for me. Why did I want to come here in the first place? It’s a great career opportunity, but I’m not the sort to sacrifice love, family, and friends over career, or so I thought, when that’s what I ended up doing in coming to Boston. I realize that I’m probably not giving Boston, its inhabitants, and the people at MIT a fair shake, and I’m sure that they’re all nice people. In fact, my coworker is about as nice a person as you can find — he always laughs at my bad and hastily mumbled jokes. I just feel like something is missing from my life here, and no amount of either studying or socializing is going to fill the gap in my heart for friends and family far from here.

I stopped by a restaurant. I was expecting something excitingly spicy and delicious, when what I got was more like a thin gruel, kind of like how my classes have gone in this, my first semester. You know how it goes? You go through college (or you don’t), you take Physics and are exposed to all of these wonderful beautiful physical ideas — from momentum to electromagnetism to heat transfer to quantum mechanics — for the first time, and your eyes open wide to drink in all of this wonderful knowledge. I like that excitement that comes from first knowing a concept, an idea; the first spark of inspiration that flares brightly dies quickly, though, in later years, when all your classes seem to deal in essential yet dull minutiae of the same concepts that you learned back in freshman Physics. Perhaps it’s a cynical view, coming from my engineering (i.e. applications-oriented) background, but that’s the way that most engineering courses work. The last really exciting class I took was my introductory heat transfer course, where we got to get down into the nitty-gritty of the equations governing the processes; a similar class taught by the same professor the following semester focussed mainly on applications and I found it as dry as dirt.

The fluids course that I’m taking seems to have very few redeeming features, except for the fact that I’m learning about certain concepts better than I’ve ever cared for before. Most of the will to work on the problem sets was burned out over the month that it took me to finish the problems on control volume theorems. I’m not sure why. It’s strange how courses billed as “advanced” really should be relabled “fundamentals of”. I grow tired of problems that test whether or not I know the tricks to apply to turn them into solvable problems. I grow especially tired of an instructor/section leader who spends his class times strutting and preening his own ego; the socratic method only goes so far, and the reason why we ask him questions is not to get questions back (sometimes which I think are designed to humiliate us, but that’s probably my ignorance of his brilliance shining through) but rather to get answers. Having to beat the concepts into my head is something I do best on my own; I don’t need help (but thanks, anyways). Maybe it’s just the topic, but every time I try to crack on those problems, I don’t get too far before I’m too sleepy or I don’t understand some obscure point.

It’s a slightly larger leap (sorry), but I feel the jumping kids represent some sort of personal evaluation on the worth of so many degrees. These were all kids that I’d had some sort of association growing up with and to see them hurling their bodies voluntarily just because it was a cool thing to do was heartwrenching. So why am I earning a master’s degree? I get the feeling lately it was because it seemed like I was predestined for it, or so I did believe. One of my teaching assistant/mentors early in my sophomore year told me that if I didn’t go into research, I’d be wasting a lot of potential, which made me swell up with pride (good and bad effects both). I tried to land a research-type job ever since the summer of my freshman year, and I finally got one the following year. Although it was an unpaid job that was really more of a technician’s job than a researcher, I had done it — I was working on research of sorts (more like trying to figure out how many layers of carbon plies I could apply before my fingers and ligaments and connecting bits would wear out). I wasn’t deathly bored with the job, but I did live in a vague fear of the boss, who was rumored to have a short temper, as well as a small contempt for the graduate student who wasn’t directly supervising me and yet felt that I needed some sort of micromanagement. The saving grace in that job was my graduate student boss, who I figured out to be a decent human being as well as an excellent teacher. The next summer, I began working on my dream job: setting up an experiment from the ground up. The first grad student boss that I had had to join the Navy, though, and I found myself sliding from peer to peon, with the new boss, who seemed to have little experience with setting any sort of experiment up. The lab supervisor seemed to delight in small torments, too, and before I sound too whiny, I’ll wind it up quickly by saying that I was somewhat glad to have left (a couple of months after I had graduated), although sad, too, at having to leave that professor as well as Berkeley behind.

My current research is interesting, I guess. If you want the official word on it, you want to see my (probably never-to-be-completed) work page. The unofficial word that I’ll tell you right now is that all I see my research right now is all that I’ve ever done in my life — set up expensive equipment, make sure it works, and then do something that someone else wants done. It’s probably a bitter and no doubt unnecessary way to regard things, but I feel like I’ve spent so much of my career to date helping to get other people’s work off the ground and running that I’m not sure what to do when faced with my own. If I don’t do it, who will? Does it really matter in the end? What chance do I have for posterity in this world – isn’t that what we’re all chasing in the end? Maybe I’m not going to set up a Liubel Prize or anything like that, but as my life has worn on, I’ve finally reordered my priorities.

I’m chasing my motivation, and never quite catching up to it. My advisor has advised me that soon the research will begin to motivate itself, but if that’s going to happen, it had better happen soon, before the boards give way under my lazy weight and I fall through. I used to wonder why more people didn’t stay in school for as long as they could manage to, back when I was an eager beaver of a freshman. It’s not that school has been so horrible to me, it’s just that I feel as though there’s more to life than problem sets. Of course, after a few weeks of work, I’m fairly sure that I’ll want to crawl back to the comforting unreality of school, but I grow less patient of the stifling artificiality of school every day. I’ve been in school now for nearly eighteen years, which is more time than I’ve ever spent doing anything else. I realize that I’m still young and probably full of beans, but eighteen years of anything is likely to send me running out into the streets looking for something new.

If you’ve ever been to MIT, with its maze of tunnels and corridors, it’s not such a stretch to extend the buildings to the apartment complex of my dream. I remember my first thoughts on stepping into the lobby of Building 7 was to suddenly utter the words, “great cathedral of learning”. With its soaring roof and massive arches, it looked the part. The “Infinite Corridor” is also a fairly impressive work, although probably unnecessarily cluttered with dangling pipes and massive arches. It reminds me somewhat of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building on UC-Berkeley’s campus: the lobby is impressive as all get-out, but once you get past that, the main corridors are cramped up by the reality of HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning, for you non-ASHRAE (don’t ask) types) ducts. They took a graceful old building and grafted new modern necessary implements on to it (hmm, vaguely Borg-like), which undoubtedly results in a more functional building, but somewhat ruins the experience for me. I don’t claim to be a purist with respect to preservation, but there has got to be some limit over which function can take over form. Anyhow, you can spend at least an hour wandering through the Rogers Building (at 77 Massachusetts Avenue) and its connected hallways if you don’t know where you’re going.

Seeing as how this is probably the last personal page that you’ll read until I write something even more sappy, I figure that you deserve some sort of overarching conclusion to this all. By now, you know what my life has been like up until now; what plans do I have for the future? I’m not sure. At this point in my life, I’m planning on finishing up my Master’s Degree and leaving school for one or two years, at least, to go to work. I’m no longer sure about what I want in a job: why are the only engineers over forty in administration or academics nowadays? When I used to daydream about being an engineer, none of my dreams included cubicles or calculators: I’d spend all day tweaking engines (isn’t that what an engineer does?) and dropping them into cars with nary a care in the world. Reality is different, and started sinking in long before I got to college. No, not all of us can be like Steve Dinan or John Lingenfelter; though we may try, people are not going to pay us to make their cars go faster.

The truth is that it seems I’m most suited to designing door handles or, given my specialty, analyzing the flow of coolant in an air conditioning compressor. The truth is that I’m more or less turned into the mundane person that I always dreaded that I’d be. The truth is that I’m too young to be giving up on the dreams I had, that I should be reaching up and over, beyond and ahead. The truth is that I don’t feel so young any more; in fact, I feel rather elderly and mis-used. I’m still growing up. I’m still learning that nothing is hard-and-fast true.

I remember growing up knowing that whatever I’d be, if I wasn’t good at it or I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have to do it. Guess what?