P. J. O’Rourke was an American libertarian political satirist and journalist.
He wrote books such as Holidays in Hell (1988).
Tag Archives: literature
RIP Alan Sheridan (1934 – 2015)
This happened at least five years ago but it escaped my attention.
Alan Sheridan was an English author and translator. He translated Gilles and Jeanne (1983) by Michel Tournier.
The death of Sheridan came to my attention while documenting Pornographic Archaeology which I read thoroughly vertically last week.
RIP Steven Marcus (1928 – 2018)
Steven Marcus is best-known for The Other Victorians (1964) [below], a study of Victorian pornography in which he coined the term pornotopia.
The Other Victorians cover
The Other Victorians back cover
The book is a classic in the academic study of pornography.
I’ve never been able to find out the identity of the author of the illustration on the cover. It’s in the skinny style of Raphael Kirchner (1867– 1917) and Léo Fontan (1884 – 1965) which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That’s all I know. Anyone?
“I would prefer not to”
“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) is a short story by Herman Melville famous for its dictum “I would prefer not to,” uttered by the reluctant clerk Bartleby.
Many existentialists and absurdists have regarded the story as a prescient exploration and embodiment of their concerns.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote an essay on the text titled “Bartleby, or, the Formula” (1989).
Above is the Encyclopædia Britannica film adaptation of 1969.
RIP Richard Hoggart
RIP Richard Hoggart, 95, British academic and author (The Uses of Literacy).
My interest in Hoggart?
There was a time I was obsessed by the overlapping areas of high culture and low culture (nobrow!) and the notion of cultural pessimism, commodity fetishism and commodification (think Cocacolonization, Disneyfication, McDonaldization, Walmarting) and false consciousness and whathaveyounot (all essentially notions of Marxist cultural criticism).
I think this was due to my interest in sexual fetishism (hence the link to commodity fetishism) and my reading of Dick Hebdige and being into popular music and against state funding of the arts and being affectionate of the beautiful loser.
Things have changed, my interests have become less fanatical. But I’m still against drab intellectualism and in favor of the best of the body genres.
Why read the classics?
I finished reading Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino, a book featuring 36 essays on classic books.
Excellent reading. Highly erudite. Such ease of narration.
Of course, I love the genre, books about books. The last I read of its kind was Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 by J. M. Coetzee[1].
Highlights, you ask?
The large essay on Stendhal and on De l’amour in particular.
That the Anabasis is a war novel.
That Twain was not much of a stylist.
That Orlando Furioso is an example of the fantastique.
A reference to the Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes by Raymond Queneau which reminded me of Umberto Eco’s pet project the Cacopedia.
And … the prose poetry of Francis Ponge:
- “Kings do not touch doors. They do not know that pleasure of pushing open in front of you, slowly or brusquely, one of those big familiar rectangular panels, and turning back to close it in its place again – holding a …”
- “. . . the pleasure of grabbing, at the belly of one of those tall obstacles to a room, its porcelain knob; the rapid duel in which you hold back your step for the instant it takes for the eye to open and the whole body to adapt to its new surroundings.”
- “With a friendly hand you hold onto it still, before decisively pushing it back and closing yourself in another room — a feeling of enclosure which is reenforced by the click of the handle’s powerful, but well-oiled spring.”
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- “The Pleasures of the Door” [2]
Absurd bad news: RIP Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013)
Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, Panther Books edition.
I first read Colin Wilson in 2004 when I found The Outsider in a tiny second-hand bookstore about five hundred meters from where I live. This unrecognized — yet extremely prolific — author is very likable for several reasons: his autodidacticism; his love of the outsider and the misfit; his nobrowness and his dislike of pessimism and the pessimist existentialism of Sartre et al. He put the latter this way in a 2004 interview:
When I was in Paris in the early 1950s, Samuel Beckett had just been discovered. Waiting for Godot was on in Paris and I thought ‘What fucking shit! Who is this half-witted Irishman who’s going around saying life’s not worth living? Why doesn’t he just blow his brains out and shut up?’ I felt the same about Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and later on others such as William Golding. I had always had a passionate feeling that certain people I deeply approved of – like G K Chesterton, who spoke of ‘absurd good news’, for example – and people like Thomas Traherne… the mystics in general, that they were saying that we’re basically blind.
The Misfits is the book of Wilson which made the biggest impression on me. Among other things, it observes how John Cleland in Fanny Hill succeeded in slowing down time (and for me defined the concept of slow motion in literature): “the time it takes to read [some scenes] is obviously a great deal longer than the time it took to do.”
I’ve given attention to Colin Wilson on numerous occasions. At Jahsonic.com[1], on this blog[2].
On Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, unreadability and the ‘cacopedia’.
My copy of ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ overlooking the Pigeon Valley from the rooftop of Has Konak in Cappadocia
As is often the case, the most salient bits of a book only become apparent a while after finishing it.
So it was only after a week or so after digesting the 600+ pages of Foucault’s Pendulum that the phrase “urban planning for gypsies” suddenly sounded in my ears:
‘Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.’
‘Great,’ Belbo said admiringly. ‘I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.’
‘Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Anynata?’
‘We’ll have to see.’ Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. ‘Potio-section…’ He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. ‘Potio-section, as everybody knows, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,’ he said to Diotallevi. ‘It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy.’
‘What’s tetra…?’
‘The art of splitting a hair four ways. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles.’
As it turns out, “urban planning for gypsies, the art of slicing soup, Morse syntax, the history of antartic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrian-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film” and other nonsensical endeavors are part of what Eco has termed the cacopedia.
What baffled me while reading Foucault’s Pendulum, is the commercial success of the novel, a book full of esoteric references to the Kabbalah, alchemy and conspiracy theories.
It makes you wonder what the owning/reading ratio is. Just imagine the number of people who bought it or got it as a gift but left it unopened on their shelves.
The book is unreadable for the uninitiated, the name-dropping is so extensive that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index. In fact, Wikipedia produced two of them: Concordance of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Concordance of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (2).