Literary Leviathan: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from the poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
Everyone should read Moby Dick at least once, and you book lovers probably mostly already have. It's one of the top ten great American literary achievements, and gets the number one spot on a lot of lists. It's the only American novel included in the Great Books of the Western World set (and the only American work at all besides The Federalist, some Founding Fathers documents like the Constitution, and William James on psychology. The second edition added Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Lost Lady, some O'Neill, Dewey, and Veblen.).
As a novel, its plot structure is horrible. It starts nicely enough, with the episodes of Ishmael, Queequeg the harpoonist, Father Mapple's pulpit and sermon, the Pequod and its crew, and the eventual appearance of Captain Ahab, an embodiment of the line that divides courage and daring from foolhardy stubbornness. Its ending is also epic, from Fedallah's prophecies to the inexorable final fight with the great white whale. In the middle are chapter after chapter detailing everything connected historically, scientifically and philosophically with whales and 19th century (and earlier) whale hunting. Students assigned to read it recoil in bored horror and most readers skip right through it and literally "cut to the chase" to get back to Ahab's quest for the whale.
My advice: don't skip those parts. They're there for a reason. They may not advance the plot, but they're a large part of the reason why Moby Dick is "great". It's not just a novel. It's a philosophic tract that springboards whales and whaling into life, the universe, and everything. (And yes, it seems to me that Douglas Adams's ill-fated traveling companion to a bowl of petunias was a distant relative of the Great White One. But I digress.)
The part I quoted above is the end of the chapter that begins detailing the laws of "fast fish" (physically connected in some way to a fishing boat) and "loose fish" (those not so connected, and therefore fair game for seizure by anyone). It starts out looking like a boring legal digression, and ends up being postulated as applicable to Columbus vs. the First Nations; intellectual property rights, and we the people.
And also, things would have worked out quite differently for Ahab if instead of Fedallah and Starbuck, he had had a Tough Lesbian Pal for a confidante.
Don't read it for pleasure and adventure. Read it at a time when you're in the mood to think. Very high recommendations.
Pride and Petticoats: Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese p. 2that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. “A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!” Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation; but, somehow, good-will reigns among them to a considerable degree.
Cranford is not a novel so much as a loosely connected series of vignettes about life in a town where everyone knows everyone else. An equivalent American book would be Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The characters and environment are similar to those found in Jane Austen, though somewhat more eccentric, and presented, roughly 50 years after Austen, as anachronisms on their way out. Pause to appreciate this bygone era, but let it pass and be gone, is the theme. Not so much lamenting lost youth as lost age; by Gaskell's time, things were moving faster and being displaced for newer things more quickly.
Shark Tank: Cousin Pons, by Honore de Balzac
To indicate how much heroism was contained in this phrase "ve vill go pric-a-prackink togezzer", it must be made plain that Schmucke was crassly ignorant in the knowledge of bric-a-brac. It needed all the motive force of his friendship for him to avoid breakages in the drawing room and study given over to Pons for his art collection. Schmucke was wholly devoted to music; he composed it for his own pleasure, and he gazed at all his friend's baubles as a fish supplied with a complimentary ticket would gaze at a flower-show in the Luxembourg gardens.
I do not know if anyone has read the entire "Human Comedy" series of Balzac; I know that the dozen or so works over the course of eight months has exhausted me. Balzac is too melodramatic, too given to digressions on minor characters, too steeped in one time and place that is too different from my own, and above all too painful in his themes of good but vulnerable fools ruined by treacherous society-approved self-interest and snobbishness and gossip, to be sustained for long at once.
Cousin Pons is presented as a mirror image of Cousin Bette (July 2017 bookpost) on the theme of "poor relations", with the "poor" title characters being presented as the aggressor (Bette) and as victim (Pons). The culture shock is odd today; Bette is by no means down and out, and her "rich" antagonists present well in society but are on the edge of ruin even without Bette's machinations, due mostly to the paterfamilias's over the top foolishness. Pons, meanwhile, is presented as a good and innocent poor man whose problems stem from a longing to have good dinners and from his painstakingly collected set of objects d'art. The collection is worth a fortune; an old man in Pons's situation today could easily sell a few items and dine well in restaurants for the rest of his days. In 19th Century France, one apparently had to be invited to dinners at the homes of high society; and Pons's mean, rich relatives savagely arrange to get Pons shunned and un-invited by everyone, solely out of spite, and in a way that presents pretty much everybody as mind-bogglingly callous.
Pons in turn spends so much of the book slowly dying of psychologically induced sickness, surrounded by greedy people trying to get the art collection that he had previously been giving away piecemeal to those who fed him well, that one either rejects it as unrealistic or suffers unbearably along with him. Only Clarissa Harlowe takes longer to die. No more.
Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick
The aim of Ethics is to render scientific--i.e., true, and as far as possible, systematic--the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end considered as ultimately reasonable. These cognitions are normally accompanied by emotions of various kinds, known as "moral sentiments", but an ethical judgment cannot be explained as affirming merely the existence of such a sentiment; indeed, it is an essential characteristic of a moral feeling that it is bound up with an apparent cognition of something more than mere feeling.
In a period when the representative philosophy is long on heavy duty German metaphysicians who pride themselves on their incomprehensibility, it is nice to find a mostly simple Englishman talking about the much more interesting (to me, anyhow) study of learning right from wrong., without even begging the question by invoking "God".
Sidgwick compares and contrasts three popular ethical theories of the day: There is hedonism (the epicurean kind which we call "enlightened self interest" today), which presupposes capacity for impulse control and delayed gratification, and that society will remember what you do--and so the problem is not so much unbridled lust and gluttony as not understanding where true self-interest lies. For example, practitioners of ascetic religions (say that they) experience ecstasies that most people cannot even contemplate without first undergoing severe disciplines. Same with the feelings of pride and honor that come with following Bushido or other warrior codes.
Second, there is "intuitive" or Kantian ethics, that follow a priori (written in advance) principles of duty--with the difficulty that moral "laws" need qualification or exceptions. hence books of statutes that attempt to codify moral law and end up running to several volumes under most or all governments as legislatures are confronted with the need for exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, and so on.
Finally, we have Benthamite Utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number", and clearly Sidgwick's personal choice) which bases ethics on the practical consequences to society, and which is hard to reconcile with egoism.
Sidgwick is big on impartiality as a virtue, and on benevolence towards humans in general. Although he loves Utilitarianism, his stated conclusion is more of an agreement to disagree with egoists than a full argument against them. A good book for students of ethics, dabblers, and serious scholars alike.
Libertarian Paradise: Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions...However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.
Hard Times is one of Dickens's shortest novels, quite short enough to be part of a standard high school curriculum; and it's maybe the most relevant of his novels to the present day. It has a factory where laborers are treated like crap, by a boss who pretends that treating them well would put the whole factory out of work, that unionization would horribly impair their freedom to make desperate bargains for sub-subsistence existence, and that he himself was born penniless and cast out into the gutter with nothing, and raised himself by his bootstraps. And people are still saying these things today.
It has a school that is run like a practical business (with a teacher named M'Choakumchild), priding itself on teaching practical facts in fields that will make them Useful, and in killing imagination in the bud. We get to see prime examples of how children who do brilliantly in this environment turn out, and how those who are considered failures turn out, with all the biting satire you might expect. And people still want schools like this today, when they want schools at all and do not wish instead for children to get unpaid internships at the School Of Hard Knocks.
It has a good man trapped in an unhappy marriage to a horrible woman, who is unable to have happiness with the good woman who can and would give it, because morals. And there is an equal and opposite wonderful woman trapped in a marriage to a beastly man, whose temptation to look for something better is seen as a descent down a staircase to damnation, and the other man treated by Dickens himself as a cad. And today, although there is easy divorce, poly communities are still savagely derided by the monogamous, and many kinds of healthy relationships are scorned, and NeoCalvinists in religion and government try to make them unavailable to all.
These are very relevant topics for a young mind to explore, in a book of under 300 pages, with lively, if occasionally two-dimensional characters to be held up as very needed examples and warnings to people in danger of suffering through the belief in nonsense. And yet, I am not aware of this book being taught in any secondary school.
And I can't think why.
Jerk in Germany: Royal Flash (Flashman #2), by George MacDonald Fraser
If I wasn't an Englishman, I would want to be a German. They say what they think, which isn't much as a rule, and they are admirably well-ordered. Everyone in Germany knows his place and stays in it, and grovels to those above him, which makes it an excellent country for gentlemen and bullies. In England, even in my young day, if you took liberties with a working man, you would be as likely as not to get a fist in your face, but the lower-class Germans were as docile as [n-word deleted] with white skins. The whole country is splendidly disciplined and organized, and with all their docility the inhabitants are still among the finest soldiers and workers on earth--as my old friend Bismarck has shown. The basis of all this, of course, is stupidity, which you must have in people before you can make them fight or work successfully. Well, the Germans will trouble the world yet, but since they are closer to us than anyone else, we may live to profit by it.
The second book written but the fourth in the chronology is a short one taking place mostly in continental Europe. Frasier's MO is to find historical events that happened not too far from each other, and to send Flashman so that he manages to encounter them all. Hence, an adventure that combines the adventuress Lola Montez in Munich with young Otto von Bismarck in Saxony, and an arrangement of The Prisoner of Zenda.
As always, CN because the protagonist is an utter asshole, a rapist and an English chauvinist who uses offensive words on almost every page. In other words, typical Victorian English white dude.
Meanwhile, in Australia: The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes
It is a quarter century since the Australian in London risked hearing languid sneers directed at his criminal ancestry. This colonial vestige was already dying a generation ago. Nevertheless, it was part of English attitudes to Australians before 1960, and especially before World War II. When it appeared, it would send upper middle class Australians into paroxysms of social embarrassment. None wanted to have convict ancestors, and few could be perfectly sure that some felon did not perch like a crow in their family tree. Fifty years ago, convict ancestry was a stain to be hidden.
Holy fucking shit, this history of how white men fucked up Australia is AMAZING. I found the book referenced in a foreword to one of Patrick o'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, and made a note to read it. I was glad I did. First, as part of the tapestry emerging from the Early 19th Century Canon as THE age of exploration in works from that age and from modern works (Dana, Melville, O'Brian, Fraser; prior to the 19th century there was Hakluyt and Marco Polo. after that, there was more to the world than just Europe.). Second because the popular mind, considering australia, never gets beyond "Australia was settled by convicts."
The Fatal Shore is a work about the simultaneous oppression of indigenous peoples and the lower classes of a "privileged" nation, and about the ways in which oppression of the marginalized unnecessarily fucks up life even for the privileged. Australia was governed by the USA Republicans of England, with predictably horrible results. Everybody suffered, as we suffer today, simply because of dogma that certain people were "naturally predisposed" as better than others, and that there is such a thing as "just deserts" (always punitive). There are chapters on climate and flora and fauna of the new (to white people) land, and chapters about criminal justice, and about the ways in which innocent people were ancestry-shamed for things people long-dead had done; chapters on resistance to authority and chapters on the savagery to which people descend in the utmost extremity.
Just read it. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Very highest recommendations.
The Art of the Essay: Winterslow, by William Hazlitt
On the question being started, Ayrton said, “I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?” In this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Everyone burst out a-laughing at the expression on Lamb’s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. “Yes, the greatest names,” he stammered out hastily; “but they were not persons—not persons.” “Not persons,” said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. “That is,” rejoined Lamb, “not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Principia,’ which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see anyone bodilyfor, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller’s portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare?”
--from "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen
Jacques Barzun highlights Hazlitt as a great writer of the times and urges Winterslow as an introduction to his work.
I wasn't convinced. These lit-crit essays just made me go "Meh". fortunately the book was short. There are many other Hazlitt collections, and I intend to try at least one more, that may be more representative of the whole of his work.
The First Crypt Keeper: Uncle Silas, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity, smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the loved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more, henceforward to lie outside, far away and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded.
One of the great classic gothic horror stories. I'd never read it before, and found it surprisingly tame, probably because I imagined it in Edward Gorey animation the whole time I was reading it. Other than a few prophecies, there is nothing supernatural about it, and unless you're reading The Lovely bones, a first person narrator is probably going to live through her ordeal.
There are, however, plenty of every-day horrible people. The heroine's moody, lugubrious father knows or should know that his brother Silas is an Evil man. YES--religious, and, YES--very fond of money and has none, and YES--his enemies tend to die, leaving poor, oppressed Silas under the shadow of suspicion. And so, what does Daddy do for his daughter, the one charm and love of his life? He decides to prove Silas's goodness and redeem him by putting it in his will that the girl must live with her Uncle Silas for three years "until she comes of age" (never mind that she's already 18 to begin with) AND makes Silas next of kin to the vast fortune she is to inherit if she lives. that way, her survival will PROVE that silas is an innocent man, since a villain would take advantage of the opportunity to do her in or something something garbanzo.
Mayhem ensues, and no one could possibly have predicted it. More along the lines of "creepy delight" than "gonna make you whimper all night just thinking about it", and you get credit for reading "literature". good recommendations.
The 19th Century Murders: Blind Justice; Blood on the Water, by Anne Perry; The Bellini Card; The Evil Eye; The Baklava Club, by Jason Goodwin; Crimson Angel, by Barbara Hambly
Brother in law or not--advocate of 'eradicating' the 'disgrace of slavery' or not--Jefferson Vitrack was a white man, and so January refrained from saying, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."
Instead he simply said, "No"
"Your journey would not go unremunerated", Vitrack hastened to assure him. "Whatever we find, you will be entitled to half of it for your trouble, as you would be going into Haiti alone. As a whit man, it would be impossible for me--"
"And as a black man, finished January gently, "the moment I set foot in Cuba, I would be at extreme risk of being kidnapped and shipped as a slave back to the United States, where I promise you, NOBODY is going to ask if I've been enslaved illegally or not--or more likely, to Brazil."
--from Crimson Angel
Monk had anticipated this news from the moment Hooper had told him Lord Ossett wished to see him. The whole issue was poisoned beyond any possibility of finding evidence uncontaminated by time, interference, emotion or confusion. And--worse than that--when they failed, as they certainly would, the blame would rest with them, not the Metropolitan Police who had actually mishandled it. People would remember only that it was the River Police who had ended it in disaster, confusion and injustice.
--from Blood on the Water
The dead, in Yashim's experience, could never wait. The shock of murder penetrated glass, and betrayal shattered stone. And death brought Yashim across the border of men's lives.
Right now, he thought savagely, a murder would suit him very well.
--from The Baklava club
Anne Perry continues to preach contemporary social justice issues wrapped up in a Victorian-era setting that shows that things rarely change. Blind Justice has Oliver Rathbone facing charges for doing a mind-bogglingly stupid thing in the course of a case, raising issues of legal and judicial ethics versus actual justice, while Blood on the Water, written in 2014, involves a Middle Eastern man scapegoated for an act of terrorism by a government that wants a fast closure of the case, and then turns to Monk and the river police to bail them out when their fuckup becomes apparent. There is suspense, but not as to whodunnit so much as what will happen next.
Barbara Hambly's tales of Benjamin January, a free man in a land where people who look like him are presumed to be things, get better and more instructive the farther abroad they go. Crimson Angel is an emotionally nasty but historically rich narrative that goes from NO to Cuba to Haiti and provides much detail about the differences between those lands in the 1830s, with particular detail given to the Hatian Revolution of the 1790s, often overlooked in American historical accounts by a nation that would prefer not to explain that a nation governed by black people existed in the western hemisphere while the Slave States were proudly asserting as fact that the people they enslaved were animals incapable of self-determination.
Goodwin's Yashim the eunuch series, set in early 19th century Istanbul and presiding over the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, is rich in Middle Eastern atmosphere, but the corrupt and decadent government and skullduggery involving collaboration with hostile Russians hits too close to home for me, at a time when I'm trying to escape into murder fiction. These are the last three in the series, and I read them out of duty, since they are supposed to be for historical enrichment and almost all of the others are set in England, always England.
Ayamase Before Bedtime: The Palm Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola
To my surprise, when I helped the lady to stand up from the frog on which she sat, the cowrie that was tied on her neck made a curious noise at once, and when the Skull who was watching her heard the noise, he woke up and blew the whistle to the rest, then the whole of them rushed to the place and surrounded the lady and me, but at the same time that they saw me there, one of them ran to a pit which was not so far from that spot; the pit was filled with cowries. He picked one cowrie out of the pit, after that he was running towards me, and the whole crowd wanted to tie the cowrie on my neck too. But before they could do that, I had changed myself into air, they could not trace me out again, but I was looking at them. I believed that the cowries in that pit were their power and to reduce the power of any human being whenever tied on his or her neck and also to make a person dumb.
This short Nigerian novel is in the form of a Yoruba folk tale. It makes little sense, has no moral, and meanders all over the place like a weird dream without rhyme nor reason. It reminded me of one of the narratives from the Arabian Nights, stretched out and full of digressions and fantasy.
The basic plot is that the narrator, a gentleman of leisure whose sole pastime is to snorfle down palm wine by the barrel, suffers when his tapster, the only man who can procure him so much palm wine, dies; he goes on a quest to bring the tapster back from the dead, to continue to serve him--and the quest takes him from one weird land to another, encountering talking skulls, witches, giant snakes, you name it, and eventually acquiring a magic egg that will produce all the palm wine he needs. Its main value, it seems to me, is its atmosphere, savage and evocative of times long past, and as a voice from outside the western literary world. Highly recommended.
Drinking from the Finger Bowl: Good Behavior, by Harold Nicolson
It is unnecessary to dwell on the great advantages that can be conferred on a community during the stage of growth and consolidation, by the existence of a hereditary governing class. Such a class restrains despotism, provides continuity of experience, and furnishes the State with a supply of potentially able, responsible and honest administrators. Yet if a governing class is to be of durable value, it must not degenerate into a stew pond for the culture of large carp with extended bellies and protruding eyes; it must be a lake, fed with clear freshets, with its inlets and outlets unencumbered and its waters constantly renewed.
A fun and well-written survey of the evolution of morals and manners throughout civilization, from the Chinese dynasties to Greeks, Roman and barbarians, French fops, English courtiers and "gentlemen", the German gemutlichkeit, and--dissected with withering sarcasm--the Victorian era school system and the moral lessons of respectability that would be laughable had they not inflicted such real horrors on impressionable children. See, also, Jesus Camp and other programs to kill moral thought in the young. Highly recommended.