Two summer projects.

1. I'm trying to read Ulysses again. I made it 70 pages last time I tried, back in 2005; this time I think I can do it. Joyce and I have some history: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has the place in my history of reading that Catcher in the Rye has for many others. Portrait was the book that both alerted me to the possibilities of the written word and fixed in my mind certain ideas about artistry and authenticity. Of course, this is mainly because I misread it. When I re-read Portrait last year, I caught much more of Joyce's humor. I was somewhat disconcerted to realize that Stephen Dedalus is not quite the artist that he thinks he is. I'm glad to say that Ulysses is actually pretty funny. For example, the verbs in the library scene: “Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered…”, “Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured…”, “All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled.” And a page later: “John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth: —Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.” This stuff makes me chuckle.
2. I'm also trying to learn to follow sports. It's not that I don't like sports. I get a big kick out of going to see games live. It's just that I have trouble keeping track of games I don't watch. This is a little bit weird, since I can spout out esoterica about actors in movies I don't even plan to see, but I can't keep track who plays for the teams that I claim to like. So, warming up with Wimbledon and the World Cup, I'm going to try to figure out how to follow sports so that when NFL season starts up, I'm not the odd man out at the office.

If I can follow through on both of these projects, I'll probably be able to keep my level of pretension exactly where it is right now.

Poisons.

“Was I an apostle of health, and if so what was health? If it was bodily well-being, that was a reasonable if not a simple answer. But if it included mental well-being, or spiritual well-being, the whole thing became greatly complicated. There are people who must have their poisons, or they are not themselves.”

-The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies, III.2

Busy week.

I had a pretty busy week, but all I really want to say is that Prokofiev's Sonata in A Major, No. 6 is unbelievably impressive when you're sitting ten feet away from the piano.

Tonight.

I'm going to go see Megafaun tonight in Arlington, VA. Haven't seen these guys in a while, so I'm pretty eager to get down there. Their new "mini-album" drops in September.

Megafaun - Volunteers | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

From “Jesu, meine Freude.”

Gute Nacht, o Wesen,
Das die Welt erlesen!
Mir gefällst du nicht.
Gute Nacht, ihr Sünden,
Bleibet weit dahinten,
Kommt nicht mehr ans Licht!
Gute Nacht, du Stolz und Pracht!
Dir sei ganz, du Lasterleben,
Gute Nacht gegeben!

Good night, existence
that cherishes the world!
You do not please me.
Good night, sins,
stay far away,
never again come to light!
Good night, pride and glory!
To you utterly, life of corruption,
be good night given!

Two on Hypatia.

There's a new movie that's supposed to be about the life of Hypatia, an Alexandrian Neoplatonist philosopher and her murder at the hands of a Christian mob. But the details are off:

• David Bentley Hart is supremely irritated, and he hasn't even seen the film. Working from a New York Times article, he goes over some of the territory he covered in his last book.
• But in case you don't trust a movie that's being reviewed at such a level of remove, Nathan Schneider's posted a review at Religion Dispatches. Though he comes to substantially the same conclusion about the accuracy of the history, he's got some kind words for the film's larger perspective.

Either way, not the sort of movie I'm planning to see.

Two from the League.

I've no idea if there is anyone who reads this blog and doesn't read the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a group blog that is kind enough to let me post. But just in case there is such a person, I want to link to two of today's posts at the League:

• David Schaengold wrote a delightful little post about the Clinton marriage. He conjures up a not-entirely-impossible scenario in which the Clintons are “the secret representatives of genuine romance in our age.” It's a grand idea.
• Second, I dropped a link to this article in The Nation about the Templeton Foundation, which funds faith-and-science research. As a result of this article, I'm now deeply interested in how the Templeton Foundation engages with academia, and I hope to find out more.
  

Hardcover books.

Alan Jacobs highlights the closing paragraphs of Ruth Franklin's report on her visit to the BookExpo America:

“At one panel I attended, titled ‘The Next Decade in Book Culture,’ Nicholas Latimore, a publicist for Knopf, waxed lyrical about the material qualities of a hardbound book. His house has always gloried in its beautiful design: the colophon page at the end that identifies and gives the history of the font the book was set in; the deckled edges on the most prized books, which encourage the reader to turn pages slowly rather than flipping through; even the attention that book designers put into choosing paper with ‘the right tooth’—that perfectly calibrated roughness of texture. In response, someone commented that the hardcover book might be going the way of the vinyl LP: largely obsolete, replaced by a cheaper and more convenient product, but still prized by connoisseurs for the superior quality of the aesthetic experience it offers. A collective gasp was stifled at this idea. But perhaps it’s not so crazy.

“Of course, the book has been around a lot longer and is far more deeply entrenched in our vision of culture—both what it is and what we want it to be—than the LP, which turned out to be a disposable format, a means to an end. Yet what the digital revolution in the music industry shows us, I think, is that what people want is music: the format doesn’t matter nearly as much as the product. As we moved from 45s to LPs to eight-tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s, the music itself remained the constant. What we wanted, it turned out, was to have as much music as possible at our fingertips at any given moment, easily accessible. This hasn’t been an unmitigated boom for the music industry, but it’s also been far from an unmitigated disaster. And I have faith that people—who have been telling stories just as long as we’ve been singing songs—will continue to want novels, too, no matter the format. I like deckled edges and toothsome paper as much as the next person, but if they turn out to be extravagances we can no longer afford, well, I still plan to keep reading.”

While the codex's current advantages over digital formats—durability, open format, “flippability,” etc.—aren't simply extravagances, I'm also not very worried about the future of reading. Furthermore: though I have to admit that from time to time I have the desire for “as much music as possible at [my] fingertips,” that's not exactly what I'm after with books. That is to say: I'm a big re-listener but generally not a huge re-reader.

That hideous Rorty.

From George Scialabba's essay “C. S. Lewis: Beloved Tormentor”:

“Lewis’s phenomenology of evil attained its apotheosis in Wither, archfiend of That Hideous Strength, the conclusion of his theological science-fiction trilogy. Wither was a philosopher-bureaucrat, whose mode of operation – almost a mode of being – was to blur distinctions. Now, a short definition of modern intellectual history might be: the progressive undermining of all firm distinctions, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical. In recent years, no one has carried on this dissolution more subtly or rigorously than Richard Rorty, perhaps the most respected living Anglo-American philosopher. I revere Rorty, but thanks to Lewis, I have never been able to leave off mentally comparing him to Wither. And when I heard Rorty lecture for the first time, the physical resemblance I saw – or fancied – between him and Wither made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. That’s how it feels when mentor and tormentor meet inside one’s head.”

On the strength of this paragraph, I may re-read the Space Trilogy soon.