Asimov's Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World

The Foundation Series and Great Books of the Western World have many common points. Both Foundation and GBWW are concerned with the preservation of the civilizing influence of reason and Western culture. Both address theories of knowledge and power. Both attack ethics and the sentiments with great feeling and strong views.

But as the Great Books of the Western World is a real life conversation spanning the ages, it is about true things and actual stories, which even though fiction are based in true cultures and times. The Foundation Series is fiction through and through, fiction in the best, the Aesopian, sense of the word. The world of Foundation cannot and could not ever exist.

But in a deeper sense Asimov's Foundation is poetry; it is a fiction that shows more truth than a history can.

The underlying context of Foundation occupies the same epistemic space as Plato's ideal republic. Socrates insists that reality can be measured; how much more does the fictional Hari Seldon force nature to yield up her secrets through psychohistory! The Encyclopaedists of the Foundation represent the Platonic educational ideal, and the various scurrilous derring-do of the first book of Foundation represent symbolically much of the political dialog that followed in the wake of Plato's work these last few thousand years.

Finally, in the annoyingly analytical smugness of the psychohistorians, starting with Hari Seldon himself, we can see Aristotle's rational and dry wisdom at work.

The key point of dissimilarity between the Great Books and Asimov's Foundation is simply that Asimov has a far more narrow view of knowledge than the Great Books. Asimov's Foundation, when exposed to the harsh, humane, realistic light of the Great Books, reveals itself to be marred by a narrow scientism and cramped by reductionistic cliches.

Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom would put it, the Foundation Series expresses considerable anxiety towards the centralized authority of the Western tradition. The Empire is doomed, but the Foundation will endure through the dark age of irrational faith and mystical, magical thinking. Asimov's effort to assert reductionist scientism makes the Foundation Series (at least in the first three books) vital and genuine.

Finally, comparison with the Great Books casts a new light on the latter books - ie, 'Foundation's Edge', 'Foundation and Earth'. If the heroic effort to ward off the forces of gaian wholism in the latter books of the Foundation Series is not entirely convincing, then the fault is perhaps not in the vitality of the writer but in the weakness of the material.

The Place To Meet Milton: On Re-reading Paradise Lost

I just finished re-reading Paradise Lost.

My impressions? It's very Christian. The end goes all prophetic. Really it's like four poems.

Paradise Lost Poem One tells Satan's comeback from his wee setback of eternal damnation.

Paradise Lost Poem Two is Archangel Raphael and First Human Adam's chitchat about this and that - war in heaven and the creation of the universe and sundry other cosmick gossip.

Poem One and Two are the great science fiction style parts of Milton, and show what he learnt from the speechifying of the Ancients and Mr Shakespeare's productions.

Paradise Lost Poem Three is the Action: vis, Eve and Adam eat and Fall. It's, um, a psychosexual drama with angels.

Last we get Paradise Lost Poem Four, the prophetic wrapup where God judges, the Son sacrifices, Heaven hurrahs, Eve repents and Adam hallucinates the future on a hilltop with Archangel Michael. Then it's out of the garden and into the book of Genesis.

What to think? It's hard to appreciate deeply enough the science-fictionality of Milton's Paradise Lost in context of a world where SF didn't yet exist.

Certainly the poem compares not unfavorably to Homer's work (Poem One and Two), Dante's (Poem Four), Shakespeare's (Poem One's psychological portrayal of Satan and Poem Three's portrayal of Adam and Eve), and D.H.Lawrence (Poem Three's frank eroticism). In the light of the Western Tradition Milton is indubitably great.

Dante, Milton's opposite in temperament, best shines a light on the artist John Milton. Where Dante's art is delicate, tinted mercurial (being a Gemini as he informs us) Milton's is darkly sensuous, visionary, and monumental art.

Milton's effects strain the imagination; much is left to the reader to imagine, and much of Milton is dark to the moral eye not through obscurity but through largeness of imaginating. These effects become vivid only when the reader's sensual and moral temperament happens to concur with Milton's.

Image making in Milton is moral AND sensual; he sees no break between the two natures of the animal and the angel in a true Christian. This view, so alien morally but so modern in its acceptances of sensual desire, at once endears and distances us from Milton.

We feel he is serious, and noble, and a man disappointed in his sex life, and yet we sense a rich inner life of emotion and sensuality survives the disappointment, an inner life sustained, to our modern consternation, not by healthy adult relationships but by mere moral fortitude! Milton becomes uncanny, heroic, when we consider him as the figuration of the Human. What kind of pragmatism is involved in such a moral-sensual stance? Perhaps outside the author of Paradise Lost we cannot imagine another such man.

Ultimately the greatness of Paradise Lost comes down to incommensurates: I find myself liking John Milton more for himself than for his poem. Paradise Lost becomes the place I meet Milton in rather than the poem I read.

How Reflection Creates the Past: On Reading Conrad's 'Youth'.

Joseph Conrad writes with great style and heart!

I just read aloud 'Youth'. Into this little book which Conrad wrote as a youth of 24 years he poured all the experience of aliveness and joy from his formative years.

Reciting 'Youth' disclosed the breath and the silence and the difficult play of words in the author's throat. So when the narrator, old Marlow, asks his listeners to pass the bottle of claret, I reached over and sipped my cup of peppermint tea, and mindfully breathed a moment. Conrad means you to rest when Marlow rests, because he requires you to work when Marlow remembers. If you do not rest when Conrad/Marlow rest, you will probably miss much of the meaning of the story, which is encoded in the emotion and style. This kind of reading is great fun, too!

"...the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colassal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet."

See how Marlow piles up the three clauses on one another? He uses this technique for three quarters of the text. It happens whenever young Marlow, the hero of the story, is powerfully moved. The effect when recited is rhapsodic - it builds complex waves of feeling and image - it crests and foams into the last quarter of the story, which is written very simply. If you do not follow the waves, you probably will not feel the impact of the simply written last scenes. That is why recital is best for this story. But it also expresses the emotional rollercoaster of being young so very well!

If being young is like being asleep, or like being in a dream, then becoming an adult is like waking up and remembering the dream even as it fades from memory's lips and leaves a faint bitterness. Likewise, I didn't understand 'Youth' until I had slept on it. When I woke up all of a sudden the mind cleanly took hold of the whole story as a single object, and I understood what Conrad is up to.

This is not a coming of age story at all. This is a dream of youth and age, as mythical as the sport of the gods, and as golden. The sweetness of immortality and the bitterness of age come together and heighten one another. The authentic taste of the passing of time is here in these pages, intangible and subtle.

"Allegory" is a dead word for a living form. According to wikipedia it comes from αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public". Wiktionary tells us that allegory is "the representation of abstract principles by characters or figures". I see many problems with the use and meaning of the word (too many to go into here), because it presupposes a break between presentation and representation, between the abstract principle and the concrete image.

In my experience, sometimes the abstraction IS the character - these is no difference between Achilles and vengeful wrath, is there? Likewise, in Conrad's 'Youth', there is gap between abstract and real, presentation and representation. The thing is the idea is the thing.

And in this case the thing is Youth and Age. The story shows the essence of both so well, so powerfully, that is is almost jejune of me to speak of it with ordinary words. It is a very powerful presentation of poetic truth!

The entire story of 'Youth' is an allegory for the nature of youth, complete with invocations to Jove, the god of juveniles. The moments when Marlow uses the triple repetition signal the efforts to hold back the unconscious contents of the actual event - the twining repetitions of threefold horrors are gorgonic snakes of words that ward off the actual experience of youth from Marlow's weather-beaten consciousness.

Marlow's story, with its rhetorical flourishes, is old Marlow's defense against the authentic experience of youthfulness. The story is not just about a sea adventure, but about the life Marlow has lived since then. That is why the first three quarters of the story are charged with such sorrow and sagacity.

And what about the actually young Marlow? We remember pumping water til the cook goes mad, waiting in dry dock til the rats abandon ship, and sailing til the ship burns and sinks. But what do we feel about all this stuff we see of the young Marlow?

We feel the moody turbulence of adolescence in the constant rain and water pumping. We feel the sense of waiting to become an adult in the social embarrassment of dry dock. We feel the fiery concupisnce of puberty in the smouldering invisible fire beneath the vessel which bears a freight of fragile human lives to a new unknown world in the East.

Conrad's 'Youth' is a precise allegory for adolescence! Every detail provides an exact imagining-forth of the essence of being juvenile. So 'Youth' is immortal. And so what? Every adult of character has been through the same transformation in her or his own way.

Old Marlow's perspicacious warding-off of genuine feeling breaks down at the end of 'Youth'. This is signalled by the loss of complex language when young Marlow wakes to see the faces of the East, loses the repetitions altogether. It is simply written. The faces of the East are an image out of dreamtime; consciousness has been broken down by the storms of adolescence, but in being broken, has become adult.

And so what? We wouldn't want to repeat the ordeal of losing these sweet illusions so bitterly, nor would we want to forget the pleasure that the delusions of youth brought us.

For old Marlow in his drink youth is a bitter illusion, until the moment when he breaks through to the direct experience of young Marlow once again, and for a moment the old man is soft and vulnerable once again.

But Conrad seems to be saying also that as adolescence dreams of the man he is to become, so the adult who reflects on her adolescent dreams can always take the opportunity to make them real... reflection is the work of a well lived life.

This is the greater attainment of 'Youth': Conrad through the voice of Marlow realizes his own adult self through reflexively investigating, probing, testing and deepening his perceptions of his own youth.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

Unspeakable Nature in Wordsworth's Prelude: A Poetry Recital

Tonight I read Crashaw's 'The Flaming Heart'. I recited poorly but the poem didn't bear repeating. Crashaw's 'Flaming Heart' is a fiery rush of sexual-religious rhetoric.

The poem is inspired by (a better word would be 'ejeculated from') Crashaw's reading of the life of Saint Teresa: the resulting gush of verbiage represents his unmediated transposition of female orgasm into Crashaw's intellectual process. That is to say, Crashaw's sustained passion for Teresa's piety, the images of fire and melting, the forceful accumulation of ornate figures that when read aloud are so isomorphic to a desperate squirming of the body - all this and more makes Crashaw's poem 'The Flaming Heart' just NSFW.

Crashaw's poem is an example of that obscure subgenre, Catholic erotica, at its finest.

Then I turned to Wordsworth's 'Two Part Prelude (1799)'; altogether a different order of poem. Really for the first time I got the shamanic darkness of the poem. As I read I heard a roaring in the inner ears and felt, as if from a shadowy second body which stood right behind me, mine and yet not me but the body of a dream, shadowing the physical body.

I'm not ashamed to say it frightened me a bit, this darkness and motion and words that name things which I knew no names for. I stopped reciting and turned on the TV.

But it was no use: the entire field of awareness went on vibrating inexplicably with the impact of Wordsworth's greatest poem.

The unutterableness of Wordsworth's poem, neither pre- or trans-verbal, has that quality of Nature Herself which also storms uneasily beneath the verse of William Shakespeare.

Perhaps it was the recital of Crashaw that evoked it; the darkness of Wordsworth was drawn by the fire of Crashaw. I don't know.

It made me uneasy all the next day.

On The Incredible Badness of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ With Sundry Slurs And Personal Smears Against the Poet Laureate

Tonight I read Tennyson’s ‘Dedication’, and ‘The Coming of Arthur’. I suggest we consign ‘The Coming of Arthur’ to the Office of Dead Bad Books. That we just forget it existed.

Let’s look at what ‘Arthur’ has got. Tepid sentiment. Rancid blank verse. Chilling second-hand reports of vapid inactions and trite offstage discussions between faceless characters.

Tennyson’s ‘Coming of Arthur’ is Milton left to go cold, reheated by Keats, then left to go cold again and reheated and served up as if fresh meat. Tennyson’s blank verse reads like three day old stew. Spenser in comparison is an imagiste.

I read aloud the opening four lines no less than four times to make them sing:

Leodogran, the king of Cameliard,
Had one fair daughter, and none other child;
And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,
Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

This scans like handful of mud. “Fairest of all flesh” – is she a lump of meat or what? “Of all flesh on earth” – and at what butcher shop the unearthly or heavenly flesh is to be got?

And what’s with that last line? “Delight” clinks against “child” in a nasty ole mis-rhyme. And, reader, you must read aloud the last two lines to really get for yourself how stilted and idiotically tuneless this poetry is.

Then I read three times the passage where Arthur decides to take Guinevere as his girl. The first read through I thought, “Sweet, a half decent poetic figuration!” and so re-read the lines to get at their meaning. But on second reading, I discovered that the figure (a rich expanded metaphor of Arthur and Guinevere as the alchemical and magical enaction of social unity), was in fact my own imagining projected onto the lines, and if present at all, it was not quite articulated.

Tennyson had just plain failed to put the idea across, and I read it a third time in disgust just to make sure that poor Alfred’s disaster was complete. I cannot quote it; it is too poor. It’s lines 81 to 93; Arthur is speechifying.

I quickly read the rest of the ‘Coming of Arthur’ so I could be sure there seems to be absolutely nothing of lasting value in it, and passed on to Plato’s superb ‘Theaetetus’. I even glanced forward over the chronological selection and realised that when I first as a thirteen year old kid read his short poems I had got the best his work.

I mean, did Alfred Tennyson have a stroke or just start taking anti-psychotic drugs? All his work from ‘In Memoriam’ on features lots of grinding rhythms, and precious little romance, music, color, and life, and woeful verbal fluff combined with vague imagery. It’s like a detailed record of really bad sex.

I want to suggest that Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is in fact composed to commemorate a series of painfully ill-executed headjobs which Alfred got from Parisian whores, including a series of stanzas on the trauma of painful teeth grazings, and a sequence on Tennyson’s treatment for syphilis. I suggest this as the real meaning of these poems not because I believe you can read that into the text at all, but because any topic would be more exciting than the unpersuasive panegyric on the death of a friend that poor Alf has has inflicted upon posterity.

Why Read Proust?

Why Read Proust?

There are many good reasons not to read Marcel Proust’s great novel A la Rechere du Temps Perdu.

It is uneventful. It can be boring. The narrator is a bitchy snob. It has too many outright lies in it to be autobiography, and too much tiresome bickering to be considered a novel. And it is too long.

It is cynical: all human relationships except close family are false, fake; naked unconscious self-interest and vanity drive all social interactions; childhood habits once broken can never be recovered; insomnia, poor health, jealousy, sadomasochistic urges, ungovernable impulses – all of these completely overrule and overdetermine the individual’s sense of reason.

It is capricious: a huge cast of mostly irrelevant characters caper about uttering strange irrelevancies, whose total sum is some kind of mysterious calculus of snobbery cloaking intense animalistic urges, which Proust seldom deigns to explain to readers living in a less uptight culture. Cruelty is commonplace between characters that are considered friends, and sexual compulsions bind everyone together invisibly and inseparably.

It is disorganised: the tone changes from page to page, from book to book, without warning, guidance, or apparent reason. The paragraph divisions are completely useless, presenting the book messily. The chapter headings are either hopelessly irrelevant or simply nonexistent; the reader is left to impose his own structure on the book if he is to make sense of it.

So why read Proust? If the good is the enemy of the great, surely Proust’s book is its own worst enemy? But if you read merely good books, then you are condemned to mediocrity. And since Marcel Proust’s book is both bad AND great, it provides the most uniquely vulgar amusements in the midst of the most sublime art. I don’t dispute its greatness; its goodness I sincerely doubt.

So why read it? I can tell you must read Marcel Proust. I can tell you it is great. But I cannot tell you why. Harold Bloom blathers on about identity and memory; I don’t know about that. I can only tell you that I do, you must, it’s worth it – that is all I can say.

Addendum: Okay, okay, so Proust is funny, charming, insightful, sweet. His language is beautiful, delicate, tough, and sinewy. His ideas on love are shocking and wise in equal measure. And the badness of Proust’s book makes the great qualities all the more astonishing. It is as if it were discovered that Thomas Aquinas has been, in addition to writing his Summa Theologica, the author of some pornography – I kid you not: Proust is THAT shocking.

Barbarians in the Cathedral

I read a summary of the critical reception of Anna Karenina today.

What these critics miss, except for D.H. Lawrence who overstates the case from pagan zeal (and he has Raskolnikov's axe to grind), is that Anna Karenina sets the consciousness of the reader ringing like a bell! Anna Karenina resonates in precisely the same way a grand cathedral filled with constant plainsong might. I mean this very literally. It is sacred.

Who cares what the book means? What does 'means' mean?! In the face of the cathedral purity and aesthetic primacy of the book, intellectual criticism is flat out inadequate.

Yes, the words might be critiqued, but only by aesthetic illiterates; Anna Karenina exists as a transcendent and Platonic solid, a symbolic and timeless space of play, a temenos, an ideal realm - the reader who knows this must revere, then, and keep his head's mouth fast shut.

Laughter of the Devil: Re-reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov

I've had an eventful month. I haven't posted here for a while: having a broken computer really lends itself to getting quality reading done.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's a remarkable book. I love it; I really do. Maxime Gorky said Fyodor proves in it that he is a sadist. Karamazov is not a cruel book - it is a funny book. Gorky missed the joke
A hard joke, a difficult and passionate joke, but still - Dostoyevsky is bullet-to-the-head humor. If it doesn't knock you down like it did Gorky, do you think you even have a soul in you?

Penguin translator David McDuff pinpoints the main characteristic of Brothers Karamazov: it is the work of the devil. He falls short: the real devil in Karamazov is Dostoyevsky. The outrageous humour of the Evil One himself dressed as the teacher and sage of Tzarist Russian peity and patriotism is not to be missed.

Brothers Karamazov also reads forward in time to Kafka, Nietzsche, Gide, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, providing a context and critique to the future. It is prophetic if you suppose the horrors of the future can only be endured by horrible mockery. Dostoyevsky is a nasty insect, and to read him is to shed a carapace made from the purest hysterics and mocking laughter. What remains is the Devil himself.

McDuff translates as 'crack-ups' the chapter where all the main characters go mad. It's as good a word choice as any. For Dostoyevsky, then, we all crack up when shame and guilt makes us act in a hateful way - and for him this crack up is the only thing that has the power to bring you to accept God's Will. That's how I read it: Dostoyevsky's Devil is the guide to God, and his frightening laughter lights the way.

Practically speaking, for those considering reading Karamazov, I recommend skipping these chapters as tedious:

- Book One, part three - 'Voluptuaries' tediously demonstrates the Karamazov vileness which part one describes in fewer words.
- The entire Public Procurator's speech is just a wasteland.
- The Chapters on the life of the Elder Zosima; they are merely background color to render the monks more ridiculous. Since they already are silly, it can be omitted.

For a first time reader I suggest you start at the moment the family visits the monastry, and then return to the long introductory chapters on Fyodor Pavlovich's life, which are less interesting material. I am re-reading these chapters now, for the fourth time, just for the pleasure of Alyosha's childhood and Fyodor Pavlovich's amusing life.

The most remarkable chapters in the piece, for which the greatest attention should be preserved, are the Onion, the Wedding at Cana, the Grand Inquisitor, the entire hilarious Crackups Section, "It's always interesting to speak with an intelligent man" (this requires the most precise attention, and the outrageously black and funny three talks between Ivan Fyodorovich and Schmerdyakov, and "For a moment the lie becomes truth", which is the only sublime chapter untainted by satanic hilarity.

I read Karamazov as a teen and in my mid-twenties. Reading it now at 34 years of age, I finally get the joke. It's a comedy of the sweetest and most sacred kind, and to be approached in a reverent way. I had little realized how profoundly it had influenced my own book, Savage Things. Now had I realized the effort it must have taken Dostoyevsky to utter his book - enmeshed in the absurdly uptight society of the time, he managed to utter a few free words. Compared to his, my own Savage Things exists in an existential void where the upmost freedom of choice is available to all characters, but like Gide's Michel, no guide or signpost as to what actions are right or proper to a free man.

As it happens, I am reading Chekhov's stories and plays pretty constantly this last month and the next, so many of these questions find original answers in the generation after Dostoyevsky. I cannot wait to read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Even now, reading Chekhov has cast an incredible light onto Isaac Babel in explanation. I love and take a lot of joy in Russian literature at the moment; they seem to me the natural inheritors of the Greek Enlightenment (6 century BCE) and French Enlightenment of the 17th century.

On Harold Bloom

I am beginning to get a little pissed off with Harold Bloom's ideas.

Perhaps it would help if I had his astrology chart -- then I could interpret him from a purely pagan and nonverbal perspective and place him outside the veritable cloud of interpretations he surrounds himself with

Bloom as an invoker of haunted figures of rhetoric seems himself haunted with his own figure. He is easy to overdefine or underdefine, hard to evade, subtle to prefigure and alone on the field of a battle of his own imagining.

I have been reading his work for 15 years and I just now seem to be finally arriving at a clear impression of Harold Bloom's ideas. I feel strongly and negatively about his ideas. Specifically, I feel negatively impressed by his faith, negatively amused by his taste, and negatively entertained by his criticism. And I feel the need to put these three aspects back into perspective.

1. Harold Bloom's Atheism.

Mister Bloom calls himself a gnostic. What this means is that he finds athiesm unaesthetic and prefers to pretend to believe that God is absent from reality. In other words, he is an athiest who likes to pretend God exists.

I am negatively impressed by the high spirits of this enterprise. I mean, who gives a shit about the ironic delicacies of Jahweh as they relate to King Lear. But Harold says he is haunted by them, and I suppose it's as good a pastime as any while you wait for death.

2. Harold Bloom's Aesthetics.

The Big Haitch sez in his Western Canon that Joyce memorised a passage of Beckett's Murphy which is so miserably over the top that it is funny.

What I suppose he is aiming at here is the proper sense of the camp aesthetic - the outrageous as the real. The long string of outrageous books Bloom has had published testify to his own preference for the camp aesthetic over the merely sublime or beautiful. But he consistently mixed the camp with the terrible, the unbearable, the monstrous. There is no relief. He persistently appreciates a book or poem's uncanniness.

He says otherwhere ('The Best Poems in the English Language') that poetry is marked by wisdom, aesthetic power, and cognitive strength. Falstaff and Joyce's Bloom are examples of this expansive power. So where is the joyful campery in Harold Bloom? As with Freud, his camp is grimly embedded in his understanding of the reality principle and his reality testing. Never in Bloom does a flight of pure fantasy end well. Never in Freud does a joke end up funny.

I guess what I am trying to say is the Harold Bloom is just not gay enough. I prefer my bad taste to be lovely and sublime, Bloom prefers his bad taste terrifying.

3. Harold Bloom's Hermeneutics.

Let's look at Harold Bloom's hermeneutics in pieces:

The Big H-Bloom compels attention with his refined and superb treatment of the Kaballah of his ancestors in 'Kaballah and Criticism'. 'Kaballah and Criticism' has the advantage of being at once usefully dispassionate for the discerning esotericist, and overwhelmingly left-of-center to the normal run of literary criticism.

I suspect 'Kaballah and Criticism' is Bloom's own stab at canonical strangeness. It reads like the dude's channelling Borges, like a light piece of fantasy metaphysics. It's good fun.

On the darker side, Bloom's Freudian reading of literary criticism in 'The Anxiety of Influence' is enough to induce anxiety just trying to understand it. But there's a punchline to 'Anxiety of Influence': the family drama of writers through time turns out to be just good clean competition. What a relief: literature is really actually sport! Whew. But the lack of laughter in Bloom's literary criticism is revealing: in this literary Olympics we are not dealing for the most part with good sports. And in the process a lot of fun literature loses its joyful humor.

Next, throughout his books on Romantic poets and 'The Western Canon', the H-Bloom delivers for the first time I have seen a full-blooded Yankee approach to literary criticism, with his Emerson-inspired reliance on his own views and experiences as a reader. It's fun and lively writing, full of his fascinating personality and views.

Finally, 'The Western Canon'. Like Henry James and other astute modern American intellectuals, he situates himself between Europe and the United States as a complex, shadow-haunted figure of rejection and acceptance -- he puts himself between the Old and New World like a filtering mechanism, saying (in his imagination) Yea or Nay to which texts cross the Atlantic west into the promised land -- and by standing between the two Worlds, implicitly buys into the idealist and utopian notions of America that fuel the daydreams of political extremists of both the left and right.

'The Western Canon' reads like a season of Big Brother with great writers as housemates. One by one the writers are evicted until only Shakespeare is left winner. And I have to wonder, not that the voting process has been hijinked (I do not doubt that Shakespeare rocks) but whether it is really Willy S. or just the Bloom in sly Shakespearean drag.

We have four approaches to interpretation, the Kaballistic approach, the sport-based pagan approach, the individualistic Yankee approach, and the Canonical reality-tv style. What are we to make of this mess?

Tracing out the H-Bloom's hermeneutics are like doing a study of who has had sex with whom in a gay ghetto in a large American city -- not only it is salaciously personal and intricate, but it is also substantially frivolous.

Investigating H-Bloom's frightening and frightful sense of the camp aesthetic, which he uses to interpret the highest kinds of literary excellence, we discover at the essence a mordant sense of horror such as might excite Stephen King's complete indifference. We can interpret this through Borges or through Freud or through Jahweh Herself should we fancy - but any interpretation suffers from belatedness - that is, the subject of Harold Bloom is already sufficiently fogged up with interpretation, even to the level of becoming useless for the actual work of literary criticism.

Yes, art does relate to politics and gender and class and elites. No, in my opinion we have not clarified precisely what this relation is. But I can draw three major distinctions from things so far:

- Bloom is a pagan, not a Jew (or Christian or Muslim). He cannot be expected to treat non-pagan topics with the same brilliance as he treats pagan matters of aesthetics and competitive poetic excellence.

- Bloom likes the frightening form of the camp aesthetic, not the joyful forms. He cannot be expected to blossom with a life-giving camp, and he can be admired for his gothic charms without wishing he were different.

- Bloom is an American first and foremost, not a European. He cannot be expected to accept the interpretative traditions of Europe and their corresponding European-specific biases. That said, however, Bloom seems to have made significant progress towards an expressly American literary criticism. Harold Bloom's sense of bad taste may be a bit Emily Dickinson, a tad Gothic in his love of the uncanny, but his interpretations are of an all-American individuality, delivered with such a sunny Yankee disposition -- I reckon even Mister Emerson might've approved!

On Writing Style: the Realists Versus the Rest of Us.

In regards to questions on style in writing prose, one thing is certain: It depends.

French prose is the start and end of all matters of prose style. Why? Because not only is French as a language more amenable to supple and sinuous turns of style, but it is less hampered by the shackles of the demand for actual substance in writing by an indulgent and fickle French reading public. (One year it is novels as jigsaw puzzles, the next cannibalism as romance... crikey French readership what's wrong with youse??)

The basic dichotomy I perceive is the realistic prose stylists versus the Rest of Them.

The Realists...
Some writer called Flaubert used the concept of a "telling detail". He said you only need the detail that helps TELL THE STORY AND NO MORE. His realistic style proved the basis for French writers for a century.

Now I find Flaubert dull. I found his novel Madame Bovary so dull, you could hire the dvd and not finish watching it...so dull you could fall asleep using the pages as toilet paper...so dull that a recital by lesbian midget circus performers in midair juggling flaming sticks would... but you get the idea: boring boring boring man and writing and books. But this is the really cool thing about style - you might pick up Flaubert (play safe) and really enjoy his books.

So the instruction from Mister Flaubert - for those who don't speak French, Flaubert is pronounced 'Phallaeo-Bart' - the instructions for writing realistic telling details in prose, are as follows: for creating telling details is to ask yourself if each detail advances the story, and omit those that do not.

...And The Rest of us.
Style is complex and elusive, because it is related to your fundamental strengths as a writer and abilities as a human. To develop style, read the great stylists, reflect on your strengths and their strengths, and vigorously experiment with your writing.

Start with purchasing and reading every year or two a copy of Strunk and White's legendary book 'The Elements of Style'. Continue to George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' (found online with a quick google). Every single writer I know has read and admires both of these.

Then I suggest you push at the limits of modernity. Try the two great trans-realistic prose stylists of the last century, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolfe. Woolfe's prose is simply gorgeous, and Proust's is very very funny. But reading will not take you all the way.

Proust and Woolfe both wrote "pastiches" of other writers - that is, they rewrote their own essays or stories in the tone of another writer. They did this because that gave them freedom over and from the style of the other writer.

As a rule, then, you will see that style is learnt sequentially by imitation, by theft, by imitation and by transforming - the same way children get good at speaking and the way by which adolescents transform language.

Good writers began by recognising and imitating their betters; develop and expand their abilities by stealing from vital equals; learn by vigorously adapting the greats through pastiches; and then the rare great prose stylists become great by innovatively transforming their own merely good writing by infusing it with the vivid awareness of the greatness of the prose of other writers.

On A New Statesman critique of Beckett's novel, The Unnameable

"That is really the point of The Unnameable, whose demands on the reader seem, at times, to approach the demands it must have made on its author (the popularity of Beckett studies at universities around the world is testimony not only to the inexhaustible richness of his oeuvre but also to the feeling that only people with nothing else whatsoever to do with their lives would be able to digest, sift through and evaluate everything he has written); and it is not so much that Beckett shot his bolt with it that makes his subsequent work so (mercifully) short as that concision was the only possible subsequent artistic course that would have allowed him to continue with integrity."

(From www.newstateman.com)

This paragraph's savage humor goes way beyond damning Beckett by faint praise or even attributing to Beckett a bad eminence. Does anyone else read in this paragraph a series of jokes against the author?

Can it be anything other than a joke to claim that The Unnameable was such a failure that it constitutes nothing more than an APOLOGY for everything Beckett afterwards wrote.

The Top Top Ten List

THE TOP TOP TEN LIST

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov.
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I have tried to read all of these. I found these four hard going and retreated to try another day: Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Chekhov. I am in the process of reading the Proust, obviously enough.

Which ones haven't you read yet?

This list comes from a wonderful and amusing book which asks hundreds of writers to list their top ten books, then counted recommendations as if they were votes to create the above list.

What is most striking but not at all apparent about the top top ten list is that they are all canonical classic works. The reason a classic is a classic is because it is universally recognised as being excellent, not simply because of the social conditions or such rubbish. This list re-validates the reality of the core of classic Wetern civilization.

Consider Western Civilization With Me For A Moment

I feel privileged.

I invite you to consider the reality of Western Civilization for the space of three to ten in and out breaths. Just sit and consider the following:

I am surrounded by the most beautiful music ever written in every culture;
By the greatest books and teachers of the ages;
By the accumulated wisdom of a dozen successful societies infused into the society I inhabit.

I am surrounded by a culture distinguished by continual and constantly increasing

- invention in the arts,
- innovation in the sciences,
- and practical applications in medicine, agriculture, technology.

A Shorter Canon of the Great Books of the Ages, partly based on Harold Bloom’s Western Canon.

Life is not long enough to read everything great.

The problem is not that you only have time to read the great stuff. The problem is that there is not enough time to even read all the great stuff that exists and is deeply well worth reading.

Not only that, but with each new book you need a new entry-point into the text, which in turn takes study, talking, opportunity, time and effort.

Harold Bloom himself observed that as recorded and literate history extends in time, all but the most essential pieces fall away. I don’t see why we can’t prune them away first. The chief difference between my list and Bloom’s is that Bloom is concerned with the lastingly good writers, while this list gives not only the very best of each age (which after all will be the only ones likely to survive in the future) but also the books that best represent the consciousness of that age.

But there are more compelling reasons that time-saving for this Shorter Canon. Each of these books are major entry-points to complexes of other books before and after them. If you can manage to get into even one of these books, you will have at your fingertips a hundred other books accessible and waiting for you. Reading this books, you enter a great library with no end.


The Classical Era:

The Bible
Homer
Plato
The Athenian dramatists
Virgil
The Quran

The days are upon us already when if one can use ordinary phrases from the Bible it is considered erudite, so this age is lost to most people and much of it is pearls thrown before swine. But it still has essential merits. These books are like the opening theme of a great piece of music that is still playing today, although in unrecogniseable variations, in the background of our lives. These books normally need footnotes and guides. Living guides are best, but genuine classicists are rare.

The Aristocratic Era:

Dante Alighieri
William Shakespeare
Francis Bacon
John Milton
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Edmund Burke (on the sublime)

These guys are still accessible directly with the aid of notes on the page. Thankfully, all their work remains current in one form or another. The birth of humanism and Western self-consciousness can be traced to these distinctive works.

The Romantic Era:

William Blake
John Keats
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Leo Tolstoy

In these few writers can be seen the sources and roots of the modern modes of consciousness, especially effecting our way of seeing beauty, our psychological modes, our models of change and our conceptions of truth.

The Modern Era:

Jorge Luis Borges
Marcel Proust
George Orwell

These three astonishing writers come face to face with the past and successful absorb it, the first Borges into sheer word-magic, the second Proust into the subjective experience itself, and the third Orwell radically politicizes the past. How Orwell brings to the whole exercise of critical Western modes of consciousness a brutal idoeological simplicity that paradoxically, empowers the complexity of postmodern political consciousness through its starkness, is a whole fascinating other essay.

This is the most ruthless of lists of great writers possible. It eliminates all secondary greatnesses and leaves only the absolute pure gold of writers.

What writers would be necessary in order for our humanity be preserved, were all the libraries to be lost? Look no further than this list. You have to go to another planet, without hope of return, and have only a suitcase to carry twenty seven books in? Get the paperback versions of these ones and cram them in if you want the best to survive at your destination.

The Western bias is evident. I depart from Harold Bloom here: I would add several more Eastern books which have touched my life greatly. These ancient books are the wellsprings of civilisations, and thus of the kind of incalculable merit of the same scope as that of the Bible and Quran:

The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Stephen Mitchell.
The Dhammapada and the Digna Nikaya
Narayan’s retellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
The Upanishads
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
Analects of Confucius, translated by Simons Leys.

Finally, of the modern age I would add the following writers whose contribution to the modern world seems especially epochal, the first Hawkins because of his radical Westernization representation of the abovementioned Eastern classics, and the second Robinson because of his masterful recontextualisation of postmodern Western culture as a force of nature, which returns me in imagination to the darkness of the Greek dramatists with its great primal force:

David R. Hawkins
Kim Stanley Robinson

The full list of 27 essential classics, then:

• Dhammapada and Digna Nikaya
• Analects of Confucius, translated by Simons Leys.
• Ramayana and Mahabharata (best retold by RK Narayan).
• Upanishads
• Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
• Bible
• Homer
• Plato
• The Athenian dramatists
• Virgil
• Quran
• Dante Alighieri
• William Shakespeare
• Francis Bacon
• John Milton
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Edmund Burke (for his essay on the sublime)
• William Blake
• John Keats
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Leo Tolstoy
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Marcel Proust
• George Orwell
• Kim Stanley Robinson
• David R. Hawkins