6,000

A non-horrific statistic (at least I think it is): I happened to notice that my Memorial Day/Poetry Monday post was #5,999 in this blog's history. So this is my 6,000th post on Dreaming Up Daily.

I accept that the post counter is accurate.  But I'm not sure what the daily page view count actually means, what with bots, spammers and photo links, but page views passed 500,000 total awhile ago.  A good many Twitter and Facebook and other social media accounts exceed that number in a week, some in a day or an hour.  But for a writer, it's a big number, especially if it represented actual readers.  Even cutting it in half, which is generous but more realistic, is pretty good.

Blogs are obsolete, not quite yet in the same retro cool category as other things I've held onto, like vinyl records, flip phones and even video cassettes.  Not yet Old School either. But Twitter is too short, Facebook too ugly and creepy, and only blogs give me the space and the flexibility to create a page, something like a magazine.  I like that. So I keep playing here, regardless of who does or doesn't shows up to watch.

The superseded blogs as well the always unfashionable ways I use this one have contributed to the decline of daily hits over the years, especially for the newest post.  I am heartened however that older posts still get hits, which I suspect means readers who were actively looking for something found an example of it here.  I still have other blogs where I post seldom if ever (I've been blogging since something like 2002, though this blog is not that old, sometimes maintaining five or so at a time) and they continue to pile up hits, some in the thousands.  There's something substantive--an issue, a play, a writer, a Star Trek episode, that somebody wants to know more about.  Maybe an old movie or a book they just heard of, or just remembered.  Or they're turning 60 or 70, and found one of my posts on that.  This is what I've called the Internet of Remembering, and I'm pleased to be part of that.

There's an element of service in this, and I do think about that.  I think about adding to knowledge, making my very particular contribution.  I take it seriously.

But my dirty little secret is that I have always been less interested in sounding off, attracting clicks or going viral than I have been in writing.  Sure, there's an element of showing off in all this.  And I like to do what I used to do professionally for awhile, which is make a kind of page out of words and images.

When you're showing off it helps to have an audience, and there is something essential about the pairing of writer and reader. But that's becoming secondary (as the length of these posts may suggest.)  Especially at this point in my life, it's mostly about the doing.

Even famous writers will say this.  T.S. Eliot did, at the end of Four Quartets.  Last night I read an interview with Malcolm Cowley in his old age, a literary critic and biographer who had a lot of influence in American literature from the 1930s through the 1950s especially. (And he's also a western Pennsylvania boy.)  "Writing becomes its own reward," Cowley said.  "What do you need from others--except a little money--if you have satisfied the stern critic in yourself?"

These days not even a little money enters into it, and the inner critic is maybe less stern in some ways.  I can't say I'm exactly saintly about it--I get discouraged at the silence at the other end.  So I am grateful for my regular readers.  I suspect I know most of them by their first names.  I probably know their birthdays, too.

But in the end it's a kind of serious play, the work of a lifetime and the work of a life.  So when I get over myself and get into myself, when the energy returns, I can inhabit my zone of illusion, inside my carapace of play. And I make more sentences, and assemble another post.  Some don't look so good the next day.  But I'm happy with a lot of them.  I may have a huge blind spot here, but I think many are as good as anything else one can find on the Internet on a given day.

Still, I doubt there's another 6,000 posts coming.  Though I suppose you never know.

R.I.P. Immortals 2018: Live Words

“ One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time, plenty of time...” Ursula Le Guin 1969: The Left Hand of Darkness

"Whatever may happen in the bad times, the verbal arts, at least, tend to become very important. It’s really important what you say in the bad times.” Ursula Le Guin 2017: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon

Yet another kind of immortality can belong to the writer.  Their words are preserved in small physical objects that circulate, are available and easily obtainable. Books provide the most accessible legacy.  They are in so many forms and places--from new and used bookstores to thrift shops, bargain bins and free boxes, libraries and in the homes of friends.  Now they are in digital form, and free on the Internet.  They are much easier to find--and especially, to serendipitously stumble upon--than old films or TV shows, let alone the evanescence of performances.  And they last.

There also seems to be something about the written word that can take time, to expand, to drop the reader into deeper levels, to open new eyes and ears beyond the writer's physical time.  Writers can live in the lives of strangers long after they are dead, perhaps more than they did in life.

The first month of 2018 was not yet over before Ursula Le Guin died. No Time To Spare, her wonderful selection of online writing, especially for her blog, had been a Christmas hit in December. I bought it on Christmas Eve at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park, California.

This Christmastime I returned to Kepler's and saw a special Le Guin endcap, with that book still featured, as well as collections of short stories, her last volume of poetry, and the collected Earthsea novels, plus a new book, Conversations on Writing, that consists of interviews she gave in 2017. This book suggests some of the reasons that Le Guin was and will remain a strong influence on other writers, and all kinds of writing.

In terms of her fictions, her particular gift of anthropological science fiction is likely to influence even more visions of the future, as that future is more and more shaped by climate and ecological crisis. Margaret Atwood notes that all the oppressive aspects of the future she imagines in her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, do happen in parts of the world or did happen in history. Many of the striking imaginings in Le Guin's novels are derived from Indigenous cultures of the past and present. Her insistence on cultural attributes that serve the Earth as well as humanity, and preserve a realistic relationship between them, will only grow in importance.

Three very different writers who died in 2018, Philip Roth, Neil Simon and Tom Wolfe, did much to illuminate American life in the 20th century, and in so doing, helped define our view of our own culture.

Roth in his meticulous fictions, in both his grim and hilarious modes, and Simon in his comic plays and screenplays, explored Jewish-American experience, and revealed much about both sides of the hyphen. They also transcended nationality, imagining their way into other sorts of lives. Because Neil Simon was so popular, his achievement is perhaps undervalued, particularly his screenplays, including a lesser known gem like Max Dugan Returns. Tom Wolfe on the other hand came from the WASP world, and was equally comfortable writing about the rich and famous, and the oddball outcasts. He attempted more consciously to define the culture he observed.

William Goldman was one of Hollywood's most celebrated screenwriters, but he also wrote three books that became classics in their fields.  His Adventures in the Screen Trade is considered the best book on screenwriting and Hollywood, and his The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway is considered the best book on Broadway and American theatre.  But his little self-conscious fairytale novel, The Princess Bride, was a word-of-mouth hit that's now a classic, and the movie made from it has its own, still-growing cult of admirers.  I loved all three (or four, counting the movie.)

I remember watching a PBS documentary in the 1970s or early 80s on the new physics of the very large and the very small.  I knew nothing about it, so I struggled to understand something about quarks with color and the four forces of the universe.  The documentary culminated in speculation about a grand unified theory that would unite all the forces and all of physics.  There was one man, the announcer said, who might do it.  And the screen showed Steven Hawking, small and twisted in his wheelchair.  This was before he used his now-famous voice synthesizer, and so the soundtrack included his speech, completely unintelligible to all but a few intimates.  This was the greatest mind in science, in a body suffering a motor neuron disease.  It was an extraordinary mind-boggling moment.

Hawkings never did come up with the theory (then again, neither did Einstein.  Physicists today despair of its existence.)  But he became a global presence, beginning with his international best seller, A Brief History of Time.

For a few summer days at a workshop in Colorado, I was a student of writer Harlan Ellison.  It was 1969, when he was in his prime as enfant terrible, and was playing the part.  He was mercurial at best, but conveyed the fundamental seriousness of writing. (He also liked my story.)  Besides his own work ("A Boy and His Dog" was probably his most famous, and notorious) he edited two important anthologies in the late 60s and early 70s (Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions) that introduced and defined what would be called the New Wave in science fiction.  One of the authors he published was Ursula Le Guin.

Other well-known authors who died in 2018 were (most recently) Israeli novelist Amos Oz, V.S. Naipaul, Robert Bausch, poet Donald Hall, playwrights Maria Irene Fornes and Ntozake Shange.  But there were also a few lesser-knowns who I discovered in serendipitous fashion.  British philosopher Mary Midgely wrote boldly and sensibly and even heroically about evolution in particular.  American philosopher Stanley Cavell was across the street at Harvard when I discovered his books on film at the Harvard Bookstore in the early 70s.   I have a weakness for memoirs and histories of popular culture, so fairly recently I was pleased to discover Gerald Nachman's Raised on Radio.

One of the great American places for serendipity is the Strand Bookstore in New York, where in particular review copies go to live.  Fred Bass, who made it so, died in 2018.

There's a more complete list of writers who died in 2018 over at Books In Heat. May all those mentioned in these memorial posts rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Year of the Jerk and Other Notes

I'm cleaning up my bookmarks for the month, so in no particular order:

A Stanford professor promoting his book speculates on why 2017 is the Year of the Jerk, and other Peak Asshole observations.  At the very least, an entertaining read and another pressure release from overboiling outrage.

The recent fuss over the current CIA director claiming erroneously that the "intelligence community" believes the Russian interference in 2016 had no impact on the outcome, can be viewed in the context of an earlier observation made in late September by the former director of National Intelligence James Clapper about the current White House incumbent: "Our intelligence community assessment did, I think, serve to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory in the election."

Dan Rather reflects on the practice of journalism and his journalistic career, particularly in covering segregation and the Civil Rights movement, in this interview.

Department of Ignorance: An eye-opening expose of scams against seniors;  a description of the role of social media bots in the 2016 Russian cyberspace invasion, and bots as an ongoing problem.  Not sure I still understand it all.

Other tech: another of several recent apocalyptic pieces on smartphones.  That was the Guardian, here again is the Atlantic's, which has been on its top five most popular pieces for weeks.

The Atlantic also has been following the Russian invasion through social media angle--in this story and more recently in this one.  Meanwhile, while denying Russian influence, Homemade Hitler himself bragged that social media won him the 2016 election.

But it wasn't just social media. A more recent and largely overlooked study that more than suggests the state of Wisconsin swung R in 2016 directly due to that state's successful voter suppression.

While the first attempt to force enforcement of the constitutional emoluments clause moves towards court consideration, more evidence surfaces of corruption in the current administration, in the cabinet, and once again, the White House incumbent.

Meanwhile, On Planet Earth:

Everybody has their sensitive spots, their areas most prone to denial.  One of mine is the fragility of the ocean.  The news there (such as this latest study) is so ominous that it undercuts any long term hope for the human future.  The impacts of the climate crisis in heating the oceans as well as effects of unbelievable pollution (including garbage) are stuff I really don't want to think much about, it's so impossibly sad.

Add to that mix speculation on the effects on the ocean of an H-Bomb explosion, as North Korea is threatening to do.

While the media and public officials struggle to come to terms with future sea level rise etc. that so far are happening slowly, there's the ongoing evidence of changes promising an ominous future.  Earlier this month there was this report on the effects of carbon pollution in reducing nutrients in food plants--an invisible but ultimately scary effect.  I suspect there are other factors involved as well, such as the heavy use of pesticides in industrial agriculture.

More recently, there's a study on flying insects.  Declines of bees and butterflies have alarmed people, but it's apparently worse: a study conducted across Germany shows a nearly 80% decline in flying insects from 25 years ago.  You can't lose more than three quarters of flying insects and maintain ecological balance--not to mention the food supply--for very long.  Here's one take on that, here's another.  Here's the study itself--it seems quite extensive.  And here's an evaluation on the study's dire significance in context of other studies that tend to confirm it.

Cultural notes:

Nice to see an update on the activities and whereabouts of David Kippen, who was my first editor at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, and a much missed book columnist in the city.

Article about this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, who--more than incidentally--is the first winner of that prize to have ever taken a creative writing class.

A surprise Nobel Prize in psychology for researchers studying biorhythms--the human "body clock."  I did a piece for New Times magazine in the 1970s on biorhythms, specifically the Lark and Owl (morning v. night people), which the accompanying image by Dick Palulian illustrated.

 Amazing that 30 years later, this research is still obscure and underfunded, as this story suggests.  It seemed to me then and still does that this research is far more robust and relevant than much of the more publicized of what passes for psychological or brain research these days.

Among the deaths of the once well-known registered recently, one went by very fast.  Connie Hawkins was both a virtuoso and pioneer of how basketball has been played for the past forty years or so, especially from the 70s through the 90s.  Though he finally made it to the NBA, his is also another story of some of the best years taken away by racial discrimination.

He also played a year for the Pittsburgh Rens in the ill-fated ABL in the early 60s, and won the league MVP, then for the Pittsburgh Pipers in the ABA in the late 60s, leading them to a championship. These were the only two pro basketball teams ever in Pittsburgh, and neither was well supported, especially the Rens.

I saw Hawkins play once in person, in what turns out to be the only pro basketball game I've ever seen live.  And it was only because our high school played the warm-up game before the Rens at the Civic Arena.  There were more people there for the high school games than stayed or came to see the pros, including one of the all-time greats of the game of basketball, Connie Hawkins.

An intelligent exploration of the music and career of one of the best songwriters and best voices of our generation, too often overlooked: Joni Mitchell.

I was much amused by this article about listening to one of the rare performances of Eric Satie's "Vexations"--rare because the same short piano passage is repeated for 19 hours.  I was present for such a performance in 1970 at a summer artists colony in Cummington, Mass. I attended.

 A tag team of pianists played in the main hall, as I recall.  The stage was just the piano and some candles, which added to the strange solemnity, the holiness, of the event.  Listeners came and went, and though we sat in chairs, I retain a feeling they were church pews.  I wasn't present for the entire 19 hours though I was for the beginning, some of the middle, and the end.  It was an experience I am grateful I had.  Not quite on an LSD level, but of that order, like prolonged meditation.  Also one of the few community moments in a fractious summer.

Finally...

On those old news broadcasts I used to watch, they tended to at least try to end on an upbeat note.  So as counter-evidence to suggest we're not all jerks (at least not all the time) and that social media might be good for something, there's this New Yorker story about a cover image--a painting of three female faces peering down at a patient undergoing surgery-- that inspired a Twitter hashtag to collect photos reproducing the image but with real medical people--women and minorities.

There are photos in the hundreds on there now.  I suppose there might be some dubious people among them, but just looking at most of them inspires confidence in their kindness and competence.  That their faces can be seen around the world now is a decent counterbalance to what is commonly shoved in our faces.

The Gift

Robert Silvers receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama at 
the White House, July 2013. Without naming Obama, Zadie Smith's 
tribute suggests that Silver admired him greatly  as  a "kind of genius." 
 So this moment must have been a wonderful one,
 and you can see that in his eyes.

The latest New York Review of Books, while functioning as usual as its spring art issue, also contains a number of tributes to its last founding editor, Robert B. Silvers, as well as salutes in this issue's advertisements.

I noted Silvers recent death in a previous post, and several years ago I wrote about this periodical's brilliant articles on political and geopolitical matters from the very beginning, when it was one of the most important sources on the Vietnam war in the late 60s.  That function continues.  For example in this issue, Jonathan Freedland's piece ("Dover and Out") is the best single narrative on the UK's suicidal Brexit process that I've read anywhere.

  But several of the just published tributes prompt me to focus less on content than on Silver's and the NYRB's effects on writing.

My afore-linked piece on a single issue of the NYRB prompted my only contact with Robert Silvers, which was an out of the blue email from him: "I was touched by what you said about the paper. During 46 years, I’ve never read a piece in which a writer said what was actually in an issue."

These tributes make me only more envious of those that had written for him.  All the writers agree that his genius was in editing to clarify but to maintain the writer's own voice, which is a rare editorial quality. But it was not necessarily an easy process. Mark Lilla for instance:

"Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself."

What were the enduring values that Silvers' editorial mission championed?  Former NYRB editorial assistant Nathaniel Rich summarizes:

"Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible."

As Lilla also points out: "In reading the Review, you always learn something."
Even if I didn't experience Silvers' editing, I absorbed some of this ethic simply by reading what Silvers' referred to as "the paper."  I'm sure it shaped my writing to some degree, and my reading.

But Lilla goes on to offer the ultimate tribute to an editor:

" In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift."

Jim Harrison

Writer Jim Harrison is dead at the age of 78.  He is one of the great American writers of his generation, and unique in his evocation of non-urban America.  His poems, fictions, essays and interviews pulsed with a lively and engaged intelligence and humor.

 His most famous fiction is Legends of the Fall, but I believe his greatest achievement will prove to be his late 90s novel The Road Home, interlaced with an earlier work, Dalva, to form an 800 page epic that qualifies as much as any to be a Great American Novel.

There was a certain quality of elegy to The Road Home, and it seemed like the work of a lifetime in several senses.  Yet he kept writing for nearly another 20 years. And he was aware of what those years meant. The NPR story that ran on All Things Considered Sunday quoted one of his poems:

Before I was born I was water.
I thought of this sitting on a blue
chair surrounded by pink, red, white
hollyhocks In the yard in front
of my green studio. There are conclusions
to be drawn but I can't do it anymore.
Born man, child man, singing man,
dancing man, loving man, old man,
dying man. This is a round river
and we are her fish who become water.

I've written about several of his books for several publications over the past 18 years, but I couldn't begin to summarize what I've learned and what I've taken from his words.  On Saturday, the day he died (though it wasn't announced until Sunday), I watched a video of the late psychologist James Hillman (someone who Harrison often quoted) saying that as humans, our job in the world is to fall in love with it.  The New York Times obit quotes Will Blythe reviewing Harrison:  “His books glisten with love of the world."

(I didn't think of this until long after I chose the image for this post, but several times in interviews, Harrison expressed the wish, that if he were to be reincarnated, he would like to spend a few thousand years as a tree.)

This is the month of the 30th year since my book The Malling of America was published.  If memory serves, it's also the official publication date, so it's officially 30 years exactly: February 26, 1985.

Last year I thought about preparing an anniversary edition, a kind of final wrap on an era, with an introductory essay bringing things up to date.  Maybe I'll do it eventually but it seemed too daunting.  Surprising the emotions and memories it can still evoke (the book and publication etc, not the topic.)  The main motivation to do it would have to be mine.  I'd have to essentially publish it myself, as a print-on-demand.

But there still is a paperback edition available through online booksellers, like Amazon for instance. (That's the paperback cover up there.) Amazon also offers a hardback but they don't reproduce the first edition cover, so I have no idea if these are legit, especially the ones called "new."  The used ones are cheap enough to gamble on, though.  The ex-library books are probably pretty nice--I never liked the garish dust cover but the book itself looks quite elegant, with the title in gold on white.  Maybe I'll order one myself--I like that my book was in libraries.  I'd like to have one with that library card envelope in the back.

I let the 25th anniversary go by without even a mention on a blog. Seemed unseemly to be the one noting it, or maybe just humiliating.  Don't know why I mention it this time, except that the day didn't go by without recalling it.

Is Print the New Vinyl?

Before we move on beyond this accidental series on digital domination, one interesting and perhaps delightful (if true) countertrend.  However, first let's restate the trend, with the eloquent opening to the previously quoted (in the last post) Leon Wieseltier New York Times Book Review essay (with my emphases), in your Sunday Times today and here online:

 "Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” 

What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous."

The death knell for non-digital reading and writing is often sounded, sometimes with lived alarm, sometimes with complacent (I've made my money and reputation thanks) acceptance.

But leave it to my favorite newspaper columnist, Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle, to find (or maybe make up, just a little) a somewhat countervailing trend: "Print is the new vinyl."

These words were uttered, he writes, by a tech savvy entrepreneur, suggesting a trend that combines retro with realization (that analogue records offer better sound than digital.)  Together they fantasized a sweet (if likely brief, or if ever) future:

"So perhaps the latest bunch of tech billionaires want quality too. They want long-form journalism, say, that can be reproduced in a portable and well-designed format. They want editing and fact-checking. Perhaps they want fiction, poetry, excerpts from the classics.

Nothing like old media to add that sheen of prestige. The guy I was with suggested that writers might once again make actual money, that the sight of someone carrying a book would be like seeing someone toting around a dulcimer — it indicates that they have hidden depths. We’re talking about a covert desire to follow the dream of the Enlightenment."

A last ditch dream?  Probably.  But I do recall that on several visits to a fashionable cafe in Menlo Park not far from Stanford--close enough to ground zero for the tech world--I saw more people reading books, newspapers and magazines than were starring at laptops and tablets, or even conspicuously glued to their smartphones etc.  A definite counter-trend to, for instance, the HSU campus.

A Larger Reality

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award.

The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

"And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of capitalism:

"Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring humans.”
George Eliot

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I’ve been trying to understand the mentality that leads people who wouldn’t ask a stranger to give them a keychain or a Twizzler to ask me to write them a thousand words for nothing. I have to admit my empathetic imagination is failing me here."
Tim Kreider
New York Times

"As Someone Once Said:" Jung, Martin Luther King and Quotations

"That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate."
C.G. Jung

It's a great quote, right?  It's certainly a penetrating thought, succinctly expressed.  But is it really a quote?
Did Jung really say or write it--those exact words?

A lot of sites on the Internet think so, or at least they unquestionably accept it as a true quote.  Try it yourself--do a search on the quote.  I just did again--5 out of the first 6 sites at the top use these exact words, attributed to Jung, but without a source named.  One of the top six however varies it a bit: "Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate."

To be fair, this last site was quoting a book, or rather a review of a book: a Washington Post Book Review "where it was noted to be the epigraph to Craig Nova's new novel, Cruisers..."

And I first happened on it in a actual physical book as well, in the exact form quoted up top.  It's one of three quotations at the top of an essay ("Flying Rabbits: Denizens of Distant Space") by Margaret Atwood, in her recent collection In Other Words: SF and the Human Imagination.  Atwood is a careful writer and scholar, who noted in a footnote that the quotation came from another book, Meeting the Shadow by Abrams and Zweig.

It happens that I have that book, too. It's a collection of essays by various authors, including Jung.  Eager for an exact citation, I checked it. It's not in the Jung essay, nor in the many footnoted passages from Jung's work in other essays.  The quote is again one of several on the very first page, without source.

By source or citation or attribution I mean, exactly where in Jung's work does it appear?  Nobody seems to know.  And nobody seems to care.  Because it just keeps getting repeated--and thanks to the Internet, over and over. It's even been perpetuated by multiple tweets.  If it's on the Internet it must be true, right?  It's like the quote has been friended about a million times.

Instead we get "as Carl Jung once said..."

 That it appears in slightly different form--always without attribution--is perhaps telling.  The Psyche Wizard quotes it:“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And he calls it "one of the most important quotes ever!"
 
Another site: "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Though this site does attribute some quotes, it doesn't link for this one (though as we'll see, we may be getting warmer...)

For finally, someone does have an attribution to a statement that carries the sense of this one: "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves." The citation is to Jung's Collected Works Vol. 9.  The book's title is Aion, and this quote is taken from "126" which is a paragraph number I guess.  In the paperback edition it's on p. 72.  (This site comes up earlier if you search Jung and the quotation.)

So what's the point? We know by now that some famous quotes weren't said by the person credited with them, or said at all.  We know that many are not exact.  So people have different attitudes about what constitutes a quotation.  Close still gets a cigar.

On the other hand, we're seeing at the moment a consequence of the inaccurate or paraphrased quotation--namely the one that is being sandblasted off the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in Washington.  Right now it's touch and go whether the work will be done in time for the 50th anniversary of his speech at the March on Washington.

The controversy there was not so much accuracy as the inaccuracy gave a false impression of King's point.  A lot of the problem was context.  And in some sense that's true of lots of quotations.  For instance, Jung's.  In Aion he's making a very specific point about western civilization, and the split in Christian consciousness.  (The chapter is called "Christ, A Symbol of the Self.")

But of course Jung may well have said something very similar in another context.  He may actually have written or said the exact words of this "famous" quotation.  (I noted it because it is brilliantly expressed, and seemed familiar.  My hunch is that someone paraphrased Jung in just this way--Hillman maybe, or William Irwin Thompson, or Bly.)  But if so, nobody I've seen who quotes it has given any location in his writing where he wrote it--or even an interview where he said it.

What truly bothers me is that nobody seems to care where he said it, in what context, or whether he said it at all.    

Emerson for the Day

"The best you can write is the best you are."

Thoreau

You know what day it is---no, not that one, Bill Murray fans.  It's James Joyce's birthday, of course.

Never heard of him?  Well, you've heard of him, but...With Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and the books more people are likely to have actually read, A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Dubliners, he was once revered as the greatest writer of the modern age.  But his reputation has been in something of an eclipse.  That's partly been due to his own descendants, or at least the ones controlling his estate.  They've apparently raised litigiousness to a high modernist art.  They've reputedly tried to stop or control every excerpt, quote, fact, observation or mention of his name for years.  I read somewhere that his work was dropped from an important anthology of Irish prose because of their mercurial demands.  They apparently drove the scholarly biographer of his daughter Lucia half mad, and seriously weakened her otherwise excellent book--and then they sued her anyway.  That she finally won may or may not have slowed them down.

Joyce did enter popular culture for awhile, with the many Bloomsday readings in June.  And reputedly the family put a stop to that.  Notice I keep saying reputedly.  They've reputedly intimidated everybody, and may have intimidated away their future income in the process.

 It may well be that Ulysses is not the greatest novel of the 20th century after all.  Then again, we're in a philistine age.  A Portrait of the Artist will always remain an important book to me, personally and as a writer.  I revered his dedication to his craft, as chronicled with such grace in the classic Richard Ellman biography.  Now there's a new biography, which sounds pretty awful.  There really aren't many good new literary biographies.

 Maybe Joyce's example did me more harm than good, but so what?  His birthday was important to Joyce--he tried to schedule the publication of his books for this date, and I believe he succeeded with Ulysses at least.   So even if he screwed up my life, got me drunk too often and encouraged me to stay poor, while setting standards I couldn't match so I never published even a little novel. He still was a friend.  So happy birthday, James.  Your day will come again.

Tony Judt

The last two quotes posted here, from Emerson and William James, both apply to Tony Judt. There's a fine memorial piece on him by Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books. Here are some excerpts:

"Critical though he was of French intellectuals, he shared with them a conviction that ideas matter. Being English, he thought facts matter too.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of polemical intellectuals. There are those for whom the taking of controversial positions is primarily a matter of personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism. Then there are those who, while not without personal motivations and biases, are fundamentally concerned with seeking the truth. Tony Judt was of the latter kind.

Sharp and cutting his pen could be, but his work was always about seeking the truth as best we can, with all the search tools at our disposal—from the toothpick of Anglo-American empiricism to the searchlight of Gallic overstatement. Unlike the other kind of polemical intellectual, he was always in good faith. And he was always serious. Not drearily earnest—he enjoyed the acrobatics of intellectualism as others enjoy baseball—but morally serious. This was as true in private chat as in public discourse. In what he said and wrote, there was always that moral edge. He felt what he himself called, in a study of three French political intellectuals, the burden of responsibility.

Tony Judt was a very public intellectual but a very private man. He had a rich, close family life. In the last months of his illness, his wife, Jennifer Homans, and their sons, Daniel and Nicholas, set up for him a screensaver slide show on his desktop monitor. Besides happy moments from family holidays, it showed a lot of mountains (particularly the Alps) and railway stations—trains and mountains being two of his private passions.

Tony was a fighter, and he fought this illness with all his strength and will. Not for him the consolations of imagined eternity or Kübler-Rossish “acceptance.” We laughed at the great line that the English playwright John Mortimer reported coming from the mouth of his dying father: “I’m always angry when I’m dying.” He was a clear-sighted realist about what was happening to him, and what would or would not come after. Less than three weeks before he died, I said something to the effect that I knew he was going through hell. “Yes,” he said, with the eye equivalent of that no longer possible shake of the head, “but hell is a nontransferable experience.” So better to talk of other things: friends, bêtes noires, politics, books.

With the dedicated support of his family, devoted students, and professional carers, he found a way to go on doing what he did best—thinking, talking, and writing. In fact, the two years of his fatal illness were the occasion for a creative outpouring, with the Remarque Lecture on social democracy expanded into a short book (Ill Fares the Land, 2010); a set of memoir essays, composed in his head in those long periods of immobilized solitude, and then dictated (some have been published in these pages; the complete set will appear in book form as The Memory Chalet); and a book in which Tony talked through his planned intellectual history of the twentieth century, in conversation with Timothy Snyder. On e-mail—for once, an unmixed blessing—he could continue to “speak” in his old voice.

It is probably inevitable that his life and work will now be viewed, at least for some time, through the prism of his cruel illness—and the quite public way in which he described and fought it. But death should not be allowed to define life. These were, after all, only two years out of sixty-two. As a hardheaded, nonreligious, unsentimental realist, Tony would have greeted any formulaic sentimentalities about what “lives on” with that dismissive shake of the hand. But in some important sense, his intellectual Czernowitz is still alive; and his books will long be walking and talking among us."

R.I.P. Tony Judt

Historian and essayist Tony Judt died Friday as a result of ALS. Despite the progressively devastating effects of this virulent disease, he continued to write his trenchant essays, including one in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. The NYRB web site currently links to all his recent articles there. I posted excerpts from his essay on Words here. Tony Judt lived and died a hero. Never were the words more appropriate: may he rest in peace.

Mankind's Greatest Invention

"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." So begins John Banville's essay on Robert C. Richardson's books on Emerson, in what has to be my favorite quote of recent years, perhaps of all time.

When you're a writer, no matter how famous or obscure, whether you're one of the handful anointed by income or crowned by royalties to bear the title of writer, or you're a wretch like me, insultingly underpaid for squeezing into dubious forms, sooner or later, what gives you the buzz and the meaning, is a sentence you see and hear that you've written.

Oh sure, some get off on paragraphs, and there's the lucky few that get to play with chapters or scenes, and whole books, plays, sagas. But even they share the secret (and often secretive) gleam of a shining sentence, appearing under their fingers.

I wrote a review of a book about a writer who made very good sentences: Jane Austen. And in it I wrote a pretty nifty sentence, at least I like it. And for once I will violate the code and call your attention to it. It is mere cleverness maybe, but it is musical and funny, with a touch of cultural wit at the center. Or maybe it's just cute, I don't care. These days I must take my pleasure where I can. And pointing out a really elegant sentence is forbidden. That's up to readers to discover, and if they don't, well, everybody loses.

So in connection with Jane Austen's journey from obscurity in life to Jane-mania in the 21st century, I wrote this: She has the fame of the single name: absent Tarzan, she is our only Jane.

Good. Now I can put the clipping away with all the other forgotten sentences, and make some more.

Serendipity

I am a great believer in serendipity as a research technique. Even before Google and Internet links made stumbling onto stuff a required feature of information gathering, I learned to measure how close I was getting to something really interesting by the frequency and quality of material pertinent to a topic I was developing in my own mind that I came upon by coincidence, or more precisely, by being alert to it, and hungry.

For instance, the books that I found on random sale tables, or even in piles of discards, often proved invaluable. Either they related to what I already knew or had begun exploring but in a new way, or they opened up new but suddenly related subjects and connections. Several times they introduced me to authors, some of whom I immediately called or visited to interview--at least when I had a magazine or newspaper assignment or book contract to back me up.

Serendipity seems to require stubbornness. Or maybe serendipity is one of the few rewards of stubbornness, a payoff for apparently wasted time. A case in point, of something--or in this case, someone-- interesting I didn't know of before, who turns out to relate to other current investigations:

I happened on the above quote ("I'm a democrat: and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of Europe of the future") about five years ago. The author (James Joyce) and the year (1916) were given, but not the work. I have a small Joyce collection and I looked it up in Ellman's biography and the indexes to other works, with no luck. (As it turned out, the attribution to Joyce is what threw me off.) So I tried it another way: the piece where I first saw the quote was an Internet essay about Jeremy Rifkin's book, The European Dream. Maybe Joyce was quoted in that book. But when I checked the Rifkin book, Joyce wasn't in its index at all. Still, it's a pretty interesting book.

I must have just forgotten about this quote after that, but I did file it and source in a computer "folder" that I opened the other day, looking for something else. That I didn't know the source of the quote bothered me again, and this is where stubbornness comes in. However, that quality is more usefully applied these days--for even five years ago, Google and Wikipedia etc. either didn't exist or weren't as capacious as now. So a search got me some leads, and I saw what my first problem had been: though the quote is attributed to Joyce, it is from a fiction--either his book of short stories (Dubliners) or his first novel (A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man), both with the publication date of 1916. The reason that wasn't obvious to me is that it was quoted as a statement by Joyce, not by one of his characters.

A couple of references--notes in books online, but only excerpts--were tantalizing but imprecise. So I got down my annotated versions of both books, and began to compare with what was online. First I narrowed it down to Portrait. But my particular annotated didn't have a reference to the quote, so I had to trace another online (and partial) set of annotations and compare references it made with references made in my copy, to narrow down where the quote might be. I had the character's name, and finally, I found the quote, on page 177. The words belong to a subsidiary character, and so can't be really thought of as the statement of the author's views. But it was something striking to say in 1916.

The annotation mentions that the character who said it was based on a student Joyce knew when he was a student in Ireland, and who was murdered by a British soldier in 1916. The Easter uprising of that year isn't mentioned. But it's also the same year the book was published.

The annotation also mentions that the phrase "United States of Europe" was the title of a popular book published in 1899 by a well-known journalist of the time, William Thomas Stead. As editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (according to the wikipedia bio) he pioneered the news interview and what we now call investigative journalism. He traveled the world, met with leaders and wrote about the geopolitical moment. Politically he was progressive and a pacifist.

Stead also was deeply interested in spiritualism, and reportedly had premonitions of death at sea. So of course, that's where he died--and of course, in the most spectacular way: as a passenger on the Titanic. He was on his way to New York to attend an international peace conference. He had written about the danger of ocean liners without an adequate number of lifeboats.

The wikipedia bio only scratches the surface (though it's a pretty fascinating surface) but another site has links to much more information, including PDF versions of many of his books, such as the aforementioned United States of Europe. I dipped into it and it looks tempting, partly because--and this is another element of serendipity currently at work--he is a figure I knew nothing of who lived in a period that I've returned to again and again, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first through H.G. Wells and C.G. Jung separately, then through the two of them together.

I'd had several years of that, and then some quiet. But now a sudden recent storm of 19th century connections: a quote from Shelley (leading to the essay itself, which I found in a college literature anthology used by my uncle in 1951--the uncle who I saw earlier this summer, when we had our first one-to-one meal together in 30 years) and a look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, followed a few days later by a revealing review (by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books) of a new book about the links between science and poetry in the 19th century Romantic period (Age of Wonder), which mentions both Shelleys, as well as both Darwins (Erasmus, who proposed evolution, and his grandson Charles, who formulated it.) It also covers a bit of the same ground as another new book I was looking at for possible review, The Atmosphere of Heaven, and a play I did review last week, the execrable musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde--another 19th century fable of the impact of science, which like Frankenstein has come down to us through movies that are based on popular stage plays rather than the original novels.

This last burst was also coincident with another thread: the impulse to pull Eric Bentley's book on George Bernard Shaw down from the shelf when it caught my eye (and yes, I was looking for something else--the little pump I keep on that shelf to pump up my basketball), and then I became its captive. Shaw's views on Darwin (which I also then sampled in his preface to his theatre epic, Back to Methuselah) pertain to Wells, whose science fiction is largely directed by his interpretation of Darwin. Wells and Shaw knew each other for much of their long lives (they met as newspaper drama critics) and so from reading about them separately, I read their correspondence with each other.

All of this bears on a writing project that's absorbed many hours over many years, with the end always just beyond the horizon. And it's spun off other projects that actually got done--a number of published essays, and a play about Wells and Jung. But there seems always to be more.

A better understanding of Shaw and his relationship to Wells and the issues they both dealt with, bears upon the role of Wells in this project--although there's a neat little play to be found in those two. Another possible avenue of inquiry is this William Thomas Stead, who was a slightly earlier editor of a publication the young Wells wrote for--it was in fact the Pall Mall Gazette that employed Wells as its theatre critic when he met Shaw. As the editor of another magazine, Stead approved publication of a version of Wells' tales about a time traveller. Stead's globetrotting journalism and global vision are also what Wells was doing at about the same time--yet Stead's name does not appear in Wells' autobiography. I wonder why...

So the moral of the story seems to be this: serendipity can lead to new insights and new works, though it can also simply be a forking path on an absorbing journey, through a landscape that is partly familiar and always partly frontier.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday, James Joyce, who liked to have his books published on this date.

Captain Future's Log

Writing For

Let's say there are three kinds of writing I do that gets out into the world. I write for publication (in print, usually), for community blogs on the Internet, and for this blog (and my other blogs.) Each has different challenges and rewards.

Publication is the only time I get paid. For that, I give up more control, and I'm often writing about what others want me to write about (even if I came up with the idea) and in their formats. I have limited control of the final published piece. There are challenges to doing that well, and the reward (apart from the daily bread) is doing it well within those constraints, and maybe transcending them a little.

But my work for publication seldom gets a direct response. People tend to write letters to the editors only to complain. When I do hear about a piece from someone personally, it's often weeks or months later, when I feel pretty separate from it as a published work. It's interesting to observe how a piece continues to live, though. An article I did for the North Coast Journal many months ago on the efforts of local Quakers to visit Guantanamo is continuing to ripple outward in Quaker and "torture" circles, as it gets passed around at the yearly regional and national meetings. That kind of response I hear about second or third hand is gratifying but distant.

Writing for community blogs (like dKos) has the virtue of response. I've received generous comments on long pieces that few publications would touch, and even a short piece that nevertheless reflects some serious thought and intent, like this one, got a few appreciative comments. A few is better than none.

I don't get paid for what I write there, or here. (Despite the ads, I have yet to see a penny.) I also don't get many comments here. But I do have control. I can add the graphics I want. I can continue to rewrite the piece (though I guess this is blogging heresy) as many times as I like, even after it is "published."

So it's mostly for the pleasure of making something I more or less like, in the time I have to do it. Apart from Captain Future saving the world, it's the pleasure of building an identity for the site, and a ouvre of past posts, which people find through searches by topic or names. When I was in 5th grade I made up some comic book characters and drew my own strips. This is kind of like that, except with an audience. The number of daily visitors is still growing, though very slowly, along with the number of those who return, so I'm guessing that the proportion of visitors who read something here is pretty high. So that's good. (And hi to my fans in Thailand, Afghanistan, GB, Aus., India, Suisse, Italia and Washington, D.C. )

That's about the extent of it, except for the Soul of Star Trek blog, which has gotten me invited to the 40th Anniversary Star Trek convention in Seattle, to moderate a panel called "The Soul of Star Trek." It also means on the actual anniversary night of Star Trek's first episode aired on US TV, I'll be lifting a glass of champagne with Majel and Eugene Roddenberry, Jr., and several members of the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise and the Next Generation Enterprise, up in the Space Needle... Where no blog has gone before.

Margaret Atwood