Saturday, August 21, 2010

The World Trade Center was influenced by Islamic architecture and design.

Who knew? Slate, 2001

That's pretty interesting to me. While the article takes the Mecca-esque design as another affront to Bin Laden, I think there is a good argument to be made that it is a fitting tribute to architectural innovations of Arab culture and the Islamic faith.

Don't tell the GOP. Their heads might explode.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Hemingway on American Fiction and writing

From Green Hills of Africa:

     "We do not have great writers [in America]," I said. "Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore you."
     "Please explain," he said. "This is what I enjoy. This is the best part of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu."
     "You haven't heard it yet," I said.
     "Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer and loosen your tongue."
     "It's loose," I tole him. "It's always too bloody loose. But you don't drink anything."
     "No, I never drink. It's not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But tell me. Please tell me."
     "Well," I said, "we have had, in America, skillful writers. Poe is a skillful writer. It is skillful, marvelously constructed, and it is dead. We have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things, can be, wales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in which is not there."
     "Yes," he said. "I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the dynamo."
     "Sometimes. And sometimes it is only the blue sparks and what is the dynamo driving?"
     "So. Go on."
     "I've forgotten"
     "No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid."
     "Did you ever get up before daylight --"
     "Every morning," he said. "Go on."
     "All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making. Very good men with small, dried, and excellent wisdom of Unitarians; men of letters; Quakers with a sense of humor."
     "Who were these?"
     "Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. I can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are born only to help another writer to write one sentence. But is cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic. Also, all these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that you asked for it."
     "Go on."
     "There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good, Thoreau. I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless that are being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But one they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, of make something with her that makes the rest unimportant."
     "But what about Thoreau?"
     "You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly everything later."
     "Better have some more beer, Papa."
     "What about the good writers?"
     "The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers."
     "Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know."
     "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since."
     "What about the others?"
     "Crane wrote two fine stories. The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. The last one is the best."
     "And what happened to him?"
     "He died. That simple. He was dying from the start."
     "But the other two?"
     "They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers into something very strange."
     "I do not understand"."
     "We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them what they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present [ca 1930s] we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent."
     "Who are these writers?"
     "Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have written, become frightened, and be impotent again."
[...]
     "Do you think writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?"
     "Oh, yes."
     "Are you sure?"
     "Very sure."
     "That must be very pleasant."
     "It is," I said. "It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it."
     "This is getting awfully serious," my wife said.
     "It's a damned serious subject."
     "You see, he is really serious about something," Kandisky said. "I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu."
     "The reason every one now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is important, to make it seem vain to try to do it, is because it is so difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible."
     "What is this now?"
     "The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if any one is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten."
     "You believe it?"
     "I know it."
     "And if a writer can get this?"
     "Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance that he succeeds."
     "But that is poetry you are talking about."
     "No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But is can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards."
     "And why has it not been written?"
     "Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try and get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do you say? Should we talk about something else?"
     "It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with everything."
     "Naturally."
     "What about a gimlet?" Pop asked. "Don't you think a gimlet might help?"
     "Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that harm a writer?"
I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand intangibles int a sentence, now, before lunch, as too bloody.
     "Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money, ambition," I said profoundly.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Christopher Hitchens on Anderson Cooper 360

I never read any of his books about Atheism but he was one of the modern movement's big names. He was instrumental in my understanding of the Iraq War and one of the voices that made me hawkish toward our Mesopotamian adventures. He seems pretty far along into chemo-therapy and the physical effects are disturbing.

Here's an article he wrote for Vanity Fair about his cancer.  Insightful as always. I find that reading about people's perception of themselves is often more rewarding then their writing about politics/religion/culture/etc.