One of the benefits of my job is that I attend educational conferences from time to time. I am in Ottawa, on what turned out, after a cloudy start, to be warm sunny afternoon. The city was crawling with police – really and literally. The police stage a memorial event on the last Sunday in September. Representatives of almost every Canadian police force march in their full dress uniforms. Some forces have pipe bands – seems the Scots ran the police forces in the old days and their traditions carry on. There were a few officers in kilts in line when I walked by Tim Horton’s this morning, which must have given the staff a start.
I spent the afternoon in a seminar. One of the other participants said that I had worked out what many other people hadn’t. I had moved to Victoria to do a job that I liked with many years before retirement to enjoy.
Month: September 2007
Wonder Books
From The American Scholar, a review of the style of popular and literary fiction based on healing journeys: Brooklyn Books of Wonder, by Melvin Jules Bukiet. It’s a savage assessment of my least favourite literature, sentimental fiction. It has a good explanation of why this stuff sellsit works: narcissistic empathy. Read it, weep and perceive yourself as a nice, sensitive person.
They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”
Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.
And yes, another hit from AL Daily.
Light Exercise
Link to an excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, a new book by Gary Taubes, published in New York Magazine, The Scientist and the Stairmaster.
Taubes says that the idea that light exercise is a way to lose weight has been oversold. He agrees that light exercise is a good idea, but light exercise doesn’t burn enough calories to let us eat and drink as much as most of us, in North America, tend to. He also supports some of the criticisms of the dominance of carbs in diet.
The Sociable Web
Another piece of reportage and ideas served up by AL Daily. Christine Rosen writing in the New Atlantis on Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism.
This proves topical as I have signed up on Facebook, using some of the message and communication resources.
Rosen’s work is pretty good – her essay on cameras, photography and images, The Image Culture, for instance, or her essay on channel surfing and TiVo, The Age of Egocasting.
Amour Propre
In Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, the title character is an American academic, fond of Paris, and prone to using French expressions. In one scene, he dismissively mentions some neighbours as self-satisfied bores, full of amour propre. Ravelstein was founded on Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom. Bloom after having studied and taught in Paris, was a life-long francophile. Amour propre was an idiomatic expression in Western Europe when Bloom taught in Paris. The English term would probably be snob, although dictionaries translate and define amour propre as conceit or excessive pride.
Bloom was a student and teacher of the works of Rousseau. Bloom favoured the cautious liberalism of Montesquieu over the Romantic liberalism of Rousseau, but he admired Rousseau’s passion. Rousseau understood, as Bellow has put it in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, that
The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”
Mars and Venus, Anon
A short entry, a link to an address to the American Psychological Association, last month, by Roy Baumeister, called “Is There Anything Good About Men?”. Denis Dutton, one of the editors of AL Daily posted it to his own web site and linked to it from AL Daily. It asks questions about some of the central myths of our culture – that women are naturally wise and benevolent and naturally better parents and friends than men.
About AL Daily
Art & Letters Daily has one of my favourites for as long as I have been writing A Sea of Flowers, largely for the reasons mentioned by Robert Fulford in his columns in the National Post January 22, 2002 and June 27, 2007.
On any given day, it is the gateway to well-written, reasoned commentary about things that matter in the life of the mind – language, literature, and thought. Over the course of few days, the editors added links to stories and essays about the decimation of book reviews from American newspapers by Steve Wasserman, the decline of literary journalism by Morris Dickstein, and James Wood’s move to the New Yorker.
The Wikipedia Entry spends some time on the question of whether AL Daily is conservative, as that term is understood in America, or libertarian. I think the editors like to report on the ideological or culture wars but are detached from the passions that drive the debate. I wouldn’t say that they are independent, but I am not sure what constitutes bias in the study of facts and events. They are loyal to keen observation and sound argument.