Undisputed Classic 8

Classic Set in a Place You'd Like to Visit. A long time ago I visited Hong Kong around Christmas when they would put cool lights on the tall buildings. What a place! It breaks my heart nowadays Hong Kong is just another Chinese city. I'd like to visit Taiwan again actually.

Librivox – Text

China and the Chinese – Herbert Allen Giles (1845 - 1935)

Giles worked as a British diplomat in China from 1880 to 1893. Then he spent 35 years at Cambridge as its only professor of Chinese. He published both scholarly items and articles and books for the general public. This book collects lectures that he gave in 1902 at the inauguration of the Chinese studies program at Columbia University.

Chapter 1 kicks off with an interesting primer on the language. He touches on the Sinitic languages of the coast from Canton to Shanghai, but gives special emphasis on the language of government, Mandarin. He argues that the four tones of Mandarin are easily mastered and explains the absence of grammar in terms of conjugations or case or gender, which is lucky considering reading and writing take serious commitments of time, effort, and focus. He explains how the written language works, with its indicators of pronunciation and meaning in the same character.

Chapter 2 is an admirable overview of important Chinese written works in the Cambridge library. This chapter is worth reading for students looking for a quick summary of important books in traditional China. To gain true insight, he recommended reading everything – almanacs, ghost stories, joke books,  etc.

There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized by the patient's family and tied up. In the night he managed to free himself, and escaped by swimming across a river. When he got home, he found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him, "Don't be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!"

Giles says, “…the fact is that a successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to their classics and higher literature …. … It must embrace the lesser, not to say meaner, details of their everyday life, if we are ever to pierce the mystery which still to a great extent surrounds them.

Chapter 3 is about how the Chinese organized national government from the Gate of Heavenly Peace all the way down to the village level. He argues that the Chinese are more democratic than the stereotype of “Oriental despotism” would suggest. He tells many stories of riots and demonstrations that quelled official action to impose taxes. He claims

Nowhere on earth can be found such perfect cohesion of units against forces which would crush each unit, taken individually, beyond recognition. Every trade, every calling, even the meanest, has its guild, or association, the members of which are ever ready to protect one another with perfect unanimity, and often great self-sacrifice. And combination is the weapon with which the people resist, and successfully resist, any attempt on the part of the governing classes to lay upon them loads greater than they can or will bear. The Chinese are withal an exceptionally law-abiding people, and entertain a deep-seated respect for authority. But their obedience and their deference have pecuniary limits.

Chapter 4 goes over surprising similarities between ancient Greece and traditional China. He speculates if Greco-Bactria, a kingdom in 250 BCE, might have been the meeting point: south of the Oxus River and north of the mountains of the Hindu Kush, i.e. much of present-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Chapter 5 is a readable overview of Taoism, a topic that must have particularly interested Giles.

The last chapter is the inevitable explanations of popular images of China at the time for the lay audience.  Topics include the queue, the status of women, infanticide, ancestor worship, foot-binding, Chinese medicine, and Chinaman as Other. Giles was deeply interested in the people and wanted to explain their ways to the west so foreigners could have a more nuanced view of roughly 20% of the world’s population.

Librivox – Text

Reading Those Classics #8

Classic Short Stories set in The Wilderness. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

In the section called The Wilderness, not for Faulkner stuff about the noble redman living in accordance with nature. The artist dares greatly to imagine another orientation to life and cultural mores but driven by the same human cravings for property, power, wealth, status. The key word, I think, is imagine because as an artist he will make up stuff for whatever his artistic intention is and the experienced reader understands mythologizing when they see it.

Red Leaves. Set in the early 19^th century, the Indians include “the peculiar institution” when they condemn Euro-culture as without honor or decorum. But mouthing the worst cracker stereotypes about blacks, the Indians own slaves because they have an interest in the white man’s economy, which demands stealing labor from black people. Crazy not to go along to get along, obtain horses and pretty French slippers and avoid sweating, right? The bloated son of the recently dead chief symbolizes the degenerate state the Indians have allowed themselves to fall into. Anyway, age-old traditions that have not changed though everything else has changed demand that a dead chief take to the next world valued possessions.  That means his unnamed slave must be killed along with the prized horse and hunting dog. The Indians don’t have a grudge against the slave but as they are culture-bound they don’t dream of exempting him from this custom. Because it would be like, not meet, unlucky, crazy, not to follow the custom, right?

A Justice. This Russian nesting-doll story within a story within in yet another story starts with twelve-year-old Quentin Compson telling of a visit to his grandfather’s farm where the ancient carpenter Sam Fathers relates the story behind his name as told him by Herman Basket, co-star of Red Leaves. The story is an illustration of a corrupt patriarch Ikkemotubbe deciding whose child is whose and adding on to a house in the most wasteful way imaginable. It gives one to think that the default position for umpteen thousands of years was small bands of humans run by a strong man and his shit-headed henchmen.

A Courtship. This tall tale has elements of the comic and tragic. Herman Basket’s comely sister is an Indian Helen of Troy. Her beauty and remoteness inspire two contestants, one white and one Indian, for her hand (and the rest of her, unwashed though it is). They agree the beauty to the winner of contests of strength, endurance, and bravery. They both are disappointed in the end. They sour-grapeishly conclude that they are better men for the competition and the mutual respect it fostered. The white man says, "Perhaps there is just one wisdom for all men, no matter who speaks it" while the Indian replies "Aihee. At least, for all men one same heartbreak." In this story we see Ikkemotubbe while young, just a guy, before he became a corrupt strong man. Finally, this story gives heart to the quiet guys who get the best smart kind women, while the jocks and rich guys get women that give them hell.

Lo! A tall tale starring a wily Indian chief and President Jackson. The chief gets the better of Jackson, who ironically calls his adversaries, “poor innocent Indians.” The Indians are so other to federal officials that the feds are not even sure of the Indians’ names. No soft-pedaling about “the inevitability of the vanishing of the red man” because the ending of the story hints at the reality of history, thus giving a regretful edge to the comedy. Between 1776 and 1887, the USA federal government, a most powerful institution then and now, seized over 1.5 billion acres from America's indigenous people by treaty and executive order.

European Reading Challenge #7

I read this war memoir for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army – Flora Sandes

Trained in nursing, Flora Sandes volunteered in early 1915 to go to Serbia to work in a humanitarian organization. She later joined the Serbian Red Cross and worked in the ambulance corps of the Serbian Army’s 2^nd Infantry Regiment.

This memoir begins in November 1915. After a brief break in England, she was able to re-join the ambulance corps of the same regiment just in time for the Great Retreat.

It was no use throwing men's lives away by holding on to positions when no purpose could be gained by it, though the Colonel felt it keenly that the finest regiment in the Army should have to abandon position after position, although contesting every inch, without having a chance of going on the offensive. It was heartbreaking work for all concerned, and the way they accomplished it is an everlasting credit to officers and men alike.

In the tragic weeks of this retreat, almost 80,000 soldiers died of starvation, exposure, and action; almost 80,000 soldiers went missing; and about 220,000 civilians lost their lives. It is not strange that Serbians call this retreat the Albanian Golgotha, since they marched through the mountains of Albania to reach the Adriatic.

Yorkshire people are known for their determination. Sandes is the personification of the proverbial expression, “Yorkshire-stubborn.” She overcomes obstacles in travel and transports. She does without and makes do with constant supply shortages. She learns Serbian by ear since there were not even Berlitzes for Slavic languages. She reads directives carefully to distinguish “order” from “advisement,” so that she can stay and help the Serbians, whom she admires as much as Rebecca West did later in the 1930s.

The popular image in Western Europe at that time was the Balkans were populated by brutish peasants and wild-eyed savages. So one of Sandes’ goals in this memoir was convince people in the UK that Serbians were allies worthy of support. To be honest, I too assumed that she would get condescending male guff every time she turned around. But no:

People who do not know anything about them have sometimes asked me if I was not afraid to go about among what they imagine to be a race of wild savages, but quite the opposite is the case. I cannot imagine anything more unlikely than to be insulted by a Serbian soldier. I should feel safer walking through any town or village in Serbia at any hour of the night than I should in most English or Continental towns.

When they cross into Albania she is made a soldier as she has proven her ability to handle a horse and rifle and has maintained her poise under rifle fire and shelling from Bulgarian troops. She also had enough French, German, and Serbian to cut through incessant logistics snarls which are inevitable in wartime. She finds the Albanians dirty and so angry at the Serbs that they over-charge for food and irregulars snipe at the troops. Marching up to 15 hours is an ordeal but strong people learn from both good and bad experiences.

....I had often been rather puzzled at the general reply of the new arrivals,"Sve me boli"

(“Everything hurts me"), it seemed such a vague description and such a curious malady; but in these days I learnt to understand perfectly what they meant by it, when you seem to be nothing but one pain from the crown of your aching head to the soles of your blistered feet, and I thought it was a very good thing that the next time I was working in a military hospital I should be able to enter into my patient's feelings, and realise that all he felt he wanted was to be let alone to sleep for about a week and only rouse up for his meals.

As in Rebecca West’s epic, the spellings may be confusing. Babuna is rendered “Baboona.” And Mogilee for Mogila and Orizir for Orizari. This mild confusion is balanced by the charm of the old-fashioned idioms like “They all at once got terribly worried on my account, began to work like steam.”

Worth reading for hardcore readers into war memoirs and nursing chronicles and readers interested in people and things Serbian. In a gesture of fond respect, the Serbians put Flora Sandes on a stamp in 2015.

On the web: Librivox – Text

The Ides of Perry Mason 59

Note: On the 15^th of every month we take a trip to the Perryverse. Reviewed below, however, is a stand-alone novel by Gardner from the Thirties. Because we need the variety, as we stand on the verge of the 60th installment of this seemingly never-ending series. Every month for five years now - it beggars belief.

This is Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

This stand-alone crime novel from 1936 opens with our hero Sam Moraine moping about his job. Not a private detective, not a go-to fixer, not a crook, regular guy Sam works as the owner-operator of an advertising and printing company in a smallish city in California - San Luis Obispo? Encinitas? Big enough, anyway, to support two machines vying for power in the rackets of vice and politics.

But nothing like major crime to snap one out of job woes. The wife of a prominent dentist is kidnapped and Sam is asked by the woman’s friends to deliver the ransom. The D.A. Phil Duncan does not like it that the feds are not notified but unofficially agrees to his poker buddy Sam delivering the $10,000. Sam hands over the ransom and gets the victim back. But local and federal authorities smell something fishy about the kidnapping and grill Sam and the victim harshly.

Days later the boss of a political machine is found shot dead in his study. The dentist’s wife is found battered to death outside the boss’ house on the same night. A suitcase stuffed with politically explosive documents has gone missing. And bad people want to get it located but quick.

Sam dabbles in detective work because he wants to clean up his sense of being used as a patsy by a femme fatale in the kidnapping fiasco. His other goal is to clear his secretary Natalie Rice of suspicion of killing the kingpin and clearing her father who has the revenge motive since he was framed for a white-collar crime by the boss and sent to the pen.

The plot unfolds with non-stop action, realistic dialogue, and Gardner’s no-frills prose. Sam is a not a tough-guy pulp hero like Ed Jenkins, Phantom Crook, but more like a protagonist in an Alan Furst novel. In other words, a regular joe who has to use his native smarts and resourcefulness in extraordinary situations.

Gardner stretches out a little when he describes the scene of Sam being taken in for questioning by a homicide detective. He builds foreboding in the reader by describing the cold police headquarters and impersonal manner of the cops. Readers who’ve been unlucky enough to have experienced first-hand that institutional décor, those bland detached looks, and that casual manner based on the fact that they control utterly the situation, will recognize that Gardner, who was an attorney, spent time in such places, dealing with such people.

Gardner knew first-hand about bossism and the influence of crime syndicates on poorly paid municipal guardians of law and order. Gardner was to return to civic corruption as a plot device in the nine-novel series starring DA Doug Selby (The DA Holds a Candle, 1938) and numerous Cool & Lam novels such as the outstanding Turn on the Heat (1940).

Undisputed Classic 7

Pre-1800 Classic. The first part is Jowett’s summary of the dialogue and its explication. The second part is more general about how Plato influenced later Western philosophers. These two sections were interesting for me, who knows roughly squat about Plato. I don’t even know if we should say PLAY-dough or PLAH-to. 

Librivox –  Text

Meno - Plato (c. 428 BCE - c. 347 BCE) Tr. Benjamin Jowett (1817 - 1893)

The author structures this example of philosophical fiction in the form of a dialogue. Blade about town Meno is young, comely, and affluent and philosopher Socrates is old, homely, and poorish. Meno impetuously springs a serious question on Socrates who replies basically you ask whether virtue (excellence) can be taught but you don’t define what virtue is.

The translator speculates that this dialogue is one of the earlier ones, but it still covers issues that are always important. Above, we see that for Socrates, a good thinker will define terms precisely so that all discussants will agree that they are talking about the same phenomenon. The importance of having clear definitions influenced later thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius. He said that we should examine people, places, situations and events by stripping them down to their essences, with a mind that’s minimized its own irrational emotions and prejudices. Like Plato, Aurelius thought that our reason was an inborn gift given by God to understand the natural world and to live in harmony with other people.

Jowett points out this work is from the “infancy” of philosophy so there is content that modern philosophers would have no truck with. For example, Socrates talks about the soul seemingly remembering knowledge. I wasn’t confident if Socrates was talking about knowledge we are born with (like our innate capacity to learn languages) or knowledge we recall from previous lives (reincarnation). There is a curious exchange Socrates has with a slave in which Socrates elicits through questions alone the boy’s innate knowledge of geometry. It is noteworthy that in our day the research indicates that human beings do indeed have innate abilities for number sense, geometrical notions, pattern identification, and spatial awareness.

Socrates and upright citizen Anytus have an exchange about Anytus’ aversion to the Sophists, professional teachers who “are a manifest pest and corrupting influence to those who have to do with them.” Not comfortable with blind prejudice, Socrates irritates Anytus with:

SOCRATES: Has any of the Sophists wronged you, Anytus? What makes you so angry with them?

ANYTUS: No, indeed, neither I nor any of my belongings has ever had, nor would I suffer them to have, anything to do with them.

SOCRATES: Then you are entirely unacquainted with them?

ANYTUS: And I have no wish to be acquainted.

SOCRATES: Then, my dear friend, how can you know whether a thing is good or bad of which you are wholly ignorant?

ANYTUS: Quite well; I am sure that I know what manner of men these are, whether I am acquainted with them or not.

SOCRATES: You must be a diviner, Anytus, for I really cannot make out, judging from your own words, how, if you are not acquainted with them, you know about them.

Sounds like school board meeting where a school librarian is defending To Kill a Mockingbird from a mutton-head of a parent who wants its banned from the library even though they’ve never read it but BurdTurd1177 said on Twitter it was bad. Anytus leaves in a huff and with an ominous warning. Later Anytus was a member of the faction that went after Socrates and had him executed for “corrupting youth.” Helluva system, republican democracy, so vulnerable to doom merchants and demagogues who make hay by appealing to the fears and hatreds of the mob.

In fact, in this dialogue Socrates argues that things parents, teachers, friends and the rest of society call “good” are in their own nature intermediate between good and bad. In our context, if used wisely, a prestigious prize can attract more attention to your research and thus draw more grant money. But what if you unwisely use the grant money to hire research assistants and post-docs and then treat them with zero dignity or respect?

For Socrates, what’s important is virtue, which means the endless work of cultivating an excellent character. Reasoning clearly, an excellent character is the only intrinsically good thing because it will keep one from making bad choices with money, power, fame, prizes, influence, and hangers-on all the time telling you how wonderful you are.

Nothing is more important than a fine character. Sheesh, maybe Anytus and his ilk are right. Who is Socrates to claim that health and beauty, and power and wealth and thems that possess them are not what we plain folks should aspire to, should idolize? What if everybody started cultivating their character, became critical thinkers, and started mending it, fixing it, making do, and doing without?

Do without? Sounds frickin’ unamerican.

Librivox – Plato Text

Reading Those Classics #7

Modernist Classic. Green’s novel Loving and Living are gems for readers into literary modernism, of the uncompromising and peculiar kind especially.

Party Going – Henry Green

Green releases birds like doves and peacocks in Loving (1945) and sparrows in Living (1929). So, this 1939 novel starts in fog, with a flying-blind pigeon crashing into a balustrade, fatally, and falling at the feet of an old lady in a busy train station in London. The eccentric aunt picks him up, washes him, wraps him in brown paper, and carries him around as she waits to see off her niece, a member of a circle of young socialites. One member of their coterie is paying for them all to take the boat train for France.

The fog, however, besides causing fatalities among pigeons, has stopped all train traffic. Thousands of commuters and travelers end up waiting in the station. The socialites decamp to a hotel, which has put down a steel door to keep out the hoi polloi that has descended in the past in similar circumstances and caused a lot of damage. For about four hours, the keyed-up beautiful people stew about self, love, life, jealousy, conflict, and competition.

So much for the plot. Green’s power lies not in spinning tales full of incident.

The train station and hotel make a fog-bound world, trapped, crowded, temporary. Green has us readers view the action, such as it is, from above. We are detached, as if we were spirits disconnected from these doings serious to the participants but trivial to the observer. In fact, the reader wishes for God-like access to the Smite Button, zeroing in on the socialites because on the rare occasions they are not speculating like children as to whether the fog is going to lift or squabbling like couples that have no idea what they want, they are discussing an inconsequential diplomatic dust-up involving one of their friends Embassy Richard. They talk across each other. They don’t listen. They are obtuse. It’s maddening to read their inept communications but at the same time the dialogue is empty-headed funny like Wodehouse and compelling like Faulkner.

Green didn’t have interest in fine writing or pretty sentences, being a modernist that wanted to capture how feelings, ideas, memories, inconsistency and contradictions cross over mental landscape like weather fronts skim or slide or ooze over landscape. These socialites are unconscious of the social problems of 1939 so there is satire of vile bodies and their fear of the masses finally rising up, like they never have done before. But in light of the interior monologues, what a hash our minds are:

Again while she had wondered so faintly she hardly knew she had it in her mind or, in other words, had hardly expressed to herself what she was thinking, he was much further from putting his feelings into words, as it was not until he felt sure of anything that he knew what he was thinking of. When he thought, he was only conscious of uneasy feelings and he only knew that he had been what he did not even call thinking when his feelings hurt him. When he was sure then he felt it must be at once be put to music, which was his way of saying words.

It's not quite stream of consciousness, and it seems to me that it takes much craft and care to stay just this side of it. When you get accustomed to Green’s voice, you start to get it. Or at least, you think you do.

As in Living, Green doesn’t make experiments easy for the reader. He throws names out all in a rush and refers to characters by either by their first or last name randomly. His grammar is loosey-goosey, stopping just short of Joycean psychedelia. Characters obscure what they mean to test an idea, speak just for an effect, and make noises when they’re not listening. For readers, translating ordinary words in relaxed syntax into complex and subtle meanings is an intellectual challenge but it also becomes an immersive experience that is somehow emotionally satisfying and aesthetically pleasing.

Suggestive instead of explicit, it’s art, a playful way to show us Green’s take on reality and see if it has any effect on our view of the world. But what the metaphors - birds, fog, crowds, baths, patches of bamboo and artichokes – are pointing to, I don’t rightly know. Maybe trying to pin down an elusive writer like Green tells more about the reader’s own search for meaning than the writer’s point of view.

European Reading Challenge #6

I read this travel narrative for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Twilight in Italy – D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence spent a couple of months in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany in late 1912 and early 1913. Out of the stay he got articles of long journalism for high-class magazines. He later worked up these pieces into this book which was released in 1916. In that terrible year of attrition I imagine readers felt a nostalgia for pre-war days and were looking for something to think about other than the Somme offensive.

This is in fact two books, one of vibrant travel writing.  

I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.

The other book is considering the spiritual challenges of living in the modern mechanized world. Lawrence, like many intellectuals of the time, was uneasy about the effects of industrialization in the US, the UK, France, Germany and other advanced countries.

He was disgusted with the natural world and landscapes being turned into a wasteland due to development. Lawrence describes his own English north-country as ‘black, fuming [and] laborious’, ‘spreading like a blackness over all the world.'  So in the Alps, he looks down on the modern industrial hellscape and muses ‘... it seemed to have lost all importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance. The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but wander about?’

Veteran readers of Lawrence know they just have buckle up when the 27-year-old writer goes mystical. He has the supernatural ability to get inside the heads of other people.

She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment. That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there was anything in the universe except her universe. In her universe I was a stranger, a foreign signore. That I had a world of my own, other than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.

He will just go off, generalizing about national characteristics that are real and apparent, the natural and the artificial, the light and the dark, the secretive and the open. The confidence, the daring -- the audacity is endearing, making us sad he died so young, but grateful he was so prolific. He loved to write.

This is worth reading if for nothing else than Lawrence’s uncanny ability to describe people and places. He makes us see, because it is what Lawrence does with words, like a tree makes leaves, like clouds scud across the sky. It’s beautiful, it's strange, it’s sheer reading pleasure.

On the Web: Librivox & Text