Maps and Memories

The Garden of Evening Mists 
by Tan Twan Eng

"Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?" - Tan Twan Eng,  p 307.

Thomas Mann begins his magisterial novel, Joseph and His Brothers with this line: "Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?"
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng demonstrates the truth of Mann's remark. For in this beautiful and haunting novel it seems that the main character is continually dipping into the well of her own past to search for the memories that made her the aging judge that she is as the novel begins.
The story is told by Judge Yun Ling Teoh in flashbacks as she prepare her memoirs of a life that included a brutal period during World War II when she was interned in a Japanese wartime camp. The main events of the story focus on the period just after this in 1951 when she and others in Malaya (soon to become Malaysia) are recovering from the adversity and tribulation of the wartime experience. She had been employed as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal in the immediate aftermath of the war, but she came to visit a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, at his tea estate in the fall of 1951. It is during this visit that she comes upon Yugiri the only Japanese garden in Malaya and meets its enigmatic creator, Aritomo. In spite of her hatred for the Japanese she agrees to allow Aritomo to teach her how to build a garden - one that she wishes to prepare as a shrine for her dead sister.
The events and developing relationships as related from the memories of Judge Teoh form an exciting and suspenseful tale. But there is always the mist of memory like an aura surrounding the events she records. The author uses two statues of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and her unnamed sister, the goddess of forgetting, as a metaphor for the aura of memory. It is at the tea estate of Magnus that she encounters these statues:
"A pair of marble statues stood on their own plinths in the center of the lawn, facing one another. On my first glance they appeared to be identical, down to the folds of their robes spilling over the plinths. . . "The one on the right is Mnemosyne. You've heard of her?"
"The goddess of memory," I said. "Who's the other woman?"
"Her twin sister of course. The goddess of Forgetting."" (pp 35-36)
The memories are always there in the story, but the story tells of danger, sinister events and an eeriness from potential danger - terrorist gangs roaming the countryside in the aftermath of war. One aspect of the novel that provides a counterbalance to the edginess of the story is the beauty of the natural surroundings. The garden of Aritomo is in the highlands and there are the mountains in the distance. "My eyes wandered from on end of the mountains to the other. "Do you think they go on forever?"
"The mountains?" Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. "They fade away. Like all things."" (p 187)
Gradually the terror abates and the Emergency it caused comes to an end. Aritomo, who is as much a philosopher as an artist, responds to this with the words. "Life has been suspended , somehow, during the Emergency," Aritomo said. "I often feel I am on a ship, heading for a destination on the other side of the world. I imagine myself in that blank space, between two points of a mapmaker's calipers"
"That empty space exists only on maps, Aritomo."
"Maps, and also in memories."" (p 284)


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Running Haiku

Morning Path

A bicycler's legs

flash excitement in the sun

My path remains calm

From "The Kingdom of Music", 2013

James Henderson

The Coast of Utopia, III - Romantic Exiles

Salvage
by Tom Stoppard

"Herzen : I don't see how the well-being of society is going to be achieved if everybody is sacrificing themselves and nobody is enjoying themselves. (...) Who has gained by it ? 
Blanc : The future. 
Herzen : Ah, yes, the future."


Completing the trilogy that comprise The Coast of Utopia, Salvage opens with Alexander Herzen resting at his home in Hampstead, England. He dreams of a pantheon of emigre friends, political refugees from Germany, Poland, France, Italy and Hungary.  It is "A dream about exiles", he explains -- an almost unreal world much like the one he himself inhabits, in the center of the vortex of those trying still to organise and cause change in Russia from far abroad.  It is five years after the revolutionary turmoil of 1848, but the turmoil and lack of direction seem pervasive among the radicals.
The First Act continues juxtaposing domestic turmoils of the Herzen family, a new German tutor for the children, Natalie and Nicholas Ogarev and others. With their tribulations in the forefront the background of change for Russia becomes a descant that is briefly heard from with discussions of the new publication, The Bell, that provides a tocsin for the opponents of the Tsar. The freeing of the Serfs as an event seems not to satisfy either the radicals or the Tsar.
 In Act Two Nicholas Chernyshevsky appears on the scene providing another opportunity for dialogue with Herzen over the best approach to effect change in Russia. There is not a definitive answer to that question beyond the continuing disagreement.  There is also the voice of Turgenev who gently opposes those who deride him and what he does, believing that his art does also serve some purpose -- and responds when asked what his purpose was in writing a fiction: "My purpose ? My purpose was to write a novel."
The nostalgia of Herzen for his homeland leads him to rue his decision to leave it even though he would likely face prison and Siberia if he were to return. The lives of the Russian exiles are romantic only in an ironic sense as the fog and mist of England mask their disappointments.

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The Pure Musical Experience

Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience 
by Peter Kivy

"Of the fine arts, music is, notoriously, the only one that requires a kind of technical knowledge and conspicuously technical vocabulary in order to "speak with the learned."  Hardly any but musicians ever acquire these things." - Peter Kivy, "Preface", p x

Peter Kivy commences this thoughtful book with one of my favorite words: "why". Specifically he asks: "Why Music?"(p 1) This metaphysical beginning is appropriate for a book that explores the shape of music; its surface and depth and the whatness of music. His subject is the philosophy of music, that is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of music and our experience of it. However, unlike philosophy of science, say, the philosophy of an artistic practice, such as music, is one that most people have a significant background in, merely as a result of being members of a musical culture. Music plays a central role in many people's lives.
In this collection of essays Kivy states that by music he means "the kind which Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven's C#-minor String Quartet are paradigm cases"(p 14). He fascinates the reader with discussions of music as stimulating the passions or music as a form of mimesis. The mimetic view of music can be difficult to discern in more abstract music, but is particularly visible in "program music" such as that popularized by the Romantic composers like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Indeed a strong supporter of Berlioz's music, Jacques Barzun, argues that "all music is programmatic, explicitly or implicitly, in more than one way"(p53).
Through sharing philosophic thoughts on how to understand music, its movement and emotional impact on the listener, Peter Kivy presents reflections that challenge the reader (presumably a music-lover and fellow listener) to meditate on the nature of the experience of music. This reader found the discussions illuminating with clarity and elegance that honored the experience of music.

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Sonnet for Monday Morning

It is a beautiful sunny day, finally, in Chicago.  This Sonnet from Shakespeare seems appropriate for our Chicago weather is nothing if not changeable.  So in that spirit here is Shakespeare forthwith:

XXXIV.

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

Thomas Hardy

Today is the birthday of Thomas Hardy.  He was born on 2 June 1840 in a brick and thatch two-storey cottage in the hamlet called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset.  Brief reviews of two of my favorite Hardy novels follow this poem from his massive oeuvre.

We Are Getting to the End

We are getting to the end of visioning

The impossible within this universe,

Such as that better whiles may follow worse,

And that our race may mend by reasoning.

We know that even as larks in cages sing

Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse

That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse,

We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.

And that when nations set them to lay waste

Their neighbours' heritage by foot and horse,

And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams,

They may again, - not warily, or from taste,

But tickled mad by some demonic force. -

Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams! 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy

“Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.” ― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess starts out as an emblem of innocence, a pretty country girl who delights in dancing on the village green. Yet the world conspires against her. Her travails begin when her family is in need and decides to seek help from relatives by the name of d’Urberville. They send Tess to ask them for help. Seduced by a duplicitous older man, her virtue is destroyed when she bears his child and her future life is shaped by a continual suffering for crimes that are not her own.
Cast out by a morally hypocritical society, Tess identifies most strongly with the natural world and it is here that Hardy's textual lyricism comes into its own. His heroine's physical attributes are described with organic metaphors - her arm, covered in curds from the milking, is 'as cold and damp ... as a new-gathered mushroom'. At the height of Tess's love affair with the parson's son, Angel Clare, Hardy describes a summer of 'oozing fatness and warm ferments'. When she is separated from him, Tess is depicted digging out swedes in a rain-drenched, colourless field, working until 'the leaden light diminishes'. Tess’ baby symbolizes Tess’ bad circumstances and innocence in the sense since this baby was innocent having done nothing wrong, but it was punished by society for coming from such an evil act. Having been raped, Tess was also innocent of the crime, but she was still punished and pushed aside by society.
This book deals with the oppression of an innocent girl. Most of the consequences she faced were not consequences of her own actions which makes this story somewhat of a tragedy in that sense giving the book a mood that you can try to make for yourself a good life, but you do not determine your own outcome.
Hardy uses a lot of imagery and describes the scenery in great detail. While each individual sentence may not be difficult to understand, it is the way the various sentences fit together to form a whole picture which separates him from other authors. His evocative descriptions are underpinned by a gripping story of love, loss and tragedy. According to Hardy's biographer, Claire Tomalin, the book 'glows with the intensity of his imagination'. It is this that remains the key to its lasting power.





The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy

“The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.” ― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native


I have enjoyed reading and rereading this novel since I was in my teens. In thinking about this I can only suggest that from the first reading I was impressed with Hardy's ability to create a complete believable setting where the characters interacted not just with one another but with the world in which they lived. That world was a rural Victorian one, but it resonated with my own somewhat rural experience even though it occurred more than one hundred years earlier.
What Thomas Hardy created was a tale of passion and tragedy on Egdon Heath located in his fictional Wessex. Egdon Heath itself is the first "character" introduced into the book. The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: characters are defined by their relation to the heath. Among them is Eustacia Vye whose desire to lead a life elsewhere is dashed when she marries Clym Yeobright (the Native) upon his return from Paris. The pair represents the archetype of two people caught up in their passion for each other and conflicting ambitions. For Clym, the heath is beautiful; for Eustacia, it is hateful. The plot of the novel emphasizes just this kind of difference in perception. What impresses me upon rereading this is the intricate plotting of Eustacia who throughout the novel is weaving a web of deceit with the aim of enhancing her own life. Her hubris knows few bounds and is exacerbated by her lack of understanding of those in whose lives she has intervened. She raves, "How have I tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! I do not deserve my lot! O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!"(Book 5, Chapter 7) This lack of understanding is an example of the importance of misconception in the novel which is not limited to the character of Eustacia. Ambiguity builds as the novel progresses and the main characters remain obscure for the reader. When The Return of the Native was first published, contemporary critics criticized the novel for its lack of sympathetic characters. All of the novel's characters prove themselves deeply flawed, or--at the very least--of ambiguous motivation. What I found redeeming about the novel was the way Hardy brings the lives of this couple and their friends and families alive through detail that reinforces his penetrating portrayal of the community on the heath.
The final section provides some hope for the future, tempering the otherwise bleak landscape of the novel. This was Thomas Hardy's first great novel and he would follow it with bleaker tales this is the one that I return to when reminiscing of the joy of reading Thomas Hardy's novels.

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Sunday Skateboarder

Sunrise Run

Skateboarder on deck

Jogs my harbor Sunrise run

Wind behind my neck

James Henderson,

from "Kingdom of Music" 2013

Weekend Poetry

Dawn

Running with the dawn

He receives the sun's first light

The moon still beams down

James Henderson, from "The Kingdom of Music", 2013

Poetry for Spring

Spring

Blossoms cover the ground

From lilacs in the morning

Spring slowly fades away

by James Henderson,

 The Kingdom of Music, 2013

Poetry for Today

It has been raining every day for the past week.  I chose short poems, haiku by Bashu, as appropriate for the rainy end of May.  The three spring poems from Bashu create a trilogy of beauty.

Matsuo Bashō was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as the greatest master of haiku (at the time called hokku). His poetry is internationally renowned, and in Japan many of his poems are reproduced on monuments and traditional sites. Although Bashō is justifiably famous in the west for his hokku, he himself believed his best work lay in leading and participating in renku. He is quoted as saying, “Many of my followers can write hokku as well as I can. Where I show who I really am is in linking haikai verses.”
Bashō was introduced to poetry at a young age, and after integrating himself into the intellectual scene of Edo (modern Tokyo), he quickly became well known throughout Japan. He made a living as a teacher, but renounced the social, urban life of the literary circles and was inclined to wander throughout the country, heading west, east, and far into the northern wilderness to gain inspiration for his writing. His poems were influenced by his firsthand experience of the world around him, often encapsulating the feeling of a scene in a few simple elements.

667

Spring rain
dripping down the wasps' nest.
from the leaking roof

276
The moss pure spring

beginning to melt,
with the mountains as always
at daybreak

471
In my home village, having sown seeds of the three vegetables in
my brother's garden

spring rain ---
just beginning to sprout,
eggplant seedlings


Basho's Haiku: Selected poems of  Matsuo Basho. David Landis Barnhill, trans. SUNY Press, 2004

Two Disappointing Views

Escape from Freedom
by Erich Fromm

“If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.”  ― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

Fromm's book explores over a few short chapters humanity's shifting relationship with freedom, with particular regard to the personal consequences of its absence. Its special emphasis is the psychosocial conditions that facilitated the rise of Nazism. Fromm distinguishes between 'freedom from' (negative freedom) and 'freedom to' (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. This is the kind of freedom typified by the Existentialism of Sartre, and has often been fought for historically, but according to Fromm, on its own it can be a destructive force unless accompanied by a creative element, 'freedom to' the use of freedom to employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts. This, he argues, necessarily implies a connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse: "...in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world..."
Freedom, argues Fromm, became an important issue in the 20th century, being seen as something to be fought for and defended. As 'freedom from- is not an experience we enjoy in itself, Fromm suggests that many people, rather than utilising it successfully, attempt to minimise its negative effects by developing thoughts and behaviours that provide some form of security. Fromm suggests that Fascism may arise anywhere a people devolve their thinking on authorities rather than doing it themselves: "The right to express our thoughts ... means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own". In this he echoes Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1840 book Democracy in America stated "It is vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity."

To Have or to Be? 
The Nature of the Psyche
by Erich Fromm

“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”  ― Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche

Fromm states that people in our society have become obsessed with acquiring property, keeping it and increasing it. People become property to be owned and used. He rejects the ideas of the enlightenment and those thinkers who believe people can live freely and trade with one another maintaining a respect for each other through sharing mutual values. His views about people seem to stem from a static view of power rather than a dynamic view of the possibilities for individuals who choose to live a flourishing life. He claims that humans have a deeply rooted desire to express themselves, yet he does not explain the apparent contradiction between this view and the social structure that forces people to have rather than to be. Joy is experienced through productive behavior which, for Fromm often ends in sadness. It was disappointing to read a book that was contradictory on so many levels.

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A Road Toward Himself

Demian 
by Hermann Hesse

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”  ― Hermann Hesse, Demian

Herman Hesse writes in the Prologue to Demian, "Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path."(p 2) Is there a reality apart from our "constructed self"? Rather is each man on the road? The story of Emil Sinclair and his relationship with Max Demian is Hesse's attempt to narrate one young man's journey on the road toward himself.
Hesse draws upon Nietzsche, Jung and others for his ideas, but the story is almost an archetypical example of the search both  for meaning and identity.  The forming of an identity involves discovering values, forming beliefs, and learning how to deal with reality. For Emil this includes his dream life. He tells a friend, "I live in my dreams--that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference." (p 118) The experiences of Emil are dramatic and result in a rejection of the convention life for one of a seeker. In his search Emil confronts his beliefs, dreams, and more. An epiphany occurs on one Spring day when he is attracted by a young woman in the park. He names her Beatrice and is soon transformed "into a worshipper in a temple." (p 81) He says,

"I had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery and a feeling of dawn that made me immune to all taunts. I had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and servant of a cherished image."(p 81)
Thus the narrator describes what in Jungian terms is his "anima". This inspires him to create and to read as his journey takes him in a new direction. For Hesse and the reader it is always a path on "a road toward himself".

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Magnificent stories of Nature and Man

Sketches from a Hunter's Album
by Ivan Turgenev

"It is a remarkably pleasant occupation, to be on one's back in a forest and look upwards!  It seems that you are looking into a bottomless sea, that it is stretching out far and wide below you, that the trees are not rising from the earth but, as if they were the roots of enormous plants, are descending or falling steeply into those lucid glassy waves, while the leaves on the trees glimmer like emeralds or thicken into a gold-tinted, almost jet-black greenery." (p 131)

In his Preface to "The Seasons" the Scottish poet James Thomson wrote, "I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?"
This is a theme that runs through the Sketches From a Hunter's Album. The beauty of the sylvan glade or the summer sun glistening off the meadows flowers is brought to life by the prose of Turgenev in these vignettes. Certainly the characters are also finely drawn and include all social stratas while emphasizing the narrator's interactions with peasants and serfs. It is the latter that impress the reader by the respect and generosity with which they are treated. The combination of fascinating characters and beautiful nature writing made this book a joy to read. I found myself looking forward to the next chapter with expectation that I would be treated to another even more interesting facet of the countryside and its denizens. I was not disappointed until the end of the book and only then because I did not want it to end.

Considering this book was first published in 1852 after having appeared serially as separate sketches, it is a further wonder because the serfs would not be freed for another decade. These short stories revealed Turgenev's unique talent for story-telling. And they greatly influenced Russian short story writers into the early 20th century, including Anton Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Alexander Kuprin and others. The stories remain fresh today, even in translation, and reward the reader with their magnificence.  But let me leave you with a quote from Turgenev himself that expresses my feelings as well:

“the deep, pure blue stirs on one’s lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul”

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The Coast of Utopia, II

Shipwreck
by Tom Stoppard


"Bakunin: The mistake is to put ideas before action. Act first ! The ideas will follow, and if not -- well it's progress. 
Herzen: Belinsky -- save me from this madness !"



The second in his Coast of Utopia trilogy, Shipwreck is a tale of the diaspora with the revolutionary idealist Michael Bakunin paired with the more tempered yet complex advocate of freedom, Alexander Herzen. Swirling around these men are other revolutionaries along with their friends, family, lovers and the complications that go along with such a diverse group.
Stoppard tries to hold the characters together as they move through a maze of vignettes. The play, like the first in the trilogy Voyage, is arranged into scenes that are mostly in chronological order moving from place to place as Herzen and Bakunin move throughout Europe. In doing so characters as diverse as Turgenev, Herwegh, Belinsky, and even Karl Marx appear on the scene. Neither Herzen nor Bakunin can return to Russia and one of the funniest scenes occurs when Herzen is in Nice (November 1851) and the Russian Consul brings him an order from Czar Nicholas I that he must return to Russia. The Consul's discomfort and attempts to persuade Herzen to accede to the Czar's request are progressively more and more ridiculous and hilarious.
But as in  Shakespearean tragedies the humor is used for comic relief.  Philosophy shares the center stage with family tragedy.  In Bakunin's case he is following what he sees as the "new religion" of Hegel and the ideal expressed in the phrase "what is real is rational".  Herzen seems to provide moderation while Belinsky tilts in various directions before deciding to oppose the Russian reality.  The propinquity of friends and family move them in new and disastrous directions as human nature takes its course.
Unlike the dreamlike quality of Voyage, Shipwreck is about the reality of their lives. Instead of finding the utopia they have been dreaming about, they discover that revolutions come with harsh penalties, and not much changes after all. In essence, this play is also about growing up. The characters began in Voyage as young men and women with hopes for the future. Their struggles were those of passionate youths hoping to make a difference. In Shipwreck, they have grown up and are now fighting to put their hopes into action. They learn the hard way that life does not always turn out the way we wish. They must face harsh realities and even death. There is a somewhat manic, frantic pace to many of the scenes in Shipwreck that underscores the characters' desperation as they yearn for political change while striving to hold onto some semblance of normalcy in their personal lives.

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Alien Relations and Sheep

The Android's Dream
by John Scalzi


“Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.” ― John Scalzi


This is a whimsical novel of alien foreign relations with some surprising twists that made it a delightful read. The story hangs on the relations between the Nidu alien empire and Earth. The protagonist, Harris (Harry) Creek, is an official with the State Department who specializes in dealing with aliens, particularly when the news was bad. In this case the death of a Nidu trade negotiator. The death starts the story and it quickly becomes a quest for Harry Creek to acquire a sheep of the Android's Dream breed for the coronation ceremony of the Nidu. The Nidu assert that unless a sheep can be provided, that the political and diplomatic fallout will cause the Nidu to declare war on Earth, a war Earth will lose badly. The genetically designed breed is very rare and believed extinct after a sect of Nidu intent on deposing the government exterminate all known samples, leading Harry on a chase to find one along with assistance from Brian, an AI based on Harry's childhood friend. That may sound a bit complicated but the story has more twists and turns and should please readers looking for traditional science fiction leavened with a large dose of humor. I know I enjoyed the book for that reason and enjoyed the suspenseful action until the last page.

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Tales of Arabian Nights

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Concert

"I have already heard it. I had better not go: I will start to get accustomed to it and finally like it." Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Referring to music by Debussy. Conversations with Stravinsky 

The story of Scheherazade and the thousand and one tales she narrates is famous.  In Sir Richard Burton's translation of The Nights, Scheherazade was described in this way:
"[Scheherazade] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred."
Against her father's wishes, Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with the King. Once in the King's chambers, Scheherazade asked if she might bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, Dinazade, who had secretly been prepared to ask Scheherazade to tell a story during the long night. The King lay awake and listened with awe as Scheherazade told her first story. The night passed by, and Scheherazade stopped in the middle of the story. The King asked her to finish, but Scheherazade said there was not time, as dawn was breaking. So, the King spared her life for one day to finish the story the next night. So the next night, Scheherazade finished the story, and then began a second, even more exciting tale which she again stopped halfway through, at dawn. So the King again spared her life for one day to finish the second story.
And so the King kept Scheherazade alive day by day, as he eagerly anticipated the finishing of last night's story. At the end of one thousand and one nights, and one thousand stories, Scheherazade told the King that she had no more tales to tell him. During these one thousand and one nights, the King had fallen in love with Scheherazade, and had three sons with her. So, having been made a wiser and kinder man by Scheherazade and her tales, he spared her life, and made her his Queen.
Last Saturday evening the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen, performed Scheherazade, the Symphonic Suite by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.  The performance was stunning.  The young conductor who was leading her first CSO subscription concerto managed to bring out the detail and romantic charm of this enduring classic.  Beginning with the Violin solo, elegantly performed by Concertmaster Robert Chen, the piece imagines Sinbad's sea journey and other moments.  Linking all the movements is the theme first heard on the Violin and repeated even to the end of the final coda.  This was an exciting concert for someone like myself who has cherished this piece for almost  his whole life.
The first half of the concert included The Fair Melusina Overture by Felix Mendelssohn and The Mississippi River by Florence Price.  These were performed well but did not have the impact of the Rimsky-Korsakov.  The evening as a whole once again demonstrated the exceptional quality of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The Coast of Utopia, I

Voyage 
by Tom Stoppard

"When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable. When reason and measurement are made authorities for the perfect society, seek sanctuary among the cannibals ..."

Why does one go on a voyage? Sometimes you voyage to return to a place where you had previously visited, but you may choose to voyage to a completely new place, adventure in the unknown and perhaps into the future. This play is about the latter type of voyage. It is about young idealists centered around the polarizing and exciting figure of Michael Bakunin. It is about his family, their domestic relationships, and his friends. Stoppard presents these characters and develops situations that demonstrate Russia in the wake of the Decembrists.

The opening scene is a dinner scene with the Bakunin family, four daughters, mother, and at the head of the table father Alexander.  He boasts of his daughters' learning and nostalgically remembers his own youthful Rousseau-based liberalism with the ghosts of the Bastille.  The return from Moscow of son Michael is the first clash demonstrating the impact of change and new ideas on tradition presented in scenes of the young idealists, including Bakunin, Belinsky, Stankevich, and Herzen, with their elders, teachers, acting in the shadow of the minions of Tsar Nicholas I.
The young idealists discuss new ideas like "transcendental idealism" and question the nature of "objective reality". The world of ideas, represented by German philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Schelling, is changing rapidly leaving Russia "Stuck between dried up old French reasoning and the new German idealism which explains everything." The philosophical response of Michael Bakunin is that "Hegel shows that objective reality cannot be ignored," while Belinsky's approach is artistic invoking Pushkin. For Belinsky "The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."
Belinsky's approach seems closer to that of Stoppard himself. His play, for all of its intense intellectual dialogue, is multifaceted with domestic relations among the Bakunin women mirroring the changes being discussed by the young idealistic philosophers. We gradually see the budding of the intelligentsia whose ideas would be the tinder for the coming fires of revolution, first in the rest of Europe and only later in Russia. The drama of Voyage leads the reader on a journey that raises questions on almost every page. One answer to the central questions of the play is presented by Belinsky as the play nears its end:
"Don't you bother with reading, Katya, words just lead you on. They arrange themselves every which way with no can to carry for the promises they can't keep, and off you go! "The objective world is the still unconscious poetry of the soul." What do these words mean? "The spiritual communion of beautiful souls attaining harmony with the Absolute." What do they mean? . . . Nothing, and I understood them perfectly!"


The final scene is set again at the family estate, a final farewell for old Alexander Bakunin. The stage directions even point out the old man's age again ("aged seventy six"), one more reminder to emphasize the end is nigh. Immediately his wife warns "You'll catch your death !". Oh yes, and he's watching the sunset. An age is over, and new times are coming, the voyage begun.  "The words just lead you on" and in the end you remain in a state of wonder, still seeking The Coast of Utopia.


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A Grander View of Life

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows...There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whiles this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” ― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

HMS Beagle embarked for South America with Charles Darwin on board on May 11th in 1829. Thirty years later he published The Origin of Species where he began by laying out the main principles of his theory of natural selection in the early chapters. However, Darwin devotes most of the book to defending his theory against criticisms and presenting detailed examples of how natural selection occurs. The geological record is a formidable impediment to Darwin’s theory, as the existing fossil record does not provide the “missing links” in the chains of descent that Darwin proposes. In response, Darwin argues that the geological record is imperfect and that many fossil remains have been destroyed by changes in the earth or have yet to be discovered.
Darwin also attempts to explain how variations occur in species, driving natural selection and the creation of new species. Geographical isolation is a key component of Darwin’s theory. Darwin hypothesizes that because all species originated from one or a few original beings, species needed modes of transportation to migrate between geographical areas throughout the world. Barriers such as oceans and mountain ranges restrict the ability of organisms to migrate, and the few that manage to do so play a large role in shaping the evolution of species on islands and in geographically isolated areas. Geographical isolation accounts for the plethora of unique species on islands, as well as the wider distribution of species across continents.
Darwin’s theory challenged not only the prevailing view of the independent creation of species but also larger claims of religion and science. Darwin explicitly denied the validity of natural theology, which posited that species’ adaptations to their environments was proof of their “intelligent design” by a creator. It was natural selection, not independent creation, that resulted in these adaptations, Darwin argued. Moreover, Darwin’s use of scientific methodology to prove his theory amounted to an explicit critique of naturalists who would attempt to ignore the scientific validity of his theory because of its controversial nature. While the text of The Origin of Species did leave room for religious theology, Darwin’s overall commitment to scientific rationale rather than theological reasoning pitted him against religious doctrine.
Darwin’s text sold out on the day it was published in 1859 and created both friends and enemies of the theories discussed still to this day. There have been modifications of Darwin's theory of the origin of species (notably the Mendellian synthesis that incorporated genetics into the theory), but it stands to this day as the foundation of our understanding of the evolution. Surprisingly the only time evolution is specifically mentioned is in the last paragraph of the book.
This is a great book for anyone who wants to read a classic text of science.

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Snow from Greenland to the Future

Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Høeg

“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.”  ― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

Danish novelist Heg's first English-language publication moves from an intimate mystery to an ever-widening circle of corruption and danger--and to even colder climes. Surly Inuit/Greenlander Smilla Jaspersen is a world-class expert on ice and snow who, since emigrating to Denmark, has gone on nine scientific expeditions to her homeland and published half a dozen highly regarded papers in scholarly journals--but she still can't hold a steady job. Isaiah Christensen, her six-year-old downstairs neighbor with a long-standing fear of heights, plunges from the roof of the White Palace, his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. With the help of another neighbor, dyslexic mechanic Peter Fjl, Smilla follows a trail from the White Palace through the Cryolite records of a fateful (and fatal) 1966 expedition, and ends up aboard the Kronos, a smuggling ship stuffed with drugs and desperate characters and bound for Greenland's Barren Glacier and a truly unimaginable cargo.


Snow
by Orhan Pamuk

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”  ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the winter of 1992 in the city of Kars in the north-eastern part of Turkey. The story is narrated by Pamuk himself as he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves, but also in the hope of meeting a woman he used to know. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found. This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.


Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata

“The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.”  ― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. The novel began as a single short story published in a literary journal in January 1935. Kawabata continued writing about the characters afterward, with parts of the novel ultimately appearing in five different journals before he published the the book in whole. He continued working on the novel over a period of years. Finally, in 1948, the novel reached its final form as "Snow country", a literal translation of the Japanese title "Yukiguni". The name comes from the place where the story takes place, where Shimamura arrives in a train coming through a long tunnel under the border mountains between Gunma and Niigata Prefectures. Sitting at the foot of mountains, on the north side, this region receives a huge amount of snow in winter because of the northern winds coming across the Sea of Japan. The winds accumulate moisture over the sea and deposit it as snow while running up against the mountains. The snow reaches four to five meters in depths, sometimes isolating the towns and villages in the region from others. The lonely atmosphere suggested by the title is infused throughout the book.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, Kawabata's stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha takes place in the town of Yuzawa. The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral. The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, a wealthy loner who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed from the opening. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book. I thrilled at the dense simplicity and sadness of Kawabata's story.


Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson

“When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”  ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

In the future the only relief from the sea of logos is the computer-generated universe of virtual reality? But now a strange computer virus, called Snow Crash, is striking down hackers, leaving an unlikely young man as humankind's last hope. Like many of Stephenson's other novels it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, mimetics, and philosophy.
Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning... was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash' ". Snow Crash established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.

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Grass: Four Variations

No Blade of Grass
by John Christropher


Dystopic science fiction of a high caliber.  In this chilling, prophetic novel, the end of mankind begins with a break in the ecological chain: an Asiatic virus . . . destroys the grass and grain supply of the entire world. In the ensuing panic, mass slaughter begins as nations exterminate some of their own citizens so that others might live.  It is an unusual and absorbing piece of science-fiction about the relentless transformation of England when the balance of nature is upset.



Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman

"I sing the body electric"


Whitman is today regarded as America's Homer or Dante, and his work the touchstone for literary originality in the New World. In Leaves of Grass, he abandoned the rules of traditional poetry - breaking the standard metered line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the vernacular. I read this most recently as part of a weekend retreat sponsored by the University of Chicago's Basic Program of Liberal Education.  The music of his poetry was present as it is in the many authors who Whitman influenced.
Emily Dickinson condemned his sexual and physiological allusions as `disgraceful', but Emerson saw the book as the `most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed'. A century later it is his judgement of this autobiographical vision of the vigour of the American nation that has proved the more enduring.




All Grass Isn't Green
by Erle Stanley Gardner  (writing under the name A. A. Fair)



Detective fiction was never better than when Gardner was in his prime.  After making his creation Perry Mason into a household name he branched out under a pseudonym.  This effort featured dope smuggling and a witness who is both more, and less, than he seems in this suspenseful tale. Donald Lam, as a detective, is in stark contrast to the fictional hard-boiled types of his era. Donald is short, weighs 130 pounds soaking wet, and gets beat up quite frequently. While he does get into several fistfights, he loses all but one — a single fistfight against an insurance investigator in Double or Quits. It should be noted that this was only after taking boxing lessons and studying jujitsu with a master named Hashita in Gold Comes in Bricks.  Donald doesn't carry a gun because, as he says: A) "A gun, a good type of gun such as I would want to carry, costs money", and B) "People are always taking it away from me and beating me up" (meaning the gun). His primary weapon is his brain, not his brawn.



Girls in the Grass
by Melanie Rae Thon


Ranging across a uniquely American landscape, from rural Idaho and suburban Arizona to downtown Boston, the eleven stories in this eagerly awaited reissued collection explore with painful lyricism the harsh awakenings of adolescence: eroticism and hypocrisy, love and violence, responsibility and guilt, adult inconstancy and the random cruelty of life and death.  Melanie Rae Thon is a master of the short story.

A Humanist Perspective

A Preface to Morals
by Walter Lippmann

"The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart." - Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals

Walter Lippmann was an influential journalist and political theorist of the twentieth century. A Preface to Morals, his most well-known and influential book, was first published in 1929. I was introduced to Lippmann in the late sixties when the Time Reading Program included this book in its offerings. In it Lippmann argues that in modern society traditional religious faith has lost its power to function as a source of moral authority. He asserts that ancient religious doctrine is no longer relevant to the conditions of modern life: governments have become increasingly democratized, populations have moved from rural to urban environments, and tradition in general is not suited to the dictates of modernity. Further, the democratic policy of the separation of church and state has created an atmosphere of religious tolerance, which suggests that religious faith is a matter of preference. In addition, the development of scientific method has created an atmosphere of doubt as to the claims made by religious doctrine. That doubt has grown larger over the last fifty years.
Lippmann offers humanism as the philosophy best suited to replace the role of religion in modern life. He notes that the teachers of humanism are the wise men or sages, such as Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius, Plato, Socrates, and Spinoza, and that it is up to the individual to determine the value of their wisdom. He goes on to observe that one of the primary functions of religion is to teach the value of asceticism, or voluntary self-denial, as essential to human happiness. Lippmann describes an attitude of ‘‘disinterestedness’’ as essential to the development of a humanistic morality. Disinterestedness, for Lippmann, is an approach to reality that puts objective thought before personal desire. He claims that the role of the moralist in modern society is not, as in traditional religions, to chastise and punish but to teach others a humanistic morality that can fulfill the human needs traditionally filled by religion.

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Comic Novel with Tragic Moments

A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh

"Polly's party was exactly what she wished it to be, an accurate replica of all the best parties she had been to in the last year;  the same band, the same supper, and, above all, the same guests.  Hers was not the ambition to create a sensation, to have the party talked about in the months to come for any unusual feature, to hunt out shy celebrities or introduce exotic strangers.  She wanted a perfectly straight, smart party and she had got it." (p 55)

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, on several end-of-century Top 100 lists,was published on September 3, 1934. Waugh took the title for his novel from a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh returned to the same poem, sending Anthony Blanche out on an Oxford balcony to stutter a few lines from it. Waugh’s biographers have noted a particular connection to Eliot. Early in life, Waugh liked to associate himself with Eliot’s avant-garde style; in his late twenties, Waugh became a Catholic, as Eliot in his late twenties became Anglican; and later in life, both authors grew more conservative and wrote in support of preserving and improving the crumbling class system in Great Britain.
IN this novel we have a comedy that contains tragic events, but still manages to entertain the reader with Waugh's brilliant satire and wit. The protagonist, Tony Last, is an ossified country squire. As one of that system’s most doomed representatives when we first meet him, Last is living in blinkered bliss at Hetton Abbey, a rambling Victorian mansion renovated in tasteless neo-Gothic style. He is blithely unaware of his wife's peccadilloes. When the battle over divorce heats up Tony goes on an expedition to South America with a con man. Whether the trip is made because he is merely fooled by the con man or as a reaction to the divorce proceedings it does not work out quite as he expects. Eventually he falls under the spell of a madman named Todd who has a beloved set of Dickens novels; it is his passion to hear them read aloud, and it is Tony's personal hell to be the one required to do this.
This is Waugh at his satirical best and I can forgive his use of Dickens as torture (which reading him may be to some people anyway). While I had trouble understanding the foibles of most of the characters I understood enough of the story to become mesmerized by his brilliant satire and witty prose.

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