Thoughts on Literature

Hello, what's up? I've been reading a lot lately and finished quite a few as well. Here I'd like to jot down some thoughts, impressions of the readings.




Bertrand Russell A History of Western Philosophy
This is an excellent primer and I recommend it to well, anybody interested in philosophy really. Russell starts with the early civilization, pagans, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, thru the Christian period, to Renaissance, and 1600s through late 1800s.

What makes this book so great is in fact learning about the great ideas as they've developed through the ages, but its also Russell's writing style. His voice isn't your typical textbook philosophy book. He seems to speak to the reader in a much more personal way, making the 840 page book a lot smoother than it otherwise could've been.

I was interested in reading this because I read Sir Toms More's Utopia and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. These books came up when I typed in "oldest science fiction novel" on google. From there I read Descartes' Objections and Replies, and I'm reading through Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan as well. Not light reading, but at the same time I read it because I find it fun and interesting.

This book helped put a context for a lot of the things I read. I can understand where the writers are coming from what I learned here. Its a great beginning to philosophy. Of course I still have a lot to learn, and in fact I would like to never stop learning, for it is a fun as well as enlightening endeavor.

The Iliad
I just started reading this epic beginning story of Western Literature. I'm in Book 2 in the translation I'm reading. I find the lines to be quite beautiful, describing every detail in excruciating detail. One of the things I love about the Iliad is that there are some lines that end with exclamation points. With these you always get a sense for the voice of the story, of the characters, plot, and subplot. Madeline Miller's two novel prepared me for these epic poetic legends. I plan on finishing it soon.

Black Music by Amiri Baraka
This book is a collection of essays by Amiri Baraka (Formerly Leroy Jones), a black poet, musician, and writer from beat era. I know a guy that said he used to hang out Baraka when he came to LA. The book is quite fascinating, we see a jazz critical perspective from a black artist himself. What I find great is that Baraka seems to understand the so called new thing, or free jazz when it first appeared. He spoke highly of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, late period Coltrane, and Don Cherry. He knows whats up musically, artistically. Baraka's writing style is interesting, descriptive, and sometimes captivating when you realize he knows what he's talking about. Worth a read if you love jazz.

Also on my reading list is Dune, Tales From Earthsea, Seduction and Betrayal, Paradise Lost, and Dante's Inferno. A wide range of stuff, some fun, light, serious, classical, and captivating.

As I think back about all the great stuff I've read since spring to pre-fall, all the things I've learned, about words, reading, and writing,  I feel a great sense of wonderment. Reading has really enriched my life, and time seems to be very pleasant when I spend it in this manner. Finding the time to read is difficult for most people, that's why I'm grateful that I can even do all this, lol. Its a good obsession. 

The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles is Madeline Miller's debut novel, released in 2011. It took her ten years to write. The novel is a modern retelling of the Iliad that focuses on Achilles' friendship with his friend Patroclus. Miller was inspired by Homer's story from the Iliad. She wanted to explore who Patroclus was to Achilles, and in this case Patroclus is Achilles' best friend and lover. This idea is quite old as Miller says she stole the idea from Plato. The actual Iliad doesn't explicitly say they are lovers, but its sort of implied. The book won the 17th annual Orange Prize for Fiction. Homer would be proud of  her! 

Before I go in depth here I want to say that this is an amazing novel. After finishing the novel I was riding a high for nearly two days straight. Its only 360 pages but it feels like it was a 1,000 pages, 1,000 grand pages of beautiful prose. It was like falling in love in a way, like how I am with music. I was so into it that I finished it in nearly 4 days, forget the two week library rental. That being said, lets talk about what makes this book great. 

The prose. The fact that Miller worked on the novel for five years, but completely scrapped everything because the narrator's voice wasn't developed well enough shows you the depth of her writing powers. The writing style here is very much a la Homer, like the Iliad. Its a modernized version so its all complete sentences and full thoughts, a little less poetic because of these fully thought out sentences, but it still has a poetic beauty, albeit a modernized one. Like her second novel Circe, The Song of Achilles has a young adult novel feel to it, in the sense that the story is about two boys who grow up together and fall in love. Miller really knows how to describe young people in love, I learned this from Circe as well as this book. If there's one thing I learned from Miller its that one can never underestimate young love, its one of the greatest and most powerful things in the universe. 

The story is told from the first person point of view, from Patroclus' point of view, Achilles' lover and best friend. Patroclus is somewhat of a loser, he was exiled from his Princely happenstance after he killed a boy by accident. He becomes a somebody when Achilles wants him to be forever by his side. In addition, Patroclus becomes a hero in the Trojan War when he kills Serpedon, a son of Zeus, a god. This makes Patroclus a hero in the Trojan War. 

Next, lets talk about the story. So the story is sort of slow until the end, then it builds to a climax and ends on a high note, its fantastic. It begins with Achilles and Patroclus meeting in their youth, they begin a friendship, and then eventually a romantic, sexual relationship. The boys meet each other as young as 10 or 12. They get trained in the art of war as well as other things men should learn by a centaur, that Achilles' mother, a goddess named Thetis, is an associate of. 

From there Achilles gets asked to fight in the Trojan War, to save Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, "the face that launched a thousand ships." This is where the novel really takes off as something else, not just a loving relationship. Its interesting to note that the war parts of the novel are very graphic and gory. However, the sex scenes here are all polka dots and moonbeams, like softcore porn. Miller is willing to describe men's guts hanging out of their stomachs but won't go near the physicality of gay sex, interesting choice, can't say I blame her. But we as an audience know better than that. 

Inspiration. This book is inspiring to read. There's something about it that sticks with you for a long time. Its only been two days since I finished reading it and not only do I have a great sense of accomplishment from reading it but I also realize that this is something I will remember for a long time because a) its terrific writing b) its a great story and c) its inspirational. 

By inspirational I mean that the novel got me reading the actual Iliad, of which I have two different translations. This book prepared me for the epic poetry of the Iliad, which was indispensable. I have read epic poetry before. I've read the Bible in its entirely about ten years ago. I've read Shakespeare. Now I'm finding myself reading more of that kind of material. The interesting thing to note is that I bought two different copies of the Iliad, a hardcover and a paperback, but I never read any of them until now. Now is the time. This is what I call a great inspiration. 

If a writer can get you to go back and read what is arguably the beginning of Western Literature you know that's a great writer. This is a novel fit for young adults, adults, anyone curious and sophisticated enough to appreciate fine literature.

Artemis

Artemis is the 2017 follow-up to The Martian, written by Andy Weir. Here Weir attempts to replicate the success of The Martian in a sophomore effort. Weir is already a writing superstar as The Martian sold 5 million copies fast even before the movie came out in 2015. Weir has a background in computer science, even working the infamous Warcraft II game with Blizzard back in the day, pretty rad. Because of his computer skills its easy to see where Weir gets his technical and scientific expertise, which is where the genius in this novel lies. 

Artemis follows the life and struggle of smuggler, porter Jasmine Bashar, Jazz for short. She's a twenty-something Saudi Arabian woman, who if not for the fact that she reads Saudi blogs, could happen to be any race. She lives in the space the size of a closet, shares communal baths, and eats algae with no extra flavors. She's po. Her dream is to become a tourist guide and make big bucks so she can live a great life. Oh, and all of this takes place on a colony on the moon called Artemis. Jazz gets involved with some criminals on the colony when she's offered a million slugs to sabotage some resource harvesters.

The book is told from the first person, from Jazz's perspective. This is interesting because the last novel I read (Circe, check out the review here) was also told from the first person. Seems like there might be a trend for novels in the first person that I wasn't aware of, the more you know. Jazz is an sweary, original, protagonist and narrator but the other characters are sort of generic. Good guys that help Jazz. Bad guys that want to hurt Jazz. The brainy tech ally. The millionaire ally. The muscle. Etc, etc.

When it comes to dialogue the book is simplistic. I'm not sure if Weir really knows what twenty-year old women really think, how they think, let alone what they think of sex and their bodies. Although these aspects are disappointing there is one saving grace-science and detailed explanations of action scenes. 

Artemis shines in explaining things. Particularly geeky things that I will never, ever hear about again. In that sense the book is a great once-in-a-lifetime affair. Things like how to get into a vacuum-sealed double hull from the outside get thoroughly explained. 

The science gets hammered in more and more towards the end with "little lectures on why the spaces between the inner and outer hull of Artemis’s domes are pressurised at 20.4 kPa, 10% less than the pressure inside the dome itself, or laboriously listing all the MacGuffin’s technical specifications (“I checked the core’s index of refraction: it’s 1.458, a little higher than fibre optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit … a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometre … the precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometre." (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/15/artemis-andy-weir-review-the-martian)

Some people might not like all this laborious scientific explanation but for me that is the charm of the novel. The dialogue and characters needed more work but these scientific freakouts are what made the writing interesting. A great comment I saw written about the book in a review is that its like a juvenile Heinlein sort of thing. If Heinlein is mentioned in a review about your book, then you know you've done something right.

However, the science doesn't make everything else good. After finishing the novel (I listened to it in audiobook form, narrated by Rosario Dawson) I had a great feeling of satisfaction, from listening to eight discs' worth of narration and finishing a new science fiction novel. However, the plot to Artemis isn't something I'm going to think about two months, two years, or two dozen years from now. Its okay, and that's fine. 

Why there's no excuse for stupidy in 2018

I've gone through a vast reeducation, learning about everything from jazz music history, to philosophy, to ethics, politics, journalism, propaganda, and government. My friends aren't interested in any of that stuff and they don't want to hear about it. I have a friend who is even against reading in and of itself. The rise of anti-intellectualism has been timed perfectly with the rise of Trump. With anti-intellectualism comes racism, and prejudice, like the neo-Nazi rally last year in Charlottesville where one person died to to a neo-Nazi driving a car into the crowd. However, in today's modern technological golden age, there's no excuse to be stupid, uninformed, or uneducated. You don't have to go to college to be an intellectual. But it sure helps to go to school and come from a rich, educated family.

First of all, because the internet is pretty cheap (or free if you go to the library or a coffee shop), that means that everybody has constant access to free information. This free information is indispensable right now. I wouldn't be able to order the books I want to read without being able to look titles up through the library's servers. I wouldn't know whats going on in government if it weren't for the news websites. Its a given that you can learn a lot because of the free information on the net. Use it or lose it. Don't use it just for Instagram and Twitter. The modern thinker uses the internet to strengthen his wits and to engage discourse in ideas, art, and culture. Most of the music I listen to is on YouTube for free. That is how I know so much about music, by listening to it online for free.

Next, the archaic media known as books. Reading wasn't something I was attracted to for nearly twenty years. I did two years at the University of Wisconsin system and the entire time I was there I dreaded reading and preferred to play guitar in the guitar club and hang out with my buddies in the computer science club. It wasn't until the ripe age of twenty that I began my reading career. Technically I'm behind my peers, some of whom already have Bachelors, Masters, and even PhD's. When my dad was my age he had already read most of the best that science fiction had to offer whereas I'm still somewhere in the beginning of it.

Reading isn't something you can force yourself to do. You have to learn to enjoy it, to enjoy the process of prose, and gain intellectual understanding of the text, as well as empathy within the narrative. Its a powerful force. Literature may be more important to mankind than music, and I love music dearly! To finish on this subject there's no excuse to be stupid because books are free and you can learn about nearly anything and everything, provided you have a library card and dedicate the time to improving your mind. You might find that you have a greater appreciation from the world after you've read a lot. I've found that my thinking has become more linear, concise, and forward. It also helped me to become a better writer, something I strive for, especially because I have aspirations of becoming a writer.

Lastly, your peers, friends, co-workers, bosses, and even customers at your work affect you in some ways. Sometimes they can change you for the better, to become smarter by giving you advice, sometimes even when you didn't think you would need it. This guitar player customer taught me a lot about jazz guitar comping when he told me I should play the chords with the pick and fingers rather than just using the pick all the time. Such a simple thing but I never figured that out on my own in my ten years of playing the guitar. Its not rocket science but its helped me a lot.

The more people you know the more advice you'll get. Most of this you can take it or leave it. However, I find that when I look into things that people tell me to do or look up I find myself enriched by that said thing, even if its something small like,"you should write everyday", "look up this political writer", "listen to this classical composer", etc, etc. The list is endless. At the end of the day something your peers or customers tell you isn't going to change your world but it may help you somehow.

These are the reasons why there's no excuse to be stupid in 2018. Maybe instead of lurking on Facebook or Instagram or playing video games you should finally crack open that novel that you bought but haven't started yet. Your mind will thank you later.

Circe, the good witch

 

Circe is a new novel from April 2018 written by Madeline Miller, a classicist and teacher who won the Orange Prize For Fiction, for her first novel The Song of Achilles. I think so highly of Circe that I already went ahead and ordered The Song of Achilles from the library server.
 
Circe is a a great modern take on mythology. We've all read mythology as kids. Probably when teachers forced it upon us in grade school or middle school, maybe even high school. Circe is the daughter of Helios (sun god and Titan) and an unimportant naiad named Perse. The story is told from Circe's point of view, the first person. Its quite a stunning tale.
 
The novel starts with Circe as a young naiad, living in the halls of the gods. The beginning has a young mind framework, you get the sense that yes Circe is a god but she also started off not unlike humans, young, immature, and afraid of the world. The first couple chapters makes Circe look like a teenage girl. At first I was thinking, am I reading some sort of classical mythological young adult novel?  
 
The book kicks off plot-wise once Circe notices that Promethus (a Titan, a god) has been punished hardcore. He was caught helping humans, teaching them the art of fire and culture. His punishment was being chained outside and having his liver pecked at by birds for eternity. Once his liver regenerated, the birds would come back the next day and do it all over again. Talk about harsh.
 
Circe goes out and helps Prometheus but once Zeus finds out she's helped him Circe gets cast out from the halls of the gods, her punishment being imprisonment on her own island, which is where the common tales of Circe stem from.

Most people know Circe as a witch who lives on an island and pretends to help lost sailors on their wayward travels. Then she turns them into pigs using magic, otherwise known in the gaming world as casting polymorph, pretty neat trick. But Circe is shown in this novel as not just being an evil witch.
 
She started turning men into pigs because she was sexually assaulted by the first men who came to her island, which brings to mind the issue of rape in modern society. There's a feminist tone to Circe's actions once she interacts with the mortal world, man in particular.
 
Another strong feminist tone in the novel is when Circe becomes a mother to a mortal son. She exclaims that she will do anything for her son, including claw her eyes out. She lives for her son and loves her more than anything. In motherhood we cannot see Circe as just a witch who plagues men. She is a loving character, much like mortal mothers are their kids.
 
Circe's love for her son is symbolic for the maternal love of mothers. It made me think about my relationship to my mother, weather good or bad ultimately a mother does whatever they can for you because they love you. Even their mistakes and bad actions are acts of love. Of course making Circe a loving mother humanizes her and turns her into a good witch, which isn't the usual myth tale.  
 
And then of course there's plenty of other interesting stuff that happens. Circe turns a mortal into a god using magic, but once the man, Glaucos decides to marry another unimportant naiad instead of her, despite the fact that they were lovers when he was mortal, Circe gets made and uses magic to turn Scylla, the unimportant naiad into a multi-headed monster, who goes on to plague man in the seas for generations. Typical bickering, even among gods.
 
A cool part that I enjoyed in particular was when Circe swam to the bottom of the ocean and met with an ancient sea god. They come to an agreement of some sort where Circe got to keep his tail, which was a weapon of poison, of godly destruction. Circe later uses this weapon to fight against Scylla. The weapon turns Scylla to stone.
 
What makes Circe such a great novel is that the prose is elegant and sharp. There's classical meaning to terms and phrases. There's modern every day exclamations. The story itself feels like an eternity, the life of Circe, a goddess. You get the sense that this is what a god's life could really be, thousands of years old and still feuding with your relatives over petty things.
 
The first person view for the narrative plays a key role in this book's success. Because everything is told by Circe in the first person you get to understand all the different nuances of the character in question. We begin to understand Circe's thoughts and actions, and vice versa. In this point of view we can relate more to Circe, turning her into a good witch despite turning men to pigs with spells.
 
The novel reads incredibly easy. Not that its kiddie stuff or young adult by any means. More that the writing isn't complicated or busy, just technical enough to be of mythological historical importance. But not overbearing with the technicalities of it, and even offering new slants and points of views within the story.
 
It was a great read, I recommend it to anyone who wants to read something different and very good.

Annihilation

Annihilation was one of those movies that took me a long time to finish watching. I saw the very end of it at a movie theater once in February. I had it on DVD but didn't watch it until four weeks after I got it. When I finally watched the film I was in was awe. It was a great experience. 

Annihilation is a science fiction movie about a group of female scientists (led by Natalie Portman) who explore an alien environment called the Shimmer, which is slowly taking over more and more land over a big area.  Only one soldier came back from a ship but he in was in bad shape mentally and physically.

Once inside the shimmer, the scientists find themselves in quite a strange world, strangers in a strange land you could say. The film has some horror elements to it. First, they run into a mutated crocodile that nearly kills one of the crew. Portman opens the creatures' mouth and realizes its teeth were all different, mutated. She had first noticed these mutations on the plants. She spotted a plant that had endless variations all on the same vine. 

So what we come to know is that the Shimmer refracts DNA. The team sets up camp at the former soldier teams' base of operations. There's early signs of a mutiny early in the film. There's another monster attack (this movie has cool monsters and aliens). A giant bear strikes at the base just before dawn. It takes down a member of the crew. 

The crew gets distracted when Ventress (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) says they should move on without trying to see if their crew-mate lived or was already dead. Lena (played by Portman lies to the team and says the best way to get back out is to go farther in by going to the water's shoreline, and taking the shoreline route all the way back. It was a ploy to get them to keep moving forward. 

At some point when everybody's asleep, a member of the crew commits a mutiny and ties everybody up in a chair. She has a knife to Lena's stomach. At this point we believe she might be going mad because of the effect of the shimmer. All of a sudden we hear the lost crew member's voice, yelling, shouting, the last words of her life screamed out into the open. It was a trick of the creature, the bear that attacked them. 

The bear tears the crazed woman's throat apart and that was the end of her. The others shoot down the creature as soon as they get themselves free. They keep moving forward. Another member of the crew says she doesn't want to go in, and becomes one with plants. 

Its just Ventress and Lena at this point. They make it to the Lighthouse, the goal for the team. Lena sees a camera that shows her husband killing himself with a phosphorous grenade, only to have a doppelganger walking in front of him. She runs down into this alien-like den, which reminded me of the Aliens' (from Prometheus) home planet lairs. 

Ventress is already mutating, into something...Its shown as a sort of violent exorcism, garish and video-gameish, Ventress puking out a blob of fantastic colours to loud sound. Overly dramatic but tends to get the point across. A splotch of blood from Lena's eye falls into the colourful blob, which triggers the blob into a humanoid form. 

The alien has no face or mouth, its just like a tall silver form, like an evil Silver Surfer. It chases Lena but it isn't clear what it wants. There's a bit of a struggle but in the end Lena throws a grenade at it, and it gets engulfed in flames, destroying the creature, the Lighthouse, and dissipating the Shimmer. 

Back at base Lena and her husband Kane are reunited. Kane admits he doesn't know he's the real Kane. And when he asks if Lena is human Lena does not respond. There's a shimmer in their eyes and that ends the film. 

What a story. I was quite taken a back with how gory and violent the film was at first. The part with Kane cutting open a guy's stomach with a knife made me cringe. The bear ripping throats was a surprise. Even the crocodile was somewhat unexpected. These horror elements add a lot of spice to what is otherwise a lot of dialogue with no action. This is a good amount of spice, its not overbearing. 
 
The special effects also had a strong effect on me. The ending was such an utterly climactic scene that I plan on re-watching it again. I've seen it twice now, once in the theater and most recently on my desktop computer. Seeing that in the movie theater was amazing, it was such a memorable science fiction scene. It reminded me of 2001 A Space Odyssey.  

On the other side, the monotone direction of the film is quite great, almost intellectual in a way. By making the movie more about the characters rather than action scenes they created a much better movie than most science fiction films. Its a smart science fiction movie like Arrival, another great sci-fi movie back from 2016. I feel that because the movie was sort of slow to build up, it actually created a much better and more climactic ending.

The science fiction element (DNA mutation) to the movie was what made it so cool to me. The alien at the end suggests an all powerful presence, but it isn't clear if it is, or if it even wants anything. The fact that the film ends with us not knowing if Kane and Lena are human or alien is what gives the film its edge. You could say that the movie was trying to go all intellectual on the audience. Or that they're just trying to be clever. But I would disagree. I would say they wanted to create an ending of all endings, infinite ideas to justify conclusion. Its quite interesting once you see it and think about it. Maybe even more interesting after watching it again...

You could throw down any number of theories for what happened (regarding if they are human or not) but ultimately the audience doesn't know. That is suspense!

Watch this movie, you won't regret it.