Women and Architecture, Choice Architecture, More on Madame

I finished reading Deblay's biography of the Duchesse d'Orleans. This was probably the most historical and the most insightful of the books I've read about her. The husband sounds like someone who would try a saint, and it is unromantic about the court of Louis XIV. The book on women and their commissions of architecture were very interesting, although I had studied those houses in my previous readings on architecture. The monograph Nudge, on being a choice architect, was weaker than some other similar books I've read. It failed to differentiate successfully between various phenomena, and it failed to be crystal clear about what it was discussing. It did include a mention of a survey of professors conducted in the US: in their sample, 94% of professors considered themselves to be above average. Certainly helps explain lots of the behaviors I've been observing lately.

Anti-semitism, Madame, Writers and Writing

I read a lot of material since I last posted. I read Julia Cartwright's Madame, a biography of the Duchesse d'Orleans, Princess Henriette of England. It was at least a historical treatment, not a novelized version like the other book by Margaret Irwin's Royal Flush/The Story of Minette. I also read Five Stuart Princesses, by Robert Rait, another turn of the century money-maker. On an entirely different subject,I read Key Houses of the 20th Century, by Colin Davies: these are the canon of 20th century architecture, complete with plans and pictures. It was extremely interesting, once I figured out how to read the plans and some of the technical terms. I was flabbergasted at the modern houses built before 1920! I read the two volumes of Janet Sternberg's The Writer and her Work, which was quite interesting although the political correctness got to me after a bit. I also read Sol Stein's How to grow a novel, but I preferred Alfred Knopf's advice as an editor to writers than Stein's. I also read the third and fourth series of Writers at Work, the interviews from the Paris Review. Not all writers are articulate about their work. I laughed out loud at Nabokov's dissing a wide range of other writers in the most animated language. I thought David Morell had a few good points in his Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, especially about the structure of writing and the proportionality. Finally, I read the three volumes of Histoire de l'anti-semitisme by Leon Poliakov. This was a real eye opener -- I didn't realize that Montaigne was the son of a Marrano, a concealed Jew, or that the Crusades included what I can only call pogroms against the Jews, or that Voltaire and so many others were anti-Semitic. I was floored. I'm really glad I read it, there were some fascinating passages about Jews beginning the diaspora before the destruction of the Temple and their influence all over north Africa.

Herzl, Gardner, Morris

I read two books in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary: Alon's Herzl, about the great Zionist leader, and Benny Morris' Beginning of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. I didn't find Alon insightful about Herzl, and I raised my eyebrows when the biographer described Herzl falling in love, as he puts it, with little girls. There is no indication Herzl acted on his impulses, but it gave me pause. And then there are the tragedies of his wife, two children, and grandson committing suicide because of mental health issues, and his last daughter dying in Theresienstadt after spending her life in a mental clinic in Austria. Plus, the guy dies young. This was not a happy life. Morris' book certainly puts the early Israeli decisions regarding displaced Palestinians in a different perspective. I am not sure that people where so deliberate in determining a way to deport them all from Israel, although it certainly was normal for the founders to wonder what it would mean to have 40% Arabs in the new state. There were comparatively few and limited atrocities for a war made up of irregulars at the start. But the fact remains that the crush of Jewish immigrants being housed in abandoned Arab houses and the possession of Arab lands which started with the Jews not letting a harvest go to waste certainly meant trouble for the future: the Arabs could not then return. I'm not sure there wasn't more neglect and uncoordinated decision-making than Morris implies. I'm now onto to Righteous Victims, so it'll be interesting to see how he treats the material there.

I also read John Gardner's much praised How to Become a Novelist. It was a quick, easy read, and I thought he made some good points, but nothing that helps me in my novel-writing. Mind you, I've read about 50 of these how-to books by now.

writing, odds and ends

I read a cartload since my last blog entry. First, I read Rigadet's famous novel, Le diable au corps. Turns out this is a fairly standard sexual awakening story, of a male teenager having an affair with someone's wife. She dies at the end. I then read Allison Plowden's biography of Queen Henrietta Maria -- I didn't realize that she had headed some armies during the run-up to the Civil War in England. Plowden strives to be chatty, I find it detracts from the seriousness and insight of a biography, although the queen certainly comes to life. I also read the transcribed conferences by Andre Maurois on three noblewomen: the Duchess of Devonshire, the Countess of Albany, and Madame. It was forgettable and pretty short. I read Madame de Lafayette's memoir of Madame, the sister-in-law of Louis XIV. She seems an affable person who bore well her travails, including being married to a gay guy. It was interesting to read something written by someone who actually knew her. I read some chapters on Maser's life of Hitler, which continues to impress me greatly, as well as a good book on an awful subject, lingchi or Death by a Thousand Cuts by Brooke, Bourgon and Blue. This is about the method of execution in classical China, used right up to 1905, and the perceptions of cruelty in China. I read three books on writing, one by Dorothea Brande -- good, but I'm past that stage of becoming self-aware. Another was called Elements of Storytelling, by Peter Rubie, and I didn't even finish it, it was so badly written and unimaginative. A third, called Self-Editing for Writers, by Browne and King, was excellent. It gave examples drawn from life (the authors have editing firms, which means that this was a long self-advertisement), as well as examples of what not to do written by the authors themselves. It answered some questions I had about texture and proportion, and how to break up dialogue, that I had on my mind now that I'm writing a novel. Finally, I started reading Stiff, by Mary Roach. It is not a good book, written in too jocular a fashion, and covering ground (OK, about cadavers) I already knew about.

Racine, Nuremberg

I am reading a book on the Nuremberg trials by Bradley Smith, but I have already read Werner Maser's account of the procedural problems at the trial, as well as its analysis (along with other Holocaust trials) by Lawrence Douglas. Each book is radically different from the other. Maser, a German, catalogues the many indignities and injustices suffered by the prisoners and witnesses for the defense, in a way that makes those trials a caricature of justice. My sense of justice was offended, as those who know me will expect, in many ways that aren't even mentioned by Maser. But I also saw that the necessity for justice on a broader scale that couldn't be provided by any legal system as we know them. Douglas' book also covered the Eichmann, Barbie, Demjanjuk and Zundel trials, and I learned a lot about all of those trials as well, as political theatre, as collective expression of grief and sorrow, as part of various national discourse on the Holocaust. Wow. The poet who dramatically collapses and cannot testify, the judge reluctant to interrupt the witness, the whole country of Israel riveted by radio testimony. Incredible, even though I was very well informed on the Holocaust for a lay person and a Gentile, having read extensively on the subject.

I have also read several books on Jean Racine, the great French dramatist -- something of an essay on the life of Racine by Francois Mauriac, an essay on Racine as dramatist by Lucien Goldmann. I have two or three on my bedside table.

Finally I also read a book on the idea of monarchy, by William Spellmann. It was a quick easy read, a survey of monarchy on the five continents in the last millennium -- quite an overview.

I also read the New Scientist, the New Yorker, and the Vanity Fair cover to cover.

All in all the last few days have been a pleasant re acquaintance of reading as escapism, and I confess I jumped in with both feet. I have a large stack of books to return to the library now.

Philip II of Spain, Zelda Fitgerald, Eudora Welty, Clintons

I read stack of books yesterday, it was pure escapism, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I read a biography of Philip II of Spain, poor soul, which purported to set aright many myths about him. It did for me -- he was not a prude, he was religious and not tudious but a hard-working monarch without being a prig. I zipped through A Writer's Beginnings as it was not about becoming a writer but about Welty's childhood. Interesting enough, but not what I hoped for. Then I read Bedell Smith's book on the White House years of the Clintons. There was next to no information I didn't already no, so it was an un-scintillating 500 pages. Then I read a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and it was both very sad and very illuminating. What a sad pair those talented people were, she a schizophrenic and he a terrible alcoholic. Their marriage was a shambles of fights, drunks, and pain. According to this book, Scott did use their lives as material but objected when she did, and passed some of her writing as his own to get more money. He was threatened by her, and it would appear she advised him extensively on his own writing.

I am now reading a classic of travel literature on Yugoslavia by Rebecca West. The tone certainly is flippant. I'm going back to the library for more.

Paris Review on Women Writers, Henry James, Eudora Welty

As a treat for myself after all the professional reading I've done, I read James' essay on the art of fiction, several essays from Welty from Eye of the Story, and then the collection of Paris Review interviews on women writers. James' essay was charming, and I agree with him that the task of the novelist is to create a believable, world. Welty was a little less good, although she is the author of the best short story I've ever read, about a lonely deaf man. I can't think of any insight gained from what she wrote in those essays. The interviews, on the other hand, were a revelation. Some authors give terrible interviews, some authors cannot talk about their process in an illuminating way. Some have led terrible lives -- Anne Sexton committed suicide. Hellman sounded raspy even on the printed page. I really enjoyed how they discussed where and how they wrote. All of them would have benefited from the word-processing age. Anyway, I stayed up way past my bedtime because I couldn't put it down.

Miranda July, Henri Crouzat, return to Descartes

Yesterday I read the New Yorker cover to cover, a collection of short stories by Miranda July, and I finished off the satire of colonialism by Henri Crouzat. The satire wore thin as the pages went on -- the plot was thinner than the portraits were biting, I found. But it was still excellent. I don't really get the short story form, and I found there was a lot of sexual content to July, who is supposed to be a phenomenal artist. I find I'd rather see one of her movies than read another of her short stories.

I also returned to my survey of the philosophical works of Descartes yesterday, something I started before my trip to Italy but left lying there while I plowed through a number of books from interlibrary loan. That's the best thing I read.

Maritain, early Greenland colony

I just read Viking Settlers in Greenland and their Descendants During Five Hundred Years, by Poul Noerlund. This is an anthropological study based on archeology of the two settlements. It was written in the 1930s, and it paints a sad picture of a people who became cut off from Europe and died out from all the diseases of malnutrition. One settlement was weakening when it was attacked by Innu and the settlers killed by burning their church refuge over their heads. (There is plenty to show the animosity and cruelty was mutual.) The other settlement died out slowly, with bone malformations preventing childbirth and growth so stunted the average woman was only 4 ft 6. People's teeth were worn down from eating low quality grain, they were iron-starved (heads of axes were fashioned from bone), and of course their were abandoned to their fate by the colonial power, Norway-Denmark, when the Little Ice Age meant the fjords filled with ice became impassable. The Church also abandoned them as the weather deteriorated. It is an ugly memory, right up there with the Irish potato famine, in terms of white-on-white colonial neglect causing death. I read a trashy novel in French, Dole Rumen's Lys d'or, a novel about an art trader in China. It is short and has none of the telling detail a good novel has. I also finished off the complete works of Jacques Maritain. I didn't think his wife's journals were worth publishing, and they were not insightful, although this is not to say the person didn't have merits. It was just a list of headings about when she prayed, and whether she felt arid or transported. She doesn't explain what aridity or exaltation means. The rest of the work is fairly good. I feel at the end how I felt from the start. He would have been more effective if he didn't constantly judge other religions to be inferior to Catholicism. I also thought what a great contribution it would be to look at the impact of Christianity on philosophy in various ways, but also how little he actually does that.

Barre, Bennett, Voll and Esposito

I read the biography by Jean-Louis Barre of the Maritain couple. It is a bad translation, in the sense that I could hear the French that was being translated all the time. It was a bad biography in the sense that is was not critical enough and was lacking in insight. Nonetheless, I am far better informed about the Maritain than I was. I suppose that strange little menage a trois qualified as preternatural Jesus freaks, with the sudden conversion, the extremes of mortification and religiosity, and, of course, the attempts to convert others, including pressure on Raissa's parents, attempts to hold gay people off their lifestyles, and most famously, a man who went from wanting to be a priest to being a Gestapo collaborator, finally committing suicide. It does the reputation of the philosopher no good, like Sartre's life story doesn't help his reputation either.

Bennett's book is called Beyond UFO's, and I already knew most of the science. But I had never even hear of the moon Titan, and came to appreciate the accomplishments of scientists who not only got pictures, but landed a satellite (named Huygens) on it.

Finally, I read Voll and Esposito's Islam and Democracy, a series of case studies of modern political systems dealing with or incorporating Islam. It includes Egypt as a Arab country, which will make specialists smile and Egyptians seethe, and does nothing for their credibility.

I also read several long essays by Jacques Maritain. I was sort of thinking (heretically, I'm sure) "What's the big deal?" and now, having read the sordid details of his religiosity, I'm even less enthusiastic. But I want to finish off the lot, and I am going to put Julien Green, whom Maritain knew, on my list of books to read.

Jacques and Raissa Maritain

My partner bought a bunch of magazines to send to soldiers serving in Afghanistan, so I've read Esquire, Maxim, and Gentleman's Quarterly cover to cover, in addition to this week's New Scientist and New Yorker. Otherwise, my reading has been plowing through Jacques and Raissa Maritain's complete works, in French. I have read primarily Jacques so far, and I find him clear and easy to read, and witty at times, and able to admit mistakes easily. I also find him elegant. In his book on artistic intuition, he talks about how talent is given, not created, but that the poet can keep his intuition free of obstacles and distractions. I agree with that. In one of his last books (I'm still waiting for volumes 7 and 9 of the complete works), Le Paysan de la Garonne, he writes about how it is entirely possible to admire the resources of human stupidity and the fact that it can coexist very easily with faith in the same brain. I laughed out loud. How right he is! He also makes an argument that Jesus died ahead of his wounds and crucifixion, as a final loving choice to save humanity. I'm not sure this is accurate (and I am struck afresh at how irrational the whole faith thing is, but then, I've known that since high school), but it's an intriguing thought