Paleolithic Art, Richard Wright, Bourbon Queens

I read Rebecca Fraser's biography of the Bronte's, followed by Hazel Rowley's biography of Richard Wright. First, I forever give up my right to complain about my own life as a writer, ever, ever, ever. Second, Wright treated his women very badly indeed. I finished Laurie Lisle's life of Louise Nevelson, a biography without much insight, as was her life of Georgia O'Keefe, and also what a self-centered person Nevelson was. I then read the first of four volumes on the queens of France in the Bourbon dynasty by Simone Bertieres -- I'm reading a lot about XVII and XVIIIth century France this summer -- and I confess to boredom as I had recently read biographies of Richelieu and Mazarin. I also finished Dale Guthrie's book on paleolithic art, but it's a misnomer. It's about what we can conclude paleolithic life was like based on the art. There was a much longer chapter devoted to sexuality in the art than is usual in archeological texts. And yes, the pompous tone goes on to the end, including what seems to be the author's own poems and musings. I mean, really.

Brontes, Women's Literature Surveys, cave paintings, marketing, Press Effect

I read three studies of women and literature: Showalter's A Literature of One's Own, Spack's Female Imagination, and Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar. I enjoyed, indeed devoured each of them. I found myself sharing the self-consciousness and the impostor syndrome of all these authors, and I hadn't given much thought to what all these novels said about women. I also found I had read much of what they had referred to: Eliot and the Brontes and Austen and Dickinson and Sand. It was an unadulterated pleasure. I just finished a biography of Charlotte Bronte. All I can do is repeat what I said to my boyfriend as he left this morning to go to the farmer's market: the Brontes keep dying. This biography was by Rebecca Fraser. The next one I'm just starting is by Juliet Barker. I'm also 200 pages into The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by Dale Guthrie. I had read of this book elsewhere, and there was a suggestion that the author was full of himself. It is frequent to find this in an academic, but it rarely comes across in what amounts to a textbook. It does here, despite the care and the completeness and the thoroughness.

I also devoured Hall and Waldman's Press Effect: this confirmed much of what I thought of the bias of the press towards established narrative, except that the roots went much further than I thought, and that the journalists in the US I most admire are also falling prey to this. I also read The Long Tail, about the move beyond limited consumer options. I found it much better written that The Black Swan. I also read La Grande Mademoiselle's memoirs, which were as self-centered as their reputation made them out to be.

More Foucault

In addition to reading The New Yorker, The New Scientist, and GQ cover to cover (in the New Yoker, Henrik Hertzberg's column contains such unconscious sexism he's going to get a torrent of e-mail; GQ has a great article on the treatment of soldiers wounded in Iraq at the the Landstuhl hospital), I read three books by Michel Foucault. Ceci n'est pas une pipe is an essay on Magritte, as one might expect from the title. I didn't think it was particularly insightful. I also read Archeologie du savoir, where he expounds his theory of the study of forms of communication. I found it certainly more abstract -- this must be where people find him difficult to read -- but not particularly difficult to follow. Of course, French is my first language, but really I think it is the training I got from plowing through all of Heidegger that has prepared me for any intellectual jungle. Most impressive was Foucault's study of madness, La folie a l'age classique. This was most revealing. I am sympathetic to anyone looking at how outsiders are treated, but this was full of interesting tidbits as well. Ship of fools is not just a figure of speech: towns put their homeless mentally ill people on a ship to get rid of them, and this ship aimlessly traveled from place to place. Also, when the sources of infection for leprosy disappeared at the end of the Crusades, the leper colonies were then populated with the mentally ill, a category which included all deviants of society and the mentally handicapped as well. Wow. I am now reading Les mots et les choses.

Foucault, Derrida, Taleb

I forgot to mention I read a biography of Jacques Derrida by Jason Powell. It was notable mostly for the dislike of Derrida's energy and success by academics and the establishment more generally. I also read Sara Mills' biography of Michel Foucault as a preparation to reading his works. It was sad to lose an intellectual at such an early age. Finally, I'm reading Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. I find his argument simple, but it is presented in a distracting, chatty way. I suppose it makes a change from too much academic prose, but he could have said all that in a simpler and more direct way.

Foucault, Morality, Odds and Ends

I read Peter Oborne's Rise of Political Lying, which was a quick easy read but which disappointed me to the extent that his examples were all drawn from British politics. However, it did confirm that what I had noticed in the US and Canada was also happening there, and that the types of political lying (omission, what I call best-foot-forward, misuse of information and statistics, misrepresentation) were also common to the three. The same can be said of John Lloyd's What the Media Are Doing to our Politics, except that I was even more disappointed because I was hoping to see what was going in the US and Canada to be analyzed, i.e. a media bias in favour of a candidate which cannot be fought. I've ordered up Press Effect, from the Annenberg Foundation, and I hope that will be closer to what I am interested in. I read with great delight Shklar's Ordinary Vices, which discusses the wrongdoings of everyday life, not just the great big historical wrongs. The chapter on cruelty was the one that interested me the most, because it said that to be cruel, one must be hypocritical or deceive oneself. Well, I understood much cruelty in my own experience, the pettiness, the narrowness of mind, and it was usually accompanied witI also read Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams.h self-deception. My level of self-deception is relatively low, so I am particularly clear on that.

I also read Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson, about his investigation an influential but not well-known blues player from the American South. I read Christian Jouhaud's Pouvoirs de la litterature, about the interplay of politics and literature in Ancien Regime France. Then I fell into a trio of Michel Foucault's books, which I decided to read. I read L'Ordre du Discours, about the increasing significance of the author, among other things; Sept propos sur le septieme ange, and most important so far La pensee du dehors. I identify with all sorts of outsiders, and I think his argument in favor of the significance of those outsiders to any culture is very important and very effective.

Racine, XVIIIth century English political figures

I finished reading the last six plays of Jean Racine, including his most famous, Phedre. I was really looking forward to it, and the language was indeed very beautiful, euphonious even. I also read a biography of Queen Anne, a sad affair with her bad health and unfortunate life, a biography of the Earl of Oxford who was a politician, and a biography of the radical Duke of Lennox. I also read a biography of Michel Foucault, and decided to read all his work. On my bookshelf now is a second biography of Mazarin, a bit more informative but still irritatingly lacking in insight, a biography of Jacques Derrida, and a couple of essays on media and politics, on the one hand, and lying on the other.

Descartes, Racine's first six plays

I completed the reading of Descartes philosophical works, and there is nothing like the immortal glory of the Meditations. I read the Principes and the rest, but the Meditations are great. The fact hat I read a relatively contemporary translation of the Latin makes it easier, but much of what he wrote I could have said for myself, and the consideration of the relations between faith and knowledge that is relevant is rare in a document already so old.

I have also read the first six plays written by Racine. I ran out of steam last night trying to read Bazajet. I think Racine a poet with an ear for what is natural, his language is clear and metaphorical and smooth. I compare this to Shakespeare (he is only writing fifty or sixty years earlier) and find him much much easier to understand. I am really looking forward to reading Phedre in the next few days.

Milton, Sidgwick, Shakespeare's Wife, Descartes

I read the towering biography of Milton by Lewalski, it was wonderful, although not that much attention was paid to his personal life. I also read Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, which was very clearly written and discusses the ways in which we can decide what is right. I was pleased to read about the fact that such a great philosopher was also regarded as a great teacher. I also read Germaine Greer's book on Ann Hathaway. I found her biography thin, but what can you expect from such a book undertaken on principle? I have returned to the complete philosophical works of Descartes, specifically his meditations. They are an extraordinary exploration of knowledge and faith. He also makes some very interesting comments on the ease and simplicity of studying such matters as geometry and the exact sciences, and how much more difficult it is to study what is the object of today's social sciences. I laughed at the thought of what some of my colleagues might say. Finally I also read Shut up! I'm Talking by Gregory Levey. I didn't find it insightful or that funny, it's a speech writer's reminiscence about working in Israel for politicians and diplomats.

Mill, Mazarin, and Hypocrisy in Politics

Yesterday, in addition to reading People magazine, OK magazine, and the New Scientist, I read a biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves, a biography of Cardinal Mazarin by Pierre Goubert, and Ruth Grant's Hypocrisy and Integrity. Stuart Mill's biography was interesting, I had no idea what his life was like, and while I wasn't sure that he was as much the archetype of the public intellectual as the author argued, I learned a great deal nonetheless. Poor him, who was educated as an experiment to make him the arch-liberal. And then, like Prince Charles, falls in love with a married woman and has to wait forever to marry her in his turn. Mazarin was another biography that doesn't tell us that much about the subject: there was little insight, and the book was stuffed with essays on France's economy, society, politics, and major political events beyond what Mazarin would have had to do with them. Grant's book on hypocrisy and integrity, which is mostly a discussion of Rousseau, was interested for a number of reasons: first, she convinced me that hypocrisy is inevitable in any society where there are public ideals and where reality diverges from a similarly perfect application of those ideals. So we must judge hypocrisy in terms of what is acceptable for something inevitable. Second, she doesn't distinguish between Rousseau's life and his philosophy: she discusses his public statements about morality and contrasts it with his decision to abandon in turn his five children to the orphanages, as was the social custom at the time for someone in his station. That's a precedent I may use in my current work.

Richelieu, hypocrisy, insomnia, sex research

I read two excellent biographies of Richelieu, one by the Conservator in Chief of the French archives, Francoise Hildesheimer, and one by P.J. O'Connell. Hildesheimer in particular is outstanding in her mastery of the myths and the truth that emerges from documentation. I didn't get a sense of when Richelieu had his turning points, however, and that O'Connell provided.

Next I read Eluned Summers-Bremner's Insomnia, a short cultural history of the phenomenon. She covers the ancient world, then skips right to medieval Europe. I was a little disappointed, but it was clearly written, short, and had interesting analyses of paintings and novels and films. I also read David Runciman's Political Hypocrisy. That was very interesting, talking about politicians who are insincere even when they exaggerate the ills they propose to fix.

I also devoured a book on sex research, called Bonk, by Mary Roach. The writer is very witty, and I actually learned some things. I read in 24 hours, and it was great escapism.

Proust, Voltaire, Hitler

I've read a book on writing that urges writers to have a plot! It's called Writing to the Point, by Algis Budrys. I've also read Consumed by Benjamin Barber: it makes an argument that we are infantilized into consumption. I agree, although I don't think I personally am likely to be so infantilized. I also read an interminable biography of Jean Racine, by Georges Forestier, which reminded me primarily that Racine wrote his great plays in a short amount of time. I finished Rebecca West's travelogue of prewar Yugoslavia. I finished Maser's biography of Hitler -- no, he was not missing a testicle, yes, he had a normal sex life (if you discount sleeping with your niece) and liked women with larger chests. I also read Orieux's life of Voltaire, which was very revealing: I had no idea Voltaire was so eccentric. Finally, I read with great enjoyment the first volume of Painter's biography of Marcel Proust. It recounts in great detail the models in Belle Epoque society for Proust' A la recherche du temps perdu, and recounts many incidents and eccentricities of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was really enjoyable -- like Justine said in The Thorn Birds, he really is nothing more than an old gossip.