update New muxtape version of this playlist can be listened to here
Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums is a grinning fool of a book, partially autobiographical, spewing forth like a wine-induced poetry reading, all mirth and chaos, and yet, fighting through the adolescence and restless spontaneity of the piece is the aspiration for a mature spiritual enlightenment [...]
[This is the first part of a rather lengthy mock exhibition for my Rare Books and Manuscripts class. I will come back later to add the footnotes and make corrections, for now, this is proof that I have been writing these last few months.]
The present exhibition centers on [...]“[The novel] is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative … [...]
An anecdote and then the antidote.
I am/was an underground man. The first time I read Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ I was twenty or twenty-one, a couple years younger than the novel’s protagonist during its second part, ‘An Occasion of Wet Snow’. I was going through my own ‘occasion’ at the time and in [...]
From Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in which fifty-two year old Clarissa contemplates a moment from when she was eighteen:
“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation [...]
I include in full the James Irby translation of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, slightly oblivious to the copyright issues I may be infringing upon. This staggering work of prose is so much more than a philosophical parlor game, it is an allegory of the human condition as evocative as life itself. [...]
Question: What is the ethical obligation of the West to the people of Darfur?
Here in California there are now ads on TV in which several actors pose as “persons on the street” and read excerpts of letters from the people of Darfur that speak of numerous horrors. At the end of the ad the [...]
I never do these things but I have time to kill so here goes:
1. One book that changed your life?
George Orwell’s ‘1984’... I lost my innocence reading that book, the first time I ever heard the term ‘proletariat’. I can almost pinpoint beginning to think for myself after reading that book, I was snapped [...]
Now it’s my turn to follow up on an earlier comments thread. After exposing myself to be a cold-hearted snake for not feeling substantial empathy for the Katrina victims, I went further and proposed that is impossible for us non-Katrina survivors to every really understand their plight, and thus some kind of detached compassion was the best response to the calamity. I’d like to offer both a defense of my lack of sentiment and a critique of empathy itself, basing my points on two novels by the 20th century British author Graham Greene. (I have tried my best to not give away the endings in the novels.)
The problem with empathy is that it relies on understanding, and understanding is so subjective a process that it defies our best efforts, inevitiably leaving us reliant on a jumble of personal instincts and impressions that we convert into a workable truth. If we admit that we can never truly understand each other, is it possible to experience empathy for another person? Or is it better to assume we can understand each other on some level, perhaps an intangible connection that binds us together and acts as a kind of social glue for society? Going even further, the degree to which we process the world through media like television, film, radio, and the internet offers up a new, even more ambiguous realm for relating to other people. I can’t address the all of the layers of my query, but I do think Greene’s novels provide an interesting lens through which to view the our relationships with other people.
Every so often I need to listen to this, and in lieu of my appreciation of Spike Lee’s documentary on the wake of Hurricane Katrina, now is as good a time as any.
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