Imagine a novel about an ambitious, slightly coarse, provincial young man, determined to make his name in the capital city. He is tall and strong, with uncanny blue eyessea-cold, merman eyes. He talks too loudly. One of the capitals most polished journalists dismisses him as a swaggering farmboy. Even the rich heiress who almost marries him agrees with him that he is like a mountain troll from a fairy tale; her sister, on first meeting him, noticed his slightly provincial shoes. But he has brilliance and will, and others welcome this young engineer with a head full of projects as the prototype of the active man of the twentieth century, a figure from a different, luckier tale, an Aladdin (as one of his friends crowns him) who will surely prosper and triumph. The novel describes this journey.

Now imagine that the novel systematically subverts the swelling arc of the bildungsromanthat, on the cusp of each achievement, some ghostly hand pulls our hero back from victory. He is about to leave his mark in the capital city, but eventually withdraws. He is about to marry the rich heiress, but calls off the engagement. He returns to the country and starts a family with a modest country girl, but he isnt happy there, either: He was like a clock whose insides had been carefully removed, piece by piece. In fact, our Aladdin seems destined to follow the serial emaciations of Hans in Luck, one of the Grimms fairy tales, in which Hans, having been paid in gold by his master, is persuaded to exchange his gold for a horse, then his horse for a cow, then his cow for a pig, and so on, until finally he loses everything, and returns home happy and unencumbered. His luck is his reduction.

The hero of this novel comes to the conclusion that all worldly treasures lost their worth as he got closer to them. He spends his final years living in virtual isolation in a remote rural area in the north of the country. After his untimely death, a notebook of his is found, which contains these beautiful words of fatalism and rebellion:

When we are young, we make immoderate demands on those powers that steer existence. We want them to reveal themselves to us. The mysterious veil under which we have to live offends us; we demand to be able to control and correct the great world-machinery. When we get a little older, in our impatience we cast our eye over mankind and its history to try to find, at last, a coherence in laws, in progressive development; in short, we seek a meaning to life, an aim for our struggles and suffering. But one day, we are stopped by a voice from the depths of our beings, a ghostly voice that asks Who are you? From then on we hear no other question. From that moment, our own true self becomes the great Sphinx, whose riddle we try to solve.

This shattering, sometimes unbearably powerful novel, completed in 1904, was written by Henrik Pontoppidan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1917. It is considered one of the greatest Danish novels; the filmmaker Bille August turned the story into a nearly three-hour movie called, in English, A Fortunate Man (2019). The novel was praised by Thomas Mann and Ernst Bloch, and is effectively at the center of Georg Lukcss classic study The Theory of the Novel (1920). In Danish, it is called Lykke-Per; in German, it was given the title of the Grimm brothers fairy tale Hans im Glck. And in English? In English, it didnt exist, having gone untranslated for more than a century, until the scholar Naomi Lebowitz administered the translators equivalent of a magic kiss and roused it from shameful oblivion. Published nine years ago in academic format, Lucky Per has finally appeared in Everymans Library, in Lebowitzs fluent and lucid version, with an excellent introduction by the novelist and critic Garth Risk Hallberg. Our luck has caught up with everyone elses.

Have I spoiled the plot by revealing the ending? The critic only gives away in silver what the great novel eventually releases as gold. Besides, its almost impossible to discuss Lucky Per without discussing the shape of its plot, because the radical oddity of the book is so bound up with the heros final renunciations. At first sight, Lucky Per looks like a stolid work of realism. It is almost six hundred pages long. Through its ample halls moves a large cast of characters, from several layers of Danish societymiddle-class clergymen, rich merchants, lawyers and politicians, writers and intellectuals. There is much conversation about the coming century: the fate of the nation, the future of technology.

But one reason its generally unwise to talk about a single style called realism is that prose narrative is so often lured away from conventional verisimilitude by rival genres, notably allegory and fairy tale. The books opening chapter is at once familiarly realistic and heavy with the ironic fatalism of the folktale. In a small market town in East Jutland, Per Sidenius is one of eleven children growing up in an austerely religious family. His father is a pastor with an ascetic hatred of the body. His mother is bedridden. While his brothers and sisters mutter their prayers in a sort of underworld blindness to the light and full of a dread of life and its glory, Per is a singular, rebellious life force. He sneaks out of the house to go sledding, he flirts with a local girl. When a parishioner complains to the pastor that Per has been stealing apples from his garden, the wayward son is severely admonished at family dinner, warned that he could end up like Cain, the first murderer, whom God cursed thus: You will be a wandering fugitive in all the earth. His siblings weep in dismay, but Per silently scoffs. At the age of sixteen, he escapes this prison, and goes to Copenhagen to study engineering at the Polytechnic Institute. The coming-of-age novel, Pers sentimental education, will now begin in earnest, as the dark, religious family grotto recedes into the distance of legend.

Alas, the past cannot be escaped so easily. Fable and allegory curl themselves like creepers around our heros feet. Per has, in effect, been exiled from Eden, for the Adamic sin of stealing apples. But his home wasnt Edenic, and besides, he doesnt share his fathers Christian faith. If he hasnt committed a sin, how can he be cursed? All the secular energy of this noveland it has a magnificent, liberating secular powerpushes against the reality of the pastors Old Testament damnation. Yet Per is cursed: hes destined to wander, destined to quest, and destined to fail. With a steady, returning beat, closer to allegorical verse than to realist fiction, the novel reminds us of its guiding theme: the homelessness of its hero, condemned to spend his life in the lonely quest for a metaphysical safe harbor. So is Pers curse a religious curse or a fairy-tale curse? And what is the difference between the two?

Pers odd life path might simply be the result of being born into the Sidenius family. The Sideniuses, we learn at the novels opening, trace their lineage, through generations of ministers, all the way back to the Reformation. Its a family tree of unimpeachable piety and dreary episcopal conformity, with one exception. An ancestor, also a pastor, known as Mad Sidenius, somehow went off the rails. He drank brandy with the peasants, and assaulted the parish clerk. In a novel haunted by insanity and suicide, the memory of this family outcast is important. The potentially blasphemous question rears its head again: if its a curse to be a Sidenius, is Per cursed by generations of unerring piety, or by that ancestral aberrant flash of madness?

Henrik Pontoppidans life began much like his fictional heros. He was born in 1857, the son of a Jutland pastor, into a family that had produced countless clergymen. Unlike Per, Pontoppidan seems to have remained on friendly terms with his family, despite drifting away from his inherited Christianity. In his memoir, published in 1940, three years before his death, he declared himself to be an out-and-out rationalist, dismayed by the tenacity of religious superstition. Like Per, he left the provinces to study engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen of the eighteen-seventies and eighties has been described (by the critic Morten Hi Jensen) as the first real battleground of European Modernism. A parochially Protestant culture was beginning to do intellectual trade with the rest of Europe: French realism and naturalism, Darwinism and radical atheism were the imported goods. The two most talented conduits of these new freedoms were the novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen and the critic Georg Brandes, both of whom make appearances in fictionalized form in Lucky Per. Jacobsen translated Darwins major work into Danish, and wrote what is surely one of the most fanatically and superbly atheistic novels in existence, Niels Lyhne (1880). A lyrical aesthete and a Flaubertian prose polisher, he is pictured, in Lucky Per, as the sickly poet Enevoldsen, fussing with his lorgnette at a Copenhagen caf while worrying about where to put a comma. Jacobsen was championed by Brandes, whose lectures at the University of Copenhagen in 1871 were an inspiration for a generation of Scandinavian writers. (Brandes and Pontoppidan corresponded for decades.) Brandes had read Mill, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss. A fervent atheist, he introduced Danish readers to Nietzsche and, late in life, wrote a book entitled Jesus: A Myth (1925). He was an advocate of European naturalism, and of fiction that attended to the social and political moment. It was time, he argued, to open Denmark up to the outsidea movement that became known as the Modern Breakthrough. In Lucky Per, Brandes appears throughout the novel, more invoked than encountered, as the dominating Dr. Nathan, sometimes nicknamed Dr. Satan. Brandes was Jewish, and Pontoppidan, remarkably alert to European anti-Semitism throughout the novel, writes that Per had kept his distance from Dr. Nathan because of this: He simply didnt like that foreign race, nor did he have any leaning toward literary men.

But Pers life will soon be changed by another Jewish character, and one who shares the bulk of the novel with him: the fierce, brilliant, troubled Jakobe Salomon. Per meets Jakobe through her brother, Ivan, who decides, early in the novel, that Per has the potential of a Caesar on whose brow God has written I come, I see, I conquer! Pers imperial impulses are manifest in his vast utopian engineering project, which envisages a system of canals on the Dutch model that will connect Denmarks rivers, lakes, and fjords with one another, and put the cultivated heaths and the flourishing new towns into contact with the sea on both sides. His dream is a physical enactment of Brandess Modern Breakthrough. He also shares Brandess atheism. There was no hell, Per reflects, other than what mankind, afraid of loves joy and the bodys force, created in its monstrous imagination. The Anglophone reader is sometimes reminded of Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence. Per exults in the healthy secularism of the body: The embrace of man and woman was the heaven in which there is oblivion for all sorrows, forgiveness for all sins, where souls meet in guiltless nakedness like Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise.

With the ruthlessness of the provincial hero, Per decides that marriage to an heiress of the vast Salomon merchant fortune will speed him on his way. At first, though, he stirs in Jakobe a deep-seated hatred of Christian culture, and she treats him with an insulting haughtiness. Bookish, sensitive, twenty-three, and already considered a bit of an old maid by her family, Jakobe had been a sickly child, and the target of anti-Semitic bullying. Per triggers in her a memory, at once sharp and hallucinatory, narrated with dreamlike indulgence by Pontoppidan, and one of the novels most potent scenes. Four years earlier, Jakobe had been in a Berlin railway station. Her eye was caught by a group of pitiable, ragged people surrounded by a circle of curious, gaping onlookers. When she asked a station official how to get to the waiting room, he replied that with her nose she should find it easy to smell her way there. On the floor of the waiting room were hundreds more desperate, emaciated paupers. Suddenly, she realized that they were Russian Jews, on their way to America via Germany. She had heard of the pogroms, and was astounded that this infamy crying out to heaven could happen right before Europes eyes with no authoritative voice raised against it! Pers Nordic frame and blue eyes make her think of two police officers she glimpsed in Berlin, who seemed the embodiments of the brutal self-righteousness of the Christian society she lives in.

With great ironic power, Pontoppidan convinces us that Jakobe and Per must inevitably hate each other, and then, soon enough, that these two damaged creatures could have found comfort only in each other. Their relationship is passionately erotic and ardently intellectual; Jakobe, again like some heroine out of D.H. Lawrence, is helplessly attracted to Per, despite the blaring correctives from her conscience. The couple have in common their committed atheism, their hatred of the established church, and a sense of being chosenby theology, by race, by similarly heroic notions of destiny.

Garth Risk Hallberg, in his introduction, says that Jakobe Salomon is as intelligent as anyone out of James, as bold as anyone out of Austen, as perverse as anyone out of Dostoyevsky, and adds that, with all due respect, the frankness and amplitude of Pontoppidans depiction of the Salomon household leaves George Eliots Daniel Deronda in the dust. I like it when writers are made to run races with one another, precisely because were supposed to be above such competitions, and I also think that Hallberg is right. Jakobe is utterly alive and complex, and burns at the living center of the book. Pontoppidan endows her with an extraordinary intellectual restlessness, and allows her some of the most movingly lucid secular proclamations I have ever encountered in fiction.

One of these statements, a long letter that she writes to Per, becomes an eloquent, scalding testament to her atheism and her faith in the known limits of our worldly existence. She excoriates Christianitys exaggerated anxiety about death and, following Nietzsche, complains about the link between the fear of death and slave morality:

Never will I forget the impression that some plaster casts of bodies excavated in Pompeii made on me. There were, among others, a master and his slave, both evidently caught by surprise in the rain of ash.... But what a difference in the facial expressions! On the slaves face, you could read the most confusing puzzlement. He was overturned on his back, his eyebrows were raised up to his hairline, the thick mouth open, and you could virtually hear him screaming like a stuck pig. The other, by contrast, had preserved his mastered dignity unto death. His almost-closed eyes, the fine mouth pressed shut, were marked by the proudest and most beautiful resignation in relation to the inevitable.

My primary complaint against Christianitys hope of eternal life is that it robs this life of its deep seriousness and, with that, its beauty. When we imagine our existence here on earth as only a dress rehearsal for the real performance, what remains of lifes festiveness?

The powerful secular argument of the novel resides in the freedom and intensity of Per and Jakobes brief relationship. Theres a marvellous scene in the Austrian Alps, where Per has travelled after the couples engagement, and where Jakobe has arrived without notice. The time they spend together in the Alps constitutes their true marriage, a new birth and baptism. One day, out walking, they come across a crude wooden cross, a simple hillside shrine with a rough painting of Jesus. Per tells Jakobe a fable that he heard as a child, about a farm boy who wants to become a great shot, a magic marksman. But in order to achieve this the boy must go out at night, find an image of Christ, and shoot a bullet through it. Every time the lad tries to do it, his confidence wavers, his hand shakes, and he fails the test. He remains a common Sunday hunter for the rest of his life.

Per turns back to the hillside shrine. Look at that pale man hanging there! he says. Why dont we have the courage to spit from disgust right in his face. Per takes out his revolver and fires at the image of Jesus, while yelling, Now I shoot in the new century! As the cross splinters, a second, hollow boom sounds through the valley, like infernal thunder. Per blanches, and then laughs, remembering the signposts he had seen earlier: Take notice of the echo!

Heavy, God-infested, magnificently metaphysical, unafraid to court ridicule, and playing for the highest possible stakesthey dont write like that anymore. They didnt write much like that in 1904, though Knut Hamsun, in 1890, and Jens Peter Jacobsen, in 1880, and above all Dostoyevsky, the great progenitor, had all sounded something like this, not so long before. Given the novels astonishingly raw atheism, how are we to read the religious renunciation of its ending? At the novels close, Jakobe and Per appear to be living alone, and each is now committed to a life of religious seriousness, though neither is a religious believer: Per in the remote north, living in monkish retreat, and Jakobe in Copenhagen, where she has founded a charity school for poor children.

Throughout, Per is hard to comprehend in his cloudy questing. At one momentaround the time of his mothers deathhe is pulled back toward his inherited faith, repenting his lust for worldly success and begging forgiveness from God. But fifty or so pages later his recoil from Christian self-sacrifice is palpable once again; he is repelled, for instance, by Thomas Kempiss lament, in Imitation of Christ, that truly, it is an affliction to live in the world. Per reflects that he is at home neither among ascetic Christiansthe piety of the Sideniusesnor among the children of the world: the luxury of the Salomons. And yet, troubled by this very homelessness, he feels that one must choose: on one side, renunciation; on the other, the world. Which is it to be? For it is necessary to take a stand, to swear fidelity... to the cross or champagne.

In the end, Per surrenders to the religious impulses of a faith he seems to stand outside of. We have been here before, in this world of a deformed and contradictory atheism. Raging heroes in Dostoyevsky, Jacobsen, and Hamsun enjoy denouncing a God they dont believe in. But Per Sidenius is stranger still, because he seems to want to imitate a Christ he doesnt believe in. Thomas Mann praised Pontoppidan as a kind of gentle prophet, for having judged the times and, like the true poet which he is, pointed toward a purer humanity. In a suggestive afterword, the novels translator, Naomi Lebowitz, notes how Per restlessly evicts himself from all those places which could offer him refuge. Subtler than Mann, she also sees Pers journey as the discovery of, finally, an authentic and transparent sense of self... the need to be himself, by himself.

The novel encourages such readings. Pers notebook, written in his final years, contains the following entry: Honor to my youths expansive dreams! And I am still a world conqueror. Every mans soul is an independent universe, his death the extinction of the universe in miniature. In this reading, Lucky Per, though rather Scandinavian in its religious intensity, is a still familiar version of the bildungsroman, in which our hero ventures out into the world, tastes success, tastes the ashes of success, and retreats to ponder, on his own authentic terms, the riddle of the self that has always preoccupied him. Fredric Jameson has suggested that we should see this as a happy ending, albeit an ironic one, in which Per has managed to get beyond success or failure.

Yet how can we accept the ironic wisdom of this ending without smothering the vital force of the novels earlier secularism? Where have the magic marksmen, willing not only to spit at Christ but to shoot at Christ, gone? Where has Jakobes proud Roman master scuttled away to? You dont have to be a fully paid-up Nietzschean to feel that if you no longer believe in the Christian God you should no longer believe in that Christian Gods slave morality. If you have rejected the content of the faith, why mimic its more self-punishing practices? Pers imagined choice between cross or champagne is not only a false choice but a mutilated one, posed by a reduced version of Christianity. In fact, Lucky Per emerges as a savage critique of the persistence, in Danish culture, of a certain Kierkegaardian masochism, in which all choices are made religious rather than secular, purifyingly negative rather than complicatedly affirmative. Kierkegaard said that one had to be a kind of lunatic in order to be a true Christian. Is there a difference between this form of religious madness and actual madness? Lucky Per inserts its secular, novelistic lever into just this question.

What if Pers final renunciation is a narrative false flag? Instead of looking at Per, we should perhaps look toward Jakobe, whose own renunciation takes her into the world, not away from it, and who seems to manage this turn without compromising her defiant secularism. She is the novels true hero. How do you get back to Eden? Back to the place you inhabited before the original religious curse? Back to a home before religion made it a home you could be exiled from? If you are a wandering, homeless Christian, scarred by original sin, the answer might be: in the arms of a wandering Jewbut one whose own itinerancy is unseduced by the lure of religion, whose own secularism is not tempted by the simplicity of religious masochism. In the strange switchback of their lives, Per and Jakobe each redefined the meaning of luck. The shame was that they could not share it. Lucky Jakobe, unlucky Per.

More:
A Neglected Modern Masterpiece and Its Perverse Hero - The New Yorker

Summary: Jokers opening weekend shattered the record for an October release (despite its R rating), and brought in an incredible $234 million worldwide. Films do not hit those numbers by skill alone. The film must speak to us and our deep concerns.

We live in a time when the forces of chaos again threaten to break loose. Violence breaks out around the world in the name of the Hindu and Muslim gods. Our once poor but culturally rich inner cities such as New York and New Orleans have rotted into ghettos, almost ungoverned zones with cultures alien to the rest of America.

Under stress people often turn to fantasy, not just for encouragement but also to help process these events. Many such stories tell of transcendental saviors (an alien Jesus) or regular people given magic powers to right wrongs. The Batman saga is different. Bruce Wayne has everything intelligence, looks, wealth but gives up a life of ease. Instead honing his physical and mental skills to the very limits in order to personally and painfully wage war on the forces of disorder that have engulfed his city. His greatest opponent epitomizes the forces of disorder: the Joker.

Why does this story have such appeal both to adults and children? It gives form to our fears about the weak foundations of our society, as it totters against threats both foreign and domestic. Allan Bloom helps us to better understand this in his Closing of the American Mind, from which this material is taken. Some of this summarizes what he says; some is a close paraphrase of his words.

Rousseau and Nietzsche destroyed the intellectual basis of the Enlightenment, and the Wests self-confidence in itself. Replacing that in the minds of the intelligentsia is contempt for the bourgeoisie that is, the self-satisfied, morally blind, materialist middle class and beneath that fears that our values (their Christian roots discredited) have no foundation. It leaves few grounds for hope.

So we live in darkness on top of a void, no longer illuminated by rational analysis. The rise of the bourgeoisie results in a spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul, which weakens us in face of the unlimited choices made possible by the death of God in our souls and the disappearance of His rules. It leaves only a weak basis for any rules.

That is the basis ofMax Webers science (i.e., modern philosophy), which was at best a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, with values certainly beyond its limits. That is what the precarious, or imaginary, distinction between facts and values means. Reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Weber found it impossible to prefer rational politics to the politics of irrational commitment; he believed that reason and science were just value commitments, and so incapable of asserting their own goodness.

Weber believed that politics required a dangerous and inherently uncontrollable semi-religious value positing. Our era is the struggle for the emergence of new values, with unpredictable or unknowable results. Everything is up in the air, and we have no theodicy to sustain us. He, along with others who understood Nietzsches insights, saw that everything we care about was at stake, and we lacked the intellectual and moral resources to govern the outcome.We require values, which in turn require a creativity that is drying up and has no cosmic support. Scientific analysis reveals reason to be powerless, and dissolves the protective horizon within which men can value.

This struggle emerged in the fires of WWI, and then in its result: Weimar Germany. The Wests cultural wars are louder echos of the forces unleashed then. This is best known in the descendants of Christopher Isherwoods semi-autographic Goodbye to Berlin

Few today remember the story that is the context for the song. Even less well-known is its origin in an aphorism in Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra

This is the philosophy of the Joker. Few will understand it, for it lies beyond the vision of the bourgeoisie. That is why the tide of madness will continue to rise, and efforts to stop it will prove futile. Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, bringing America into a world where anything is possible for people who sing about the joy of the knife in cabarets. And who find villains such as the Joker more exciting than heroes who protect us from them.

He now saw himself always as doer of a single deed. Madness I call this: the exception now became for him the essence. The line he followed bewitched his meagre reason. Madness after the deed I call this. Hear me, you judges! There is yet another kind of madness: and this is before the deed. You have not crawled deep enough into this soul!

Thus speaks the scarlet judge: But why did this criminal murder? He wanted to rob. But I say to you all: his soul wanted blood, not loot; he was thirsting for the joy of the knife! But his meagre reason was unable to grasp this madness and it won him over. What is the point of blood! it said; Do you not at least want to steal something too? Or to take revenge? And he listened to his meagre reason: like lead did its speech lie upon him and so he robbed when he murdered. He wanted not to be ashamed of his madness. And now again the lead of his guilt lies upon him, and again his meagre reason is so stiff, so lamed, so heavy.

If only he could shake his head, his burden would roll off: but who can shake this head? What is this man? A heap of sicknesses that reach out through the spirit into the world: there they want to catch their prey.

What is this man? A ball of wild snakes that are seldom at peace with each other so they go forth singly and seek prey in the world. Behold this poor body! What it suffered and desired, this poor soul interpreted for itself and interpreted it as murderous pleasure and greed for the joy of the knife. Whoever now becomes sick is overcome by the evil that is evil now: he wants to hurt with that which hurts him. But there have been other times and another evil and good.

Once doubting was evil and the will to self. At that time the sick became heretics and witches: as heretics and witches they suffered and wanted to inflict suffering. But this will not enter your ears: it would harm your good men, you tell me. But what do your good men matter to me!Much about your good men disgusts me, and verily it is not their evil. How I wish they had a madness through which they might perish, just like this pale criminal! Verily, I wish their madness were called truth or loyalty or justice: but they have their virtue in order to live long, and in wretched contentment. I am a railing by the torrent: grasp me, whosoever can! Your crutch, however, I am not.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

If you liked this post,like us on Facebookandfollow us on Twitter. See all postsabout heroes, aboutreforming America: steps to newpolitics, and especially these

By Joseph Campbell (1949).

This is the book that sparked serious research in to the function and significance of myths. See Wikipedia. From the publisher.

Since its release in 1949,The Hero with a Thousand Faceshas influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbells revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In these pages, Campbell outlines the Heros Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the worlds mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.

As relevant today as when it was first published,The Hero with a Thousand Facescontinues to find new audiences.

Like Loading...

Read more from the original source:
The philosophy of the Joker - Fabius Maximus website

Like most rare-book dealers, William H. Schaberg of Athena Rare Books in Fairfield, Conn., focuses on a specific niche for his business, following his passion and finding what he calls important works in the history of ideasthe majority of which are philosophy books. Schaberg is known as the go-to guy for authenticating first editions of works by Descartes, Locke, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and more.

Schabergs literary passion for important historical texts extends to what he says is one of the most significant spiritual movements of the 20th century: Alcoholics Anonymous. In 2001, he purchased at auction a multilithed prepublication copy of Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Hundreds of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholismthe title commonly referred to as the Big Book. That purchase launched Schabergs investigation into the early history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, nearly two decades later, he has published his own book: Writing the Big Book: The Creation of A.A.

The Big Book, written by William G. Wilsonaka Bill W.and first published in 1939, laid the foundation for the 12-step movement that revolutionized addiction treatment and helped millions of people get and stay sober. With more than 37 million copies sold, the Big Book is one of the bestselling works of all time. It has been translated into 43 languages and was named by the Library of Congress in 2012 as one of the 88 Books that Shaped America.

Willson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous and was the visionary behind the creation of the Big Book, was an inveterate drinker who underwent a spiritual awakening in December 1934 and developed a program that kept him sober for the rest of his life. He then refined the insights, ideas, and practices that became AAs foundational principles.

First of all, he diagnosed the problem as the alcoholics inability to refuse the first drink, Schaberg says. Alcoholism wasnt a psychological problem or a failure of will power or a moral lapse of some sort. Wilsons solution to his understanding of that problem was equally direct and simple. It was to guide the alcoholicthrough a 12-step program of recoverytoward his or her own vital spiritual experience.

When Schaberg purchased the multilith copy of the Big Book at auction, his interest in AA was purely practical. He wanted to answer some basic questions about his newly acquired book: How many had been privately printed? Just how rare was it? This eventually brought him to the

AA archives, which contain a veritable treasure trove of previously unreported data. The tremendous amount of unmined information I discovered was staggering, he says. That led to my decision to write a book covering just 18 months of AA history: from the first time they said, Hey, we should write a book! until the day the book was actually published. It was amazing; the more I researched, the more great details I uncovered.

Schaberg was surprised to learn that the stories Bill Wilson always told about AAs early years were more parables and myths than anything approaching historical fact. In fact, he says, the true story of the evolution and founding of AA is far more miraculous and inspiring.

Schaberg meticulously details the twists and turns of those early years and shines a light on the formerly unacknowledged importance of early AA member Hank Parkhurst. After Bill Wilson, Parkhurst is without a doubt the most important man in the formulation of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and then the packaging of that program into a book, Schaberg says. The Big Book would never have been written and published without Hanks constant pushing and prodding of Bill Wilson to get the job done. And throughout this whole process, Hank was always arguing for his own point of view.

Ultimately, Schaberg hopes readers will find his history of the Big Book inspirational, positive, and uplifting. And he hopes that, in its own way, the book sup- ports the work of Alcoholics Anonymous. Who wouldnt be proud, he says, to be part of a movement with such wonderfully human roots and such an amazingly miraculous backstory?

A version of this article appeared in the 10/14/2019 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Writing the Book on the Big Book: Spotlight on William H. Schaberg

More:
Writing the Book on the Big Book: Spotlight on William H. Schaberg - Publishers Weekly

Dionysos' (Aries Osiris) declaration of divinity in Bakkhai isn't as desperate as Jesus' or Yeezus' demand for worship. The character, who represents duality and fluidity in Shaking the Tree Theatre's production of Euripides' ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae and goes by the plural pronoun they, doesn't need love, but simply requires that their godhood be celebrated as natural law. It's a fact that their late mother's mortal family won't accept, bringing Dionysos (the spelling used by the writer of this adaptation, Anne Carson) to Thebes in a hero's quest for recognition, illustrating the brutal lengths they will go to seek revenge.

My first exposure to The Bacchae, the Dionysian Xena: Warrior Princess episode, maintains parallels to Bakkhai and its source material. On TV, Bacchus (the god's Roman name) was a ram-horned red devil with a harem of vampiric succubi who had to be vanquished. At Shaking the Tree, Dionysos is a beautiful, androgynous youth who spends at least a half-hour in a meditative trance while the audience is seated. In the production, Osiris looks like a medieval Janelle Monae in long braids fashioned like horns and a verdant green gown adorned with flowers and moss that drapes across the length of the stage. Though beauty belies the character's vengeance. The Dionysos in Bakkhai is far crueler than Xena's Bacchus, far more successful in their mission, and far more predatory.

Kadmos (David Bodin), Dionysos' mortal grandfather, comes closest to acknowledging his relative's divine origins, if only half-heartedly, by simply questioning the harm in proclaiming them a god, while the rest of the family, including Pentheus (Zak Westfall), Dionysos' cousin and Theban king, won't accept these "alternative facts." He also wants his mother, Agave (Kelly Godell), freed from Dionysos' hedonistic influence and conservative order restored. Though the besuited Pentheus ends up sealing his own fate when, after arresting Dionysos, he insults the god by suggesting they cut their luxurious braids.

Dionysos escapes Pentheus' prison using wit, seduction and supernatural powers, convincing their cousin that the only way to spy on the Bakkhaia femme Greek chorus that cheers and sings while roaming the audienceis to dress like a woman. The plan both excites and frightens the man. Knowing the ruse won't work, Dionysos builds trust with Pentheus like someone who helps you look for the wallet they stole from you themselves. Under the god's sway, Pentheus could be a baby drag queen at CC Slaughters, slowly building the confidence to sashay freely.

You sense Dionysos' betrayal coming, but there's still something shocking about it when Pentheus breaks out from the Bakkhai's control far too late, and only then recognizes his own doom. This is among Bakkhai's stronger moments. Godell's and Bodin's reactions nail the still-horrific trope of mothers killing their own children. Dionysos' refusal to forgive their grandfather and aunt makes this production feel like a queer revenge story.

I wish Bakkhai's pace were slowed, so we could revel in how Dionysos outwits everyone onstage. Beyond that, Shaking the Tree does justice to a gruesome narrative that Nietzsche helped pull from obscurity, and the company's textural projections fill in some of the play's more graphic and difficult moments. With its lush greenery, Bakkhai gives an unexpected boost against seasonal depression, and with its cast, provides a timely take on an ancient story pushing the limits of excess.

SEE IT: Bakkhai is at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant St., shaking-the-tree.com. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, through Nov. 2. $15-$35.

Read more from the original source:
Dionysos Takes Human Form in a Bloody Quest for Recognition in Shaking the Tree's Bakkhai - Willamette Week

SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

WE LIVE IN a divided world. Our politicians talk of either building walls so that others will not invade us or of creating spaces where diversity may bear fruit to new forms of life. Much of what reaches the general public is in the form of opinions espoused by either television pundits or social media celebrities. If in the past artists and thinkers philosophers in particular had a voice in the public sphere, that is certainly no longer the case. At some point, philosophy seems to have gone inward: it disappeared from the public stage and, among other things, it ceased to be concerned with the humans relation to the nonhuman world. True, to a large extent, the specialized, often incomprehensible, jargon-driven discourse of the philosophers themselves has contributed to this withdrawal. In the English-speaking world in particular, the disputed territories are between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental (or European) philosophy. That, of course, leaves out a whole lot of philosophy that is not part of either tradition: African, Latin-American, or Asian philosophy, for example. For many mainstream philosophers of today, non-Western thought (putatively imagistic, mystical, mythological, and non-discursive) fails to constitute true philosophy. To give an example rather close to home, Latin-American philosophy is usually referred to just as thought. But thought, as James Maffie points out in Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, is usually understood as something naturally possessed by everyone, whereas philosophy is thought to be a deliberate doing. Ironically, as Maffie points out, for all their implicit colonization of philosophy, Western philosophers have not been able to arrive at a consensus as to what philosophy proper is. Indeed, until relatively recently, they have not even considered meaningful parallels between Western and non-Western philosophy. And this brings us to the special import of Jason Wirths new book, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy.

In his latest book, Wirth does something different from what he did in his previous books, something specific and general at the same time, to which the entirety of the title alludes. First, it is the comparison between Nietzsche and this thing which goes by the name of Buddhism in the West. Wirth begins the book with a kan: Nietzsche and other Buddhas? a pairing that for the nonspecialist who has some general knowledge of both Nietzsche and East-Asian philosophy, at least on the face of it, may seem rather paradoxical. Yet, as Wirth explains:

Plenty of books have been written on the relationship between Nietzsche and Buddha Dharma as if comparison were an issue of weighing what one term of the comparison is, weighing the second term of the comparison, and then bringing them together in a third act of weighing and measuring.

Such an enterprise is further complicated by the fact that, as Wirth reminds us, Buddha Dharma generally holds that there are no isms there is not even Buddhism! How, then, can you compare one with the other?

In concrete philosophical terms, one of the things that makes the comparison problematic but positively worthy revolves around Nietzsches affirmation of the self and the will (to power), and Zens negation of the same. While Bret W. Davis, for example, conceives of this difference as a confrontation between different conceptions of the will, Graham Parkes argues that such a confrontation does not exist, because for Nietzsche the ego is simply a fiction, and the will to power a manner of interpreting the world, not a force to exercise over others. As Wirth points out, Parkes is not alone in seeing Nietzsches conception of the ego in this light. For the Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (18851962), Nietzsches egoism is actually nothing more than a disguise. However, the debate does not end there. In the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Davis responded to Parkess Open Letter with a conciliatory article aptly entitled Nietzsche as Zebra: With both Egoistic Antibuddha and Nonegoistic Bodhisattva Stripes. Curiously, all of this debate takes places against the background of Nietzsches own negative pronouncements about the Buddhism he knew, most of which was aimed at Schopenhauers interpretation of the Vedas and the Buddha in The World as Will and Representation.

In any case, the point of Nietzsche and Other Buddhas is not to argue in Western philosophical terms for one position or the other. As Wirth writes: I appreciate the force of both readings and note in agreement that neither Davis nor Parkes presents the conflicting strands as an either/or but rather as a both/and. What is positive about the comparisons and contrasts between Nietzsche and Zen is what they bring to light: I settle [] for engaging a problem that gains new vigor when pursued in and between some aspects of the Japanese Zen tradition and Nietzsches inadvertent contribution to new ways of thinking in a contemporary Zen idiom, writes Wirth. This co-illuminating confrontation, as he calls is, is the main concern of his book, which brings us to the more general aspect of the project that is invoked in its subtitle: the place of philosophy after comparative philosophy.

This broader aspect lends Nietzsche and Other Buddhas even greater significance as it points to a philosophy without walls. Wirth says the following of both Nietzsche and Zen:

Nietzsche challenged the conventions that govern how issues come to have philosophical value as well as the values by which we patrol the borders of philosophy. Given that Nietzsches experience of philosophy is a non sequitur from the prevailing practices of philosophy, one could not say that he derived his sense of philosophy [] from the status quo. [] Zen practice also does not originate from or primarily conduct itself in discursive activity.

And at the end of the introduction, Wirth again reminds us that his ruminations are meant to go beyond the traditional, East-West philosophical borders in order to illuminate the paths to new ways of doing philosophy.

Therefore, if rather than arguments what Nietzsche and Other Buddhas presents are different perspectives that one may or may not connect with, depending on ones lived experiences, then we have moved away from a traditional conception of philosophy as an exclusively discursive practice. When Jason Wirth declares that he sees the debate between Parkes and Davis as one that calls for an and/both rather than an either/or response, I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattaris disjunctive synthesis of the and and and, and of the formers rejection of debate and philosophical argumentation. But that is not surprising given that Wirth himself often refers to Deleuze and Guattaris notion of philosophy as emerging from non-philosophy, just as art emerges from non-art, and science from non-science. For instance, writes Wirth, the true Dharma eye is not in itself philosophical, but it is related to the possibility of philosophy as such. Such an understanding of philosophy undoubtedly takes philosophy out of philosophy departments, and makes it much more inclusive, while no less rigorous as an experiential practice encompassing both body and mind.

What, then, should philosophy be about after comparative philosophy? Certainly not about comparing apples and oranges, or about having to choose between different manners of living and thinking the world, but rather about a way of having differences illuminate each other. It is not correct that Nietzsche is a Buddhist, although it still may be true, says Wirth, in a way that returns to the kan with which he began the book.

What is at stake for the future of philosophy after comparative philosophy, notes Wirth, is not comparing and contrasting various philosophies but rather renewing a more philosophical commitment to exploring and unleashing the powers of philosophy, and in doing so, I dare say, the power of love, for in the composite word philo-sophy, let us recall, the first part comes from the Greek word for love (philia). Deleuze was once asked why he only wrote books about philosophers he liked, to which he responded: if you dont love something, you have no reason to write about it.

Jason Wirth has written a book that is the product of his love for both East-Asian and Western philosophy, and as such a book that bridges differences. In that respect, then, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas is an important book for an age marked by intolerance and disregard for the other (the environment, the immigrant, the non-gender-conforming individual), and where the love of thought, spirit, and body that is indeed philosophy has an important role to play.

Rolando Prez is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and philosophy in the Romance Languages Department of Hunter College. He has written on Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, and Latina(o)/Latin American philosophy (Las Casas, Mart, Dussel, Anzalda), and on the relation between philosophy and Spanish & Latin American literature. His creative writing has been featured in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, and his latest non-academic publication is Tea Ceremonies for Winter (2018).

The rest is here:
Building Bridges, Climbing Walls: On Nietzsche and Other Buddhas - lareviewofbooks

SEPTEMBER 23, 2019

NOBODY ENTIRELY LACKS the will to be honest; but most people settle for a rather small share of it. These are the words of Walter Kaufmann, who refused to accept the very sorry portion of honesty that is generally deemed agreeable. What he accumulated was the wealth of a philosophical life, unencumbered by the petty habits and practices of thoughtlessness, hypocrisy, and deceit.

Born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1921, Kaufmann was raised by Protestants of Jewish descent. He returned to his native faith when he was 11, unable to accept the trinity or divinity of Jesus. When his parents encouraged him to reconsider, because they said he was too young and because of Hitlers rise to power, he insisted that one could not change ones mind for a reason like that.

Kaufmanns immediate family departed for the United States just in time to escape the horrific violence of Nazi rule. Many of his relations, classified by ethnic heritage, did not. Upon arrival in 1939, Kaufmann lived, on paper, nothing short of a charmed American life: a European immigrant, fleeing a monstrous tyrant, swiftly climbing the latter of success (at Williams and Harvard), while answering the call of duty to defend his new homeland (in the Army Air Force and Military Intelligence Service). His time in World War II put his graduate studies on hold, but it wasnt long after his return before he completed his dissertation at Harvard in 1947. Soon he accepted a teaching appointment at Princeton.

As the postwar boom ushered in an economy of excess, and institutions of higher learning became increasingly specialized, Kaufmanns ascent was trained on different heights. In Stanley Corngolds Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic, we see how his steadfast pursuit of truth was as rooted in a deep knowledge of Ancient Greek thought as it was in Old Testament prophecy, modern German poetry, and Christian theology. Long before the term interdisciplinary became a nostalgic marketing device to promote a form of education that no longer really exists and very few actually care about, Kaufmann was among the exemplars of what interdisciplinary scholarship could look like and what it could do.

His first major accomplishment, building on his dissertation at Harvard, was the publication of, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950). With its appearance, Kaufmann became principally responsible for bringing Nietzsche to America. At the time, the German philosopher was mostly a novelty item in the United States powerful but obscure, and too closely associated with the rise of fascism in 20th-century Europe to be canonized by academic gatekeepers. In this sense, Kaufmanns work was an introduction for some, and a recovery project for others. For his Princeton colleague, Alexander Nehamas, Kaufmanns interpretation and achievement rested on the controversial claim that Nietzsche is a rationalist heir and not, as he had been thought to be, a romantic critic of the Enlightenment. He also worked to undermine a myth that still wont go away: Nietzsche as proto-Nazi.

As Kaufmann argued, Nietzsches books are easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker. [] As soon as one attempts to penetrate beyond the clever epigrams and well turned insults to grasp their consequences and to coordinate them, one is troubled. Perhaps the least troubled, and most troubling coordinator of Nietzsches thought was his sister, Elisabeth, who began shaping her brothers legacy in accordance with her own ideological preferences while he was still alive and descending into madness. Married to an outspoken antisemite, Elisabeth, who curated her brothers work, was decisive in setting the trajectory of an oeuvre that Kaufmann worked tirelessly to demythologize. Her influence was solidified as she gathered the publishing rights and, according to Kaufmann, refused to publish some of the most important manuscripts, carelessly and strategically published unfinished works, poorly edited texts, and promoted the significance of particular passages and volumes that, taken out of context, obscured the larger concerns of the author himself.

For Kaufmann, the way to demythologize was to humanize, and the way to humanize Nietzsche was to philosophize the life and work of a thinker whose style was not commensurate with the systemic coherence of Aristotle, Thomas, Kant, or Hegel. But an absence of systemic coherence does not mean an absence of coherent thought. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is a staggeringly comprehensive and cogent study that remains as vital today as it was in the middle of the 20th century. It also did not give way to the claims of relativism or anarchy so readily imposed on the man who Kaufmann characterized as a fanatical seeker after truth [who] recognized no virtue above intellectual integrity.

As we see in Corngolds account, the same could be said of Kaufmann, whose devotion and service to Nietzsche alone is worthy of considerable attention. Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic goes further, describing the broader philosophical ethos of Kaufmanns teaching and scholarly production, which extended far beyond the horizon of one thinker. In fact, for the critical work he did in excavating Nietzsches life and thought, many readers will only have a faint acquaintance with Kaufmanns name as the translator attached to their Modern Library Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1967) or Penguin Portable Nietzsche (1977). But there are no doubt others, including myself, for whom Kaufmanns name first calls to mind books like Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956), Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), the three volumes of Discovering the Mind (198081), Tragedy and Philosophy (1968), or Religion from Tolstoy to Camus (1961).

These and other titles give voice to Kaufmans stunning philosophical range, historical depth, and literary dexterity, the sum of which is the focus of Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. More a work of commentary than an intellectual biography, Corngold writes with a tenacity and intensity that matches his subject even when its clear that keeping up with Kaufmann is painstaking work. Of the choices, relationships, and twists of fate that animated his life we learn very little. And in this sense, a more delicate and personal account like Rdiger Safranskis writing on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, Ray Monks on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehls on Hannah Arendt would still be welcome. But as a provisional cartographer of Kaufmans thought, Corngold proves an admirable guide.

As he points out, The Faith of a Heretic serves as the most intimate expression of Kaufmanns interior life and public commitments. Kaufmann would forever want to be more than a professor, Corngold writes. That is, he wanted to model for his students what it looked like for thought to be transformed into action even when action came in the form of philosophical or literary expression. Where philosophy theoretically requires leisure to function, and the modern university created comfortable conditions for philosophical reflection and expression to occur, The Faith of a Heretic marks the more perilous intellectual, if not always sociopolitical, terrain on which philosophy invites us to travel. Kaufmann carefully engages some of the most treacherous interpersonal and intercultural battles that have been fought throughout human history, and the private discomforts we must assume if we are to fight, or make sense of, those battles honestly.

Because, as Kaufmann writes, honest appraisals of faith and morals often lead to hurt feelings and even war, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. And worse, in a state of presumption or resignation, [m]any recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. For Kaufmann, this was a pervasive, lamentable, and distressing silence that needed to be broken. How could reticence about religion and theology lead to anything more than ignorance of religious and theological traditions? How could confused interpretations of the Old and New Testament lead to anything more than dismissive, muddled, or overzealous treatments of formative cultures and institutions? And what good is philosophy, if its timeless pursuits are increasingly obscured by petty domestic infighting between the annoyingly abstruse (Continental) and the presumptuously ascetic (Analytic)?

The Faith of a Heretic is a passionate plea to address these questions with the clarity they deserve, wrestling them away from philosophers whose motivations were too obviously informed by career advancement, and theologians who too readily fabricated doctrines of god in their own image. The crisis he witnessed in philosophy was one in which the discipline had become a profession a job rather than a vocation, such that if Plato or Spinoza actually applied to graduate programs they and their (too modest or too ambitious) projects would likely be rejected. The crisis in theology, especially Christian theology, was one of obscuring reality with a spiritualized otherworldliness, simultaneously ignoring moral responsibility while reinforcing predetermined cultural biases; Jesus is as easily construed as a fire-brand fundamentalist as he is a radical socialist, or bourgeois liberal. But with salvation at stake, theologians can always escape the need to explain themselves, or live in accordance with the claims of their faith. After all, the world we know is only a temporary home.

For Kaufmann, such intellectual failure and moral frivolity was not grounds for categorically dismissing philosophy or people of faith. Rather, it compelled him to offer a more robust and forthright account of the human condition. It was the calling of the philosopher and humanist to reconfigure what had been sundered by philosophys very recent personality disorder and theologys ongoing shell game, championing a spirit of self-making via thought that is deep enough, daring enough, to confront the darkest hours of existence, and ascend to its greatest heights. My own ethic, he wrote, is not a morality of rules but an ethic of virtues. It offers no security but goals.

The goals for Kaufmann rested on four pillars: humility, love, courage, and honesty. As evinced by Socrates and the Hebrew prophets (who Kaufmann revered), to live a life in accordance with these virtues invites ostracism, exile, and the branding of heresy. Where most are trained and content to prize comfort and self-interest, the philosopher and prophet stands in the gap, echoing Socrates who denounced the false justice of the benevolent dictator and Jeremiah who refused covering the wound of my people, lightly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. It is easy to demand or lay claim to justice: to make sacrifices for it is not.

In this vein, Kaufmann reserved some of his most ruthless criticism for American Protestants of every stripe. Where the fundamentalists would claim the United States as a Christian nation, he unequivocally illustrated how our form of government depends utterly on the widespread abandonment of any deeply felt faith in traditional Christianity. Where mainline liberals have long since given up on belief in hell, the more troublesome reality for Kaufmann was that few have ever given any thought to the idea that they might end up there. All of which points to an ethic of complacency and conformism, tempted to delight in the false peace of dishonesty, but inevitably inviting intellectual and moral chaos. A practicing Protestant myself, I could lament that Kaufmann so accurately characterizes the transgressions of (if I must) my people. But is an uncriticized faith in a religion, political movement, hero, or friend worth believing any more than an unexamined life is worth living?

The examined life Kaufmann envisioned did not require a prized academic life or position. It did require the provision of an education, no matter how elementary, so we can learn to understand views different from ones own and to outgrow the narrow-mindedness and lack of intellectual imagination that cling to us from childhood. To learn in this way sets us in the direction of a humble ascent, fortifying the individual to take pleasure in and weather the vicissitudes of life. It should also inform how we understand and approach our dying. In The Faith of a Heretic, he wrote:

If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep means bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss. [] The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer.

For Kaufmann, philosophy isnt just about learning how to die. It is a discipline that prepares its faithful participants to be left for dead following the great thinkers, prophets, and occasional martyrs of the past whose reward for defending a more honest and courageous way of life was to be ignored, shunned, betrayed, abandoned, and sent away. Though Kaufmann remained at Princeton until his death in 1980, as Corngolds closing scene illustrates, toward the end of his life he began to lose favor with some of the same colleagues, students, and reviewers who once heralded his fresh iconoclasm. But in this, Kaufmann was simply living out a calling that required a sturdy enough disposition to fend off petty grievances and to be enriched by the suffering we all experience. In the face of such suffering, philosophy promises no comforts. But it does promise that we can die in peace having given an honest account of our short and frail existence. To give Kaufmann the last word, It is better to die with courage than to live as a coward.

Robert L. Kehoe III writes from Madison, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife and their four children. He is an editor atThe Point Magazine, currently at work on a book about philosophy and athletics.

Read more:
Left for Dead: On the Philosophical Life and Vocation of Walter Kaufmann - lareviewofbooks

Paul Theroux, a novelist and one of Americas most prolific travel writers, recently spent over a year making forays into Mexico. In a half-dozen trips, each lasting around a month, he drove his own car the length of the border and traveled through the hinterlands: Sonora, Potosi, Oaxaca, Chiapas. In particular, Theroux was interested in exploring the motivations behind Mexican migration to the U.S. What are they leaving? Who are they leaving behind? he wondered.

The result is his newest work, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey,Owhich is out Oct. 8th. The title comes from the name of an ancient town the writer chanced upon while driving, after having picked up some locals requesting a ride. A lot of towns in Mexico have the word snake or snakes in their name, he says. Theres a snake on the Mexican flag. Snakes were sacred beings in Aztec society.

Theroux, 78, who divides the year between Hawaii and Cape Cod, recently spoke with Penta about the new book, as well as the joys of marksmanship, the idea for his next travelogue, and what he thought about Anthony Bourdain.

My favorite neighborhood in the world is where Im living now. I live on a hillId rather not reveal the townin Cape Cod. At the end of the road is a tidal creek. I can look at the ocean from my window. I can work here with a nice view and at the end of the day, like yesterday, I can wheel my kayak or take my rowboat down to the creek. Its a combination of living, working, and recreation all rolled into one. The neighbors are friendly, but none live close to me. Its quiet, serene. I spend the summer here, as I did when I was a small boy.

At a certain age, it helps to have worked out your favorite neighborhood and live there. You shouldnt get much beyond retirement age and think, Oh my god, where do I want to live? By then, you should have figured it out and found the great good place.

The one thing in my kitchen I cant live without is a non-stick omelette pan.

If I were to buy a piece of art, it would be an oil painting by Francis Bacon. Hes the greatest modern painter. I just love his work. Its strange, beautiful, ambiguous; some of its violent. Its beauty and its cruelty seem to epitomize the modern world.

The best book Ive read in the last year is I re-read Moby Dick. But Im gonna say, I Am Dynamite, about Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux. I knew very little about Nietzsche. What surprised me was what a struggle he had to get started. The strangeness of his life, inspiration and bafflement and solitude, and then he went mad. But he had these short years of brilliance before going completely off his head.

A passion of mine that few people know about is marksmanship. I go regularly to a rifle range. I started off as a Boy Scout (Michael Bloomberg was in the Boy Scouts with me). I got my marksmanship merit badge when I was about 11. Ive never killed an animal but Ive been shooting at targets since then. I havent shot abroad but Ive been shot at: Guns in Kenya and Malawi, and in New Guinea some boys jabbed me with spears. Ive been on the wrong end of hostility.

The one trip Ive taken that I would love to do again without question, Mexico. I would go back to the opening of a taqueria. I would use any excuse to go back to Mexico and see my friends there, speak Spanish, look at churches, talk to people. Its a rich, various, and wonderful place, and its next door.

The next destination on my travel itinerary is I have an idea for a travel book but I dont want to disclose too much about it, except that it involves returning to Malawi, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer 56 years ago. Thats part of it, just a hint.

The thing that gets me up in the morning is the idea of writing something, of returning to my desk. The notion that theres work to be donemy work. I dont have a boss. I havent had a boss or a salary since 1971. The idea that I have work in progress and I have always had work in progress, even after 50-odd books. Ive had something unfinished for all that time.

The restaurant in my hometown that I love to take a visitor is a Japanese restaurant in Yarmouth Port, Mass., called Inaho. Its a great restaurant. When people visit us, we end up there.

A person who inspired me to do what I do is the greatest inspiration I had or mentor was V.S. Naipaul. I met him first in Uganda in 1966, and I visited him in London just before he died in 2018. We had our differences over the years. But he was the man who helped me to become a better writernot a better person because he was a very flawed individual. But in terms of writing, he was a great example. One of my favorite books Ive written is Sir Vidia's Shadow, a book about me and Naipaul and a book about how I became a writer. It took everything I had to write.

If I could have a drink with anybody, anywhere, it would be Anthony Bourdain, to find out the mystery of this man. His suicide was one of the most shocking things I could imagine. Maybe having a drink with him I would have found out something. Maybe I would have been able to help. People said, He dabbled in drugs; he was depressed. But that doesnt explain it. He had a daughter whom he loved. He loved to travel. He loved food. He loved people.

I did have lunch with him once and he was a wonderful person. Hed been so many places. I had just published my book, Deep South, and I mentioned various juke joints, diners, barbecue spots. He knew every one of them. He was just a wonderful guy. Another thing, he was a great reader. The idea of having a drink with someone who reads is a great pleasure for me. And Ill say this, I have no desire to have a drink with anybody in power. Oprah, Bill Clinton, Putin, you name it. People conscious of their power dont interest me and they always seem out of touch. I have always sought out the companionship of people powerless and overlookedthey have the best stories and are usually longing to tell them.

Read this article:
Worldwise: Esteemed Travel Writer Paul Therouxs Favorite Things - Barron's

The topic of college admissions lends itself well to degenerate farce on The Politician, a terribly giddy examination of human desire, American hierarchies, and the baroque structures erected in support of each. The eight-episode first season of the serieswhich was created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennanis the first flowering of Murphys three-hundred-million-dollar deal with Netflix, the biggest such contract in TV history. The Politician announces its intention to provoke from the jump, with a trigger warning alerting persons of sensitive mental health that some distress may follow. The plot, a soapy, dystopian fantasia about extracurricular competition among rich high-school students, delivers on the threat: theres suicide, existential alienation, and fear and loathing in both the Friedrich Nietzsche and Hunter S. Thompson-on-the-campaign-trail senses, plus high anxiety about class and power. This is American Horror Story: So-Called Meritocracy, and it arrives at an opportune moment: on the heels of the college-admissions scandal, right around the PSATs.

It is a timely satire not only in its strafing of privilege but also in its funhouse-mirror reflection of the contrived faades and convoluted selves of aspirants to political power. The high-school antihero, Payton Hobart (Ben Platt), is a type-A kid and a DSM-V-type sociopath. Hopeful of securing admission to Harvard College, and thereby moving toward his long-term goal of winning the U.S. Presidency, Payton is running for the presidency of his student body. Payton seems addicted to ambition for its own sake, but he also worries, in his heart of hearts, that he has no heartthats hes faade all the way to his core. Platt is amazingly elastic in depicting Paytons struggle to maintain the series of successful gestures comprising a personality that at times seems focus-grouped. The character is, like most who dream of high office, a narcissist. But is his narcissism malignant?

In flashbacks, we see that Payton, who is perhaps sexually fluid or simply closeted, had a romance with his Mandarin-language tutor, who is now his opponent for the student-body presidency. This is River (David Corenswet), who looks like what you get if you picked up a vintage Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and ordered a J.F.K., Jr., clone. Payton and River were friends and part-time lovers, but it was doomedthe shows outlook on human nature is often deliciously grimfrom the start. (The scene depicting their first meeting offers a symmetrical shot of the pair hovering over a chessboard.) Likewise, the first episode takes extreme care to depict characters troubled by the questions of what is fake and what is real by having them repeat those labels again and again. It also allows a member of Paytons campaign team to exclaim, during a debate, Hes sweating like Nixon! The show had already done a foxy job of evoking the thought, but it cant resist returning to the passage with a highlighter. On the other hand, I guess that it cant hurt to shoutthat it clears a safe path to proper understandingand to be firm about your points when you are trying to make a work of Heathers-level mercilessness in a country that cannot handle a Heathers remake.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Paytons mom with a benevolent glow; the family also includes a gerbil-like zillionaire father (Bob Balaban) and Paytons two older brothers, a set of toxic jocks with popped collars. Imagine Bill Murrays jackass twins from Rushmore, but played by Armie Hammer. The Politician isnt merely cribbing Wes Anderson, here and elsewhere, with its casting, compositions, camera moves, and stylized prep environment, with fabulous costumes in tangerine and lavender and cotton-candy pink. The show proceeds as a deliberate pastiche, dense with references to movies ranging from thirties screwballs to the work of David Lynch. (Jessica Lange plays a platinum-blonde monster mom whos like a cross between Patricia Arquette in The Act and Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart.) But the show has a special regard for Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, from the pill-popping swing of Valley of the Dolls to the bubblegum pop of Robert Redford in The Candidate and the chicken-salad sandwich from Five Easy Pieces. It knits these moods together to accommodate both paranoid thrills and grand pastel melodrama. The campiness and creepiness are joined by way of biting wit, such that the show reads like some kind of Hal Ashby telenovela. The Politician hits a tonefuriously angry, wistful beneath its bitternessthat is indebted to the disillusionment of the Nixon era, and updated to capture the disorientation of ours. The show doesnt quite do subtlety, or subtext, but nor do these times.

The rest is here:
Ryan Murphys The Politician Is a Funhouse-Mirror Reflection of the So-Called Meritocracy - The New Yorker

by Emily Zhang | 9/26/19 2:00am

West's class focuses on the work of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry and W. E. B. DuBois.

This Monday afternoon, Cornel West Harvard University professor, political activist, public intellectual and social critic stood outside Filene Auditorium and chatted with a student about 20th-century, African-American identity in the United States. Fifteen minutes later, nearly a hundred students flocked into the auditorium to attend Wests class titled ENGL 53.43, Race and Modernity.

This fall, West is teaching as a temporary faculty member at Dartmouth in the English department. His course examines the themes of race and identity among works of three African-American intellectuals: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry and W. E. B. Du Bois. The class meets for three hours every Monday during the 3A and 3AX period.

Before this fall, West had come to Dartmouth several times both to teach and speak. In 2017, associate dean for the faculty of arts and humanities and English professor Barbara Will invited West to give a speech as part of a lecture series titled Why the Humanities Matter in the 21st Century.

I invited him to give a lecture two years ago, and there were about six hundred people in the audience, Will explained. It was out of that I decided it would be terrific to bring him back to teach a class.

In the summer of 2017, West was invited back to campus to teach a course called The Historical Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois. Last summer, he also spoke at the Race Matters@25 conference in celebration of the 25th anniversary of his book Race Matters.

This week, West started his lecture by reviewing the four legacies of Du Bois covered in the previous class and presenting a short biography of Du Bois early life. He then gave a detailed analysis of the first few chapters of Du Bois seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, exploring the themes of victimization, alienation and suppression.

West connected Du Bois work to the works of a wide range of philosophers, such as Socrates, Goethe, Kafka and Nietzsche, as well as elements of todays popular culture, like hip-hop and swagger. His literary interpretations were often intertwined with personal anecdotes and deliberate digressions, causing the audience to fall into alternating periods of laughter and silence.

Will expressed her appreciation for Wests teaching style and method of close reading.

The reason his teaching is so powerful is that he can speak to anybody, wherever they are in their lives, and talk about really essential issues about what it means to be human, what it means to be American, what it means to have an identity, race, gender, Will said. He often takes a paragraph and goes through it very closely, so you can see all of the nuances. It may mean you dont always get to cover everything, but you do get that in-depth kind of connection to the text.

English professor James Dobson is co-teaching the class with West. Dobson explained that the reasons they chose those particular African-American writers are because their works cover a wide variety of literary genres including plays, essays and autobiographical reflections and because they represent three different time periods.

From the late 19th century to the 20th century, [it is] an unfolding process to track the evolution of these twinge problems of race and modernity, Dobson said.

West also expressed high respect for the three authors, adding that it was difficult to find three more towering figures than Baldwin, Du Bois and Hansberry.

Natan Santos 21 said he thoroughly appreciates Wests lecture style.

[Wests lecture had] a constant flow of imagery [and context] all tied into one, Santos said. Its really engaging.

Arabella McGowan 23 said that Wests class was unlike anything shed taken in the past.

Hes just a very powerful speaker, McGowan said.

During the second half of the class, six student responses to The Souls of Black Folk were selected and discussed together, touching upon the influence of Jerusalem, American Romanticism, Athens and European Enlightenment on Du Bois work, as well as the contemporary significance of Du Bois insights about African-American identity in 20th-century U.S.

Elizabeth Whiting 21, a student whose response was selected, analyzed the influence of Jerusalem and American Romanticism on Du Bois work. As an English major, she said she chose this course in part because the topic was related to a class she took during her sophomore summer.

When asked why he decided to come back to Dartmouth to teach a course again, West said, he has had a great time teaching at the College.

Students are hungry for truth, for beauty, for goodness, and I love to be part of that hunger, West said.

See the rest here:
Cornel West returns to Dartmouth to teach class on race and modernity - The Dartmouth

The Latest on the Emmy Awards: How to Win the Crown of Life

Game of Throneswon for Outstanding Drama Seriesat last nights Emmys, making itthe most-awarded narrative series in the history of the Emmys.Fleabagwon for Outstanding Comedy Series. Jodie Comer and Billy Porter received Outstanding Lead Actress and Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

Here is what I noted: Except for a few minutes watching a late-night talk show here or there, I did not see a single show that was nominated. Not one.

Part of the explanation could be that much of popular culture is aimed at people half my age. Another factor is that I have to go to bed early each night to finish this article early the next morning.

But I suspect the largest reason for the disconnect between the 2019 Emmys and my television-watching habits is that Janet and I choose to watch shows that do not dishonor the Lord and his word. Im not suggesting that every nominated show fails this standard, but many do.

Scripture calls us to be holy in all your conduct (1 Peter 1:15). In that light, we should heed the warning of the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg: Never undertake anything for which you wouldnt have the courage to ask the blessing of heaven.

I wish I could tell you that I always follow his advice. But I do recognize the truth of his assertion.

The popularity of television shows that contradict the biblical worldview reveals that many people do not realize there is a biblical worldview.

Gods word speaks to every dimension of every moment of life, not just our Sunday worship or Monday prayers. Abraham Kuyper was right: There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

When we make Jesus our Lord, we must stand against all that stands against him. Unfortunately, many see Christianity as little more than a means to our personal happiness. If we attended church services yesterday and read the Bible and pray today, all will be well with us, or so we think.

There islittleprice to pay for following such a faith. To the contrary, it exists for us, not us for it.

Sadly,Friedrich Nietzsches scornful description of popular Christianityis even truer now than when he penned it in 1881: A God who, in his love, ordains everything so that it may be best for us . . . so that everything at length goes on smoothly and there is no reason left why we should take life ill or grumble about it: in short, resignation and modesty raised to the rank of divinitiesthat is the best and most lifelike remnant of Christianity now left to us.

As a result, he claims, Christians live in the belief that, in the entire universe, benevolence and honest sentiments will finally prevail. Nietzsche calls this state of affairs the euthanasia of Christianity.

Biblical Christians know that the opposite is actually true. Scripture calls Satan the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). As a thief [who] comes only to steal and kill and destroy (John 10:10), the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).

Consequently, Christians do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12).

In a fallen world like ours, popularity can be perilous. Jesus warned us: Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets (Luke 6:26). If you must choose between temporary fame and eternal reward, choose the latter.

Every time.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? Vanity asks the question, Is it popular? But conscience asks the question, Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

The man for whom Dr. King was named observed: They gave our Master a crown of thorns. Why do we hope for a crown of roses? (Martin Luther).

By contrast, our Master promised: Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life (Revelation 2:10).

Which crown do you seek today?

TheDaily ArticlePodcast is Here!

Click to Listen

Publication Date: September 23, 2019

Photo Courtesy:Getty Images/Kevin Winter/Staff

More:
The Latest on the Emmy Awards: How to Win the 'Crown of Life' - Christianheadlines.com