A Different Stripe

Monday Multimedia: Two Ways of Writing About War

Just before Halloween, the New York Institute for the Humanities sponsored a panel discussion about Vasily Grossman and Curzio Malaparte, two writers who worked as war correspondents on opposite sides of the Eastern Front during WWII. When it was Chris Hedges turn to speak, it became clear that he believed the most significant divide between the two writers to be not geographical or narrowly political, but primarily moral. The panelists were too polite to duke out the merits of realistic writing versus the fantastic mode or the value of giving voice to war's victims (Grossman) rather than focusing on those in power (Malaparte) right then and there. Too bad, we would have liked to hear panelist and Malaparte translator Walter Murch come to Malaparte's defense.

Last month, the radio program On The Media gave Hedges an opportunity to discuss war writing, Grossman's bravery and what he terms Malaparte's "war pornography" in more depth. It takes a minute, but an audio player should load right on this very page.

By the way, it's worth listening to this entire episode of On The Media, which took "The Future of the Book Industry" as its theme.

Checking in on Thoreau: arguing about John Brown and finding friends in windfall acorns

Today's excerpts from Henry David Thoreau's Journal are in posthumous dialogue with The New York Times. The first dates from exactly 149 years ago and itself was written around the one-year anniversary of John Brown's execution. As these editorials from earlier in the week show, we haven't finished arguing about the raid on Harper's Ferry. The second excerpt came to mind after reading the Urban Forager's recipe for acorn-flour bread. In these two passages, we see the diversity of subject in Thoreau's daily log, but also how, in each case, he draws from the particular moment (a debate, a discovery) a lesson for about life and its proper conduct.

Dec. 3 [1860]. Talking with Walcott and Staples to-day, they declared that John Brown did wrong. When I said that I thought he was right, they agreed in asserting that he did wrong because he threw his life away, and that no man had a right to undertake anything which he knew would cost him his life. I inquired if Christ did not foresee that he would be crucified if he preached such doctrines as he did, but they both, though as if it was their only escape, asserted that they did not believe that he did. Upon which a third party threw in, "You do not think that he had so much foresight as Brown." Of course, they as good as said that, if Christ had foreseen that he would be crucified, he would have "backed out." Such are the principles and the logic of the mass of men. It is to be remembered that by good deeds or words you encourage yourself, who always have need to witness or hear them.

Oct.8 [1851]. By the side of J.P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible. To my taste they are quite as good as chestnuts. No wonder the first men lived on acorns. Such as these are no mean food, such as they are represented to be. Their sweetness is like the sweetness of bread, and to have discovered this palatableness in this neglected nut, the whole world is to me the sweeter for it. To find that acorns are edible,—it is a greater addition to one’s stock of life than would be imagined. I should be at least equally pleased if I were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutritious. It increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes. How easily at this season I could feed myself in the woods!

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858
Oct. 22, 1837

TIA: The One-Straw Revolution by the Reverent Eater

Part of an occasional series in which we post excerpts of reviews from around the web. This excerpt comes from the blog of a Unitarian Universalist minister who writes about sustainable farming at The Reverent Eater.

After reading [Fukuoka's] chapter on "Do-Nothing Farming," I think finally understand better the 29th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, which I've read translated by Peter Merel as:

Those who wish to change the world
According to their desire
Cannot succeed.

The world is shaped by the Way.
It cannot be shaped by self.
Trying to change it, you damage it;
Trying to possess it, you lose it.

My favorite translator of the Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, has interpreted the same passage to read:

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

His interpretation of the chapter continues:

The Master sees things as they are
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way.
And resides at the center of the circle.

Ironically, despite my interest in farming and the natural world, in the past, I've always understood this portion of the Tao as a reference to the world's social problems. I've usually interpreted it to mean, rather pessimistically, that we ought not bother trying to change those things that are troublesome about the world, such as the poverty, the racism, the human rights violations, and even climate change. As such, I've really wrestled with this passage.

But perhaps when Lao Tse said "the world," he really did mean "the earth" - "the natural world," rather than the society that humans have created, complete with all of its problems. What is climate change, after all, but the world thrown out of balance by human intervention? To not address it, Fukuoka would say, would be abandonment. He might recall the time when, as a young man, he was handed charge of his father's orchards and, eager to put his new way of thinking into action, he too suddenly allowed the trees to take care of themselves without first doing what he could to ease them back into a place of natural balance with their surroundings. As a result of his inaction, the trees withered and failed to produce fruit. There is an immense difference between "Do-Nothing Farming" and neglect, he learned, just as there is a difference between wu wei (non-doing), and not doing anything at all.

[read the entire post here]

Mutimedia Tuesday: Edwin Frank on Thoreau's Journal

Today is the official publication date for the NYRB Classics edition of Henry David Thoreau's Journal. Last month, while in town to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the series at the Harvard Bookstore, in  Cambridge, MA, Edwin Frank sat down with Jenny Attiyeh of Thoughtcast to discuss the book.

We also recommend reading Geoff Wisner's review of the Journal at The Quarterly Conversation. Geoff has a passion for Thoreau, and for the Journal in particular. So we held our breath knowing he was working on an assessment. Well, what does he have to say?

Damion Searls’ new edition is meant to showcase the Journal as a unified work of literature. More than any previous version, it allows a direct encounter with this great work and approximates the experience of reading the whole. In fact, by clearing away some of the underbrush in the fourteen volumes, it highlights the better-known passages and uncovers hidden gems and significant connections.

A Big Welcome to Greenlight Bookstore

On Saturday, October 17, 2009--Greenlight Bookstore flung open its doors to the lucky residents of Fort Greene in the borough of Brooklyn. To celebrate this new independent bookstore in our city as well as 10 Years of the NYRB Classics series, we are throwing our last event of the year. We hope you'll join us!

When and Where:
Friday, November 13th at 7:30pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street (at South Portland Street)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 246-0200

What:
A reading and reception in celebration of 10 Years of NYRB Classics and the opening of Greenlight Bookstore.

With Brooklynites--and NYRB Classics introducers--L.J. Davis on A Meaningful Life, Jhumpa Lahiri on The Cost of Living, and Matt Weiland on Names on the Land. Introduction by NYRB Classics editor (and Brooklyn resident) Edwin Frank.

A Conversation with Damion Searls about Thoreau's Journal

Later this month we will officially publish one of the most involved (and thrilling) undertakings of our first decade: an abridgment of Henry David Thoreau's nearly two-million-word, 14-volume Journal into a portable 700-page single volume. Whenever a book is presented in an altered format, there are multitudes of  questions that accompany every step in the editorial process. Translator, editor, and novelist Damion Searls has had abridgments and selections on his mind for much of the past few years (see his recent work, ; or the Whale) and was guided in his selection by a very particular ethos, which he describes both in his introduction to the book, and in the informal Q&A that follows.

You can pre-order ORDER The Journal by Henry David Thoreau at 25% the list price at www.nyrb.com.

What was your first experience with Thoreau's writings? Did you read him for pleasure, or as part of a class assignment? Did you feel an immediate rapport, or did he grow on you over time?

Instead of my last semester in college, I took a year off and spent the first half, January to June, living in a cheap sublet house—$150 a month I think—in Waterville, Maine. I picked Waterville because someone I knew in college was from there, and he helped me find a place to stay. On my first visit to this friend's home, before I decided to move to Maine, I saw on a table in his house a little letterpress edition of Thoreau's essay "Wild Apples," and thought it was just brilliant.

I was a philosophy major and had studied with Stanley Cavell, whose works, incredibly, include the century's best essay on Shakespeare, the best essays on Wittgenstein, the best book on Hollywood screwball comedies, and the best book on Thoreau: The Senses of Walden. So along with all the other books I read up in Maine, I read Walden, I think for the first time but I'm not sure any more. It was late to encounter him, and I wasn't in school, but I had a guide to open up some of the depths of the book. It was fantastic.

When did you first encounter the Journal? How did the idea to edit an abridged edition, rather than a selection come about? And can you talk a little about how this edition differs from previous presentations of the Journal (apart from the complete, 14-vol. edition)?

I ran across the paperback 14-volume edition at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California and bought it for $75. It was just an impulse. For years I would dip into it in small doses, read an anniversary entry from the same date as that day or flip around. He's an incredibly relaxing writer. I love his lists, his names of plants. He is such a good writer that his lists are great.

And this aspect of the Journal wasn't available to people. There have been selections from the Journal, but they all feel like grab-bags of the good bits, not the way reading the Journal really feels. Especially with Thoreau, snippets can feel sententious or bossy or crabby, and the Journal isn't. You have to leave in the "boring bits"—because first of all, they're not boring, and second of all, they're what make the excerptable snippets as great as they are. There was no edition both big enough and holistically enough edited to capture the feel of the thing.

Thoreau said it himself: "I do not know but that thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the selected ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. . . . Perhaps I shall never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern" (1/27/1852 and 1/28/1852, with the great Thoreau pun on "far-fetched": things you get from somewhere else are inherently less plausible than things from close to home).

I also thought we needed a contemporary edition that portrayed Thoreau as a complex emotional man, a committed writer, and a subtle philosophical thinker, without condescending to his scientific, ecological interests—the Thoreau we've learned to read from Virginia Woolf, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, John Ashbery.

What will readers—even those familiar with Thoreau's work—find most surprising in the edition?

How pleasurable it is to read Thoreau even when he's not making a particular point. In his books and essays he's usually trying to argue something, and he writes with the tone of someone absolutely sure of himself. This confidence is a big part of the thrill of reading him, but also why some people don't like him. I think the self-doubt occasionally on display in the Journal, like the book's looseness and openness, gives Thoreau, perhaps paradoxically, even greater integrity.

Speaking of self-questioning, the Journal has great questions in general. Why are mountains pointy? Why are the shadows on snow blue? Why do rivers wind back and forth? The ones he doesn't answer are sometimes the most poetic.

And there's just the scale of the thing. When you hear that Thoreau spent his life taking walks around Concord, it's hard not to think that that's ultimately kind of a waste, or at least pretty boring. Emerson already said that in his eulogy for Thoreau; even Thoreau had his moments of wondering. Well you read the Journal and it's all so full, he wrote a longish essay about the events of the day, day after day, month after 80- or 100- or 120-page month, and not to be dutiful but because it was interesting. In my intro I quote a comment by Hans Richter about Kurt Schwitters that applies to the Thoreau on display in the Journal: his life was more full of incident each day than the entire Trojan War.

What is your favorite entry from the NYRB edition?

I don't know that it's my favorite, but I put the entry of December 25, 1851, in my query letter to NYRB, to argue that a new edition of Thoreau's Journal was needed:

. . . It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects, make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same, increase a little the stock of knowledge, clear a new field instead of manuring the old. . . . We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. . . . Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed. . . .

I also discuss a couple other favorite moments in my introduction, including maybe my favorite line: "The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

Is there anything you had to cut for space but that you wish you had been able to retain?

Most of the book! There's basically 6,000+ more great pages where the NYRB edition came from. My first pass through the 14 volumes of the full Journal, making check marks or question marks in the margins and not worrying about the page count, ended up with about 1,200 pages of Yes and another 1,200 of Maybe.

I had wanted to keep more full entries, but ended up needing to shorten most of them. But I'm glad that the full entries that remain are indicated (with dates in all caps), so readers can browse for them. I also kept a year's worth of months more full than the rest, with a list of them in the introduction, so readers can see more fully what April or August or October meant to Thoreau. That means there's a 180-page book tucked inside the 670-page edition.

You've also edited an abridgment, or inverted abridgment, of Moby-Dick called ; or The Whale—an edition that includes only the words edited out of the Orion Books abridgment Moby-Dick in Half the Time. Could you imagine a similar project for the Journal? What would the resulting book be like?

Well the resulting book would be 6,300 pages long, since the NYRB edition is only about a tenth of the whole. So I don't think an inverted abridgment would work. Unless we took the first version I sent to the publisher, about 1,150 pages long, and subtracted the final, 700-page version.... I don't think that would be as interesting as ; or The Whale. But there are all sorts of other ways to use the Journal as a source for other writing. John Cage wrote several major texts and pieces using the Journal; I think a book made up of all the questions in the NYRB Journal would be great, like Neruda's Book of Questions.

One of the points you make in your Introduction to this edition is that The Journal should be looked at as more than a log: that it is a book, as significant a work as any Thoreau intended for publication.

Yes, Thoreau's journal started out as a notebook among others but after his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was such a commercial failure, he reoriented his ideas about authorship, writerly vocation, and the meaning of publication. He later published Walden but the Journal was his great book, his "Book of Concord," the one he quite consciously worked on as a systematic "calendar" of the ecology of his world. As I say in the intro, it was "an investigation of dailyness, seasons, and the relationship between self and nature—a hybrid and incompletable book but a book in its own right nonetheless, with an ecology all its own."

I think Thoreau's great insight, and his poetic method too, was to perceive the interaction of different systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and most centrally how the life he led shaped Henry David Thoreau and vice versa. Very early on (page 7 in this edition), he says:

The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And thoughts flow and circulate, and seasons lapse as tributaries of the current year.

Later he puts it more forcefully:

I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? (5/17/1854)

These parallels animate everything, so that for Thoreau the whole world is intelligent and alive, and that is what makes his writing so alive and so moving:

I planted six seeds sent from the Patent Office and labelled, I think, "Poitrine jaune grosse" (large yellow pumpkin (or squash?)). Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighs 123 1/2 lbs. the other bore four, [weighing 186 1/4]. Who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of our garden? Yet that little seed found it. (9/28/1857)

The same is true for his Journal. The whole thing lives and breathes as an ecosystem of its own.

November 5th at the NYPL

Monday Multimedia: Sylvia Townsend Warner gets the digested classic treatment

If you're not familiar with the Guardian's Digested Read series, we suggest you have a look at John Crace's recent roundup of the Booker nominees.

Here Mr. Crace presents a satirical, meta-critical summary of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel of a hapless missionary who after 3 years of residence on a remote Pacific island, has managed to convert only one heathen—or has he?

Listen to The Digested Classic, Mr. Fortune's Maggot

This edition of Mr. Fortune's Maggot includes "The Salutation"—in which we discover what becomes of Mr. Fortune.

By the way, the word "maggot" here does not refer to an creepy crawly creature, but is a synonym for "whim." Sylvia Townsend Warner's formulation, however, recalls a musical naming convention. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Music explains the word was "used by 16th- and 17th-cent. composers in titles of instrumental pieces, often country dances, e.g. ‘My Lady Winwoods Maggot.’"

TIA: Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

A brief review of Memories of the Future by Dwight at Royal Rhino Flying Records:

[Krzhizhanovky's] works beautifully parade their influences, Russian and otherwise, and share affinities with those of other authors inside and out of his medium. The stories collected in Memories of the Future happily jaunt into Borgesian irrealities, with John Collier’s whimsical poeticism and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s humor. [read the entire post]

You can read a more detailed essay about Krzhizhanovsky by Christopher Byrd at The Barnes and Noble Review and next Sunday's New York Times Book Review will feature a full-page assessment of the book.

Checking in on Thoreau: The first entry

Oct. 22 [1837].
“What are you doing now?” he* asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

So begins Henry David Thoreau's Journal, one of the major projects of the naturalist's career, and one that would eventually comprise nearly one two million words.

The abridged Journal of Henry David Thoreau will be available through www.nyrb.com in early November.

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858

*In his introduction to The Journal, editor Damion Searls remarks, "The 'he' in this first entry is undoubtedly Emerson."