Nope. Agree completely. It reads like we're hearing a woman on her cell phone dropping names
a million times a second to impress someone but it ain't me.
Guess nyrb is getting desperate about roping in readers under 50? under 40? and gambling that adding
these artsy watercolors and trendy lingo will do it. Wisin 'em good luck but not doing anything for me.
In my geezer cluelessness-hauteur I actually thought it was sort of insulting because who the heck knows
all that she assumes "everyone knows."
Just finished up reading huge biography of Wittgenstein that I started months ago. Three-fourths
through I lost patience and skimmed through the remainder. Never read biography, I say to myself
once again!!! I do have a better set of notions about how and why W left his mark on 20thC
thought and opinions. Within the small academic worlds of Cambridge and Cornell etc---philosophy.
Basically W came into their world and behaved like a crazed poet who challenged all their dead
languages, ways of talking about their stuff post-Kant. His upper class Austrian wealth and standing
of course was the initial ticket, plus he was brilliant in lots of unusual ways. Wish the biographer had been a poet-type
instead of a philosopher-bureaucrat. He carefully records and sifts through the mountain of letters
and diaries that generation piled up, but by the end you feel he has little enough understanding
of human nature for all of that learning. Oh well. Have no interest in trying to read W's writings
because he never was satisfied with them, constantly changed them, could never finish anything,
difficult with publishers etc etc. Of course I know nothing about math and logic, so my response
probably looks pretty dumb. But at one point W himself says the only real way to write philosophy
is to write like a poet.
Monk's book published in 1990
"What emerges from Wittgenstein’s Vienna is a clearer understanding of how a philosopher’s views emerge. Wittgenstein no longer seems so peculiar. One can understand that the issues that so perplexed him, and almost at times drove him into a frenzy, were issues that hung in the air in countless coffee shops of old Vienna, where the intelligentsia read with delight the witty and pointed aphorisms in Kraus’s Die Fackel (‘The Torch’), or discussed the poetry of von Hoffmannsthal, the novels of Musil, and the scientific writings of Mach. They correct the inappropriate view of Wittgenstein as a man without a culture. Lonely he may have been (and sexually frustrated too), but Janik and Toulmin show that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, his philosophical investigations were following up on leads he took from others before him.
To know something about a philosopher’s life need not be a useless exercise, even when that something could be a sordid event or a secret the philosopher would have preferred remained buried. So long as one does not engage in the sort of reckless reductionism Paul Johnson revels in, one can come to a better understanding of who that philosopher is, and why he or she chose to grapple with certain issues. To quote from William Gass’s review of yet another Wittgenstein biography, Brian McGuinness’s Wittgenstein: A Life, philosophy is a strange business. “To persevere in such a difficult and unrewarding course,” Gass writes, “requires the mobilization of the entire personality – each weakness as well as every strength, each quirk as well as every normality. … Valery’s belief that every philosophy was an important piece of someone’s autobiography need not be rejected as reductive; for whatever the subliminal causes and their kind are like, the principle put forth must stand and defend itself in a stockade of arguments, it must make its own way out into who knows what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there.”
Thus, while Marx’s boils may have fueled his ire against the bourgeoisie, one cannot dismiss Das Kapital on those terms. The origin of a thought and its impact are not one and the same. Likewise, Wittgenstein’s Viennese upbringing gave him issues to grapple with, but it was his own genius that propelled them forward. If such thoughts were caused at least in part by strudel and coffee, so much the better. As Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked, when told that his best general, Ulysses S. Grant, was an alcoholic: “find out what he’s drinking and give it to my other generals.”
© Dr Timothy J. Madigan 2002
29 September 2023
Dear Bob,
This was my quotation.
God is the actor who justifies the world rather than a theology justifying God to the world.
It was in a thread commenting on Levinas (and von Balthasar) and their mutual suspicion of what used to be known as ''natural theology"!
Musil is connected in my mind with Wittgenstein through ''Wittgenstein's Vienna" that I think is the best book on Wittgenstein's cultural context. I do not know whether there was a direct link between the two but there was a shared cultural framing.
Thank you for posting the Houghton/Miller book. I have just been asked to review Mark Vernon's newish book on Dante for the Temenos Academy Review. Life flowing in circles!
When will you be in New Mexico? I am planning a working trip to the West Coast and could plan a side trip.
Just arrived in the UK for my mother's birthday - 90 and counting!
Love and best wishes, Nicholas
——
Hi Bob!
Your letter was at the bottom of my mailbox and I didn't see it until last week. So I'm sorry it took so long to get back.
I am SO happy you shared, and that you took the time to write to me. Yes, I think psychedelics are a much more humane way to treat people that are having mental health difficulties. We are having such amazing results - people coming in with chronic suicidality and depression or treatment-resistant PTSD and walking out without it (!!) - and so many more options are coming down the pike too (right now we are using ketamine, teaching about psilcoybin, and excited about MDMA). We are so hopeful this will revolutionize mental health.
Let's catch up next time I'm back! And I'll check out Tim McFarlane! Thanks for the suggestion.
Hannah
————-
Oct 7
Dear Bob,
The book safely arrived and I have enjoyed starting it and has already given me what I principally wanted which was to hear Houghton's voice (as it were) - and wholly unsurprised he spent four years beavering away at Swedenborg!
Off to Bilbao on Sunday for a conference.
Love and best wishes, Nicholas
——-
Oct 7 Reading yesterday about the 100 year old runner in Cincinnati, Mike Fremont. Watched an interview video. He went to Boston for a week to learn macrobiotics from Michio Kushi himself. Did I
see Kushi in person or am I imagining that? I ate at the Brookline eatery at least one time. Brookline or Newton.
Like how Nicholas wants to hear Houghton's voice. That is what reading our favorites means. And what we keep looking for in other voices. Right
now de Silva's Square is moderately interesting enough but not a voice I am cherishing or wanting to be with for a while. Already in the second book, Logos, his voice has matured a good deal. Somehow, however, I've not taken to Houghton's voice quite as Nicholas has and I would say that is cultural. I am not British after all. Houghton's voice for Nicholas would have so many more layers of resonance. For me, Thomas Wolfe perhaps,
or Kerouac when I was interested in him. Who recently? Ed Schwartz's two poems. Salvatore's Volunteer but not that successfully. Perhaps I should look again at Henry Miller to see how he sounds now.
18 October Tuesday
Rainy morning. Lebanon. Afternoon cleared, sunny and warm. Walking in Walmart correctly assumed today was the day Apple released the new ipad Pros. Sat later in the Basket cafe and ordered one. Succumbed to Lord Overseer Macdonald. Decision or shifting to the strong wind blowing took place weeks ago, overwhelmed by the inescapable advertising and buzz vectors guiding the ship.
Listened to Buddenbrooks on audio in the car most of the day. Drove out Whittemore Point road.
Just filled out MuniRevs and posted payment for September!! Woo Hoo! What a biz tycoon me be. What I paid did not jive with what VMG said was due, 40$ short, but I will go with what the website did for me and let VMG
figure things out later.
Tomorrow I'll look at the air tix prices to see if there's much sense in waiting further or going ahead and purchasing.
Well maybe I made mistake on the munirevs site after all. Got a message saying no problem.
Booked flights for January. Should I stay with de Silva's Logos?
Needed Va's reassurance today that buying Casa Alegre was not a mistake. Have been feeling it was for a few days now. Why?
Hesitating to buy rest of flights. So strange that I plop down what Apple wants for an item but get spooked by net chat that if I wait x days or hours the price of the air tix will quaver 3 to 13 dollars. Weird consumer anxieties. Get a life.
to Phil
oh yes the Crawdads book. Perfect market concoction that won the hearts and money of every womens' reading group
in the country. Va insisted we see the movie of it on the big screen because the swamps would be so beautiful.
Cinderella tale for STEP teenage women, who feel Outside and abandoned, figure out nature, find a true love, he
abandons her, she becomes world famous as scientist-artist, he magically returns and true hallmark love conquers all.
Oh yes Pbs murder mystery woven in for the adult tv viewing readership in case any are needed.
Va's reading group is now reading a MUst---the women of yalta. The yalta meetings seen through the daughters
who were either along for the ride or who lived under the shadows of their daddy's greatnesses.
My reading has been unsatisfying. 4/5s of Wittgenstein. What an egotist passive agressive soft bully he was!
The Blanche DuBois of 20thC philosophy, living off the kindness of strangers. Gives away massive fortune and
then expects to be treated the rest of his life as if he still had it. Is that a Jewish thing? a gay thing? a
narcissistic thing? Are any of his books even readable. Another fifty years will debate it all.
Also read a new whippernsnapper, de Silva, first generation Sri Lankan American whizkid, phd in philosophy at
Cambridge UK (raised in Oklamhoma!!). Two huge novels. Gave up on Square Wave 3/4s through, got
about half into second one, Logos and am giving it a rest to see if I want to pick it up again.
Listened to one third of T Mann's Buddenbrooks in the car the other day. Old fashioned but good. Might keep reading
the rest of it. May also go back to Musil and reread his whole tome now that I know what it is about and how to
read it for the minor thrills I missed first time through. Need some suggestions, preferably thin little chapbooks.
Am looking to see if Modiano's most recent has been translated from the French yet. I may have bought a copy
of Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel but am not sure where it is. Is it Lethem or the other guy---
Oh, also read the memoir of my campus writer about his year of living with terminal cancer. Might have a coffee
with him next week. His book is completely him, and well done. Smoothly written, quiet and steady. I "know"
him too well though so between the lines I notice gripes and grudges I find I still have with him, unfair
little rough edges. Feel sad for him and even sadder about some things---thirty some years after their divorce
he still wants his first wife's approval and forgiveness. (I've surmised she left him. They were both teaching
at St Paul's prep here in NH at the time.) His second wife, most recent, he mentions
not a whit even though he adopted her son. He doesn't clarify that. The son now figures as the hero of the tale for taking care
of his sick father with this cancer diagnosis. He's about thirty-five I think. There is a new girl friend of about
seven years, generous and kind, and they've kept their separate lives going too. Before retirement he
bought a small house on the northernmost coast of Maine, on the ocean beach, cover photo shows him
on the porch of that place.
——
22 October
Larry
I will confess when I saw mention of "act-networks" I thought, oh, he reinvented Dramatism without having consulted Burke first!!
Maybe about forty years ago I would have gotten into it. Rapidly skimmed the wiki article on him and could not get much of a take.
Must admit the Title of this book on religious speech is darn good. Knowing the wee bit of French I do, I'm skeptical that
translation would be easy for a book such as this seems to be.
But that is an inartful deflection. More truthful is I've been out of the game for a good while and wouldn't have the energy or interest
to dive into a writer like La Tour. And---more importantly---I've just made it through 3/4 of Monk's biography of Wittgenstein.
As superb a work it is, it has soured me once more on "big thinkers." Much prefer Lars Iyer's small book "Wittgenstein, Jr."
For me it is the old back and forth between "poetry" and "philosophy" and I can never stop the pendulum. Robert Musil
I might go back and reread---I did enjoy his massive "novel" much more than I ever did Proust's. And last year I tackled
Richard Zenith's biography of Pessoa and liked that very very much. Z seemed to have the deepest understanding and
empathy for his subject than any other lit biography I've read. Monk on W just didn't have that---but he did struggle
heroically to track and clarify what was W really after, really trying to achieve in the history of thought.
If you explore further into Latour let me know how it goes. The one website I knew about on Burke studies seems to have gone off the
air about a year or so ago. Do you see many mentions of Booth here and there?
——-
Bob,
If you are at all interested in Latour, I'd love to hear your take on him. I see him as having affinities to Kenneth Burke in his own French fashion—maddening and enlightening at the same time. He's also a pluralist with a metaphysical sense of humor.
If there is anyone who can break the code of Latour's book "Rejoicing: On the Torments of Religious Speech" you are the guy!
Someone named John O'Malley from Georgetown tells us on in a blurb on the back of that book that "As I read, I felt he (Latour) had climbed into my soul." I felt the vibe on the first twenty or so pages but then got lost in the density of it all. If I only knew a Burkean to show me the way.
Hey I do know a Burkean--It's Garlitz!
I'd take any morsel from your philosophical table regards to Bruno's "rhetoric of religion."
Thanks again for the note on the Obit and the recommendation of Sebastian's Abyss.
Larry Inchausti
———
spent most of today online shopping for shoes. One pair just arrived via usps, the leather ones made in vietnam with a british name. birchfield?
meet with the DHMC orthopedist not for two weeks. two other pairs of shoes arriving this midweek. Preparing myself for the doctor to say
oh fuck, another idiot who has ruined his feet by wearing only barefoot shoes for the past ten years. Stubbornly wearing them. To which I will
say how can I find a podiatrist who will not prescribe orthotic insoles?
new yorker featured "Rouge" so now we will probably subscribe to Criterion once more.
I haven't heard a peep, by , about, or for Booth in years; but that doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere. Not much about the U of C either.
I heard a report on NPR about Wittgensteins' WWI Journals that have just been published somewhere. Apparently, the enlisted men couldn't stand him, although he had crushes on some of them ( most he couldn't stand either.) I haven't read Monk's bio but I've been tempted. The Zenith book looks good and given your recommendation I might tackle that just for the intensity and passion. I think your intuitions are right as to Latour and his translators. After reading his first book Why We've Never Been Modern, I couldn't decide if he was just a poor writer or the translation was bad. Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech has its moments—the closing section is pretty good—but again, it's not a great English prose style. Does that mean he might be a "stylist" in French? Probably not, He's popular among the social scientists, so that is not a good omen either.
I've run into passages by Robert Musil that knock me out, but never could sustain a deep trek into his novel—what was it called, Sleepwalkers? Or am I confusing him with some other German modernist. I always thought Adorno's Minima Moralia was his best work—short paragraphs that you could take or leave—most tiny bundles of aphorisms.
As ever,
Larry I.
——
Dear Beckie, Thank you for your very nice and newsy note. Tell me more about your new dog-name,sex, Has he/she learned any karate moves from your canine crew? Did you have to take her/him to the vet??
Sorry to hear that the balloons were not so great this year. We tried to watch them on TV, but didn't find much good coverage. We would like to take our grandkids up when they come for Christmas in February in Albuquerque (since they won't be coming here in Plymouth for the holiday this year). We have a date (Feb 15 ) with Jill HARTKE at the Albuquerque Museum to show us the museum's collection of my great Aunt Alabama's photographs.
You and Dan are welcome to come too.
Aunt Bama is in my book. I am very glad you and your friend liked it. Since you seem interested in my stuff I am sending you a letter that I sent my dad from Spain in 1987. A thousand years ago, right??
Keep writing. It is very exciting to get real letters in the mail.
See you in mid January next year(2023). We will be coming back here after my birthday on May 18th. That way I hope to see the rhododenrons blooming in our garden (Imissed them last year, since we stopped to have a mini reunion with Bob's family in North Carolina on the way home.Thank you for the tip on having Bob go to Mountaineer.
We are trying to think of other places to take my son and his family when they come to celebrate Christmas in Albuquerque.
We will definitely hit the zoo. I was very impressed by the penquin exhibit last year. We will have to make sure go when the animals are out. Can we call to see when that will be??
We have in mind taking everyone to Santa Fe on the train
since 6 people won't fit into a car. Do you know anything about the train?? Bob and I can check it out when we are there in NM. (Have to be sure I can get on/off. (boring details...).
Enjoy the rest of this yesr and likw Isaid,l
——-
Phil's post today
The following comes from a newsletter published by a Congressman for Maryland: "Western Maryland is in dire need of more medical professionals."
Coincidentally, just last night I was thinking of how Cumberland's economy and wealth had shrunk over the past 60 years. When my father, whose specialty was ophthalmology, was practicing, he had a Cumberland friend who owned the most expensive auto in the world at that time - a Bugatti Royale. Less than ten had ever been made for European aristocracy Dad's friend bought it from a cash-strapped Spanish prince just after WWII. Another Cumberland friend owned the world's most expensive stamp at the time. Ironically the stamp was worth more than the car because the stamp was so rare. But it looks like those days of wealth in Cumberland are gone now. It's a pleasant town these days, but its better days seem behind it. And now there is a shortage of physicians and other medical staff.
Phil
I wrote that email because I didn't think anyone at Lasalle had any idea of such things.
I forget who owned the Bugatti, but I think it was Dr. Skidarellick (sp?) who owned the stamp, which was worth $50,000 in the early '50s. Its face value was something like 6 cents in the native currency, I forget which country printed it. Dr. S told dad that he wasn't a stamp collector, but he was a shrewd investor.
Where is the Hagan Wright house? P
———
24 We finished watching A Dangerous Method, film about Jung, Freud and Spielrein. Most excellent. I had seen it once before, ten? years ago.
Such a superb script and cast. Mortensen and Fassbender 19 years apart just as their characters were.
26 Oct Weds
Just got the call that Va is out of her procedure. Didn't take more than an hour, hour and a half really. I left her about 11 and it is now 12:15. Kids sent great set of photos from their family day at Vuitton center. Emma said Joan Mitchell's paintings reminded her of mine!!!
Coffee with Joe yesterday morning went better than I'd expected. He seems slower physically, aging, bit grayer all around, but otherwise the picture of health. No one would guess that he's on a med to delay death by cancer. Unless long experience would show you how to look at the expression, a touch of yellow pallor in the skin around the eyes? Who knows? Jessica
might be such an expert but I'm not. Joe is last in a family of seven children. Two have already gone on before him. He and Susan are going up the the
Maine cabin this weekend, perhaps the last visit until after this winter. Doctors give him, on this drug, a year, a year and a half. Still scribbling away. Luanne has been steadily successful at it as well. Joe was on bestseller list in Germany because some agent did the work on his book that is a novelization of a screenplay. Have to look up the titles. Not sure if the movie has gotten made or released yet. He got 100k to do it. Some reminiscences of campus characters past, a few students. In all very good fun. Might check on him with email every so often. Both of us expect we can have a coffee again next spring or summer.
Va back from her procedure. Eye bleeding a bit. Now sleeping after some soup and crackers for lunch. Had to go out to get some Tylenol. Drops every four hours.
Waiting for my new ipadpro to arrive today so I have a new toy to play with. With new realizations of all sorts unleashing themselves my inner geek and nerd have found they want to engage as well. techno stuff, managerial stuff, new cars, screens, pens, you name it.
Heavy steady rains all day. Don't dare look into the basement! Ipad just got here. Also two Brooks shoes, both double E. First slip on not at all as comfy as the leather Birchburgs.
Will I consent now to read everything on the iPad and not buy paper books?
Lunch with my writer friend the other day. Joseph Monninger. Sells
about (under) 3000 books a year. 30 year career, 26-27 titles, not sure
how many in print. He created a publisher for two of the titles, had
some shop make up the copies. Most are with good houses, I guess.
Athenaeum when I first met him. Few years ago some agent asked
him to write a novel from a screenplay under consideration. Someone
in the chain gave his novel to an agent in Germany. She got it to
be at the top of selling list in Der Spiegel for a few months. He
got 100k for the novel. Movie not yet been made.
His friend in the trade, Luanne Rice, sells many more copies of her
books. some get 53k reader reviews on amazon and goodreads.
Who are these writers? She wonders why she has never gotten a
Pulitzer. Joe sort of knows but grumbles that the new yorker never
took any of his stories. They need to write like others need to take
a long walk two or three times a week? They produce the books
that fill out the shelves in barnes & n? Some of Rice's got made
into hallmark movies. Endless genre entertainment, pretty much
like endless stream of detective novels and movies.
Phil wasn't in the mood for this chat.
—-The internet seemed like a good thing at first, and to some degree it is, but it has also unleashed a lot of bad stuff, some of it very bad. The same seems true of publishing. So good luck to Joe. Just like the internet, it's hard to say whether the publishing business is mainly good and mainly bad these days…..P
—-
sounds kinda down.
—-
31 October
Dear Bob,
I would hold back from a life in advertising! As will I! Though I did think of Pro Freedom, Pro Love and Pro Care. I could think of no way of getting thought in there that had any traction - perhaps because nobody thinks!
Reading yet another Houghton novel - this one written in the midst of World War 2 but set in the run up: All Change, Humanity!. Very similar pattern to previous efforts and I just find them very enjoyable. I am tracking them down one by one! This one has an asylum off the coast of Wales named Beulah (after Blake's realm of the Subconscious, the source of poetic inspiration and of dreams.") where a mysterious psychiatrist is relieving people of their memories in a highly positive way and they are born anew!
Love and best wishes, Nicholas
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