Category: Prose

This is a section where you’ll find creative writing penned by one Anna Bidoonism (a.k.a. other names too, you know other nom de guerres, other pen names etc.)

a♡bibliography

calculated in terms of the passage of time.

01. — 📕 Beautiful “&” Sublime (n.d.)

This is a book of a sort that due to its evolving nature is best described as being of indeterminate in length and nebulous in type. Take one look and we’ll wager you’ll be hooked. But then again, as it’s no more and no less nefarious to its very core (its innermost heart & sanctum sanctorum soul), possibly this kind of gift horse will be seen as but an ass in your esteemed estimation, dear fraternal fellowship of feminine readers (oh Jay! Where are you this day?).
 
 

02. — 📕 The Kama Sutra (c. 369 B.C.E.)

The Kama Sutra (कामसूत्र / Kāmasūtra in its Sanskrit original) is an ancient Indian text on sexuality, eroticism and, the emotional fulfillment in life. It ain’t just (or indeed predominantly) a sex manual on positions. The Kama Sutra is a guide to the art of living happily alongside a treatise on the nature of love. Of interest (to me anyway) is that one of the first to translate this into any European language was Sir Richard Burton—Oh the Devil does Drive, and on its merry rounds, the said driven one (Richard Burton) inter alia slipped into Mecca and tracked in the sands of the lands that were later traversed by the Don of the Desert and the hauntingly daunting and deeply enrapturing Rub’ al Khali (a.k.a., ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي‎ a.k.a., the “Empty Quarter”), the venerable Wilfred Thesiger.
 
 

03. — 📕 The Art of Love (2 C.E.)

The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria in its Latin original) was written by the Roman poet Ovid (who’s probably most famous for having written: Metamorphoses, tellingly said: “love is a kind of warfare” and was born in 43 B.C.E. [♟] and died circa 18 C.E. [☠] and whose full name was in fact Publius Ovidius Naso). The Art of Love is an instructional elegy series in three books. It was written in 2 C.E. (or as we may wanna say 2 AD). The first part/book deals with how men can ‘find’ women; the second part is on Ovid’s ways of ‘keeping’ her (once found) and the third—penned two years after the first two were put to the public—gives women advice on how to win and keep the love of a man.
 
 

04. — 📕 The Arabian Nights (10th c. onward)

The Arabian Nights or, ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ ( أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ‎ / Alf laylah wa-laylah in its Arabic original) is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled during the so-called Islamic Golden Age. Of interest (to me anyway) is that one of the first to translate this into any European language was Sir Richard Burton—Oh the Devil does Drive, and on its merry rounds the said driven one slipped into Mecca and tracked in the sands of the lands that were later traversed by the Don of the Desert and the hauntingly daunting and deeply enrapturing Rub’ al Khali (a.k.a., ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي‎ a.k.a., the “Empty Quarter”), the venerable Wilfred Thesiger. Déjà vu, anyone? From Hindustan (^ see entry 02, above) we’re now in Arabia (think: Sand City / Date grove) and this high art of CTRL + C and CTRL + V continues in the listing that follows (see entry 05, below) when we traverse the Arabian/Persian Gulf and wend our way to Isfahan and its environs. Many of the tales in The Arabian Nights have erotic undertones, from the stories of wives and their lovers to those of kings and their conquests, to the overarching story of Shahrazad and Shahryar. However, so as not to hide it, Burton did add colour, many say he took the poetic license granted to translators of poetic text a few furlongs too far. Take for one example this note he made to an aspect of one tale’s plot: Debauched Arab women show a particular lust for black men on account of the size of their parts. “I measured one man in Somalia who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches … No honest Moslem would take his womenfolk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there.” (Burton had a habit of measuring ‘quiescent’ male members and was frank enough to say Europeans were only average but those of ‘pure’ Arabs and the menfolk of Hindustan were well below average.)
 
 

05. — 📕 The Perfumed Garden (15th c.)

Giving it its full title, The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (الروض العاطر في نزهة الخاطر‎ / Al-rawḍ al-ʿāṭir fī nuzhaẗ al-ḫāṭir in its Arabic original) is a 15th c. sex manual and work of erotic literature by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi. The book gives advice on sexual techniques, recipes to remedy sexual maladies and, among other things, gives lengthy lists of names for the penis and vagina. Yep, our man in the Orient, Sir Richard Burton, was the first to translate this treatise on the birds ‘n’ bees into English too. Oh! The Devil does Drive, and on its merry rounds drove Burton to dip himself into a bath of crushed walnut and Rose water to dye himself in preparation for penetrating Mecca and Medina (not content to undertake this mendacious act as a common man, he adopted an Afghan lilt to his near fluent Arabic and posed as a Sheikh who happened to have acquired near magical Eastern gynecological skills; permitting him not only VIP entry into the confines of Mecca but also the tents of the wives of the dignitaries of some of the fiercest Wahhabi subscribers to Ḥanbalite law that ever did live and breath [upon gaining this rarefied, no wholly ‘exclusive’ realm of the Bedouin tent, he promptly made b-lines to the a-lines beneath the petticoats worn under the puritanical black abaya {worth noting too that Burton, whilst posted to Bombay and tiring of the tedium of stockpiling loot from the subcontinent in the warehouses of Naval Dockyard for the East India, took it entirely upon himself to carry out, first-hand, so-to-speak, a comprehensive and exhaustive anthropological study of Bombay’s red light district ((Lal Bazaar))}]) and track in the sands of the lands that were later traversed by the Don of the Desert and the hauntingly daunting and deeply enrapturing Rub’ al Khali (a.k.a., ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي‎ a.k.a., the “Empty Quarter”), the venerable Wilfred Thesiger. From Hindustan (^ see entry 02, above) by way of Dhow sail (داو dāw) to Arabia (^ see entry 04, above), we’re now in Persia (think: of the patter of decorated feet on the cool marble floors of Purdah in cahoots with the hubbub of the market rising from the streets beyond the palace walls) and this high art of CTRL + C and CTRL + V, now concludes. Freud considered the theory of repression to be: “the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests…” the extent to which this links in with déjà vu is up to you, I’m just saying don’t go confusing Freud the elder with Freud the younger (i.e., I’m here on about Sigmund not Lucian).
 
 

06. — 📕 The Carnal Prayer Mat (1696)

The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rouputuan in simplified Chinese) has a controversial status in Chinese history and its literary canon. It has long been banned and censored. It was written by Li Yu (who was born in 1610 [♟] and died in 1680 [☠] and was also known as Li Liweng) who was a playwright and a publisher in addition to a writer of prose. Today The Carnal Prayer Mat is considered by some to have used unabashed pornographic tracts to attack Confucian puritanism. Prophetically, the book’s prologue declares that sex is healthy when taken as if it were a drug, but not as if it were ordinary food. As literary critic Danny Yee wrote in 2004, although this text is “pretty raunchy in places” it should be applauded far more for its “brilliant comedy and satire.”
 
 

07. — 📕 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748)

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), known too as Fanny Hill (possibly an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus), is an erotic work by Englishman John Cleland (born [♟] 1709, died [☠] 1789). It was first published in London in 1748 whilst Cleland was in debtors’ prison. It is considered to be the first original English prose pornography and thus has been one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. Being as from where I’m from I’m compelled, yes compelled in an utterly unstoppable way to write in support or as a retort: camel toe. In sum, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) details the coming of age and subsequent shenanigans of one Frances Hill who was orphaned at the age of 15. With no money at hand she leaves her villages and travels to London where she gets a cleaning job at Mrs. Brown’s brothel. At first Fanny believes her new job to be legitimate, but her curiosity and sensuality are aroused when the prostitute with whom she shares a room introduces her to sex. Mrs. Brown then tricks Fanny into ‘servicing’ a client. She thereafter leaves Mrs. Brown and falls for a man called Charles but this is a short-lived respite from her engagement with the world’s so-called oldest trade, because he’s sent of to sea never to be seen again (or does he return ;))… Fanny then finds work at an upper-class brothel, where she experiences a multitude of sexual acts and discovers that sex for money is not as satisfying as sex for love…
 
 

08. — 📕 120 Days of Sodom (1785, published: 1904)

120 Days of Sodom (Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage in its French original) was Sade’s masterwork; the manuscript was lost for a period during the French Revolution and was not published until the 20th c. Marquis de Sade’s unfinished drafts are nowadays described as being both erotic and pornographic (born [♟] 1740, died [☠] 1814; Donatien Alphonse François [Marquis de Sade] was a French nobleman who was/is famous for his libertine sexuality and writing on sex and infamous for his sexual abuse of adolescents). In sum, the tale of 120 Days of Sodom is about four wealthy male who embark upon a quest to experience the ultimate sexual gratification by conducting a string of orgies. They do this by sealing themselves away for four months in an remote castle deep in the heart of the Black Forest (in today’s Germany; think/don’t think: Black Forest gâteau [Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte]) with a harem of 36 victims.
 
 

09. — 📕 Flowers of Evil (1857)

Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in its French original) is said to be a real masterpiece of French literature (it is a collection of poems that are sometimes of an erotic nature/bent). Upon publication Charles Baudelaire (born [♟] 1821, passed [☠] 1867; was a French essayist, poet [his poems are widely considered to show a mastery of rhyme and rhythm and combine neatly Romantic exoticism with realistic observations of everyday life] and, an early translators of Edgar Allan Poe into French.) was prosecuted by way of an ‘outrage aux bonnes mœurs’ (‘an insult to public decency’) and fined 300 francs. Six of the book’s poems were then suppressed for almost 100 years: “Lesbos,” “Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer…),” “Le Léthé,” “To Her Who Is Too Joyful,” “The Jewels” and, “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.” Thanks to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee we now have the internet and we have uninhibited, unabridged and unexpurgated access to this sextet, Flowers of Evil in full and indeed, every line of every work in this selected♡bibliography.
 
 

10. — 📕 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the more famous novels by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Lawrence was born [♟] in September of 1885 and expired [☠] in March of 1930, his collected works, inter alia, can be seen as a reflection on the dehumanising effects of modernity, industrialisation and ‘The Great War’ [WWI] [within this reflection he explores vitality, spontaneity, sexuality and emotional well-being]). It was first published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France—its explicit descriptions of sex, and Lawrence’s use of then-unprintable (in the United Kingdom at least) four-letter words rendered it a liber non grata in England. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the U.K. until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case and quickly sold three million copies. In sum, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman.
 
 

11. — 📕 Story of the Eye (1928)

Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’œil in its French original) is the 1928 novella written by Georges Bataille (whose full name was/is Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille, a gentleman who was born [♟] in 1897 and broke on through to the other side [☠] in July of 1962 and whilst alive was interested in many things including the history of art and wrote on an array of subjects in various forms including: eroticism surrealism and transgression)). In sum, Story of the Eye, details the increasingly bizarre sexual perversions of a pair of teenage lovers. It is narrated by the young man looking back on his exploits. The work contains several vignettes, centered around the sexual passion existing between the unnamed late adolescent male narrator and Simone, his primary female partner. Within this episodic narrative two secondary figures emerge: Marcelle, a mentally ill sixteen-year-old girl who comes to a sad sticky end, and Lord Edmund, a voyeuristic English émigré aristocrat of the debauched (we’d say) debonair (he’d say) kind.
 
 

12. — 📕 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller (Henry Valentine Miller, [♟] December 26, 1891 – [☠] June 7, 1980, was an American writer noted for developing a new type of literary format, a semi-autobiographical one that blended character study, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes and mysticism), has been described as both ‘notorious’ for its realistic descriptions of sex and ‘responsible’ for the free speech that is now considered as a given in literature. Although published in Paris in 1934, it was long banned in the United States. When finally Tropic of Cancer was published in America in 1961 the publisher, Grove Press, was taken to court and it took until 1964 for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide that it wasn’t too obscene to be added to the higher up bookshelves of bookshops.
 
 

13. — 📕 Delta of Venus (1940s, published: 1977)

Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin (or, as spelled out in her passport, Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was born [♟] in 1903 and passed away [☠] in 1977, she was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, nwho was born to Cuban parents in France where she spent her formative years in Paris [La Ville Lumière], beforehand it was Spain and Cuba and after that it was all lived out in the U. S. of A.), is a book of fifteen erotic stories mostly written in the 1940s. It was not made available to the general public until 1977. Nin wrote these stories for a long anonymous individual known as ‘The Collector.’ (The Collector also paid Henry Miller (^ see entry 12, above) and English poet George Granville Barker [1913–1991—who I can reveal to be the person that penned ‘The True Confession of George Barker’] to produce erotic fiction for their private consumption). We today know the identity of this pornographic patron, one Roy M. Johnson of Healdton Oil, Oklahoma, You. S. Ayy (Roy’s now made it on to Oklahoma’s ‘Hall of Fame’ that is maintained diligently by the Gaylord-Pickens Museum [who deftly omit all mention of his interest in erotica, instead focusing on the patronage he bestowed upon church and state]).
 
 

14. — 📕 The Story of O (1954)

The Story of O (Histoire d’O in its French original) is an erotic novel published in 1954 by French author Anne Desclos (Anne ‘Cécile’ Desclos, born [♟] 1907, died [☠] 1998) under the pen name ‘Pauline Réage.’ Desclos was bisexual. She had a long-term relationship with her employer Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, who was 23 years her senior and a long-term liaison with historian and novelist Édith Thomas, who may have been an inspiration for the character of Anne-Marie (The Story of O’s protagonist). In sum, The Story of O is the tale of female submission involving a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer named O, who is taught to be constantly available for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse, offering herself to any male who belongs to the same secret society as her lover. She is regularly stripped, blindfolded, chained, and whipped (and even gets her bum cheeks branded with a hot rod).
 
 

15. — 📕 Lolita (1955)

Lolita was written by a Russian-American novelist who, in his later years, preferred to reside in a serviced Swiss chalet appended to a swish swanky hotel resort and engage in caustic trysts [sic] with literary critics and, is known to us today as, Vladimir Nabokov (born [♟] 1899, died [☠] 1977 and who famously wrote, ‘it was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight’). This work is notable for both its controversial subject matter and the crafting of the English language. The book soon became a literary classic and remains one to this day not least because of its style and its precise portrayal of the banality of postwar America. In sum, in Lolita, we follow the protagonist-cum-narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. Humbert is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after using both hook and crook, he becomes her stepfather.
 
 

The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you’ll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love – in case things don’t work out.
The word ‘kama’ means the desire for sensual pleasure in Sanskrit, and was considered an essential part of the well-rounded education of a young, urbane gentleman. Treating pleasure as an art, Kama Sutra is a handbook covering every aspect of love and relationships. Its seven sections are devoted to the social life, courtship and marriage, extra-marital relations, the conduct of courtesans and prescriptions for enhancing attractiveness, as well as systematic, detailed instruction on sex.
Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller’s first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century — new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality. ‘At last an unprintable book that is fit to read’ Ezra Pound ‘A momentous event in the history of modern writing’ Samuel Beckett ‘The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written’ Erica Jong
The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you’ll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love – in case things don’t work out.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he’ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. The questions we, the readership will ask are: Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king stories of adventure, love, riches and wonder – tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.
Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller’s first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century — new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality. ‘At last an unprintable book that is fit to read’ Ezra Pound ‘A momentous event in the history of modern writing’ Samuel Beckett ‘The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written’ Erica Jong
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he’ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. The questions we, the readership will ask are: Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king stories of adventure, love, riches and wonder – tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.
In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own ‘language of the senses’, she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), born in Paris, was the daughter of a Franco-Danish singer and a Cuban pianist. Her first book – a defence of D. H. Lawrence – was published in the 1930s. Her prose poem, House of Incest (1936) was followed by the collection of three novellas, collected as Winter of Artifice (1939). In the 1940s she began to write erotica for an anonymous client, and these pieces are collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds (both published posthumously). During her later years Anaïs Nin lectured frequently at universities throughout the USA, in 1974 and was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘Anaïs Nin excites male readers and incites female readers … and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness’ The New York Times Book Review
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he’ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. The questions we, the readership will ask are: Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
The word ‘kama’ means the desire for sensual pleasure in Sanskrit, and was considered an essential part of the well-rounded education of a young, urbane gentleman. Treating pleasure as an art, Kama Sutra is a handbook covering every aspect of love and relationships. Its seven sections are devoted to the social life, courtship and marriage, extra-marital relations, the conduct of courtesans and prescriptions for enhancing attractiveness, as well as systematic, detailed instruction on sex.
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), known too as Fanny Hill (possibly an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus), is an erotic work by Englishman John Cleland (born [♟] 1709, died [☠] 1789). It was first published in London in 1748 whilst Cleland was in debtors’ prison. It is considered to be the first original English prose pornography and thus has been one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. Being as from where I’m from I’m compelled, yes compelled in an utterly unstoppable way to write in support or as a retort: camel toe. In sum, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) details the coming of age and subsequent shenanigans of one Frances Hill who was orphaned at the age of 15. With no money at hand she leaves her villages and travels to London where she gets a cleaning job at Mrs. Brown’s brothel. At first Fanny believes her new job to be legitimate, but her curiosity and sensuality are aroused when the prostitute with whom she shares a room introduces her to sex. Mrs. Brown then tricks Fanny into ‘servicing’ a client. She thereafter leaves Mrs. Brown and falls for a man called Charles but this is a short-lived respite from her engagement with the world’s so-called oldest trade, because he’s sent of to sea never to be seen again (or does he return ;))… Fanny then finds work at an upper-class brothel, where she experiences a multitude of sexual acts and discovers that sex for money is not as satisfying as sex for love…
The word ‘kama’ means the desire for sensual pleasure in Sanskrit, and was considered an essential part of the well-rounded education of a young, urbane gentleman. Treating pleasure as an art, Kama Sutra is a handbook covering every aspect of love and relationships. Its seven sections are devoted to the social life, courtship and marriage, extra-marital relations, the conduct of courtesans and prescriptions for enhancing attractiveness, as well as systematic, detailed instruction on sex.
The Story of O relates the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover, René. The test is severe—sexual in method, psychological in substance… The artistic interest here has precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience.
The 120 Days of Sodom is the Marquis de Sade’s masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual perversions and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade’s lengthy imprisonment for sexual deviancy and blasphemy and then lost after the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille’s Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era.
Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English Literature.
Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in its French original) is said to be a real masterpiece of French literature (it is a collection of poems that are sometimes of an erotic nature/bent). Upon publication Charles Baudelaire (born [♟] 1821, passed [☠] 1867; was a French essayist, poet [his poems are widely considered to show a mastery of rhyme and rhythm and combine neatly Romantic exoticism with realistic observations of everyday life] and, an early translators of Edgar Allan Poe into French.) was prosecuted by way of an ‘outrage aux bonnes mœurs’ (‘an insult to public decency’) and fined 300 francs. Six of the book’s poems were then suppressed for almost 100 years: “Lesbos,” “Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer…),” “Le Léthé,” “To Her Who Is Too Joyful,” “The Jewels” and, “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.” Thanks to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee we now have the internet and we have uninhibited, unabridged and unexpurgated access to this sextet, Flowers of Evil in full and indeed, every line of every work in this selected♡bibliography.
Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in its French original) is said to be a real masterpiece of French literature (it is a collection of poems that are sometimes of an erotic nature/bent). Upon publication Charles Baudelaire (born [♟] 1821, passed [☠] 1867; was a French essayist, poet [his poems are widely considered to show a mastery of rhyme and rhythm and combine neatly Romantic exoticism with realistic observations of everyday life] and, an early translators of Edgar Allan Poe into French.) was prosecuted by way of an ‘outrage aux bonnes mœurs’ (‘an insult to public decency’) and fined 300 francs. Six of the book’s poems were then suppressed for almost 100 years: “Lesbos,” “Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer…),” “Le Léthé,” “To Her Who Is Too Joyful,” “The Jewels” and, “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.” Thanks to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee we now have the internet and we have uninhibited, unabridged and unexpurgated access to this sextet, Flowers of Evil in full and indeed, every line of every work in this selected♡bibliography.
The Story of O relates the progressive willful debasement of a young and beautiful Parisian fashion photographer, O, who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover, René. The test is severe—sexual in method, psychological in substance… The artistic interest here has precisely to do with the use not only of erotic materials but also erotic methods, the deliberate stimulation of the reader as a part of and means to a total, authentic literary experience.
Written in 1928 and subsequently banned, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is one of the most subversive novels in English Literature.
In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own ‘language of the senses’, she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), born in Paris, was the daughter of a Franco-Danish singer and a Cuban pianist. Her first book – a defence of D. H. Lawrence – was published in the 1930s. Her prose poem, House of Incest (1936) was followed by the collection of three novellas, collected as Winter of Artifice (1939). In the 1940s she began to write erotica for an anonymous client, and these pieces are collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds (both published posthumously). During her later years Anaïs Nin lectured frequently at universities throughout the USA, in 1974 and was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘Anaïs Nin excites male readers and incites female readers … and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness’ The New York Times Book Review
Not typical in European erotica, of the 1700s or since is a lot of discussion of the importance of and details about attending to the sexual satisfaction of the female. Men are judged by their stroke count. That count tending to be from a few to many thousands. The ladies will speak directly with each other about who is better and make their preferences clear to a lover. Overall there is a remarkable lack of restraint on a variety of matters sexual. Penis size counts, as does the ladies relative willingness to be active. Virginity is discounted as a thing to be preferred over experience. Side note: There is a rather modern anticipation of turning to surgical techniques to enhance male size. There is a case made for the curvier female as one who has better strength to bare the weight of her lover and as have being in general more desirable than a thin weak woman. Again, one has to be careful as the author may be making fun rather than speaking to common prejudice.
Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller’s first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century — new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality. ‘At last an unprintable book that is fit to read’ Ezra Pound ‘A momentous event in the history of modern writing’ Samuel Beckett ‘The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written’ Erica Jong
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he’ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. The questions we, the readership will ask are: Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight presents opinions on what qualities men and women should have to be attractive and gives advice on sexual technique, warnings about sexual health, and recipes to remedy sexual maladies. It gives lists of names for the penis and vagina, has a section on the interpretation of dreams, and briefly describes sex among animals. Interspersed with these there are a number of stories which are intended to give context and amusement.
The 120 Days of Sodom is the Marquis de Sade’s masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual perversions and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade’s lengthy imprisonment for sexual deviancy and blasphemy and then lost after the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789.
The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you’ll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love – in case things don’t work out.
Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in its French original) is said to be a real masterpiece of French literature (it is a collection of poems that are sometimes of an erotic nature/bent). Upon publication Charles Baudelaire (born [♟] 1821, passed [☠] 1867; was a French essayist, poet [his poems are widely considered to show a mastery of rhyme and rhythm and combine neatly Romantic exoticism with realistic observations of everyday life] and, an early translators of Edgar Allan Poe into French.) was prosecuted by way of an ‘outrage aux bonnes mœurs’ (‘an insult to public decency’) and fined 300 francs. Six of the book’s poems were then suppressed for almost 100 years: “Lesbos,” “Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer…),” “Le Léthé,” “To Her Who Is Too Joyful,” “The Jewels” and, “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.” Thanks to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee we now have the internet and we have uninhibited, unabridged and unexpurgated access to this sextet, Flowers of Evil in full and indeed, every line of every work in this selected♡bibliography.
In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own ‘language of the senses’, she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), born in Paris, was the daughter of a Franco-Danish singer and a Cuban pianist. Her first book – a defence of D. H. Lawrence – was published in the 1930s. Her prose poem, House of Incest (1936) was followed by the collection of three novellas, collected as Winter of Artifice (1939). In the 1940s she began to write erotica for an anonymous client, and these pieces are collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds (both published posthumously). During her later years Anaïs Nin lectured frequently at universities throughout the USA, in 1974 and was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘Anaïs Nin excites male readers and incites female readers … and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness’ The New York Times Book Review
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), known too as Fanny Hill (possibly an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus), is an erotic work by Englishman John Cleland (born [♟] 1709, died [☠] 1789). It was first published in London in 1748 whilst Cleland was in debtors’ prison. It is considered to be the first original English prose pornography and thus has been one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. Being as from where I’m from I’m compelled, yes compelled in an utterly unstoppable way to write in support or as a retort: camel toe. In sum, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) details the coming of age and subsequent shenanigans of one Frances Hill who was orphaned at the age of 15. With no money at hand she leaves her villages and travels to London where she gets a cleaning job at Mrs. Brown’s brothel. At first Fanny believes her new job to be legitimate, but her curiosity and sensuality are aroused when the prostitute with whom she shares a room introduces her to sex. Mrs. Brown then tricks Fanny into ‘servicing’ a client. She thereafter leaves Mrs. Brown and falls for a man called Charles but this is a short-lived respite from her engagement with the world’s so-called oldest trade, because he’s sent of to sea never to be seen again (or does he return ;))… Fanny then finds work at an upper-class brothel, where she experiences a multitude of sexual acts and discovers that sex for money is not as satisfying as sex for love…
Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in its French original) is said to be a real masterpiece of French literature (it is a collection of poems that are sometimes of an erotic nature/bent). Upon publication Charles Baudelaire (born [♟] 1821, passed [☠] 1867; was a French essayist, poet [his poems are widely considered to show a mastery of rhyme and rhythm and combine neatly Romantic exoticism with realistic observations of everyday life] and, an early translators of Edgar Allan Poe into French.) was prosecuted by way of an ‘outrage aux bonnes mœurs’ (‘an insult to public decency’) and fined 300 francs. Six of the book’s poems were then suppressed for almost 100 years: “Lesbos,” “Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer…),” “Le Léthé,” “To Her Who Is Too Joyful,” “The Jewels” and, “The Vampire’s Metamorphoses.” Thanks to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee we now have the internet and we have uninhibited, unabridged and unexpurgated access to this sextet, Flowers of Evil in full and indeed, every line of every work in this selected♡bibliography.
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), known too as Fanny Hill (possibly an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus), is an erotic work by Englishman John Cleland (born [♟] 1709, died [☠] 1789). It was first published in London in 1748 whilst Cleland was in debtors’ prison. It is considered to be the first original English prose pornography and thus has been one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. Being as from where I’m from I’m compelled, yes compelled in an utterly unstoppable way to write in support or as a retort: camel toe. In sum, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) details the coming of age and subsequent shenanigans of one Frances Hill who was orphaned at the age of 15. With no money at hand she leaves her villages and travels to London where she gets a cleaning job at Mrs. Brown’s brothel. At first Fanny believes her new job to be legitimate, but her curiosity and sensuality are aroused when the prostitute with whom she shares a room introduces her to sex. Mrs. Brown then tricks Fanny into ‘servicing’ a client. She thereafter leaves Mrs. Brown and falls for a man called Charles but this is a short-lived respite from her engagement with the world’s so-called oldest trade, because he’s sent of to sea never to be seen again (or does he return ;))… Fanny then finds work at an upper-class brothel, where she experiences a multitude of sexual acts and discovers that sex for money is not as satisfying as sex for love…
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille’s Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era.
The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight presents opinions on what qualities men and women should have to be attractive and gives advice on sexual technique, warnings about sexual health, and recipes to remedy sexual maladies. It gives lists of names for the penis and vagina, has a section on the interpretation of dreams, and briefly describes sex among animals. Interspersed with these there are a number of stories which are intended to give context and amusement.
In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own ‘language of the senses’, she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), born in Paris, was the daughter of a Franco-Danish singer and a Cuban pianist. Her first book – a defence of D. H. Lawrence – was published in the 1930s. Her prose poem, House of Incest (1936) was followed by the collection of three novellas, collected as Winter of Artifice (1939). In the 1940s she began to write erotica for an anonymous client, and these pieces are collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds (both published posthumously). During her later years Anaïs Nin lectured frequently at universities throughout the USA, in 1974 and was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘Anaïs Nin excites male readers and incites female readers … and she comes against life with a vital artistry and boldness’ The New York Times Book Review
The 120 Days of Sodom is the Marquis de Sade’s masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual perversions and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade’s lengthy imprisonment for sexual deviancy and blasphemy and then lost after the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789.
The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight presents opinions on what qualities men and women should have to be attractive and gives advice on sexual technique, warnings about sexual health, and recipes to remedy sexual maladies. It gives lists of names for the penis and vagina, has a section on the interpretation of dreams, and briefly describes sex among animals. Interspersed with these there are a number of stories which are intended to give context and amusement.
The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you’ll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love – in case things don’t work out.

 
references (upon request)

Al Nafzawi, M. (1989 [15th c.]). The Perfumed Garden: First illustrated edition of Sir Richard Burton’s translation. London: Hamlyn/Octopus Publishing Group/Hachette Livre/Lagardère Publishing.

Bataille, G. (2001 [1928]). Story of the Eye. London: Penguin Classics.

Baudelaire, C. (2016 [1857]). Flowers of Evil (duel text edition). London: Alma Classics.

Bidoonism, A. (n.d.). Beautiful “&” Sublime. Anotherland: The Openbook Duet.

Cleland, J. (2000 [1748]). Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Classics.

De Sade, M. (2016 [1785/1904]). 120 Days of Sodom. London: Penguin Classics.

Desclos, A. [Réage, P.] (1994 [1954]). The Story of O. London: Corgi Books/Transworld Publishers Ltd./Penguin Random House/Bertelsmann.

Haksa, A. N. D. (Translator). (2012 [369 B.C.E.]). Kama Sutra: A Guide to the Art of Pleasure. London: Penguin Classics.

Irwin, R., Lyons, M. &, Lyons, U. [Translators] (2010 [10th c.]a). The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights (Volume I). London: Penguin Classics.

Irwin, R., Lyons, M. &, Lyons, U. [Translators] (2010 [10th c.]b). The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights (Volume II). London: Penguin Classics.

Irwin, R., Lyons, M. &, Lyons, U. [Translators] (2010 [10th c.]c). The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights (Volume III). London: Penguin Classics.

Lawrence, D. H. (2006 [1928]). Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Penguin Classics.

Li, Y. (1991 [1657]). The Carnal Prayer Mat. Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Classic Erotica.

Miller, H. (2005 [1934]). Tropic of Cancer. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Nabokov, V. (2005 [1955]). Lolita: 50th anniversary edition. London: Vintage Books/Knopf Doubleday Publishing.

Nin, A. (2000 [1940s/1977]). Delta of Venus. London: Penguin Classics.

Ovid (2012 [2 C.E.]). The Art of Love. London: Vintage Publishing/Alfred A. Knopf.
 
 

to eternity m’dear
 

The Spectator (1711)

¶ Fox Jumps Dog ¶

The Spectator was a short-lived London daily publication It was founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and spanned the period, 1711 to 1712.

 
The Spectator was a short-lived London daily, put out to print by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.[1]  It lasted for little more than 18 months (during the years 1711 & 1712) and, most issues contained a single essay penned by either Addison or Steele. Lest you be confused, it ain’t related to the current London magazine apart from the latter adopting the former’s name:

The Spectator, first published in 1828, is a weekly magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It is owned by the current owners of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The magazine is right-wing. It contrasts neatly with the more left-wing British The New Statesman
The Spectator, first published in 1828, is a weekly magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It is owned by the current owners of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The magazine is right-wing. It contrasts neatly with the more left-wing British The New Statesman
The Spectator, first published in 1828, is a weekly magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It is owned by the current owners of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The magazine is right-wing. It contrasts neatly with the more left-wing British The New Statesman
The Spectator, first published in 1828, is a weekly magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It is owned by the current owners of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The magazine is right-wing. It contrasts neatly with the more left-wing British The New Statesman
The Spectator, first published in 1828, is a weekly magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It is owned by the current owners of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The magazine is right-wing. It contrasts neatly with the more left-wing British The New Statesman
The Spectator (^ the modern day incarnation) was first published in 1828 and is issued weekly. It focuses on culture, current affairs and takes a right-wing political standpoint. It thus contrasts nicely (neatly?) with the avowedly left-wing New Statesman—another London weekly that too focuses on culture and current affairs:
The New Statesman, first published in London in 1913, is issued weekly and focuses on culture in addition to current affairs and politics (it describes its current political standpoint as liberal, and sceptical).
The New Statesman, first published in London in 1913, is issued weekly and focuses on culture in addition to current affairs and politics (it describes its current political standpoint as liberal, and sceptical).
The New Statesman, first published in London in 1913, is issued weekly and focuses on culture in addition to current affairs and politics (it describes its current political standpoint as liberal, and sceptical).
The New Statesman, first published in London in 1913, is issued weekly and focuses on culture in addition to current affairs and politics (it describes its current political standpoint as liberal, and sceptical).
The New Statesman, first published in London in 1913, is issued weekly and focuses on culture in addition to current affairs and politics (it describes its current political standpoint as liberal, and sceptical).

Back on course now—returning to piste, so to speak (/piːst/ [think French alps and snow white, not the past tense of an English drunk]); off the dunes and back onto the straitlaced tarmac (oh Thesiger how I burn [Sand City] oh Sir Burton how I yearn [Date grove])—The Spectator (1711) is of interest to those interested in English literature in various ways. One is that one of its 555 issues—№ 476, set out in full below—underpins the English Style Guide and another is that a revised and edited version of all 555 issues (or papers) of The Spectator (1711), in three compendious volumes (1891), was overseen by Henry Morley, who is widely considered to have been the first Professor of English literature (‘interest,’ ‘interested;’ ‘one is,’ ‘one of;’ ‘555 issues,’ ‘555 issues;’ I know, I know). Henry Morley (1822–1894), in addition to liquorice allsorts, wrote a popular book containing biographies of famous English writers, download options are to be found below.[2]  (It is now thought probable that Morley was not the one responsible for penning the now quintessential English language pangram concerning a dog and a fox).[3]  Morley was the son of an apothecary and was born in Hatton Garden, London.[4]  He gained entry to King’s College London in 1838. And following his father’s footsteps became a fellow of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries soon thereafter. Yet a business venture into the art of apothecary (where in times and places the craft is little more than the concoction of placebo potions and snake oil, think for instance of Soho’s now notorious Serpentine Slimming Tea Leaves) resulted in financial failure and to avoid debtor’s prison (think for example of John Cleland, [author of 📙 Fanny Hill {a.k.a., “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure”}]), he begun writing satirical articles for paid publication. Fortuitously, these essays caught the eye of Charles Dickens. At Dickens’ invitation in 1850, Morley returned to London and became an editor of, and a contributor to, Household Words (one of Dickens’ publications). From 1865 onward, Morley served as professor of English literature at University College London and was noted for his knowledge of English literature and being an engaging and warm teacher (incidentally, one of his doting students was Rabindranath Tagore).[5]  Morley’s principal work was English Writers (composed in ten stupendous volumes from his early UCL days until death). His First Sketch of English Literature—the study for the larger work—is now out of copyright and thus, downloadable below; at only 901 pages, it serves as a brief introduction to his principle voluminous work (i.e., English Writers).

Set out below, in full, is issue № 476 of The Spectator (1711). The original text is identifiable by the dark grey vertical bar, comments by the orange bar. In sum, the essay by Addison describes two modes or forms of essay. One being the formulaic and well-structured variety, the other being of the more meandering and nebulous kind. Some great thinkers are given more free reign and will be forgiven for their verbose and flowery style but they are exceptions to the rule. Like the strictures of poetic meter, academic essays, be they journal articles, reports or essays produced as part of one’s undergraduate studies, will be rigorously straitjacketed. It may be APA, CMS, MLA or some such but within any such convention there will be an abstract, key words will be drawn from a preexisting bank, hypotheses will need to be logically articulated, methods ‘will’ precede results, the background context stroke ‘relevant’ literature review will necessarily cite the already most highly cited works. The analysis following the presentation of the results will be cautious, conditional and replete with caveats. No conclusion will pass peer review or get a pass unless it ends with a call for further research… We were once told that to be able to break the rules — to be a little flowery, to be whimsical in an instance or two, to express what might be without backing it up with cast iron (‘The Rule of D’ ;)) irrefutable fact — may only be done when the rules have first been thoroughly learnt and secondly, evidence of this is documented in a dozen or so texts of a prosaic and somber tenor (I am writing a scholarly article, you, my audience, want only to read a contribution that follows this genre’s tried and tested structure).

The Spectator, № 476

… lucidus Ordo! Hor.

Cui lecta potenter erit res, nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo. Lit: “The speaker who has chosen a theme suited to his powers will never be at a loss for felicitous language or lucid arrangement.” A quote from Horace’s The Art of Poetry—Ars Poetica in its Latin original—(c. 19 B.C.E., lines 39 and 40)]

Friday, September 5. 1712.
 
Among my Daily Papers, which I bestow on the Publick, there are some which are written with Regularity and Method, and others that run out into the Wildness of those Compositions, which go by the Name of Essays. As for the first, I have the whole Scheme of the Discourse in my Mind, before I set Pen to Paper. In the other kind of Writing, it is sufficient that I have several Thoughts on a Subject, without troubling myself to range them in such order, that they may seem to grow out of one another, and be disposed under the proper Heads. Seneca and Montaigne are Patterns for Writing in this last Kind, as Tully and Aristotle excel in the other. When I read an Author of Genius, who writes without Method, I fancy my self in a Wood that abounds with a great many noble Objects, rising among one another in the greatest Confusion and Disorder. When I read a Methodical Discourse, I am in a regular Plantation, and can place my self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the Lines and Walks that are struck from them. You may ramble in the one a whole Day together, and every Moment discover something or other that is new to you, but when you have done you will have but a confused imperfect Notion of the Place; in the other, your Eye commands the whole Prospect, and gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory.

Seneca — Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BC – AD 65) was born in Cordoba but raised in Rome, where he was schooled in rhetoric and philosophy. Seneca’s influence on later generations is said to be immense—during the Renaissance he was “a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of morality, a master of literary style and a model for the composition of dramatic art.[6]
Montaigne — Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a key French Renaissance era philosopher. He is known for developing and setting the parameters of the ‘essay’ as a literary genre. Thus his work and thought very much ties in with Joseph Addison’s essay here. Many of the essays Montaigne produced combined casual anecdotes, autobiography and intellectual insight and often supported the latter with references.[7]
Tully — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a Roman statesman scholar and academic skeptic. Tully, as Addison affectionately refers to him, is considered one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists. Cicero’s extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics.[8]
Aristotle — Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was many things to many (wo)men. In terms of writing style, in his “Rhetoric,” he proposes that a speaker (or writer of essays) can use three basic kinds of appeals to persuade his or her audience: (1) ethos (an appeal to the speaker’s character) (2), pathos (an appeal to the audience’s emotion) and (3), logos (an appeal to logical reasoning).[9]

Irregularity and want of Method are only supportable in Men of Great Learning or Genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore chuse [choose] to throw down their pearls in Heaps before the Reader, rather than be at the Pains of stringing them.
 
Method is of Advantage to a Work, both in respect to the Writer and the Reader. In regard to the fist, it is a great help to his Invention. When a Man has plann’d his Discourse, he finds a great many thoughts rising out of every Head, that do not offer themselves upon the general Survey of a Subject. His Thoughts are at the same time more intelligible, and better discover their Drift and Meaning, when they are placed in their proper Lights, and follow one another in a regular Series, than when they are thrown together without Order and Connexion. There is always an Obscurity in Confusion, and the same Sentence that wou’d have enlightened the Reader in one Part of a Discourse, perplexes him in another. For the same Reason likewise every Thought in a Methodical Discourse shews is self in its greatest beauty, as the several Figures in a piece of Painting receive new Grace from their Disposition in the Picture. The Advantages of a Reader from a Methodical Discourse, are correspondent with those of the Writer. He comprehends every thing easily, takes it in with Pleasure, and retains it long.
 
Method is not the less requisite in ordinary Conversation, than in Writing, provided a Man would talk to make himself understood. I, who hear a Thousand Coffee-house Debates every Day, am very sensible of this want of Method in the Thoughts of my honest Countrymen. There is not one Dispute in Ten, which is managed in those Schools of Politicks, where, after the three first Sentences, the Question is not entirely lost. Our Disputants put me in mind of the Skuttle Fish, that when he is unable to extricate himself blackens all the Water about him, till he becomes invisible. The Man who does not know how to methodize his Thoughts, has always, to borrow a phrase from the Dispensary, a barren Superfluity of Words. The Fruit is lost amidst the Exuberance of Leaves.
 
Tom Puzzle is one of the most Emminent Immethodical Disputants of any that has fallen under my Observation. Tom has read enough to make him very Impertinent: His Knowledge is sufficient to raise Doubts, but not to clear them. It is a pity that he has so much Learning, or that he has not a great deal more. With these Qualifications Tom sets up for a Free-thinker, finds a great many things to blame in the Constitution of his Country, and gives shrewd Intimations that he does not believe [in] another World. In short, Puzzle is an Atheist as much as his Parts will give him leave. He has got about half a Dozen runs upon the Unreasonablenss of Bigottry and Priest-craft. This makes Mr. Puzzle the Admiration of all those who have less Sense than himself, and the Contempt of all those who have more. There is none in Town whom Tom dreads so much as my Friend Will Dry. Will, who is acquainted with Tom’s Logick, when he finds him running off the Question, cuts him short with a What then? We allow all this to be true, but what is it to our present Purpose? I have known Tom eloquent half an Hour together, and triumphing, as he thought, in the Superiority of the Argument, when has been non-plus’d, on a sudden, by Mr Dry’s desiring to tell the Company, what it was that he endeavoured to prove. In short, Dry is a Man of a clear methodical Head, but few Words, and gains the same Advantages over Puzzle, that a small Body of regular Troops would gain over a numberless undisciplined militia.

Tom Puzzle — a fictitious character (I’m sure). Emblematic of a writer/essay style that is flowery, nonconformist and where going off-piste is de rigueur. It is a style where sailing willy-nilly off course for no apparent reason is to be expected. A clear purpose and point that draws to a logical conclusion may be partially or even mostly absent.
Will Dry — another character whom I do deeply suspect is a figment of Addison’s creative imagination. Served to us to illustrate a writer/essay style that is more formal and succinct than flowery and verbose and more structured along conventional academic journal article layout lines than free flowing and meandering.

— § —

Notes & Downloads

[1] ^ (return)  Gloriously glamorous

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an English essayist. Richard Steele (1672–1729) was an Irish essayist. Both Addison (painted on the left) and Steel (painted on the right) were active politically
With wigs, velvets & silk stockings down to high-heeled boot. It’s Addison and Steele
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an English essayist. Richard Steele (1672–1729) was an Irish essayist. Both Addison (painted on the left) and Steel (painted on the right) were active politically and members of the Whig party (a now defunct British political grouping (active between the 1680s and 1850s) which was noted for supporting constitutional monarchism (a strong parliamentary system and no absolute monarchical powers). The Whigs played a central role in what’s now know as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 — the name given to the events leading to the deposition of King James II of England (Reigned: 1685–1688) and his replacement by Mary II (James’ daughter), and her Dutch husband, William III (of Orange) who reigned as England’s King from 1689 to 1702.
Johan De Witt
“The Brothers, Cornelis and Johan De Witt” Johan to the left; Cornelis on the right. Jan de Baen (c. 1675). To be viewed, if you so choose, at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Museumstraat 1).
Cornelis De Witt

 

[2] ^ (return)  “Liquorice allsorts” — Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by George Bassett & Co. (1842) Now known simply as Bassett's the brand is owned by Cadbury which itself is now a brand owned by Mondelēz International (headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.). It is said, and I do like this, that in 1899, Charlie Thompson, a Bassett’s sales representative, tripped over and dropped a tray of sample sweets that he was showing to a dashingly handsome client in Leicester, mixing up the various sweets. He frantically scrambled to re-arrange them but, the client was intrigued by the new creation … as a consequence, Bassett's began to mass-produce the allsorts and they became a successful product. "Liquorice allsorts" is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or to describe a wide range of e.g., attributes, publications or talents.

Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. "Liquorice allsorts" is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.
Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. “Liquorice allsorts” is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.
Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. "Liquorice allsorts" is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.
Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. “Liquorice allsorts” is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.
Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. "Liquorice allsorts" is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.
Liquorice allsorts are assorted liquorice confectionery sold as a mixture. Made of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly and, fruit flavourings, they were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd. “Liquorice allsorts” is also now a phrase used to describe a person who struggles to make decisions and/or used to describe someone who is in an altered state of mind (e.g., stoned and reciting random disjointed thoughts) and/or used to describe a wide range of attributes/talents.

 

[3] ^ (return)  Pangram — A pangram (pan- meaning all) is a sentence that contains all of the letters of a given alphabet. In English, this is the most widely cited one: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This pangram’s popularity is probably due to it being concise and clear. Today it is commonly used, inter alia, for displaying examples of font families on computers.

Foxes and hedgehogs, thinking fast and thinking slow, reasoned vs. impassioned
Thinking fast vs. Thinking slow / Impassioned vs. Reasoned / Foxes vs. hedgehogs.

 

[4] ^ (return)  Hatton Garden — Hatton Garden is a street and commercial area in the Holborn district of central London. It takes its name from Sir Christopher Hatton, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, who established a mansion here (long since gone). Today, Hatton Garden is famous as London’s jewellery quarter and is the UK’s diamond trading business. The area has an extensive underground infrastructure of vaults, tunnels, offices and workshops (so more troglodyte than Tiffany’s).

Retirement is a bitch.
Retirement is a bitch. Your wife has passed away. Most of your mates are in exile, prison, or the grave. Even the cops you once eluded have died, retired, or forgotten you. You skulk around your run-down mansion in the suburbs of London, puttering in your garden, infuriating your neighbours by running a used-car dealership out of your home, and “hobbling over to the news agent,” as one neighbour put it, for the daily papers to read about younger men doing what you used to. // Read the full text, “The biggest jewel heist in British history” written for Vanity Fair (2016, March 19), by Mark Seal.

 

[5] ^ (return)  Rabindranath Tagore — Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet and writer who was born in Calcutta. He has been variously described as a producer of “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse” and was the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. A little know fact that’s well worth knowing is that at the age of sweet sixteen, he released a collection of poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha (“Sun Lion”), these were seized upon by literary authorities as being, beyond reasonable doubt, long-lost classics!

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

 

[6] ^ (return)  Seneca — Seneca’s prose works include a dozen essays and one hundred twenty-four letters dealing with moral issues. These writings constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for ancient Stoicism. As a tragedian, he is best known for plays like Medea, Thyestes, and Phaedra. In the year 41, he was exiled to the Corsica (under emperor Claudius) but was allowed to return in 49 to become a tutor to Nero. When Nero became emperor in 54, Seneca became his advisor and, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus, provided competent government for the first five years of Nero’s reign. Seneca’s influence over Nero declined with time. In AD 59, Nero ordered the murder of his mother and this was the start of a reign of terror that caused the deaths of many others, including his wife Octavia—Nero basically went radio rentals; became unhinged in extremis. Romans had had enough and, in 65, Seneca was forced to take his own life for alleged complicity in a plot to assassinate Nero (contemporary historians believe with near certainty that he was innocent. His stoic and calm suicide has become the subject of numerous paintings (and lest we forget his wife, who tried in vein to take her life by his side too). With full indebtedness to a write up by Josho Brouwers, we can assume as true the following regarding Seneca’s death. In AD 65, a coup for the decapitating of Nero was in the making. It was led by one Gaius Calpurnius Piso (and is now referred to as “Piso’s plot”). However, this Italian job went pear-shaped pretty quickly. Some of the conspirators were crucified (Judaean-style) but the aristocrats amongst the flock (including Piso himself) were, according to ancient Roman custom, obligated to commit suicide. Seneca — the father of stoicism — was stoic in his acceptance of philosophically accepting that whatever happens/happened is just as it is supposed to be. So upon learning that he would have to take his own life for being part of a plot that he was not, he protested to a reasonable degree but upon learning that Nero’s dead horse had not deemed Seneca’s alibis to be of merit, Seneca stoically accepted his fate. According to Tacticus, a contemporary writer of Seneca’s, the father of stoicism told his dinner guests not to cry and asked again and again, “are your maxims of philosophy, or the preparation of so many years’ study against evils to come? Who knew not Nero’s cruelty? After a mother’s and a brother’s murder, nothing remains but to add the destruction of a guardian and a tutor.” Seneca then turned and embraced his wife, asking her not too grieve too much. But Paulina told him flatly that she, too, had resolved to die. Together, they cut the veins on their arms. However, in the event — which became rather comic — Paulina fainted and was resuscitated by her slaves (it wasn’t Nero’s order for her to die) In the meantime, Seneca was dictating his last words to scribes. As bleeding to death was taking too long, he asked one of his friends to prepare a poison, perhaps inspired by the death of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (who had been condemned to drink hemlock), however, the poison had little effect. He then has the idea of sitting in a nice warm bath as he deduced that this would probably aid the outpouring of blood. As Brouwers write. “Some of the war blood-infused water he sprinkled about, proclaiming it a libation to Jupiter the Liberator. Seneca expired soon afterwards. He was then, according to his wishes, cremated without any of the usual, and often ostentatious, funeral rites.”

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage
All cruelty springs from weakness.

 

[7] ^ (return)  Michel de Montaigne — Montaigne’s essays were seen as an important contribution to both writing form and skepticism (the word essay itself comes from the French word essais, meaning “attempts” or “tests.”). His seminal work—The Essays (Essais in its French original) written, redrafted and revised between 1570 and 1592, was published in 1580 (the work’s stated aim was to jot down for posterity, “some traits of [his] character and of [his] humours”)—crafted rhetoric designed to intrigue and sought to involve the reader, sometimes appearing to move in a stream-of-thought from topic to topic and at other times employing a structured style that would give a more emphasis to the didactic nature of his work. The arguments Montaigne put forward were often supported with quotations from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian texts e.g., the works of Plutarch. Montaigne, it is shown, had a direct influence on a plethora of Western writers including Francis Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Edward Gibbon, Woolf, Marx, Sigmund Freud (less so I suspect Lucian Freud), my conformist, not wanting to break the mold, Charles Darwin and my dear anodyne Friedrich Nietzsche.

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (a significant French philosopher and developer of the essay genre).
“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (a significant French philosopher and developer of the essay genre).
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”

 

[8] ^ (return)  Cicero — Joseph Addison affectionately called Cicero, ‘Tully’ and I’ll tally that up as: “Tally-ho” (Tally-ho dates from around 1772, and is probably derived from the French ‘taïaut,’ a cry used to excite hounds when hunting deer [and for the British, foxes with the assistance of their English Foxhounds]; it was also used by RAF fighter pilots in the WWII to tell their controller they were about to engage enemy; in addition “Tally-ho” is used to this day by NASA astronauts in audio transmissions to signify sightings of other spacecraft, space stations, and [excitingly] unidentified objects)—and he to did do it (the ending of his life) “old Roman style” (but not quite to the letter as did Seneca [see note 6 ^ above]). Towards the end of his life, Cicero turned away from his oratorical and political career and looked instead to matters of philosophy and religion. The dialogue The Nature of the Gods both explores his own views on these subjects, as a monotheist and member of the Academic School, and considers the opinion of other philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age through the figures of Velleius the Epicurean and Balbus the Stoic: is there a God? If so, does he [sic] answer prayers, or intervene in human affairs? Does he know the future? Does morality need the support of religion? It will come as no surprise that this work of Cicero’s (Tully’s) did deeply influence later thinkers like Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Now . . . “he leaned out […] and offered his neck unmoved, his head was cut off.” Was it that they fervently believed in the afterlife or what? What is it with Rome, Romans and the act of suicide? Offering one’s head ain’t quite taking one’s head but, any way. Porcia Catonis (c. 70 BC – 43 BC) was married to Marcus Junius Brutus (the most famous of Julius Caesar’s assassins) and is said to have had an affectionate nature and an addiction to philosophy. She’s said to have committed suicide and her death remains a fixation for many. Contemporary historians claimed that she did so by swallowing hot coals, yet modern ones see this as implausible and speculate that Porcia may have committed the act by burning charcoal in an unventilated room and passing to the other side by way of carbon monoxide poisoning. Those of all eras pin her perishing to her hearing that her man Brutus had died in battle. True or not, we don’t know. In Rome, suicide was never a general offense in law, and fully approved of what might be termed “patriotic suicide”; death, in other words, as an alternative to dishonor. For the Stoics, to give an example , death was a guarantee of personal freedom and an escape from an unbearable reality that had nothing left to give. According to Roman tradition, the rape of Lucrece (or ‘Lucretia’) by Sextus Tarquin and her subsequent suicide led to the overthrow of the Roman monarchy and the establishment of The Republic (the act was the sparked straw that cracked the camel’s back and acted as the red rag to the masses who’d grown sick ‘n’ tired of the tyrannical traits of Tarquin and his father, the last king [for a time] of Rome). A very definite line was drawn by the Romans between the virtuous suicide and a selfish suicide! Thus — some say — Mark Antony’s stabbing of his own heart due to lost love was seen as a weakness not a stoic act of self-sacrifice.

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
“They condemn what they do not understand.”
“While there’s life, there’s hope.”
Dig my dear, just a little deeper now, dig. “The Intervention of the Sabine Women” by Jacques-Louis David (1799) can be viewed at the Louvre Museum.
From tender thigh to jugular vein. Entitled: “Porcia ferendo la coscia.” An English translation of the Italian would be: “Portia wounding her thigh.” Painted by the short-lived Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665) (1664).

 

[9] ^ (return)  Aristotle — Aristotle writes in his “Poetics” that epic poetry, tragedy and comedy are all fundamentally acts of mimesis (“imitation”), each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. It follows that Aristotle believed each of the mimetic arts/types/styles possesses highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes. Bidoonism has a full page dedicated to Aristotle and that can be viewed here:  Philosophers  ❮  Aristotle.

Aristotle is generally credited with developing the basics of the system of rhetoric that “thereafter served as its touchstone”, influencing the development of rhetorical theory from ancient through modern times.
Aristotle’s Poetics (Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês; Latin: De Poetica; c. 335 BCE) is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.
On the Soul (Greek: Περὶ Ψυχῆς, Peri Psychēs; Latin: De Anima) is a major treatise written by Aristotle c. 350 BCE. The work focuses on the kinds of souls possessed by different kinds of living things, distinguished by their different operations.

 

Anodyne — an adjective meaning not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull. Origin: mid-16th c. English via Latin from Greek anōdunos ‘painless’, from an- ‘without’ + odunē ‘pain’.

 

Apothecary — a term for a medical professional who formulates and dispenses materia medica (medicine) to physicians, surgeons, and patients. The modern chemist (also known as a pharmacist in American English) has now largely taken over this role. Origin: late Middle English: via Old French from late Latin apothecarius, from Latin apotheca, from Greek apothēkē ‘storehouse.’

 

Didactic — an adjective meaning, intending to teach. Origin: mid-17th c. English via from Greek didaktikos, from didaskein ‘teach.’

 

📘 “A first sketch of English literature”
— A lengthy tome penned in 1883 (Editable PDF).

Lit.’s “LIT,” literally

The wannabe wordsmith’s
redacted //

📁 Conrad et al.  |  📁 Plath   |  📁 Walcott

❝
I love my one&only as do poets love the poetry that kills them, as do sailors the sea that drowns them.
❞

^ Adapted a little &, agreed:

❝
The classics can console. But not enough . . .
❞

A while back, as per the curriculum’s instructions, I was discovering the works of Toni Morrison. Now a similar set of instructions invites me to investigate the works of Derek Walcott. Like flotsam I’m adrift, listing and teetering, buoyed a bit — only just — by the Gulf stream’s salinity (or should I say in fact the Dead Sea’s? You tell me for, what occurred in the arena and environs of what’s today named Palestine, really underpins all that we call the Western canon of literature). I dwell, I’m sure you’ve ‘deduced’ — you [2nd pl.], the fabled fictitious, as in you aren’t at all there, you; you [2nd sing.], the mercurial one whose mental whereabouts is a mystery to humankind n beast alike — in Arabia Deserta. That is, the region above Arabia Felix — from desert to orange grove, yeah right, no, think Queen of Sheba, the heat of a relentless afternoon in Sana’a and the incessant burn of insatiable internal desire; a constant unflinching flame — and, below Arabia Petraea — that I’ll expand and add to Palestine: ‘The Hebrew Bible’, Mesopotamia, Gilgamesh and, to hell with time and geographical rigidness, Homer’s epics too.  [1]

❝
If I should die, think only this of me…
She’s gone, and all our plans
           are useless indeed
And say with conviction:
“Dulce Et Decorum Est”
But fa sure, consider this rejoinder to Horace:
is it? Is it really worth it…
❞

I see it and read it in “Unspeakable, unspoken” and I see it and read it in “Omeros.” Time heals yeah? And believe you me I listened to 1619 — I even put the audio files here for posterity — but you see, we can lionise Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece because what happened there is past and what remains are beautiful things like democracy and underfloor heating and fa sure, fantastic fiction in both poetic and prose from. So yes I see colonialism and slavery as they rightly should be seen, but — dear reader — has not humankind always been unkind to fellow humankind? Us and them was not manufactured by the likes of Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. No! It was there in Sumeria, it was there lurking in the orchard, it is, I brazenly say, within the fabric of humankind, part of the human condition.

The episode involving Odysseus's confrontation with Polyphemus in the Odyssey bears similarities to Gilgamesh and Enkidu's battle with Humbaba in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“Polyphemus”
By Guido Reni (1575–1642) (c. 1640). __ Must’ve been a cold day? Right! ;P __ The episode involving Odysseus’s confrontation with Polyphemus in the Odyssey bears similarities to Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s battle with Humbaba in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Grindstone

Here are some pages of potential interest. I hasten to emphasise and underscore the adjective ‘potential’:

01. — On vocabulary (by J.H.K., 2020)
02. — On language (by Rouse, n.d.)
03. — Literary devices (by Bonnie & Clyde)
04. — “The Elizabethan era”
05. — “British literature of the 20th c.”
06. — “Global literature” (esp. Derek Walcott)
07. — “Comparative literature” (esp. Sylvia Plath)

The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
I’d rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don’t really care about.

In terms of public interest and the greater good, a duet of works by Walcott, for study purposes only:

📘 “Collected Poems 1948-1984”
— Initially, many were self-published (Editable PDF).
📘 “Omeros”
— A take on Homer (Editable PDF).

REFERENCES

Walcott, D. (1986). Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Walcott, D. (1990). Omeros. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux

Derek-Walcott's--Books
— “The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.”

— § —

NOTES

[1]   To try and trace the course or deduce the derivation of something is not always a scientific endevour. No! It can be far more speculative and subjective in certain circumstances. It was a long time in coming and the comeuppance was and is harsh. See:
“Empire of Deceit: entrapped in honey, money or, plain old power?”

📕📕📕

{S.} {O.} {S.}

Last night, I was literally saved by a book

so, in deference and in homage of,

I do hereby present to thee

an encomium entitled:

“Between Bookends”

dedicated to

the book

“Brave New World”
Oh Ox!

Brave New World
— Aldous Huxley
 
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything”
 
Science. Technology. Want for nothing. Maximum pleasure. Welcome to a world where society exists without war, poverty, sickness or unhappiness, where instant gratification and mass consumerism sooth the inhabitants into happy conformity. One man stands to challenge all this: Bernard Marx, alone in harbouring a longing to break free. His attempt to do so sets off a chain of events that could disrupt everything.” — Is this Brave New World that Huxley imagined where we are headed, or are we already there? Take the drugs and float away through Huxley’s relentless cityscape, and you might find answers to questions you didn’t know you should be asking. (This is taken from a too be published 2021 edition introduction by Yuval Noah Harari.) [1]

“Brighton Rock”
— Grahame Green

Brighton Rock
— Graham Greene
 
“Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”
 
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, Pinkie is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, who is determined to uncover him. This is Graham Greene’s chilling exposé of violence, class, and gang warfare inspired many imitators. Few, if any, can match the originality of Brighton Rock, and of Pinkie – one of fiction’s most unnerving and compelling villains.

“Catch 22”
by Joseph Heller

Catch-22
— Joseph Heller
 
“He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.”
 
It’s the closing months of the Second World War and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him. But the enemy above is not Yossarian’s problem – it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening ‘Catch-22’ that allows for no possibility of escape. Penguin, the publisher, writes, “No book has satirised military madness so hilariously and tragically. It is the tale of one man’s struggle to survive the sheer lunacy of war.”

“The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories”
English Writer Angela Carter. September 23, 1987. (Photo by Doris Thomas/Fairfax Media via Getty Images).

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
— Angela Carter
 
“Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.”
 
We grow up on fairy tales but it is only later we realise what we have been fed. Angela Carter saw the power of these dark stories – stories in which objects betray, children threaten, men turn into animals and women are unsafe. Erotic, subversive, ancient, modern: the tales in this book pulse with a vivid, radical imagination. Turn the key, enter the chamber. Carter untwists our old tales and offers them up with sensuality, depravity, humour – and a mirror held up to ourselves. (From a yet to be published 2021 edition with an introduction by Laura Dockrill.)

“Slaughterhouse 5”
by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse 5
— Kurt Vonnegut
 
“So it goes.”
 
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber’s assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier­­ – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out? Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.

“The Old Man and the Sea”
by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea
— Ernest Hemingway
 
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
 
In the baking sun, in a small village off the coast of Havana, lives an old fisherman named Santiago. It has been eighty-four days since he last caught a fish. The locals call it bad luck. Refusing to accept defeat, Santiago sets off in his tiny skiff alone, fishing further out than ever before. It is here, over a number of days, that he, his will and his character are tested beyond imagination. Faced with bad weather, hunger and thirst, the old man finds himself in battle with a giant marlin, a fish bigger than any to have been caught before. Nature is not kind and gentle in this fable, nor is Hemingway. You hold in your hands one of the very best pieces of writing to have ever been created.

“When Breath Becomes Air” — Paul Kalanithi
by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air
— Paul Kalanithi
 
“Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
 
This magnetic, hopeful book was first published in 2016. Adored by millions of readers, it is a Vintage Classic already and a book that will stand the test of time. — We often ask ourselves how we should be living. In Paul Kalanithi’s deeply moving memoir, he is forced to ask himself the question, ‘how do you live when you are dying?’ At thirty-six, having just finished his training to become a neurosurgeon, he was faced with a devastating cancer diagnosis. This is his memoir. From student, to doctor, to patient, to father, and to writer, Paul preserved his last years and legacy in this truly unforgettable book.

“To Kill A Mockingbird”
Harper Lee

To Kill A Mockingbird
— Harper Lee
 
“It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.”
 
This evocative and amusing novel has charmed and inspired generations. — Summers for Scout in the Deep South are long and golden. Her story is one of innocence, and growing up. It is also about justice. When Scout’s father Atticus Finch, a lawyer, agrees to defend a black man against an accusation by a white girl, he takes on the prejudice of the whole town. Through the case, Atticus teaches Scout that your imagination is not just for childhood games, but for understanding other people. Because you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.

“Stoner”
by John Williams

Stoner
— John Williams
 
“He learned silence and did not insist upon his love.”
 
For nearly fifty years this book existed as quietly as its protagonist before it was rediscovered. It is now regarded as one of the most heart-stopping and beautiful classics of the twentieth century. — This is the great forgotten novel of the last century – a quiet book; the story of a quiet life. William Stoner is a man who learns to contain himself, but beneath the surface lie passions and principles. An undistinguished career, an unhappy marriage, a bitter conflict with a colleague; Stoner endures. He is a different kind of hero. This wise, moving story seethes with the power and beauty of an individual life.

“The Handmaid’s Tale”
by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale
— Margaret Atwood
 
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
 
Atwood’s Handmaids have become a symbol of feminist resistance. This masterpiece blurs the boundaries between fiction and news headlines. — Imagine a world where women’s bodies are controlled by men. Where society has descended into religious patriarchy and censorship. Where the environment has been destroyed and a powerful few hold the reins to all wealth and freedom. Welcome to Gilead. This is the story of Offred, a Handmaid forced into sexual servitude, in the country once known as the USA.

❝
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness . . .
. . . Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
          Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
❞
— John Keats (extract, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

NOTES

[1]   Vintage Classics [Penguin, 2021]: “MOST LOVED. MOST RED.” — ten must-read modern classics. You get me, don’t you:

William Burroughs and, Maurice Girodias (a bootleg pornographer and renegade Parisian publisher; he inherited Olymipa press — think: Henry Miller’s 1934 novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” which had explicit sexual passages and could not therefore be published in the United States; Anaïs Nin’s “Winter of Artifice” (1939) and James Joyce’s “Haveth Childers” Everywhere and “Pomes Penyeach” (1932) — and ran, for a time, Obelisk Press, notable publication firsts were Burroughs’ “The Naked Lunch” and, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov).
 
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

*ART

Joseph Conrad places fiction in the schema of *art

— What is *ART?

As Maria Popova writes in The Atlantic on the subject of (the increasingly, nowadays, ‘controversial’) Joseph Conrad, “Much of his writing bears a profound philosophical quality, exploring the depths of psychology and other pillars of existence.” In this post I give you some of Conrad’s case for how strings of (“tired old”) words can be construed as a form of fine art. I would personally place literature (not music, as he does) at the pinnacle but, this is me and, I am not he:

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts—whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism—but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims. It is otherwise with the artist.
 
Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the color of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.
 
The sincere endeavor to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
 
Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget. And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim—the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult—obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.
 
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest.

1619

Lest we forget or indeed, in case we aren’t yet fully au fait, you may like to listen to or download even, the “1619 Project” podcasts.

“Elsewhere”

_ that’s where i am _

“Elsewhere”

❝
Elsewhere Anchises,
 
Fatherly and intent, was off in a deep green valley
Surveying and reviewing souls consigned there,
Those due to pass to the light of the upper world.
It so happened he was just then taking note
 
Of his whole posterity, the destinies and doings,
Traits and qualities of descendants dear to him,
But seeing Aeneas come wading through the grass
Towards him, he reached his two hands out
In eager joy, his eyes filled up with tears
And he gave a cry: “At last! Are you here at last?
I always trusted that your sense of right
Would prevail and keep you going to the end.
And am I now allowed to see your face,
My son, and hear you talk, and talk to you myself?
 
This is what I imagined and looked forward to
As I counted the days; and my trust was not misplaced.
To think of the lands and the outlying seas
You have crossed, my son, to receive this welcome.
And after such dangers! I was afraid that Africa
Might be your undoing.” But Aeneas replied:
“Often and often, father, you would appear to me,
Your sad shade would appear, and that kept me going
To this end. My ships are anchored in the Tuscan sea.
Let me take your hand, my father, O let me, and do not
 
Hold back from my embrace.” And as he spoke he wept.
Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.
❞
— Virgil, “The Aeneid” (Book VI). Translated from the original Latin by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013); published by The New Yorker in 2016.

^ I have now read this a dozen or more times and only now, is a meaning emerging. I’ve no context (((I could dig but I shan’t — i.e., I could read up on Virgil’s “The Aeneid” and/or look into a good half-millennia’s worth of essays and tomes that draw out and align his Roman founding myth with that of Ancient Greece’s — I did though happen across a few painted works of art on the subject and these are depicted below))) but what’s beginning to form in my mind is a passage depicting a dream, double vision, wanting a heartfelt wish to materialise, wanting beyond want a thing that is neigh on impossible to get or to have. More devastatingly so because, even if it were to be realised, the ramifications of it — I speak here more personally now — would soon act to indelibly taint and mar the realised dream. Back to the poem, some things can never be sated; sons and fathers reaching in vein to bridge breaches. Must there be fault-lines along this cline? I know not, if ever I had a connection, it has long since gone (I don’t feel beholden, I don’t feel denigrated). As my woman said to me, no response stings more than apathy. To elicit consternation and ridicule is better than a snoring Lecturer on student presentation day or, a swipe left without a second glance or a moment’s hesitation (I don’t recall if rejection’s a swipe to the left or to the right but, you get the point don’t ‘you,’ oh fic-fuckin-ticious you). Mums ‘n’ daughters; Freud (Sigmund) ‘n’ Freud (Lucian) & the Oedipal complex and, the impassioned lyrics “The killer awoke before dawn / He put his boots on / He took a face from the ancient gallery / And he walked on down the hall // He went into the room where his sister lived / And then he paid a visit to his brother / And then he walked on down the hall / And he came to a door / And he looked inside / Father? / Yes son / I want to kill you / Mother, I want to… /// was it ‘fuck,’ or just ‘kill’ too? Etc. etc. I’m sic n tired of relying on context for understanding, for my long-run weakness to blindly adhere to the interpretations of others. Literature is art, art is in the eye of the beholder, it is for me — in my isolation wing of solitary confinement — to decide what I see and what I feel when I happen across a piece of poetry.

“Virgil reading “The Aeneid” to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia“
By Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762–1834) (1790).
“Aeneas flees burning Troy”
By Federico Barocci (1535-1612) (1598).
“Aeneas meets Dido”
By Rutilio di Lorenzo Manetti (1571-1639) (c. 1630).

Short-termism

the zeitgeist of now

See too: “Mask Wars” by J.H.K.

Abstract

The essay considers the prospect of large-scale, ethically motivated (individualistic) short-term sacrifice taking place for the assumed longer-term (collective) common good. Put differently, it considers the likelihood of the deferral of immediate gratification occurring; the not eating of one’s cake today so that one (or indeed, one’s offspring) can have it tomorrow. Put specifically, this essay will ask why it seems possible for world governments and international institutions to act quickly and decisively when met with a crisis like Coronavirus (Covid-19) yet seemingly be incapable of acting in such a way when it comes to tackling the longstanding issues of desertification, overfishing and rainforest destruction (i.e., the catchall: ‘environmental crisis’).[1]  In sum, I will argue that the reason is simple: today’s humankind have been conditioned to act and think in the short-term, to take pleasures today and bury their heads in the sand when it comes to dealing with the consequences. This is exemplified in activities such as binging on Netflix (resulting in overtiredness and the propensity to eat junk food the following day); spending on credit cards (whereby the hard graft of actually earning is deferred to a future date); overconsumption (that is causing unsustainable natural resource depletion) and, indulging in meat eating (which directly leads to yet more natural resource depletion and, greater likelihood of more zoonotic diseases, resultant from the homogenisation of animals and factory farming).[2]  I will argue that because Covid-19 is an immediate problem, government and citizenry seem able to forfeit a lot in an attempt to tackle it ‘now’; however, because the global environmental crisis is seen as a longer-term, abstract and theoretical problem, the political will to make big sacrifices—policies that enforce radical lifestyle changes—is lacking and are, it seems. easy to defer to a non-binding ‘future’ point in time.

Introduction

It has been argued that the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in an impressive level of large-scale inter-governmental coordinated action. However, the extent to which the action is coordinated or unilateral is not yet an established fact.[3]  Nonetheless, there clearly has been a great deal of collaboration (be it helping to repatriate citizens, the sharing of research for an inoculation etc.). So, if such collaboration on global issues has now been proven possible, would it not be possible to believe that something similar could happen with respect to the environmental crisis? To answer this question, we would first need to consider if the Covid-19 pandemic is in any way analogous with the environmental crisis? Incidentally, a strong case for directly linking this pandemic to the environmental crisis can be made (consider, e.g., factory farming, overpopulation, and rapid unregulated urbanisation). There are indeed many interconnected questions. What possible lessons might be got from the globe’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic for addressing the environmental crisis? What role may international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) play in bringing about such transformative measures? As Weizsäcker and Wijkman (2017) point out, while leading governments now, “claim to recognise the need to change our way of life, “if we are to survive as a species,” it is far from clear if they actually appreciate, “just how radical that change needs to be.” Lastly, what can concerned individuals do in relation to self-sacrifice for the greater good—not eating the honey to ensure generations to come can have some on their tongues? Does the adage, “think globally, act locally,” still suffice?[4]

This essay will consider the role of ethical sacrifice in effective action on the current pandemic and how that might be extended to effective action on the environment. It will proceed as follows. Firstly, it will consider the issue at hand, the quarantine we in the Arabian Gulf and those in many other parts of the globe are placed under because of Covid-19 (“The issue at stake”). It then considers possible ways of addressing the environmental crisis in light of responses to the current pandemic from the theoretical standpoints of utilitarianism and deontology (“Hypothetical speaking”). The essay then moves on to look at how we tend to opt for immediate gratification even if we half think we would get greater gratification by delaying it, this is made into a honey today allegory throughout this text (“Short-termism”). The next section considers the mechanisms by which such acts of short-term self-sacrifice may actually take place in an ethically sound and non-coercive way (“Implications of large-scale coordinated action”). In the essay’s final part (“Concluding remarks”) research is referred to that implies there are ways to overcome humankind’s propensity to opt for a teaspoon of honey today as opposed to a very likely—but not guaranteed—tablespoon tomorrow.

The issue at stake

As I write all university students in the Arabian Gulf are in self-quarantine (as are many other categories of people; international travel has essentially stopped and most forms of social gatherings have been halted). This period of self-quarantine is in most countries mandatory, varying degrees of punishment are given for those not obeying these orders. The question this essay considers is more focused on the justification for the quarantine than the right of authorities to impose it upon us. Specifically, how can policymakers and think-tanks concerned with the environmental crisis learn from the measures and restrictions rapidly imposed by governments the world over and the general acceptance of citizens to accept these.

Environmentalists have a hard task (not least because overconsumption and going to shopping malls to buy things whether we need them or not seem to now be the pastime of all those in the world who can afford to or have credit cards). As O’Donoghue and Rabin (2000, p. 233) put it, “people have self-control problems.” Environmentalists have to somehow tackle the extent to which the idea of Social Darwinism has become the norm in schools, welfare systems and society at large. As Von Weizsäcker & Wijkman (2017, pp. 6–7) explain the way that Social Darwinism has become blindly accept as the way of things, “right and proper” and even “an iron law of nature” in which “only the most competitive should survive” poses a huge challenge. The notion of survival of the fittest, in my view, does not apply to all species and especially not social ones like us. However, it is easy to see why those wanting to maximise their profits and retain all of their wealth for themselves would propagate Social Darwinism as an immutable truism. Secondly, and in a not unconnected way, environmentalists need to tackle the de facto way in which businesses now operate today, a culture in which the free market doctrine of Milton Friedman is seen as gospel in public management systems worldwide (see, e.g., Klein, 2007).

If we take the point of view that this current quarantine is for the greater good, what arguments could we make to convince sceptics of the merit of self-sacrifice in relation to addressing the root causes of global warming? (i.e., what are the key points to make in order to encourage the public to accept and lawmakers enact self-quarantine legislation). We will also need to ask what a proper ethical framework for understanding the role of sacrifice and large-scale coordinated action with respect to such events ought to be. Such understandings will help give insights in how to better deal with the environmental crisis. Any such insight would need to articulate clear roles for international organisations—e.g., WHO, the World Trade Organisation and other UN bodies—governments and citizens to play. Such roles will need to be conveyed in a consensual way in order to be affective. The truth is most people would prefer a future of uncontrolled chaos than a future where everything is clean and green if the price to pay for the latter is to be bossed around and always told what to do.

Hypothetically speaking

Philosophically speaking we could adopt a utilitarian or a deontological perspective in order to justify self-quarantine as the ethically and morally appropriate thing to do. We may then extend the same logic to further acts of individualistic self sacrifice in order to tackle the environmental crisis. To be clear, in the theoretical sense, “utilitarianism” places the focus on the pros and cons of the consequences of any given set of government policies or personal lifestyle choices; it looks beyond self-interest in the here and now and focuses on the common or collective interests of others at a later point in time. The “deontological” differs in that it focuses on the ethical implications (rights and wrongs) of the actions now and not the consequences of those actions at a future point in time.

As we know, democracy is compromise and as we know too, being too dogmatic in one’s views is neither progressive or likely to result in new inventions and forms of creative art. Therefore, it seems to me that in the real world, thinkers and philosophers should not advocate exclusively utilitarian or deontological arguments for dealing with the environmental crisis (and/or the current Covid-19 pandemic). It might help to think of the “carrot or the stick” analogy. As opposed to it being a binary choice, a one or the other, it should be a combination of the two: a bit of carrot and a bit of stick. The question then becomes how much carrot and how much stick?

As Fisher (2019) points out, the discounting of the needs of future generations is analogous to “burying a shard of broken glass in a forest.” The logic is as follows: if a child steps on the glass and cuts themselves today (‘now’) then a discount rate suggests this injury is much worse than a child hurting themselves on that same piece of glass in a millennia or so from now (in the ‘future’) but basically and ‘ethically’, “there is no difference between the two.” Giving in to temptation (e.g., scrolling through an infinite number of Instagram posts as opposed to finishing the research essay) leads to immediate gratification (e.g., happiness from effortlessly looking at satisfying things), but also to delayed negative outcomes (e.g., anxiety and a lower score for a essay submitted after the deadline date). On the other hand, resisting temptation (e.g., drafting and redrafting the research essay) does not make one feel good in the here and now but should result in delayed positive outcomes (e.g., a well received essay with a high grade awarded to it)—see the research of Magen and Gross (2007) on ‘temptation’; a key human tendency.

If we watch TED talks or listen to Big Think or Intelligence Squared debates it seems to be so that the longevity of humankind depends on us reducing our honey consumption rather radically to enable (in theory) our grand and great grandchildren to partake in this heavenly delight too. They key questions seem to be (1) is it, or can it become, part of human nature to be altruistic enough to care about people we will not even be alive to walk and talk with? And if so, (2) what will it take to break free from the short-termist ways so many of today’s humans seem to have adopted?

Short-termism

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding argued in the mid 1970s; “if one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.” Just imagine, Fisher (2019) ponders, how would Boulding react to today’s “relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics” and the non-stop fashion advice etc. that we are bombarded with on a daily basis as a consequence of the internet of things and our love/hate affair with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. As Fisher (2019) states, it is little wonder that “problems like climate change feel so hard to tackle right now.” He asks, “how often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they ripple into the decades and centuries ahead?” (see Appendix B). As Magen and Gross (2007 p. 415) put it, today temptations surround us—“sugar-coated donuts [and] distracting TV shows—critically these things all have one thing in common, the “promise [of] immediate pleasure and delayed suffering.” They go on to articulate how less obvious forms of temptations are also potential sources of harm to us and others—e.g., “driving too fast, speaking angrily, and procrastinating”—and caution that the struggle against temptations is “constant, and success is far from assured.”

In a seminal study that sought to investigate the antecedents and correlates of choice behaviour with respect to the delaying of gratification, Mischel and Gilligan (1964, p. 411) observed that

Yielding to temptation—in a situation in which attainment of achievement rewards is contingent upon deviant (cheating) behaviour—was conceptualised to be a function of (a) the strength of the motivation to attain the prohibited gratification, and (b) the inability to delay immediate gratification.

Some psychologists have used the metaphor of a “horse and rider” to describe this tension between our rationality and urges, “the rider knows it is smart to think longer-term, but the horse has its own ideas” (Fisher, 2019). This begs the question, if we are susceptible to ignoring the wellbeing of our own health the day after tomorrow, it is even harder to imagine how most people will have real empathy for their yet to be born descendants. This focus on self-interest and short-termism is most obviously seen in politics (doing what is necessary to be popular today and not what is best for the given country’s longer-term interest) and economics (consumption over and above necessity).

As Semuels (2016) has argued, once upon a time, what was good for many business tended to be good for the country as a whole, “companies invested in their workers and new technologies, and as a result, they prospered and their employees did too.” Today things are different. They are different because people want to have their honey today, not to delay for a possibly larger and possibly tastier quantity of honey tomorrow. There is now widespread concern that businesses are too focused on short-term profits and are thus not, “investing in their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce profits temporarily” (Semuels, 2016).

Implications of large-scale coordinated action

Beckstead (2013 p. ii) has put forward the following thesis, from a global perspective, “what matters most (in expectation) is that we do what is best (in expectation) for the general trajectory along which our descendants develop over the coming millions, billions, and trillions of years.” This sounds and seems to be utilitarian in nature for it suggests that future generations are of more import that our current one. We most of us have tasted some honey, those yet to be born certainly have not. What right do we have to deny them this delicious opportunity? The issue soon becomes technical and difficult because who knows what are the best actions for us to take ‘now’ to ensure that we can best ensure there is honey available to be tasted in the ‘future’?

One way of trying to measure this is use Social Discount Rates (SDRs). SDRs might be used to put a present value on costs and benefits that will occur at a later date” (LSE, 2018). In the context of tackling the environmental crisis, SDRs might be used to calculate and forecast how much today’s society should invest in trying to limit the impacts of climate change for tomorrow’s generations. In other words, they calculate how much self-sacrifice will probably be needed in the here and now in order to ensure the generations of the future will still have a natural environment to enjoy and utilise in a sustainable way. SDRs are designed to weigh future people’s benefits against the costs borne by us today (we self-sacrifice by self-quarantining; we could then self-sacrifice by reducing the number of times we travel by air for holidays and pleasure).

This all gets complicated because nobody really knows how much we should sacrifice. Imagine for instance international travel, should we tell rich people to only take one holiday per year, would they accept this? Which government could win elections with such promises? According to Hodgkinson (2014), the main issue in terms of addressing the environmental crisis is that, if the world’s key governments and institutions were to agree to reduce carbon emissions now, “people living in the future will benefit, not those living today … but it is we [who will] bear the costs of reducing such emissions.”

Remembering the extent to which Social Darwinism is seen as a law of nature (it is not) and the extent to which most business leaders and world governments have adopted the economic philosophy of Milton, it is hard to see how anyone (be it a liberal democratic institution or a concerned individual) advocating frugality, reusing as opposed to throwing away and repurchasing is likely to do well. The thing is this, free market economic policies are causing the overexploitation of the natural environment and businesses are all encouraging people to spend big today and forget about tomorrow. The few businesses or governments that might want to self-sacrifice will likely be put out of business or become unelectable as short-termists will price them out of the market. As many have suggested, the dominant view prevailing view at the international level about action on climate change seems to be, “Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” And it is those views about what future generations are worth that will determine whether or not we are actually able to deal with the world’s most pressing issue, the global environmental crisis (e.g., Hodgkinson, 2014; Martin, 2015)

While I argued that short-termism is the current zeitgeist, politically, economically and in terms of humankind’s consumption and lifestyle choices, and that it is short-termism—“The Century of the Self” as Adam Curtis (2002) calls it —that is the main reason for there being no clear roadmap to address the environmental crisis, I am actually a rational optimist.[5]  I will dwell a bit and now ask you to dig deep, in a thinking sense, to what Andersen wrote in 2012. She argues, and I paraphrase, that humankind must consciously put aside their own pleasures and preferences for the greater good, because it exercises a kind of ‘moral muscle’ in us. She continues, such selfless acts can actually strengthen us by showing us that we are not simply selfish, hedonistic creatures. Acting in such a way, she contends will probably lead to, “stronger bonds of trust and mutual respect” amongst human beings, reminding us that “living on this planet is a group endeavour; that none of us can survive alone.” We must begin to accept (with the ‘carrot’ of improving our ‘moral muscles’) that making ethical choices that may not be comfortable or lucrative are sometimes, simply put, the right thing to do. I would say that too much of a draconian ‘stick’—like the authoritarian tracking of citizens to, monitor their temperature as some states are doing now—will ultimately backfire.[6]

Concluding remarks

As Magen and Gross (2007, p. 415) point out and then ponder, “many of us succumb to temptations, despite knowing that we will later regret doing so … how can such behaviour be avoided?” I can reply with experience, “such behaviour cannot easily be avoided.” However, referring once more to the seminal work of Mischel and Gilligan (1964, p. 417), two important findings are drawn, both of which do offer us hapless sinners some ray of light (a possibility of there being some honey and happiness both in the ‘now’ and for the ‘future’). First, they did observe that responses to temptation are not “simply a function of internal controls” and that conceptualisation concerning behaviour in a temptation situation should take into consideration the reward value of the prohibited gratification. Secondly, they concluded that “individual and situational differences in preferences for such immediate gratification.” O’Donoghue and Rabin (2000, p. 247) talk about ‘naïfs’ and ‘sophisticates’ and they demonstrate that with education and increasing the awareness of the implications of behaviour today and its impact on them tomorrow may result in changes to short term behavioural patterns. They back this up by saying the sophisticates were in some ways more able to delay immediate gratification as they were more aware of its possible future adverse consequences.

Therefore, it seems to me that if leaders and role models can really sell us the idea of delayed pleasure (e.g., the foregoing of (some) honey for the common good of tomorrow’s generations) can bring us happiness in the sense of the feel-good factor of being a nicer person, then we can hope to learn from the Covid-19 pandemic response. We can then realistically dream of averting the impending climate change catastrophe. It is very important that we do not be totally utilitarian or totally deontological in approach. I will say that a mixture of the two is both ethically and morally sound and critically, more likely to bring to us the end we want without making the means too unpalatable and difficult to endure.

— § —

Notes

 
 
[1]   In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic; the extent to which it has impacted on GDP growth and international travel by air is unprecedented and is projected to result in the biggest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Gopinath, 2020). The ‘environmental crisis’ includes the following features, all of which human population growth and consumption choices cause: biodiversity loss (a load of fauna and flora are threatened with extinction because of the destruction of their natural habitats and direct exploitation—think of Wuhan’s animal market and overfishing of the seven seas), climate change (global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion), deforestation, desertification (soil erosion and degradation) and the scarcity of clean fresh water.

 
 
[2]   Refer to Sheahan et al. (2008); “Zoonotic SARS-CoV likely evolved to infect humans by a series of transmission events between humans and animals for sale in China” (p. 2274).

 
 
[3]   As I write this essay, China and the USA are playing a blame game. Basically, both governments are attempting to shift attention from their own mistakes by seeking to turn the public attention to the mistakes they allege of each other (see Appendix A). More recently still the U.K.’s government has accused Russian spies of seeking to steal British research insights into Covid-19 and, the very next day (‘…you took it all away’) the U.S.A.’s government accused Chinese spies of seeking to pinch American research insights into Covid-19. (see: Walker (2020) and Gramer (2020), respectively)

 
 
[4]   For instance, see the Intelligence Square debate on this motion “To Stop Climate Collapse, We Must End Capitalism”: intelligencesquared.com/events/to-stop-climate-collapse-we-must-end-capitalism/

 
 
[5]   In this wide-ranging video documentary, we hear a lot about consumerism and commodification and links this to contemporary view on fashion. It makes the argument that superficiality benefits big business. what is interesting is that this was made before social media. So, the points made almost 20 years ago are even stronger today. The last US election was not about politics and policies, it was about media manipulation, showmanship and ad hominem gone wild.

 
 
[6]   China is using big data to control and monitor everything its citizens do, where they go, what they do and who they meet. Many others are following China’s lead in increasingly monitoring every move of their citizens be it Hungary, Thailand, or the Philippines (Gebrekidan, 2020). Closer to home, we see this happening too in Egypt. As Magdy (2020) writes, Egypt’s President has granted himself more powers using Covid-19 as a cover. While some of the new powers can be linked to Covid-19 human rights groups say, others such as the power to now ban public and private meetings, protests and even celebrations, can not.

— § —

References

Andersen, E. (2012, 26 May). The Noble Art of Self-Sacrifice. Forbes. Retrieved, https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/05/26/the-noble-art-of-self-sacrifice/#3588ff7136ac

Beckstead, N. (2013). On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future. Ph.D. Thesis, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Retrieved, https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/

Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self. Retrieved, https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s

See: Bidoonism’s Adam Curtis anthology

Fisher, R. (2019, 10 January). The perils of short-termism: civilisation’s greatest threat. BBC. Retrieved, bbc.com/future/article/20190109-the-perils-of-short-termism-civilisations-greatest-threat

Gebrekidan, S. (2020, 14 April). For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power. The New York Times. Retrieved, nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.htm

Gopinath, G. (2020). ‘Global lockdown’ will cause worst recession since Great Depression, says IMF. The Guardian. Retrieved, theguardian.com/business/video/2020/apr/14/great-lockdown-recession-great-depression-coronavirus-imf-video

Gramer, R. (2020, July 22). U.S. Closes Chinese Consulate in Houston Amid Surge in Chinese Espionage Cases. Foreign Policy. Retrieved foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/22/us-trump-china-escalation-tensions-spying-closes-chinese-consulate-in-houston-chinese-espionage-cases/

Hodgkinson, D. (2014). Thomas Piketty, climate change and discounting our future. The Conversation. Retrieved theconversation.com/thomas-piketty-climate-change-and-discounting-our-future-30157

Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Penguin. Retrieved https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cpmRBAAAQBAJ

LSE. (2018). What are social discount rates? The London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/faqs/what-are-social-discount-rates/

Magdy, S. (2020, 9 May). Egypt’s president expands powers, citing virus outbreak. The Washington Post. Retrieved, washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypts-president-expands-powers-citing-virus-outbreak/2020/05/09/849af3e0-91f2-11ea-9322-a29e75effc93_story.html

Magen, E., & Gross, J. (2007). Harnessing the need for immediate gratification: cognitive reconstrual modulates the reward value of temptations. Emotion, 7(2), 415–428. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.415

Martin, R. L. (2015). Yes, short-termism really is a problem. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved https://hbr.org/2015/10/yes-short-termism-really-is-a-problem

Mischel, W., & Gilligan, C. (1964). Delay of gratification, motivation for the prohibited gratification, and responses to temptation. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69(4), 411–417. doi:10.1037/h0048918

O’Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (2000), The economics of immediate gratification. Journal of Behavioural Decision Making, 13(2), 233–250.

Prasso, S. (2020, 6 May) Lawsuits against China escalate Covid-19 blame game with US. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/lawsuits-against-china-escalate-covid-19-blame-game-with-u-s

Rachman, G. (2020, May 4). The US and China’s dangerous blame game will do no good. The Financial Times. Retrieved, ft.com/content/ffc6ac00-8de0-11ea-9e12-0d4655dbd44f

Semuels, A. (2016, 30 December). How to stop short-term thinking at America’s companies. The Atlantic. Retrieved theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/short-term-thinking/511874/

Sheahan, T., Rockx, B., Donaldson, E., Sims, A., Pickles, R., Corti, D., & Baric, R. (2008). Mechanisms of zoonotic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus host range expansion in human airway epithelium. Journal of virology, 82(5), 2274–2285. doi:10.1128/JVI.02041-07

Trofimov, Y. (2020, 8 March). Democracy, Dictatorship, Disease. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved, wsj.com/articles/democracy-dictatorship-disease-the-west-takes-its-turn-with-coronavirus

Von Weizsäcker, E., & Wijkman, A. (2017). Come on!: capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet. Berlin: Springer. Retrieved books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWA-DwAAQBAJ

Walker, A. (2020, July 17). U.K. ‘95% sure’ Russian hackers tried to steal coronavirus vaccine research. The Guardian. Retrieved, theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/17/russian-hackers-steal-coronavirus-vaccine-uk-minister-cyber-attack

— § —

Appendix A: The blame game

Appendix A: The blame game
Note  Illustration by James Ferguson (Rachman, 2020).

Despite there being many instances of global cooperation etc., not everything is ethically minded and being done altruistically. According to one viewpoint, historians of the future might record that, “the Covid-19 pandemic marked the start of a new cold war between China and the US” (Rachman, 2020). As Prasso (2020) makes clear, mistakes in relation to the virus were made on both sides—cover-ups and arrests on China’s part, downplaying the virus’s contagiousness and suggesting the injecting oneself with household bleach may be a remedy on America’s part.
 
Point: “Coronavirus, explained”
 
Counterpoint: “Once upon a virus…”

— § —

Appendix B: Me, myself & I

Fisher-2019-a

Fisher-2019-b
Note  Illustrations by Nigel Hawtin (Fisher, 2019)

As Fisher (2019) stresses, today’s population of 7.7 billion is small if balanced against all humans who are to be born. If Homo sapiens endure for thousands of years to come, billions of yet to be born individuals do rely on us to do the right thing regarding the environmental crisis. Intangibly it will benefit ‘our’ peace of mind; the benefit to ‘them’ will be very tangible.

Seemingly deceitful

“The Devil’s Trident” et al.

Simply put an illusion is something that is not real. But we most of us want to believe in things that science and reason tell us, by verifiably replicable experiments and observations, are not real; are “illusionary.” They say we see with our eyes, but let us be clear here, our eyes simply act as conduits to our brains, it is our brains that decipher and decide. For those fortunate enough not to be blind, we do like to be titillated by objects of beauty, panoramic views, the flickering of a fire, the waves rolling in and, optical illusions. The latter are a subject of much interest, writing in 1976, Coren et al. (1976, p. 129) pointed out that in the 120 years since Johann Joseph Oppel published the first systematic work on visual geometric illusions, “nearly a thousand papers have appeared that deal with distortions evoked by simple two-dimensional patterns of lines.” In the past 20 years with the aid of computers (to analyse) and social media (to share) the interest in optical illusions has grown further still (Alter, 2013; Hogenboom, 2015; Schultz, 2013). In this short essay I will discuss a number of such illusions, the way/s in which they trick the brain (alongside the human visual system) and the psychology behind them. But first I will discuss the workings of the eye and how it, like the human brain, is very susceptible to chicanery and trickery—to being deceived.

In the beholder’s eye

We know that the human eye works like a camera. When we look at something, light reflected from that thing enters the eyes through the pupil. Bizarrely it comes in upside down and this light and colour info is focused through the optical bits and bobs within the eye (see Appendix A). As Whitaker et al. (1996, p. 2957) point out in relation to the typical functioning of the human eye:

Judgment of the relative position of objects is an important feature of the human visual system. We seem able to perform this task effortlessly across spatial scales. Thus, whilst we can view two objects and estimate their separation, we are also aware of the relative position of internal features of the objects themselves.

However, the human eye, as with the human mind can easily be tricked. Optical illusions occur because our brains automatically try to interpret and make sense of what we see, usually they get things right, that Apple iPad ‘is’ an Apple iPad but, magicians and sellers of snake oil (and psychologists and visual artists) have long known eyes can be tricked because the human brain is partial to seeing myth as fact and fact as fake. Optical illusions fool our brains into seeing things which are there when they are not actually there or are not seemingly there when, in fact, they actually are.

Perception—what we think, what we think we see—is the interpretation of the things that enter our minds including via our eyes. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is subjective. Therefore, the same object will not be seen as the same thing by any two people. As pointed out by Hogenboom (2015) Aristotle wrote that, “our senses can be trusted but they can be easily fooled.” This was in the context of him looking (not into Nietzsche’s abyss, but) into a waterfall for too long. He observed that, if we watch something moving quickly for too long, and then look at an inanimate object next to it — like the rocks beside a waterfall — they will appear to move in the opposite direction; a phenomena now classified as the “motion aftereffect” or, “the waterfall illusion.” Neuroscientists have argued that this can be explained by the fact that it takes a lot of energy and effort for the eye to compute fast moving and continually ‘forward’ moving objects so that when it suddenly switches to seeing a stationary object if over emphasises the lack of movement and moves the object slowly ‘backward’ (Hogenboom, 2015).

There is a theory attached to all of this and it is called the Centroid Hypothesis. It states that judgments of distance between visual objects are influenced by the brain’s computation of the “centroids of the luminance profiles of the objects” (Whitaker et al., 1996). Concerning the Devil’s Trident (see Appendix B), the Müller-Lyer arrows (see Appendix C), the Penrose triangle (see Appendix D) and similar illusions, the pattern of neural excitation evoked by contextual flank overlaps with that caused by the stimulus terminator, thereby leading (due to the shift of the centroid of summed excitation) to its perceptual displacement. The relative displacement of all stimulus terminators leads to misjudgement of distances between them; that is, the illusion occurs as a side effect due to necessarily low spatial resolution of the neural mechanism of assessment of the relative location of the visual objects.

The Devil’s Trident 🔱

Devil's Trident -- an optical illusion
Figure 1: “The Devil’s Trident,” Masterton and Kennedy (1975, p.107).

The Devil’s Trident (a.k.a., “The Impossible Trident”) was first noted in the academic press by an American psychologist—Donald Schster—who is said to have been inspired by an advert he saw in a magazine (Schuster, 1964). Accounts of the “Devil’s Trident”—see Appendix B—stress that the middle prong, “appears to be in two places at the same time” and that it involves, “incompatible surface depth cues linked as though they were compatible” (Masterton & Kennedy, 1975, p.107).

Knowledge of optical illusions is not a recent thing. Like all good things, we can go back to Ancient Greece to find initial thinking on the subject: Aristotle and the waterfall (as mentioned above). Indeed, as Bach and Poloschek (2006 p. 21) say, Plato also alerted us to the discrepancy between perception and reality in his “Allegory of the Cave.” Philosophers remain intrigued to this day. As Donaldson (2017) argues that impossible figures prove problematic for sense-data accounts of perception that contend that, corresponding to every visual human experience, there are mental objects (sense-data) that we are aware of—and that sense-data have the properties that the objects that our experiences tell us they do. The problem is that sense-data would have to be impossible objects … surely, impossible objects can’t exist!” There are other explanations. For example, illustrations like the Müller-Lyer arrows (see Appendix C) confuses the brain (in some cultures, according to Alter (2013), not all) and it overcompensates, “making the line appear bigger — as it would have to be in real life to produce those kinds of proportions” (Hogenboom, 2015).

Concluding remarks

To sum up, we can assume that we will never be able to suddenly see true reality with crystal clear clarity and 20/20 vision, be it the waterfall’s rock, the shadow play in the cave or the Devil’s Trident. But this is the magic of reality. This is something we should embrace and revere, not fear. Just because we do not know what lies within black holes or what exists beyond the edge of the universe does not mean we need to create myths to fill in the gaps and then dogmatically and religiously follow them (see Dawkins, 2011). Personally, I like that art can trick us it actually says to me we are human. Also, I feel that visual illusions are actually logical and explainable by reason and science: our brains have evolved to need to constantly predict what is about to happen so, illusions demonstrate our brain being logical and telling us what we should ‘typically’ see not what we rarely physically see.

References

Alter, A. (2013). Are These Lines the Same Height? Popular Science. Retrieved, https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/are-these-walls-the-same-size-your-answer-depends-on-where-youre-from/

Bach, M &, Poloschek, C. (2006). Optical Illusions. Visual Neuroscience, 6(2), 20-21.

Coren, S., Girgus, J., Erlichman, H., &, Hakstian, A. (1976). An empirical taxonomy of visual illusions. Perception & psychophysics, 20(2), 129–137. doi.org/10.3758/BF03199444

Dawkins, R. (2011). The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True. London: Bantam Press.

Donaldson, J. (2017). “Impossible Trident” in F. Macpherson (ed.), The Illusions Index. Retrieved, https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/impossible-trident.

Hogenboom, M. (2015). How your eyes trick your mind. BBC. Retrieved, http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/story/20150130-how-your-eyes-trick-your-mind/index.html

Howey, T. (2016). “How the eye works” Retrieved, https://www.tomhowey.com/How-the-Eye-Works

Masterton, B. &, Kennedy, J. (1975). Building the Devil’s Tuning Fork. Perception, 4(1), 107–109. doi.org/10.1068/p040107

Schuster, D. H. (1964). A new ambiguous figure: A threestick clevis. The American Journal of Psychology, 77(4), 673. doi.org/10.2307/1420787

Schultz, C. (2013). Are Optical Illusions Cultural? Smithsonian. Retrieved, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-optical-illusions-cultural-6633978/

Whitaker, D., McGraw, P. V., Pacey, I., & Barrett, B. T. (1996). Centroid analysis predicts visual localization of first-and second-order stimuli. Vision Research, 36(18), 2957–2970. doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(96)00031-4

Wikipedia (2020a). “Impossible trident.” Retrieved, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trident

Wikipedia (2020b). “Müller-Lyer illusion.” Retrieved, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion

Wikipedia (2020c). “Penrose Triangle”. Retrieved, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_triangle

— § —

Appendix A

How the Eye Works
(Howey, 2016)

— § —

Appendix B

Devil's Trident -- an optical illusion
Note: The devil’s trident (or ‘tuning fork’) is a drawing of an impossible to physically construct object. As articulated by Wikipedia (2020a), “it appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end” (see also: Masterton & Kennedy, 1975, p.107).

— § —

Appendix C

Note: The Müller-Lyer illusion typically comprises of three arrows and we think the stems of these arrows are different lengths but, as the diagram shows, they are in fact the same length; as far as we know it was first devised by the German sociologist Franz Müller-Lyer in the late 1800s (Wikipedia, 2020b).

— § —

Appendix D

Impossibility in its purest form” is how the so-called Penrose Triangle is described. It is another of these object which can be drawn but cannot exist as a solid object -- just like this paper’s 'Devil’s Trident'
Note  “Impossibility in its purest form” is how the so-called Penrose Triangle is described. It is another of these object which can be drawn but cannot exist as a solid object (Wikipedia, 2020c) — just like this paper’s “Devil’s Trident” (see Appendix B, above).

📙 Sophie’s World

— by Jostein Gaarder (1991).

Do please allow me to introduce to you, Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder (by the by, it was published in Norwegian in 1991 and then in English in 1994). It is a novel of sorts that seems to align with Bertrand Russell’s 1945, History of Western Philosophy. I say “of sorts” because essentially I see it as a way — one of many, see e.g.: “Put simply” — of making the key philosophers and their main ideas more accessible to the likes of me.

📙 Sophie’s World
inspired by Bertrand Russell’s:
📙 History of Western Philosophy

REFERENCE

Gaarder, J. (1994). Sophie’s World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The novel centres on Sophie Amundsen, who is introduced to the history of philosophy by one Alberto Knox, a lecturer in philosophy by way of a number of letters and various other, often somewhat cryptic, mediums.

Sophie’s World “But when these basic needs have been satisfied—will there still be something that everybody needs? Philosophers think so. They believe that man cannot live by bread alone. Of course everyone needs food. And everyone needs love and care. But there is something else—apart from that—which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here.”
Sophie’s World “The universe would have been equally incomprehensible if it had only consisted of that one stone the size of an orange. The question would be just as impenetrable: where did this stone come from?”
Sophie’s World “A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.”
Sophie’s World “Basically there are not many philosophical questions to ask. We have already asked some of the most important ones. But history presents us with many different answers to each question. So it is easier to ask philosophical questions than to answer them.”
يا صوفيا 🍉 هلا و غلا

Every day, a letter comes to Sophie’s mailbox that contains a few questions and then later in the day a package comes with some typed pages describing the ideas of a philosopher who dealt with the issues raised by that morning’s questions. The philosopher, Alberto Knox, sends her these packages via his aptly named dog, ‘Hermes.’

Lets delve, together you and I, into the rabbit hole.
Lets delve, together you and I, into the rabbit hole.
Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder (1st ed. 1991)
Lets delve, together you and I, into the rabbit hole.

Alberto first tells Sophie that philosophy is extremely relevant to life and that if we do not question and ponder our very existence we are not really living. Then he proceeds to go through the history of Western philosophy. Sophie (and us readers) gets a reasonably coherent extended review from the Pre-Socratics to Jean-Paul Sartre. We get by way of Alberto, key points regarding the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Existentialism, as well as Darwinism and the ideas of Karl Marx. I thought it might be interesting to consider his categorisation, it is stated as being focused on ‘Western’ philosophy so the omission of the other canons is an acknowledged one.

Ancient Philosophy

— The Pre-Socratics
Including: Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles & Democritus
— Socrates, Plato & Aristotle
— Ancient Philosophy after Aristotle
Including: the Cynics, the Epicureans, the Stoics & Plotinus

Catholic Philosophy

— The Fathers
Including: St Augustine & Pope Gregory
— The Schoolmen
Including: St Thomas Aquinas

Modern Philosophy

— From the Renaissance to Hume
Including: Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke & Hume
— From Rousseau to the Present Day
Including: Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx & William James.

I don’t like to paraphrase the following remarks but life ain’t always gunna b nice to you so, here goes, a reviewer at Publishers Weekly (familiarly known in the book world as PW and, they say, “the bible of the book business” has been printing out literary reviews since 1872 and somewhere along the timeline decided to drop the apostrophe) did write something along the lines of this: Regardless of age many readers will be tempted to skip over the somewhat “dryly written” philosophical lessons — which are not particularly integrated with the “more engaging” meta-fictional story line. This reminds me of something Li Yu is said to have said in his Carnal Prayer Mat.

❝
How low contemporary morals have sunk! But if you write a moral tract exhorting people to virtue, [you] will you get no one to buy it.
❞

Which is akin to the marketing adage/joke:

❝
SEX—
— Ah! Now that I have your attention, let me tell you about something completely different. . .
❞

Providing a polar opposite perspective is Steven Gambardella. He writes that Sophie’s World has changed the lives of millions of people and is the “red pill of literature.” It is “the best place to start reading about philosophy” and “eloquently captures the wonder of philosophy, the giddiness you feel when you realise you are floating in space.” The rabbit is sketched to be representative of the universe. In the book, we humans are compared to tiny insects in the rabbit’s fur. Some of us burrow down into the warmth of the fur, while the philosophers among us climb to the tops of the hairs “to stare right into the magician’s eyes.” As Gambardella states, it was written by a high school teacher with a passion for the subject, became a bestseller and has now “sold over 40 million copies.”

The red pill and blue pill is a meme representing a choice between taking either a “red pill” that reveals an unpleasant truth, or taking a “blue pill” to remain in blissful ignorance. The terms and concept are taken verbatim from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.
rabbit-hole
Run rabbit run, take me into the abyss — the deep and bottomless midnight zone of eye & ur innermost consciousnesses.
Going [reaching || falling] down the rabbit hole
Falling / Going / Reaching down the rabbit hole, is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a ‘troublingly’ (or possibly too ‘wonderfully’) surreal state or situation.
The Persistence of Memory
“The Persistence of Memory”
By Salvador Dalí (1931). One of the most recognisable works of Surrealism [Spanish title: La persistencia de la memoria].
By hook or by crook, let them — these contemporaries of Sappho and idols of Catullus — reach down into your rabbit hole; let Freud & co. sweet-talk you there, bent over, cowering under or splayed out on the psychologist’s faux-leather, mock-Chesterfield couch.
On a tangent of his own Gambardella says that philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom — knowledge is merely instrumental and is applied to get us by — it is thought about thought. Knowledge of philosophy, he argues, allows us to enhance our pleasures and diminish our pains of our own accord. He quotes Seneca as saying:

❝
Without [Philosophical pondering] no one can lead a life free of fear or worry. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to [it].
❞

Me, well I’m a dipper (skinny I wish) and this applies to all that I read and my writings and musings too. The chalice or urn is neither overflowing or bone dry. It is, I submit to you, bang in the middle. The purpose of this book in my view is to encourage us to think for ourselves, question things that are taken as given and doubt dogmas, as Gaarder writes, “my concern [, dear Sophie,] is that you do not grow up to be one of those people who take the world for granted.” I’d take the red over the blue, politically and metaphorically speaking and in relation to the pleasures and pains of love too.

I’ll end with a nod to who I’m guessing was an influence on Gaarder: Bertrand Russell. Russell was an English philosopher and campaigner for freedom (of expression and from authoritarian control). Reassuringly — to me anyway — he said do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once seen as being eccentric.

The History of Western Philosophy

❝
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
❞
— Bertrand Russell

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

❝
The fundamental cause of trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
❞
— Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

p.s.
Consider visiting Bidoonism’s page on Philosophy and/or reading her recent reviews of the following works:

Eldridge, R. T. (Ed.). (2009). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gottlieb, A. (2000). The Dream of Reason: a History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Gottlieb, A. (2016). The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. London: Penguin.

Grayling, A. C. (2019). The History of Philosophy. London: Penguin.

Kenny, A. (1998). An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy. New York: John Wiley & Sons

Russell, B. (1945). A History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Mayday, ((m’aider))

venez m’aider (“come and help me”)

8B2744B8-935A-4927-AF16-01EC18590BBC
Hand Made

The Handmaid’s Tale stresses the importance of reading to our freedom…

This book is usually, and quite rightly, placed in the same category of dystopian fiction as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, but has a particular focus on the tyranny of patriarchy (the Aunt’s being the lapdogs so to speak). **I do though get confused by Offred because, well, yes you’ve gotta adapt to survive, but she seems somehow accommodated to her trysts with Commander fRed and in to her dalliances with the driver. What happens to Molly? how exactly did her daughter get wrested from her bosom up by the cold river?** The book’s ending pleasingly open-ended, because come on — dear J — there ain’t no such thing as black — 000000 — and white — FFFFFF. __Context — our sub-text & reading in between the lines my Only.One — is everything; ain’t it m8? Atwood stresses this by emphasising how changes in context impact upon behaviours and attitudes. We read the phrase “Context is all” in the book several times: Think scramble. And yeah, I loved it how our Ofred believed that she’d won round one and let him take the second, but after several “games nights” realised his superiority at this particular board game.__

… it also stresses the trap that academics may fall into: the risk of misreading and misunderstanding historical texts.

Snippets

❝
There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to, now you are being given freedom from. (p. 24)
❞
⁓Total Control⁓

❝
Men are sex machines, said Aunt L, and not much more. They only want one thing, you must learn to manipulate them. Lead them around by the nose, this is a metaphor. This is nature’s way. (p. 143)
❞
⁓Total Control⁓

❝
So there it was. Out in the open: his wife didn’t understand him. That was what I was there for then. The same old thing. It was too banal to be true. (p. 156)
❞
⁓Total Control⁓

❝
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. (p. 193)
❞
⁓Total Control⁓

❝
“Nature demands variety, for men” he says. “It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. … Women know this instinctively … they buy so many clothes to trick the men into thinking they are several different women.” (p. 239)
❞
⁓Total Control⁓

B02BACD9-6C87-42CC-AA9A-FA6A6FCA7008
George Orwell’s “1984” is often juxtaposed with fellow English author, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

Who controls the past controls the future /
Who controls the present controls the past.

p. s.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday”
Mayday is an emergency procedure word used internationally as a distress signal in voice-procedure radio communications. The “mayday” procedure word was originated in 1921, by a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. The radio officer—one Frederick Stanley Mockford—opted for “mayday” from the French m’aider (“help me”)—a shortened form of venez m’aider (“come and help me”)—because he had a thing at that time for a fine young thing from Paris.

My hero: George Orwell by Margaret Atwood
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. I read it at age nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book – the child’s version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead. To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. The whole experience was deeply disturbing, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since. As Orwell taught, it isn’t the labels – Christianity, socialism, Islam, democracy, two legs bad, four legs good, the works – that are definitive, but the acts done in their names. Read on…

Lust and Lambast
A hand left poignantly unshaken; a republican party, quite unstirred.

Strong
Weak
Writing concisely is not my style yet, as column inches for anything other than celebrity gossip, consumer reviews and self-help are now such a precious commodity, I must be succinct. Even if I were allowed to go wild with the word count, it would probably demonstrate only the validity of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Nowadays smartphone shortened attention spans need to be taken into account. In order to gain wide readership on matters of current affairs, being parsimonious with prose is a necessity. Gone are the days when waxing lyrical in verbose flowery language on issues of international political economy was considered a mark of distinction. Read on…