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On one hand, you have elections, a functioning balance of powers, and a messy, often unsatisfactory Republic; on the other hand, you have an Empire. How do you rise or fall from one to the other? British novelist Tom Holland helps answer this question, and with the sure hand of, well, a novelist. He takes you from Rome’s Tarquin-vanquishing foundation to the Battle of Actium and the triumph of Octavian. Holland definitely keeps the narrative churning. And I finished the history with a tremendous respect for the way that he selected and arranged a vast body of material. If you are in the mood for a tale of incest, oysters, panthers, conquest, political intrigue, high rhetoric, backstabbing (often literal), debt, gang warfare, pirates, sex, gladiators, senators, graffiti, morality, immorality, eels, and luxury coastal property, this is your book.

On one hand, you have elections, a functioning balance of powers, and a messy, often unsatisfactory Republic; on the other hand, you have an Empire. How do you rise or fall from one to the other?

British novelist Tom Holland helps answer this question, and with the sure hand of, well, a novelist. He takes you from Rome’s Tarquin-vanquishing foundation to the Battle of Actium and the triumph of Octavian. Holland definitely keeps the narrative churning. And I finished the history with a tremendous respect for the way that he selected and arranged a vast body of material.

If you are in the mood for a tale of incest, oysters, panthers, conquest, political intrigue, high rhetoric, backstabbing (often literal), debt, gang warfare, pirates, sex, gladiators, senators, graffiti, morality, immorality, eels, and luxury coastal property, this is your book.

Stories of Ignorance, Part II: Don’t Know Much About History A couple months before Mrs. Tragos, Brother Tragos and I decided to get our geography game on, Mrs. Tragos and I were enjoying a little breakfast on the balcony discussing what we didn’t know about history. Mrs. Tragos has been a far better student of the past than I, having read many large tomes on Renaissance, art, Soviet, WW1, WW2, and English history. Me? Let’s just say I spent my youth floating in the ocean getting blinded by the sun. Such is our lot, we San Diegans. On a day to day basis, I don’t get much time to read up on much of anything that happened after, let’s say, the third century BCE. Maybe….maybe, I will cut loose and dip into ancient Rome. But for the most part, if I’m reading history, it’s grandpa Herodotus and uncle Thucydides. Mostly, though, it’s due to my sheer, unadulterated laziness that I know little to nothing about the past. So in yet another sure-to-be-futile self-reform movement, I decided to learn a little bit about WW2. I decided to do it from another country’s perspective so as to avoid any unsavory triumphalism. Well. Unsavory American triumphalism at any rate. I grabbed a copy of the French historian Max Gallo’s succinctly titled, A History of the Second World War: 1940: From the Abyss to Hope. The first of five volumes in the series. It’s quite a story. What surprised me was how much I became a child reading tales of the heroic Churchill and de Gaulle, and of the Vichy villains Pétain and Pierre Laval. The story engrossed me so completely I might as well have been my nine-year-old self reading Lord of the Rings. Because the book focuses so singularly on France, it offers a useful lens on the unseemly domestic politics that contributed (more than I’d have thought) to the blindingly quick success of Rommel’s invasion. For example: before 1940, de Gaulle—as yet only a colonel—warned repeatedly that France needed to improve the strength and technology of its armored tank divisions. Mostly due to the senescence and complacency of France’s ruling class at the time, his efforts were met with complete indifference. Nonetheless, de Gaulle, leading the Fourth Armored Division at Montcornet, led a rare but ultimately futile victory against the oncoming German advance. And he did it without air support. I’m not ready to move on to the next volumes. In fact, I decided to spend the rest of the month reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Along with Helen Vendler’s invaluable commentary.) But I will return to the front. Fear not.

Stories of Ignorance, Part II: Don’t Know Much About History

A couple months before Mrs. Tragos, Brother Tragos and I decided to get our geography game on, Mrs. Tragos and I were enjoying a little breakfast on the balcony discussing what we didn’t know about history.

Mrs. Tragos has been a far better student of the past than I, having read many large tomes on Renaissance, art, Soviet, WW1, WW2, and English history. Me? Let’s just say I spent my youth floating in the ocean getting blinded by the sun. Such is our lot, we San Diegans.

On a day to day basis, I don’t get much time to read up on much of anything that happened after, let’s say, the third century BCE. Maybe….maybe, I will cut loose and dip into ancient Rome. But for the most part, if I’m reading history, it’s grandpa Herodotus and uncle Thucydides.

Mostly, though, it’s due to my sheer, unadulterated laziness that I know little to nothing about the past. So in yet another sure-to-be-futile self-reform movement, I decided to learn a little bit about WW2.

I decided to do it from another country’s perspective so as to avoid any unsavory triumphalism. Well. Unsavory American triumphalism at any rate. I grabbed a copy of the French historian Max Gallo’s succinctly titled, A History of the Second World War: 1940: From the Abyss to Hope. The first of five volumes in the series.

It’s quite a story. What surprised me was how much I became a child reading tales of the heroic Churchill and de Gaulle, and of the Vichy villains Pétain and Pierre Laval. The story engrossed me so completely I might as well have been my nine-year-old self reading Lord of the Rings.

Because the book focuses so singularly on France, it offers a useful lens on the unseemly domestic politics that contributed (more than I’d have thought) to the blindingly quick success of Rommel’s invasion. For example: before 1940, de Gaulle—as yet only a colonel—warned repeatedly that France needed to improve the strength and technology of its armored tank divisions.

Mostly due to the senescence and complacency of France’s ruling class at the time, his efforts were met with complete indifference. Nonetheless, de Gaulle, leading the Fourth Armored Division at Montcornet, led a rare but ultimately futile victory against the oncoming German advance. And he did it without air support.

I’m not ready to move on to the next volumes. In fact, I decided to spend the rest of the month reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Along with Helen Vendler’s invaluable commentary.) But I will return to the front. Fear not.

“The necessity of being up-to-date in order to obtain recognition explains why the concept of modernity is so frequently and so emphatically invoked by writers claiming to embody literary innovation, from its first formulation by Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century to the very name of the review founded by Sartre a hundred years later—Les Temps Moderne. One thinks of Rimbaud’s famous injunction (‘One must be absolutely modern’); also of the modernismo founded by Rubén Darío at the end of the nineteenth century, the Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920, and ‘futurist’ movements in Italy and in Russia. The rushing after lost time, the frantic quest for the present, the rage to be ‘contemporaries of all mankind’ (as Octavio Paz put it)—all these things are typical of the search for a way to enter literary time and thereby to attain artistic salvation.”

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 2004 (trans. M. B. DeBevoise). (via literarypiano)

“Lorca was a poet of no school. He’s usually included among the Spanish poets known as the Generation of ‘27, but they were generally grouped together, paradoxically, by virtue of their shared resistance to stylistic categorisation. He was a dramatist who brought theatre to the people, a homosexual who lived as openly as he could in an era where to live at all was no certainty, a supporter of the Republic and the sympathiser with the ruling leftist Popular Front. He had friends and admirers across the political and social spectrum, aroused controversy without courting it as shamelessly as some of his contemporaries, and in perhaps the last age where a poet could truly be considered famous, did everything he could to earn and justify that acclaim. He did not have the demagogic impulse that often proves useful for some artists, or is simply irrepressible in others. He once joked in a lecture that “whenever I speak before a large group I think I must have taken the wrong door.”

As with most artists who are “vanished”, there was little protocol or officialdom in his execution. Some muttered mentions of “subversive activities”, no hint of a trial, no kind of court for him to stand in and try to make a case for his continued existence. Imagine that: asking a poet to justify his life. What poetry might rise to meet that challenge? Even fascists knew better. Indeed, the regimes in question usually seem to be vestigially aware of just how well the state-sanctioned murder of artists tends to play with the public. In 1937, with the civil war still raging, General Franco took the time to issue the official line. “I say it again: we have shot no poets.”

This is reason why Lorca’s death unsettled many then, and haunts us still today: Governments tend to take on their worst form, to devolve to their most horrific manifestation, when they kill artists. Artists look out into the horrors of the world, and inevitably, the horrors sometimes reach back.”

No One Is Untouchable: Not Federico Garcia Lorca, Not Ai Weiwei < PopMatters (via byronic)

(via byronic)

On the Impermanence of Reading Things

“In the Roman Empire, the literacy rate was never high, and after the Sack of Rome, in 410 C.E., it began to plummet. It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populous scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about the fate of books.”

The literary critic best known as the leading “New Historicist,” Stephen Greenblatt, has written an article on the recovery of a long-lost manuscript that helped spawn the Renaissance renewal of  materialist pleasure and scientific inquiry: the Roman poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). [In the August 8, 2011 edition of The New Yorker, p. 28 - 33.]

The story of the Roman poet, his Epicurean poem, and its role in reinventing pleasure, is downright fascinating. However, it’s this passage here that really caught my eye.

Literacy is never permanent. In the dark ages before Homer, Greek writing died an early early death, only to be resuscitated centuries later. And Greenblatt suggests in detailing the history of Rome’s decline that when literacy turns scarce, it quickly finds itself the mandarin possession of the few.

That said, I couldn’t help wondering, not if literacy per se, bit if certain kinds of literacy, could go extinct, and how. In a world of mass lowest common denominator literacy, could endangered species of reading and writing fall to centuries of desuetude? What if new empires crumbled, if faith resurged triumphant over science, if globalism waned, and public education were starved out by anemic budgets? Would certain vocabularies and grammatical complexities exile themselves to caves of eccentricity and irrelevance? What kinds of reading would live or die?

“

Have you read the great political writers? De Toqueville? Machiavelli? Have you seen them indulge in facile indignation? Never. It’s by way of ironic formulations, by a certain arrangement of words that they make their feelings known.

…

…in politics, myths play a considerable role. And in times of serious adversity, but also in times of great happiness, truth is prosaic, unbearable.

…

It’s not enough to understand in order to excuse. You need understand and explain. That doesn’t mean that you fail to condemn people or issues. But I don’t like playing as if I am ‘universal conscience’.

”

Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur engagé,  Éditions de Fallois, 2004, p. 135 - 137, my transl.

In the opening chapter of Le Spectateur engagé, in what is basically a transcription of an extended television interview, the French political writer Raymond Aron explains why, during WWII, during his exile in London, he wrote articles attempting to understand the situation of the “traitorous” Vichy France, with which he empathized, but which he did not endorse. It was his act of the imagination that allowed him to understand that the majority of any nation is neither heroic nor evil. It’s Aron’s empathy that allows him, ironically, to analyze politics with a gimlet-eyed realism. To understand who people are, rather than whom you want them to be, you need what are basically novelistic modes of empathy.

What interests me is Aron’s insistence that style is not only symptomatic but reflective of a political vision that is empathetic and realistic, a vision that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of naivete and cynicism.

From my own experience, I can say that I feel both my analytical powers and my humanity falter when I lose myself to impassioned righteousness, adjective-strewn prose, and Manichean categories. What scares me is how severely this kind of indignation saps and seduces the heart and mind both at once.

It’s important to remember that Aron was one of the first French writers to warn against the civilization-threatening dangers of the National-Socialist movement in Germany, where the French writer lived and studied in his early 30s. In fact, many of the critics who impugned Aron’s “moderation,” were the same people who willfully ignored his calls to stem the rising tide of fascism in Germany.

This is why, both in myself and others, I look out for skewed processes of prioritization. For example: when we pay too much attention to the minor (but still valid) sins of domestic faction, while ignoring horrific tyrannies abroad. Passion doesn’t impede our ability to condemn abuses of power per se. What passion does, is distort our ability to rank in order of importance these abuses of power. And that distortion can be dangerous. I wish I myself fell prey to it less often.

Sometimes, I think the only thing that keeps my worst passions in check is an awareness of style. Which is to say, the style of writing, writing, reading, and observing. My stylistic weaknesses are often prelude to weaknesses in political understanding.

People like to use the word “nuance,” which comes from the Latin word for “clouds”. As in, you look up at the sky and notice the gradations from light to dark spread against the clouds. Maybe style is about noticing those gradations, and recording them with verve.

“This [Enlightenment] tradition of the novel is fundamentally secular – coincidence or human machinations, not God, order destinies. It is a form that is plural, forgiving, profoundly curious about other minds, about what it is to be someone else. On its central characters, high or low, rich or wretched, it manages, by a sort of divine authorial attention and focus, to confer respect on the individual.”


“Ian McEwan on winning the Jerusalem prize” in today’s Guardian.

superfluidity: Αἰγυπτίων οἱ λοιποὶ τὰ αὐτὰ φρονήσαντες...»

superfluidity:

News outlets are taking different stands on the spontaneity of the Egyptian protests, but most are describing it as a spontaneous surge of popular demand in the wake of events in Tunisia. In my mind, I’ve been comparing it to the Athenian revolution of 508/7 BC, a popular uprising behind the…

As always, Superfluidity provides telling context for the events at hand.