I walk into De Slegte in Maastricht regularly, I pass it on my way to the HEMA & am close when I go to the AH. This afternoon I walked out again with a well-filled plastic bag. Two cheap dvd’s with old horror-movies (Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains) (for the shared dvd-o-theque of F., my brother & me). The 1946 Modern Library edition of Ulysses. The 1969 hardback of Ida Gerhardts translation of Virgils Georgica that I read earlier this year & quite liked. Gilbert Sorrentino’s postmodern classic Mulligan Stew. In Amsterdam going to the public library every week prevents me from making these kind of acquisitions.

It seems that this year I’m also catching up on some Joyceana. First I read Alan McClellan’s Bloomsday, his theatre-adaptation of Ulysses — not sure if that was used for the movie at all. Nice enough to read, well, always nice to read a summary of Ulysses consisting of sentences from Ulysses.

Btw: I have never seen an English copy of this book, but the Dutch translation from the sixties can still be found in secondhand bookshops for a few euro’s.

Then I read Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper, his account of the first 20 years from his brother’s life. Very valuable, especially wrt the brother-theme in FW (Shem & Shaun) — tho’ ‘der Arno’ (Arno Schmidt) exaggerated the case when he made sense of FW almost solely on the basis of the battle between brothers. (Schimdt translated both Stanislaus’ diary & this book). And that Stanislaus was a ‘blockheaded’ guy. He never went back to Ireland, never had a nice word for religion. Exile, silence, cunning. Well, for Stanlislaus it was rather, exile, silence, stubborn honesty.

& now I’m reading Stephen Hero. A surprise — it is a much better book than I had anticipated (yet it has its weaknesses), and it is much more outspoken wrt Joyce’s views on Ireland, Irish politics, culture & literature.

In between I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I could repeat here what I wrote earlier this year on Jules Verne — good story-telling & flat, overly optimistic characters, together given a perfect perspective on early 20th century-views on progression, science, society… and how it could possibly go wrong. An exploration & extrapolation of that optimistic ideology, typical of a changing technological world. What should I read to get the same for this, 21st century? Toffler? Sterling? Wired-articles? Hollywood SF-movies? Neal Stephenson? Willam Gibson? I wouldn’t mind an European view… (an no, not that of Houllebecq).

Catching up on 18th century literature (if one can catch up with a century of literature…): finished Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau and Jacques le fataliste. Both in a Dutch translation.

I don’t know. Some people consider these 2 books by Diderot as favorites — because of the humour, the richness of ideas, hopping from one subject to another, because of the investigative attitude, the rationalism (not in a pejorative sense) for which nothing is holy. For the total negation of all ‘fundamentalism’ & dogmatism. But I don’t know. I admire these books, I read them with full interest — but sometimes I began to long for more thoroughness, less humourful wit. A theme or idea that is more fully represented, and not just dismissed after a while with a funny remark. Hmm, more, euhh, seriousness?

Just a personal remark re Diderot. As if it matters.

Could one draw a parallel between Diderot’s age (full of changes, also in the ‘writing industry’) & this internet age? A parallel between Diderot’s way of writing & style and the sort of wittyness that works in blogs? Writing in a conversational manner about anything that comes to mind — new music, theatre, acting, sincerity, politics, earning one’s living, metaphors, philosophers…

Hmm, maybe not.

(Maybe it’s just that Diderot doesn’t fit my sense of humour. My sense of humour tends to the banal — hence my love for Joyce?)

Currently reading: Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication. For background, but very interesting. Fills a lot of gaps in my knowledge wrt for instance late 18th & 19th century French philosophy, Saint-Simeonism, the development of traffic, railways, trade, the use of the figures of circulation & network in 18th & 19th century discourse (trade, politics, ‘communication…).

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/mattelart_invention.html

Review here (that is, if you or yr library has a subscription…):
http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/technology_and_culture/v040/40.3br_mattelart.html.

And at google-books:
http://books.google.com/books?=armand+mattelart+invention+of+communication.

Next thing to do here is listen to Steven Shaviro’s lecture at the Thinking Through Affect-conference http://affect.janvaneyck.nl. Shaviro blogs here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/.

Rob van Kranenburg is back to blogging: http://robvankranenburgs.wordpress.com/

That too much side-tracking. I’ll be off the field. Skimming trough & beginning to read Sincerity and Authenticy I conclude that this summary, taken from an anonymous review at Amazon, is all I need to know now: “Trilling draws a fine but deep distinction between two conceptions of selfhood. Sincerity, or being true to yourself with an eye to being true to others, was the dominant concern of Renaissance and early modern thought and literature, from Shakespeare to Rousseau. Beginning with Wordsworth, gaining momentum throughout the 19th century, and finally emerging with full force in the 20th, though, there is a new, more morally demanding ideal of being what or who one is, apart from all external conditions.” Just now I’m no so interested in reading an essay about Rousseau and Moliere, touching on Hegel too.

Trilling’s books are not in the library, and not at google.books. But there’s someone who’s gone through the effort of making a part available: http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Trilling/index.htm. Much obliged.

Yesterday I took part in the first discussion of the Reading Department: http://www.reading.department.cc/. Using Skype for a collective chat — reading through Agamben’s text We Refugees. I had to log off at 21.30, at a moment when some interesting issues where coming up — a beginning of a critique of Agamben.

Well, that is what I am interested in, a critique of Agamben. (His texts are beautiful anyway). In order to to entangle both the fascination and the sense of unease with Agambens way of reasoning and doing philosophy. Or trying to do that. Something — I ‘feel’ — is not ‘right’ with Agamben, yet his analysis seems to be very precise and thorough, and to the point.

Taking up Dewey: maybe the problem lies in that Agamben, does use examples from experience, uses practical, political situations, but in the end relegates everything to the realm of ideas and ideals — and leaves it there. A realm of “Anschauung”… the spectator view of knowledge…

But I have to add a big question mark here.

— Then I stumble on this, in the statement of the Reading Department: “Can theory compete with an ongoing war? And what kind of implications bears the “distance of theory”?”

Is that the problem? Theory is not distant, should not be distant. Theory comes from and applies to the world of experience. Of course there are different layers of involvement, entanglement — but the realm of ideas and concepts is not seperate from dirty life. Distance is not the same as separation, but at some point distance becomes separation in practice.

Anyway. Maybe my conclusions are too eeeazy.

“I used formerly, (he added,) when sleepless in bed, to read like a Turk.”

That might be Dr. Johnsons most famous quote…

Earlier in Boswell’s Life of Johnson we learn that Johnson read a lot, read fast, read without any system, read anything that took his fancy, and considered this the best way to acquire knowledge. Also he considered reading books a better way to learn than listening to lectures. In this sense Johnson is the perfect example of a ‘new world’ of learning & acquiring knowledge.

“[W]e may be absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges on this subject, once observed to me that ‘Johnson knew more books than any man alive.’ He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote.”

“Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON. ‘I have looked into it.’ ‘What, (said Elphinston,) have you not read it through?’ Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do YOU read books THROUGH?'”

“A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?”

“He then took occasion to enlarge on the advantages of reading, and combated the idle superficial notion, that knowledge enough may be acquired in conversation. ‘The foundation (said he,) must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life. In conversation you never get a system. What is said upon a subject is to be gathered from a hundred people. The parts of a truth, which a man gets thus, are at such a distance from each other that he never attains to a full view.'”

“‘Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours in a day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge.'”

Add to this that Johnson wrote for money, wrote extremely fast, often did not edit, rewrite, yes, often did not reread what he wrote and published.

“He told us, ‘almost all his Ramblers were written just as they were wanted for the press; that he sent a certain portion of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remainder, while the former part of it was printing. When it was wanted, and he had fairly sat down to it, he was sure it would be done.'”

“When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.'”

All quotes from James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, 1791, electronic version: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1564.

(I read this edition: … edited & abridged by Christopher Hibbert, Penguin English Library, Harmondsworth, 1979).

In issue 74 of The Idler he defends enjoying the flow of reading, and argues against marking passages or copying fragments in notebooks:

“It is the practice of many readers to note, in the margin of their books, the most important passages, the strongest arguments, or the brightest sentiments. Thus they load their minds with superfluous attention, repress the vehemence of curiosity by useless deliberation, and by frequent interruption break the current of narration or the chain of reason, and at last close the volume, and forget the passages and marks together.”

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idler