October 19 - November 1, 2008

The Wordy Shipmates
Sarah Vowell
2008, hardcover
14 cards

This is a book about the Puritans, the Separatists and the Non-Separatists, but since it is written by Sarah Vowell it is so much more than that. Vowell positions what took place in the early days of the United States alongside the current wars the United States wages. With her humor and cynicism and wading through history to dredge up the good stuff, her approach also demonstrates how one can fuse one's practice, with one's beliefs in ways that inform the current state of affairs rather than just recount. And the book starts with a drawing by Marcel Dzama. With the recent election we might not be Ronald Regan anymore (p. 62), but we'll see.

Since it is the month of the holiday known as Thanksgiving I point your attention to the following statement: "Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What if we didn't deserve it?" (p. 198) Maybe this year it should have been November 5.

Some excerpts:
1- "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed."
6- Middle East
-"Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife."
-"(Martin) Luther's point was that, according to scripture, salvation is not a bake sale..."
7- "Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves."
9- "hot Protestants" (Puritans)
11- The Humble Request, 1630- "Nothing uppity about us, Your Majesty, we're just hobos in the woods."
-Winthrop: "We shall be as a city upon a hill."
12- wrote their own books
-Ralph Waldo Emerson- "The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man."
13- "The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary."
14- Reverend Thomas Shepard Jr. to his son: "So I say to you read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it."
15- John Adams- "Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties..."
16- David McCullough
20- "check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago."
21- General Cornwallis [so that's why that road name near me comes from]
23- the Great Migration 1629-40
24-25- Massachusetts Bay Colony's official seal [Dzama's drawing]- "Indian says, 'Come over and help us!'"
-"The worldview behind that motto- we're here to help, whether you want our help or not- is the Massachusetts Puritans' most enduring bequest to the future United States. And like everything the Puritans believes, it is derived from scripture."
26- 1801 inaugural address by Thomas Jefferson argues for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations- entangling alliances with none."
30- germs- "The kingdom of death extended from Chile to Newfoundland..."- map at the National Museum of the American Indian
-Squanto- "spoke English because he had learned it in Europe after he was kidnapped by sailors. By the time he made his way back to America, everyone he knew was dead."
34- text at the museum next to the map- "That initial explosion of death is one of the greatest tragedies in human history because it was unintended and unavoidable, and even inevitable. But what happened in its wake was not."
45- MLK Jr. 1957- "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you 'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'"
54- John Adams- "The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed for the common good."
56- surveillance
59- Dolly Parton
-Winthrop's sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with."
-"And looking into the ways the sermon, or at least that one phrase in it [city on a hill] was used, throws open the American divide between action and words, between what we say we believe versus what we actually do."
62- "In the USA, we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues."
-"City on a hill, though- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizen of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we are Ronald Regan."
65- Reagan: "...and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here..."
69- Abu Ghraib
74- regularly scheduled voting
81- blank pages
82- ferkins- kilderkin
86- state house, Boston- "one of the oldest upholstered chairs made in New England."
91- plaques in Boston
108- "A cross, to a Puritan, is not a symbol of Christ- it is a symbol of the pope."
112- pamphlet fight!
118- Vacation Bible school- "It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier..."
119- lessons "be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in..."
127- "Williams's greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety."
128- "...Winthrop is Peter Seeger...Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport..."
129- Williams "a man who devotes his life to keeping government out of the church- not the other way around."
148- "...Rhode Island was purchased by love."
150- "Williams, like Melville, is a tad too excited, too lonely, too longwinded, too strange."
-Melville- paper mill- "endless supply of paper on which 'I should write a thousand-a million-billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you!"
157- "I'm an indoorsy urban woman..."
159- "most useful, or at least the most telling" Algonquin phrases Williams translates: "We understand no each other." "You trouble me."
171- pirate
196- Foxwoods
197- dioramas
198- "When's Thanksgiving?"
-"might be June 15, 1637"
-"Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What is we didn't deserve it?"
236-237- (magazine subscription card) "she is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss) or man hating harpy (Ms.)."
238- plaque text
239- "To get to his city you see her name."
248- JFK: "For of those to whom much is given, much is required."

August 27, 2008

"Circles"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

4 cards

Writers in the previous post's n+1 pamphlet mentioned wishing they had read Emerson earlier and hold him up alongside Nietzche, if not above. As I make my way through Emerson this year it seemed like the time to read "Circles" since it was mentioned by them. Emerson, of course, offers all one could hope and more in his reflection on and about circles.

Brief excerpts:

252- the eye

-"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning..."

-"Permanence is but a word of degrees."

253- "The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet..."

-"New arts destroy the old."

-"Everything looks permanent until its secret is known."

255- "Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations."

256- "Conversation is a game of circles."

257- "Good as is discourse, silence is better."

-"The field cannot be well seen from within the field."

-"Therefore we value the poet."

259- "'The worse things are, the better they are.'"

260- "I am only an experimenter."

261- "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

-"Life is a series of surprises."

-"The simplest words- we do not know what they mean expect when we love and aspire."

262- "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

-"'A man,' said Oliver Cromwell, 'never rises so high as when he knows now wither he is going.'"

August 26-27, 2008

n+1 Pamphlet Series #2

What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions

2007, paperback

14 cards

I was looking for another book when this and other treasures found me. Six books and three days later I found the book I was looking for in a place I never would have visited otherwise, but that's how the best living comes about. I've always held n+1 the magazine in high regard, but the quality and ideas shared within these two discussions are to be appreciated by any reader or anyone who teaches college students. The initial impetus for the conversations was reflection upon what writers and professors in their 30s mostly wish they would have read as undergraduates, as well as what they wish they hadn't and what they read too late. College freshmen can even get a free copy of this pamphlet by writing the email address on the back cover. It includes lists as well as discussions. Some of my reading this year was reflected in these discussions. I fully agree with the importance of reading Emerson, whom I have just begun to read this year. This is one of many of exquisite statements made, "No book is for you, until it is." Adding to the discussion on page 79, luckily I discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 17, if not 16.

Some selections:

-3- "Books we should have read earlier"- "For me, one thinker I should have read earlier is Foucault."

5- forming a self from reading

7- "books as enthusiasms"- "books that you are lucky enough to find when you are ready to find them."

11- "And what you can't do is ask a school to schedule your enthusiasms, exactly."

12-13- (students) "They pick up teachers and fall in love with them and then abandon them, throw them away like bits of trash or crumpled up paper. But this is what you have to do as a student....And the process is similar when you fall in love, and you want to read the books that the person you fall in love with most likes."

-"reading fiction is all about the tension between the book and you, and the book has to make you want to keep going. If it's assigned to you on a reading list, that tension disappears. So you're not really understanding the book, you're just reading it."

14- "poetry was the most important thing to happen to me in college"

15- periodicals club

18- "What I found that I couldn't very easily do was to sit at home and read Kant's Critique of Judgment, though I tried, and also I had no one to talk to about it."

20- "So books can speak to the world around you, but how are you going to get them to do this for you?"

21- "C.A. Bayly's Birth of the Modern World, which I don't agree with, but at least he'll give you a map. And hopefully then you'll start questioning that map..."

23- "The landscape of the future is completely blank."

27- "Because you're learning, you're being exposed to great things and discovering some sort of enthusiasm in yourself."

28- "...because time is limited in our lives...books that were read instead of other books"

32- "No book is for you, until it is."

-"I'm glad that I didn't encounter the Frankfurt School earlier because I know that I would have been doomed to be a Frankfurt School epigone."

60-61- Kierkegaard's Either/Or

63- "I went to graduate school to make up for undergrad."

64- "Nobody can get a proper undergraduate education. You'll never know in advance what that education should be. Regret is the feeling you have when you finally realize what the education is that you want. Right? And you're always going to come to that after it's too late."

66- Proust

67- "You move through your mistakes toward the absolute...Proust is another great author for regret- the purpose of all this retrospection is to redeem your regrets in whatever ways are possible."

68- "The world is not a text!"

71-72- "The books that one reads tend to take on a sort of naturalness within one's life, so they seem to come to you when you want them, and when you're ready for them. And so for me, the fact that we're on the verge of total civilizational collapse...next 50 or 60 or 70 at most years- makes me regret the lateness with which I've figured that out."

73- (being dazzled by a boy) "...part of what dazzled me was certainly my sense the he knew about things that I did not."

-"I didn't know at the time that you could have a crush on someone who seemed to embody things that you wanted to be yourself."

76- "...almost everyone in academia feels like an outsider, nobody knows what's going on. Academia's an empty vessel, but the ones who don't realize it end up going all the way and end up in charge."

78- "I could have discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 16, as opposed to 26, and you might say this is a minor matter, but it's a matter of style."

79- "What would have changed?"

-"I wouldn't have been such a stupid idiot, I think, and such a romantic and such a moralist. And maybe I wouldn't have married so early."

81- VU song "Sunday Morning"- theme of this symposium- "You wake up, it's Sunday, what have you done with your life, or week."

-"...Sunday's for doing nothing. But actually you know, Sunday is the day to move on from your regrets."

86- reading in a vacuum- useful framework

87- "your education shifts from this sheer accumulation of stuff, to a posing to yourself of certain fundamental questions, and then in certain ways life becomes very easy thereafter."

89- "many of our ideas about the world still seem to come from the field of classical economics- earth's resources are finite (not seemingly abundant as in classical times)

90- "Emerson instead of Nietzsche"

101- Emerson's Circles

114- advice to young people- keep a journal- read seriously- think about everything that happens

118- courage- remain open to things and serious about them

June 7, 2008

Art

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Library collection of essays, paperback

3 cards

Emerson covers a lot of ground and in this essay he discusses art and published in 1841. Here too he writes with wide-reaching impact. Even the last lines I've included capture what Pop art exposed.

Select lines:

275- "But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old."

-"Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision."

276- "The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and unhappiness and unproductive."

-"The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet."

-"The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of the object he contemplates."

277- "Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs."

278- "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not."

-(visiting the Vatican one can forget) "they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his own breast"

279- (Naples) "There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place...made all that traveling ridiculous as a treadmill."

-"All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are."

280- "But true art is never fixed, but always flowing."

282- "...instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and the road-side, in the shop and mill..."

June 5, 2008

Friendship

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Library essays edition, paperback

5 cards

This is the next essay for my reading group. Emerson of course has brilliant insights into friendship even though in a sense he seems to unravel them a bit on page 212. For those in search of dreams and fables, armed with sublime hope.

Select lines:

201- "The world uncertain comes and goes, the lover rooted stays."

-"We have a great deal more kindness that is ever spoken."

202-203- "Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend and it would be content and cheerful along for a thousand years."

203- "My friends have come to me unsought."

"A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep."

204- "Shall I not be as real as the things I see?"

205- "Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love..."

207- truth and thinking aloud

209- "It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery."

-"Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort."

-"an absolute running of two souls into one."

210- "Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue."

-"Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness..."

-"Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo."

-"Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought?"

211- "The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter."

-"We must be our own before we can be another's"

-"... the only way to have a friend is to be one."

212- "We walk along in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart....souls are not acting, enduring and daring, which can love us an we can love."

-"By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great."

213- "I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can fine them, but I seldom use them."

-"I will receive from them not what they have but what they are."

-"We will meet as though we met not and part as though we parted not."

214- "It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. but the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited."

"The essence of friendship is entireness..."