A New Biography of Thomas Hardy

I passed by Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin today as I was wandering around the book store. I knew it was the cover review of this week’s New York Times Book Review but I had not yet read the review so I didn’t pick up this new biography. I read the review when I came back home. The review is positive and Tomalin even presents an intriguing view of Hardy’s later poems, those he wrote after the death of his first wife. Now, I am not particularly appreciative of Hardy’s poems, taking the lead from Marian who read through them whilst earning her BA in literature. But Tomalin’s advocacy of his Emma poems (Emma was his first wife) leads the reviewer to ponder a “tentative reconsideration”.

To say that Hardy was a solitary and morose figure is to gloss over the depths of his dismal view of the world he lived in. He wrote a letter of condolence to Henry Rider Haggard upon the death of Haggard’s 10 year-old son. Hardy’s condolence was

To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.

Well, ok then.

This moroseness informs his novels, of course, filled as they are with fateful suffering and assured failure. Even Tomalin, who lives with Hardy through 486 pages says reading Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure

is like being hit in the face over and over again…It was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress.

Despite such modern evaluations of his work (contemporary criticism focused more on Hardy’s frank approach to his characters’ frailties) Hardy though of himself as an evolutionary meliorist. I suppose so. A meliorist thinks the world can be improved through human action. An evolutionary meliorist thinks that the worst of human suffering must first be experienced before improvements can be considered. Well, yes, this certainly sounds like Hardy.

The review of Tomalin’s book is positive but quite so laudatory as the Guardian’s review last fall. Here is a sample of the Guardian’s tone. On the bye and bye, the observations here are echoed in the NYT Book Review piece.

Tomalin’s fine, fresh handling of Hardy’s poetry breathes through the whole book. She refers to more than 100 individual poems, and quotes stanzas from nearly 60. Her little nudges of commentary are wonderful. She spotlights key phrases: “the original air-blue gown [from "The Voice"] lifts and lights the whole poem”.

She is never trapped into tedious identity-hunting – who was that girl? – the bane of much previous Hardy scholarship. She sees how the bitter or gloomy conclusions of so many poems have a musicality that lifts them towards something transcendent. The reader can go back to the beginning, and “call up the delight again”.

In any case I’ll have to tromp back to B&N to buy the book whilst averting my eyes from offending stickers obscuring names and titles.

1-30, Tuesday

I ended up sleeping until 9 this morning. Sleep deficit from the night before, I guess. Went to Panera for a Sierra Turkey sandwich and my usual 3 diet cokes with lemon. I can’t decide which is better — the sandwich or the diet coke.

Witness to Birth of a Nation.

Also bought a new vacuum cleaner today at Sears. Consumer Reports really liked the Kenmore (Sears) Progressive 25615 so I drove over to Sears and bought myself one. It looks like this: They also had an orange version that was particularly ugly. Replaces an aging and really loud vacuum cleaner. It was so loud I thought about some sort of ear protection.

The State of Brand-Name Bookstores

I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up the latest Paul Auster novel, Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel . While there I wandered through the store to see what was new. Depressed I was after my tour. Replacing the new book tables near the front are tables with featured themes such as nutrition, self-help, books on whatever holiday is upcoming. Worse than that is how they handle books. My own pet peeve is placing stickers over book titles or author names. Both the books I bought are excellent examples: Do you know the author’s name is Auster if you were not already familiar with the name? Can you read the title of the Grimes book?

Goes downhill from here. Hiking back to the Philosophy section, located next to the Tarot Cards and across the aisle from Eastern Mysticism. Books in this section have the coherence of books ordered but never picked up. Four different versions of Plato’s basic works, a single copy of Durant’s History of Philosophy, dozens of books on ethics, a bunch of summary books with titles such as Philosophy for Dummies, Philosophy Simplified, A Short History of Philosophy. Otherwise a smattering of schools, periods, explainers.

Travelling even farther back into the bowels of the bookstore I stumble across the Poetry section, occupying the same spot on the southwest corner of the building as does Art Techniques section does on the northwest corner of the building. The usual depressing panoply of collections and compilations. Harmon’s 500 Best Poems and his 100 Top Poems for those too busy to go through all 500. Oddly, for a population that reads so little poetry, this section had a bunch of poetry anthologies. Multi-volume sets costing $35-$40 per set such as the Norton Anthology, the Oxford Book of American Poetry, the University of California anthology. Each set has thousands of poems by hundreds of poets. And what about Dante’s Divine Comedy? I found three editions of all three canticas in a single volume plus three sets of each cantica. AND another edition of each cantica, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso illustrated. Is there such an overwhelming interest in the Renaissance, in the medieval view of the after-life. Certainly not represented by the number of serious students in the English classes I took.

Why would a bookstore attracting so few poetry readers that it exiles poetry to that little place next to the fire exit then stock the shelves with huge poetry compilations? Is it the same idea as they have about philosophy, that no one will actually read an entire book by one philosopher so we put histories and explanations out there? In poetry we stock the shelves with 20 pound anthologies because no one is so interested they will buy an entire book of poetry by a single poet.

I know the rise of chain bookstores is inevitable and irreversible but I am still dismayed by the slow extinction of the independent bookstore.

My daily rant is over for tonight.

1-29, Monday

A cold day. I really have to stop complaining about warm winters. Temps barely made it to 50 here. Elsewhere that is a fine spring day but here it is the depths of winter.

Marian was sick most of Sunday night so neither of us got a lot of sleep. She stayed home today suffering through waves of nausea. I worked on my Dreamweaver knowledge and worried about her. I’m also putting together a number of Blue Ridge photos to print and frame for her new office. They were supposed to move in last fall (they’ve been ready to move for three-quarters of a year now) but the usual bureaucratic snafus, lost budget items, paperwork shuffled to the wrong desk, all conspiring against efficiency.

Program on Milton Friedman

I watched a particularly uncritical encomium of Milton Friedman last night. The Power of Choice. Mostly the PBS feature was positive with only a very short section by his primary economic nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith. The program credited Friedman with the market revolutions of the Indian, Chinese and Estonian economies and the abolishment of the military draft. The New York Times review of this program suggests that it is reductive in its praise of Friedman.

Certainly, Friedman was a giant, (he even has his own globally recognized Milton Friedman Day)

but this program seemed excessive in its praise of Friedman’s influence outside the U.S. and offered no real criticism of Friedman’s ideas or the public policies arising from his ideas. A good full-blooded assessment of Friedman can be found in the current issue of The New York Review of Books by the New York Times columnist and Princeton economist, Paul Krugman. He writes that

Friedman’s laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries’ governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Exactly. In the California debacle Krugman mentions above, Enron becomes the worst-case-scenario example of market capitalism abetting criminal manipulation further aided by hostility to criticism of market capitalism.

Perhaps that is what lies behind PBS’s reluctance to honestly discuss the full impact of Friedman’s ideas. Krugman’s final paragraph does a much better job of summarizing Friedman and the impact of the public implementation of his ideas (called Friedmanism by Krugman):

In the long run, great men are remembered for their strengths, not their weaknesses, and Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived. But there’s a good case for arguing that Friedmanism, in the end, went too far, both as a doctrine and in its practical applications. When Friedman was beginning his career as a public intellectual, the times were ripe for a counterreformation against Keynesianism and all that went with it. But what the world needs now, I’d argue, is a counter-counterreformation.

1-28, Sunday

Cool today but with clearing skies so by evening the air was clear and bright. We are warned that we will spend 5 hours below freezing tonight. I recall a Pittsburgh weather guy saying that the high one day of 26 degrees added up to a brisk day. Meanwhile here the forecasters are suggesting people break out their heavy coats.

Here even dogs wear jackets on chilly days.

Netflix Movie This Week

We watched Crash this afternoon. Academy Award winner for best picture in 2005 and features an all-star crash cast. [I corrected this on rereading the post.  A humorous mistyping, I must say.]  Made on a shoestring budget it brought its producers back six times its production costs. Many of my acquaintances suggested I watch this movie because they thought I would think it an anodyne to my liberal predilections.

Nevertheless, we saw the movie as a little too neat, the rough edges smoothed a little too effectively. Everyone learns a lesson about their prejudices, people go through little vignettes to illustrate either their complexity as humans or the foolishness of their prejudices. The nine (about) characters all present hostility toward another ethnic or racial group only to be taught a lesson about that hostility by the end of the movie. Ho-hum.

The clockwork design of the plot elements reminds me of the Final Destination series of movies. In each of the three movies we see a character cheat death. This evasion of fate sets the narrative cogs in motion where fate finds each of these characters through a sort of Rube Goldberg machine series of contingent events leading to their death in odd circumstances.

We can add, now, to the declaration of a too buttoned-up story a number of borrowed features:

• a circular narrative design, borrowed from Pulp Fiction and from Joyce’s Ulysses design of a 250,000-word book taking place in a single day .
• hyper-articulate bad guys who discuss post-modern topics immediately preceding their perpetrating thuggish, violent acts, borrowed from Pulp Fiction.
• the Final Destination-type clockwork plot turns.

I agree with A. O. Scott’s review in the New York Times criticizing these simplistic lessons taught to these characters. Scott writes that

these bromides count as insights may say more about the state of the American civic conversation than about Mr. Haggis’s limitations as a storyteller, and there is no doubt that he is trying to dig into the unhappiness and antagonism that often simmer below the placid surface of everyday life.

Manipulative instead of subtle, programmed instead of plotted.

In Winter, by Michael Ryan

Well, finally the weather is becoming a bit winterish, so a winter poem is appropriate here. Michael Ryan is an established poet (that is, he has found a way of writing poetry and finding a paying job associated with writing poetry) and this poem is from his second book titled, aptly enough, In Winter.

It is a good poem. Ryan evokes the darkness of winter and three “gray” women, reminding the writer of his own relationship with an unnamed woman. Her thinking of a winter scene as “lovely”, the way her body responds to nice thoughts. And the light of winter, hardly welcoming, evoking a memory of the light during their relationship. Winter light is bleak, dull, gray, like the women he sees at the beginning of the poem. The relationship has the gray and bleak character of winter, so it is no wonder that their relationship is composed of “mistake after mistake after mistake.”

In Winter

by Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

1-25 Through 1-27, Thursday Through Saturday

Well, OK, I haven’t updated my blog since Wednesday. I must include updating as part of my regular routine regardless of how tired I am. I know, poor Richard is tired at the end of his day in retirement. Worthy of pity, certainly.

Thursday

Movie I Saw on Thursday

Cool again today. I spent much of the morning just reading but decided to see Letters from Iwo Jima this afternoon. Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers. Both movies are about the battle of Iwo Jima where only 1,000 of 22,000 Japanese soldiers survived and nearly 10% of the invading Marines died. While Flags is the traditional Hollywood war movie Letters uses letters home from Japanese soldiers as a narrative source. It focuses on two officers and two enlisted Japanese soldiers and their own experience at Iwo Jima. Aside from a fine, realistic portrayal of men at war — both the terror and the boredom — it extends its focus to the other side of the war. Both sides are made up of real people with mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and wives and children.

One scene shows an English-speaking Japanese officer reading a letter he finds on an American soldier who died after the officer attempted to save him. He reads the letter aloud to everyone in his squad. It is a letter from the dead soldiers mom who asks him to be careful, that she misses him and prays for his safe return, to do right because we must always do right. It is a moment where everyone in that place realizes that they are fighting men just like them. I make it sound a little trivial but really, watching it on the screen really is quite affecting.

Wolfgang Puck’s for Lunch

Before the movie I went to Wolfgang Puck for lunch. Butternut squash soup and a chicken caesar salad. I sat at the bar to avoid a line of septauganerians I know, I know, I’ll be there soon too) and couldn’t help but notice a dirty glass from the night before (the place had just opened) and a green bean that looked — how shall I say this? — old. Tell-tale signs of a not altogether focused staff. After my lunch (OK but not up to the reputation of Puck) I discovered a bathroom trash can not emptied from the night before. Perhaps the staff believes their clientele (your average Disney visitor) is not worthy of their complete attention.

Friday

Looking at Google Map I found an old unused airfield to the east of Orlando. Since I like driving through undeveloped Florida, as small as that area may be getting. So I drove east on 528 for about 20 miles and got off on Dallas Road Turning south I anticipated driving through dry pastures and toward the Eckonlockhatchee River Swamp. Alas, the road is gated by some mineral mining company so I turned north instead into a housing development stuck out in the middle of old pastureland. On that same Google map if you look north of 528 you can see the development grid.

Very odd, this subdivision of acre-size lots and homes miles from anywhere. But if you work in Orlando and crave country life then you have a fairly short commute in mileage although I imagine the traffic is pretty horrible.

This picture of an intersection in this development shows how empty it is.

I thought I’d try that closed road from the south side and made my way to Nova Road about 10 miles south of 528. No luck. A gate locked with no fewer than 10 heavy locks. This is the view from the south side.

A few mobile homes up the road but no access. So much of what is left of old Florida is private land cut off from any public access.

I drove west on Nova Road back toward St. Cloud. At first the landscape was fairly empty — pastures, fences, an occasional building. Scenes like this

As I moved back toward civilization the empty spaces began to fill up with those services people always need, from barbershops to auto garages to ethnic bakeries to pawn shops featuring guns and ammo or gold and ammo.

Eventually, as I got into St Cloud the nightmare and congestion of strip development

I did turn off the main road toward the Kissimmee waterfront. Oddly enough, compared to the noise, congestion, the 30-car backup at every light, the waterfront was virtually empty, almost bucolic. It was quiet enough that birds rested contently on pier supports.

I did make one more detour before making it back to the hotel. Amongst the ridiculous piling up of people, cars, and buildings was this quiet enclave next to a lake called New Eden, with street names like Adam Lane, Eve Road, Salvation Place.

I don’t know if the residents settled this place were especially religious or if the developer was just using names not used elsewhere but it is a lovely little respite from what lies beyond this little development. I especially liked the understatement of this sign:

This little development has dirt roads and lovely little canals:

Movie We Saw on Friday 

When Marian finished her day we were going to go to an Irish pub over at Disney’s Pleasure Island but saw that the theater there was showing Volver, only 20 minutes from the time we walked by it. So we delayed our Irish dinner and went to the movie. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, it is quite a tale about a family of women betrayed in the most intimate ways by their men and how they dealt with those betrayals. It is a movie about complicated relationships that continuously rotate between good and bad. It is about a community of women who recognize a kinship circumscribed both by family ties and by their societal definition. We both liked Penelope Cruz here much more than in English-language movies. She seemed much more at home here and really quite good, as if not having to concentrate on her English pronunciation allowed her to focus on her acting.

After the movie we went to Raglan Road pub where Marian had the chicken pie and I had the shepherds pie. Along with a Smithwicks and Irish music playing in the background we found our dinner to be a pleasant if somewhat Disney version of an Irish pub dinner.

Saturday

I went with Marian to a presentation on using Powerpoint with special ed students and then we made our way back home. All uneventful.

1-24, Wednesday

Orlando

Well, we came over to Orlando today with threatening skies and cool temps. I didn’t bring my bathing suit (actually, I don’t have a bathing suit) but I was hoping for bathwater temps. Instead it was in the 50’s and forcasts for high 30’s Thursday night. Wasn’t I just complaining about how warm it was?

El dios está mirando.

Here is a local television station webcam of the delightful winter tropical conditions we are witnessing. This is a live link but when I posted it skies were low and grey, water droplets on the camera lens, a generally gloomy scene not conducive to joyous touristing:

Actually, this shot is of Thursday morning but you get the idea.

Marian and her two colleagues and I had a delightful dinner at CAFÉ TU TU TANGO last night on I Drive. No this is not a road created by Steve Jobs, but rather International Drive, home of some of the kitschiest tourist sights one might imagine. But the food — a series of appetizers — is excellent and the company was stimulating. And nine college degrees amongst the four of us, Richard notes with a supreme sense of elitism.
Books I’ve Just Finished

Children of Men by P.D. James is a good read. The book certainly is not much like the movie by the same name. I very much liked the movie but the writer and director added a lot of content and characters to heighten conflict and allow the movie to make some pretty direct comments on American foreign policy. In the book there is no Michael Caine character, no hard-hearted advocates ready to kill to save, no immigrant camps. The sense of a police state is much less overt in the book than in the movie. James focuses on the characters rather than on George Bush. Now President Bush isn’t in the movie but his policies and policy outcomes heavily weigh on the movie’s details and mood.

The book is typical James: not particularly fast-paced, somewhat lugubrious, with an inner dialogue I did not anticipate in a movie so dependent on external conditions. James concerns herself with the moral choices made by her characters but the situations in which they occur are extreme, rendering them a little less human than I would have liked. It is usually pretty clearcut which choice to make when the alternatives are jumping off a cliff or stepping back from the edge. It is not a particularly subtle book, but her readers don’t buy her books for their subtle mood.

She does a good job, I think,  describing a world with no future and no children.  Adults baptizing dolls because there are no more children, the last generation of young men and women out of control, violent, murderous.  A country becoming a police state as government must carefully conserve resources. After all, there is no succeeding generation to operate the generating stations, the water treatment plants, to generate wealth on which a country runs.