Poe vs. Gibbon

Poe also mocks the following sentence by Gibbon (emphasis added by Poe himself):

“The Life of Julian, by the Abbé de la Breterie, first introduced me to the man and to the times, and I should be glad to recover my first essay on the truth of the miracle which stopped the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem.”

Poe remarks: “This laughable Gibbonism is still a great favourite with the stelle minores of our literature.”

I do think Gibbon is a great English stylist, though elsewhere in this review Poe hits the nail on the head– the massive scope of Gibbon’s subject means that he has to cram lots of indirect allusion into every sentence. Poe chooses a very good example of a single sentence about Britain from the opening pages of Gibbon’s work:

“The proximity of its situation to that of Gaul, seemed to invite their arms; the pleasing, although doubtful, intelligence of a pearl-fishery, attracted their avarice; and, as Britain was viewed in the light of a distant and insulated world, the conquest scarcely formed any exception to the general system of continental measures; after a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke.”

Poe neglects to mention that Gibbon augments this passage with at least two footnotes. In one of these notes he explains that Julius Caesar was the one who heard of the supposed British pearl-fishery, which turned out to be worthless because the pearls were too dark. In another he gives us a key by saying that the stupid emperor was Claudius, the dissolute one was Nero, and the timid emperor was Domitian. But this assistance via footnote only proves Poe’s point that indirectness often leads to a sort of florid pedantry. Though I wouldn’t want to write like that, I wouldn’t mind writing a bit more like it.

As Poe brilliantly and charitably puts it:

“The immense theme of the decline and fall required precisely the kind of sentence which [Gibbon] habitually employed. A world of essential, or at least of valuable, information or remark, had either to be omitted altogether, or collaterally introduced. In his endeavours thus to crowd in his vast stores of research, much of the artificial will, of course, be apparent; yet I cannot see that any other method would have answered as well.”

Poe vs. Voltaire

Poe is too seldom discussed as a literary critic, but he’s one of my favorites. Here’s an amusing couple of lines, all the funnier since they are a standalone observation, not an excerpt from a longer passage:

“Voltaire betrays, on many occasions, an almost incredible ignorance of antiquity and its affairs. One of his saddest blunders is that of assigning the Canary Islands to the Roman empire.”

This is one of those indirect amusements that, in my view, make up the heart of comedy. The amusement of reading this passage is different and more intense from what the feeling would be if reading Voltaire himself and coming across that passage. It is Poe’s attitude to the supposed blunder that amuses us, more than the blunder itself (and Volatire actually has a case, since Juba’s dealings in the Canaries might be considered Roman deeds given his relations with Augustus.)

Godzilla/Mothra highlights

Most of the YouTube clips of the Godzilla/Mothra fights are spoiled by homespun pop and heavy metal soundtracks idiotically added to the footage. But here’s a raw Japanese preview of the film at a length of about 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

On one level the Japanese monster films are kiddie entertainment, but I’ve always found Godzilla and his fights to be rather potent on a mythical level, perhaps in part due to the atomic bomb connection that so many have discussed. And that strange sound that Godzilla makes is so ambivalent– on one level it gives you the chills, but on another it makes some part of your brain feel that the human race is protected (perhaps illusorily so; I’m just talking about the psychological effect of the sound).

Another factor is that many of us (at least Americans of my generation) watched Godzilla films most heavily very late at night in early childhood, which is perhaps the most impressionable circumstance in our lifetimes. To be a child at 1 AM is to be in a pretty strange place that is never really replicated again at a later age, when the entire clock is sometimes required as a normal work zone. For adults the middle of the night loses that quasi-forbidden status in which myth works most readily on the mind.

In the 1970’s there was obviously no YouTube, nor were there even video rental places for anything but porn (and hardly anyone owned a VCR anyway). Also no cable TV then, at least not in Iowa. So you had to watch specific Godzilla films whenever it pleased the fancy of the local CBS or NBC or ABC affiliate to broadcast them. They were like gifts from the gods, tied down to a certain night and time, and this only added to their mythical power. “Monster Island is being shown on Saturday at midnight!” “Really? Can I spend the night at your place and we’ll watch it?” I recall conversations like this with my cousins.

One of these days I need to watch Godzilla films throughout the night again. It’s been well over 30 years since I did that.

some Heidegger to look forward to

Although many of the recent releases from the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe are bottom-of-the-barrel material that would never have been published if someone else had written them, I’m greatly looking forward to ordering and reading the Heidegger-Rudolf Bultmann Correspondence, published not long ago.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect Heidegger to be a top-notch letter writer, but he is. The letters to his wife are gems even in their coldest moments, and I also like the exchange with Heinrich Rickert.

The correspondence with Elisabeth Blochmann probably puts Heidegger in the worst light, while the exchange with Imma von Bodmershof (ex-fiancée of the deceased Hölderlin scholar Norbert von Hellingrath) tends to degenerate into affected Hellingrath worship.

Mothra is freaking me out

Even more disturbing than the film is the WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON MOTHRA.

The sheer amount of information available on what I had regarded as a fringe cinematic monster is a bit overwhelming. The photo is weird, as is the disturbingly detailed description of the color patterns on Mothra’s egg.

This opening paragraph bothers me a bit too, for some reason:

“Generally regarded as female by English-speaking audiences, she is a giant lepidopteran with characteristics both of butterflies and of moths. The name ‘Mothr'” is the suffixation of ‘-ra’ (a common last syllable in kaiju names, viz. Hedo-rah, Ghido-rah, Ebi-rah, Godzi-rah) to ‘moth’; since the Japanese language does not have dental fricatives, it is approximated ‘Mosura’ in Japanese. In the American dubbing of Mothra vs. Godzilla, Mothra is also referred to as the Thing. She is occasionally an ally to Godzilla but more often than not engages in conflict with the King of Monsters due to his anger toward the human race.”

Also fairly disturbing is that the song of those really weird fairy girls in the film was originally composed in Malay! Don’t ask me why.

Nor is the existence of the song itself especially reassuring:

Hanba hanbamuyan
(Hamba hambamu yang)
Randa banunradan Tounjukanraa
((Ter)landa bangunlah dan Tunjukkanlah)
Kasaku yaanmu
(Kesaktianmu)

Mothra O Mothra
If we were to call for help
With your mother’s might
Over time
Answer our prayer
Over sea
Your servants
Like a wave you’d come
Overcome, rise and show
Our guardian angel!
Your Power!!

good magazine article

If you have a half hour to kill, try THIS FASCINATING ARTICLE from the new issue of The Atlantic.

It discusses a long-term (“longitudinal”) study of a large group of male Harvard undergrads from the 1940’s, who have been studied intensively throughout their lifetimes in an attempt to study the sources of human happiness. John F. Kennedy was part of the study, it has been revealed, but his records have been sealed until 2040. It sounds as though other celebrities emerged from the group as well.

The article doesn’t really answer the question as to what the sources of human happiness are, but there are a few interesting practical nuggets.

Also, I like what the study says about how misleading a personality can be at one particular age. We all know this is true. At age 17, the teachers’ pets may be destined for dull mediocrity while the troubled rebels may be the ones with the really deep intellectual life, one that simply hasn’t found its voice yet. The same for emotional life… The apparently well-adjusted undergraduate might just be a conformist suck-up, while the more problematic character may simply need longer to develop what is actually a richer and subtler character. Oppenheimer is a textbook case of someone who presented many misleading faces at an earlier age, and who ended up something completely different from what one might have expected.

This plays right into my ontology, of course, since it points to the utter superficiality of tangible surface qualities. There may in fact be no way to figure out what people have inside at age 17 or age 20 or in some cases even age 30. The character is a certain “style” that, before maturity, hasn’t yet adopted a typical and recognizable language.

Schopenhauer also famously mentions that everyone should try to live to at least age 60, because by then the surface distortions have largely worn away and you begin to have some idea of what sorts of people you’ve been dealing with all this time. I’m still pretty far from 60, but have already experienced plenty of surprises when hearing about high school and college friends. Paths of development have not always gone as expected.

weirdest link to this blog

My post on Mothra has ended up with all the film news on IFC.COM.

another point on memory

I’ve also been catching up (on Facebook) with a good friend from high school. In 1988 we both spent the summer working at a Lake Erie resort near Cleveland, and we’ve been trading stories from that period– there are literally hundreds of hilarious things that happened that summer (I make an oblique tongue-in-cheek reference to that fact in Tool-Being; some might remember the passage, but look in the index for Stonewall Jackson if you don’t remember– same paragraph as Stonewall).

In any case, during this dicussion my friend and I have both had occasion to say: “I forgot about that!”

This is one of my favorite phrases to think about. Because on the one hand, when you say “I forgot about that!” it’s not strictly speaking true, because if you had really forgotten about it then your friend wouldn’t be capable of reminding you of it. And on the other hand, a literal reading of this phrase could imply that anything not currently in your mind is something that you’ve forgotten.

And yet, that’s not what we mean when we use the phrase, which would be a good candidate for phenomenological analysis. When someone tells us something that makes us say “I forgot about that!”, what we seem to mean is that we had lost free, independent access to that memory. If I had been daydreaming about the summer of 1988 and its gallery of wild human characters, I would never have remembered incident X if my friend had never reminded me of it.

Some of the stories he’s told me are ones that I fully remembered by myself, even if I hadn’t thought of them in many years. Those stories are more of a “sharing between old friends” sort of experience. But then there is another class of stories where the relationship is asymmetrical, because one of the friends is dependent on the other one for triggering the memory. It feels like a wall is being broken down in your brain, and a sense of shock or surprise occurs. You suddenly recall that, yes, that did happen. But it feels a bit cloudy at first, because someone else is guiding you through it.

In fact, a geographical metaphor is probably the most appropriate one. I know Zamalek pretty well, and can of course wander freely through it by myself. But once in awhile someone shows me something new, or I enter a house I have never entered before. A few days ago, some out-of-town visitors (readers of my books) wanted me to come over to the President Hotel to meet them for breakfast. It’s about a 7-minute walk from my place, and I’ve been into the hotel countless times for various reasons. But never before did I have reason to eat breakfast there, and the 10th floor view of Zamalek was stunning.

I mention this because the new breakfast view from the hotel had a similar feel to the “I forgot about that!” scenario. Both refer to situations that are not entirely strange, but somehow out of our normal space of free imaginative access. Both feel slightly shocking– like being punched, or tripping and falling on the sidewalk.