Beaton's memoirs of two years spent working in the oil sands mines in Alberta are artfully written and illustrated, yet strangely self-absorbed. SurroBeaton's memoirs of two years spent working in the oil sands mines in Alberta are artfully written and illustrated, yet strangely self-absorbed. Surrounded by trucks taller than four-story buildings tearing enormous pits out of the earth to extract oil and run it through city-sized mazes of pipes and machines, she hardly spares a few frames in this 400+ page book to say anything about that situation or its meaning. She says nothing about what they were all doing there, how it worked, how the camps were laid out, or even what oil sands mining is - the reader picks up on the degree to which this is all incidental to the story she wants to tell. Climate change is not mentioned at all until she half-heartedly waves the topic away in the afterword, and many of the relevant social and environmental impacts are ignored. And she never seems to see herself as a willing contributor to all of the things that the camps were, or to feel any concern about that. To that degree, I don't particularly feel like she takes responsibility for her life. Instead, she seems to see herself as part of an unfair system that left her with no choices.
I don't get it, honestly. What the book is overwhelmingly about is her experience as a woman in a camp filled almost entirely by men, and how it affected her to be the object of constant attention and harassment. This is of course a valid focus, but I found it a bit strange that this was apparently the only lens through which she was interested in viewing that time and place. It's not that she needed to turn her memoir into a treatise on climate change, but to simply leave out that whole side of it and the part she happily played in it created a work that strikes me as quite incomplete, from a narrative perspective. Like if you wrote a long book about the years you worked at a casino and literally said almost nothing about gambling. ...more
It's difficult to know how to assess this work - one can celebrate how honest, absorbing, and revealing it is, while at the same time recognizing thatIt's difficult to know how to assess this work - one can celebrate how honest, absorbing, and revealing it is, while at the same time recognizing that the way Davis treated himself and others was frequently genuinely horrifying. I think of the time, for example, that he freaked out and physically attacked a woman in an elevator in New York. Strung out and not knowing where he was, and started yelling "Bitch, what are you doing in my car?" at the terrified stranger. That's just one of countless cases.
I don't think he's going to win many humanitarian awards, but one quality he does possess is honesty, and that, for the reader, is a great virtue. I don't agree with him on many points, but I was grateful for his willingness to say exactly what he thinks. Solely for the opportunity to get so close to the life experience of a Black man in America who lived and worked in the second half of the the twentieth century, it was a fascinating read, and would have been worthwhile, even if he had been a construction worker, and not one of the greatest musicians and bandleaders of our age.
Davis describes himself as having a devilish energy, as a Gemini who embodies the forces of both light and darkness at the same time. I saw him as Faustian in Goethe's model - always changing, always striving, never looking back, always building, relentlessly indifferent to the often-destructive effects he had on people around him, such as his wives, girlfriends, and children.
For the jazz fan, it's clear that no book remotely like this will ever be written. By the time he was 19 years old, Davis was already working with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Bud Powell, and even a list of the musicians with whom he directly worked is like a who's who in the history of post-Swing jazz. They're all here - Mingus, Monk, Coltrane, Adderly, Philly Joe Jones, Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, Duke Ellington, John McLaughlin - the list goes on and on. And we get an unvarnished look, to put it mildly, at their personalities and behaviors. It's an incredible, precious, unforgettable, enthralling history of his life and times, and a vital and absolutely unique chronicle of the florescence of one of the world's great modern art forms.
The style of the book is conversational, clear, and off-the-cuff. Co-author Quincy Troupe clearly put in an enormous amount of work turning dozens or hundreds of hours of interviews and recordings into the well-ordered, highly-readable book that it is....more
Augustine's Confessions is a literary masterpiece of world-historical importance, to be sure. There is hardly a subsequent European Christian author fAugustine's Confessions is a literary masterpiece of world-historical importance, to be sure. There is hardly a subsequent European Christian author for whom his work did not loom as the very paradigm of how doctrine is to be approached, and how it is to illuminate one's individual life and reflection. It forms the acme of moral inventory and autobiographical reflection, and contributes mightily to the European concept of interiority and subjectivity which, in Charles Taylor's sense, provides one way of answering the question, what is the self?
I would not myself take it as an exposition of timeless truth, but I think the author himself would not have it be taken thus, fifteen hundred years after it was set down. Rather, I will follow his own proposed model and allow that what was good for certain people in certain remote ages is not necessarily what is good for us.
In my view, this book consists of three principle parts. The first is the autobiographical confession for which this book is principally known; the second is an allegorical interpretation of the beginning of Genesis influenced heavily by his reading of the Neoplatonists; the third is the mysterious conjunction of these two in a single work, which receives little explanation, and which, I think, is intended as a kind of koan, or an enigmatic and edifying puzzle, for the reader's contemplation. I will leave this last mystery to the reader's own imagination and take up the first two, briefly.
The story of Augustine's life is well-known - his growth from a precocious, well-educated youth to a Manichaean, his brief foray into Neoplatonism, and his subsequent conversion to Christianity. This journey is presented by the author as a kind of morality tale in which he gradually learns what he needs to learn in order to accept right doctrine, and here his encounter with Neoplatonism was decisive. Although he is clear that its abstract idiom left his compelling existential and soteriological concerns unaddressed, it nevertheless provided him conceptually with the tools he needed to conceive of spiritual matters in abstract terms. An illustration of this paradigm may be seen in his analysis of Genesis.
Here I must say that I fundamentally differ from Augustine's moral paradigm, which in my eyes is chiefly concerned with virtue, in the sense of coming to know what is the right thing to do, and doing that thing. My own moral idiom is fundamentally motivated by compassion and care for all beings.
Take, for example, the famous story of the pear tree, which Augustine uses as a case study in the depravity of his youth, and the nature of sin in general. As a boy, Augustine conspired with other youths to despoil a neighbor's pear tree, having no need of its fruit, and indeed having their own store of better-quality pears, but they delighted in the act of transgression itself.
Augustine unpacks this incident at some length and is disturbed by what he sees as the intrinsic compulsion for people to do wrong for its own sake, and to take a kind of delight in it. It is this "for its own sake" that characterizes his moral concern, while to me what is of even greater concern is the effect this act had on his neighbor, whose pears were robbed, and who may not have been able to easily bear their loss. But this does not occupy Augustine's reflection in the least - what matters to him is the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of the act itself.
I take a certain anthropological and psychological interest in walking down this road with Augustine, but I do not agree that whether or not we've got it is the most important thing. I suppose this is a question of whether one follows the Christ of the beatitudes, and take the injunction to love one's neighbor as one's self as pre-eminent, or one follows the Christ of Paul, who takes the assertion of the right creed as redemptive and thus of cardinal importance. For myself, I would rather be wrong and do my neighbor right than the opposite.
So I can only go so far along with Augustine in his agonized self-reflection, absorbed as it is with a question of right doctrine, and also convinced of the wickedness of man in a degree that in my mind debases the spiritual reality and potentiality of human life. I would not agree, for example, that a badly-behaved baby is acting sinfully, though for Augustine it is the manifest cruelty of infants that demonstrates the doctrine of original sin. For Augustine, behind every human error lies sin, and I do not see it that way.
As a philosopher, I naturally found Augustine's allegorical reading of Genesis rather exciting, though it may leave some readers confused. I was particularly fascinated by his analysis of time, his demonstration that it cannot mean what we normally take it to mean, and his use of that argument to demonstrate that the priority of various acts in the sequence of creation as presented in Genesis cannot be taken to mean a literal, temporal priority, but rather a logical or ontological priority. For God, for whom all time is equally "now," the act of creation is always, and creation is always created and sustained by the act of creation, which seems to our senses to be the play of time.
This is clearly one of the most important books in the late classical period, and of colossal importance for understanding the intellectual history of Latin Europe. Fortunately, it is highly readable and often engrossing....more
I'm sorry to report I didn't have a great experience re-reading this book for the first time from high school - this is obviously intended as no commeI'm sorry to report I didn't have a great experience re-reading this book for the first time from high school - this is obviously intended as no commentary on the importance of the book for the historical record, or the magnitude of the horrible tragedy that robbed us of this bright, precocious girl, and millions more.
This translation is very old. I remember finding its English stilted and difficult to relate to when I first read it in the 80s, and it's only more so now. Given how widely-read this book is, I believe pretty strongly it should be retranslated into idiomatic English. In addition, it includes almost no explanatory notes or historical commentary, which I think is simply a mistake.
Lastly, despite the high regard in which this book is held, I simply don't find it particularly illuminating. I suppose people respond to the prosaic nature of its occupations, but not much happens, to put it mildly. It illuminates the Holocaust only insofar as you make contact with the personal observations of one of its victims, but they are, after all, almost entirely confined to the context of living inside a crowded wooden box. ...more
An interesting but disjointed and exceedingly uneven presentation of reminiscences by Oliver Gogarty, most often remembered as the inspiration for JoyAn interesting but disjointed and exceedingly uneven presentation of reminiscences by Oliver Gogarty, most often remembered as the inspiration for Joyce's Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, but an intriguing figure in his own right. A brilliant and accomplished doctor, poet, and senator, Gogarty knew everyone on the Dublin scene, from Lord Dunsany to Lady Gregory, and famously escaped being shot by British soldiers in the 1916 uprising by jumping into the Liffey and swimming to escape.
This book is organized as a collection of topical vignettes in which he reflects on his encounters with various personages. Of chief interest to me is his self-defense against his presentation in Ulysses, which he entirely misunderstands. His extremely critical appraisal of Joyce's personality does have the ring of truth to it, however, and he excuses what Joyce would pillory as superciliousness in his character as his attempt to get the withdrawn and sullen genius to lighten up and stop being so Jesuitical about everything.
This book contains something for anyone interested in the period and milieu, though its wide and uneven range of concerns and the precious quality its prose will probably prevent most readers from calling it a classic. ...more