Sally Rooney: 'Conversations with Friends' (2017)

Finished Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends (London, New York: Hogarth, 2017; originally published by Faber & Faber, 2017) and Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018) back-to-back. At the conclusion of the latter, my mind remained absorbed with it throughout the night. Both novels look closely at -- feel closely -- the intricate workings of social relationships.  

In Conversations with Friends, the main characters are Frances, Bobbi Connolly, Nick and Melissa. Other characters include Philip; Frances' divorced parents; Evelyn; Derek and Marianne. Much of the action takes place in Ireland, but not all of it. 

In the swirl of her intense relationships with Bobbi and Nick, Frances sometimes recoils. "I was a very autonomous and independent person," she tells herself, and her readers, "with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived." (page 275)

Sometimes Frances seems to be Waiting for Godot. "Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen . . . Things went on." (page 276)

Bobbi is sharp, "an active listener" (page 289) and engaged thinker/doer: "Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister [there are no quotation marks to delineate dialogue]. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? (page 291) . . . Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that's outside our control. You know?" (page 292). 

Exactly! Who, indeed? Rooney makes her writing seem simple, and maybe it is. But as in war, in writing even the simplest things are complex (see Marie and Carl von Clausewitz).

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. 'Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life' (2016), Part I

Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Translated by Heather Cleary. New York: Penguin, 2016. Originally published as Ikigai: Los secretos de Japón para una vida larga y feliz (Medicinas complementarias). Urano, 2016.

I love books that delve into philosophies of life. This is another in a slew of such, and fun it is -- a quick, easy read, too. And, as usual in these offerings, there are useful insights that make it worth the effort.

The authors take an eclectic approach. They suggest not being a dummy on auto-pilot. Push the envelope. Learn new things every day. Explore, investigate and observe. Carry about with active curiosity. "Presented with new information, the brain creates new connections and is revitalized. This is why it is so important to expose yourself to change, even if stepping outside your comfort zone means feeling a bit of anxiety." (page 21).

This keeps mind and body active, and also makes time feel slower and more drawn-out: more musing, less rush. Why? Because the brain has to "take more time" to process the new tidbits of observation. 

Another suggestion: be less overtly emotional in response to the storms of life (what Carl von Clausewitz called "friction"). 

"A stoic attitude -- serenity in the face of a setback . . . lowers anxiety and stress levels and stabilises [stabilizes] behavior. This can be seen in the greater life expectancies of certain cultures with unhurried, deliberate lifestyles." (page 31) 

I concur completely with both approaches, which are complimentary: be a curious, open-minded seeker, and don't lose your toast over things that you can't control. 

In the next post, we'll consider the authors' suggestions in how to employ Viktor Frankl's concept of logotherapy to strengthen one's life. Interesting stuff.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of 'On War' (2016)

Vanya Eftimova Bellinger, Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Using primary source material, this book fills in gaps and contextualizes the story of Marie Sophie von Brühl and Carl von Clausewitz, giving readers a glimpse of European life before, during and after the Napoleonic period, most specifically from the point of view of Prussia and other German-speaking lands. The spirit of Napoleon and the French Revolution permeates everything, even fledgling German nationalism.

Back up a minute. Two of the great (and possibly most important of them to date) books on and about war and human society are:

孙子, 孙子兵法 / Sun Tzu, The Art of War (first Chinese edition circa 500 B.C.)

Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege / On War (first German edition 1832 A.D.).

We can't say much for sure about the creation of The Art of War, but Bellinger's well-researched study clearly shows that Countess Marie Sophie von Brühl (1779-1836) was a key player in the development of Carl von Clausewitz's (1780-1831) adult life and work. Though she started higher up in the social scale, Marie faced constraints in the public sphere because of the conservative status quo regarding gender roles. She pushed against them to the point of shocking many of her peers. 

The two married in 1810 and, when parted from each other's company due to wars and other duties, carried forth a lively correspondence. In person, they enjoyed free-wheeling tête-à-tête discussions and active participation in literary salons. Throughout, she influenced him and he influenced her. They both wrote, organized and edited.

After Carl died at age 51 from cholera, Marie steered On War and Carl's other works into publication, and just in the nick of time. For Marie died just five years after Carl, at the age of 56. Marie, incidentally, like George Washington, was killed indirectly by her doctors, the most likely cause of her fatal infection. 

One of my favorite parts of On War is the discussion of "Friction" in war (which stands in for other aspects of life, as well). "Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult . . . Countless minor incidents -- the kind you can never really foresee -- combine . . . so that one always falls far short of the intended goal . . . Iron will-power can overcome this friction: it pulverizes every obstacle, but of course it wears down the machine as well . . ."  ~~ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984 edition; originally published in 1976), page 119. 

Without Marie von Clausewitz, there wouldn't have been such a gestation and early launch for Vom Kriege; without Vanya Eftimova Bellinger, we wouldn't have truly grasped even that. This is important historical work -- making more visible a previously obscured mover and shaker, inspiring us to muse anew about On War and its impact. 

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Lewis Milestone: Pork Chop Hill

Lewis Milestone, the man who directed the first and best version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), gives a no-nonsense look at a late Korean War battle over a token (useless) hill. For the most part, Pork Chop Hill (1959) tells the story in straightforward fashion and holds up very well -- except for the overdub ending, a telling artifact of the Cold War that's a nifty example of propaganda, and innaccurate at that, probably tacked on at Hollywood's insistence so as not to draw the ire of John Birchers. The bulk of the movie, though, is as about as accurate as anyone can expect, and is not far different in grittiness from Stanley Kubrick's classic World War I film, Paths of Glory (1957).

As for the battlefield, it's not much different from a World War I tableau: trenches, bunkers, concertina wire, artillery and infantry, flairs and machine guns. 

The mission to retake and hold Pork Chop from Chines forces, like almost anything in war, goes awry from the get-go. Examples of what Carl von Clausewitz called friction abound: men drop their weapons, go into shock, shirk, perform reckless feats, obey orders, disobey orders, launch a bayonet attack, all while the rear headquarters commanders have misconceptions about what's going on at the front; there's also at least one "friendly fire" incident -- and so on: much of this spelled out in  S.L.A. Marshall's study, Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring, 1953 (1956).

The amount of time spent developing characters is minimal, but there are a slew of actors in early roles. African American actors are fairly downplayed as far as dialogue, but significantly are included playing soldiers in the recently-desegregated U.S. Army. Besides the magisterial Gregory Peck, you get at least a glimpse of Clarence Williams III, Harry Dean Stanton, Martin Landau, Rip Torn, Woody Strode, Normal Fell, George Peppard, Harry Guardino, Robert Blake, James Edwards and George Shibata (in real life, the first Japanese American to graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point -- pictured above with Gregory Peck).

Given the political contraints of the Cold War, Pork Chop Hill is a damned good war movie -- better than, say, the comparable Vietnam-American War flick, We Were Soldiers (2002).  



Today's Rune: Strength. P.S. I remember seeing this as a kid and loving it -- my opinion remains essentially unchanged.

Benelux Next Time

195th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo (1815). If Napoleon had won, it's possible the Benelux countries would still be part of greater France, and the Germans might have been kept at bay in their later uses of the Low Countries as an invasion route. The British Empire may have run basically the same course through the present. But who knows?

In any case, Belgium, Netherlands (Holland) and Luxembourg are strange, interesting little countries, much fought over in the past. Belgium has Flemish and Walloon culture (I'm partly Walloon by way of Sweden) and good ale. I've spent time in all three, happily.

New book (really an old book, newly translated from German into English by Peter Hofschröer) -- Carl von Clausewitz, On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo (2010). Von Clausewitz's work is full of pithy aphorisms. He was a thinker. From Vom Kriege / On War: "Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results." (Michael Howard/Peter Paret translation).  Something still not learned very well by those who indulge in war.  

Waterloo keeps inspiring powerful cultural expressions, not only through books and visual art, but through metaphors, movies, monuments and music.  In its own way, Waterloo is as evocative as Cleopatra and Helen of Troy. What do you think when you hear the name?

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

The Peter Principle

The cable box to my left is flashing and my direct internet access isn't working, so I'm using some unknown neighbor's wireless connection instead. Not incidentally, to my right sits The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull (1969). (Before my cable connection blipped out, I'd checked my online banking transactions, only to see a five-day processing delay. Meanwhile, my cable TV conection is still working . . . if I take the time to unplug my laptop and re-connect to the other cable line, it'll probably work again -- but why should I have to do that for a "premium service"?)

"Incompetence knows no barriers of time and space (p. 10) . . . Education, often touted as a cure for all ills, is apparently no cure for incompetence. Incompetence runs riot in the halls of education. One high-school graduate in three cannot read at normal fifth grade level. It is now commonplace for colleges to be giving reading lessons to freshman. In some colleges, twenty percent of freshman cannot read well enough to understand their textbooks!" (p. 13)

"I receive mail from a large university. Fifteen months ago I changed my address. I sent the usual notice to the university: my mail kept going to the old address. After two more change-of-address notices and a phone call, I made a personal visit. I pointed with my finger to the wrong address in their records, dictated the new address and watched a secretary take it down. The mail still went to the old address. . ." (p. 14)

The Peter Principle looks specifically at bureaucratic organizations and posits that in a typical hierarchy, people deemed competent at one level are promoted to a level of incompetence. One way to avoid becoming a rube is to avoid overpromotion within such a system.



The Bush Administration provides hundreds of examples of overpromotion -- Michael DeWayne Brown was in no way qualified to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but this became abundantly clear only in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and even then, the man who chose him, praised him (just as even now, some of the people who elected Bush still praise him!)

In addition to incompetence, things can go wrong for many reasons. Things always go wrong in wartime. German war philosopher Carl von Clausewitz named this reality friction. To all things collectively human that go wrong, we might add entropy, illness, accident, bad luck, ill fate, kismet, karma, stupidity, ignorance, greed, malice, bad faith, and deliberate sabotage. It's amazing things function at all, and that's probably due as much to personal resilience, flexibility, desperation, creativity, and improvisation as it is to good luck, kind fate, intimate cooperation, and, despite the vagaries of human nature, faith and hope.



Natalie Wood didn't fall off a tall building. No, though she feared drowning all her life, instead she fell off a yacht and drowned.

Today's Rune: Warrior. (p.s. Sorry for any spelling errors. Spellcheck isn't working!)

New Jack City

I. Farmer Jack, once Metro Detroit’s most powerful supermarket chain, is folding. Most of its 66 remaining stores are being sold to Kroger, some will go independent, and some will be dozed.

II. Mr. Bush's Iraq War has displaced roughly two million refugees so far, many fleeing to neighboring countries in the Middle East such as Syria. Soon, though, federally approved refugees will be moving to Metro Detroit -- somewhere between 3,500 and 7,000 Iraqis, mostly Arabs. Kurds will resettle mostly in Nashville, Tennessee, already the home-in-exile for a substantial Kurdish population. Most Americans know Jack Squat about Kurds, Arabs, Persians, Chaldeans, Sunnis and Shi’ites, or anything in between -- regardless, facts are facts. With the Turkish Army (aka Johnny Turk) massing on the northern Iraqi border, expect to hear more about the Kurds.



III. Jack Kevorkian, now 79, was released from prison today. He is suffering from hepatitis contracted during the Vietnam War – something to do with Vietnam vets and blood transfusions. His crime? Assisted suicide. That’s the reason he’s known as “Dr. Death.” While I’m not existentially opposed to suicide (for other people, that is), official sanctioning of euthanasia seems creepy, too fraught with peril (i.e. its use by the Nazis to purge “undesirables,” various imagined science fiction dystopias, etc.).

Today’s Rune: Defense.

Birthdays: Jacques Marquette, Carl von Clausewitz, Nelson Riddle, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Andy Griffith, Marilyn Monroe (b. Norma Jeane Mortenson), Brian Cox, Ron Wood, David Berkowitz, Larisa Lazutina, Heidi Klum, Alanis Morissette, Veronika Vařeková.

Sayanara!

You'll Always Live in Interesting Times . . . . .

A fortune cookie prediction from the other night, and the opposite of a Chinese blessing. Today's entry will be short because of what Von Clausewitz called friction. Entropy will do, as well.

Gypsy Curse: "May You Get Exactly What You Wish For."

And finally, from Saint Teresa of Avila: "There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."

Z: "He lives!"