I left off last time explaining how Zeitoun is the only “new release” book I’ve ever read. I zoomed through it in eight days, since I had checked it out from the local library (the book was sold out everywhere from Christmas until about a week ago — but I hadn’t had a library card since I was a kid, so that’s fun). My main reason for reading the book was to get a sense of what happened to New Orleans and the people who called the city home. Even though the book was written from the perspective of a single family, I thought it would still feel epic in scope (it didn’t).

I did enjoy learning about the Zeitoun family though. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American man who settled in New Orleans after about a decade of living and working at sea. A friend introduced him to his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native who was raised Southern Baptist but had converted to Islam on her own. Kathy has a son from a previous marriage, and she and Zeitoun (as everyone calls Abdulrahman) have three daughters together. In my opinion, Eggers’s focus on this quintessential “American” family is the strongest aspect of the book. The result was that I learned more about Islam than I had ever known before.

You may have noticed from my discussions that I don’t read much modern literature. I think Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Choke might be the only works of narrative prose (i.e. – fiction or creative nonfiction) published within the last 25 years on my bookshelf at home. (Correction: I also have Nick Horby’s novel High Fidelity, Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction work Into The Wild, Tao Lin’s short story collection Bed, and one or two others.) There are a few reasons for this. First, I’ve been trying to catch up on many of the “classics” that I missed out on while skirting the reading requirements in high school English classes. More often than not, I managed to patch together a project without reading the entire book — and N64’s “Goldeneye” seemed much more important at the time.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.

I recently watched both parts of Che, the 2008 biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara starring Benicio Del Toro and directed by Steven Soderbergh. I don’t intend to comment extensively on the quality of the film. However, its overall impact is questionable; that’s evident by its average score of 64 (out of 100) on Metacritic.com. I say “its” when it was actually produced and released in two parts: The Argentine and Guerrilla. Part 1 tracks Guevara during the successful Cuban revolution, and Part 2 follows him through the unsuccessful Bolivian revolution.

As one critic put it (I forget which one or where I saw it), Soderbergh seemed to be avoiding any of Guevara’s common stereotypes (i.e. – political activist, guerrilla warrior, t-shirt imagery). It did seem that Soderbergh wanted to let the story speak for itself. But 41 years after Che’s death, one wonders if a film should be made at all if it doesn’t dare to take a position on the controversial figure. This is, after all, an extremely important figure in recent history that most American students are taught nothing about (or at least I wasn’t).

According to Wikipedia, Jean-Paul Sartre once “described him as ‘not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age’ and the ‘era’s most perfect man.’ Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that ‘he lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel.’”

The film does provide at least a basic context for why these people were attempting a revolution in Latin America. Therefore my strongest criticism relates to the lack of insight into Che’s mind. I was surprised to see that the films were based on Guevara’s own writings: Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Part 1) and The Bolivian Diary (Part 2). Knowing this, I wondered why Che’s thoughts were only revealed during an interview with a journalist that is scattered throughout Part 1. One of Che’s statements stands out from the rest:

“Of course, defeating imperialism is impossible if you don’t recognize its source is the United States of America. In a capitalist system, people live in an invisible cage. For example, they accept the myth of the self-made man. But they do not understand that opportunities for the majority are determined by forces completely beyond individual control.”

The journalist then asks the question, “What is the most important quality for a revolutionary to possess?”

Che responds, “A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love — love of humanity, justice, and truth. It’s impossible to conceive of an authentic revolutionary without this one quality.”

The paradoxical nature of this statement set off my skeptic alarm. How could a person with great love of humanity seek to change the world through armed conflict. In other words, how could anyone using their rational faculties hope to improve mankind by shooting people with guns? A six-year-old would be able to tell you that that’s not a path to success. It was equally confusing to me that Jean-Paul Sartre would condone this armed conflict. After reading Nausea, I got the impression that Sartre’s existential problems were individual in nature and required an autonomous process of treatment. It’s almost as if Sartre didn’t understand his own philosophy, and that has caused me to lose faith in his writing.

Luckily I have the work of Carl Jung to fill the gap. I finally finished reading, Man and His Symbols, edited and co-written by Jung. The chapter by M.-L. von Franz entitled “The Process of Individuation” directly addresses my problem with Che Guevara, evident in the following quotes:

“Fanatical political activity…seems somehow incompatible with individuation” (p. 241).

“…The unconscious is pointing to the fact that today the dreamer should not try, as X did long ago, to free his country in an outer way. Now, the dream says, liberation is accomplished by the anima (by the dreamer’s soul), who accomplishes it by bringing the images of the unconscious to life” (p. 244).

“…In our time genuine liberation can start only with a psychological transformation. To what end does one liberate one’s country if afterward there is no meaningful goal of life — no goal for which it is worthwhile to be free? If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime. Only if he can use his freedom to create something meaningful is it relevant that he should be free. That is why the inner meaning of life is more important to the individual than anything else, and why the process of individuation must be given priority. [...] …If a single individual devotes himself to individuation, he frequently has a positive contagious effect on the people around him” (p. 245).

In the film, Che’s character spoke of building a meaningful life through a communist revolution. But if the film succeeded at anything, it demonstrated the blatant absurdity of Che’s quest. The only thing armed conflict leads to is more death, more destruction, and more tyranny. When Fidel Castro took power of Cuba, he abolished elections in order to remain in power until modern day! Down in Bolivia, Che was executed by a common soldier in a dirty shed, when he could have rejoined his wife and children in Mexico or Cuba. And perhaps worst of all, American imperialism never ended.

It seems that we as a society are far overdue in studying the suggestions of Jung and his colleagues. The only revolution that will ever work is one of individual psychology. But if it could happen on a widespread level, it would change the world. A recent quote by President Obama (albeit in a different context) reflects this idea:

“One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.”

If our president’s expression of such a profound concept isn’t optimistic enough for you, perhaps (in observation of today’s public funeral) I should also reference Michael Jackson. His song “Man in the Mirror” even has the basic principle down — a fun fact I realized a few years ago when I started getting into literature and philosophy.

I’ll have more on this topic soon. I’ve finally begun a large-scale essay on Jungian Psychology and the need for modern man to learn himself before trying to change anything external. In the meantime, I can’t make any promises about consistent activity on here, but I’ll try my best. I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post. I’m truly sorry for that — times have been tough.

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. While the subject material is quite controversial, Hitchens’ approach is not. He focuses much less on vague concepts like faith and belief, and much more on the real-world concerns surrounding religion. Hitchens concedes that he pays respect to all customs and religions, and has entered many churches, synagogues, and temples without reservation. However, he is very clear about his stance on religion. He calls it a “babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge, as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs.” He starts off with three main points:

1. Religion and churches are all man-made entities
2. Ethics and morals are independent from faith and cannot arise from it
3. Religion is both amoral and immoral

Hitchens then runs through many true examples of the pitfalls of religion before branching into discussions of metaphysics and philosophy. I’ll share with you some of my favorite sections. Hitchens tears the Mormon religion limb from limb, asserting that 25,000 (twenty-five thousand) words in the Book of Mormon were copied directly from the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. An additional 2,000 words were taken from the New Testament. And yet Joseph Smith supposedly transcribed the text from golden plates delivered from God by an angel. Given that Mormonism is one of the largest religions to be created in America, it’s a shame that Hitchens doesn’t discuss the joke that is Scientology (I think I’ll save my own comments on that subject for another blog post).

My other favorite section explains the Catholic Church’s friendly treatment of Hitler’s Nazi regime. At one time, the Papacy even celebrated Hitler’s birthday. Then after WWII, the Vatican used its power to provide passports and funding for Nazi leaders to flee to South America. But these two examples are merely the most humorous, and not nearly representative of all the evil that religion has caused on earth.

Naturally, a book like this would be lacking without any mention of psychology and literature. Hitchens does reference Freud on a few occasions. Freud said that religion cannot free human beings of their fear of death. Likewise, Freud apparently said that religion is inevitable until mankind stops fearing death and breaks its tendency for wishful thinking, neither of which is extremely probable. Hitchens claims that “philosophy steps in where religion fails, just as science and medicine for alchemy, and astronomy for astrology.” But his main suggestion for deriving moral behavior without religion is essentially to obey karma. Hitchens suggests that the saying “treat others as you would wish to be treated” can be taught to children and requires no violence, massacres, or sadistic behavior.

Hitchens is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever come across. The extent of his intellect makes itself clear throughout the book. The book succeeds most at explaining all the disgusting behavior that religion has promoted and allowed. But obviously any one book isn’t going to convince the world that all current religions are outdated and irrelevant (as Bill Hicks would often say). Still, Hitchens says that a new enlightenment is necessary. He condones “the study of literature and poetry for its own sake and for the greater good of mankind.” He also commends the unrestricted pursuit of scientific discovery and the utilization of widespread information on the Internet.

And that, of course, is why I write on this blog.

While visiting my parents’ house a couple weeks ago, I happened to find an essay in The New York Times Magazine by David Gessner. The article discusses Gessner’s transition from full-time journalist and author to creative writing professor. I devoured the essay, highlighting my favorite parts along the way. There are two main questions in the essay. First, is it undesirable for a growing number of professional writers to be taking jobs as professors (or anything other than independent writer)? Second, is it possible to create memorable literature while in any kind of full-time job?

In Gessner’s words: “Consider that our first great national literary flowering constituted, in part, a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing.” A lot of his worries mirror my own. I often find myself wondering, is it possible to fulfill my drive to write without banishing myself to the wilderness? Can someone balance career obligations with creative impulses? Are security and benefits worth sacrificing an artistic lifestyle that is both consistent and unbridled?

“Something is lost by living the divided life,” wrote Gessner. “Intensity perhaps. The ability to focus hard and long on big, ambitious projects. A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it.” The job provides a “safety net,” some social activity, and (in the professor case) summers off for writing. But the job also means less adventurous writing, and less time for reading and creating. The author seems inconclusive until the end of the article, when he suggests that he wouldn’t miss teaching as much as he misses the writing life.

Once I finished reading, I went on the web to research the author. In some ways he seems to be a nature writer — but that’s an oversimplification. For example, I read on Amazon that his book A Wild, Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod starts with the nature focus, but also covers family drama, battles with cancer, and drug use.

That wide array of topics presented through a condensed lens seems like exactly the type of thing that I’d like to do in the future. For the first time, I feel as though I’ve possibly found a writing mentor who is still alive. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to enroll at UNC Wilmington where he teaches. I’ll just have to communicate with him another way. (UPDATE 12/9/08: I emailed David Gessner and he recommended his book Sick of Nature, since it contains discussions about these types of difficult decisions).

Below: A video of David Gessner giving a guest “lecture” on transformation in literature.

Link:
David Gessner’s Website

Firstly, I’d like to apologize for my inactivity of late. I just underwent a move from Traverse City to Ann Arbor, and then a switch of apartments with my girlfriend. It’s been a very hectic four weeks, but — other than the fact that I’m still unemployed — I’ve mostly settled down now.

Recently I realized  that it would be very difficult to write consistently on here about fiction and philosophy. Not only would it be exhausting, but I’m just not sure that I have those kind of resources. For this post, I turn to a sort of nonfiction reference book. I caught wind of Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale on a trip to the MSU Computer Store circa Spring 2007. A girl working at the counter set the book down to assist me, and I couldn’t help reading the cover when she went into the store room.

I found the book used on Amazon and started reading. For someone who hasn’t had an English class since 2001, this was a hefty undertaking. This feeling was increased since, on more than one occasion, I disagreed with her suggestions. For example, she seems to prefer third-person writing to first-person without question.

“In today’s culture of confession, many writers prefer the first-person point of view. Unabashed subjectivity may be fine for ever-popular memoirs on incest and inside-the-Beltway intrigue, but the third-person point of view remains the standard in news reporting and writing that aims to inform, because it keeps the focus off the writer and on the subject” (p. 36).

She’s correct about focus, but some of the greatest literature — especially in American history — has been told from the first-person view: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, etc. Plus (as if I haven’t already made this clear), the authors that got me to write were all using first-person: Kerouac, Thompson, Miller. I would even go so far as to suggest that third-person writing is a way of hiding behind other characters, instead of facing the story head-on. Or maybe I just can’t understand the concept of omnipotence, or pretending to know what dozens of characters are thinking and feeling, let alone saying out loud.

Hale progresses through three parts: Words, Sentences, and Music. Each subsection (i.e. – Nouns) features both Cardinal Sins (what to avoid at all costs) and Carnal Pleasures (what to work hard at developing). One of her Cardinal Sins is the way that journalism copy editors remove interjections (short words or phrases intended for strong effect more than meaning), leaving the writing stale and sterilized.

How she omits Kerouac — one of the most poetic prose writers of all time, who infused jazz into his words in amazing ways — from the Music section is beyond me. But regardless of my opposition, the book is still worth reading.

I want to return to Into The Wild to discuss the author himself. Jon Krakauer waits until the third act of the nonfiction book to discuss his own life, but doing so adds a lot of depth and context to the story of Chris McCandless. Krakauer is a climber and avid outdoorsman, and he has been in some hairy situations throughout the years. Some feats sound more taxing or reckless than anything that McCandless ever did.

Krakauer brings up his own life to demonstrate that many young men are driven into some sort of wild place, whether that’s a mountain, a desert, or even the middle of a huge city. Much of Krakauer’s drive was related to his father. “Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please” (p. 134).

The older Krakauer was a doctor who put loads of pressure on his children to succeed, particularly in the field of medicine. “I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations” (p. 148).

“He had built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage” (p. 149).

His father eventually suffered a mental collapse and, after a failed suicide attempt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital. This forced Krakauer to evaluate what that father/son relationship really meant. “The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit” (p. 150). (That pursuit, if you’re not familiar with him, is renowned journalist and nonfiction book author.)

Krakauer has a deep understanding of the way people try to run from their problems, only to find that path to progress and healing lies within. “I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing” (p. 155).

The author isn’t trying to discredit McCandless’ travels. There is value in travel, especially the full-fledged, total-immersion type of travel. But when you wander, all you really find is yourself. This concept echoes true through American literature, from Emerson to Henry Miller. As a result, I keep thinking of that random saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.” McCandless did come to similar realizations, if only too late. I won’t give away that part. You have to read or watch for yourself.

Aside from The Outsider and Tropic of Cancer, the other life-changing book I read this year (yes, it’s been a big year of reading discoveries) was Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. I actually heard about it last fall, when I bought a large book on Stanley Kubrick as a Christmas present for my brother. The author of the Kubrick book was semi-obsessed with Brown’s work, and he would reference it when writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Given my semi-obsession with those films, I had no choice but to get Life.

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)

Sorry to inundate you with facts about and quotes from Hunter S. Thompson. It’s only natural, since he’s one of my main literary inspirations. It just so happens that The Proud Highway, his first volume of collected correspondence, is “chock full” (as he would say) of useful advice. Before he reached the irreversible state of constant drug and alcohol use, he was an aspiring novelist who stuck with journalism more for the search for truth—and the occasional paycheck—than for a love of the industry. In fact, this volume is also loaded with biting hatred for the news business, pointed at everyone from reporters to editors to publishers.

After devouring Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (a book I have not yet read), Thompson was on fire with the concept of individuality. In a letter dated 10/24/57—when he was only 20 years old—he wrote the following:

“Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it in one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden bursts of frustrated violence. [...]

“Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able—or even have the courage—to achieve. [...]

“Keep in mind that the ability to create is an integral part of the makeup of man. If a lack is encountered, it lies not in the ability, but in the scope of perception of one’s own creative ability” (pp. 69-70).

Thomspon was at a stage where he started to work out a balance between ideals and reality, between thinking and action. He was starting to see that creativity is one path to fulfilling the human desire for personal achievement. To a certain lot it even seems like the best path, which was something on my mind when I coined the new slogan “Freedom Is Expression.” After all, the word “create” can be applied to many different things, and is more often connected with physical or architectural projects than intellectual or artistic ones. Think of all the skyscrapers and pyramids and monuments that humans have built throughout the centuries. These can be referred to as “sublimations,” or the outward expression of our subconscious drives (I will return to this concept in further posts).

I’m starting to feel very strongly that creative works are the purest form of creation that doesn’t inherently involve equal or greater destruction. Now if you’re an environmentalist like me, you’re probably thinking, “But what about all the paper used by writers?!” Well, now we have digital compositions, and they are increasingly taking over for traditional paper-based publishing with the help of the Internet. The really difficult part is, once you get the urge to attain individuality through creative expression, you have to constantly battle the feeling that your efforts are futile; that you will never fully express yourself or what it means to be a human being; that you will never really be an individual, and your actions certainly won’t help people after one or two generations have passed; that you will die alone just as you were born alone, and immortality will be lost.

Okay, so I’ve taken that strain WAY off the deep end, mostly to make a point. Of course I don’t always feel that way. I do think it’s important to learn the complexities of this type of philosophical thinking. And Thompson would soon learn that thinking is useless without extremes of action—but to set rules for action based on the thinking process makes less sense than acting and then figuring out what it meant.

Reading these letters makes me slightly angry that I didn’t start reading consistently until the age of 21—but better late than never, even if I am five years behind Thompson in starting to understand these concepts. You can definitely look forward to more quotes from HST on this blog, so hopefully I haven’t crossed your comfort threshold yet.