D a l l a s R o b b i n s

Back in the City Weekly

Well, after a bit of a hiatus, I'm back in the City Weekly this week.  (Next week too!)

Just got out of the habit, but it's a nice gig when you can get it.

This week I give a brief preview for Utah Opera's production of Beethoven's Fidelio, playing now.  His only opera and one that definately is as powerful today as it was when it originally premiered. 

(Ya, ya, Beethoven, boring, I hear you say.  But remember the ending scene of the King's Speech, when he was giving the King's speech?  Well the music was Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major, which underscored that moment perfectly, and created a transcendent, aesthestic moment.  So try an opera for once in your life, it won't kill ya.)

I am hoping to contribute more over the next while to the CW, hopefully 2-3 times a month.  As a writer, it's a nice break from other involving projects, providing me a clear, deadline-driven focus.

Now, back to the novel...

The mystery of unbelief...

James Wood, an avowed atheist and one of the best literary critics currently working, in a recent lecture tackles the New Atheism's simplistic explaination of religious belief.  Instead he encourages fiction as a better vehicle to explore the nuanced way belief and unbelief actually work in the lives of real people.  Good stuff.

Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but weirdly symmetrical) creeds. Likewise, in contemporary politics, the worst crime you can apparently commit is to change your mind. Yet people's beliefs are often not stable, and are fluctuating. We are all flip-floppers. Our "ideas" may be rather as Woolf imagined consciousness, a flicker of different and self-annulling impressions and convictions...

An essay or work of polemic finds it hard to describe the texture of such fluctuation, whereas the novelist understands that to tell a story is to novelise an idea, to dramatise it. There is no need to make a tidy solution of belief; to the novelist, a messy error might be much more interesting.

I would agree to a certain extant.  In fact I may even go furthur, and suggest that great fiction helps explain the complexity of human nature and offers much wisdom in understanding our world and the people in it, more so than traditional non-fiction narratives.   What say you?

 

With Teachers Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Another incisive essay about the decline of English depapartments. 

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

I think that most of these type of essays have really great points, being myself averse to theory-dominated textual "studies".  But while much can be gained from the minority who are critical of the status quo, who is trailblazing new solutions for the future?  What solutions are there?

"My intention was to give the reader a punch in the stomach."

My favorite living author Umberto Eco has a new novel Il Cimitero Di Praga, which seems to be causing a bit of controversy.  Unfortunately,  English readers will have to wait unti the fall of 2012 to see what's the hoopla.  (At least it will come before the Mayan apocalypse!)

Eco, who made his literary debut 30 years ago with In the Name of the Rose, takes on freemasonry, conspiracy theories, forgery and the unification of Italy amongst other things in this latest novel, but at its core is anti-semitism and perhaps the most famous – and certainly the most pernicious – forgery in the world: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The main character of Eco’s novel, the fictitious* Simone Simonini, whom he describes as ‘the most hateful man in the world’, is a master forger in the employ of various secret services. Fuelled by anti-semitism, he concocts the ultimate conspiracy theory, where a mythic meeting of the elders of Zion takes place in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, detailing their nefarious plan to rule the world.

It’s not the first time that Eco has examined conspiracy theories, or indeed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (for example, they play a significant role in Foucault’s Pendulum, but this time the focus in particular on the most famous anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and his choice of a convinced anti-semitic protagonist has rasied objections.

For those without the mental agility to process irony will certainly object to Eco's latest narrative.  But personally, I cannot wait.

 

 

"The Apostate"

Once in a while you read a work of investigative journalism that blows your mind.  This one did.   You might have already heard about or read this article, but if you haven't, then do yourself a favor. It reminds me why blogging, etc, can not hold a torch to the long-haul work of a journalist discovering a world that needs to be revealed.  Amazing work that deserves the attention of everyone who dares calls themself a journalist.

A Toast to The Professor

Today is the 119th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkein.  There are a million things I could say about the man, but I'll reserve it for another time.  But today is when his friends, admirers, and fans, raise a toast.  From the Tolkien Society:

On the 3^rd January 1892 JRR Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. To celebrate this event, on this day each year Tolkien fans around the world are invited to raise a glass and toast the birthday of this much loved author 21:00 (9 pm) your local time.

I'm unsure what I will drink, but tonight I will be raising a toast to the man and his imagination.

 

"I hope I have done justice..." - Denis Dutton 1944-2010

Denis Dutton has passed away.  He was a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and founder and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.  But he is most known for creating the indespinsible website Arts & Letters Daily, co-creator of the website Climate Debate Daily, as well as the author of the recent book on bio-aesthetics, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

Of course I never knew him, but I truly admired him from afar.  A&L Daily is always the first website I check everyday after firing up my browser.  If you are not a vistor, do yourself a favor.   I like what Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) has said,

The agenda of the English-language press, upon which the sun never sets, was driven to a startling degree by Arts and Letters Daily, produced in Christchurch. I once published an article in an excellent cultural journal of limited circulation about a subject of interest to few of my compatriots. I had forgotten about it; but suddenly, a frenzy of interest erupted in it. In the space of a few hours, at least 20 radio stations contacted me, wanting to talk about the article. I found this utterly mysterious until I discovered that Arts and Letters Daily had posted it shortly before.

A man, however, is not to be measured wholly by the quality of his achievements. I wish only that I were able to turn as fine a compliment of Denis Dutton as Doctor Johnson turned of Sir Joshua Reynolds: that he was the most invulnerable man that he knew, for if he should quarrel with him, he should find the most difficulty how to abuse him. Denis Dutton was of that ilk.

In speaking of Charles Darwin in the introduction of The Art Instinct, Dutton said "I hope I have done justice both to him and to the great artists whose achievements so captivate us."  Dutton has done justice to more than just Darwin and the artists that inspired him, he has done justice to the "humanities and sciences" and honest inquiry in the chaos of the interwebs, and we are better for it.

And last, but not least, he had a great sense of humor.  From his visit on The Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Denis Dutton
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

Books for Christmas!

 To me there is nothing better than getting books for Christmas.  Here's the skinny on what I received this year.  (Friends are awesome!)

Pen of Iron: The simple yet grand language of the King James Bible has pervaded American culture from the beginning--and its powerful eloquence continues to be felt even today. In this book, acclaimed biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists--from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy--have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. Showing the radically different manners in which the words, idioms, syntax, and cadences of this Bible are woven into Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sun Also Rises, Seize the Day, Gilead, and The Road, Alter reveals the wide variety of stylistic and imaginative possibilities that American novelists have found in Scripture. At the same time, Alter demonstrates the importance of looking closely at the style of literary works, making the case that style is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but is the very medium through which writers conceive their worlds.

 

What Even Happened to Modernism: The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.

 

The Word Exchange: The dazzling variety of Anglo-Saxon poetry brought to life by an all-star cast of contemporary poets in an authoritative bilingual edition. Encompassing a wide range of voices-from weary sailors to forlorn wives, from heroic saints to drunken louts, from farmers hoping to improve their fields to sermonizers looking to save your soul—the 123 poems collected in The Word Exchange complement the portrait of medieval England that emerges from Beowulf, the most famous Anglo-Saxon poem of all. Offered here are tales of battle, travel, and adventure, but also songs of heartache and longing, pearls of lusty innuendo and clear-eyed stoicism, charms and spells for everyday use, and seven "hoards" of delightfully puzzling riddles.

Featuring all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets—including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Jane Hirshfield, David Ferry, Molly Peacock, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, and many others—The Word Exchange is a landmark work of translation, as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

 

What A Writer Always Wanted but Didn't Know It

If you write, like me, I just wanted to share something cool from Small Beer Press, that little indie publisher that has some of the coolest stuff around, not least of all Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

Starting last year and continuing again for 2011, they have created A Working Writer's Daily Planner.  It's filled with writing advice, prompts, contest deadlines, publishers info, and much more.  It won't help you write more or better, but it might get you a little better organized so you can write more, and maybe, even just maybe, better.

"The perfect supplement to any writer’s life, this new edition of A Working Writer’s Daily Planner is even better than before, packed with more of the information writers need to organize their work schedules, track upcoming deadlines, and learn about grant opportunities, contests, and workshop programs. For 2011 we turned to those who know best what writers want—writers themselves—and asked them what resources they’d find most useful. The result is a unique and indispensable tool that makes it easy for writers to keep track of the practical, business end of writing, leaving more time for them to actually spend writing."

As for me, my one and only New Year's resolution is to write a helluva lot more.  NaNoWriMo got me started a little, but this coming year will put everything to shame I've done up till now.  Or at least that's my plan, and since you now all know (all 3 of you), then I've got some accountability to someone, somewhere.

"There are some Russians who think Dostoevsky wrote badly..."

 

If you read any Russian literature, you have certainly come across the names Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, those tireless translators, who also happen to be husband and wife.  I first came upon them when their translation of The Brothers Karamozov was released back in the early 1990s.  It was one of the most transendent reading experiences I've had. If you have not heard much about them, here's a New Yorker article that will get you up to speed.

Just wanted to point your direction over to Lapham's Quarterly, who has an interview with them in their "podcast" series.  The occassion is on the recent release of their new translation of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, but they talk about all kinds of things, including the myth that Dostoevsky's prose style was poor.  And they even openly consider House of the Dead by Dostoevsky as their next project.  Great interview with some of the best literary minds of our time.

Here's a direct link to the audio.