Sickness and Shifting Gears

When I am sick, it is a time of melancholy but also of philosophising. While my brain seems sluggish, and I cannot focus on my common routine, my mind is so clouded it is hard to work on my papers or latest project. This opens up an opportunity rarely taken in the day-to-day. It becomes a time to think on the nature of death and mortality, ask what is moral and what passes for being moral. It can be a time to critique power and hear how others justify the abuses of state power. Being sick is a good time for all of those wonderful questions.

If you cannot speak, it is a time to listen. Sickness and those days off that sickness brings can give us the time to check up on the news regarding things we actually care about. We can read blogs, listen to clips on our interests and take stock of the new developments in the world that we were so ignorant of while we remained locked within our routine. Sickness can give us the opportunity to become more informed citizens. More than "time off" it can be a time to ourselves, and thus a time to improve what we know.

Of course, distraction is so very good when to swallow is to experience pain. When breathing is hard listening completely to a presentation by specialists can take us temporarily away from the concerns of the body. Comedy sites can give some relief in 2,5 or 20 minute intervals, but the better form of distraction is philosophy and broadening our knowledge of the world and current events.We can focus on such "heady" topics with just a bit of time off. If we cannot speak, we may still be able to type.

We are limited while gripped by sickness, our minds do not function so clearly. Yet, there is still an opportunity to do something, to learn something, and to deviate from our typical schedule. Distracting ourselves from the pain, dizziness or trouble breathing is also no bad thing. That is why I think that in being sick once in a while, we can find ourselves open to asking the big questions, and the questions personally important to us. In being stuck at home and unable to go to work we can shift gears and explore part of what it is to be human, and ask the big questions that we push to the side as we carry out our daily lives with all of their obligations and responsibilities.


P.S: apologies for any errors, I was a bit under the weather when I wrote this.

Reviews, Jesting and Pain

For those that write, a new year can mean a year where you will come under review. Assuming of course, that your projects are finally finished. Yesterday I was reading a section of The Writer’s Quotebook by Jim Fisher, when I flipped to the review section. It so impressed me, and had such humour contained within it that I had to include a large portion of it below:

REVIEWS

It’s hard to imagine how a review—say, in Kirkus Reviews—could, in a substantial way, affect the commercial success of a book. Other than writers and a handful of literary types, who reads book reviews? Book reviews, however, are important to the authors under review and to people in the business of dust-jacket blurbs, review excerpts that carry no credibility whatsoever. Still, in the life of a writer, a bad review is a terrible thing; and writers who say they don’t read the reviews of their books or don’t care if a review is good or bad are generally not believed.

Authors are also upset when their books are not reviewed. Isaac Asimov complained that none of his books were ever reviewed in The New Yorker, even though, as a well-known writer, he had been mentioned in the magazine many times. The reason: he was not taken seriously as a novelist because most of his writing was science fiction. Wallace Stegner, a brilliant novelist and nonfiction writer who lived in and wrote about the American West, was never reviewed in the New York Times even though his novels, Angle of Repose (1971) and Spectator Bird (1976), won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award respectively. Why did the Times ignore Wallace Stegner? Probably because he was not a part of the Manhattan literary scene.

I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros—but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

John Irving

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write.. I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my... books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can’t recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

H. L. Mencken

People who aren’t writers might think that authors would be well advised to study their negative reviews with care, rather than letting a protective skin form. After all, isn’t there something to be learned from the thoughtful analysis of intelligent and knowledgeable critics? Well, maybe, but most of the writers I know don’t take them seriously, and neither do I. It’s not that I don’t respect reviewers. It’s that reviewers don’t write their columns for writers. They write them... with readers in mind, and that’s a different thing.

Aaron Elkins

I can get very depressed by a review that is unfair, unreasonable, and totally destructive.

John O’Hara

I get angry at the stupidity of critics who wilfully refuse to see what my books are really about. I’m aware of malevolence, especially in England. A bad review by a man I admire hurts terribly.

Anthony Burgess

A recent review of one of my books was kind of horrific. It described my work as some sort of terrorist mission—and yet I like it, I like to be controversial in that way. It’s proof that I’m alive.

Robert Coover

I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book’s chances because they’ve missed the point, the tone, the everything.

Ann Beattie

Very often adverse criticism goes to craft, and that sounds an alarm to which attention should be paid.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

It’s discouraging to be criticized because you can’t contend with it. It’s like someone saying, “Sorry Jim, but you just don’t measure up. We’re looking for someone a bit more handsome than you.”

James Lee Burke

It isn’t infrequent that reviewers get the plot wrong. Am I naïve to have expected more consideration, am I naïve to be disappointed? Even “positive” criticisms so often seems uninformed, ignorant.

Joyce Carol Oates

The critics don’t interest me because they’re concerned with what’s past and done, while I’m concerned with what comes next.

Aldous Huxley

You’re always looking—and it’s very foolish, it really would be better not to read the reviews—but you’re always looking for some reviewer who will tell you something about your book that you didn’t know yourself and at the same time that you think is true. And that very, very rarely happens.

Mary McCarthy

Rotten reviews are the lot of the writer, and selling well is the best revenge.

Isaac Asimov

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

Truman Capote

My favourite Kirkus review labelled my writing as “awkward and repetitious.” I framed that one.

Charles Knief

I’ve known writers who are absolutely destroyed by adverse opinion, and I think this is a lot of shit. You shouldn’t allow that to happen to yourself, and if you do, then it’s your fault.

James Dickey

Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can’t be bothered to protest this institutionalised corruption.

Warren Murphy

Good reviews aren’t helpful, and the bad reviews are less... They’re not creatively critical. I don’t think there’s really any point in reading them. You don’t learn anything from them.

Thomas Tyron

If you ever write something, and it is reviewed, and the reviewer includes a photo of you, and both the photo and the review are bad, you will find that the photo is more painful.

Diane Johnson

The Writer’s Quotebook is an excellent resource, capable of bringing a definite smile and soothing nerves. I am young to the game, but already I have faced unkind reviews, with a reviewer missing the point (Beattie and Carol Oates’ point). With my writings on Islamism and terrorism, I too was as surprised (and pleased?) as Robert Coover when my work was described as some sort of terrorist mission and analogous to terrorist ideology. A harsh review can be entertaining months later, but they hit very hard when we crave the affirmation and praise for our hard work.

Trev

Zen Pencils and Strong Images

Today I have been overwhelmed by the fine work coming from another blog.

Gavin Aung Than, also based out of Melbourne, is a cartoonist that has an excellent site. Famous quotes and poems are attached to really intelligent and thought-provoking comics. The archive for his site is here:

http://zenpencils.com/archives/

Some of my favourites include comics attuned to the words of Bruce Lee, Churchill and Carlin.

The most touching though, was this one:

http://zenpencils.com/comic/104-malala-yousafzai-i-have-the-right/

French Earl Grey from Mt Dandenong

My latest and newest tea was a French Earl Grey. It comes with "hibiscus flowers, sunflowers and rose petals". Not a normal tea for me, this had the most excellent aroma. The whole house was more pleasant to be in while the tea was steeped.

It comes from tealeaves.com.au, a shop up on Mt. Dandenong, not that far from Melbourne. The small pack will easily give 15 cups of tea.

Now on the taste, it was not the best tea I had ever tasted. It was not greatly strong or distinctive, this is a tea imbibed for the smell. It was calming, it did feel "healthy", it is probably incredibly good for you, but it didn't have an excellent taste.

It was served without honey, but would benefit from a medium strength light honey. Too thick and the taste would be knocked out entirely, but you do not have to fear about destroying the smell, that is strong and will persist whatever you add to it.

So it is a joy to brew, but not exiting to drink.

Have a great day.

On The Many Names in Academia, For One Thing

'This is what medieval theologians called Vahdat dar Takassur (Unity in Diversity). Seh nagardad barisham ar ou ra parnian khanish ya harir-o-parand, says the great Persian poet Hatif Isfahani (d. 1783), “Silk will not become three different things, if you were to call it parnian, harir, or parand” (three Persian words for “silk”).'

-Hamid Dabashi (2008: 258).

Intellectuals can make three or a thousand names for one thing, but that does not change what the thing truly is, only what it denotes for us. The many names are constructions grasping to assign meaning. A desperate endeavour carried out by all societies. The things remains, regardless of what chatter says about it. The truth of a matter should be more important than our labels (is this the yearning for facts?), but on anything discussed seriously,  people find themselves in a game of ever-changing names and definitions, a circling joust of competing labels.

I study Islamism, and the subjects of this topic go by many names: jihadists, jihadis, Islamic revivalists, Islamic radicals, radical conservatives, nativists, religio-ethnic nationalists, fundamentalists, theocrats, anti-moderns. The writers can't seem to help but proliferate multiple names for a single thing. Here the naming labels emphasise the different aspects of the Islamist, and betray how they are seen and identified by the name-giver. The name denotes what theories will be use to explain the subject, what intellectual direction they come from, and where emphasis will be placed e.g. as anti-moderns, jihadists, theocrats, nativists or conservatives.

It was wonderful to share this quote with you; now back to editing for me. This will require some tea.


Note: I have serious reservations with Dabashi's text, his vilification of Ayaan Hirsi Ali for one; but this was a quote worth drawing out.

The Arts, How They Have Changed by Joseph Epstein

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/who-killed-liberal-arts_652007.html?nopager=1

It would be very easy to just disagree with this trumpeteer of the old guard. Claim that this one writer is out of date, that he implicitly rejects the positive changes to the liberal arts across universities in recent decades, and is unable to appreciate the full scope of pop-culture studies or anything that veers away from old white men of respected authority. Such rings the post-modern critique that sits inside us and pushes out these opinions; but standards are for many art undergrads quite low in what they produce and in the capacity to discuss what they are learning without single-line arguments of dogmatism. To assess a topic with complexity, with a good scope of readings and gathered multiple opinions, to enter weighty texts and comprehend their many meanings is in decline because it is contrary to examination culture and quick answers, which is not long thoughtful debate. Epstein is saying that change is not always for the good, it hasn't been for American arts, and in the American universities that cover his partial experience, the negatives have risen as the favour and reputation of the arts has declined.

The politicisation comment got my attention. In my area of Islamism studies and sociology, politicisation is heavy, palpable. The answers proposed partial and often simplistic, because the writers are adhering to the sub-discliplinary commands of political allegiances. In my drafts, when I have indicated how easily sociology reinforces one camp of argument only (that of external reasons for why Islamism has emerged), this has been marked as something that should not be included. A faux pas to note that common explanations of sociology, here are so limited.

Critique of the arts and social sciences is essential, especially when limitations on thought concerning a subject are easy to see. The arts should be robust enough to take critique, but now they are in decline and depth of analysis is so often lacking—and not just in under-grads. To write on this, is to walk on egg-shells. Epstein deserves credit for explaining what he has seen.

-

To readers, I have apparently reached the mark of having over a hundred views. Early days, but it has been a pleasure. Cheers.

Prison Art and Punishment

I sent this off to a few friends today:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/2529b79c-d644-11e1-b547-00144feabdc0.html

            It got me thinking and feeling. I was surprised by the beauty of the pictures. Art on whatever canvas is available, with simple materials to escape the grim situation of confinement. What sad and tragic longing for the “free world”, the beautiful world outside of their prisons.

            Following this, I read comments on another post calling for death by hanging for paedophiles, murderers, drug dealers and the like. Art is an escape I thought, a chance to find calm, to leave an old self behind and make something worthwhile as an artist, even if you come from an awful background and have done great evil to other humans. Then to read the comments (there were over 1,300), most of which supported death by hanging, but not all, it just seemed like there was an inversion. The incarcerated artists were trying to find peace, but the posters out there in the free world wanted death, and punishment and public killing. It was very sad to read such hate and bloodlust from the free.