(no subject)

61. Emily Dickinson (Everyman Poetry)
62. Letter to a Christian Nation
63. The Moral Landscape
64. The Blue Octavo Notebooks
65. Parables and Paradoxes
66. King Lear
67. The Tempest
68. A Boy's Will
69. Three Sisters (Mamet adaptation)
70. Complete Short Novels, Chekhov

The Frost is too lame to leave on there by itself, though I've seen it reprinted separately. I wish I'd bought that when I had a chance, actually: it was a beautiful set of exact facsimiles of his first two or three books. Something like five dollars for all of them, which I guess seemed like far too much for presentation at the time, unable as I was to foresee a day I'd make dumb promises to myself that having lots of short books around would help me fulfill (to my own satisfaction). I'll feel like a cheater if I won't have managed to get through 75 discrete books.

I really love his earliest poems, written before he achieved his rather guarded, characteristic mastery. Actually I love his late poems too. With your favorites you often like what happened to them, like what their whole lives end up looking like. Which they probably didn't themselves. He was already himself enough that the title is an irony. Well, nearly everything in the book is an irony. But it's not a double, triple irony, so it's not quite yet Robert Frost.

(It's not that I've been ignoring suggestions, but I can't yet get a library membership of my own and used bookstores suck in this stretch of suburbs. Bernhard and Pavic, who I own nothing at all by, are on Christmas lists.)

(no subject)

What to read next year?

I don't want to try to beat 75. I'd probably have to turn to Dr. Seuss to. And the number goal, combined with an internet-atrophied attention span, meant I read very few even mid-length books this year, most of which were collections of shorter pieces.

One thing I'll do the same will be rereading a lot: well over half of this year's books were rereads. I've just reached a point where that's become a much more reliable source of great experiences; I guess I'm reaping the reward for the wider reading I did when younger. I'm sure a point comes when you can burn out on rereading too, but I'm not near it.

Or maybe I just needed comfort this year? And last year, now I think of it, with all the Borges and Calvino. Maybe that need will pass with what inspired it.

As a compromise between reading new and reading old, I think I might try tackling consecutively a few authors I usually read around in: Emerson, especially, maybe going through his journals in order, and the relevant collections of poems and essays as I get up to when he's writing them; Dickinson's letters likewise, reading each year of her poems in the Franklin edition concurrently with that letter year; ditto Kafka, though maybe just with his diaries and stories, since most of his letters don't do much for me.

I imagine I've read all Dickinson's poems by now, but perhaps I missed a few. I used to read her for hours on end on plagiarist.com, despite owning the various print editions, because of the 'random' button they had there. She was something like twenty percent of their whole database, so you only had to click through a few non-her poems, usually by Robert Service, to get back to Dickinson. I liked there being just one poem highlighted on the page, giving everything she wrote a special attention. But I want to annotate her. I'm trying to annotate now, and she's one of the few writers where I do feel like making lines and circles and drawings on her poems.

For rereading, I need to revisit Lawrence and see what I make of him now. Women in Love at least. The Magic Mountain I keep thinking about, and Emperor and Galilean. I didn't get around to much Shelley in the summer. A complete run through is in order. As is seeing what Volokhonsky and Pevear make of Tolstoy, Lydia Davis of Proust.

Of the new things read this year, most of the best were Chekhov stories. There's a number of his I still haven't read.

I'm not sure I can hold off from Little, Big until the anniversary edition's out.

Reading Shakespeare makes it hard to read non-Shakespeare. I might do a few more of his aloud these next couple weeks: Antony, Love's Labour's, Comedy, Winter's Tale, Othello, Troilus, Midsummer. Haven't read some of those in ages.

It's time for Resurrection, the book I've been saving since 2000. Maybe I'll start the new year with it, or use it to end 2010 if I've hit 75 by c. Christmas?

(no subject)

I find incoherent Zizek's critique of Harris' argument, in The End of Faith, that torture should be permissible on utilitarian principles - i.e. in cases where there's reason to think the harm done while torturing will be less than the harm diverted by whatever info's obtained. Zizek claims this makes other people objects, not Neighbors, thus disregarding "the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject." But math can be done using infinites, after all - allowing X number of people to die abandons X numbers of infinite abysses to implode (or evanesce or whatever) for the sake of not harming X+1 minus X. That's so obvious even he must see it - he must ultimately mean some kind of sacredness should be respected. Which of course it should, but that doesn't help with questions of setting things right when it hasn't been, when questions of suffering in abyssal subjectivities are live. Harris wasn't arguing for punitive torture, after all. So how can this line of thought not fall apart? Unless he's suggesting, which he never seems to be, that "suffering shares the nature of infinity" (Wordsworth) but death is no big deal. Is Zizek an idiot? I don't know enough about Zizek, though he did print a good piece on European atheism in the wake of this that put him a lot closer to Harris et al. than to (e.g.) Eagleton and Mieville.

Personally, I accept that Harris is correct, but would argue that this is never a right we should cede to Them, the people that would be in charge of the permitted torture. We need it to not become a precedent, in fact need the punishment of people caught ordering and committing it to be the precedent, not because torture could never hypothetically work to prevent greater harm, but because we're too likely to be lied to by those in charge about the circumstances warranting the torture. Like we are about war, of course, but the threat of being able to wage war is probably foundational for states, hence until states have imploded or evanesced is a power necessarily yielded to the (delegated) ruling Few, whereas torture is not - unless you include any form of imprisonment under the torture umbrella.

We can of course vividly imagine examples where a state's very identity is threatened by knowledge withheld by some single, torturable individual - someone who knows the location of a nuclear weapon set to wipe out central D.C. or Manhattan, is the standard thought problem. But we can even more vividly imagine, having seen it, how a state's very identity can be threatened by the mission creep of treating situations that can lead to that hypothetical situation as being on par with it. And of course since the criminal code is ultimately aimed at a) disincentivizing dire misbehavior and, relatedly, b) empowering discretionary suppression of dire misbehavior, if That Situation ever does happen then presumably legal disincentives, and whatever law enforcers are on hand, will not stop the law-breaking torturer. The possible disincentives won't outweigh the obvious, exigent incentives to torture, for one thing, and any law enforcers in the room will likely help. If it can be made at all clear to anyone what you meant to accomplish by the torture, the Greater Good defense will be a shoe-in. Utilitarianism's built into, or rather laid under, the law already.

Hell, there should probably be a jury system in place to decide whether we should go to war. Alongside every other control we've been ignoring in the U.S. for sixty years.

(no subject)

My handwriting.