Literature – the coffee philosopher

Posted on February 16, 2024 by the coffee philosopher

The Fetishist

Not what you think. Or, sort of what you think. The unfinished but mostly finished and completed/compiled by the late author’s daughter novel about, well, “yellow fever.” White men who mostly/only date/pursue Asian women and the kind of dangerous sexualization and fetishism associated with that. Which is all very awkward for a guy like me who is married to a woman from Thailand (a country which has its own unique place in the pantheon of cultures creepily fetishized by White and western men).

It’s an excellent book, with some well-drawn characters and its Baltimore location felt very real to someone who has lived there and visits often. It suffered, of course, at the end, because, presumably, she would have fleshed it out more than the brief epilogue-like fragments that made up the last sections of book.

Also… classical music plays a big role, so, if you like a nice string quartet, you can hear the music in your head sometimes while reading this book.

Posted on October 5, 2023October 5, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

The Star Mill

Emil Petaja asks the reader an important question: what if Finland was populated by secret space wizards?

Yes, that’s right. This book is that bats–t crazy. It starts out like a classic silver age science fiction novel, with a lost spaceman who has survived this cosmic zone of death called the Black Storm. The Storm is growing and it disintegrates everything it touches. Even the crew of the ship that picks up our intrepid spaceman (who is, we will learn later, named Ilmaren) slowly and painfully melts into atomic nothingness just from having been near things that were in or near the Black Storm. He blames himself (as do most people in the first half of the book), but later it is off-handedly said that it couldn’t be him, but maybe his spacesuit was contanimated? Felt like there was some more detail we could have gotten there, but by that time, we are off to the land of the space wizards who descended from the people of modern day Finland. Mostly, they live like gnomish wizards underground, but once a year they come up and party (protected by an illusion, so normies don’t discover them) like it’s approximately 1000 CE.

You will be surprised to learn that Ilmaren is actually a chosen savior of the galaxy who must journey to land of goblins, elves, and hell hounds, created by an evil witch who got herself a Star Mill due to… well, it’s a long complicated retelling of Finnish mythology that is barely even metaphor, apparently. Anyway, Ilmaren saves the die by traveling through a tapestry using space magic and destroys the Star Mill (though not the witch! she escapes!) using a science magic… um… light saber, I guess. It’s really not clear. He’s sort of trapped in the little space witch world, but he seemed hopeful, so I guess it’s a happy ending. And we are meant to assume that the Black Storm will not destroy the entire universe anymore, so, job well done.

Posted on June 15, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

‘Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back To Life’ By Clare Mac Cumhail & Rachael Wiseman

The premise is that four women of varying closeness to each other who also studied philosophy together helped push back against the analytic turn in British philosophy and the apparently nefarious influence of A.J. Ayer’s version of logical positivism.

The four women as fascinating and clearly did important work (obviously, Murdoch is well known beyond philosophy), but the thesis of the subtitle is not really upheld. Did they bring philosophy back to life? They could have, but the authors don’t necessarily make that case (and even undercut it by mentioning several men who came back from World War II and felt driven by what they saw and experienced to turn away from analytic philosophy). In an unfortunate choice, the focus on Anscombe’s friendship and professional relationship with Wittgenstein risks making her appear as a moon, albeit an important one, in his orbit. I am convinced their work was important and interesting, but their influence, particularly on the (still) male-dominated world of philosophy is poorly documented, nor is it suggested that they created a cohort of female disciples to batter down the patriarchal door.

Posted on May 5, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

King Solomon’s Mines

I love this sort of book and hate myself a little for loving them. Featuring the surprisingly not indefatigable Allan Quatermain, King Solomon’s Mines is what the term “rip-roaring adventure” was made for. Brisk and exciting, but also depressingly racist.

Quatermain is actually a somewhat nervous elephant hunter in his middle age, living in Africa, with a son in medical school back in England. He is recruited to help a wealthy aristocrat find his lost brother – lost looking for – can you guess? – the biblical King Solomon’s lost African diamond mines. Accompanied by Naval officer, recently mustered out, and an African man, they cross mountains, nearly starve (the description of the journey is pretty exciting), and then discover a sort of lost civilization. A militaristic African nation in a hidden valley, past nearly impassable mountains. Of course, they find the mines, but only after their friend reveals himself to be exiled son of the nation’s former king and they win a subsequent civil war.

They find the mines, of course, grab some diamonds and… well, you see, the naval officer had fallen in love with a beautiful woman and she dies saving them and Quatermain utters one of the most disgusting things I’ve heard since someone said that there were good people on both sides of clash around the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. He thinks that it might be good thing she died, since it could never have worked, her being African and him being White. Just… really unnecessary.

They return and randomly happen upon the long lost brother, living in shack in the middle of nowhere after he hurt his leg and couldn’t complete his journey.

H. Rider Haggard also wrote She, another rip-roaring adventure. It’s in the same vein as A. Merritt (using a first initial seemed to be a thing) and Edgar Rice Burroughs and even Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlock adventures and is in this tradition of late nineteenth and early twentieth century pulp adventures, some edging closer to horror and others towards science fiction and others are just fun adventures. This genre is one of my delights, despite the flaws.

Posted on April 3, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

Uncle Silas: A Tale Of Bartram-Haugh

My first Sheridan Le Fanu novel and, uh, it was okay. Uncle Silas promised to be a sort of locked door mystery, but ended up a low-rent Ann Radcliffe. The privileged daughter and only child of a slightly reclusive rich man is sent to live with her ne’er do well uncle after said rich man dies. Oh, and her uncle is now a reformed man after having been a gambler and womanizer who also maybe killed a man, but it couldn’t be proved.

For a moment, it seemed like it might be a sort of closed door mystery as a plucky young lady manages to prove her uncle innocent.

But no. It’s a just another 19th century novel, with a neck-breakingly acceleration into a gothic turn as a bald and bewigged evil French governess (re)appears and her uncle’s grammatically challenged and obviously dangerous son try to kill her. And would you believe the uncle was a bad guy after all? And we learned the solution of the locked door mystery, but it’s a single sentence throwaway.

Skip.

Posted on March 7, 2023March 6, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

Review: The Transcendentalists And Their World

What a great book, really.

I borrowed it from the library, but with everything I had going on, especially the other reading I needed to do, it was clear I wasn’t going to have time to finish it before the due date (there was a long-ish waiting list for it). So, I pre-ordered the softcover version (because, as much as I want good books to succeed, that doesn’t mean I have to pay for a hardback copy; especially since it was so much less awkward to hold and read the paperback, even an oversized one).

It is not about Transcendentalism, but about the town of Concord, Massachusetts from the 1790s to mid 1840s. The opening history is about the town figuring out how to memorialize its role in the Revolutionary War and it closes with Henry David Thoreau giving the lectures that would make up Walden. It’s a close reading of the history and archives of a particular place that happened to have been very important in American history.

The structure is a thing of magic. It manages to move chronologically through time, while, at the same time, being arranged thematically. There is a section about religious change, as the long-time minister of the official church moves towards Unitarianism and rival churches are formed. There is a section about the rise of manufacturing. And, of course, there is a great deal about Ralph Waldo Emerson, though he does not dominate the book, because it is, ultimately, social history, not intellectual history.

Highly recommended.

Posted on January 28, 2023January 24, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

Poetry Is Just Fine, Thank You

Please check out my latest essay, now up at the Decadent Review, “Poetry Is Just Fine, Thank You.”

And check out the whole magazine, they are publishing some great articles and reviews; I would suggest that they are a European equivalent to something like The Los Angeles Review of Books, which is to say a place for intelligent essays and reviews (many of them, more intelligent than mine, I am freely willing to admit).

Poetry Is Just Fine, Thank You

Posted on January 14, 2023January 13, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

The Hatred Of Poetry

I do not like the provocative title. I don’t think it is particularly useful. Years ago, before I became a father, I read Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (I have not read any of his poetry, or rather, any of his poetry collections; I have probably read one of his poems in a magazine), but Hatred is my first time returning to him.

The actual contents are much less provocative than the title and perhaps the publisher picked it, so let’s give him some benefit of the doubt.

He makes some nice points and has a very interesting analysis of Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. He has a great deal to say about implicit bias in poetry criticism that, while not new, is important to say.

But overall, the book is interesting rather than captivating and also meanders a bit, which increases the sense that the title wrote a figurative check that the copy can’t cover.

Posted on January 6, 2023January 5, 2023 by the coffee philosopher

Defense Of Poesy

The ur-text for all arguments for poetry in the English tradition, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy is better than you think. Don’t let that archaic spelling in the title throw you off.

I have heard it described as being very Aristotleian, though I confess I don’t see it myself, except insofar as both are operating under the shadow of Plato and both attempt to answer Plato’s challenges with more practical than theoretical answers.

After first reading it, one of my thoughts was its timelessness. In both a good and bad way. If you made the language blander and more modern, you could slap David Brooks name on it and claim it had been published in The Atlantic under the title “Poetry is dying: I have a plan to save it.”

The plan is reject literary theory and focus on how poetry is of practical value, as a moral and pedagogical tool. Which isn’t wrong, but feels inadequate.