by Richard Subber | Jan 5, 2022 | Joys of reading, Language
I won’t show you mine…
You can learn something from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007)
Now, Vonnegut isn’t my favorite writer. Yes, of course, I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. OK, that puts me in the “I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five” category. To paraphrase Woody Allen, the novel has to do with World War II and stuff…
OK, sorry about that downer intro. I don’t incline to sound like a Vonnegut fan when I say that the following anecdote is a glorious insight that moves me.
In 2006, shortly before his death, Vonnegut gave some advice to five New York City high school guys who had written to him:
“. . . Here’s an assignment for tonight,
and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it:
Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed . . .
Make it as good as you possibly can.
But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing.
Don’t show it or recite it to anybody,
not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them . . .
You will find that you have already been
gloriously rewarded for your poem.
You have experienced becoming,
learned a lot more about what’s inside you,
and you have made your soul grow.”
Oh yes, I’m writing my poem now.
Don’t show me yours.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
“…watchers in the crystal sphere…”
”Night watch,” a poem
“…friends who pass the time…”
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 29, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, History, Power and inequality, World history
the traders forgot the common good…
Book review:
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008
Commercial long-distance trade in goods and people has been part of the human experience for about 5,000 years or so, and Bernstein offers plenty of detail about the highs and lows of this experience, and about the wealth that was accumulated by a few of the traders and the governments that backed them.
A Splendid Exchange makes it plain that, across the millennia, disease and plague has unavoidably followed trade routes. The various scourges that we nominally know about, like the Black Plague, were spread around by sailors and merchants who sailed on their ships.
Bernstein rather unconvincingly describes trade as an instinctive human enterprise. However, he clearly states that major trade and long-distance trade has been the vocation of the few and the powerful, and that rich merchants never have prominently attempted to serve any concept of the common good as they amassed their riches.
It’s an old story.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
The “dime novels” in the Civil War
Think “blood-and-thunder”…
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 22, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
Does history have “causes”…?
War and Peace, Second Epilogue
Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1988
Originally published in 1869
The Second Epilogue: Tolstoy’s reflections on history and its causes, and free will
Perhaps you know that Tolstoy appended two epilogues to War and Peace.
In the Second Epilogue, Tolstoy’s sometimes discursive style may impede the modern reader. It’s not boring, but it seems to be repetitious, and Tolstoy uses surprisingly mundane examples that may seem irrelevant to the modern reader.
It’s a Russian version of mid-19th century style. It seems to be relentlessly organized, using what Tolstoy presumably believed was an elaborate precision of language that tends to obscure and confuse his observations and conclusions.
I respect his ruminations about the nature and causes of history, the inevitability of historical events, and the possibly countervailing potency of human free will.
I confess that I am essentially unmoved by his conclusion that freedom of will and action is not a prime mover in human enterprise and human history.
I suspect that Tolstoy’s endorsement of “dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause,” and his acknowledgement of so-called “laws” that frame human history, is a manifestly inadequate description of the reality and the process of human history.
I suggest that Tolstoy went astray in his search for “cause” in human history.
Of course, there are forms and trends and ex post recognition of patterns in history. The longues durées exist, but they are only part of the story. There are recognizable, durable attributes of human nature. They are only part of the story.
Tolstoy almost forgets to mention the utterly contingent natures of historical reality, the historical process, human action, and the sequence of past events. One essential element of history is the continuous interaction of innumerable competing and complementary human behaviors and environmental circumstances.
History is the unpredictable single chain of events that actually happened, with many or most of their contingent antecedents forever unknown. There’s no way to write a neat and complete version of it.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Nov 3, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics
the “public watchdog,” as if…
Book review:
-30- The Collapse
of the Great American Newspaper
Charles M. Madigan, ed.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007
Madigan collected 15 commentaries on the continuing decline of the American newspaper industry and the woeful prospects for its improvement or survival.
The authors of Collapse do not offer predictions, but the adverse circumstances they describe as existing or possible seem all too real almost 15 years later.
Community newspapers have mostly disappeared or shriveled in vitality and importance.
Big city newspapers have been transformed into cash conduits by profit-seeking money managers, who as a group don’t care about doing or preserving the popular (and dubious) legacy concept of journalism as “a public watchdog.”
At every level of government, from township zoning hearing board to U.S. Congress, fewer and fewer reporters—or no reporters—are showing up to observe what’s going on and report it to a citizenry that historically has never wanted to pay the full cost of getting “the news.”
The basic business model of newspaper owners today is: soak the aging, shriveling group of home delivery subscribers for as much as they will pay, and soak the shriveling group of newspaper advertisers for as much as they will pay, for as long as they’re willing to pay. One by one, newspapers are disappearing.
For example, the seven-day home delivery price of The Boston Globe is about $25/week, or almost $1,300/year.
Do you remember how much a newspaper cost when you were a kid?
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
…too much death (book review)
Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.)
and Joseph L. Galloway
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Nov 1, 2021 | Democracy, Politics, Tidbits
“…a dope pusher’s argument.”
“Is news what the public is interested in
or what’s in the public interest?…
This business of giving people what they want
is a dope pusher’s argument.
News is something people don’t know they’re interested in
until they hear about it.
The job of a journalist is to take what’s important
and make it interesting.”
from -30- The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper
Charles M. Madigan, ed.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007
p. 121
Too much of the media is focused on making money by entertaining everyone—
it’s not about journalism any more.
Mostly, if you want news, you have to search for it.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
A quote from General Custer
Hint: something to do with Indians…
–
Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
