by Richard Subber | Dec 6, 2019 | Human Nature, Tidbits
Too many ways for lies to travel…
“A lie can travel halfway around the world
while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens “Mark Twain” (1835-1910)
I tried it—I can tell the truth twice while I’m tying my shoes.
Try telling someone the truth today.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
A quote from General Custer
Hint: it’s something to do with Indians…
–
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 20, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
The language is Dickens, the humanity is Melville…
“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”
A short story by Herman Melville (1819-1891)
First published 1853 in Putnam’s Magazine, and later in Melville’s The Piazza Tales in 1856
If you can read “Bartleby” without suspecting, nay, without more or less believing that it was written by Dickens, you can take pride in your mental discipline whilst reading. I wanted to read it again, and I confess that I briefly searched for “Bartleby” in my rumpled collection of Dickens, which of course does not include The Piazza Tales.
None of Melville’s notorious South Sea elements here. This is straightforward, 19th century prose set in 19th century Wall Street with shabby, luridly eccentric antebellum characters including the narrator and his bedeviled scrivener (copyist), Bartleby.
The circumstances of this desiccated short story are curious, even eccentric, incredulous. The withered and aloof Bartleby is presented, examined and disdained, until his very dispirited isolation makes him the object of the narrator’s genuine but increasingly troubled caretaking.
Bartleby’s enervating and apparently desperate ennui keeps him always a step removed from the narrator’s efforts to supply a little humanity in his life.
The scrivener is lonely beyond understanding. He bears almost in silence the emotional poverty that ultimately kills him.
The reader understands that Bartleby longed, in vain, to be able to repel the Reaper with his simple and inscrutable refrain: “I would prefer not to.”
Despite all temptation, I will prefer not to re-read Melville’s tale on a dreary afternoon.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Book review: To Serve Them All My Days
by R. F. Delderfield
A beloved teacher,
you know this story…
–
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 | Oct 10, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, World history
…all too believable,
all too horrific…
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred before WWII—
two friends who couldn’t understand how to avoid mutual self-destruction.
Book review:
Address Unknown
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor (1903-1996)
Washington Square Press, New York, copyright 1938, published 2001
Read Address Unknown in one sitting. You can do it.
This is a tiny work that delivers gut punches on every other page. Repeatedly, it seems to be gratuitously dramatic and somewhat contrived, except that it’s all too believable and all too horrific.
It’s hard to discuss Address Unknown without including spoiler information, but I’m going to try because I think you should want to take a short time out of your busy day to read this through at one sitting and let the experience overwhelm you.
In 1932-34, Max Eisenstein, a Jew in New York, corresponds with his non-Jewish friend, Martin Schulse, in Germany. They have a joint business interest: a New York art gallery. Ominously, Hitler is setting the stage to become Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Max and Martin habitually exchange letters. Their correspondence is swiftly transformed from business matters and the chatter of friends, to awkwardly ingenuous, increasingly corrosive, and bitterly destructive words that betray Martin’s fatal embrace of the newly politicized Aryan culture.
Max and Martin cease to be friends. The terrible consequence of their estrangement is no surprise, but not less terrible because we can so easily grasp its nature and implications.
Kathrine Taylor relentlessly tells the story. The reader is left to wonder about the dreadful imperatives of the kind of human behavior that cannot avoid self-destruction.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
You’re down to just one piece of bread…
…would you share it with anybody?
Book review:
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
click here
–
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 | Aug 30, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Tidbits
Think about your own well-being…
Here’s one for your reading list
Tribe: On Homecoming
and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
In his Introduction, Junger says:
“Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word ‘tribe’ is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with…
Tribe is about why [treating someone like a member of your tribe] is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.”
It doesn’t take him too long to get right to the point, quoting from a 2012 journal article:
“The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment…that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
Here’s the thing: if you read that last sentence without saying some of the words right out loud, maybe twice, with feeling and with some awareness of despair, well, maybe you should grab the CliffsNotes version and save yourself some time.
Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2016, xvi-xvii, 23.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
–
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
–
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 | May 15, 2019 | Human Nature, Tidbits
…searching for a hero…
“One must think like a hero
to behave like a merely decent human being.”
May Sarton (1912-1995)
American poet
This pithy quote from May Sarton stopped me cold. It’s surprising, how strange and how true it is in our world today that acting like a decent human being could be, and in many ways is really heroic.
I read it again, and now I think that maybe she got it backwards.
It seems that it must be true that I have to think like a decent human being to behave like a hero.
Either way, it’s a good thought. I’m holding on to it.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Walking on the beach is so personal
Do you remember?…
”Take your time,” my poem
click here
“Many waters cannot quench love.”
Love will rise to meet you…
(what you hear is poetry)
Book review: St. Ives
by Robert Louis Stevenson
click here
–
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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 1, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
a miss on tactics,
a miss on strategy…
Book review:
Moral Tribes:
Emotion, Reason,
and the Gap
Between Us and Them
by Joshua Greene
New York, Penguin Press, 2013
422 pages
“This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up.” Greene’s sincere aim is a bit too breezy for me.
Reluctantly, I admit I don’t have time to read a book like Moral Tribes right now. I feel like I’m too busy sticking fingers into the terrifying political dike that is threatening to collapse in America, indeed, in the world.
I’m interested in learning more about Greene’s approach in Moral Tribes: “understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems that our brains were designed to solve and the distinctively modern problems we face today.”
I don’t have enough time or energy to indulge Greene’s apparently sincere efforts to develop “a practical philosophy that can help us solve our biggest problems.”
America’s problems—Americans’ problems—are all too clear and at least one part of the fix is all too clear: there are lots of folks who can live with and live for the hatred they feel, and they’re voting; there are lots of folks who are afraid of some of the kinds of people who are getting elected and exercising political power to the detriment of most Americans, and too many of these fearful folks aren’t voting.
I think a dominating element of a practical philosophy for America right now is “Get out the vote!”
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
A poem about the right thing
…and the lesser incarnation…
“Vanity”
–
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 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”
* * * * * *
