Kirsten @ Snoqualmie Archive.

Literature, the best literature, both reflects and critiques the human condition.  Professor Arnold Weinstein uses novels, films, paintings and short stories to show how the world's best authors confront death, joy, dreams, love, and madness.

"Through art," Weinstein notes, "we discover that we are not alone."  Feelings and experiences are understood best by situating them in a social context, by discussing them with others either directly or through producing art such as novels, paintings and films.  Feeling, embodied by the heart, is at the center of Weinstein's book.  As the seat of popular conceptions of feeling, the heart also stands for the biological fact of being alive-- having a heart beat, pumping blood through the body, etc.  The convergence of this figurative and literal importance in what the author calls "the world's heartbeat" is the collective experience of which art brings each of us into closer awareness.  Weinstein discusses paintings, stories, novels and films revered for their exquisite depictions of human feeling, from the obvious choices of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex to the paintings of Swedish artist Lea Cronqvist.

The most intimate and complex of sentiments, grief and love, are explored through Faulkner's Tender is the Night and Edvard Munch's paintings after the death of his sister, Sophie.  As the examined works bear out, these emotions can be powerfully intertwined.  Themes of exposure, to plague (Camus's The Plague and Bergman's The Seventh Seal) to AIDS (Kushner's Angels in America), to smallpox (Dickens's Bleak House) allow authors to explore the objectification of the patient in modern medicine and the impulse to seek meaning through processes such as diagnosis.  Hamlet's "disposition turned heavy" echoes in Quentin Compson of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.  In an age more interested in banishing depression as quickly as possible, these two characters depict the depressed mind in great detail as a tragic melancholia, deeply compelling and ultimately deadly.

Weinstein is a professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and is widely renowned for his teaching exellence.  This book reflets decades of study and refinement of his argumentation in dozens of classrooms.  The scream that goes through the house, Weinstein shows, is the primal, universal expression of feeling projected into the world through art and literature.  Even reformed English majors will enjoy his thoughtful, insightful discussions of how art can make us better people.

A ridiculous number of vampire books have been published lately.  Good ones and not so good ones.  I haven't read much horror in recent years, but when I read about a movie adaptation of a Swedish vampire novel called Let Me In, I checked my usual review sites to see if the novel was any good.  The tone of the reviews in general was somewhat strange: the book was highly recommended, but in serious, intense terms.  Not the "oh, I loved it!" kind of response at all. 

So, I borrowed the book and took it home.  I read, like many of us, right before I go to sleep at night.  Working life has many dictates, and this is one of them.  This circumstance was unfortunate, which I sensed long before I could finally put the book down that first night.  This book is scary.  I feared falling asleep.  I feared shadows in the corners. 

Let Me In, in the best tradition of horror, includes very effective literary techniques (foreshadowing, pacing of the plot, allusion, etc.) for heightening the reader's susceptibility to the shock of the experiences Oskar, a 12-year old boy living in suburban Stockholm, endures.  Oskar is a bit of a dork.  He's socially inept, is overweight, and a favorite target of his school's bullies.  When one of the bullies ends up dead, Oskar is equally horrified and relieved.  A new neighbor has moved into Oskar's building about this time; a girl and a man who could be her father.  Eli doesn't go to school, though, and Oskar only sees her at night.  Oh, yeah, she's definitely a vampire.  Lindqvist develops Eli, Oskar and the other characters not as types, but to the point that you know them like you know real people.  And the things they do are unspeakably grotesque, but for reasons we all understand: love, fear, hunger and the need to belong.  These are vampires of the Anne Rice variety, once human and now monsters of appetites.  Eli befriends Oskar, cares for him as no one else does, and for that he keeps her secret and accepts her terms for their relationship without dispute.  And ghastly terms they are.

If you want to get an overview of major themes in Philosophy and giggle quite a bit at the same time, this is your book.  Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein received Philosophy degrees from Harvard, then "pursued the usual careers" afterward: working with street gangs, designing gags for Candid Camera, that kind of thing.  However lucrative those jobs may have been, the authors have made a considerable contribution to the general understanding of philosophy through Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... 

Each chapter uses jokes and cartoons to illustrate particular philosophical questions in areas such as ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.  The book opens with my favorite philosophical/astronomical joke: What holds up the world?  A turtle.  What does the turtle stand on?  Another turtle.  And what does that turtle stand on?  It's turtles all the way down, of course!  (Okay, it might not be a knee-slapper, but just try to imagine it!)  Cathcart and Klein go on to explain that this particular joke relates to the philosophical idea of infinite regress, an aspect of the discussion regarding a First Cause (for the universe, time and space, etc.).  Of course, a sense of humor is necessary to receive the maximum benefit from this book, especially the Philosophy of Religion chapter.  The approach is certainly irreverent, but the point of philosophy is to ask questions about what we believe and how it is that we can believe what we decide on, if we actually reach that point.

The jokes provide the authors a common reference to work from for each philosophical idea, almost like a case study, and propel the discussion of what could be rather esoteric subjects, like stoicism, forward.  (The one about the dentist and his "stoic" patient is priceless!)  Since many jokes are necessarily ironic, the section on the nature of irony provides some of the best.  Between the giggle and guffaws, Cathcart and Klein provide succinct descriptions of philosophers' contributions to the problems of existence, justice, and how we express ourselves.  Similarities in Eastern and Western philosophy are demonstrated through discussing such notions as Shopenhauer's relationship to Buddhism, which comes down to a question of resignation or release.  It's a simple concept with significant room for meditation, or may just be semantic.  Whether you're in it for the serious analysis or just the funny bits, this book will give you what you want, along with much we all need.

By halfway through the first chapter of The Great Mortality, the smells, sounds and grotesque sights of plague-ridden Europe creep up out of the book and surround the reader.  This is not in fact entirely unpleasant, as the personal stories John Kelly uses to evoke these sensations are often witty, and always compelling.  Alongside these anecdotes are clear descriptions of how the yersinia pestis bacillus (aka, Plague) spreads from flea, to rat, to human and throughout the population. 

Kelly excels at describing the utter devastation the plague left in its wake in the mid-fourteenth century: one in three people died in the least ravaged areas in mere weeks, in heavily populated cities three of five people succumbed.  Whole villages disappeared, fortunes were lost, and even the Pope died of plague.  The survivors were left with the reconstruction of European civilization.  Kelly tells the stories of courageous doctors who stayed to treat the stricken after their families deserted them, as well as of the anti-Semitism produced by fear and panic.  The entirety of Europe's economic devastation from unharvested crops to the collapse of newly-emerging commercial markets are illustrated in records from English farms, diaries of noblemen, and account books of merchants (all tear-stained, no doubt).    

In the more than six centuries since the Great Mortality, scholars have debated the causes and effects of Europe's most catastrophic demographic episode, and Kelly presents all views in the ongoing attempt to understand exactly what happened and why.  While this may never be known in its entirety, Kelly's broad picture populated with scientific fact as well as the voices of eyewitnesses presents the the most complete, and readable, description available.