I have a bench right at the head of my bed where I pile the books I am currently reading. Well, it’s actually a stool, but “book stool” just doesn’t sound right. So I call it a bench.
I thought that from time to time I would review the books I am reading and reviewing. In retirement, I have reverted to my much younger practice of reading multiple books at once, switching around as I feel the mood. I have a vast personal library, my tastes are decidedly eclectic, and I luxuriate daily in the sensuality and promise of books. None of that new-fangled e-reading for me (except of course for the virtual stack of newspapers I mow through every day). I mostly read history, I rarely read current books, but there is nothing human that is not fascinating to me.
Before we begin, I always buy my new online books at Bookshop.org where the profits go to independent booksellers and not to mega-corporations. You can pick a bookstore to which to dedicate the proceeds from your purchases, or just allow the proceeds to accrue to the general fund which benefits all of them. (I believe Bookshop.org is only available in the US so far.) Or you can buy them direct from the publisher. I buy my used books only at alibris.com. Only as a very, very last resort would I use Amazon. Naturally, buying books at a real live bookstore is an unparalleled pleasure and always the first choice.
So, here’s what’s on my book bench today.
Island of Bali
The Island of Bali, published originally in 1937, was written and illustrated by the Mexican artist and ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias. It has an easy and accessible style, albeit with characterizations that would not pass muster today. But it is a deep work that generally portrays Balinese life and culture with accuracy and sympathy. During my doctoral period in South and Southeast Asian studies, I read chunks of it here and there, but being able to luxuriate in it at my leisure is a great, indeed, pleasure. So far, outside of the disagreeable characterizations of some of the peoples less favored by the author and his informants, I have found little with which to disagree. It certainly brings back to mind my own travels in Bali which took place in the 80s and 90s just as the modern tsunami of tourism was picking up force and volume.
The photographs in the book are by Covarrubias’ wife Rosa Rolanda (identified on the cover page as Rose Covarrubias) who was a dancer and choreographer and evidently deeply moved by Balinese dance. The photographs are a treasure in and of themselves.
I’ll perhaps have more to say about this book as I dive deeper into it.
The Phantom Tollbooth
I have long meant to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth. I first read it with my one and only girlfriend, Paula W., when we were still innocent high-schoolers. We were more or less hiding in her room when she showed it to me because her father did not approve of boys in general or me in particular. (I’d love to find Paula again, but both her maiden and married names are sufficiently common that I have never managed to Google her.) The part I remembered through the years was that you can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and never get wet … turns out the book actually says that you can “still come out completely dry.” The vagaries of memory.
It was fun re-reading this, though it did get to drag a little. It seems that Norton Juster got s little bored too because in the end he rattled off a long list of demons as if he had to get them out of his imagination before the book got too long.
Milo, the hero, makes me remember being a boy. I am still deeply in touch with the boy I used to be. I always want to reach back and tell him that it would all turn out okay, that he can just relax and focus, that life would be deep and sweet and rewarding. Of course, boys don’t hear things like that from their older selves. We are frequently told that childhood is the best time of life, but it is not; being an adult is endlessly deeper and more rewarding and more fascinating. But to be an adult, you have to be a child first. And we adults are the better for remembering to embrace that inner child that we once were and who never fully leaves us behind.
I fear in this modern life that boys are a little forgotten, a little promoted beyond their years too early, a little taken for granted, a little pegged and pigeon-holed. The historically new and wondrously expansive attentions paid to the glories and skills of girls are a limitless addition to our society, and they enrich us all. But boys and their particular needs and fancies must not thereby be left behind, and I fear it is such too often. Milo’s journey is a boy’s journey, a boy’s adventure, a boy’s failures and successes, muddling through with his friends, getting dirty and doggedly figuring it out, returning always to his playthings and the doing it all again, lugging away until the task, whatever it might be, is done. Ah, to be Milo again.
But I’ll never be a boy again, even though The Phantom Tollbooth made me smile in the memory of once having been.
Ibn Khaldun, An Intellectual Biography; The Muqaddimah; and, Hans Wehr’s Arabic-English Dictionary
I already did a mini-review of Robert Irwin’s Ibn Khaldun, An Intellectual Biography in post a few days back on Afghanistan and Ibn Khaldun. I still have to motor through the last couple of chapters that deal with Ibn Khaldun’s later reception. But I’ll repeat here my exasperation with the academic author for failing to transliterate Arabic words accurately (and, for the record, don’t get me going on the failure of academic writers on Chinese topics for failing to include tones in their transliterations … sheesh). For those without acquaintance with standard or classic, aka fuṣḥā, Arabic, the alphabet sports a bunch of so-called emphatic consonants, so there are two s’s, two t’s, etc., normally indicated in English by subscript dots And the three vowels are either short which are not written or long which are written. So to look up a word, you need to know if the vowels are long and whether the given consonants are emphatic.
English-speaking students of Arabic look up words in the ubiquitous Arabic-English Dictionary, by Hans Wehr, translated and edited from the German version by J Milton Cowan. The pictured copy, its cover reinforced with duct tape, is actually my second copy; the first copy died a noble death after being thumbed to obliteration during my years of Arabic classes at Berkeley. The text is incredibly tiny; at my increasingly magisterial age, I prefer to read it with a magnifying glass! To look up a word in Arabic, you have to figure out what its root is, and then look up that root, and then find the particular form of the root. So knowing what letters you’re dealing with makes it a heck of a lot quicker. Hans Wehr, by the way, was a Nazi in favor of the Germans allying with the Arabs. I guess he gets a modern pass because no Arabist can function without his dictionary.
The Bollingen Series, Rosenthal-translated, abridged version of Ibn Khaldun’s The Muqaddimah (Introduction) is on the bookshelf of every thinker who concerns himself with matters Islamic or Arab. The current editions do not have the fabled yellow cover, and I can’t see why you’d change that. When I need the book, which is a little more often than you might surmise, I scan the Islamic shelves of my library for its telltale color. My version is heavily penciled with my notes from my doctoral days, and that helps parse its density.
I was delving again into Ibn Khaldun when, simultaneously I took up blogging and Afghanistan fell backwards to the Taliban. Fate? No, it’s just that I seem to return again and again to the same themes, Islamic history, Central Asia, Indonesia, the Middle Ages, English history, that sort of thing. Not fated, but fortuitous. Thinking about how human beings, in all our majestic variosity*, take ancient seemingly inbred patterns, repurpose them in modified garb for reuse, most often to the same ill-effect as in previous iterations.
All that said, I seem to be incapable of not engaging in meta-reading … taking the passing thought and passing it through a few more thoughts. So to read one book takes three.
Muslim Society
And in that vein, no book in my intellectual history invites more meta-reading than the ineluctable Muslim Society by Ernest Gellner. It was brought to my attention, as noted in a previous post, bynow emeritus Professor Ira Lapidus, my intellectual mentor in things Islamic and someone who sat on my dissertation committee at Cal. The first chapter, “Flux and reflux in the faith of men” has a structure that is imprinted on my mode of thought, and which I periodically revisit because parsing its dense and rich language stirs up a stew of thinking that I prefer to call dialectical. I pulled it out to assist in writing the Afghanistan and Ibn Khaldun post, and now it will occupy a spot in the tower of books on the book bench until I settle in an inevitable re-read of that first chapter. Perhaps I will report here on that.
Dissemination
I know the photo has some motion blur, but that just seems fitting so I did not reshoot it. Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination played a role in focusing my thinking on a key issue in my dissertation. I’ll come back to that below. But first, the new cover in the Bookshop.org listing is risible … pharmaceutical pills?? … good lord, who is in charge of these things.
I recently had a brief discussion of Derrida with my best friend of over four decades whole I call in these writing IM. We were laughing at the absurdity of trying to parse this stuff, especially with reference to a recent send-up of post-modernistical style and post-post-modern political correctness called “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” … check it, it is side-splitting stuff especially if you suffer from a little smugness after a cocktail or two. But notwithstanding our ribaldry, I had to credit that of the impenetrable modernistic literary critics, Derrida still arrives from an understanding of classical rhetoric. Cut away the dross, and there is important thought there.
When I opened the Derrida book to find something to illustrate my point to my friend, five little yellow index cards from a few decades fell out into my lap, and on them are the notes I made as I was puzzling out how Derrida’s idea of différance applied to my work ... specifically his notion that “différance produces what it forbids”. This is profoundly dialectical. For me it gave insight into how the curiosities of the expression of the notion of derhaka (see this as “treason”) in the Malay tradition both appeared to condemn it even as it was celebrated. Of course, the traitor always dies, but only after a rollicking good tale. Again, this is the sort of thing that I plan on blogging about in this scribblings. Promises promises!
My notes, riffing off Derrida, referred to how classical philologists, looking at the Malay tradition, demanded immediacy and presence, and because of their occupational preoccupation, they missed the différance, they missed the dynamic between outward meaning and inner structure. They could not see how an “as-if” ironical approach was built into the structure of the telling and expressed through the formal conventions of the medium, notwithstanding the only apparently explicit meaning of the story. My job in my doctoral work was to unpack that dialectic, and to rediscover the intentions of the anonymous and foreign authors through their light and skilled manipulation of the structure of the tradition. And Derrida helped me, so I give him that. (The “as-if” idea I mention, about which I will blog in the future, is something I played with a lot back then ... all my colleagues ridiculed it except my advisor, the late Professor Amin Sweeney, who totally got it and laughed with me about it.)
Now I confess that I never read more than chunks of Derrida. I actually think that is true of most everyone who stumbles across him. I was looking for some dialectical utility. And I have to aver that it was there and it helped me.
So my advice to my friend was to pick Julia Kristeva as the icon of the worst of the post-modernistas. There is much in Derrida to be admired. Kristeva, meanwhile, is incomprehensible to anyone.
And that’s a wrap
I told you I was an eclectic fellow. I hope to prove that repeatedly in the posts to come. But this is enough. And I have to go bed. Big bike ride tomorrow. But one last photo from the Covarrubias book, itself something I really ought to blog about down the road.
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*I am astonished to learn at this late stage that there is no word “variosity.” I have been using it for years. Variousness does not quite express what I mean. So those of my readers who self-identify as pedants may scorn me, and I welcome your scorn as it is your raison d’être, but I am sticking with variosity, and the OED be damned if they do not adopt it.