The Island of Second Sight by Thelen as recommended by Zolov, Weiss, and Hoople from Amazon and Riding of the New York Times

 

I don't really want to read it. Another must read. Another groan from me. But since it is effusively "recommended"...and why do I read the reviews? OK, a quick check on Amazon, but a little too much in price as I was hoping for ebook savings. Library? On order.

Amazon's reviews, by the way, collectively give me more reason to read it rather than the NY Times review that told me of permutations of predilections all too familiar summed across books across the years. So I wanted another reason to read it and the other thing it has going for it, is style and humor. Too little of these two, as examples, were in the Times review to get me to buy it.

Then, too, the reviewers aren't looking to sell the book to me. I can read it when the price drops or the library copy can be checked out. It would make more sense for me to read any of anything’s reviews months or longer from now so that any hype, justified or otherwise, could die down or level off and the price and library availability would decrease and increase, respectively.

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor, as done by Pearson and Macfarlane

 

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor benefits from an appreciation in The Guardian online, or it is more like a white-hot tribute to Fermor by Allison Pearson in meeting with Artemis Cooper, author of a very recent biography of Fermor. Also from The Guardian online, the same biography is recommended by Robert Macfarlane. Fermor was their hero, whose touchstone was WWII and Fermor's Cretan exploits therein. Heroes are rare today. What they did to become a hero is usually severely compromised by an emphasis on what the hero did not do or should not have done. The nay overpowers the yea - though still a hero, albeit qualified.

The qualification doesn't partake of morals. No heroes today are moral figures. Pearson and Macfarlane between them found him to be unconventional and faunlike. The faun wasn't like one in marble since he could smoke 80 cigarettes a day and drink like a drowning fish. Very early on, on the farm, he roamed the English countryside and it is suggested he wanted to always do so. To do so he was a bit of a sponger and more like a satyr but that was more than counterbalanced by a passion for living so that in his 80's (he died at 96) he could leap from rock to rock all the while asking about food, what had been visited, supplying information about Greek myths and Dylan Thomas - meantime sporting invigoration and curiosity in addition to being inconclusive and charming.

His personality did not need assembly. Such types can get to be tiresome though envied. Who spent a long time with him on their terms and put more luster on the hero's image? One could add to his being uncommon in many of his activities such as in moral matters. He wrote about a long journey in 1933-34 when he was 18. Then, when he was much older, books about that travel came out in 1977 and 1985. He wrote them from notes not at all supportive of what found its way into print. He, in one example, recounted how he rode across a plain on horseback when he didn't have a horse.

He was not liked by all. He certainly liked the Greeks of the Mani peninsula where he had a home. Why the Greeks? Doesn't the passion for living and being an invigorating influence have representation and reception in other times and places? Yes, in other places, but in other times, certainly in more recent times, is doubtful. The sensations he brought to the fore are routine now as they are accentuated by television, the Internet, and movies. One vital distinction remains - he was real, they are not.

Fifty Shades of Grey as done by James Parker

 

The little that is left, of our culture, cannot be found in the book mentioned in Parker's "Bad Romance". [in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 2012] Now, of course, all romance is bad unless saved by S and M. So it would seem, since boredom is our plight.

He states, if you have genitals, you must have an opinion about the book. You are driven by the "culturally compulsory" to take up a position. A few of us become like soldiers hopelessly defending a private redoubt.

I thank Parker for telling me enough about the book so that I do not care to read it. Rather, I could not read it - trash, he calls it. It is hopeless, at this late date, to ward off the trash lobbed at the redoubt.

They and it cannot get in the redoubt - never will they and it do so. They and it can overrun the position. Take it, you lost souls and pieces-of-crapola. We aren't defending modernity, not what Lawrence's 1928 lament wanted abolished, but since after 1928, modernity did suffer a repulse; we now contrary-wise assert no victory over trash triumphant.

Elsewhere, the numbness of modernity vibrates so loudly that fractures put fragments in play. Those fragments that Parker quotes are sharply enough felt by him to put his observations in a register higher than the quotes he makes. The numbness that hums, drones, into his bones is too loud to be countered by any vibrancy.

The constant hum of our "culture" prevents us from hearing a small and quiet voice. In other words, morality is no longer heard here.