Rarely have I enjoyed a piece of political commentary as much as I did Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.
IIn William Shakespeare’sRarely have I enjoyed a piece of political commentary as much as I did Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.
IIn William Shakespeare’s day, it wasn’t safe to disagree with power. Unlike today’s America, with the protections of the First Amendment, his world was governed by the near-absolute power of the monarch, the aging Queen Elizabeth. And speaking ill of the queen led to swift and often deadly punishment. Instead, the Bard through his plays would examine the ways and means of tyranny, delving into the past and into foreign lands to create his voices that could say what could not be said frankly (“Greenblatt is the Harvard Shakespeare expert who co-founded new historicism, the lit-crit practice that seeks to place works in their historical context.”)
In the vein of speaking obliquely, this is Greenblatt’s commentary on Donald Trump, though the president is not named in its pages. Instead, the Tyrant focuses on several of the same that appear in Shakespeare's plays, examining them in their foibles for the causes and results of their tyranny. The book is rooted in an article that Greenblatt wrote for the New York Times in 2016. At a friend’s encouragement, he expanded it to a full book. He focuses his examination on Macbeth, Richard III, Lear, Coriolanus and Leontes from A Winter’s Tale (notably leaving out Claudius, perhaps because he is more well-known than most).
While it is ostensibly a commentary on politics, it does not read like just another piece of political punditry or tribal drivel. On the contrary, Greenblatt makes Shakespeare accessible and, well, interesting, as well as providing principles that can be read and interpreted to apply to almost any power selfish politicians or businessman. Reading it is as enjoyable as watching Shakespeare performed well. As Constance Grady puts it in her review of the book, “There is a certain pleasure to watching Shakespeare’s tyrants work, to watching Richard III brazenly woo Lady Anne over the body of a man he killed or listening to Macbeth’s mournful, poetic speeches.”
Perhaps the biggest observation for me, and where the book most departs from other books that more directly take on Trump, is that Tyrant leaves the reader to make his own observations and conclusions. Here is what a tyrant does; is this what we are living through?...more
What a delightful little read. You'll find here one to two-page summaries of how some of the great artists, scientists, writers, movie makers, composeWhat a delightful little read. You'll find here one to two-page summaries of how some of the great artists, scientists, writers, movie makers, composers, and more worked. Each is short and sweet, perfect for a quick bit of motivation or inspiration between other tasks. It fills the place that exists between one project and another, one meeting and the next.
In fact, Daily Rituals was born out of one of those very moments. Mason Currey was under deadline and avoiding writing an article for the publication he worked for at the time. He began to research how the great writers worked, surfing the internet to find out. Before long, he had started a blog and was writing about the work habits of the men and women he was reading about. From that blog came the book.
I read it while walking into the office from the parking garage, occasionally skipping them if the individual--an artist or writer--was one with which I was unfamiliar. The peeks into the lives of these extremely successful people was fascinating, if massively abridged. The rituals, or routines, or, maybe lack of routines, were varied as the artists (let's just call them all artists, and that includes all of them whether they were or not). Some worked mornings, some in the evening. Asimov worked all day every day; others, only for a few hours in the morning, or a few in the evening. In fact, many of them seemed to work a mere two to four hours each day. Darwin took decades to write his book, and he hated society, hiding from the world in his country home. Warhol would call his agent each morning to detail the entire previous day for a journal that was used for tax purposes. Dickens would take long walks through London to collect characters and scenes for his serialized stories.
It was a fun read and inspirational. I recommend it. ...more
A few years ago, I read a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Written by David Graeber, an anthropologist, and anarchist (I'm not sure how one teA few years ago, I read a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Written by David Graeber, an anthropologist, and anarchist (I'm not sure how one teaches at the London School of Economics and calls themselves an anarchist, but what do I know?), it was less about economics and more about anthropology. It described various and diverse ways different cultures have dealt with debt over the millennia of human history and, to be honest, there were times when I didn't recognize the people and cultures that Graeber included as anything like my human ancestors so much as aliens transplanted here from another planet. It was absolutely fascinating. I recommend it, even if it is occasionally a dry read.
For whatever reason, when I first bumped into Time Travel: A History by James Gleick, it was Graeber's book that came to mind. Something about the promise of a survey of a topic, an in-depth look at how it developed, and where it is now. That the topic was time travel--time travel!--made it that much more intriguing. Would it be a history of a genre of science fiction? A look at physics? Was it a novel? Speculative fiction?
Or all of the above?
Well, not quite. But close.
Starting with H.G.Wells's The Time Machine, Gleick walks forward through time to examine and tell the story about how our concept of time and time travel evolved. It's one of those concepts that never really existed in its modern concept until Wells invented it. With the exception of some ancient views of dreams and memory and death and ancestors that resemble a form of time travel, it wasn't until the twentieth century that people began to think about time as a fourth dimension, one that might be moved along. Gleick follows the idea of time travel through the last century, weaving in the writers of science fiction who, like Wells, in large part created the language, with the concepts that would later be adopted by physicists. Indeed, sometimes it seems like the science and physics of time and time travel is tracking the vision and imagination of the science fiction writers, even adopting the words and jargon that they introduce. If Einstein (who also finds a place in this history) is to be believed that imagination is more important than knowledge, then it is the imagination of writers that led the way.
Among the writers here are Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Jores Luis Borges (100 Years of Solitude), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Robert Heinlien (for multiple stories), among others. On the technical side are Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, and Stephen Hawking. The interplay of fiction and nonfiction in Gleick's tour of time travel is intoxicating and thought-provoking, even when Gleick seems to get a little lost, like a guide in a museum that seems to be full of new ideas and concepts.
Time Travel: A History is all the more fun if you have read the books and watched the movies (Doctor Who fans will love it) that looks to. It's also has a lot to interest the philosopher who wants to examine the human concepts of memory, history, and self-awareness....more
I'm always on the look out for new books to read (but what I really need is more time). Suggestions from friends, mentors, reviewers, blogs, and referI'm always on the look out for new books to read (but what I really need is more time). Suggestions from friends, mentors, reviewers, blogs, and references in other books send me off on an endless cycle: hear about a book, find it on Amazon (or the library), purchase (or check out) said book, bring it home, put it on my bed-stand with great anticipation, read ten pages to a reference of another book, and...repeat. The result is a two-stack, five books per stack, "pile up" next to my bed that has resulted in a reading bottle neck. And, believe me you, it's a bottleneck that affords me more enjoyable hours than I've ever passed in traffic.
That's all really just a long way of saying that in reading Charles Hill's "Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order" I constantly found myself adding new books to some real or imagined book list that I may, or may not, ever get a chance to read. Every chapter of Grand Strategies was full of new books that sounded interesting and fascinating. Some--like Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Salmon Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," or Thucydides's "The Peloponnesian War"--I had read and could quickly relate. Others--Xenophon's "The Persian Expedition" or Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"--were new, at least to me. Worse, especially for my book list, Hill manages to craft his dialogue about each in such a way as to bestow meaning and insight beyond a cursory reading of the text.
For example, though I've often heard it referenced and cited as powerful piece of poetry, never had I seen John Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a commentary on war and the modern polity. And yet, perhaps it is.
"But far beyond the politics of the day 'Paradise Lost' is Milton's comprehensive commentary on modern warfare, revolution, founding a polity; on strategy, leadership, intelligence, individual choice under conditions of modern statecraft; and on the justification of God's ways to men."
Suddenly, the war in heaven, through Milton's eyes, becomes a proxy for competing views of the world worked out during the Oliver Cromwell English Civil War.
In Hill's eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The "international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm," he argues. "[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out." Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. He continues:
"A sacral nature must infuse world order if it is to be legitimate. that order is not to be identified with a particular social system, but to legitimate, the system must hint at the underlying divinely founded order. The modern Westphalian system was conceived when such was the case, but with the Enlightenment's addition of secularism, science, reason, and democracy, the system increasingly spurned , then forgot, its legitimizing sources of authority.[...] Revolutionary ideology radicalized secularism, science and reason into the task of erasing original sin, o perfecting humanity--all requiring terror to create "the New Man." Modern efforts to create a sovereignty potent enough to fill the void produced the statist monstrosities of Stalin and Hitler. America became an empire but never gained the understanding to go with it. China is now on its own misguided course."
Thought provoking, insightful, and, of course, full of literature to read when you finish it (including a bibliography of primary and secondary sources that will keep you busy for several years), and reread, Hill's "Grand Strategies" is a worthy addition to your bed-stand stack. Just make sure you put it on top....more
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