Two Anthologies from Damon Knight

A Century of Science Fiction 
edited by Damon Knight

"Science fiction is distinguished by its implicit assumption that man can change himself and his environment. This alone sets it apart from all other literary forms. This is the message that came out of the Intellectual Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that has survived in no other kind of fiction." - Damon Knight

This is a good introduction to the Science Fiction genre. Damon Knight, the editor, has selected stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and grouped them thematically. Thus there are sections for "Robots", "Time Travel", "Space", "Other Worlds and People", "Aliens among Us", "Superman"(not the 'Man of Steel'), and "Marvelous Inventions". Most of the selections are short stories from classic SF authors like Alfred Bester, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Poul Anderson. However there are some excerpts that highlight great novels including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, Odd John by Olaf Stapledon, and The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. The result of these selections and others is a satisfying anthology of the most imaginative fiction offered over the century ending in the 1960s. A special plus is the inclusion of an introduction by the editor and a bibliography of selected readings for readers who are inspired to seek out more science fiction.


A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels 
edited by Damon Knight

“We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.”  ― Damon Knight

In 1962 Damon Knight edited a collection of Science Fiction short stories and excerpts titled A Century of Science Fiction. He followed that with this collection in 1964 that six Science Fiction novellas. They include a couple of my favorites: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. These novellas share in common the depiction of scientific experiments gone awry. Dr. Jekyll creates an alter ego in Mr. Hyde who represents his private evil side. As an allegory about the nature of good and evil it has continued, even in the age of Freud, to haunt readers and raise questions for thought. Likewise, Well's Invisible Man's experiment goes awry with unintended consequences that drive the scientist mad. Not that the scientist who became invisible wasn't somewhat demented before he attempted his experiment in invisibility. Both tales are examples of imagining the darker side of humanity. As a result they both haunt and fascinate the reader.
The other tales include in this anthology are no less imaginative and represent writers of renown like Karel Capek and Robert Heinlein. Themes include humor, the possibility of a superman, and the potential nature of future cultures. The collection covers a breadth of SF that provides both an introduction and a depiction of the possibilities of speculation on a grand scale.

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Another Commonplace Book

Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book
by D.J. Enright

"'Interplay' for reasons that are obvious, even if 'play' isn't always. 'A kind of ' admitting to hesitancy, hinting at hope. 'Commonplace' as concerns some places, in its common meaning. 'Book', because printed pages bound together are called a book." (p 1)

There is a fascination, interest, perhaps passion in which I indulge my eclectic interests. The commonplace book seems to suit my peripatetic mind. It is a writer's personal collection of quotations, observations, and topic ideas.
D. J. Enright has been a teacher of English Literature, an editor, a poet, and an essayist at times in his life. He has also been a collector and as such has accumulated this "commonplace" book out of his own and a few other authors writings. It is a book filled with aphorisms and adages, quotes and quotidian expressions, ideas and essays, or at least the germ of ideas of essays. It is a delight to dip into a book like this, especially from a poetic writer and an eclectic collector like Mr. Enright. It has inspired me (along with a similar work by the poet W. H. Auden) to collect commonplace sayings and selections of my own from some of my favorite authors. This collection is best when dwelling in the world of books and literary pretensions. It can amuse and amaze the reader, sometimes both at the same time.

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Commonplace Books

Book by Book: 
Notes on Reading and Life 
by Michael Dirda

“'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a fascination, interest, perhaps passion in which I indulge my eclectic interests. The commonplace book seems to suit my peripatetic mind. It is a writer's personal collection of quotations, observations, and topic ideas. Called florilegia ("flowers of reading") in the Middle Ages, commonplace books were especially popular during the Renaissance and into the 18th century. For some writers, blogs serve as contemporary versions of commonplace books. The classic is Auden's A Certain World which was the first commonplace book that I discovered almost forty years ago. It was a very personal anthology that included adages, short excerpts, poems, and more. Auden organized it alphabetically by categories with his own comments included in some, always brief, as a record of his own thoughts.
My favorite commonplace book is Michael Dirda's own contribution, Book By Book. It is a book-lover's delight and has led me down many trails that I visit and revisit. He shares his personal thoughts about books in a topical way with chapters on "Work and Leisure", "The Book of Love", "Matters of the Spirit", and "Last Things".  My favorite sections include "The Interior Library" where he recommends an eclectic mix of reading aimed at getting you away from the bestseller list (never a problem for me) and into a wide variety of books including fantasy fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and intellectual history (the last is a favorite of mine).  I also enjoyed "The Pleasures of Learning" where he discusses a foundation of great books (Homer, et. al.) and both books and methods of education.  He even includes a chapter, "Sight s and Sounds", that focuses on art and music.  It is likely his personal music recommendations include a few of your favorites.  Through all his recommendations he includes valuable pithy sayings on which you may choose to meditate.
While Dirda recommends Auden, of course and Cyril Connolly's An Unquiet Grave; I have taken up the challenge of one of my favorite authors, D. J. Enright. So it is with delight that I am exploring, slowly savoring, his own " kind of a commonplace book", Interplay. It is here that I will be able to meditate on the pleasures of reading, mulling both thoughts and words - perhaps cogitating some new ones of my own.

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Running Haiku

Sunday in the Park

Purple Spheres inspire

Like Shadows floating above

Morning is Serene

From "The Kingdom of Music", 2013

James Henderson

Standing on the edge of space

The Palm at the End of the Mind:Selected Poems and a Play 

by Wallace Stevens

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

~Wallace Stevens, 1954~

This collection, while not as definitive as The Collected Poetry, includes all the major longer poems and many important shorter poems of critical value. Arranged in chronological order by probable date of composition this text provides the reader the possibility of considering the overall arc of Stevens' career. I find myself dipping into the poems included here time and again and it is difficult to pull myself away. The poem above is just one example of Stevens' ability to haunt your mind with the possibilities suggested by his verse.  The thoughtful consideration of art and meaning in life is seldom conveyed any better than in the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens.  Vintage Books, 1990.

Maps and Memories

The Garden of Evening Mists 

by Tan Twan Eng

"Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?" - Tan Twan Eng,  p 307.



Thomas Mann begins his magisterial novel, Joseph and His Brothers with this line: "Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?"
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng demonstrates the truth of Mann's remark. For in this beautiful and haunting novel it seems that the main character is continually dipping into the well of her own past to search for the memories that made her the aging judge that she is as the novel begins.

The story is told by Judge Yun Ling Teoh in flashbacks as she prepare her memoirs of a life that included a brutal period during World War II when she was interned in a Japanese wartime camp. The main events of the story focus on the period just after this in 1951 when she and others in Malaya (soon to become Malaysia) are recovering from the adversity and tribulation of the wartime experience. She had been employed as a researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal in the immediate aftermath of the war, but she came to visit a family friend, Magnus Pretorius, at his tea estate in the fall of 1951. It is during this visit that she comes upon Yugiri the only Japanese garden in Malaya and meets its enigmatic creator, Aritomo. In spite of her hatred for the Japanese she agrees to allow Aritomo to teach her how to build a garden - one that she wishes to prepare as a shrine for her dead sister.

The events and developing relationships as related from the memories of Judge Teoh form an exciting and suspenseful tale. But there is always the mist of memory like an aura surrounding the events she records. The author uses two statues of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and her unnamed sister, the goddess of forgetting, as a metaphor for the aura of memory. It is at the tea estate of Magnus that she encounters these statues:
"A pair of marble statues stood on their own plinths in the center of the lawn, facing one another. On my first glance they appeared to be identical, down to the folds of their robes spilling over the plinths. . . "The one on the right is Mnemosyne. You've heard of her?"
"The goddess of memory," I said. "Who's the other woman?"
"Her twin sister of course. The goddess of Forgetting."" (pp 35-36)

The memories are always there in the story, but the story tells of danger, sinister events and an eeriness from potential danger - terrorist gangs roaming the countryside in the aftermath of war. One aspect of the novel that provides a counterbalance to the edginess of the story is the beauty of the natural surroundings. The garden of Aritomo is in the highlands and there are the mountains in the distance. "My eyes wandered from on end of the mountains to the other. "Do you think they go on forever?"
"The mountains?" Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. "They fade away. Like all things."" (p 187)

Gradually the terror abates and the Emergency it caused comes to an end. Aritomo, who is as much a philosopher as an artist, responds to this with the words. "Life has been suspended , somehow, during the Emergency," Aritomo said. "I often feel I am on a ship, heading for a destination on the other side of the world. I imagine myself in that blank space, between two points of a mapmaker's calipers"
"That empty space exists only on maps, Aritomo."
"Maps, and also in memories."" (p 284)

Running Haiku

Morning Path

A bicycler's legs

flash excitement in the sun

My path remains calm

From "The Kingdom of Music", 2013

James Henderson

The Coast of Utopia, III - Romantic Exiles

Salvage
by Tom Stoppard

"Herzen : I don't see how the well-being of society is going to be achieved if everybody is sacrificing themselves and nobody is enjoying themselves. (...) Who has gained by it ? 
Blanc : The future. 
Herzen : Ah, yes, the future."


Completing the trilogy that comprise The Coast of Utopia, Salvage opens with Alexander Herzen resting at his home in Hampstead, England. He dreams of a pantheon of emigre friends, political refugees from Germany, Poland, France, Italy and Hungary.  It is "A dream about exiles", he explains -- an almost unreal world much like the one he himself inhabits, in the center of the vortex of those trying still to organise and cause change in Russia from far abroad.  It is five years after the revolutionary turmoil of 1848, but the turmoil and lack of direction seem pervasive among the radicals.
The First Act continues juxtaposing domestic turmoils of the Herzen family, a new German tutor for the children, Natalie and Nicholas Ogarev and others. With their tribulations in the forefront the background of change for Russia becomes a descant that is briefly heard from with discussions of the new publication, The Bell, that provides a tocsin for the opponents of the Tsar. The freeing of the Serfs as an event seems not to satisfy either the radicals or the Tsar.
 In Act Two Nicholas Chernyshevsky appears on the scene providing another opportunity for dialogue with Herzen over the best approach to effect change in Russia. There is not a definitive answer to that question beyond the continuing disagreement.  There is also the voice of Turgenev who gently opposes those who deride him and what he does, believing that his art does also serve some purpose -- and responds when asked what his purpose was in writing a fiction: "My purpose ? My purpose was to write a novel."
The nostalgia of Herzen for his homeland leads him to rue his decision to leave it even though he would likely face prison and Siberia if he were to return. The lives of the Russian exiles are romantic only in an ironic sense as the fog and mist of England mask their disappointments.

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The Pure Musical Experience

Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience 
by Peter Kivy

"Of the fine arts, music is, notoriously, the only one that requires a kind of technical knowledge and conspicuously technical vocabulary in order to "speak with the learned."  Hardly any but musicians ever acquire these things." - Peter Kivy, "Preface", p x

Peter Kivy commences this thoughtful book with one of my favorite words: "why". Specifically he asks: "Why Music?"(p 1) This metaphysical beginning is appropriate for a book that explores the shape of music; its surface and depth and the whatness of music. His subject is the philosophy of music, that is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of music and our experience of it. However, unlike philosophy of science, say, the philosophy of an artistic practice, such as music, is one that most people have a significant background in, merely as a result of being members of a musical culture. Music plays a central role in many people's lives.
In this collection of essays Kivy states that by music he means "the kind which Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven's C#-minor String Quartet are paradigm cases"(p 14). He fascinates the reader with discussions of music as stimulating the passions or music as a form of mimesis. The mimetic view of music can be difficult to discern in more abstract music, but is particularly visible in "program music" such as that popularized by the Romantic composers like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Indeed a strong supporter of Berlioz's music, Jacques Barzun, argues that "all music is programmatic, explicitly or implicitly, in more than one way"(p53).
Through sharing philosophic thoughts on how to understand music, its movement and emotional impact on the listener, Peter Kivy presents reflections that challenge the reader (presumably a music-lover and fellow listener) to meditate on the nature of the experience of music. This reader found the discussions illuminating with clarity and elegance that honored the experience of music.

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Sonnet for Monday Morning

It is a beautiful sunny day, finally, in Chicago.  This Sonnet from Shakespeare seems appropriate for our Chicago weather is nothing if not changeable.  So in that spirit here is Shakespeare forthwith:

XXXIV.

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

Thomas Hardy

Today is the birthday of Thomas Hardy.  He was born on 2 June 1840 in a brick and thatch two-storey cottage in the hamlet called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset.  Brief reviews of two of my favorite Hardy novels follow this poem from his massive oeuvre.

We Are Getting to the End

We are getting to the end of visioning

The impossible within this universe,

Such as that better whiles may follow worse,

And that our race may mend by reasoning.

We know that even as larks in cages sing

Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse

That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse,

We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.

And that when nations set them to lay waste

Their neighbours' heritage by foot and horse,

And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams,

They may again, - not warily, or from taste,

But tickled mad by some demonic force. -

Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams! 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy

“Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.” ― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess starts out as an emblem of innocence, a pretty country girl who delights in dancing on the village green. Yet the world conspires against her. Her travails begin when her family is in need and decides to seek help from relatives by the name of d’Urberville. They send Tess to ask them for help. Seduced by a duplicitous older man, her virtue is destroyed when she bears his child and her future life is shaped by a continual suffering for crimes that are not her own.
Cast out by a morally hypocritical society, Tess identifies most strongly with the natural world and it is here that Hardy's textual lyricism comes into its own. His heroine's physical attributes are described with organic metaphors - her arm, covered in curds from the milking, is 'as cold and damp ... as a new-gathered mushroom'. At the height of Tess's love affair with the parson's son, Angel Clare, Hardy describes a summer of 'oozing fatness and warm ferments'. When she is separated from him, Tess is depicted digging out swedes in a rain-drenched, colourless field, working until 'the leaden light diminishes'. Tess’ baby symbolizes Tess’ bad circumstances and innocence in the sense since this baby was innocent having done nothing wrong, but it was punished by society for coming from such an evil act. Having been raped, Tess was also innocent of the crime, but she was still punished and pushed aside by society.
This book deals with the oppression of an innocent girl. Most of the consequences she faced were not consequences of her own actions which makes this story somewhat of a tragedy in that sense giving the book a mood that you can try to make for yourself a good life, but you do not determine your own outcome.
Hardy uses a lot of imagery and describes the scenery in great detail. While each individual sentence may not be difficult to understand, it is the way the various sentences fit together to form a whole picture which separates him from other authors. His evocative descriptions are underpinned by a gripping story of love, loss and tragedy. According to Hardy's biographer, Claire Tomalin, the book 'glows with the intensity of his imagination'. It is this that remains the key to its lasting power.





The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy

“The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.” ― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native


I have enjoyed reading and rereading this novel since I was in my teens. In thinking about this I can only suggest that from the first reading I was impressed with Hardy's ability to create a complete believable setting where the characters interacted not just with one another but with the world in which they lived. That world was a rural Victorian one, but it resonated with my own somewhat rural experience even though it occurred more than one hundred years earlier.
What Thomas Hardy created was a tale of passion and tragedy on Egdon Heath located in his fictional Wessex. Egdon Heath itself is the first "character" introduced into the book. The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: characters are defined by their relation to the heath. Among them is Eustacia Vye whose desire to lead a life elsewhere is dashed when she marries Clym Yeobright (the Native) upon his return from Paris. The pair represents the archetype of two people caught up in their passion for each other and conflicting ambitions. For Clym, the heath is beautiful; for Eustacia, it is hateful. The plot of the novel emphasizes just this kind of difference in perception. What impresses me upon rereading this is the intricate plotting of Eustacia who throughout the novel is weaving a web of deceit with the aim of enhancing her own life. Her hubris knows few bounds and is exacerbated by her lack of understanding of those in whose lives she has intervened. She raves, "How have I tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! I do not deserve my lot! O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!"(Book 5, Chapter 7) This lack of understanding is an example of the importance of misconception in the novel which is not limited to the character of Eustacia. Ambiguity builds as the novel progresses and the main characters remain obscure for the reader. When The Return of the Native was first published, contemporary critics criticized the novel for its lack of sympathetic characters. All of the novel's characters prove themselves deeply flawed, or--at the very least--of ambiguous motivation. What I found redeeming about the novel was the way Hardy brings the lives of this couple and their friends and families alive through detail that reinforces his penetrating portrayal of the community on the heath.
The final section provides some hope for the future, tempering the otherwise bleak landscape of the novel. This was Thomas Hardy's first great novel and he would follow it with bleaker tales this is the one that I return to when reminiscing of the joy of reading Thomas Hardy's novels.

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Sunday Skateboarder

Sunrise Run

Skateboarder on deck

Jogs my harbor Sunrise run

Wind behind my neck

James Henderson,

from "Kingdom of Music" 2013

Weekend Poetry

Dawn

Running with the dawn

He receives the sun's first light

The moon still beams down

James Henderson, from "The Kingdom of Music", 2013