W: LP: LG: FD: EHOS

EHOS= The Eternal Husband and Other Stories.

We have begun in our literary group to read and discuss a collection of novellas and short stories. The book is ISBN-13: 978-0553214444, a paperback by the same translators of the other works of Fyodor Dostoevsky that we have so far read and thought about.

Since I am not yet an educated man and have not the critical apparatus to write great intellectual essays on the significance of every aspect of a work to the overall field of literature, I am going to quote a passage from the preface of this collection of stories. This passage is about FD's use of dreams, et al, in his writing; everything is well put, check it out:

"Dostoevsky made very wide use of the artistic possibilities of the dream in almost all its variations and nuances. Indeed, in all of European literature there is no writer for whom dreams play such a large and crucial role as Dostoevsky." We must distinguish, however, between the dreamer and the dream, because dreaming takes two main forms in Dostoevsky. The first is the form of a reverie produced by the dreamer, who longs to transform the squalid reality around him inot something nobler, loftier, more beautiful. The dreamer is a fervent idealist, a great reader of German romantic poetry, but his consciousness is isolated and he usually ends badly. Reality triumphs. Yer the dreamer's aspirations receive a backhanded vindication: aesthetically he is right; art and sensibility are exalted in his person above the meanness of the world. The bubble of this sort of romantic dreaming, which Dostoevsky himself indulged in as a young liberal of the 1840's, was definitively pricked in Notes from Underground. There the dreamer becomes a far more complex and contradictory figure; his tone changes from sentimental idealism to bitter sarcasm, much of the sarcasm directed against himself and his own former dreams: "...to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground--is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an anti-hero..." Isolated consciousness has recognized its isolation. This recognition marked all of Dostoevsky's work after Notes.
The second form dreaming takes in Dostoevsky is that of an unexpected and intense vision, which comes to the dreamer in sleep as a gift or a final revelation, a 'living image' that awakens him to a truth he had not suspected or had not understood before. Such are Alyosha's dream of the messianic banquet and Mitya's dream of 'the wee one' in Brothers Karamazov. These are confirming, saving dreams. They have a negative counterpart, ultimately serving the same purpose, in the nightmares of Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime & Punishment, of Stavrogin in Demons, and finally in Ivan Karamazov's 'hallucination' of the devil.

More to follow as we examine the stories in this collection.

Personal Update: misc.

The academic year is now in full swing and even though I am not yet able to take classes for credit, I am continuing to study and learn. So here are my busy activities:

Religious studies:
Bible Study Fellowship (studying the Life of Moses)--once a week with homework;
Covenant Group (topical study on the nature of living victoriously amidst suffering)--twice a month;
Sunday School (Men's group, topical on how to cultivate a loving relationship with God and seek after holiness)--once a week plus verse memorization;
Personal devotions (exegetical of the Wisdom Literature and general Bible reading)--as time permits.

Towards writing:
Literary Group (currently reading the works of Dostoevsky)--twice per month plus the time to read;
Other Reading Projects:
Mostly recreational reading (mind candy)--currently reading Kerouac, Stephenson, PKD.
Blog entries.
Audible books.

Technical:
Not pursuing formal studies except Continuing Education credits for my electrical license--in October, WAC/WISHA rules and NFPA; in November, 2008 NEC.

For miscellaneous Philosophy: Peter Leithart's Blog

For current events: five minutes snatched here and there to surf the information ocean.

In all of this I must make sure to pay attention to my family and attend to prayer.

May God sustain me!

Social Philosophy: Comments on the US Gov't give-away to the banks & links

I had to make some comment on the breathtaking wrongness of recent events in government & banking in the USA.

It should have gone without saying that it is unconstitutional and morally wrong for the US Government to bail out the banks (who have shown themselves incompetent to be in business), but it must be that the Fascist Oligarchy masquerading as a Republic in the United States no longer feels the need to maintain the fiction of a representative democracy.

Here are links to the texts of the constitution and the bill of rights and amendments. I challenge anyone to justify from these texts where it is the US Government's place to bail out a bunch of banker assholes.

Keep in mind that I do not accept many of the decisions of the Supreme court after 1930. During FDR's administration we saw the advent of revisionism in law and novelty in the courts that were not justified by precedent in the previous 150 years of our Republic.

Let us have a word of prayer over the death of the noble experiment that was that grand republic known as the United States of America. Now it is a matter of time before religious liberty will be abrogated and the Christians will begin to suffer. May God have mercy on our souls.

Natural Philosophy: James Clerk Maxwell

It goes without saying that James Clerk Maxwell was a genius. Because of my study of electricity and electromagnetism (admittedly at only the practical level), I was primarily interested in this scientist because of his mathematical work on electromagnetism. In examining his life and career, I have found that not only was he brilliant in many other aspects of physics, but was also a devout Christian--not something that today's scientists tend to like to acknowledge. I also like that he had an appreciation of poetry.

I don't know when I will be able to write more comprehensively about Maxwell's work, but I hope to examine and write about some of his work in physics at a later time. For now, let me just say that he is on my top ten list of scientists that I greatly admire.

A general statement about Maxwell's equations:

In classical electromagnetism, Maxwell's equations are a set of four partial differential equations that describe the properties of the electric and magnetic fields and relate them to their sources, charge density and current density. These equations are used to show that light is an electromagnetic wave. Individually, the equations are known as Gauss' law, Gauss' law for magnetism, Faraday's law of induction, and Ampère's law with Maxwell's correction.
These four equations, together with the Lorentz force law (derived by Maxwell), are the complete set of laws of classical electromagnetism.

ORP: KW Jeter’s “Noir” part 4: Conclusion

Rather than spoil the plot for the book "Noir", I just want to mention that the story goes on to deal with artificial intelligence and the nature of memory. Some parts of the last 10% of the book reminded me of Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix" set of stories. Another interesting point made in an aside is that one major aspect of Noir is that betrayal is ubiquitous and self-destructiveness tends to come to many in the morally ambiguous world of noir; I shall have to read some pure noir type stories to test these observations. I notice that the Library of America publisher has issued some of the works of Raymond Chandler, so I have yet another pile of stories to examine.

King Solomon once said, "Of the making of books there is no end." This is great if you are a reader, but a bit difficult for an aspiring writer as everything that can be told has been told in one form or another. One should always continue to try. It seems fairly universal that every human civilization or people-group has a story telling tradition, so at least if you are a good story teller the people won't mind hearing the story again.