Television and books

Posted on by albrooke

This may not be original, but it occurred to me today that “television” is very different than the television I grew up with.  It used to be that if you wanted to “follow” a show, you had to make yourself available at the same time every week.  You had to be “in the mood” for Cheers or MASH or All in the Family (dating myself, of course) when it was on.  (Perhaps this kept me from being much of a connoisseur of television.)

Eventually, there was potential for videotaping, and time-shifting the shows you were interested in.

Now, though, you can pretty much “pick up” any series you want on Netflix or Amazon Instant Video or iTunes or one of the other video-streaming services.  Watch whenever you want and go quickly through an old series if you wish.

That was the way I always read books.  As a kid, I would read a string of old Hardy Boys or Tom Swifts or Nero Wolfes or Perry Masons or . . . .

And I have to say, this is a better way of consuming television.  It probably encourages better television, since it permits longer narrative arcs and more complex character development.

I’d still rather read a good novel.*

*And then read everything else the author wrote.

A use of fiction

Posted on by albrooke

Fiction is, among other things, an aid to reflection: a means by which we can more vividly and rigorously encounter the world and try to make sense of it, to confront “the problems of being” as freshly as we can. But we vary in our interpretative needs: the questions that absorb some of us never occur to others. Each of us has her own labyrinth . Every genre of fiction puts certain questions in brackets, or takes their answers as given, in order to explore others. Not even the greatest of writers can keep all the balls in the air at once: some have to sit still on the ground while the others whirl. People who come to a book by Murakami, or Neal Stephenson, or even Ursula K. LeGuin with the questions they would put to a Marilynne Robinson novel are bound to be disappointed and frustrated. But if we readers attend closely to the kinds of questions a book is asking, the questions it invites from us, then our experience will be more valuable. And the more questions we can put to the books we read — in the most generous and charitable spirit we can manage — the richer becomes our encounter not just with the books themselves but with the world they point to.

Alan Jacobs, Reverting to Type: a Reader’s Story, loc. 561-570 (Kindle ed., 2012).

Moderate virtue?

Posted on by albrooke

They call you an extremist if you want integration now — which is the only morally defensible position.  To advise moderation is like going to a stickup man and saying to him, ‘Don’t use a gun.  That’s violent.  Why not be a pickpocket instead?  A moderate is a moral pickpocket.

Branch Rickey (09/22/1957) quoted in Roger Kahn, Rickey and Robinson 171 (2014).

This reminds me of the Goldwater slogan “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”  (1964 speech).  I suppose that few would support both men’s views.

Both Rickey and Goldwater are smuggling in their certainty about justice and injustice.  Which, if they are right . . . .

Learning to learn

Posted on by albrooke

“Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small number of students this is in the main right. Even at a very early stage of school life, we can identify a few individuals with a definite inclination towards one group of studies or another. The danger for these unfortunate ones is that if left to themselves they will overspecialize, they will be wholly ignorant of the general interests of human beings. We are all in one way or another naturally lazy, and it is much easier to confine ourselves to the study of subjects in which we excel. But the great majority of the people who are to be educated have no very strong inclination to specialize, because they have no definite gifts or tastes. Those who have more lively and curious minds will tend to smatter. No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest – for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”

— T. S. Eliot (1932) reblogged from Alan Jacobs, More than 95 Theses (http://ayjay.tumblr.com/).

If you aren’t already watching out for anything Alan Jacobs writes, you should be.  (This quotation of Eliot’s reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote about the test of being well read being whether you could find something to interest you on the discount table at any used bookshop.)

Roger Kahn’s latest

Posted on by albrooke

Rickey&Robinson,

Roger Kahn has been known as one of our premier baseball writers since the publication, in 1972 of the classic Boys of Summer.  This newest book is a strikingly personal account of the integration of baseball — not as though by a historian, but by an actual participant.  Well worth reading!

http://www.amazon.com/Rickey-Robinson-Untold-Integration-Baseball/dp/1623362970/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1433350499&sr=1-1&keywords=rickey+and+robins

Meursault, revisited

Posted on by albrooke

A first-time author re-views the events of Albert Camus’ The Stranger from the perspective of the murder victim’s brother.  The brother shares the murderer’s disdain for faith:

“I detest religions and submission. . . .Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living.”

Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation (2015).

Ah, but a deity who walked and worked, sweated and suffered, loved and lost his life — now that would be a God to worship.

Nice review at the NYT site — http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/books/review-kamel-daoud-interrogates-camus-in-the-meursault-investigation.html?mabReward=A6&moduleDetail=recommendations-2&action=click&contentCollection=Politics&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&configSection=article&isLoggedIn=false&src=recg&pgtype=article — I’m looking forward to reading this one.