Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Pithy remark: It’s like Atlas Shrugged for the Easy Rider generation.

Of course, that oversimplifies the book, which is a complex, multi-partite story that is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

All right, the story, a remembered/fictionalized/stylised story, is the narrative of the author riding cross-country on his motorcycle with his young son. The author received electric shock therapy after a nervous breakdown which led him to separation from his family and, indeed, from his personality before the treatment. So as the duo (originally a quartet, as another couple joins them for part of the journey to act as foils for the narrator) travel, the author goes into a bit of mindfulness talk about taking care in the moment using mototcycle maintenance as his example and contrasts it with some parts of the modern world. Then, the story shifts into a discussion of the narrator trying to reconnect with himself before the breakdown and, at the same time, with his young son. The narrator discusses the philosophy that he was previously working on, one where Quality is capitalized and somehow supercedes mind and matter. It’s more Brahman than Buddha, but it’s still up there. As the description of the philosophy moves on, we get more into the story of how the narrator got into the philosophy starting with rhetoric and then moving onto a post-graduate philosophy program, where he, according to his telling, terrorized the department with his truth. After the retelling of the breakdown, the father and son reach San Francisco, where they are reconciled at last.

So, the nature of the narrative is compelling, and the philosophic treatise within it is interesting, but I had a bit of an Anna Karenina moment in it and had to put it down for a while about sixty percent through it so I could clear my disappointment with the philosophical treatise and get back to just enjoying the ride.

I think the book came along at the right time; given that the market is currently full of practical Buddhist mindfulness tracts as books, I don’t know if it would become quite the cult classic today as it did as the Baby Boomers were hitting their early childbearing years.

So what did I flag in this book? When he’s talking about the dynamism of understanding quality, he quotes Harry Truman:

To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you cand evelop. It’s not just “intuition,” not just unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality. Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.
It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it’s put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality you can have. Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration’s programs, “We’ll just try them… and if they don’t work… why then we’ll try something else.” That may not be an exact quote, but it’s close.

Although he does talks at length about ancient Greek philosophies, he somehow completely misses or does not address Pragmatism as explained by Peirce and James.

The other thing I flagged is how he uses style as though it’s a bad word. I immediately contrasted that with Virginia Postrel’s thesis in The Substance of Style and the concept of sprezzatura, where effort is to make something look good effortlessly. Pirsig puts style in direct contrast to his Quality without being quite specific enough that style itself is not the enemy, but using cosmetics to cover for the lack of quality.

At any rate, I’m glad to be able to say I’ve read it, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but it’s not the life-changing experience the cover sells it as.

Also, take a quick glance at the other titles available in the Bantam Wisdom Editions line:

It’s almost a quiz of new agey books! I’ll list them, bold the ones I know I own, and link to the ones I’ve read:

• I Ching: The Book of Changes
• Tao Te Ching
• The Book of Five Rings
• The Dhammapada
• The Tibetan Book of the Dead

If you include this book, I’ve read half of this particular syllabus. I don’t know if that made me any wiser, though.

This book fits right into my recent reading of books set in the latter part of the 1800s (which includes the Little House books, most recently Little House on the Prairie as well as Me and My Little Brain). Unlike the others, though, this is not a children’s book.

Instead, it tells about Alexandra, and her family’s efforts to run a farm in the newly settled upper west midwest. The book is broken into several sections. In the first, a teenaged Alexandra goes into town with her youngest brother, who loses his kitten up a pole in the winter, and a friend of hers rescues it. It’s a hard winter, and Alexandra’s father dies, and the friend and his family move away. But Alexandra goes against the advice of her brothers, who want to sell the farm and move as well, and mortgages the farm to add to its holdings as the other families move away.

End section one, and suddenly it’s sixteen years later, and all that has paid off. Alexandra, unmarried and closing in on forty, has made the family prosper, although two of her brothers resent it. The youngest, whose kitten was lost in section one, is now back from the university and is flirting with the young wife of a nearby farmer, a vivacious woman whose husband resents having to farm to support her. To make a short story into a novel, it does not go well.

The book is chock full of what my fiction writing professor would call nice little moments: A description, some characterization of the characters in the book, but the plot, as it is, meanders. We jump from struggle to success without much of that story, and as a frequent Rand reader in my youth, that’s what I’d like to read.

According to my research (which is “reading the flier that came with this Reader’s Digest edition”), the book was originally three short stories that Cather interwove into a novel. I can see that. So it’s a literary novel first and foremost.

The characters, though, seem a little thin and are drawn with less warmth than one sees in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Cather, who lived in the upper plains in her youth, did not end up there–she ended up on the east coast. So. I don’t think she’s writing the book for the people that it’s about. She describes some of the land as being like the hills of Lombardy. And her French immigrants are written in a vernacular that sounds more Italian than French.

At any rate, Willa Cather. You know, I didn’t read anything she wrote as part of my English degreeing (but, in my defense, I was in the writing program, not the reading program). So sometimes I kinda conflate her with Eudora Welty. And maybe Pearl Buck. I do have a copy of My Antonia around here somewhere; this book was a pleasant enough read that I won’t hide from the other novel if I find it.

This is a pretty good Stoic tract from 524. Based on the introduction, which pointed out how much Boethius influenced medieval thought, I assumed he was a Christian, but the book itself talks about God but not Jesus, so it’s safer to just say he was a Stoic.

The volume comes in five parts, a bit of philosophical argument juxtaposed with a bit of a prose poem lyrically making the same point. The schtick is that Boethius, imprisoned and under the threat of execution, is looking for peace of mind. He goes to poetry, which has given him comfort in the past, but is ultimately unsatisfying. Then Philosophy appears, decked out like Athena, and explains to him the way things are. The five “books” within the volume start out with some basic fame-and-wealth-are-transitory, being-self-contained-and-true-is-paramount sort of thing you would certainly expect from a Stoic (or a Buddhist, for that matter) and moves into where true happiness and good come from. The answer, though, is not “inside yourself,” but God. After proving God via definition, Philosophy answers why it seems like bad people succeed in life, but good people don’t get what they deserve and then whether an ordered world with an omniscient God allows for Free Will or chance (the answer tracks with something I read by Mark Halperin in First Things magazine a couple years back–that man’s perception of the universe is temporal and different from God’s). Left unanswered is whether prayer can have any effect in such a scheme–that is, whether God can or will change his mind and alter the tableau, which would mean that what he knew was not necessarily the way it turned out. But prayer comes from a more Christian thought of a personal God, which, like Jesus, is not a part of this book or its arguments.

I really enjoyed this book, but it took me a while to actually finish it. I started it on vacation early this summer and tore through the first three “books” in it. When I got back, I carried it a bit, but I didn’t end up places where I read a carry book a lot, so I put it on my side table to read in the evenings, but I didn’t pick it up and propel myself through it until recently. Strangely, this has proven to be true with a number of books this year, so I’ll my annual completion number might catch up to its historical norm as I finish these books.

But it’s a better, more engaging intro to Stoic thought than Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius.

It’s weird, though, how I’ve never heard of this guy before. And I have a philosophy degree.

This book fits a little in with the old timey children’s books I’ve been reading lately (Little House books, Me and My Little Brain). Whereas those books were set in the late nineteenth century, this book was written by a woman born in the late nineteenth century. As she gets older, in the early 1970s, she decides to buy a donkey and cart so she can travel around her neck of the English countryside.

So her riding in the donkey trap gives her a lot of time to reflect on life and her youth. She worked for a while as a maid in a couple of houses in her younger days before marrying, so she reflects on those duties as well as her father, who drove a horse-driven delivery van. Missing from the reflections: married life or children, although she does talk about her daughter who lives on the property in the big house (where the author lives in a mother-in-law cottage). She talks about all the animals they have, including numerous cats, goats, and a rabbit. She name-checks an awful lot of flowers and foilage on the way to creating a textual landscape which doesn’t make that much sense to me because I don’t know my English flowers that much. It’s structured a bit like the Little House books in that it covers the first year she had the donkey, from her birthday in January to a nice little Christmas story.

Still, it’s a pleasant little book. Apparently, she received some notice on the news back in the day for using the donkey cart, and she turned that exposure into this book. Which made it to an American imprint, too, so clearly back in the old days, the midlists were a thing.

Question: The English call whiskey “whisky,” so why don’t the call a donkey “donky”?

As I predicted when I read Little House in the Big Woods, it was not long before I picked up this book. Of course, I had some control over that, so it’s not really prophecy. As I mentioned in the previous book report, this is the third of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books; the second, Farmer Boy deals with the young Almanzo Wilder’s experiences in the 19th century. I don’t have a copy of that book, but my youngest son is currently reading a school copy of the book ahead of a field trip to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home near Marshfield, and he offered to surrepitiously bring the book home every night so I could read it at the same time as he’s reading it. I’m thinking about it.

At any rate, this book covers the move from Wisconsin to Indian territory in Kansas, which Charles Ingalls has heard will be opened for settlement. So they’re sooners sooner than the actual Sooners. They build a little house, meet some neighbors, and not only have to deal with the different challenges and topography of Kansas, but they also have to deal with Indians who they really, really don’t want becoming hostile. Much of the book, as in the previous volume, deals with the man-against-nature stories of building a house, trading, and whatnot, but the introduction of the Indians adds a little drama, as they can suddenly appear in ones or twos and steal your food and tobacco or get together a bunch and threaten to wipe out the settlers. But this drama is told at a distance, as the family huddles in the cabin and watches for a war party.

So it’s not a greatly dramatic narrative, but it is interesting in its historical perspectives. This book was written in the 1930s and takes place in the post-bellum west midwest, but the father speaks respectfully of natives even as others do not and, when the family is sick, a black doctor tends to them. So it’s almost suitably woke (but clearly not enough since it is not Woke™), which might lead one who is paying attention and bothers to read things not written on computers, that maybe the past was not as asleep as they’ve been told.

A couple things of note: I flagged one passage in this book, wherein Laura explains that she and Mary share a cup for drinking water at dinner, and that they only get water, and won’t get coffee until they’re adults. I contrasted this with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where the children drink coffee all day and all night.

Additionally, as I read this book listening to the Big Band station streaming from my DirecTV, I realized that the Glenn Miller I was listening to was closer in time to Little House on the Prairie than to today. Weird, we think about culture slowing or stopping in the eighties or nineties, but the rate of change has really slowed down before that.

So we’ll see how soon I dive into On the Banks of Plum Creek or if I take the lad up on his offer of sharing his school copy of Farmer Boy with me.

It seems I have read these books out of order. A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, which I read over a week ago, is a later Sally Forth collection. This book appeared a year earlier. Not that it matters, though; the strips are not particularly serial in nature, and the drawing doesn’t evolve over time, and new characters haven’t been added so I’m dealing with a pre-Asok or post-Asok world (to use Dilbert as an example).

Well, the tropes are all here: The business woman who is the primary housecleaner deals with work and her family. On the plus side, although they’re not the main characters, the males in the strip, that is, the husband and the boss, are not merely the butt of jokes, as they have their moments. So we’ve got that going for us.

It did not give me a laugh out loud moment like the aforementioned later collection did, and it did give me a moment where I wondered if I’d already read a particular strip before. I might have. Perhaps I should not read the collections so close together.

Regardless, it’s the second of the two copies I bought this spring, so I am fresh out of Sally Forth collections until the October book sales at the earliest. And I’ll let them simmer on the to-read shelves for a while to keep the stories fresh.

Now that I’m done with them, my boys can have at them. I’m not sure what they will think of it. It doesn’t match their lifestyle, as mom and dad do not work outside the house, and the strips are computer- and device-free. But they do like to look at the old cartoons since they’re cartoons.