Without Lifting A Finger

Slowgoing but I'll stick with it. Some interesting constructions. * A myth is true—that is to say, operationally true—insofar as it has predictive force. The more deeply rooted and universal a myth, the more difficult it is to combat. The myths of a tribe are the fictions it coins to maintain its powers. The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of a new mythology.

You say he was not political. Do you mean that he was apolitical? Because some people would say that the apolitical is just one variety of the political.  No, not apolitical, I would rather say anti-political. He thought that politics brought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it.  Did he preach this anti-political politics in his classes?  Of course not. He was very scrupulous about not preaching. His political beliefs you discovered only after you got to know him better.  You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?  He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings. He was too much of a Calvinist for that.  Please explain.  You want me to say what lay behind C...

 ‘I do not intend to be an examination coach for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘It is something I am doing for the present, something I happen to be qualified to do, in order to make a living. But it is not my vocation. It is not what I was called into the world to do.’  Called into the world. More and more strange.  ‘If you would like me to explain my philosophy of teaching I can do so,’ he said. ‘It is quite brief, brief and simple.’  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’  ‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to a...

 On the basis of the poems he has heard on the radio and nothing else, he knows Brodsky, knows him through and through. That is what poetry is capable of. Poetry is truth. But of him in London Brodsky can know nothing. How to tell the frozen man he is with him, by his side, day by day?  Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, Zbigniew Herbert: from lone rafts tossed on the dark seas of Europe they release their words into the air, and along the airwaves the words speed to his room, the words of the poets of his time, telling him of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they. ‘Signal heard in London – please continue to transmit’: that is the message he would send them if he could.

 ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion,’ says Eliot in words he has copied into his diary. ‘Poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.’ Then as a bitter afterthought Eliot adds: ‘But only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

The Making of Samuel Beckett by J. M. Coetzee The New York Review of Books

Ein Brief (also called "Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon") is a fictitious letter written by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gutenberg has the entire letter in German: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/997/1 Here is the section of the letter (it's jpeg thus a bit blurry) that prefaces Coetzee's postscript (another fictitious letter authored by Coetzee--or is it Coetzee's Costello--and titled "Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon): And here is Coetzee's translation (presumably): At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everythi...

Is Coetzee cryptically admitting regret for writing some of his darker books, e.g., In The Heart of the Country ? And wouldn't it have been better to simply "come out with it" instead of beating up on Mr. West?    Yet she does the same kind of thing, or used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people's faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. And from Lesson 8: At the Gate , a couple of quotes. To get through the gate you must state your beliefs:    Belief. Is that all? Not a statement of faith? What if I do not believe? What if I am not a believer? Defending herself as a writer (which doubles as a defense for unbelief):    I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and ...

Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. ...

Ok, I'm in Chapter 3: The Lives of Animals. I guess I knew this before (read it in a review): each chapter hinges on the main character Elizabeth Costello and a speech or speeches she is giving (supposedly real speeches once delivered by Coetzee). Chapter 1: A speech she gives on Realism (in which a story by Kafka figures in: "A Report to an Academy"); Chapter 2: A speech she gives on a cruise ship titled "The Future of the Novel" (an African writer gives a speech too: "The Novel in Africa"); and Chapter 3: Returning to Kafka's ape (Red Peter), and again meeting up with her son (he was absent from Chapter 2), she delivers a speech comparing our handling of animals (factory farms, drug-testing labs, abattoirs = slaughterhouses) to the Third Reich's handling of Jews and other "undesirables." * Here's Coetzee attacking reason (with reason I presume) in Chapter 3:    How is it that humankind throws up, generation after generatio...

I know: more Coetzee. Haven't I almost emptied his oeuvre? Elizabeth Costello (why do I keep thinking Elvis Costello) is again Coetzee in woman's guise; the son is another avatar of Coetzee; the narrator directs them both; but of course all of this is an oversimplification. Taking another stab at it, maybe it'd be better to say: Coetzee's creations with a few appendages/characteristics of Coetzee thrown in? Elizabeth Costello is a famous author who's not so impressive close-up (i.e., she's human); her son (at least in chapter one) is her travel companion. * Anyway, little to say since I've only started. Maybe that I'm reminded a bit of Summertime . And the landscape (or at least Elizabeth's landscape) is Australia not South Africa. When did Coetzee move to Australia?

Boyhood ends with Aunt Annie's death and funeral. She was the aunt who had made it her life's mission to sell/distribute her father's eccentric book Ewige Genesing (Eternal Healing) . The close is something of an edict from self to self. The young Coetzee has taken it upon himself to remember things no one else will. An impetus for writing? He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?

Coetzee speaks of them in various books (especially in his autobiographical works; some essays): I believe he uses both the Dutch term: Hottentot (now considered offensive), and the name these people called themselves: Khoikhoi or Khoi. I believe he also says that these natives have pretty much disappeared, or were largely absorbed into the "coloured"  of South Africa. Here's part of what Wikipedia says: The Khoikhoi ("people people" or "real people") or Khoi , in standardised Khoekhoe/ Nama orthography spelled Khoekhoe , are a historical division of the Khoisan ethnic group, the native people of southwestern Africa , closely related to the Bushmen (or San , as the Khoikhoi called them). They had lived in southern Africa since the 5th century AD . [1] When European immigrants colonized the area in 1652, the Khoikhoi were practising extensive pastoral agriculture in the Cape region, with large herds of Nguni cattle . The European immigrants ...

At what point does Coetzee become a vegetarian? I can't say. He is eating meat at the farm in the Karoo (mutton with gravy), loves to hunt, but even as a child he seems to have some Tolstoyan moments.    Sometimes when he is among the sheep--when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away--he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of the long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it--the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.

Re reading material: I had to make a decision: With the clock ticking down (I have to report back to school on 8/12, the kids start 8/15), what do I read: more Coetzee or Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity (my Kindle was lost/stolen in Europa)? I chose the easier read, Boyhood (I'm already on p. 65 of 166), and will begin Beware of Pity next. As those two books are my only "new" reads, I'll have to resort to "rereads" (don't worry I've lots of good stuff: perhaps I'll try to dig up Tolstoy's What Men Live By or some vintage Max Frisch) until I replace my Kindle (perhaps on my not-so-far-away birthday in September). * Re the naughty Afrikaans words Coetzee mentions in Boyhood (most of which are not explained: they are just given as examples of how filthy young boys can be): Just for fun I'll first see what Google Translate says, then, if that doesn't make sense, I'll Google around for a better answer: 1.) fok seems to sp...

Can't totally explain the progression of thought (mental gymnastics) that led me to, reminded me of, these debates (which I've never heard or read in toto): prejudice = what we take for granted (Heidegger), the legacy of Socrates = Ventriloquism (Coetzee's Age of Iron ), what "coloured" means in the milieu in which a young Coetzee (or the subject/object of the narrator's gaze in Coetzee's Boyhood ) grows up: . . . Coloured, which means that he has no money, lives in an obscure hovel, goes hungry; it means that if his mother were to call out 'Boy!' and wave, as she is quite capable of doing, this boy would have to stop in his tracks and come and do whatever she might tell him (carry her shopping basket, for instance), and at the end of it get a tickey in his cupped hands and be grateful for it. And if he were angry with his mother afterwards, she would simply smile and say, 'But they are used to it!'  * Anyway, found this debate transcri...

OK, to some extent Vercueil is Mrs. Curren's guardian angel (one might say: With a guardian angel like that who needs one). But in the end he becomes her Death Angel:   "Is it time?" I said.    I got back into bed, into the tunnel between the cold sheets. The curtains parted; he came in beside me. For the first time I smelled nothing. He took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had.

For me at least it has been hard to accept the relationship between Mrs. Curren and Vercueil. It's been difficult to suspend disbelief. Their relationship seems like a non-starter: he is a filthy, homeless, drunk. Supposedly there's a connection between their story and Tolstoy's What Men Live By (about a shoemaker and an angel = destitute man), but I've not read it (or haven't read it in years). Perhaps this section (p. 131) has shed a little light on things: i.e., We proceed through life--fumbling through the dark--even though we do not understand why we do what we do. Here's Mrs. Curren trying to make sense out of their relationship:    I give my life to Vercueil to carry over. I trust Vercueil because I do not trust Vercueil. I love him because I do not love him. Because he is the weak reed I lean upon him.    I may seem to understand what I say, but, believe me, I do not. From the beginning, when I found him behind the garage in his cardboard house, s...

The cancer-stricken narrator, Mrs. Curren:    As the other car drove off at last, the woman turned to glare at me. Her face not unattractive yet ugly: closed, bunched, as if afraid that light, air, life itself were going to gather and strike her. Not a face but an expression, yet an expression worn so long as to be hers, her. A thickening of the membrane between the world and the self inside, a thickening become thickness. Evolution, but evolution backward. Fish from the primitive depths (I am sure you know this) grew patches of skin sensitive to the fingerings of light, patches that in time became eyes. Now, in South Africa, I see eyes clouding over again, scales thickening on them, as the land explorers, the colonists, prepare to return to the deep.    Should I have come when you invited me? In my weaker moments I have often longed to cast myself on your mercy. How lucky, for both our sakes, that I have held out! You do not need an albatross from the old world ar...

I've noticed it in three of the novels I've read recently -- In the Heart of the Country (1977), Foe (1986), and Age of Iron (1990) -- and wondered (and sometimes thought  Is it authentic ?). Here's one slant that I pulled from the Net: But what are the feminist concerns of white South African women who, instead of finding themselves caught within two systems of patriarchal oppression, find themselves in between, stranded on literal and figurative islands as both colonial dominators (white) and subjected, second-class citizens (women)? I would argue that these two conflicting tensions serve, if not to effectively cancel each other out, to create a tension around the act of testimony that serves to silence a white South African feminist agenda -- and South African author JM Coetzee's female narrators, Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977), Susan Barton in Foe (1986), and Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron (1990), through the presentation of their continually s...