The adventure I never had

Ian writes: Way, way back when I was in the final year of high school (OK, in 1956) many of us heard stories of the big adventure and big money to be found shooting crocodiles in the far north of Australia. They were the days when we thought the only good croc was a dead croc, and the skins fetched high prices for handbags and those dreadful boots men used to wear.

For a lad who'd grown up in one of the world's most provincial and isolated cities – more than a thousand kilometres of rough dirt road helped separate Perth and the eastern Australian states – the prospect seemed appealing. Fortunately, this lad had sensible parents.

From time to time I've wondered what I would have experienced if I'd packed my bags and headed for Darwin. I'm about to find out.

In the Globusz catalogue, I've spotted an interesting read – Parched Seas, by Ian Sharp – an account by a guy who did just what I'd once dreamed of.

According to the blurb:

An employment advertisement for fisherman to work the Northern Queensland winter season is the catalyst to set the wheel-of-fortune spinning and the saga unfolding.Attracted by the promise of a tough and lucrative lifestyle, the young Sharp embellishes his resume with a bundle of skills drawn straight from his imagination, and he’s delighted when his creativity is rewarded and he gets the job.After handing over two hundred and fifty Australian pounds, as a returnable sign-on bond, to Captain McKenna, and his partner Leo, Sharp joins fifteen other young hopefuls and takes his place on the team. The hefty bond money, paid by all the workers, except for Sharp, is designed to deter the crew from jumping ship.

Now why would all these guys want to jump ship? After dipping into Parched Seas, and noting Sharp's gutsy writing, I think I'm about to find why.

I'll share my thoughts further when I've read it properly. http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Parched/index.htm

	The Principles of Aesthetics

OK, as far as book reviews go, I've decided to opt for short and sweet. This guy Parker knows his stuff; and he’s a pretty good writer too. The Principles of Aesthetics mightn’t appeal to everyone, but Dewitt Parker knows how to use words to draw even hesitant readers into his world; he shows them another dimension of art and beauty.

This book got me in, and kept me engaged. Amazing really because when it comes to art criticism, I’ve got to admit I’m a hard nosed sceptic. The topic usually gets me a bit hot under the collar. But Parker managed to put out the fire and I was engrossed. Art criticism probably has a limited audience. I think that many people are like me and think that describing art, and its multitude of applications, is a difficult thing to do; and few do it all that well anyway.

I guess they’re right, but if the work is tackled by someone who really knows the subject, and they have a good command of the written word, then it makes the task easier. Readers then find the concepts are easier to understand. I often say, describing art, is like trying to explain how a woman thinks. It’s a challenge.

Parker’s work puts many art theorists to shame. His style has incredibly easy and his prose are superb. I’ve noticed that some people get uptight when they’re told they should observe Art in a certain way. I’m one of them. But Parker has produced a work that will help to promote understanding of a topic many people avoid. His writing style is pretty near perfect (I wish I could write as fluently as him). He examines a wide range of Art topics and dissects them like a brain surgeon. Even if Art isn’t your thing, I recommend this book to you anyway. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the author’s style, grace and intelligence. It’s a prose treasure, because it demonstrates the real meaning of good writing.

Not only is Mr. Parker is a great writer and a great thinker, he’s an Art sage. If you’re hoping to find some wise comment on amorphous and experimental themes that come under the heading of modern art, you’ll be disappointed. I recon Parker was pretty smart not to tackle this genre. I think he avoided the whole scene because he knows it’s mission impossible at the best of times, and taking it on usally sends a sane human stark raving mad. No, Parker understood boundaries, and he stayed within them. He’s a classical art guru so he kept to what he knows best.

He’s a philosophical master, who speaks with authority and genuine insight on how mediums of expression should be viewed and understood; even by the novice. But just remember if you want to learn about the inner workings of modern art, this is not the book for you.

It’s more of an academic outlook on how classical and pure Art ought to be appreciated. There’s nothing experimental going on between these covers. D.H. Parker will guide the beginner, the experienced, and the expert through the amazing world of Art appreciation. He’ll open doors and windows to let fresh air in, to clear the mind. He will help the reader gain a true unadulterated understanding of Art.

Now I’ve said all the nice stuff about Parker, I’m going to get out my hatchet and go for the jugular. I totally disagree with his view that writing is the lowest form of Art and expression. I’ll defend writing as a high art form with passion. And I can back up my argument with the statement that if Parker didn’t have good writing skills, then all his art knowledge would be limited to a very small audience, and would be lost pretty quickly.

Writing has allowed Parker’s ideas to live on. Writing has made them immortal (well almost). How can the man condemn the very thing that has made it possible for him to reach a world wide audience? Art is Art, and its beauty is unmistakably clear. But I look forward to the day when an Art critic; whether he’s a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, or anywhere else, can admit that writing is a HIGH art form.

Why do so many academics say that writing is merely the use of words? Hey tell that to Shakespeare. Why don’t you decide for yourself? You won’t be disappointed if you invest the time in this book. And I can guarantee it will change you.

http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Aesthetics/index.htm

	Alex is back from the Moon

Hey guys. It's been a while since I did anything productive on the site. Sorry, but life sort of got in the way. Life with a capital L. Love and of course work. No kidding! But love kept taking a back seat to the work thing and I soon discovered the true meaning of Arrivederci. The fallout meant I ended up working twice as much, and twice as hard, as I ever have; to kid myself I didn't give a toss. The truth is, I cared a lot. But hey, that's life.

So now my life is back on track, lol, I'm going to get with the program and start writing a few reviews again.

I've chosen a Si-Fi because I think it fits the mood. I've had the moon blast, and now I'm happy to settle for reading about someone else's adventure. It’s safer that way.

Hey, it doesn't pay to turn your back on this place. I was only gone for a few weeks and there's been an explosion of stuff happening. All good! Hi to all the new team members. Bob sure is making his presence felt. Way to go Bob. Love your work.

I see Julie's on board and Jay is going to soon follow her. Great to have you on the team guys.

A bit of Goss for everyone. Lindsay's taken a hike up the success ladder and she's buried under an avalanche of paper. She said to send her regards and to tell you she read Hogback and loved it. She recommends it to anyone who wants an exciting and believable read. Great stuff she says.

Well I'd better get the glasses out and start reading. HG has waited long enough.

http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/FirstMen/index.htm

	Jacob’s Room

This is a short novel published in 1922. It followed two longer novels, “The Voyage Out” and “Night and Day.” One must read Woolf very very slowly. She writes in the good company of T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” and Joyce's “Ulysses.” You read it slowly but the story moves at the speed of light, changing its style from page to page and changing the setting from paragraph to paragraph. You have to be on your guard. But the rewards are great. It is beautifully written and shows us an author of great depth, and an author whose words reflect thoughts which go back to Plato's dialogue, Phraedrus ,which she mentions in the book, several times, including Jacob''s reading of it. The Phraedrus deals with physical and spiritual love and its relation to the Platonic soul. I offer a bit of trivia. In the dialogue Socrates and his interolocutor, Phaedrus, are sitting down outside Athens in the countryside along the river Ilissus. They sit under a plane tree. Virginia Woolf mentions this tree at least three times in the novel. Perhaps she wishes that she could be sitting along that river under the same tree, in the heat of the Attic day, listening to Socrates and responding to his refutations.

The theme is open ended. Pick your category; youth, sex, the life of a Cambridge student, ancient languages, British small town culture, London, Tristan and Isolde and their love story, prostitution, flowers, flowers, flowers, physical beauty versus Platonic beauty,war and peace, theology,and the Being of life and its appearances as shadows, which is an existential theme. They jump out at you page after page.

Jacob Alan Flanders is our hero along with his mother Betty Flanders. In the spirit of Musil and his “Man without Qualities,” I found myself searching, as I read, for Jacob's qualites, that is, his basic character, which changes from his freshman days at Cambridge to later periods; and like Musil, these qualites are evasive. But they do come to fruition at the very end of the novel. The time period is right up to WWI.

We follow, very quickly, Jacob, as a small boy, moving then to his college days, his various trysts with prostitutes or good home spun girls, his academic interests, and his filial duties to his mother. But Jacob's room itself is the central theme of the story. That theme concerns one of the few real moments of being which we humans may capture from the manifold scenes of vagueness and shadows that we are exposed to. The room appears to have no substantial reality to it until, we the readers are firmly placed into it, along with Jacob. The reader is given a description of Jacob sitting in his college room all coszy, reading, with his books strewn about. She captures an authentic sense of being with these two powerful paragraphs:

“Jacob's room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a jar on the mantlepiece; a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red margin-an essay no doubt-'Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?' There were books enough; very few French books; but then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagent enthusiasm...Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One firbre in the wicker arm chair creaks. though no one sits there.”

“It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are old, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us-why indeed. For the moment after we know nothing about him.”

We caputure this intense reality for just a moment and then we are back to the shadows of Jacob's life, and to the shadows of London town. Wth the following, I thought I was reciting “The Wasteland:”

“Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart-her sinful, tanned heart-for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.”

The novel is written in narrative form. It has its concise and quite lucid descriptions, and then suddenly breaks into 'steams of consciousness' in the Joycean or Dos Passos style. There is no subjective perspective of Jacob. We never seem to get into his mind and how he sees the world. We slowly gain compassion and respect for everything about Jacob. This basic human concern becomes an apotheosis at the end of the novel.

http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/JacobsRoom/index.htm

	What is philosophy?

Dear Group,

This is obviously not a book review, but I just wish to determine if I'm following the procedures correctly in my initial writing.

Philosophy addresses all things in the universe which we seek as real and meaningful; that which we can know, that which we ought to do (that is, all of our actions), that which is pleasurable and beautiful to us, and that which simply is; that is , what is the nature of all existence, especially, of course, our own species. Philosophy also addresses anything we may possibly imagine. In addition, philosophy deals with the search for the divine and knowledge of the divine. Everything is subsumed under these categories, which are the realm of philosophy. Philosophy also must deal with the linguistic (written , spoken, silent), artifactual, natural, and graphic way in which all of these are expressed. In addition in seeking these things and expressing them, philosophy needs a medium or instrument to structure the questions and possible answers. The medium in itself is a philosophical problem. To further challenge the philosopher, questions of human subjectivity and objectivity are applied to all questions and answers. That is, what emanates only from us and what is completely alien to us, and how can we connect the two? Consciousness takes on a considerable role in this overall scheme of understanding the universe, and the unconscious also comes into play. There are some, especially in post modern times, who have argued that philosophy has lost its reason for being. I think not.

Regards,
Bob Fanelli

Anonymous said...

Good'ay Bob, Eugene Binx here: I note that comments so far have not answered your ? What is Philosophy? You asked. Well I'd suggest it's the academic disipline concerned with making explicit the nature and significance of ordinary and scientific beliefs thus investigating the intelligibility of concepts by means of rational argument concerning their presuppositions, implications and interrelationships. It is also the particular doctrines relating to these issues of a specific individual or school of thought, any system of belief,values or tenets and of course a persnal outlook or viewpoint. In other words it's the Art Of Ambiguity & Arbitrary Measurement. You summed up, "There are some, especially in post modern times who have argued that Philosophy has lost its reason for being," but you, "Think not." I'll suggest that Philosophy has yet to find its reason and use for being. I'll leave you with this last thought, "We know that necessity was the mother of invention, but were the mothers of invention a necessity?"
Best wishes from:
eugenebinx@hotmail.co.uk

Ralph Dumain said...

I think Bob's definition of philosophy is terrible. First, knowledge of the divine is optional in this day and age, the contemporary political surge of theocracy notwithstanding. Secondly, crucial to philosophy is epistemology, which is given short shrift in this definition. Binx's take on philosophy is skeptical and austere, but at least the question is raised: well, does philosophy really have a reason for being any more? I would suggest that both professional philosophers and popularizers have failed miserably in summing up what has been learned by the end of the 20th century and what the prospects for the future are. I don't believe that the questions of philosophy are eternal and that we should just continue on popularizing philosophy as if they are, as if there is nothing to learn from accumulated historical experience. The professionals have not done much better. Ultimately, the relation between philosophy and the empirical knowledge of the world has to be settled, and more importantly, explained to a popular audience, and I haven't seen that happen.
Philosophy, at the very least, has traditionally dealt with being, knowledge, and value--those categories can of course be expanded to include aesthetics, politics, science, etc., but minimally this is what we're dealing with: what is real, how do we know, and what is the nature of our investment in the world? Those concerns can not disappear as long as reflection exists and we don't achieve perfection, but they are modified historically with changes in both the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of society. If popularizers of philosophy cannot explain this, they are useless.

robertfanelli said...

This is in a short response to Ralph.
There was no attempt to define Philosophy. My purpose in offering this intitial discussion of philosophy was to demonstrate that one may discuss the merits or value of philosophy without any technical terms; in the spirit of Nietzsche. My words were offered to all and offered for all to think about. Your paragraphs are dense and loaded with polemics. This 101 site is for book reviews, and my duty is to pick out philosophical nuances in the review, which have importance in the sense of 'seeing into the life of things (Wordsworth).' Let us get on with the business of enjoying a good book review.
Bob

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