Splendor

the sun   was proud    in the south

[--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)]

Dichtung und Deutung mitteleuropäischer Prägung

I was recently enjoying Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, in much the same way one enjoys a dish of ice-cream.  

The dust-jacket of this volume, handsomely produced by Mr. Farrar and Mr. Straus, ably aided by Mr. Giroux, is French-vanilla, with touches of peaches-and-cream.    The paper is like fresh butter.   The translation, by Mr. Franzen (with, one suspects, an occasional or possibly frequent assist from Messers. Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann[**], absent from the dust-jacket  but present in the notes to the text), is superb.  Really, truly superb.   Occasionally, the German original even reads like an awkward back-translation from the English, as “Der Gedanke ist ein Gefundenes, ein Wiedergefundenes” => “… a discovered thing, a recovered thing”.   (And later:  "erfindet das Gefundene" => "invents what he has found":  a perfect description of found poetry.)

Yet, rather than now praise it further (that for later),  I’ll now talk back to it a bit.

[**  This is the same Daniel Kehlmann who wrote the best-selling Die Ermessung der Welt.   We examine the film version here.]

Kraus (“Heine und die Folgen”), in the course of his long dismantling-job on Heinrich Heine, writes and quotes:

Kein Dichter ruft einem Fräulein, das den Sonnenuntergang gerührt betrachtet, die Worte zu:

Mein Fräulein, sein Sie munter,

Das ist ein altes Stück;

Hier vorne geht sie unter,

und kehrt von hinten zurück.

Franzen chimes in  in a footnote (p. 83):

Boy, does Kraus nail what’s wrong with Heine’s sunset poem.  And yet, when I was twenty, I found this poem hilarious.   … [And yet again:]  Heine’s poem about the girl and the sunset  is smart-ass.  It shouldn’t wear well as you get older.

Now, I cannot testify as to that, since this is the first time I read it.  But I found it -- mildly amusing:  and this, though fall’n into the sere, the silver leaf.   Certainly not worth making a fuss against.  Smart-ass? -- freilich;  but so is that indispensable reference-work, The Onion. 

Yet I wish to say something more substantial than to defend a limerick against the charge of not being an epic. 

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

* 

[Sprightly background music for this section:

  The Forellen-quintett, splendidly performed by some young Asian guys you never heard of.

The prejudice (as we watch young Asians take over, say, my meta-alma-mater, UC Berkeley) is:  Technical brilliance, to be sure;  but they can scarcely capture the echt Viennese Gspaß und Gemütlichkeit.  -- Only, they do.   They do not at all overdo the technique;  the performance is full of humor.  And -- like that quatrain of Heine -- as simple and silver as a fish.]

Let us take that rhyming trifle, not “on its own terms” (in the anemic way of New Criticism) but as having been written by a Man in Full, Heinrich Heine.  And the literalistic simplicity of the poem’s depiction of the eternal wheeling of the Sun, suggests an equally literal simplicity at the human level.  I had spent much of the morning reading  his Viennese countryman and contemporary Sigmund Freud;  perhaps that suggested this unchaste thought to my mind, but in any event:  Any red-blooded poet or artist,  beholding some buxom Mädchen waxing wet around the edges at the spectacle of the beauties of Nature, has only one natural reaction:   Invite her up to your Bude  “so that I may show you my etchings”.   Then -- vorne slides  the  Schlüpfer down;  while the frock comes up  behind.    

Following which instruction, the girl is certain to emerge with a more deeply  deepened appreciation of the cycles of Nature (even if her own might be somewhat disrupted by the aftermath).  The only point being, that while that “snatch” of doggerel (permit me the word) still falls sort of the Iliad, neither is it purely deflationary, but  on one natural reading  points forward and upward and inward, to a more fructuous development, which could even result in the birth of a child.

~

So much for the smutty reading.   But there is also -- as so often -- an anagogic, of a sort especially perceptible to the more contemplative elderly gentlemen, who are long past de-frocking Fräuleins.  For indeed, there is a subtlety here.

[Background music  for this part of the essay:

  Brahms String Sextet No.1 in B flat, Op.18  ]

This symmetry of the sun setting before us, and rising behind, is not an elementary fact of perception, but is a non-obvious cosmological hypothesis, and fallible as such.  Certainly, as a child, it never occurred to me to connect the two widely-separated events.   You see the sunset, you go to bed;  sleep happens;  you get up and eat your oatmeal, and run out to play;  the sun is already back in the sky, just as Mom & Dad are once again up and about.  What’s to explain?

Later, in school, or from our parents in a pedagogic mood, we learn abstruse suppositions about things called “East” and “West” -- not easily observable in themselves, and which go all cock-eyed the instant you race your bicycle around the corner, but in principle localizable via consultation of a completely magical and paradoxical little novelty-item called a “compass”:  you turn the thing this way and that way, trying to get the little needle to move, but it’s like herding hamsters.  Later still, they teach you poems to memorize:  “The Sun rises in the East, and sets in the West.”   (Or is it the other way about?   One can never remember.)   As with the Alphabet Song, and the one about Columbus and the Ocean Blue, knowing such poems is constitutive of becoming an educated grown-up.

And superficially, Heine’s ditty is bringing in that magisterial scientific description, with deflationary intent, to crush the girl’s vesperal (and vestal) sentimentalism.  But, note:  it does not.

It does not evoke a uniform isotropic curvilinear coordinate system in a comoving Lorenzian reference frame, together with (all the fixings):  Rather, it leaves the human perceiver  still planted in the center;  unbudging  from sundown to sunup, so that the great renewal of the diurnal earth  now sneaks up on her from behind, like a jack-in-the-box popping up to surprise you.  The bland planetary fact of a hemi-diurnal rotation  is here collapsed into a single poetic instant;  the sentient experiencer is at once  epiphanically aware of the unity of these mirror occurences, much like that of the right and left hand.  This vision is -- strictly mystical.   More fundamentally even than the astronometric account, this perspective succeeds in taking a literally quotidian fact of existence, and making it new -- making it strange.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for an epiphany,

this is what I would be reading: "

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

(Ich heisse Heinrich Heine, and I approved this message.)

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

Indeed, the Kraus-quoted quatrain  immediately called to mind one of Rilke, about Symmetry as observed by a mooncalf (we quote it as part of an essay here):

Ach was ist das für ein schöner Ball !

Rot und rund wie ein Überall.

Gut, dass ihr ihn erschuft.

Ob der wohl kommt wenn man ruft?

Superficially, in both rhymes, the language is naïve;  in reality, faux-naïf.  On the surface, rather unpleasantly, immaturity is being mocked, here in a simpleton, there in a Backfisch.   More profoundly -- Ah, but, it is difficult to plumb the profound.  I have simply circled around it, approached it from different faces and facets, in a series of poems and parables,  which you may sample via any of the following thematic labels:

epiphany  ~ round  ~  faux-naïf

And for an extravagantly anagogic take on a scatological joke, try this:
      http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/anagogic-jokes-re-upped.html     

Is Amazon Evil?

U B the Judge:

Amazon is busy, but secretive, at Kendall Square offices

The Amazon name has allure; the Seattle e-commerce giant hired at least 80 people for its Cambridge research-and-development office in 2012, according to several employees who have since moved on. But how’s this for secretive? Current and former employees are forbidden from talking about what happens at the Cambridge office, and the company won’t even tell prospective employees what they’d be working on, if hired.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/01/27/amazon-workers-keep-busy-cambridge-but-what-are-they-working/QCe5kORPZ8pgU71Iz4VviL/story.html

Sounds nefarious.

So what are they up to?   Preparing a drone attack against Wal-Mart, in revenge for dropping the Kindle?   Developing a Stuxnet variant that will selectively infect the Nook?  If you agree that, given the facts on the ground, this can only point to a massive cover-up, with probable North Korean involvement, then you are ready to embark upon the thriller experience of your life:

The Riemann Conspiracy

Set aside a week of your life, to thread through this.

There is only one man -- well okay, actually two men, but they're brothers -- who could possibly unravel this intricate structure of plots within plots: and that man (men) is (are) Murphy (Murphy and his brother Joey, I mean).  You can read about his (their) adventure(s) here:

Murphy Bros. -- Private Investigators

(Note:  Admission to that exclusive site is normally by invitation only, and involves a fee of five hundred euros;  however, for today only, and for you personally only, it's free.)

Note:  As a self-sacrificing service to our devoted readers,  we maintain the following, in the face of evil Amazon Kindle monopolism:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html'


[2 Dec 2013]  Flash update!  Amazon acquiring a fleet of drones.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/02/everything-you-need-to-know-about-amazons-new-delivery-drones/?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z13

Note:  Since the Washington Post was recently bought by Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos, it does not dare criticize the move, but rather glamorizes it.   Omitting such details as the use of depleted uranium in the nosecones, and eventually undepleted uranium in the payloads.

Today:  Amazon UAVs.
Tomorrow:   World domination.

[Update 1 April 2014]  Just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project, towards the end of which he vents:

"In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the Antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the Four Horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion."

[Update 15 April 2014]  Google punches back with its own drone army:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/04/14/google-buys-drone-maker-titan-aerospace-2/

[Update 17 May 2014]

On Thursday, the new bestseller list arrived at the offices of Hachette Book Group with good news: One of the publisher’s books, T.D. Jakes’s “Instinct,” had vaulted to the No. 1 spot.

But the bad news was that anyone trying to order the book on Amazon.com on Friday got a message saying that it “usually ships within 3 to 5 weeks,” far slower than the fast delivery on which Amazon prides itself.

Hachette, which owns Little, Brown; Hyperion; and Grand Central, says that Amazon is deliberately slowing sales of Hachette’s books in an effort to pressure the French publisher into agreeing to new contract terms on book pricing. Hachette says there is no shortage of the books.

“We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly,” Hachette said in a statement last week. “Amazon is holding minimal stock and restocking some of HBG’s books slowly, causing ‘available 2-4 weeks’ messages, for reasons of their own.”

Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post, would not comment for this article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazon-said-to-play-hardball-in-book-contract-talks-with-publishing-house-hachette/2014/05/16/cdd40854-dc62-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html?tid=hpModule_a2e19bf4-86a3-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z14

[Update 23 May 2014]
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-hachette/?hp

[Update 30 May 2014]
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/gladwell-on-amazon-its-sort-of-heartbreaking-when-your-partner-turns-on-you/

[Update 31 May 2014]

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon.

But there was a problem. When a company has dominant market power and sells goods for below marginal cost, it is engaging in predatory pricing, a violation of federal antitrust laws.

What was to be done? Fortunately, in early 2010, a natural market solution presented itself: the introduction of the iPad and Apple’s entry into the e-book market. At Apple’s suggestion, the major book publishers were persuaded to change their e-book business model to reflect how Apple had been selling its popular apps for the iPhone. Under the app model, the publisher sets the price, not Apple or Amazon — with the e-retailer keeping a 30 percent commission. Here, price competition does not go away; it just moves from the e-retailer to the app developers, book publishers and authors.

As a result, Amazon found itself no longer selling e-books at below cost, and its rivals began competing on service, spurring new entrants to the market and the release of innovative e-book devices.

All was well until the Justice Department, supported by a white paper supplied to it by Amazon, filed an ill-advised lawsuit against Apple and five of the major book publishers for antitrust violations. The publishers were charged with “price fixing” — but not for fixing prices: Not a single e-book price was fixed by the conspiracy contrived by the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/opinion/how-book-publishers-can-beat-amazon.html?src=me&ref=general

 [Update 9 Aug 2014]  A superb blogpost on the epic Amazon-versus-the-publishers battle  here:

Dispute Between Amazon and Hachette Takes an Orwellian Turn

By DAVID STREITFELD

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/orwell-is-amazons-latest-target-in-battle-against-hachette/

           

[Update a6 Aug 2015] As a place to work, apparently Amazon has elements of a cult:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html