This blog is part of my 38 37 before 38 series. I write a blog for every single day for the 38 days leading up to my 38th Birthday.
On Photography by Susan Sontag
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrass ing, art changes morals
Critics of Sontag claim that she never used a word where she can use 10. This is not unfair, but misguided. Especially today. Where books are generic, workshopped to death. No author seems to have their own style. The things that make Sontag verbose, also make her interesting.
On Photogrpahy is an essay collection. It contains essays on culture, but mostly photography. The history, and technology of it, but also her disdain for it as an artform. “Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.”, she writes. She derides the photographers fascination with the mundane, the bizarre, the banal and the exotic. She was writing about the time when photographs were still scarce. Cameras still required a lot of work. Still, she ended up being prescient about how it transformed the human experience today.
But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
How to read a book by Mortimer Adler
It is true enough that many people read some things too slowly, and that they ought to read them faster. But many people also read some things too fast, and they ought to read those things more slowly. A good speed reading course should therefore teach you to read at many different speeds, not just one speed that is faster than anything you can manage now.
You might be thinking that why would a literate person need to “learn” how to read a book. Because a book is not just a text. It is a collection of ideas, thoughts, emotions and biases. To read a book is to collect all of it. To reflect on it. It reveals how the truth seems or feels.
Mr. Adler does not use those words. He writes it as a user manual, but in the language of the early 20th century literature. He describes the simplest stages of reading, and then proscribe how to do ‘Active’ reading. Beyond that, he recommends applying skimming skills for researching through multiple texts. He refers to this is Synoptical reading.
Of course any such prescription can veer off into esoteric territory. And so is true for this book as well.
The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
‘No papers, no person,’
Bulgakov’s surrealist classic on the Devil in Stalin’s Russia survived the dictator. “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” became a famous line throughout the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Bulgakov was never able to see this success. He tried to get it published in his life time, and was unsuccessful. The novel depicts the bureaucracy that festered the republic, the affectations that the elite hid behind, and Pointus Pilate as a tragic figure. Funny, heartbreaking, and clever.