Marius de Geus believes that there is something that Utopians can teach us, if only we would listen. He writes:

I am convinced that the utopians’ insights can lend support to the consideration of alternative futures, and the quest for a cleaner plant. In my opinion, it is certainly worthwhile to study the works of prominent ecological utopians and the time has come to reevaluate the utopian genre.

It is an old belief: that literature enriches, reinforces, and directs the actions of those who read it. There might be something to it. Certainly, reading a subtle and engaging thinker’s consideration of any text makes for a subtle and engaging experience; one that can enrich and direct many readers. Marius de Geus, however, is not a subtle or engaging thinker, and his book that considers Utopias from an ecological standpoint, Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society, is nothing if not a banal consideration of Utopian thought executed in a turgid bureaucratese.

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Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness tells the story of Kurt Gödel and his famous mathematical proof, which has served as fodder for theories as various as the irreducibility of consciousness to formal laws and characteristic, relativistic screeds, vaguely postmodern, that assert that everything is unverifiable within a system, and, therefor, not true. I wanted to read the book because a friend of mine had told me that it was good, and because Gödel’s proof intrigues me (I’ve got a copy of Gödel’s Proof in a box somewhere on the globe, next to an an actual copy of the proof itself) for its strangeness and self-referentiality. Not that I can fully appreciate the finer points of the math involved, but I like to pretend.

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Given the ever increasing media consolidation in the United States (and abroad), studies of how political and corporate interests bend, twist, or otherwise distort news coverage are taking on greater importance. Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions offers a thoroughly researched and ranging treatment of political news coverage ranging from the Vietnam war to the late 80s, the time the book was published. And while the events investigated may seem like ancient history to the flightly attention-spans of our (media-trained) eyes, they are not yet resolved and the historical imbalance of news coverage accorded to them remains to be corrected, which, one can surmise, will entrain a needed shift in public opinion.

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What follows is the first part of a two or three part exploration of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pullitzer Prize.

Have recently finished Robinson’s Gilead and Derrida’s “Force and Signification,” I wish to attempt a synthetic reading of the two. Quick summaries of both: Gilead, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer prize, takes the form of the letter of a preacher, who is dying, to his seven year old son, who will presumably read it at a later age. “Force and Signification” critiques structuralist literary criticism particularly and teleological interpretation generally. Trying to see the former through the latter, certain questions come to mind.

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Whilst (oh whimsical archaism!) I was zooming past European farmland in airconditioned and unairconditioned traincars, I did a bit of reading:

1. Pale Fire
2. Swann’s Way
3. Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man
4. Dubliners
5. Half of The Name of the Rose

Reading these stroked my sense of knowledge-gaining accomplishment; it also seemed to me a bit odd that I could finish so many books when I had little of the distractions that had plagued me during my usual life. So much time spent with my focus fixed on the pages of books, brain deciphering the curvaceous and alluring letters into sensible phrases, reminded me how much my devotion to the practice of language has waned. Also, the amount of journaling I did, scrambling nightly to try to fight against my failing memory’s erasure of slighter details, has re-instilled in me a duty-sense for writing (have to admit, I enjoy pen and paper writing more than tapping out sentences on a keyboard, though).

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I
Aleksandar Hemon could easily inspire eager young American writer-would-bes to jealous theatrics. Born and raised in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in the US in 1992 with only a modest command of English. Within only eight years he produced, in English, the stories that compose The Question of Bruno, a collection executed with a verbal precision and skill after which most speakers of English can only long. Bruno is both an achievement of writing and a proactive force in literature—here I follow the distinction between the two outlined by Hemon at his site. The stories it contains are brilliantly written, sure, but that is not all; they are also models of a reflective and critical engagement with the forces that grapple with and shape how we do our living. This engagement, it would seem, is entirely necessary. It offers the possibility of testimony: the ability to recall and recount the past, with all its horrors and blessings, so that we have something from which to fashion the future.

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