Blog Archives

Marjorie Perloff on Duchamp's Urinal

3/31/2015

As something of a footnote to my previous post headlined "Ron Silliman at Odds with 'the Mongrel Coalition'", I thought I might mention that I have recently derived much pleasure from the audio files of Perloff available for listening at the PennSound archives.

I've listened to the readings and conversations at Art International Radio from November 11, 2009; the talk on The Waste Land from July 23, 2012; and the interview for the Incognito Lounge from November 12, 1991. But certainly the most instructive—the program from which I learnt the most—was her lecture on Duchamp's "Fountain" from April 25, 2011. (I see now that some of these are available as videos, but I only had access to the audio files, which I would find preferable regardless.)

The program is a long talk on Duchamp, followed by about fifteen minutes of relating the body of the speech to literature, and then a fifteen minute Q&A. At the start—the first four minutes perhaps—are a sheer delight, as the voice of Al Filreis invites people to move their seats forward to let people who show up late, or in fact, on time, be able to sit in those places.

Duchamp is not pivotal in my cosmogony—so the main portion was not without its tedium, but I felt I had learned something at the end, and let me try to briefly put into words what that was. (There are applications to "Conceptual writing," that Duchamp-derived literary genre of which I only learnt the existence two months ago.)

While it has been argued about for a century (and this is not Perloff's point, but my own conclusion drawn), what Duchamp essentially did in making his objet d'art "The Fountain," was to make a copy—almost an exact copy—of Michelangelo's statue of David.

The David had been copied before; indeed, one of my treasured memories from a period of youthful employment at one of Chicago's grand department stores (now out of business, or rather transmuted into something quite different under a different name and different ownership), was coming off of the elevator and seeing a hideous copy of the David's face. The expression was grotesque—no matter how adept the physiognomy of form, body and musculature, it is always the face which sabotages copyists of Michelangelo's masterpiece.

Duchamp was protesting exactly this kind of copy; where art replicates itself upon itself. He considered that he was doing something different; to what extent he realized his profound invention cannot be known. He duplicated the David point for point.

Once you realize that, it becomes obvious that the experiment might as well be said to have run its course; rather than making copies, it is time for artists to do something original.

Clearly, a performer such as Goldsmith, when he reads the traffic reports, or a narrative of the Kennedy assassination, or an autopsy, believes he is making an imitation of some great work of art (in the line of Duchamp) —Homer perhaps. And that is exactly what he is doing.

Mechanical reproduction can only go so far, however (or take one so far, I might say). Conceptualism as a genre may not have been "killed" (to repeat the kind of hubris one finds online), but it certainly would seem to have depleted itself, though it might well go on regurgitating copies ad infinitum.

Keats, of course, did not imitate Shakespeare; or, if he began in imitation—what novice does not?—he at last became something greater and more profound: Keats.

In the sense, as per Perloff, that Duchamp created art by making a "choice," then that explains the cries of "colonial aesthetics" in application. How else might one refer to it? (Art—and, to varying degrees, artists—have always been owned by the wealthy. That is not the question.)

Where the denouncers of Conceptualism trip themselves up, simply, is that though they decry copyists and imitators, yet they have not figured out how to do what Keats did: be themselves. Until they achieve that, denunciations remain impotent, fruitless, and not even fallow.

Thomas Hardy and the Welfare of Animals

3/31/2015

Compassion

In celebration of the centenary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

I.

Backward among the dusky years
A lonesome lamp is seen arise,
Lit by a few fain pioneers
Before incredulous eyes.
We read the legend that it lights:
“Why should throughout this land of historied rights
Mild creatures, despot-doomed, bewildered, plead
Their often hunger, thirst, pangs, prisonment,
In deep dumb gaze more eloquent
Than tongues of widest heed?”

II.

What was faint-written, read in a breath
In that year—ten-times-ten away—
A larger clearer conscience saith
More sturdily to-day.
But still those innocents are thralls
To throbless hearts, near, far, that hear no calls
Of honour towards their too-dependent frail;
And from Columbia Cape to Ind we see
How helplessness breeds tyranny
In power above assail.

III.

Cries still are heard in secret nooks,
Till hushed with gag or slit or thud;
And hideous dens whereon none looks
Are blotched with needless blood.
But here, in battlings, patient, slow,
Much has been won—more, maybe, than we know—
And on we labour stressful. “Ailinon!”
A mighty voice calls: “But may the good prevail!”
And “Blessed are the merciful!”
Calls yet a mightier one.

The above poem, not considered one of his best, indicates Thomas Hardy’s concern for the welfare of animals. Prose that he left behind—and took pains to ensure would be passed to posterity—was more explicit. “[T]he application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule,’” he wrote, must “as a necessity of rightness” be enlarged “beyond the area of mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.”

Hardy was ahead of his age; and I made use of his statement in my book The Soul’s Refinement partly to pay tribute to that. Today, more than ever, it dawns on me that he was ahead of our time also: humanity’s treatment of animals, in some quarters has improved, but largely has regressed, for example in modern agribusiness’s reliance on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

What prompted my reminiscence about Hardy was a poem that a friend posted on Facebook to celebrate Palm Sunday two days ago, something by G.K. Chesterton:

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked,
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry,
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
Of all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient, crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

The poem was not new to me, and I commented privately to a friend: “I find the Chesterton poem perfectly obnoxious—exactly the sort of thing in which I see the weakness of Christian thought.” He too was familiar with it, calling it: “One of the singlemost flagrant examples of humankind’s penchant for condescendingly lifting an animal out of the mire we have doomed it to, by virtue of the fact that one of our messianic heroes abused it on one of our High Holy Days. Chesterton’s horridly ugly description of the donkey as a species leading up to final quatrain suits humankind to a tee....” Furthermore, he added, “That poem with its presumptuous, full-of-itself veneer just revolts me.”

It has been a long while since I studied Hardy, so cannot pronounce about his religious beliefs: a quick look online reports him to have been an atheist. If so, better the atheism of Hardy than the Christianity of Chesterton.

It was, in fact, under the weight of this perception of the weakness of Christian thought that I wrote a poem about Prince Sattva and his encounter with the lions, a famous story in Buddhism. Buddhist lore includes—or to use Hardy’s terminology, has been enlarged to include the area of—the whole animal kingdom, and such stories abound. This casts no aspersion on the Jesus whose teachings inform the Christian Gospel—but the narrowness of focus which has hallmarked so many of his followers, especially in America today, must be lamented. More importantly, teaching must be done so as to widen the “application” of that message in congruence with Hardy’s universal paradigm.

According to my friend, the animal which bore Jesus (per citation of Zechariah 9:9) was not a full-grown adult, but actually “a colt, the foal of a donkey,” which casts its services in a more problematic light. (He reminded that in “the Middle Ages, and later, yanking the hair from the backs of donkeys” was considered a “‘cure’ for sundry maladies, including measles and whooping cough.”)

Questions of animal suffering aside—I was never one to sit all the way through Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar —the eccentric notion that an animal takes pride and redemption in being used for human purposes, no matter how engrained in the human psyche and facilitated by traditions of husbandry, cannot but be distortive. Condescension, which permeates all of Chesterton’s writings, must be recognized. The prevalence of his kind of thinking does not make it right.

Hardy would be appalled by slaughterhouse conditions today; but at least gratified that his words have been used by present-day advocates in trying to ease the suffering of our fellow mortals.

Without compassion, there is no use for poetry.

Ron Silliman at Odds with "the Mongrel Coalition"

3/30/2015

I had not heard about “conceptual poetry.” Conceptualism is a worldwide movement, and claims as its heritage the later career of Marcel Duchamp.

A versifier of forty years, I have drawn (literary) inspiration haphazardly or sporadically, from divers sources as I happened to find them. Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling, touched me early—names seldom to be found in academia. Then Claude McKay, also an exile from the halls of higher education, save for in ethnic studies departments, about whom I have written. To be sure, some of my illustrious literary forebears and influences do get taught in the university, but that was not primarily how I encountered them.

Having written about McKay so recently, when a Facebook link brought me to a piece touching upon “colonial aesthetics,” I could not help but be interested. I posted an entry titled “On ‘The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo’” about it. The “coalition” —more likely one or two disgruntled individuals—wrote a wild screed condemning a publication called Jacket2 as well as a couple of academics (affiliated or not?), one a poet-practitioner the other a critic-promoter of the avant-garde in poetry. The names were not familiar to me, or hardly familiar, but after the vituperative attacks against them I was sure to recognize them when next they cropped up, and I did.

Kenneth Goldsmith, or otherwise “Kenny G.” as he was referred to in the screed (which brought to mind the saxophonist whose song is so popular in China at closing time), came up in a video about which I posted: you can tell by my entry that at the time I wrote I had not completed watching the full video, or I would have seen footage of the “auteur” before his gawking presidential audience. (His performance art or wordsmithing—call it what you will—has since prompted a typical online kerfuffle, about which the best critique and analysis is by Illya Szilak at Huffington Post.)

Meanwhile I have started attending seriously to Marjorie Perloff —a substantial collection of online interviews and speeches has given me hours of amusement: it is pleasant to hear ideas spoken of seriously, even when one is unfamiliar with the names. Her article describing a poetry event at the White House had been briefly scanned by me before I posted on Goldsmith, and I obviously conflated information. (Appropriately, Elizabeth Alexander, about whom I have written cursorily—see the preview here —also performed at the event.) She is a compelling speaker, if at times a little too rushed, but I have had little luck in laying my hands on any of her published books to read more closely.

Another name which pops up is Ron Silliman. He has written a book called Against Conceptual Poetry (of which naturally I had not heard, not having heard of the thing itself), so he obviously bears some relation to the community. Googling brought up a wry article (“Death of a Kingmaker”) by Goldsmith at Harriet, the blog belonging to Poetry Magazine. (Yes, Harriet, which had linked the original “colonial aesthetics” piece—I know it all seems a little incestuous.)

I had not known of Ron Silliman either—except possibly as a name in passing—until, due to another Facebook link, I was prompted to look him up after reading a recent essay at his blog. The piece, which is untitled, touches upon a lot of the thoughts I had been having for months, which I wanted to fashion into an essay. I’ve taken several stabs at it, and failed—even mentioning it here more than once. My theme encompassed, to use Silliman’s words, “a sense... that the world is coming to a very bad tipping point quite soon—may in fact already be on the wrong side of it—and that there are no effective mechanisms for braking the out-of-control vehicle that is the Anthropocene before we all hit the wall.”

He references specifically “a lot of bile online of late” to which he is responding; my theme would address rather the function and value of literary endeavor under such seemingly Apocalyptic conditions. The jostling that we do, the acrimony, seem out of place. Silliman suggests,

All of which makes me want to say, lighten up a little, folks. Take a deep breath. Some tone deaf poet is not your enemy any more than Charlie Hebdo was anybody’s enemy. The English Department is not your enemy. The police are not your enemy—tho it would sure help if they were demilitarized, properly trained and representative of the communities they “serve.” Now the CEO of Nestlé who argues that the idea of drinkable water as a human right is nonsense, he just might be worth looking at as a significant opponent. And as somebody who controls disproportionate amount of resources on this planet, it matters that he says that. But if you think your problem is that somebody put the contradictions of discourse into high contrast in a way that made you cringe, might I suggest that you have not noticed that your house is on fire.

His priorities seem in order. While I was not aware of his (having since waned) status as a “kingmaker,” it seems today that the various (academically bestowed) literary “crowns” look pettier and pettier, the struggle to claim them paltrier and paltrier. The crier “against gringpo” (which term I have not yet figured out a definition for) now boasts credit for having “killed conceptualism” and lists a potpourri of “targets” (presumably targets of disdain, not aspirational ones) including:

GAY FLAG-DRAPERS, WHITMANIAN TWINK POETS, WHITE LGBT POETS WHO USE THE TROPHY OF QUEERNESS AS NEGATOR OF RACIAL PRIVILEGE, THERE’S CHUNKS OF EGG ON YOUR FACE, POETS WHO SO NATURALLY APPROPRIATE AND ABIDE BY THE LANGUAGE OF FINANCE, POETS WHO CLAIM THAT POETRY IS RISK TAKING BUT CANNOT LOCATE THE DAMAGE.... [all caps in the original]

What is to be made of this? The contrast with Silliman is striking.

“It’s like wanting in on the aristocracy,” wrote David Need, whom I quoted in respect to a discussion on “falling gatekeepers.” Not only the gatekeeper, the gates are falling, meanwhile some are gloating over the corpse (really the corpse of a chimera), and, amidst all the conflagration and upheaval, here or there a voice can be heard, “Have you not noticed that your house is on fire?”

Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis

3/29/2015

Some Quibbles

Chapter 5 focuses on “Rural Society”. The book is The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis, first volume of the Harvard History of Imperial China edited by Timothy Brook.

He writes:

In Emperor Wu’s reign, Zhao Guo advocated a new “alternating fields method” of agriculture. Wider furrows were plowed, resulting in deeper root systems that were better protected from summer droughts. By midsummer the field would be level. The following year the positions of the furrows and ridges were reversed (hence the name “alternating”), thus supposedly preserving soil nutrients and reducing the need for fertilizer or fallowing (leaving fields uncultivated for a period of time). Wind no longer blew the seeds away from the tops of the ridges, and water was more easily conserved. The use of oxen allowed a larger area to be cultivated with the same amount of human labor.

Then later:

While the plow used in Zhao Guo’s system required a pair of oxen and three men, Eastern Han farmers developed a nose ring that allowed a single man to control both the oxen and the plow. When farmers developed a combined plow and seeder, an individual could both plow and plant in one operation. But once again, these advances were available only to wealthy families and their tenants. As the comparative advantage of the former grew, more farmers were forced off the land.

Chinese agriculture, however big, had no equivalent to the Italian latifundia—though, as you would imagine, subsistence farmers (the majority) were perpetually squeezed from all sides.

Lewis conveys useful information; at the midpoint of his book, which totals ten chapters, I’ve found very little fluff, though previously I complained about his organization. Chapter 5 culminated in bringing to the fore certain irritations I have with the text—ultimately with the editing, I suppose (though from experience I know it’s a tricky negotiation). In the first paragraph quoted, I felt flabbergasted when I came upon, in parenthesis, “leaving fields uncultivated for a period of time” as a descriptor or definition of fallowing.

Now, I’m not a farm boy, but I should have thought that the meaning of fallowing was sufficiently clear as to not need elaboration: would not the dictionary suffice if one was stumped or uncertain? It reminds me of those poetry anthologies geared for students, in which many common words are glossed in the margins, so for example you might have, for “Whose woods these are I think I know” a little symbol after woods to inform that it means “a small forested area”.

Later on in the chapter he uses the same technique, of parenthetically defining a precedent word (possibly for students): “The same term is applied to the locally powerful lineages involved in the underworld, those who dominated commanderies, and imperial affines (relatives by marriage).”

“Affines” is not a word you would commonly know. In this case I did, and not from previous anthropological readings (though surely I have encountered it), but because he makes the exact same gloss in a previous chapter: “affines (relatives by marriage)” —though at that time I made no note to enable easy double-checking.

As I say, these are quibbles: the information conveyed in the text seems dependable; nevertheless it remains an irritation, and gives me a slight skepticism about the coherence in toto of the author’s presentation. Whose fault let me not point the finger; perhaps, as I suggested recently, it represents a “dumbing down” demanded by Harvard Press, but perhaps it represents just contemporary carelessness.

On p. 110 Lewis begins a paragraph, “A typical village consisted of about a hundred families, all of whom owned small amounts of land.” Very well; but then it is jolting to come across on p.121 another beginning: “Villages typically consisted of a hundred or more households, and in those dominated by a powerful lineage a significant percentage of those households might share a surname.”

The information is not bad; but the duplications, as I noted, are rife—as well as what I consider to be omissions, but these are harder to pinpoint. It is telling that I have already become so sensitive to notice this. Sanctioned Violence never seemed so disjointed; but perhaps editorial standards have shifted over the years. In my own experience, editors are prone to rewrite even if it disrupts the flow of one’s thought; or maybe Lewis is himself haphazard, but Brook then should not have let it pass.

Yesterday I quoted a reviewer (of another book) commending it for having Chinese words for place names and persons; I would ask further, for titles of cited (classical) texts and critical terminology (“ch’i”). Harvard avoids this like the plague, and it is hard to understand why. (Chinese characters are ever-present in Chang; after all, this is scholarly work, is it not?)

In Lewis you have something like this: “This is marked by the recurrence of such terms as ‘to connect (jie),’ ‘to contact (jiao),’ or ‘to communicate (tong),’ which often appear as compounds and have a large range of meanings.” Chang would frequently give the Chinese character along with the romanization; then, after usage had been determined with the first appearance, omit subsequently the character while keeping the romanization. In the quoted example, of what possible use to me is it to know the sound—and remember Chinese is a language replete with homophones—without giving the character? Here, a student with rudimentary Mandarin will likely know to which words these phonetics refer; but frequently it is not so simple.

After all, Yuen Ren Chao has already written a poem (“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”) —justly become famous—to demonstrate just how ridiculous it all is. Lewis and Brook should have known better. The book—and series presumably—is not so shabby as such practice makes it appear.

These are quibbles, nitpicks, and minor irritations, something to be gotten off one’s chest in a blog post: I continue to recommend the book, and honestly doubt much better is to be found, at least so up-to-date. Half way and I hope to continue.

Toward a Bibliophilia of Ancient China

3/28/2015

How far I get along with any of this is any man's guess. Rather than reading the books I have, let me count those I have not.

Well, I have bemoaned (and bemoaned) my lack of Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations by Liu Xueqin and translated by K.C. Chang (who wrote Shang Civilization among others).

Seeking to compensate, I foraged around. A book on Western Chou Civilization must not cover the same territory as Eastern Zhou, but would be interesting. (Chou, like Zhou, lies beyond my price range.) There is one review, by Louis Petrillo, who has reviewed other China titles. He lists several positive points:

1. the text contains the Chinese characters for people and place names which is very helpful as any romanization can still be ambiguous;
2. the numerous references to recent architectural discoveries are very well footnoted to sources in Chinese;
3. there are numerous pictures of and rubbings from the bronzes cited in the text;
4. there are numerous tie-ins between the archaeological sources and the classical Chinese texts (Shi Jing, Shan Shu, Chun Qiu, Zuo Zhuan, etc.)

And several negative:

1. the romanization scheme used is Wade-Giles rather than pinyin;
2. the English translations of the Chinese originals are those by James Legge which by now are somewhat archaic. Possibly Watson's translation of the Zuo Zhuan wasn't available. And unfortunately Legge is still the only one who has translated the Shan Shu and the Chun Qiu.
3. the book is already rather dated as new discoveries continue to be made. For example, there is no mention made of the discoveries of Sanxingdui or various Han tombs that have greatly enriched our knowledge of the classical writings.

All of Mr. Petrillo's positives strike me as very positive; and for me his negatory "Wade-Giles" would be very much a positive. (If I had a magic wand I would banish pinyin from the land.) He suggests a revised edition may come out one day, and if it does, in spite of the unavoidable pinyin, I could climb aboard—cost permitting of course.

To make up for my lack of anything about the Chou—and it obviously is the Eastern that I am lamenting—I've determined that my only recourse is to look into some whole-cloth histories, outdated though they (may) be, and so, I expect to glance into A History of Chinese Civilization by Jacques Gernet and into China's Imperial Past by Charles Hucker. It's a crapshoot. I intend only to look at the relevant chapters—unless one or the other (or both) offers prose that compels me to continue, in which case outdatedness be damned & full speed ahead ("lucid" prose as said of Finley's as may betoken punctilious thought).

A book came the other day, The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization by Li Chi, considered the doyen of Chinese archeologists—at least in Chang's time. He (so I understand) really spearheaded the An-yang excavations and Chang refers to him a lot. The book itself is a little pearl of refinement. Three lectures with a cumulative page count of about 100, large print type, many illustrations and black & white photographs—plus a clarity of prose. (The introduction by his Western host recounts the discovery of oracle bone fragments if not in so amusing fashion as Chang's later retelling.) I felt such a joy when I opened this little book, because, notwithstanding the difficulty I had with Chang's Shang Civilization, it felt a little bit like coming home. Much as I whinge about archeology in the right hands it satisfies me well enough.

Where that leaves The Evolution of Urban Society I cannot guess. I have no genuine intention to read it, but will do so if compelled; and Li Chi's book, similarly, I expect to put on the shelf for future reference. Like the gourmand who wants to try a surplus of dishes that he sees, I shall be lucky to taste but a slim percentage of the banquet of books I contemplate. And again, I croak instead of reading anyhow.

Mind you, none of this is my subject; and I am not a reader anyhow.

Saying that, as a final note, let me mention, that I frequently link to Amazon.com, not as an endorsement—and I am not set up to receive any kickback for traffic I may direct that way—but because it seems the most available common source for information about books. Even—as above—I have occasionally noted what reviewers have said about books there: an important source for information and opinion, when the books I like don't get much notice or review anyhow, even if they happen to be of recent minting (which is not often the case). For the record.

Using up Whole Bolts of Silk

3/27/2015

Yesterday I posted a quote by Wang Chong taken from The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis, followed by a long commentary on my (slow) progress in reading the text, with a lot of extraneous matter and links thrown in beside. Unfortunately I was working directly with the hosting service, and when it was time to go live, only the initial quote posted and everything else was lost. Irritating, but no great matter, “in the long run” (to quote Keynes—or what is commonly attributed to him).

One of the things I had mentioned, was that Lewis repeats himself a lot, while on the other hand presuming a prior knowledge about many things which I lack. Having just made my way through Chapter 4, I have a good example of that. He writes (on p.91):

The Records of the Historian/Astrologer portrays the [Han] founder, Emperor Gaozu (as Liu Bang became known), as a man who lacked loyalty to family and home, and it attributes his triumph to this very characteristic.

All very interesting, but this is the third time he mentions that Liu Bang, as emperor, was known by Gaozu. Either he expects the reader to have excessively poor retention (as I sometimes do), or the editing (or the writing?) is bad. It is very easy, when dealing with an unwieldy text, and doing a lot of cutting and pasting, to wind up with inconsistencies like this. Worse than duplication, omissions of critical data, make the text harder to follow than it ought to be—sometimes a fact being thrown in (say) in Chapter 3 that suddenly renders explicable a long drawn-out passage from the first chapter.

Having said that, I have no real complaints. Had I been able to get the book I wanted on the Chou, I might be better prepared for the ascent of the Qin (which has, by the way, gone up another $25 from the cheapest vendor since the last time I mentioned it).

If organizationally I find Lewis to be lacking, nothing he writes seems extraneous. Despite my deficiencies, I am—little by little—conjuring up a picture of his subject(s). Following on the Chang, this too relies on archeology (as you might expect); yet a description of what was found is helpful to imagining an alien political and social landscape. The emperor “ruling by absence” lies outside of Western tradition; though, if you read my Peony Pavilion (which is to be considered a retelling or a new version) you may note I retained the emperor’s designation by only an offstage voice.

“The costumes of the urban elite,” writes Lewis, “as in so many societies, became the standard for others to emulate.” I am not sure of his original source for the following quotation, but I like it:

In the city, if they love to have their hair dressed up high,
Then everywhere else they dress their hair an inch higher.
In the city, if they love to enlarge their eyebrows,
Then everywhere else they will make their eyebrows cover half their foreheads.
In the city, if they love large sleeves,
Then everywhere else they will use up whole bolts of silk.

To Mount a High Tower

3/26/2015

"To mount a high tower and glimpse as far as the four neighboring states is what people desire. To sit hidden in a closed room, turning inward into the darkness, boring into a grave and sleeping in a cave, reaching to the edge of the Yellow Springs [realm of the dead] is what people hate. Someone with a closed mind and sealed-off thoughts who does not gaze from the heights is a companion of the dead."

—Wang Chong (26-ca. 100 A.D.)

On the Evolution of Urban Society (and Then Some)

3/25/2015

Next month will be fifty years since the delivery of the original lectures upon which The Evolution of Urban Society by Robert McC. Adams is based. The book, a revised text, was published in 1966.

I only know the book because K.C. Chang mentioned it in his Shang Civilization, and it seemed interesting (plus a cheap copy was available). I’ve only begun to skim the first chapter; my real goal at this time is The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis, of which I have read the first two chapters—with mixed feeling.

In the preface McC. Adams writes, “The substance of this study was presented in April, 1965, as a third annual series of lectures at the University of Rochester in honor of Lewis Henry Morgan.” Of what importance this may be to anyone—possibly to “people in the know” —I know not; but, for my sake, noting it as a curiosity, I feel that some words of commemoration are due. In 1966, anthropology was yet a relatively young study, and the first chapter’s opening paragraph reflects this:

The generalizing, comparative study of the origins of early states has been an important research theme since before the emergence of anthropology as a conscious, distinctive intellectual approach. Indeed, the view that “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization” form stages in a universal evolutionary sequence lay very close to the core of thought and speculation out of which anthropology arose. With the subsequent, increasingly conscious and refined, acquisition and analysis of both historical and ethnographic data, the deficiencies of this view became so strikingly apparent that for a long time the diversity of cultures received greater stress than their similarities. If today the tide has begun again to run in the opposite direction, perhaps at least a part of the explanation lies in the persuasiveness and vigor with which it has continued to be affirmed over the years that the early civilizations provide a significant example of broad regularities in human behavior.

The book is a comparison, as per its subtitle, between “Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico”. Chang felt that early Chinese culture and civilization merited a place in such a comparison, albeit discredited due to various “corruptions” of external influence; his development of the theme was not a major aspect of his summary, yet it did make me curious to see McC. Adams’ work.

McC. Adams begins with some exposition on the lecture series’ namesake, Mr. Morgan, critiquing, through him, some of the limitations of the older views or ideological frameworks through which anthropology approached data—critiquing but not in any case judging condemnatorially, rather justly appreciating—and suggesting how the study had evolved in its precepts:

In comparison with Morgan’s usage, there has emerged not merely a difference in terminology but a significant conceptual advance beyond his demarcation in terms of convenient, easily recognizable traits of successive stages in what he seems to have regarded as a preordained path of progress leading upward to civilization. The more recent view is one that, instead, focuses attention on the disjunctive processes of transformation connecting one qualitatively distinctive level of sociocultural complexity with another. In fact, for purposes of systematically comparing the seemingly parallel and largely independent processes of growth leading to the formation of early urbanized polities or states, the concept of major, successive organizational levels now seems perhaps the single most indispensible one. Such levels may be regarded as broadly integrative patterns whose basic functional relationships tend to remain fixed (or, at least, tend to occur in fixed sequences), while their formal, superficial features vary widely from example to example. Given the much greater variability in the occurrence of individual features associated with the Urban Revolution than Morgan was aware of, including even such seemingly basic attributes as the degree of urbanism in settlement patterns and the invention of writing, the employment of the concept of levels permits us still to proceed beyond the acknowledgement of diversity to the recognition of genuine evolutionary parallels.

This I take it foreshadows the theme of his book, in contradistinction to his predecessor’s almost religiously-inspired teleology (as I read his characterization of it). The first chapter is titled “The Problem and the Evidence,” which already warms my heart in its favor. Subsequent ones are “Subsistence and Settlement,” “Kin and Class,” “Parish and Polity,” and “Conclusion.” Something poetic there—and I am intrigued—but when it comes to “Kin and Class” it is easy to feel I’ve done my fill of that sort of anthropological reading. I’m not intent on pursuing the McC. Adams, but little resonances reverberate back to the Lewis, if just in the repetition of choice vocabulary words:

The Han criticism of Qin as a creature of savage custom and of Qin law as an expression of barbaric local practices reached its apogee with the first great Han critic of Qin, Jia Yi, who wrote under Emperor Wen. His most celebrated discussion of Qin, “The Discursive Judgment Censuring Qin,” connected Qin’s terrain, its customs, and its rulers to one another and to its ultimate downfall.

To give Lewis full context would require summary of his entire text to that point, which is not to my purpose. Later he writes that the “increasingly clear divide between states seems to have reached a crescendo in the decades immediately prior to unification.” Without going into detail, or concerning myself here with nature of evidence to which he alludes, I find Lewis making an anti-teleological critique of his own: “This evidence, though admittedly sparse, challenges the claims of modern scholars in China that unification was a natural and inevitable result of increasing trade and cultural exchange among the Warring States. To the contrary...”

But—because I can scarcely grasp the full import of Lewis’s argument—let me not say that I accept or refute his conclusions. I hardly know whereof I read.

Onward into Qin and Han; or Maybe Not

3/24/2015

Due to one thing and another, I've had a slowdown with Qin and Han. I expect to continue, but have only one chapter under my belt. The narrative is not so straightforward, say as Politics in the Age of Caesar, weaving in and out of both Qin and Han and ending already at Red Cliff. The organization apparently is thematic (but I've not glanced ahead). Then too I am handicapped by a severe shortage of background knowledge, when it is presumed the reader knows certain things. (In reading about Rome I have already acquired some of that background.) Also, as you would expect, I am hampered by my detestation of the pinyin. My geographical knowledge is not great and I see no equivalent of a Shepherd's Atlas for China—sometimes it is hard to place exactly where Lewis is describing.

One learns by accretion, and these difficulties ought not prove insurmountable. Mark Edward Lewis—whatever his organizational principle—has a lot to place in his compass. After his overview, possibly I will be inspired to delve more deeply into specific topics. As I have mentioned, I regret the unavailability (to me) of Eastern Zhou translated by K.C. Chang. It would have covered some of the presumed background.

In the meantime, I have let myself become easily distracted, reading several of the essays in Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma. He too is an engaging writer, but the title is somewhat misleading—the pieces are not particularly about theater, or even cruelty for that matter, but more loosely "man's inhumanity to man" in a historical context, and a recent one at that. So you find something about Anne Frank's legacy; or living in Paris under the German occupation. Later on I note there's a piece about David Bowie.

I'm not so interested to read it all; and the matter seems so sporadic and haphazard that I take it to be an assemblage of various recent reviews, say in The New York Review of Books (just a guess).

Eastern Zhou has only gone up in price from the online vendors since I first looked at it: nearly $100 is being asked. At this point I am skipping ahead and hoping that the pieces will all fall into place. In the meantime, I've laid my hands on The Evolution of Urban Society because Chang mentioned it in a his closing summation. Something I will glance at not feeling an obligation to read: the comparison of Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico.

As I've stated previously, especially when it comes to certain subjects as archeology or anthropology, I don't mind having my information a little bit outdated: if it may have been superceded, I hope that the older text might be clearer to me than newer writing (reflective of newer interests) might be.

I've had Mumford on the city sitting on my shelf for a long time: a famous book by one of my favorite authors. But it felt like I had reached my saturation point a while back; and in some cases, as with Mark Edwards Lewis on Qin and Han, sometimes I do want a text that reflects recent scholarship.

Why Is This World So Hard to Bear?

3/23/2015

Why is this world so hard to bear?
Why is this human nature of my kind
Repellant in extreme?
I see what men desire, for what they dream,
Work, toil, and cheat, above all everywhere
To justice and to virtue wholly blind.

Why do the young men flail, and fall?
Why do the old give up their souls so early?
Why even more are women
Inherently or taught, mostly inhuman,
Treating their men worth not a mote at all?
(I have some past remembrance I see clearly.)

Why do the mass of men, without
Concern for any but their meager profit
All laws of decency
Utterly disregard, make nullity,
And them that do adhere to reason flout?
One rides his high horse and will not come off it.

Lord, men are taxed and bled; in debt
None find relief by even their own labors.
The overseers make sure
That men accomplish all they may endure
Being discarded wrung of their last sweat,
Each man’s small gains being coveted by neighbors.

Tonight I long for rest, as said
The poet in his verse—whom I admire
But cannot emulate,
Because for me the evening has grown late
As dusk appears, and soon I will be dead,
Vanquished all objects of my least desire.

<<Previous