Just the book to give to your sister (Ten Years Ago Today)

Recommendations for Flann O’Brien’s first novel

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 16, 2007, with links and image of book cover added today.]

“A real writer, with the true comic spirit.” –James Joyce

Why is there something rather than nothing?

The question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, has long haunted me, as it has haunted many if not most people. Could the answer be quite simply that the eternal truths of logic, whose nonexistence is impossible, require "something" to exist for them to be about, and "something's" existence as inexorably requires that it inter-react and reform itself, even becoming, over the course of millions and billions of years, creatures capable of being haunted by such questions?
    I'm reminded of my favorite short poem, by Howard Nemerov:

The world's just mad enough to have been made
By the being whose beings into being prayed.

Whether it's relevant or not, it nevertheless evokes a similar feeling in me. Awe at the weirdness of things. The mystery of being.
    Could the story by which to exult, to dance, be written as paeans to the mystery, like some weird novel by Flann O'Brien—say, The Third Policeman, which was written between 1939 and 1940 and published posthumously. In the book's frontispiece, O'Brien "quotes" his fictional philosopher De Selby:

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

As a teenage philosopher, I found The Gospel of John more appealing than the other Gospels. The very first verse of John suggests that existence derived from those eternal logical truths: "In the beginning was the Word...." As Wikipedia says, "The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos), and further identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos." While most of the Jesus myth simply borrows from the various pagan and other religious mythologies of the period [something I didn't realize as a teenager], logos is borrowed from Greek philosophy. Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) used the term for the principle of order and knowledge in the universe.

Just the book to give to your sister

Recommendations for Flann O'Brien's first novel

"A real writer, with the true comic spirit." – James Joyce

"If I were cultural dictator in England I would make At Swim-Two-Birds compulsory reading in all universities." – Philip Toynbee

"At Swim-Two-Birds and The Poor Mouth are both marvels of imagination, language, and humor." – Niall Montgomery, The New Republic

"At Swim-Two-Birds is just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl." – Dylan Thomas

A colder eye

Hugh Kenner is perhaps my favorite literary critic, and his book A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers is perhaps my favorite of his works. I was reminded of the phrase "a colder eye" this morning, as I quoted the following couplet from W.H. Auden:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That for all they care, I can go to hell.
                – "The More Loving One"

This couplet reminded me of perhaps my favorite of all limericks, also written by Auden:

As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
      The rolling-in-money,
      The screamingly funny,
And those who are very well hung.
                – "The Aesthetic Point of View"

And taking these two small verses together, I realized that Auden had as cold an eye as anyone...and I myself seem to have a colder eye. I'm skeptical, even at times sardonic (scornful, mocking, cynical—my standard attitude toward all things Bushevik; of course, when it comes to our "president," a lot of us are sardonic).

Maybe I really do have a colder eye, and that's why I'm so drawn to James Joyce and Flann O'Brien and W.B. Yeats? (Yeats's tombstone enjoins us:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!)

I've made a note now to re-read A Colder Eye.

Cinematic exhilaration

You know that feeling you get upon reading a great novel or watching a great film? I know the feeling well, because I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies and try to catch the good ones. Movies like the following (listed most recent first) just exhilarate me: "The Human Stain," "Breach," "For Your Consideration," "Déjà Vu," "Blood Diamond," "Hollywoodland," "Infamous," "The Last King of Scotland," "The Good Shepherd," "Keeping Mum," "Running with Scissors," "The World's Fastest Indian," and "The Devil Wears Prada." I just tingle and come alive while watching movies like these. I clap my hands, fidget, make side remarks (thank God that my wife tolerates this and also shares my taste in movies).

But when we see two movies in a row of the caliber I'm talking about, wow! We actually saw "Breach" and "The Human Stain" back-to-back, and over the past two days we've had this glorious experience again. The first movie was the taut, dramatic, perfectly plotted, utterly gripping tale, "Notes on a Scandal," directed by Richard Eyre and starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. I was struck by the remark of Zoe Heller, the author of the book on which the movie was based, that she deliberately concocted a "bait and switch" with the sophisticated narrative device of employing an apparently reliable narrator who later proves to be unreliable....

The second was a brilliant twist on the fictional device of having characters literally take on a life of their own and become unruly, which was exploited so well in novels by Flann O'Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939—James Joyce read it and said he was delighted) and Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, 1979). The movie is "Stranger Than Fiction," directed by Marc Forster and starring Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, and Queen Latifa, with Tom Hulce (who played Mozart in "Amadeus") in a delicious small part.

Put these films on your see list!