New Book Currently Reading: On Evil by Terry Eagleton

I anticipate posting quite a few entries on the book On Evil, by Terry Eagleton, as this slim volume is incredibly dense with ideas and assorted philosophical musings!

Right now, I'm just in the Introduction and I've already marked up my book as I dialogue with Eagleton's ideas.

He asks the question, "What is evil?" By using a case study of a couple of ten year olds who brutally murdered a toddler, Eagleton asks that if such "evil" is truly within those ten year olds then these boys should be pitied because they have no free will to self determine. Yet if these boys assumed an evil identity, thereby consciously choosing to enact evil, the boys are indeed horrific--which tends to be at odds with societal perceptions of childhood and children. Nevertheless, the idea that "reason and freedom are bound closely together" (7) remains. If the boys' actions are "rationally explicable" vís-a-vìs inherent evil, then they are not responsible for them. If, on the other hand, the boys chose their act (killing the toddler) because of bad upbringing, poverty, abuse, etc, then the boys should be treated more leniently.

But is it really this simple (and binaristic)? Eagleton doesn't seem to think so.

He brings up Immanuel Kant's idea that we are all responsible for our own actions and, funnily enough, compares this idea with conservative ideology. However, Eagleton points out the simplicity of such an idea by arguing, in order to be ultimately responsible for our own actions, we must be completely and wholly autonomous ("literally: 'a law unto themselves'" 11) in order to avoid not being influenced by our surroundings, events, upbringing, etc. Thus, an abused spouse who finally turns against her/his abusive partner has not been affected by the abuse s/he underwent. And will, thus, be "as guilty as Goebbels" (11).

So far, his book is quite fascinating and as I continue reading it I'll post my thoughts and reflections here.

Raymond Pollack's The Devil All the Time

Wow. Brutal and raw, this book is an examination of the ugliest part of humanity. Characters are depraved and Pollock's matter-of-fact tone makes them downright scary. The writing's tight and spare, with no unnecessary words or phrases. Brilliant.

Books: Life's Necessity

I was checking my Twitter feed during another pang of insomnia and came across some sad, sad information.

There's a high school in our nation's capital whose library is woefully lacking in books. This high school library has ONLY 63 literary-quality books and 77 science books. That's 140 books, people! I have more books than that in my bedroom alone!

Can you imagine a HS that has only 63 literature books in its library? Yeah, me neither. I mean, it's really difficult for me to wrap my brain around because books have always been a major part of my life, ever since I learned how to read at the tender age of six. So, if you've got books lying around, consider donating them to Ballou High School. I know I am.

Let's give these kids new experiences and new perspectives that only books can offer. And let's prove to them that strangers do indeed care about them.

Click here for more info: http://bit.ly/odBNH9

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David Hall's Without: Poems

Without: Poems by Donald Hall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Brilliant. Evocative. Powerful.



View all my reviews

Gen. Lucio Blanco

Gen. Lucio Blanco

Gen. Lucio Blanco is my father's uncle, brother to my dad's mother, and a Mexican Revolutionary. In fact, he was the first to begin distributing land to the peasants, a feat that got him assassinated in Matamoros. Now he's the stuff of PhD dissertations. And he's found a new home in the Library of Congress.

Beyond that, I know nothing. No letters, no pictures, no kind of material goods that link Blanco directly to my father, to me, other than the last name and family stories. I've seen the pictures and letters, though, but they don't belong to our side of the Blanco-Cerdas. They belong to my father's sister, a woman with whom I'm not close. I don't even know if she's still living to tell the truth.

Why do I find myself needing to learn more about my family? I've got family stories, stories told to me by both my parents, but as to hard facts, that's something else. Now I need to search more into my family's narrative... I think it's because I grew up with narrative and myth and because I was generally reared by a man who flew by the seat of his pants, choosing to live in the now, that we didn't have those tangible connections of letters, diaries, pictures, or old pieces of clothing in our family's hold. I think it's because my father always emphasized the now and my mother, well, I don't know much about her relationship to her past. It's as if the past was full of secrets, not necessarily painful secrets, just irrelevant secrets that could possibly get in the way of the children's assimilation and movement up the American hierarchy. I don't know. But I now find myself wanting to learn more about these facts that have created my now.

I find myself wanting to get more engrossed in personal history. So much so that I'm planning to join the Association of Personal Historians. I find myself needing to surround myself with history, narrative, and people's stories.

I find myself turning to dusty books, lost within libraries and meaningful to those who seek the larger truths in story.

Perplexity of Reading

A friend of mine at work is a poet, a rather gifted poet actually. She’s started a blog on writing poetry, and I am so glad she has. I find myself beginning to write poetry again! What I like about poetry is its succinctness, at least the poems I’ve been reading and writing of late. I don’t know why that is, but I’m having a very hard time sustaining the act of reading. The last full book I read was Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading--rather ironic! That doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. I have. But I’m reading bits and pieces here and there, like flotsam and jetsam of words almost. I’ve got three books going on: a biography of Abigail Adams, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and a collection of vampire stories written by women. But the books I keep turning to to read are poetry books, be they textbooks like the Norton Anthology or Donald Hall’s collection of poems, Without, that I picked up at a local Half Price Bookstore the other day.

I find my mind wandering as I read--even when I read student papers. (But that’s another story.) Anything that has long(ish) text, I lost interest in swiftly. Sometimes embarrassingly so.

So I think that poetry’s speaking to me more urgently now and I think my inability (unwillingness?) to read longer texts is fueling my renewed desire to write poetry. I’ve always loved reading poetry, not so much teaching it, but I do love reading and talking about it. I think because poetry is a personal experience, a personal journey, for me. And when I teach it, the personal is lost. Or it’s just too intimate and I don’t want to share it with students. So I stay on the topical level, the “this is a metaphor--look how it speaks to us!” level.

Poetry packs a wallop of a punch--it has to. And right now I want that. Need that. I don’t want to spend time (or energy) untangling the lines of thought in a story much less a larger text like a book. So I read poetry where each poem is itself a tiny contained universe of meaning. I have no problem diving into a poem, no matter its complexity, and untangling its various subtleties and connections. In fact, I relish that act. I love being awed by a poet’s turn of phrase or startling image. But when I read fiction or essays, I find myself losing interest. Or I challenge the writer with thoughts like “it would’ve been stronger if you added an image here” or “couldn’t you have omitted these unnecessary and flabby words?”

So I find myself reading a lot of poetry and I find myself writing poetry--badly, but I write poetry nonetheless. And I’ve started to have a teenytiny germ of an idea take root. What if I work on my own chapbook? And then what if I work on a collection of poems?

Who knows?

Wordling Ozymandias

I like to play around at Wordle.net. It's pretty fun to see words arranged according to how many times they've been mentioned in a given text. The more frequent the mentions, the larger the word appears. I've created a Wordle image of one of my favorite poems, "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.