Editor’s Entries: Martinis and a Villa in Capri • Samson and Delilah • The Lion of Judah: King Saul • Last of the Hebrews: Jeremiah • I shall not be forgotten: Sappho of Lesbos • The Cosmopolitan: Euripides (by Theodor Mommsen) • The Characters (by Theophrastus) • The Making of Judaism • Not to all People but onto Chosen Witnesses • Only the Naughty Bits: Petronius • Tell them the Great Pan is Dead: Plutarch • Hoax or History? The Annals of Tacitus • The Wizard’s Niece • Dispensation of the One: Plotinus • Homoousion, Homoiousion, or Houyhnhnms? Arius and Nicene • Keeping the Faith: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his Time • Indian Summer: the 5th Century • The Worm in Eve's Apple: Sex and Christianity • The Innovation of Childhood • The Ape that Talks • Memory is like Writing on Water • Bondage of Common Sense: Martin Luther • The Magnificent People: the Inca Empire • Let there be Light: Michel de Montaigne • Was he for real? Descartes • My Great-Great-Great Grandmother’s Letter • A hot Chestnut in the open Fly: Laurence Sterne • All in the Mind: Immanuel Kant • The Manufacture of Ideas as we speak (by Heinrich von Kleist) • From the Memoirs of Mr. Schnabelewopski, Esq. (by Heinrich Heine) • My Kind of Saint: Antonin Chekhov • A Catholic Upbringing: James Joyce • The Shame: Franz Kafka • A Sellout with Conviction: Gottfried Benn • The Unknown Russian: Vladimir Sirin • At the Pictures • The Terminus • About Me • Books I enjoy • Brief Notes on English and American Style (by Raymond Chandler) • How to stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (by Douglas Adams) • Elements of Style (by William Strunk) • If E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? • Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada? • A Case of Game Theory: the Origin of Morals • The Simple Art of Murder (by Raymond Chandler) • A Directory to Afterlife

Coming soon: An Untidy Schedule • The Book Adrian • Farewell to Venus

Our Journal

Current Entries:

It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with.

Raymond Chandler

To Dawn

This journal is recording the news of our community, giving members a voice and let the editor and proprietor – me – occasionally come out with a column. (Right now there are only my own articles – as the Chinese say: “A man past his forties is the proverbial rogue,” a wise old bird full of stories, profanities and bawdy anecdotes – but this is going to change. Not the anecdotes but me the only one telling them.)

Enjoy!

michael sympson

© – September 2010 – all rights reserved

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			Last of the Hebrews – Jeremiah: He was an intellectual of his period and I see him as a kindred spirit; he's also the best-documented personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and Egypt falling in sync for the same period of his activity. Here is a genuine voice speaking to us.
			I shall not be forgotten – Sappho of Lesbos: Prophets and “saviors” come a dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus, if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.
			Only the Naughty Bits – Petronius Arbiter: Most fragments have been handed down to us in the form of private excerpts. Since it is an unashamedly lewd book, our copyists must have been a bunch of schoolboys who selected only the juicy bits for a good wank in the dormitory.
			Tell them the Great Pan is Dead – Plutarch: “In this man from Chaeronea the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenized has found its finest expression. To live such a life in Smyrna or in Antioch was impossible; it belonged to the soil of Greece like the honey of Hymettus” (Theodor Mommsen).
			Let there be Light – Michel de Montaigne: “We did not see even one beautiful woman.” Montaigne wasn’t exaggerating. His was the period of Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer and the incomparable Hans Holbein – exceptional artists who had eyes to see and the training to accurately reproduce their vision. Yet none of their erotic paintings is even remotely stimulating.
			Was he for Real? Descartes: Descartes wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.
			A hot Chestnut in the open Fly – Laurence Sterne: Laurence Sterne had his appointment with destiny rather late. At the age of forty-nine, he offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew better than to risk his money on this nonsense. So Sterne paid for the costs of printing and published himself. Publishers know nothing.
			My Kind of Saint – Antonin Chekhov: Many of his critics liked to denounce him as a provincial dullard, somehow granted a magnificent writing talent, but too shallow ever to write anything of importance. Only after his death the great Tolstoy gave Chekhov the seal of approval: "With no false modesty, Chekhov is technically far superior to me."
			The Shame – Franz Kafka: Visitors having coffee with his parents saw the boy sit in a corner, chew on his pen and write. Somebody asked: “What is he writing?” An uncle took away the notebook from under the boy’s hand and looked. “Oh nothing. The usual stuff” (Diaries 1/19/1911).
			A Catholic Upbringing – James Joyce: Joyce was saddled with debts, he had no income, his wife was pregnant, his eyesight was failing him, nobody showed any interest in his first novel. In a desperate moment Joyce threw the manuscript into the fireside. His sister Eileen rescued parts of it from the flames. Joyce re-edited the remainders and with the help of Ezra Pound.
			The Unknown Russian – Vladimir Sirin: Some authors even give classes on the critical appreciation of good fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures in Cornell are readily accessible in print. Then, how is it, that Nabokov, and so many other authors, are purblind when it comes to the correct appreciation of their own work?

(2) I Beg to Differ

			The Lion of Judah – King Saul: Resentments are the forge of nation building. All it takes is a William of Orange or a George Washington and a new nation is born out of the resentment against the Spanish Inquisition or taxation without representation. King Saul was the George Washington of the Hebrews when the tribes began resenting the yoke of the Philistines.
			Not to All People but onto Chosen Witnesses: "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, yea, and his own life, he cannot be my companion.” A statement worthy of a mujahid with Semtex strapped to his chest!
			Hoax or History? The Annals of Tacitus: “For the longest time, words have ceased to mean what they say. Squandering the goods of others is called generosity, and recklessness in wrongdoing is called courage” (Cato the Younger 62 BC).
			Homoousion, Homoiousion, or Houyhnhnms? Arius and Nicene: Sabellianism was probably the first unequivocal enunciation of consubstantiality for the Christ and the Father. But there was a dilemma. If the Christ and the Father were of identical substance then God the Father must have suffered at the crucifixion just as badly as his son.
			Bondage of Common Sense – Martin Luther: Jesus himself had said that the "very hairs of your head are all numbered" and "many are called but few the chosen;" yet the zeal with which Luther carried the attack against Erasmus, was all his own.
			The Worm in Eve's Apple – Sex and Christianity: What has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the Kama Sutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,” women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.
			A Sellout with Conviction – Gottfried Benn: What has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the Kama Sutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,” women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.

(3) About Me

			My Great-Great-Great Grandmother’s Letter: The letter is a genuine document. She was in her teens when she lost everything, home, family and country, when Catholic France persecuted the Huguenots. In the end it was an even greater loss for the country she left behind.
			At the Pictures: My grandmother was a very down to earth person. Ultimately I owe my own existence to her conceited ways. Yet all this survival skill had not prepared her for the encounter with the weird and wonderful.
			The Terminus: Before her husband – my grandfather – was rushed to the phoney shower rooms in Auschwitz, the guards urged him to undress. He was told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that later he would find it again.
			About Me: A reader of mine was kind enough to offer actually laying money on the table if I would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will expand very much beyond this little sketch.
			Books I Enjoy Reading: Limited shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.

(4) Weird and Wonderful

			Dry Martinis and a Villa in Capri: “Love itself,” says William Butler Yeats, “would be barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape in her poetry before,” and this, I think, is true. All fiction is escapist – no, I retract that – all good fiction is escapist and embarks on a “dream, and again follows the dream – and so – ewig – usque ad finem..." (Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim).
			The Dispensation of the One – Plotinus: “The Universe is organized, effective, complex, lavish, but it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon the world, its vastness and beauty and think of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and plant, let us ascend to its archetype, to the exuberance of the One” (Plotinus).
			The Wizard and his Niece: I rather pull crumbs from the hairy chest of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,” she said.  She looked in the mirror, tilting her head to inspect the hair. She decided to color it. “Red,” she said, “it should be red.”
			The Magnificent People – the Inca Empire: The dominium of Pachacuti was a late arrival in South America, almost as late as the Spanish. The remaining quipus – strings and knots to aid the memory of a messenger – give us the time – four knots on a scarlet thread, indicating the fourth year of the ruler – and the number of subdued regions: ten small knots on a grey string.
			Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada? Instead of a linear progression, Professor Hawking proposes a permanent one-off, something beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. Hawking doesn’t mean to say that expansion and contraction occur in a cycle of infinite repetitions, but that the whole process is laid out and suspended in a timeless hyper-dimension of simultaneous occurrences.
			If E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? Personally I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? Is there an insurmountable barrier? And even if there isn’t and he is capable, why should he be interested?
			A Directory to the Afterlife: I had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of prolonged infirmity, “and why should anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up with a surprise.

(5) How We Became what We are

			Samson and Delilah: At some point women discovered agriculture. In the longhouses the women were in charge of distribution and storage. A new social model emerged. It meant organized labor and supervision in ways unthinkable for the free wheeling trapper of our hunter and gatherer past.
			The Making of Jewdaism: In 63 BC a delegation of two hundred Pharisees paraded through the streets of Rome towards Capitol Hill where one of the Senators was already waiting to submit their petition to the House. To the amazement of the Roman politicians these funny people asked a foreign power to intervene in a domestic dispute. It was the beginning of modern Judaism.
			Keeping the Faith: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his Time: The Christian ayatollahs began rolling out the shroud over culture and education. It took almost a millennium before the dissent of courageous functionaries brought changes from within. The legacy of Symmachus and his compatriots, served as a kind of cultural time capsule.
			Indian Summer – the 5th Century: Theodora spent one half of the day on her beauty sleep and the other half masturbating behind a veiled window to the torture chambers in the dungeons. A regular to the brothels would recognize Theodora’s type: quick-witted and sarcastic, with a short attention span.
			The Innovation of Childhood: We take for granted a sheltered, spoiled rotten period of prolonged "innocence" and supervision, and call it “childhood.” Yet this is a rather recent innovation. In medieval society and the Renaissance this was a foreign notion even for the high and mighty.
			Memory is the Writing on the Water: For most people it was not the letter that was holding together their recollections and ideas. It was the rhythm, a striking figure of speech, a hypnotic rhyme. The scanning of words became a science. For a long time this was the only available custodian for the accuracy of our traditions.
			All in the Mind – Immanuel Kant: Kant realized that the input from our senses must be going through some form of procedure, or it would be just noise, "less than a dream and nothing to us,” because “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (Immanuel Kant).
			The Ape that Talks: As Terence W. Deakon has put it: "Languages must go through the filter of children's reduced associative learning and short term memory constraints in order to be passed on effectively from one generation to the next with any degree of fidelity." (The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain).
			A Case of Game Theory – the Origin of our Morals: Given the seemingly irrational character of some of our taboos, does our morality not defy such explanation? It is all good and well to ascribe to a code of high-minded ethics – the morals we believe we should observe – but that’s not the morals we actually do observe. So what is really at the core of our moral makeup?

Coming Soon:

An Untidy Schedule • The Book Adrian • Farewell to Venus

At present I am writing at my novels. Of the finished copy I shall put up a taster. If you like what you read you make the payment and download the password protected PDF from the page that appears after confirmation. I send you the password, and you read to your heart’s content.

Live well and be happy.

michael sympson