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Welcome to Ruminations! A writing exercise combining various present hobbies (cigars and rum) along side that which keeps me intellectually exercised, philosophy. Somewhere on your screen is a MENU. The menu consists of categories and articles under them. You can use these to navigate to articles of interest. In the interest of convenience however, I present here a list of the categories as links you can use. If you click on a link you will see all the articles under that category. They are always arranged in reverse date order (latest on top). Some articles are multi-part. If you see a “part II” scroll a bit further down to find the part I.

Nov 14, 2024, A special essay, “A.I. Can Have My Stuff!” where I discuss the latest bugaboo over on X and everywhere else, is about using posts and other content to train A.I. Everyone seems to be up in arms about this. In the linked essay above, I argue that it is much ado about little, and Elon Musk’s new user agreement is only formalizing what has been going on throughout the social media landscape for years.

Also, in November 2024, a policy change: I will no longer review non-fiction on Amazon. I am tired of their censorship. I will continue to post reviews of interesting books here, but the format will change. First, I added a new category, “Tiny Reviews,” for book reviews I would typically have written for Amazon but not added to the blog. Nature’s Mutiny, a history of Europe in the “Little Ice Age”, is the first entry in this new category. There may not be much that ends up here. I used to put up three reviews on Amazon for every one extended here. If I put all these reviews here, there will be many of them. I’m still thinking about this. I will continue adding books to the regular review section with extra comments directly integrated. Here is a link to a little more information on the problem.

A note about advertising. Ruminations is not a free WordPress account. I let WordPress layer ads into my blog posts, hoping some income would offset the cost of this account. After a year, I have received $0, so obviously, there is no point to this besides cluttering the reader’s experience. The advertising is gone.

There are three marketing-rich subjects discussed here. Rum and cigars, I suppose, cannot be advertised even to adults. Stupid, but that’s the way our politically correct society happens to be. However, the philosophy and book reviews area is ripe for advertising. I link to dozens and dozens of books (all via Amazon). Why aren’t booksellers, especially of philosophy and science, selling to my readers? This does not require any sophisticated user tracking. Anyone who clicks on a philosophy blog page is interested in philosophy! Be that as it may, you, reader, win!! No more ads!

Categories:

Philosophy: Mostly metaphysics and epistemology in the English analytic tradition. The starting point is presently fleshed out in my books (the non-fiction, presently 3 in number) described in my books.

As of May 2017 a new subcategory is my book reviews published on Amazon. I’ve reviewed many books for Amazon. These posts are the text of the reviews themselves, not Amazon links. However, each review has a link to the book on Amazon. The books posted here are those that, in my opinion, warranted additional philosophical commentary. This commentary is posted at the head of the article. The book reviews themselves always follow. See above note (November 2024) for policy change.

At the end of 2019, there are as many book reviews as philosophy essays. In December 2018, another new category under Philosophy: Philosophy Guest Posts.

January 2026, another new category, reviews of fictional (novels) works. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately, mostly old books whose authors have long since passed away. I didn’t used to review these (dead authors do not appreciate reviews) but I will begin even if I can add little to the critical cannon surrounding these books. First up, a double review of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, followed by a review of Henry Fielding’s parody, Shamela!

Lastly, I have become a novelist! As of 2025, four novels are described in “My Fiction.”

Cigar Reviews: One of my present hobbies (I have had many). Many reviews here mainly focused on affordable cigars (under $10). A surprising number of very excellent cigars are in the single-digit price range. Note: I haven’t written new cigar reviews since 2020. Like everything else, cigars have become much more expensive. I might comment more on this at another time.

General Cigar Articles: About cigars and associated products. Covers “care and feeding” of a cigar collection.

Rum Reviews: A hobby enhancing my enjoyment of cigars. Many reviews. Like cigars, there are no new posts (2020) here. I’ve been focusing on other things.

Bourbon Reviews: A couple of reviews here.

some pairing options — A few non-rum related pairing options. Some of these I haven’t touched in years.

General Spirit Articles: Pairing drink with cigars.

Hope you enjoy. I continue to add to the blog in all categories. Hope you will like and/or comment.

January 25, 2017 (original date of this post)

Oil Companies are not Responsible for Climate Change

Oil companies are not responsible for climate change!

Oil companies have become the scapegoats for rage against onrushing climate disasters. The combustion products of hydrocarbon energy are largely responsible for climate change, and oil companies have lied about the effect of their product on the climate for as long as there have been oil companies.

Why do I say “lied?” Earth scientists understood the physics of carbon warming as early as the mid-19th century. They also knew that the planet’s ecosystem absorbed atmospheric carbon by several pathways. What they didn’t know was the tipping point, the point where the CO2 generated exceeds the capacity of the sinks.

Humans have been putting carbon into the atmosphere since they learned to control fire. At first, it was only a little. There weren’t many humans after all. In those days, human-generated carbon—most from burning wood—was likely a small fraction of the carbon produced by volcanoes and lightning-triggered forest fires.

A few thousand years ago, humans discovered coal. Used for heating and cooking by an expanding population, carbon emissions jumped. Coal was the energy source that powered metallurgy and produced steam for the Industrial Revolution, while also heating homes and cooking meals. Another jump in carbon output. Some people noticed. In the 18th, and 19th centuries, London was infamous for its coal-caused “killer fogs.”

Coal producers did not have to lie about the climate implications of their product. Not until the mid eighteenth century did anyone even suspect such a connection, and not until the mid 19th did earth science have experimental confirmation. Nor did coal producers have to “push” their product. People adopted coal because it was better than wood for all uses, old and new, developed as the centuries marched on. Coal is more “energy dense” than wood, a superior energy source—when it could be obtained—for most uses.

By the time oil came along, earth science was well aware of the causal link between carbon and atmospheric warming. Suppose the oil companies didn’t lie about it? Suppose their executives, all saints, began to preach the danger of too much atmospheric carbon (remember, they didn’t know how much was too much) in 1910? Do you suppose there would have been, between then and now, a significant moderation in the exploding development of technology energized by oil?

Would the German admiralty have forgone the production of submarines (the first modern ships designed around oil), the British abandon tank production, and everyone eschew airplanes? Would the industrial nations of the world have attended to oil company warnings and artificially limited growth in carbon-linked energy until research had cleared up the “limits” issue decades in the future? Humans shifted away from wood because coal is more energy-dense. Coal energy supported larger populations and, therefore, expanded military and economic power. Oil, when it came along, triggered and sustained a further expansion of energy-intensive technological innovation, all having military implications. Would it ever have been politically possible to restrict the expansion of an oil economy?

What could oil producers have said without lying? They might have honestly said: “We don’t know how much is too much, but given an expansion of carbon-based energy from 1910 onwards, we must eventually reach those limits.” Unfortunately, for various technical reasons, even the most pessimistic earth scientists could only guess at the limits until we began to breach them. Only by observing a failure here and there could we become aware of the real limits. The first breaches likely occurred in the early 1950s. Scientists didn’t begin to notice them until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the limits became quantifiable. We are still refining the numbers today.

In the second half of the 20th Century, the world’s much-expanded population and virtually all of its technology and economy were dependent, directly or indirectly, on oil. The first international agreements aimed at reducing the use of carbon-based energy were signed in the 1990s. By 2015, the combined nations of the world were, every year, pumping twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as they were when those first agreements were struck—see reference to the Wallace-Wells book below.

There were “climate scientists” in the first half of the twentieth century, and also “climate change deniers” who were not oil executives. These people are still with us today. Others accepted the science, but the excuse was always “we do not know how much is too much.” If oil companies hadn’t lied? There would, I think, have been more and better-funded early research. We might have begun quantifying “too much” in the 1950s rather than in the 1980s. But by 1950, the world was already addicted to oil.

By the 1950s, there had been two carbon-intensive world wars. International air travel was an established industry, and America—at least—was addicted to cars. In those days, there were no “clean” alternatives (and we can argue about how clean the present alternatives really are). By 1950, it was already economically untenable and politically suicidal to attempt to minimize, let alone abandon, carbon. Had we, in the 1950s and 60s, invested more in solar and wind technology, we might, by the 1990s, have developed renewable, efficient energy and transport technologies at scale. But the same carbon-intensive mining and material processing required to produce the technological inputs for those products would still be necessary, and no military on earth would have abandoned faster fighters, bigger bombers, more powerful tanks, and so on. None of that would have changed.

The economic and social forces driving the doubling of annual atmospheric carbon emissions in 2015—twenty years after the first international agreements to limit them—were equally present in 1975! There might have been some moderation in the growth of atmospheric carbon emissions if we had understood the Earth’s limits thirty years earlier than we did. Still, by that time it was already too late—economically and politically—to do more than produce a small alteration of the present trajectory.

Oil companies lied about atmospheric carbon to protect their markets. But they didn’t need to lie. The energy density of oil, coupled with the coal-based technological explosion that began in the 19th century, ensured oil’s ready adoption over coal (which took over from wood without any lies by the coal industry). Even if oil companies publicly acknowledged the science already known in their earliest days, it wouldn’t have made much difference to the world’s present addiction to oil. Almost literally everything in our lives, everything we own, or use, in every culture, rests on oil in some part of its lifecycle. The oil companies are not responsible for climate change. We, ourselves, our governments, our culture and economy are responsible. It has been us all along.

References: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells (2018)

The Geography of Risk by Gilbert Gaul (2019)

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan (2022)

Book Review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A link to this edition’s real source. Please support her site: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, 1928

Not a novel, but a long essay about women authors, notably novelists, and their historical restrictions. The bottom line is straightforward. Writing takes time. It requires some place, some space, to write in (Jane Austin having the exceptional ability to write in a room often crowded with activity), and also the means (money from one source or another) to sustain oneself while engaged in the process. Historically, Woolf notes, women have had none of these things.

Woolf begins by illustrating the restrictions placed on women’s time and space. While visiting Oxford, she was not allowed into the libraries without a male escort or a letter of recommendation. Late in her essay, she mentions Sappho (a Roman erotic poetess of Lesbos whose work is known today only in fragments) and Shikibu Murasaki, a member of the Japanese Royal Court credited with the world’s first “true novel” (Tale of Genji) in 1050 C.E. We don’t know much about Sappho, but Murasaki’s royal status allowed her the time and space to write an absurdly long novel. But Woolf begins by exploring a few examples of 18th-century female poetry suffused with bitterness about women’s place in the world.

Moving up, Woolf notes that the 19th century’s four great female novelists, Austin, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, were all childless. Child-rearing, especially when one has more than a couple of them, takes a lot of time unless there is wealth to afford nannies; even then, household management is left mostly to the woman. Why, Woolf asks, did women writers gravitate to novels? Novels were, she surmises, the new form, drama and poetry—including epic poetry—having been worked over by men for a few thousand years, while nonfiction demanded scholarship from which most women were excluded (as in Woolf’s chapter one Oxford story).

Lastly, already in the 20th century’s first quarter, women wrote everything: fiction, nonfiction, stories, drama, and poetry, made possible by fairer property laws, the right to vote, and the ability to work in traditionally male occupations. She wonders whether these changes, while lifting women from the status of chattel, wouldn’t end up thrusting her into a pitiless competition with men across all professional and social spheres? Much of her speculation has come to pass, but Woolf would at least applaud what women writers have achieved. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in each year, there are more published female than male novelists!

A long and delightful literary essay (would Woolf write anything less?) whose lesson can be summarized in two sentences: Writing takes time and requires some space in which to focus. Not until the 20th century did women, beyond a rare few, gain that time and space.

Book Review: Foreign Agent by Matthew Rapaport (2021)

The short version by Wehttam Tropapar

Matthew’s first, rough, and unpolished novel nevertheless delivers all the salacious thrills for which Matthew’s work is known. In addition, this novel, melded into all the pure fiction, contains several “true stories,” however much disguised. The pacing is rapid, slowing only for the sex and, in the novel’s early stage, for descriptions of the narrator’s geopolitical work. The story is utterly implausible. The Chinese will employ and pay the narrator for his geopolitical opinions. In addition, they wish to involve him in certain sex experiments. The reason for the sex is eventually revealed—no, it’s not what you think. The reason for the Chinese interest in his geopolitics is never revealed, despite the narrator repeatedly asking for clarification on that subject.

All the women in the novel are painted sympathetically with a broad brush, but they are the novel’s rounded characters. About himself, the narrator says a lot in the opening chapters, and his character becomes more fleshed out as we see him react to situations arranged entirely by others. There is no transformation here. He goes along with everything. He is the man who “cannot say no to a woman.” Not until the last chapter does he act independently, and that to protect the women who have put him through this adventure.

This is not a book of art. There is no deep truth to be discerned, no cogent observations of the human condition to be found, its cunnilingual lessons and observations notwithstanding. Foreign Agent is not a commentary on real life, but something more like a game or rollercoaster ride enjoyed for nothing more than the experience of playing or the thrill of riding.

When Foreign Agent first appeared, I wrote a much longer review to be found here. Matthew told me this was to be his only book, and I thought a chapter-by-chapter summary would stimulate scholarly work. Luckily for the world of pornographic literature, Matthew found a second book—Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter—embedded in the first—my short review linked here.

In 2025 there are four novels. Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent, the Last Chapter, are closely related. The geopolitical question is answered. The third novel, Cult of Aten, takes up a riff opened in the second book, but is otherwise a story that stands by itself, as does LoveMe Inc., Matthew’s fourth novel. There are links to all their reviews and Amazon connections here in “My Fiction,” a blog page explaining how all of this nonsense came about.

Foreign Agent can be found here on Amazon.

Review: How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding.

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008)

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)

Review: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1928 The Kindle edition is only $0.99!!

Woolf is mentioned in so many books on writing fiction that I thought I’d better have a look at her. To the Lighthouse is, I am told, one of her “more approachable” novels.

So what have we got here? Take any group of ordinary people, a few adults, and children of varying ages. Throw them together in an ordinary scene, say a small neighborhood barbecue on a summer evening. Every one of those people, adults and children, has an “inner life,” observations, thoughts, emotions, sometimes vocalized to others in the group, sometimes only thought. You could write a novel exposing these inner lives over the course of a few hours. James Joyce (Ulysses) does this over the course of a day for one character and then, famously, for his wife at the end of the novel.

In Woolf’s case, the people are the Ramsays: husband, wife, and eight children who own a summer home on the Isle of Wight and, along with a handful of guests (helping to afford the food and a couple of servants), occupy the house summer after summer. The first [almost] two-thirds of the novel takes place over one day, from early afternoon to night. Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life is given the most attention—she is the masterful lynchpin of the whole family—but the mental gyrations of Mr. Ramsay and some of the children and guests, in particular Lily, a wannabe painter, are also explored as they reflect on their own thoughts and interactions with others.

The only “story” here is a planned sail (the Ramsays own a small sailboat) to a lighthouse on a rocky island some distance from their home on the bay. The youngest child, five-year-old James, is very excited about the trip but is traumatized by his father, who cancels it due to an oncoming storm that will make the next day’s sail impossible. They all finally go to sleep.

Turn the page, and ten years have passed. Mrs. Ramsay had died. Presumably natural causes. She was only in her fifties. World War I has come and gone. Andrew, the oldest son, was killed. Rue, the oldest daughter, married and then died in childbirth. The house has been unoccupied for some years.

But people are returning. The first mind Woolf relates is one of the servants charged with cleaning the place up, getting it ready. Mr. Ramsay, his six living children (James is now fifteen), Lily, and Mr. Carmichael, another guest from the old days, and two others arrive. In the novel’s last third, Lily, now in her mid-forties and never married, is the mind most often explored. Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (a daughter), along with two other semi-characters—we never know their real names, only James’ mental meanderings about them—end up sailing to the lighthouse—they make it safely. The mental narratives switch back and forth between Lily on shore trying to paint while watching the boat make its way across the bay, and James and Cam on the sailboat. The boat disappears from Lily’s view, safely reaching the lighthouse island. Lily thinks they must be there by now. Mr. Carmichael vocalizes the same thought. Lily makes one last brushstroke on her painting. The novel ends.

Call me crazy, but aside from Woolf’s masterful word-craft, the novel’s rhythm, her representation of thought’s flow, and the novel’s “realism,” the story is trivial—a “shaggy dog” story. I know, I know. The story is deliberately trivial. The novel is about the characters’ minds and how their occasionally expressed thoughts affect one another. Mrs. Ramsay’s death greatly affects Lily, and likewise—we perceive through Lily—Andrew’s death saddens Mr. Charmichael. But all the “action” is ordinary, lacking in any drama. Except for Mr. Ramsay—who occasionally shows a temper—the conflicts and contradictions experienced remain locked in mind.

For my part, reading to experience Woolf’s word-craft—do I dare tackle Ulysses?—is the interesting thing about the novel. It all feels like an exercise. “Class… Write me a sixty-thousand-word study of a handful of characters’ mental ruminations while interacting over ordinary matters that can be anything so long as there is no serious drama acted out between them.” OK, it’s more than a mere exercise. But what is the upshot of it all: people have mental lives that are often full of conflict and emotion, even if what happens between them—behavior—is of little consequence. OK. I concur. Real people are like this. Woolf paints minds with words. In the end, I can appreciate that even if the “story” leaves me flat.

The Novel of Adultery: An Analysis of John Updike’s Couples.

Magic always has a price — (Tag line from “Once Upon a Time” American TV fantasy/adventure 2011-2018)

Couples by John Updike, 1968

I recently learned that “novel of adultery” was a genre unto itself, like “romance,” “horror,” or “fantasy” —terms that might well apply to adultery if we want to be controversial about it. Within the genre are the canonical novels Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence), in which adulterous acts and their consequences are central themes. There is adultery with consequences also in Vanity Fair (Thackeray) and The Age of Innocence (Wharton), but in the former, the real adultery takes place off-stage, and in the latter comes down to nothing more than a kiss. In the nineteenth century, adultery might be nothing more than a married woman (or man) entertaining (even merely walking and talking with) a member of the opposite sex who isn’t her (or his) spouse.

In our more enlightened times, we are allowed to say much more, and that brings us to Updike, who, in 2008, received a lifetime achievement award “celebrating crude, tasteless, or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature” from Britain’s Bad Sex in Literature committee (Google). Published in 1968, “Couples” takes place in a fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox—a fictional Ipswich, according to Time Magazine—from roughly 1962 to 1965—events are slotted in (the 1963 JFK assassination, for example), orienting us to time’s passage.

There are ten couples, professionals—a pilot, a dentist, businessmen, scientists, home builders—somewhere between their mid-twenties and early thirties. Most have young children. These are ordinary middle-class American couples. One or another of them hosts parties almost every weekend. They play tennis, three-on-three basketball, golf, ski, and swim together (Tarbox is on the coast) in various combinations. The parties are alcohol fueled (none of these folks appear to be familiar with marijuana or cocaine). Everyone is usually drunk, even the pregnant woman in the group drinks and, like most of the others, smokes cigarettes—this is 1962.

The novel’s focus is Piet, a builder and husband of Angela, father of two girls, five and about seven years old when the story opens. Updike writes mostly in third-person omniscient, but Piet (and in but one scene, Angela) is the only mind he gets into. The sexual dynamics evolve between the couples, with Piet as the dominant male. With one exception, the only sex narrated (whether in present or past tense) belongs to Piet, who ends up sleeping with five of the women (six counting his wife), three only a few times, two (besides his wife) repeatedly. The exception is a scene late in the novel between Angela and one of the other husbands. All the other sex is communicated through whispered conversations, looks, and behavior observed among the characters. Sometimes what is rumored is not the case (as in real life), but their intuitions are more often accurate.

The group is not a swap club. The affairs are supposed to be secret, but it is impossible to keep such secrets for long among that many drunken people. Shenanigans multiply. Two of the couples begin knowingly swapping partners. One of Piet’s lovers gets pregnant—a big problem in 1963. At least two of the women are bisexual. Jealosies and recriminations erupt. The result, eventually, is the group’s dissolution, Piet’s (and a few others’) divorce, and so on.

Updike writes in the style of 19th-century realists like Flaubert. The novel is 650 pages long. I think easily three hundred and fifty of that are lengthy narrations of scene, dress, homes, decorative tastes, smells, sounds, events (the aforementioned sports), the kids, and so on. Every description comes salted with at least one, and usually more than one, metaphor. Early in the novel, these diversions help to build rounded characters. Later on, they are the “realist fluff.”

The book delivers a good lesson about affairs Updike may not have consciously intended. Where the illicit sex is unencumbered by emotional involvement—other than friendship—the sex has little consequence (not everyone ends up divorcing, and of those who do, most are happier after the fact). Piet, and the women involved, mostly have a good time—read orgasms, though their occurrences are only sometimes noted. But when the sex is encumbered by more serious emotional involvement, there are more serious consequences—even for the sex. One woman never (until a last scene with her near the end of the novel) has an orgasm and yet desperately wants Piet to make love to her whenever it seems to be convenient. Is Piet a bad lover? No. Piet clearly knows his way around a woman’s sex. The problem is all hers. These two, the most “in love,” get into the worst trouble! The lesson: if you’re going to have extra marital sex because your spouse is not delivering in bed, have it for the sake of “good sex” (woman has as many orgasms as she wants and only then does man get his turn) and do not fall in love with your lover.

Is Updike’s realism very real? His characters are varied in psychology and circumstances as real human beings are wont to be. The setting (New England, USA, in the early 1960s) feels pretty real (I am only ten years behind Updike’s characters. I remember the early sixties in suburban New York as a young teenager. My parents had parties!). The “fiction,” if you will, is in the concentration of affairs among this insulated group—albeit always alcohol soused—of ten couples. We hear of no affairs outside the ten but one, late in the novel, when the pilot brags (a second-hand report) of having sex with women at distant ends of international flights. Another good rule for affairs is to have them with people outside your social circle!

How does Updike’s realism work for the sex? Why the bad sex writing award? Rather than use literal words or conventional metaphors to describe sex objects and actions, Updike extends the technique of excessive metaphorical description to sex: “He thrust upwards, seeking the light.” The upshot is that the metaphors, overly sentimental, cloying, and self-conscious in the service of “scene setting” or “character rounding” realism, become corny in the service of sex. The last thing Updike wants to write is conventional porn, so he casts about for metaphors that aren’t conventional, but remain unambiguous in their context. If his novel, like many generic romances, had one sex scene, he would, I am sure, have been forgiven. But the novel has a half-dozen long sex scenes and a greater number of shorter ones, all cast in unconventional—and corny—metaphors. I believe that is the reason for the award.

Truth be told, it is difficult to write explicit sex without being corny unless the telling is flat. Fifty Shades of Grey, despite critical opprobrium, manages it by being direct without embellishment. Anais Nin (Henry and June) avoids corniness with flat telling and a refusal to repeat herself across numerous sex scenes, often told after the fact. John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first English pornographic masterpiece) uses flat reporting and varies the level of description throughout.

Needing explicitness—adultery is the point of the novel—but eschewing directness—it would clash with the metaphor-laden realism of the rest—Updike sedulously abjures the obvious metaphors and finds others (many others) that are corny because they are so obviously meant to serve explicitness without being obvious. Overt metaphors—turgid tuber, rigid pole, cloying cavern, volcanic orifice—are always corny because they are obvious. There is no irony in them. Updike’s metaphors are rich with literary irony. He was not happy with his award.

Review: Oilcraft by Robert Vitalis (2020)

Book link: Oilcraft by Robert Vitalis

The book’s subtitle is “The Myths of Scarcity and Security that Haunt U.S. Energy Policy.”

The subtitle sums up the book’s thrust. There are two primary issues. The book’s last chapter addresses the secondary issue: There never was an “oil for security” deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The famous 1945 meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Al Saud was primarily about Palestine. Nothing in the record suggests an oil-for-security arrangement. If anything, the oil price shocks of the 1970s (precipitated by OPEC) should have been enough to falsify that myth, yet it persists.

The bulk of the book is about markets. Vitalis’ argument is essentially this: It doesn’t matter who owns the oil in the ground. If there is excess resource for the controlling entity’s needs, then the controlling entity must sell it to realize any benefit. It matters not whether the country is an ally or an enemy; they will sell their oil. If they will not sell it to us, they will sell it to someone else, and that someone else will turn around and sell it to us, or some other oil source will.

Vitalis contends that oil, extracted from the ground, lives in a market like every other commodity. Except possibly in wartime, it is, and was, never necessary for the U.S. to use military force to defend oil sources—yes, even in the case of Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait—and every such use of the military has never resulted in less expensive or more secure oil imports. Much more important, he claims, is secure control of the means of transporting the oil from source to market. In that context, he might agree that protecting ships in the Persian Gulf from Houthi missiles is justified.

The author extensively documents his claims—the endnotes section is longer than the text.

But Vitalis is wrong about one thing. Oil is not “just like” other commodities. First oil (more generally energy stored as carbon-hydrogen bonds. There are only three natural forms of it: oil, coal, and natural gas—technically also wood, which is “pre-coal”) is the apex commodity. It is an input to everything else. No other commodity has this property (food has some of it, since it is also stored carbon energy, but it is a ubiquitous input only to living systems, and today it also requires oil for planting, harvesting, and market transport). Second, every other commodity is, at least in theory, recyclable. Even food can be recycled into fertilizer. Carbon energy cannot be recycled. You have to destroy it to use it.

What about so-called renewable energy sources? Electricity? Where does it come from? Either carbon or the sun/wind/water, but capturing those sources requires oil for mining, building, deploying, and maintaining. What about uranium, the only natural non-carbon energy source (besides the sun)? Same thing. One must mine and process uranium (carbon for digging, transport, and electricity for processing) and build nuclear power plants (more carbon).

What about hydrogen? Hydrogen is not a natural energy source but a storage medium like a battery. How does one get electricity into a battery? You make it somewhere else and put it in by charging the battery. Similarly, we make hydrogen using electricity or chemical reactions, storing that energy as hydrogen. Either way, we are back to carbon. Note that in theory, oil, coal, and gas are stored solar energy (like food), but we count them as “sources” rather than “stores” because the sun put the energy in—via plants—millions of years ago.

Does the difference that oil (carbon energy sources) represents make a difference to Vitalis’ thesis that military intervention in oil sources is unnecessary in the absence of a global conflict? I don’t think so, but not because oil isn’t different from everything else. His thesis holds because, apex input or not, like other commodities, it is bought and sold in markets, and there is enough of it from multiple sources (for now) to permit this kind of treatment.

That brings me to one other small criticism of Oilcraft. Vitalis points out that every time we think we are running out of oil, we find more. He tends to write as if this will always be so, but because carbon energy cannot be recycled, recoverable stocks must eventually be exhausted.

Double Review: Richardson’s Pamela vs. Fielding’s Shamela!

Pamela by Samuel Richardson

A 1740 novel credited with being the first fully “character-oriented” novel and the original, English, “novel of manners.” It is an “epistolary novel” told in the form of letters between a daughter and her parents and later, when letters are forbidden her, journal entries. The “point of view” is first person, occasionally slipping into third person, the narrator explaining a few pages on: “so and so told me all of this later…”

Some facts. At the novel’s opening, Pamela is fifteen years old. At its close, she is sixteen. Something less than a year has passed. At twelve, her poor but famously honest and good parents had sent her to work for a wealthy woman who had just passed away when the story opens. A son, twenty-five years old, inherits all the wealth and, being something of a libertine, very much wants a piece of Pamela. Bear in mind the “age of consent” in England in 1740 was twelve!

Pamela is cast as humanity perfected in motive to serve God through her treatment of others—the Christian injunction to love God and his other children on Earth is taken very seriously by her to the point that her only lapse in perspective is fear of not loving God or others well enough. She is the sine qua non of virtue with grace, and also, we are told, exceptionally beautiful. The other point reinforced over and over again is Pamela’s fanatic determination to remain chaste at least until such time (if ever) as she should be married.

The son (known only as B___ or master throughout) makes several attempts at Pamela, eventually abducting her to a distant property where she is placed in the hands of a cruel housemistress. Her escape attempts are always thwarted. All she wants is to go home to her parents. Mr. B___ cannot believe that she is not being duplicitous for the sake of more and more material wealth that he offers her in exchange for becoming his mistress. Finally, Mr. B___ grows sick of trying and lets her leave. On her way to her parents (we are halfway through the book), Mr. B___ reads her journal (the cruel housemistress, by his orders, having kept the document) and realizes that far from duplicitous, Pamela has been sincere throughout. He sends a fast rider after her with letters begging her to return to him. He loves her (he claims) and will give her everything of his life and wealth, including marriage, which, up to this point, was precluded by her low-born status.

Is this another feint on Mr. B___’s part? Pamela isn’t sure, but she decides to go back to him anyway, and thus begins the second half of the novel in which both she and Mr. B___ become the happiest couple on Earth. The second half of the novel is the perfect complement to the first half. Not only Mr. B___, but the cruel housemistress and all the other servants—who didn’t already love her thanks to her first employment—come to love her. Even the snobish gentry recognize that she might just be the most beautiful and gracious woman in all of England!

Novelists are told to “show, don’t tell.” If you acquire a story by reading a journal, the story might be told, but you, the journal reader, are shown it through the journal’s frame. I think that is the whole point of the length of this novel. We simply could not grasp how extraordinary Pamela is, and the subsequent transformation of everybody (especially Mr. B__) without the detail (and repetition) contained in its inordinate length.

The story’s pacing is consistent throughout. There is no elaborate time management; one day mostly leads to the next. We never lack for detail, and must suspend disbelief that anyone can, by hand with a quill pen, write that much that fast on so little paper (Paper was a luxury item in the eighteenth century) as she is given.

At the beginning, I was intimidated. Did I really want to spend the time reading this? At the end, I was delighted by the story and the portrayal of Pamela (despite her own misgivings, a most spiritual and graceful woman), perhaps the most elaborate—if redundant—single-character portrayal in all of fiction.

So why did I read this? For one thing, I’ve been on a “read the classics” jag for the last year or so, but this novel in particular, because I really wanted to read Henry Fielding’s Shamela, a parody of Richardson’s novel written only a year or so after Pamela’s publication. To best appreciate a spoof, one must know what is being spoofed. But Pamela is seven hundred pages long. Shamela is fifty pages! Oh well.

Shamela by Henry Fielding, 1741

So… Pamela is not the true story! It was commissioned by Mr. B___ (whose real name—revealed by Mr. Fielding—was Booby!) to produce a work complimenting him and his new bride. The real letters and journal were fewer and shorter (which makes more sense, see my comment above) and reveal a young girl, hardly a virgin, professing her innocence to her master for the sole purpose of seducing him into a disadvantageous (for him) marriage so that she might obtain legal access to his wealth! Meanwhile she (her real name being Shamela) has been sleeping with Parson Williams (an important—and. importantly, chaste—main character in Pamela) for some time already, a liaison that continues into her marriage to Booby!

Fielding’s satire continues the epistolary style even beginning with an exchange of letters between two ministers one of whom lauds the newly published “Pamela” as the epitome of Christian virtue and its just rewards, while his replier tells him that Pamela was ghost written by persons unknown (not wishing to insult Richardson by naming him) and that he, the replier, has the “real” letters and journal!

What I love about Fielding is his bawdy sense of humor, combined with a polished ability to talk about sex (there is a lot of it) through metaphor, innuendo, and double entendre. We learn, for example, that Parson Williams was well endowed, while Booby possessed only a “spindle,” and so on.

Shamela is but a novella, barely fifty pages long. It is funny, but not that funny, and feels rushed (Fielding’s first “novel,” and published barely a year after Pamela). Must one read a seven-hundred-page novel to appreciate the fifty-page farce? Technically, yes, though the two reading tasks are, to be sure, disproportionate. I’m glad, in the end, that I liked Pamela, crazy and perhaps unreal as it may be.

Review: In Defense of History by Richard Evans

In Defense of History by Richard Evans, 1997

This is a book about what historians do: Research (looking at lots of documents and other markers of the past in the present), and then writing books, essays, podcasts, or what have you, purporting to explain what their research has revealed about some aspect of the past. It is also a book obsessed with Postmodernism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Defense of History is a critique of the impact (positive and negative) of Postmodernism on the research and writing of history.

Postmodernism is epistemically nihilistic in its extreme forms—there is no such thing as “truth”, everything can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, all interpretations reflect power relationships (men over women, straights over gays, capitalists over labor, the politics of the day, etc) in our present or the present in which some book was written, and reinterpreted today. In this extreme form, Postmodernism is self-contradictory. If there is no “truth,” then why should we think that Postmodernism has anything valuable to say?

But Postmodernism also has a milder side. It comes down to saying that genuine “truth” is approachable, but there is no such thing as “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” This can be understood purely in the present, never mind the writing of history. Suppose I am a witness to a traffic accident involving a half-dozen vehicles. I watch the sequence unfold from a position where I could pay full attention to the event. Later, I recount my recollection to the Highway Patrol. My account is valid, but not the “whole truth.” Someone bearing the same witness from the other side of the highway might describe a slightly different sequence of events. The two descriptions will essentially match up, but not be identical.

We are “perspectival creatures.” We see events from a particular angle and bring to our witness some particular experience. When we research history, the limitations of perspective are compounded. We are looking at documents (mostly) and must not only grasp their meaning (perhaps in translation, already a remove) in context. I find a document in an archive that reads like the transcript of a court proceeding. But in the absence of corroborating context, it might just as easily be a few pages torn from an otherwise lost novel. The further back we go in time, the worse this sort of problem gets because the volume of corroborating documents declines and the dating of those that are found becomes less sure.

When we write our history book, we add another layer of perspective: our own life experience in a political and cultural environment that may have emerged from the times we are studying, and so on. Such things pull us away from “the whole truth,” while the discovery and incorporation of more documents, more monuments, and so on pulls us towards it. And thus is good history writing done. More truth, a better perspective, but never “the whole truth.” I think this is the sum and substance of Evans’ argument in this book.

In a long “afterword” chapter, Evans takes on his critics. There are more than a dozen, many of them the same people whose work he discusses in the body of the book. Some of these critics, Evans acknowledges, make good points, but most misrepresent him, and he goes to some lengths to illustrate his charges. This afterword thus amounts to a succinct summary of the whole book in which Evans clarifies, in a few sentences, some of the arguments that take pages in earlier chapters.

One other thing I noted about the afterword. These historians can be really nasty! Some of the criticisms demonstrate a complete lack of attention to what Evans says and castigate him for claims he never makes. I was a graduate student in a university philosophy department at the height of the Postmodernist craze—the late 1970s. I read many critiques of contemporary philosophers by their contemporaries. I do not remember any of them being as careless and hot-headed as the historians appear to be.

Postscript: One of the historians (and Postmodernists) Evans mentions several times is Frank Ankersmit, but Evans does not discuss any of his work in detail. I read and reviewed one of Ankersmit’s books here. Written in 2012, the book makes quite reasonable claims in my opinion. Ankersmit must be one of the mild and rational postmodernists, or perhaps, by 2012, Postmodernism had moved past its zenith.

Ankersmit’s book is more interesting than Evans’ in my opinion. Ankersmit makes philosophical contributions, for example, on the relation between historical representation and art. Evans makes a competent statement of the down and up side impact of Postmodernism on the writing of history, but history moves on, and what was a significant debate in the last decades of the twentieth century is now made moot by the evisceration of academic humanities including history departments, not to mention the virtual victory of the more extreme versions of Postmodernism in political discourse (disinformation anyone?) and that of the political elite themselves.

Review: Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit

Author’s note: This review was originally written and put on Amazon in 2019. It was not included on the blog because there were no additional philosophical issues I wished to address. However, it is one of my important reviews, and now that I am no longer posting reviews on Amazon, I decided to bring this one over here.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit, 2012

I am neither a historian nor a philosopher of history, but it’s always worthwhile to expand one’s scope, and especially so with such an engaging book. Dr. Ankersmit is engaged in a multidimensional exploration, not of “philosophy of history” (though variations are touched upon), but rather of the philosophy of writing history.

Ankersmit’s beginning is “historicism”, broadly the idea that what we are today (politically, culturally, economically, and so on) has emerged through history; the actual track that each of these things (and more) took between the past and the present. This idea seems pretty obvious to me, but apparently was not always so considered in the writing of history or philosophy of history. From this point, he explores the difference between science and art as they relate to history, and comes down on the side of art, with contributions from the practice of science playing their part. He argues that art and history are representational. It reflects, to the viewer or reader, an aspect of the work’s subject.

Aspects are related to perspectives. Individuals have perspectives. They are the subjective gestalt of our individual consciousness. Aspects are derived from the external world and constitute a kind of reflection from the world back to our subjective perspective. We project our viewpoint. We get back an aspect — one aspect of a potentially infinite number of them. Aesthetics in art has much to do with aspect (something Ankersmit explores in some detail), and it is the author’s claim that the same is true in the writing of history. Like a piece of art (he uses both painting and literature in his examples), each written history (assuming it respects records of the past and doesn’t merely make stuff up) reflects to the reader an aspect that can be said to genuinely reflect, and so represent, the past to the present.

From here, Ankersmit argues that, unlike [philosophy of] science in which the truth of propositions (and by extension theories) is the primary focus (the “meaning of it all” being secondary), the primary focus of historical writing is the representation of an aspect bearing meaning to the reader in the present. As in art, propositional truth is of secondary importance in historical writing and emerges from the representational meaning of the written work. This is the central insight of the book, carefully built up through its first two-thirds.

In the last third (roughly) of the book, Ankersmit explores the outworking of the insight in various historical writings and how, in particular, aspects build on one another from one history to another, covering the same topic (for example, the Renaissance). The meaning of these aspects emerges only through the reader’s encounter with multiple aspects of the same subject. In effect, the reader has not gotten the “aspectural meaning” of the Renaissance, having read only a single history of it. But meaning emerges (like depth in vision) the moment one reads a second and grows richer with the third, fourth, and so on. Truth in history emerges from meaning (not the other way around, as is the case in science), and meaning emerges from the collective aspects reflected to readers from multiple histories.

There is far more to this book than I can touch upon in a short review; for example, it’s examination of the role of language and the contrasting roles played by it in science, and history/art. The book is beautifully organized. Each chapter has a clearly delineated introduction, arguments divided into sections, and a conclusion that summarizes the chapter’s key points. There are extensive chapter notes that should be read, as many enhance the perspective of the text, though many (not the majority) are not translated from their original German or French. I also found it odd that, while all the works cited are extensively documented in the chapter notes, the Kindle edition (I am not familiar with the paper edition) lacks a bibliography.

This is a book that deserves to be read by every historian and philosopher of history, or, for that matter, art. The historian will more fully appreciate what her writing of history is really accomplishing, and the philosopher will better understand both the scope and limitations of historical writing, which is, after all, the philosopher’s access point to history about which she is writing philosophy.”