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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 use to review these (dead authors do not appreciate reviews), but I will begin even if I can add little to the critical canon surrounding these books. First up, a double review of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, followed by a review of Henry Fielding’s parody, Shamela! Why am I doing this? I’m not sure and I am certainly not reviewing all the fiction I’ve lately read. But perhaps I’ll write a commentary — a book — on all the authors I’ve read lately?

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.. Should you wish to offer me a publishing or movie contract, my email address is quineatal@gmail.com. Serious inquiries only!

January 25, 2017 (original date of this post). Updated frequently.

Review: What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan

I’ve read only two novels by Austen, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abby. I have Pride and Prejudice on my TBR pile. Dr. Mullan’s book is one of many scholarly works on Austen’s fiction; this one told in an easy style that lets us be impressed by Austen’s invention and perfection of so many literary techniques. This is especially impressive, as we learn that, unlike other well-known female novelists of her time, Austen never met any contemporary literary lights. Apart from her own extensive reading, she did this all on her own. Throughout the book, reference is made to Austen’s letters to various family members and friends, giving us a window into experiences that inspired some of her literary inventions. Austen lived much of the culture she wrote about.

Only the last two chapters directly address technique apart from the author’s subjects and stories: When does Jane Austen Speak Directly to the Reader, and How Experimental a Novelist is Jane Austen? All the other chapters address Austen through her novel’s content. Marriage, money, literature (in the novels), dialogue among and between both primary and secondary characters, weather, names, illness, death, and sex. There is a chapter dedicated to Austen’s use of the blush—male characters “color”; they never blush. In young women, a blush can, but does not always, signal awakening to her own sexual allure. There is more besides. In Austen’s novels, apart from very few (except in Northanger Abby) “authorial interventions,” we see the whole of the story from the viewpoint of her characters. Sometimes the reader knows more than the characters, but often we are left to discover their misunderstandings as they discover them.

All the Austen novels are used in every chapter, but in rough order of which are cited most often—this is my impression. I did not keep a formal tally—they are Emma, followed closely by Persuasion and Mansfield Park, then Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abby. Sanditon, an incomplete novel (completed by her brother after Jane’s death), is also cited frequently. Despite my lack of Austen scholarship, I found Mullan’s book easy to read and impressively informative. Highly recommended to Austen fans.

Review: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita came first and has a moral arc like almost every example in the literary canon. Pale Fire does not have any moral arc that I can find, and it seems to me to exist solely to illustrate Nabokov’s prose mastery and organizational brilliance. It certainly does that. As to its physical organization, we must remember that in 1959 there were no personal computers with word processors. Nabokov’s ability to cross-reference everything in a moderately lengthy novel of four sections using only—I presume—a typewriter and whatever notes he kept is extraordinary!

The novel is usually divided into three sections, but I count four. They are:

A Forward

Pale Fire, a 999-line poem in “four cantos.”

Commentary on the poem—the bulk of the novel.

A long glossary/index—not usually considered as a part of the novel, but perhaps it should be. It constitutes almost ten percent of the text. There is considerable background here given after the story, and it further illustrates Nabokov’s organizational skills.

The Foreword tells of the arrival of Charles Kinbote, an assistant professor of literature at a small college (Wordsmith) in the fictional town of New Wye somewhere in America’s Appalachia. Charles has come to New Wye from Zembla, an island country somewhere in the Baltic Sea. He chose this obscure place to hide, evading pursuers. By happy coincidence, he discovers that the big drafty house he rents is next door to his favorite poet, John Shade, who, like Kinbote, teaches at the college. We learn how he and the poet become friends, and how the poem and commentary came to be published. We also learn, soon enough, that the poet has been killed, collateral damage, the assassin’s target being Kinbote, who is not who he claims to be.

The poem follows in four parts. It is about life, death—the Shade’s daughter perishes in an accident at only twenty years old—marriage, the afterlife, and of what sort, and so on. The poem is no masterpiece (deliberately so), but it is competent in its phrasing and structure, which the narrator uses to inspire his commentary.

Following the poem is Kinbote’s commentary, structured by reference to the poem’s lines. The lines are addressed sequentially, but there are many gaps. There can be a short paragraph commenting on line 100 while the next comment might be two or three pages inspired by line 150, and so on. But while Kinbote ultimately likes the poem, it is not, as he had hoped, about Zembla and the tales he told to Shade before the poet begins the poem. The commentary, then, uses lines from the poem to frame parts of Kinbote’s story of the last king of Zembla (Charles IV, AKA Kinbote): his upbringing, his overthrow in a revolution (with a hint of Soviet sponsorship), and his escape from Zembla.

Kinbote contrives to meet his idol, the poet, early in 1959 and, over the following months—all of this is revealed to us, the reader, only in the commentary written after Shade is dead—tells his story without revealing that he is the king. The poem is written between July 1 and July 21st, finished on the very day the poet is murdered. Nabokov speaks in the first person when discussing himself as Kinbote, but switches to the third person when recounting the king’s history. Also in third person is his account of Gradus, the assassin sent by the Zemblan revolutionaries to find and kill King Charles. Salted throughout the commentary, we learn of Gradus’ election to assassin and his travels from Zembla to Paris, Geneva, and Niece, where he learns of the king’s hiding place in obscure New Wye. How does the narrator know all of this? The answer waits for us until the story time moves to the period following Shade’s death.

Kinbote (Charles) is disappointed that the poem has nothing to do with the tales of Zembla and the king told to Shade in the months preceding the poem’s composition. Kinbote makes use of the poem’s lines (many, but by no means all) as launching points for the different elements of the story/commentary. The commentary is cross-referenced—often multiple times on each page—into itself; the narrator is constantly asking us to “see the comment to line so-and-so.” In the Kindle version of the book, these references are links, which is helpful, except that following them all (there are many dozens) and returning to the story thread is time-consuming and unnecessary for grasping the whole.

On July 21, Shade proclaims the poem finished and gives the “fair copy” and some notes on possible substitutions to Kinbote. It is then that they run into the incompetent assassin who shoots but misses the king and hits Shade instead. At that moment, a gardener, linked to Kinbote’s rented property, hits the assassin from behind with a hoe. The police arrive, and Gradus is taken alive. Shade is dead, and his wife mistakenly believes that he, Shade, was the real target and thanks Kinbote for trying to shield him. This elevates Kinbote to hero status in the wife’s eyes and allows him to persuade her to give him the poem he has not, at that point, read, for publication—with all royalties accruing to her under their contractual arrangement.

There is a small plot-hole here. In the Foreword, the narrator notes that two “trustees of the school” and its President know Kinbote’s real identity. These three (whom we never hear from) would know that Shade was not the assassin’s real target, but no mention is made of this.

Charles flees to another hiding place somewhere in Wyoming—he believes there will be others sent to kill him—where he begins to write his commentary telling us he managed to interview the imprisoned Gradus “once or twice” before the would-be assassin commits suicide. It is in these interviews that Charles, presumably, learns the details of Gradus’ travels and how he located the exiled king. I leave out a lot of character and story details throughout this review.

No part of the story is continued in Nabokov’s glossary-index, so I suppose this is not a true part IV, but it creates a structure parallel to the four quartos of the poem (Nabokov gets a lot of commentary mileage out of the poem’s structural elements) and gives us more detail—backstories–about all the novel’s characters. I assume Nabokov intended it to have some significance because there is a lot of authorial work in it.

What is the upshot of all of this? Lolita carried a heavy moral. Pale Fire, the title of the poem, seems to carry no moral weight. It is merely a story. The poem does not justify the story, but the story—told in the Foreword and the Commentary—is the vast bulk of the novel. I ended up reading each canto of the poem separately and then the commentary covering the lines of that canto. Since the commentary had little to no narrative relationship to the poem, this mattered little. What Nabokov produced was a novel that gave generations of literature students material for their theses. In the end, it was a delightfully entertaining, if silly, story that illustrated Nabokov’s linguistic brilliance throughout.

Review: Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote a novel called Pamela. It was about an exceptionally chaste, modest, and stunning young woman of fifteen, and a man, her pursuer, rich, handsome, persistent, and ten years older, the squire Mr. B____. It is what you think, but it doesn’t exactly end the way a modern reader would expect. I’ve reviewed it here, but what happened after Pamela is my subject today.

About a year after Pamela was published, Henry Fielding published his first novel (really a novella, only 55 pages long). Called Shamela, it is a very crude parody of Pamela, and Richardson was not amused. It is also reviewed via the link above.

The next year, 1742, Fielding published his first full-length novel, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews. Fans of Pamela would have immediately recognized that Joseph and Pamela happen to share the same surname! We learn early on in the novel that Joseph and Pamela are indeed sister and brother (Richardson never mentions a brother). Since born to low family (though when Joseph Andrews takes place Pamela is married to the squire), as Pamela was originally servant to the squire’s mother, Joseph is servant to the sister, who is the squire’s aunt. Welcome to the Booby family. Richardson never alludes to the squire as other than Mr. B____, and he never mentions a brother of his now-bride Pamela, nor an aunt. Fielding makes use of a family invented by Richardson in which to plant his characters. He first calls Mr. B____ Booby in Shamela and brazenly uses it in this novel.

Now, Lady Booby, the aunt employing Joseph, is but recently a widow, said to be a remarkably good-looking woman, about forty. Joseph, at this point, is just over twenty, and Lady Booby has the hots for him, as does Mrs. Slipslop (Fielding’s names can be pretty crude), another of the servants. Joseph is a very handsome and virile-looking young man! If Joseph had been Tom Jones, he might have acceded to both women, but Joseph is as chaste as his sister and rejects them both. They are furious, and the lady fires him, much regretting it throughout the novel.

A good deal of the story is the journey of Joseph and a mentor, Parson Adams, the curate of Joseph’s home parish, from Lady Booby’s summer place to their home parish, along the way meeting up with the one woman Joseph has or will ever love, Fanny, another resident of the parish with whom Joseph grew up. It is also the home parish of Lady Booby (what else could it be?).

Compared to the later Tom Jones (1744), Joseph Andrews is very linear. Things happen along the journey, but each is resolved in turn. There is a big twist near the end, and Lady Booby can taste her conquest of Joseph, who, being brother to Pamela—the squire’s wife—is now an in-law! But the twist untwists through very clever—I can’t believe Fielding came up with all this stuff—manipulation of all the characters, including a pair who otherwise appear only in Richardson’s original novel! In its rather rushed ending, everyone gets what they want, and love triumphs! Even Lady Booby flees to London and meets a dashing officer who makes her forget Joseph—we can only imagine how.

Google tells me that Richardson was “deeply offended” by both Shamela—understandably—and Joseph Andrews—less understandably, writing that it was a “wretched performance,” and that it was only fit “to entertain none but Porters or Watermen.” I’m sure revealing the family name to be Booby was a great part of Richardson’s ire, but come on… Mr. B___? Richardson set himself up for that one! In my view, Joseph Andrews is a very clever take-off from, and not parody of, Pamela. Unlike Shamela, it is not crude (ok, except the name Booby), but clever and very funny.

Review: Essays Two by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is a writer and translator. In her first book of essays (Essays One, which I haven’t read), Google tells me her subjects are the craft of writing, literary influences, the visual arts, found arts, religion, and translation theory. In Essays Two, she focuses on translation theory and practice. In a lead-off essay, Ms. Davis explains her love for the translation process. From there, she discusses specific English translations from French (Proust, Leiris, and Flaubert), how she learned Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian, and observations from visits to various parts of France. Along the way, she discusses her own theory and style of translation, comparing it to other well-respected translators of canonical novels, in particular Proust and Flaubert. There is also an interesting essay on translating older English—particularly nineteenth-century North English and Scottish dialogue—into more modern English.

I do not usually read books of essays, but I chose to read this because I am a writer—ironically, mostly essays—and like many of my contemporaries, my novels (there are presently four) may someday be picked up and translated into languages other than English (fat chance. Maybe if I pay). I was interested in the various philosophies that motivate particular translations and translators. In particular, one essay, her translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, caught my eye because of all the novels Ms. Davis discusses, Madame Bovary is the only one I’ve read, and it just so happens in her translation.

What did I hope to get out of these essays? I thought I might pick up some stylistic nuances—in English—by exploring different approaches to translation. Particularly as regards Flaubert, who has been translated many times, Ms. Davis does not disappoint, giving numerous examples of differences between her translation and others’, even showing us changes in her own work as she revised her opinion for later editions. This has helped me as a writer in at least one specific way. Ms. Davis points out that, beginning with a lyrical passage in the original, the translation can be more literal, but less lyrical in English, or the translator can try to retain the lyricism of the original and possibly sacrifice some literalness. Her examples help me to understand the difference, in English, between lyrical and non-lyrical language that nevertheless—and in perfectly good English grammar—faithfully represents the original.

What struck me was that her non-lyrical examples were, nevertheless, examples of perfectly good style, even if they did not reflect the poesis of the original.

In my Kindle edition of Bovary, Ms. Davis includes an introduction in which she discusses the novel, Flaubert, and her translation. There is material here that is duplicated in the essays volume or vice versa—I do not know which came first.

At one point in her introduction, Ms. Davis points out that in the first love scene between Rudolphe and Emma, Flaubert waxes lyrical about Emma’s reverie—giving it 20 or so lines—followed immediately by the short sentence: “Rudolphe, cigar between his teeth, mended with his penknife one of the bridles which was broken.” The reader is left to surmise that while Emma still lies on her back in reverie, Rudolphe has gotten up and is standing next to his horse. Davis calls this an irony in the “… juxtapositions Flaubert creates between the ‘poetic’ and the brutally commonplace.” Flaubert, she says, “undercuts his own lyricism.”

Me thinks she has missed a point… This is a brilliant Flaubert commentary on men, women, and affairs, especially adulterous ones… Emma is experiencing post-coital reverie, what my girlfriend and I call “basking in the glow.” Emma is in love with Rudolphe (always a bad idea where adultery is engaged). Her mind floats on the experience’s aftermath. By contrast, for Rudolphe, Emma is but one more successful seduction. Sex being over (hopefully, the cad gave her at least one good orgasm. We never know in these novels), one moves on to other tasks—fixing the bridle being necessary for the ride home, after all.

All in all, a book that helps one appreciate the art of translation and a pat on the back to the translator community. There were a few useful insights for me here. She spends far more pages on Proust (whom I haven’t read) than on Flaubert, but all of it together enlightened me at least a little.

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.

What was the lie? 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. The oil companies couldn’t lie for very long about the basic effect of atmospheric carbon, but they could deny that we were anywhere near saturating the carbon sinks, and they continued to do so well into the 1980s and beyond, when the capacity of the sinks was being better quantified. They also lied about the ecological damage caused by oil spills, well leaks, and their copious release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

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

A few thousand years ago, humans discovered coal. As the expanding population needed more heating and cooking, 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 didn’t lie about the climate implications of their product. Not until the mid-18th century did anyone even suspect such a connection, and not until the mid-19th century did earth science have experimental confirmation. Nor did coal producers “push” their product. People adopted coal because it was better than wood for all uses, old and new, 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 heeded oil company warnings and artificially limited growth in carbon-linked energy until research had cleared up the “limits” issue decades later? 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.