Chapter titles

Every chapter in Sister Carrie has a title.  All of them are interesting. They give a hint at what’s to come, but in most cases the meaning only becomes clear after you read the chapter.  I actually looked forward to reading the name of the next chapter.

Here are the first 10 chapter titles:

1. THE MAGNET ATTRACTING: A WAIF AMID FORCES
2. WHAT POVERTY THREATENED:  OF GRANITE AND BRASS
3. WE QUESTION OF FORTUNE: FOUR-FIFTY A WEEK
4. THE SPENDING OF FANCY: FACTS ANSWER WITH SNEERS
5. A GLITTERING NIGHT FLOWER: THE USE OF A NAME
6. THE MACHINE AND THE MAIDEN: A KNIGHT OF TO-DAY
7. THE LURE OF THE MATERIAL: BEAUTY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
8. IMITATIONS BY WINTER: AN AMBASSADOR SUMMONED
9. CONVENTION’S OWN TINDER-BOX: THE EYE THAT IS GREEN
10. THE COUNSEL OF WINTER: FORTUNE’S AMBASSADOR CALLS

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Compatibilism

I don’t see why free will and determinism wouldn’t be compatible.  At the moment I make a choice, I’m picking the option that I prefer.  Does it matter if what led me to that preference was entirely determined by prior occurrences?

Let’s think about what it would mean to not have free will.  Suppose I preferred option A, but just before I make the decision some external force affects my neurons and causes me to prefer option B. Well, at the moment I chose B, that was my preference.  That scenario is not inconsistent with free will or determinism (the external force is just part of the prior chain of events).

I think what people mean by free will is that they could have made a different decision.  Sure, they could have, if things had been different.  That is what they mean.  And that is free will…and determinism.

I pretty much agree with Katja Grace:

…you feel like your actions are neither determined nor random. You choose them.

And that is precisely why they are determined. They are determined by you. And you already exist to the finest detail at the time you are making the decision. If you made choices (or some element of them) not controlled by your personality, experience, thoughts and anything else that comes under the heading of ‘the state of your brain as a result of genetics and your prior environments’, they would be random, which still isn’t free will…

The narrator of Dostoyevsky‘s Notes from Underground was disturbed by determinism:

If, for instance, some day they calculate and prove to me that I made a long nose at someone because I could not help making a long nose at him and that I had to do it in that particular way, what FREEDOM is left me..? Then I should be able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand. In short, if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do;

Just because someone with perfect knowledge could accurately predict what you would do, that doesn’t mean you don’t have freedom. If what you did wasn’t predictable (i.e. included some random elements), how would that give you any more freedom (you have no control over the randomness)?

—

I liked this paragraph on free will from the book Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser:

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.  On the tiger no responsibility rests.  We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life — he is born into their keeping and without thought he is protected.  We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him perfect guidance.  He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against them.  As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces.  In this intermediate stage he wavers — neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will.  He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other — a creature of incalculable variability.

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Flies in a spider web

From Pulp:

The bartender was an old guy, looked to be 80, all white, white hair, white skin, white lips.  Two other old guys sat there, chalk white.  Looked like the blood had stopped running in all of them. They reminded me of flies in a spider web, sucked dry.  No drinks were showing.  Everybody was motionless.

…

“Has anybody here seen Cindy, Celine or the Red Sparrow?” I asked.

They just looked at me.  One of the patrons’ mouths drew together into a little wet hole.  He was trying to speak. He couldn’t do it.  …  The bartender remained motionless.  He looked like a cardboard cutout.  An old one.  Suddenly I felt young.

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Shiny and new

From John Fante‘s short story First Communion:

I knelt at the altar and said my penance.  I went out into the sunshine of a serene afternoon.  I never felt so clean.  I was a bar of soap.  I was fresh water.  I was bright tinfoil.  I was a new suit of clothes.  I was a haircut.  I was Christmas Eve and a box of candy.

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Marketing

From Factotum:

“We have three types of cartons, each printed differently.  One carton is for our ‘Super Durable Brake Shoe.’  The other is for our ‘Super Brake Shoe.’ And the third is for our ‘Standard Brake Shoe.’ The brake shoes are stacked right here.

“But they all look alike to me.  How can I tell them apart?”

“You don’t. They’re all the same.  Just divide them into thirds.”

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More Bukowski

From his short story Notes on the Pest, included in the book Tales of Ordinary Madness:

…I parked the car and went in.  I ordered a New York cut, french fries, so forth, and sat there over my coffee until the food arrived. the whole diner was empty; it was a marvelous night.  then just with the arrival of my New York cut, the door opened and in came the pest.  of course, you guessed it.  there were 32 stools in the place but he HAD TO take the stool next to mine and begin conversing with the waitress over his doughnut.  he was a real flat fish.  his dialogue knifed into my guts.  dull rotting tripe, the stench of his soul swinging through the air wrecking everything.

“His dialogue knifed into my guts.”  I’ve been there, Buk.

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Blood and guts…

I read Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker.  Definitely provocative, edgy and, uh, even confusing in places.  I liked it quite a bit though.

Here are a few paragraphs that I liked:

Having cancer is like having a baby.  If you’re a woman and you can’t have a baby ’cause you’re starving poor or ’cause no man wants anything to do with you or ’cause you’re lonely and miserable and frightened and totally insane, you might as well get cancer.  You can feel your lump and you nurse, knowing it will always get bigger.  It eats you, and, gradually, you learn, as all good mothers learn, to love yourself.

and

Once upon a time there was a materialistic society one of the results of this materialism was a ‘sexual revolution’.  Since the materialistic society had succeeded in separating sex from every possible feeling, all you girls can now go spread your legs as much as you want ’cause it’s sooo easy to fuck it’s sooo easy to be a robot it’s sooo easy not to feel.  Sex in  America is S & M.

and

Doing what I want to is dangerous ’cause I can get really hurt.  So I lie to people.  I say ‘I love living alone.’ … But I really want what I want. These aren’t passing emotions. These are my characteristics.

By love do I just mean satisfaction of the needs created by my characteristics?

One more:

The woman who lives her life according to nonmaterialistic ideals is the wild antisocial monster; the more openly she does so, the more everyone hates her.

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The Player

I recently read The Player by Michael Tolkin.  Good book.  It’s also a movie, but I haven’t seen it. 

Here are two encounters between the main character, Griffin, and his rival, Levy, that I enjoyed:

The waiter came and took their orders. Levy asked for a salad, and Griffin, buttering a roll, asked for a small pizza.  He was glad he hadn’t come to the table with a strategy, because he would have chosen the same tactics, and the same measly lunch as Levy, and now he was calm, while Levy looked forlorn that he was having only a salad and couldn’t break down for a roll or pasta.  Somewhere Levy had read a book about power lunching, but he must have skipped the lesson on keeping eye contact with the person across the table, and to avoid staring at his carboydrates.  Griffin knew he showed extreme confidence to order more food than Levy. It was a small battle, but he had won it.

and

As soon as Griffin settled into his office, Larry Levy knocked on the door with a hard cast on his wrist. … Griffin knew Levy wanted to talk about the broken arm, how he’d hurt himself, what the doctors had been like, so he didn’t ask about it when he invited him to take a seat.

…

Levy scrated inside the cast again.  Something itched him fiercely, and still Griffin refused to ask what had happened, how he had fallen on the slopes.  He sensed that Levy knew Griffin was purposefully ignoring the cast, waiting for Levy to offer the explanation, which would, because it was volunteered, carry the unmistakable whine of the victim.  The urge to tell the story of how he broke his arm was a second itch.

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Damage

I just finished reading Damage by Josephine Hart.  The narrator of the book is a man who has an affair with his son’s fiance (Anna).  Prior to meeting Anna, he was basically just going through the motions of life.  He was kind of numb.  Upon meeting her, everything changed.  He had to have her, regardless of the consequences. As he put it:

What responsibility is so great that it could deny this single chance in eternity to exist?

Anna, too, was aware of the damage that could be done, but felt like it was out of her control:

I always recognise the forces that will shape my life. I let them do their work.  Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. … I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight.  Afterwards I look around me, and I say, ‘Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.’

The narrator just ignores the storm around him:

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision — the ability to select the elements vital to survival while ignoring the great truths.

At one point in the book, the narrator’s wife recognizes that something has changed with their marriage.  He tells her that he has a problem that he has to work out on his own.  He then describes how the conversation ended:

We met each other’s gaze.  We managed to avert our eyes before truth could be seen by either of us.  Elliptical intimacy is the marriage vow of good companions.  Vows that they honour behind the closed doors of bedrooms where, trapped in the winding sheets of dead desire, they take the pleasure they are entitled to.  They convince themselves that they have not been cheated in this roulette game of passionless passion.  It is a legacy from one generation to the next.  The good marriage tie.

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The End of Faith

I’m currently reading Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.  I have mixed feelings about the book.  Perhaps I’ll discuss that another day.  For now, I’ll just quote from the book some things that I found interesting:

The belief that certain books were written by God leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. … It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it.  Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.  Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars…  Could anything — anything — be more ridiculous?  And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. 

…

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom the wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.  To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview — however heroic the effort of redactors — is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.

…

…it is merely an accident  of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

…

The writers of Luke and Matthew…insist that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos)…  Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary’s virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means “young woman”…  It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew.

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