Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Travels with Charley is a revisit with an old friend. I first read the book in high school--actually, probably the summer after my senior year. And, really, it was the first Steinbeck that I had read--I don't count acting in a cutting from "Of Mice and Men" or racing through "The Pearl" in less than an hour as the final exam in a speed reading course that I took. I also remember desperately wanting a pickup truck with a camper on it so I could travel around the country. It was probably the first travel book that I read, and it made me want to get out and explore. Later would come "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and John Graves' "Goodbye to a River." Then I traded my dreams of a pickup for dreams of a canoe. I didn't get either.

One of the highlights of our visit to the John Steinbeck Museum in Salinas a few years back (which really isn't all that much of a museum) was actually seeing Steinbeck's actual truck, Rocinante, on the floor. It seemed smaller in person, especially compared to some of the mondo cab over campers that now ply our national highways. And that brings up the question of how much time Steinbeck actually spent in Rocinante.

What called to me and seemed so fresh and inviting over 40 years ago seemed a bit dated this go around. Listening to the book was enjoyable for both Sara and me, but it just didn't have the special qualities that have made reading and listening to Steinbeck's fiction so enjoyable. I'm not sure why. Is it a kind of nostalgic yearning for the past (even the past of the Joad family) over a more contemporary time? Or does it have to do more with characterization? Do the characters come up too fast and are gone too quickly to be developed in the detail to make them come alive? There are a number of poignant scenes in the book, such as when he revisits his old boyhood friend Johnny Garcia in the Monterrey bar, or when he spends the night with a father and son feuding about the future, or meeting the Shakespearean actor who channels John Gielgud, or sharing drinks with the Canadian migrant workers picking apples. The memories that stuck most with me over the past 40 years, besides Rocinante, are Charley getting sick, and Steinbeck's tossing the racist hitchhiker out of the truck. I had not remembered much of "the cheerleaders" in New Orleans, but its clear that that scene and the lead up to it almost serve as the climax of the book. Charley stole the show for me this time around, as I'm sure he did 40 years ago, with his "pfffft" commentary on Steinbeck's thoughts, his areas of exploration around the different campsites, his going apeshit over the bears in Yellowstone, etc. etc.

So, did Steinbeck find America? Probably not. There is, of course, the whole brouhaha of how much of the book is a reliable recollection of his trip. Did he really just sit in the camper and make most of it up, as his son avers? Did he really spend a lot more time sleeping in hotels with his wife than he lets on? Does any of it really matter?

Then there's the whole realization that I'm older than Steinbeck was when he went on the trip. Shit! Steinbeck felt himself to be dying and wanted to get out and see the country and the people one more time. And it turned out to be his last work. And to realize that maybe he really didn't have the energy or the focus to pull the book together like he wanted. Part of the comedy of the book is his not having decent urban survival skills when he hits the big cities. Or setting out to search for America but finding himself getting bored and driving straight through to exhaustion. "Ah, the hell with it," I hear him saying, sometimes, and wanting to shut it down. Is that where I'm headed, too?

So, if I look at "Travels with Charley" too closely, I say, OK, it's not great literature. It's not "A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack" for the Cold War generation, and it's probably not as good as "Goodbye to a River," written about the same time. But it is John Steinbeck, and it has the powers of description, of metaphoric language, of story telling, that sets him apart. No, it's not anywhere near his best work, but it is still so incomparably well written to make it a good time.

Author: Steinbeck, John

Date Published: 1962

Length: 7 hr 58 min

Narrator: Sinise, Gary

The Science of Leonard: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig/Phaedrus wanted to explore philosophy before it bifurcated into the primary subjective/objective ways of looking at things. He called this state of thought "Quality," and looked to the pre-Socratics for its historical antecedents. Fritjof Capra suggests, I think, that really Leonard Da Vinci is the prime example of the man what represents Quality in all senses of the word, including Pirsig's metaphysical Quality, the first and foremost example of l'oumo universale, the man who "can do all things if he will." Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man says that "God made men at the close of creation, to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity, but gave him freedom to will and to love." If anybody exemplifies Pico's vision of man, it is Leonardo, who, if Capra is to be credited, really represents the apotheosis of what it means to be a human in the fullest sense of the word. Leonardo came at at time when it was possible to loosen the fetters of old thinking and learn to see and to think for himself, coming up with observations that would not be repeated for sometimes hundreds of years.

"Five hundred years before the scientific method was recognized and formally described by philosophers and scientists, Leonardo Da Vinci singlehandedly developed and practiced its characteristics." Leonardo combined detailed skills of observation with his exceptional drawing abilities to puzzle out many phenomena before science developed the language to see and deal with them. He was at that unique vortex in time before the different branches of knowledge went in their various directions, requiring more and more specialized knowledge, and so he could hold a more holistic view of the world. He combined those close observations with a deep awareness "of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole." (This sounds suspiciously like co-dependent origination to me.)

In addition to discovering the scientific method and anticipating many of the advanced principles of mathematics, such as calculus or topology, or establishing a neurological theory of visual perception, or by anticipating some of the modern findings of cognitive science, Leonardo was the first "deep ecologist" who intuitively understood the gaia hypothesis and saw the "underlying conception of the living world as being fundamentally interconnected, highly complex, creative, and embued with cognitive intelligence." Leonardo was a deeply spiritual person in whom a sense of "all life is holy" reigned supreme.

Leonardo's a fascinating character, obviously, and Capra presents a fairly unique way of approaching him through the notebooks, where Leo uses his drawings to express what would words or the mathematics of his time could not. Perhaps there was something in his visual perception and conception of the world that allowed him to see the unity in things, as Capra asserts. But ultimately, I'm not convinced. For me, Capra was not able to express in words what Leonardo saw. Perhaps Capra is a bit too enthusiastic in his presentation, maybe a little journalistic? In any case, I didn't feel the depth of knowledge to be ultimately satisfying. Perhaps in making connections between seeming disparate ideas--Leonardo and modern science, Buddhism and modern physics (in the Tao of Science) there are really too many points, too many dissimilarities at the end of the day, that get glossed over. The book succeeds in piquing my interest in Leonardo and perhaps as seeing him more of a precursor to modern thought than I would have supposed, but ultimately the book doesn't convince me, doesn't make those connections with the depth and authority needed to make the argument. I bought the book last year for the high school library, and that's about the right level for this book. Somehow, I expected more from Capra.

Author: Capra, Fritjof

Date Published: 2007

Length: 352 pp

electronic print

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Isn't the fifteenth century Renaissance in Italy the most important period in modern history? I mean, it was the time when our culture experienced a rebirth of learning, of curiosity, of individuality after centuries of the "Dark Ages." As Sir Kenneth Clark remarked in the first episode of "Civilisation," we came through by the skin of our teeth.

Of course, that is a gross simplification of history. Clark, after all, was talking about Charlemagne in that first episode, and we can really look back to the 12th century, to the "Children of Aristotle"--Averroes, Abelard, Aquinas et al--as igniting the sparks of the rebirth of learning. Still, something extraordinary happened in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that did lead to the opening of the west in the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on past the modern age and on through to our post-modern predicaments. Outside of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini, what happened? And why Italy at that time?

Jacob Burkhardt gives one of the first modern interpretations of the Renaissance. In fifteenth century Italy, Burkhardt says, "man became a spiritual individual…and recognized himself as such." Men became devoted to their own individual development as summed up by the great artist, architect, engineer Alberti: "Men can do all things if they will."  Burkhardt's main thesis is that this development was "due above all to the political circumstances of Italy." Whereas the other states of Europe were beginning to coalesce into modern nations or empires, Italy was still fragmented into a number of warring factions that were able to resist incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire. Much of that fragmentation was due to Rome, ironically enough, and the continuing struggle between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufen family ruling the empire. The Papacy still had illusions of political power, even though it had so recently returned to Rome after the "Babylonian Captivity," and had even more recently ended the "western schism" of the church, when as many as four different popes or "anti-popes" claimed jurisdiction over the Church, in 1417. This was the age of the condottieri who either worked as thugs for hire for any number of political factions or would grab power on their own and rule the state with force of arms. "Intrigue, armaments, leagues, corruption, and treason make up the outward history of Italy at this period." Men grabbed and held onto power through their own "fitness…worth and capacity," than through birthright or law. There was "no other nobility than personal merit."

This age of political intrigue and moral chaos fostered the growth of skepticism and individualism. "The spirit of the people, now awakened to self consciousness, sought for some new and stable ideal on which to rest." This coincided with the recovery of a number of Latin and Greek texts that sought for the answers to life's problems and mysteries outside the church.  Eventually these texts "were held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge." Humanists became the speech writers and the spin doctors of their day while employed by the princes or the papacy, but more importantly, educating those princes and their families. "Social intercourse…was based simply on the existence of an educated class."

The breach in medieval thought and religion by humanism was the opening for great art and for modern science. Now artists and courtiers began to experience the world more objectively and to experience the outward world as "seen and felt as something beautiful." The discovery of nature led to close observations of the external world, and "Italy…held incomparably the highest place among European nations in mathematics and natural sciences." "The great earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and form absorbed most of the higher faculties."

The great reawakening of fifteenth century Italy was the discovery of the individual. Burkhardt tells us that "the human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life." Individuality was sought for its own sake, not in the mastery of a particular skill or branch of knowledge, but for the whole man, the l'uomo universale, who "mastered all the elements of the culture of the age." The foremost example, of course, is Leonardo, who was not only a great painted, a great engineer, a great architect and city planner, a great inventor, a great party planner, but he also played a mean lute, sang beautifully, and was a good athlete to boot. And although Benvenuto Cellini was a crook and a murderer, Burkhardt tells us, "He is a man who can do all and does do all…he lives…as a significant type of modern spirit." As with ancient Greece, this individualism led to an emphasis on glory and the "cult of historical greatness." It was "the burning desire to achieve something great and memorable."

This grasping after glory, this boundless ambition and thirst for greatness, had a dark side. "The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism." Individuals saw themselves as freed from the restraints of law and justice.  Premeditated crime, murder, assassination, and revenge were symptoms of a "grave moral crisis." It was Machiavelli who objectively understood the realities and necessities of power politics--whatever it takes to help the state survive and thrive. He said, " We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above all others." And Burkhardt makes it clear that this moral morass finally caught up with them when the condottieri/usurper Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro, who was one of Leonardo's major patrons, ignited  an invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, setting off a whole series of French-Italian wars that eventually resulted in the sack of Florence and Rome in 1527.  With that defeat and the "Spanish enslavement" of Italy, the civilization of the renaissance in Italy began to shut down. "The Sack of Rome in 1527 scattered scholars, no less than artists, in every direction." Eventually the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent put an end to it all: "the Counter-Reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people." But, Burkhardt adds, it probably saved the papacy from being totally secularized as it had come close to being during the term of the Borgias, and it probably also saved Italy from "relapse into barbarism which would have awaited it under Turkish rule."

So the conditions for the development of the Renaissance are the same conditions that eventually led to its destruction. On the one hand, "the Italian Renaissance must be called the mother of the modern age," and on the other, it is an amoral "school for scandal, the like of which the world cannot show." The conditions for greatness are also the conditions for evil and depravity. Great creativity and freedom come at the price of great destruction and suffering. Do we want greatness? Do we want safety and civility? Are they incompatible?

Author: Burckhardt, Jacob

Date Published: 1860

Length: 385 pp

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Ulysses

Well, OK, it's taken over 40 years to get through my first reading of Ulysses, and my first take is: I read it, but I don't get it. I don't mean that I didn't understand the writing, although there was a lot of tough sledding in some of the sections. What I really don't understand is why so many people wax eloquently about its being the greatest novel ever written. I'm going to assume that the fault lies not in the book but in myself, so really, I feel the need to start reading it all over again, at least with some idea of what lies ahead. Only, maybe I'll wait a bit first, maybe revisiting Dubliners and Portrait first.

I decided early on to just tackle the book on its own terms and just plow ahead without a whole lot of scaffolding. I bought a copy of "Ulysses Annotated" to help elucidate some of the more obscure allusions and references, but it just slowed me down, and I decided that I could decipher enough of them to get by. Likewise, I decided to eschew any online help until I had finished the book. One major prop that I used was an audio reading of the book by Jim Norton, so I listened to the book while reading the text. I found out early that I could not listen without reading, but the listening certainly enriched the reading. Things really picked up for me when we purchased an iPad this summer, and I kept the book cued up with both text and audio on the same device. Unfortunately, the electronic version of the text wasn't all that great, however, and it was a bit irritating when the audio and the text weren't saying the same thing. I'll stick with print the next time around, although I do have to say that I thought that the audio version was a fairly masterful reading, especially Molly Bloom's soliloquy by Marcella Riordan.

So, just some initial reactions here. You may not wish to proceed any further if you have plans on reading the book and want to approach it with a fresh outlook. And if you have read the book, you'll probably wonder how I can be so dense.

First, and most obviously, it took me quite a while to catch on that Leopold was a Jew. Put this in the doh! category. Did I ever feel foolish when it finally dawned on me. Like when "The Citizen" decides to sic his dog on Poldy. And then it took me quite a bit of time to realize that Molly was getting banged by Blazes Boylan. That very day. Another big doh! And then that led to this whole question of whether Bloom was really pimping Molly to Blazes. I'm still not quite so sure about that. I do think that he stayed away from their apartment all day  to avoid a confrontation with Molly and Boylan. He would have had to make a stink about it, and Boylan was bankrolling the musical tour featuring Molly. So maybe Bloom was whoring her all along.

But then Leopold has thoughts, fantasies really, of lawsuits, revenge, divorce, and murder just before dropping off to sleep, and he implies that Boylan is just the latest in a long, rather long, string of inamoratti that Molly has taken over the past few years. At the same time, Molly implies that Leopold has pushed her into the affair with Boylan and has talked of her posing for nude photos in the past. She also intimates that poor old Poldy is pretty much a ne'er do well who can't keep a decent job, perhaps because he has been something of a political agitator. But Molly is pretty much out of her depths in trying to understand Bloom. As he with her. She says that he could no longer get it up with her since the death of their newborn son some years ago, and she's ready to move on with her life. So then I'm wondering whether Joyce is really just parodying the mistrust and misunderstanding between all married couples, or even between all people. Is that running commentary really the voice that runs below all relationships?

When you get right down to it, Leopold and Molly are a couple of middle-class, middle-aged gits. Their concerns are so banal and their wants are conventional and predictable: "Every summer we can rent a cottage/In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear." Bloom's chasing around for the Keyes ad was demeaning, not to mention the little money making schemes he was continually cooking up in his head, and his comments with Stephen in the cab stand as well as his own kitchen were commonplace. Molly struck me repeatedly as a mindless, if somewhat horny, twit. But maybe we are all banal, mindless, horny twits with conventional and predictable wants (gfree says from his own little cottage in the mountains).

Then I wonder, geez, is there anybody admirable in the book? I mean, there are times that Stephen seems like an entitled little bastard, although he hasn't got anywhere to turn. He got his nose bent out of joint at Buck Mulligan and Haines and managed to kick himself out of his own lodgings, and then he pretty much spends most of his salary on whoring and boozing that night before being "rescued" by Bloom. And he certainly can't go back to Simon Dedalus' house, who doesn't seem to have the money or the gumption to provide a decent meal for his two younger daughters. Others in the book are either contemptible, like "the citizen" or Deasy, or relatively minor.

But there is the language. Has anyone described taking a shit as well as Joyce? Or trying to hold back farts, like Molly, so as to not wake Bloom? I did have to do a double take when I realized that Bloom got his rocks off when getting a sneak peek at Gerty's bloomers. Many of Stephen's musings were dense and packed with so many allusions juxtaposed next to each other that they were difficult to puzzle out. So many styles, so many voices. I found some to be entirely tedious, like the succession of newspaper headlines describing the action in the offices of the Freeman, and some I just had to let wash over me, hoping for some clues about what was happening, like the dream/nightmare/hallucination sequence just outside the entrance to nighttown. It friggin' went on for 170 pages.

So, yes, obviously I've missed something, and I need to plunge into the book yet again. But at least I'll do so with some idea of what to expect. But for my understanding of the novel right now, after the initial foray, is that it is nowhere near the stature of "Grapes of Wrath" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls", or "To the Lighthouse," but I'll withhold making any further judgment until I give it another shot.

Author: Joyce, James

Date Published: 1922

Length: 783 pp & 27 hr 19 min

print, electronic print, and audio

Narrators: Norton, Jim and Riordan, Marchella

Human

Why do we act, think, and feel the way that we do? That's what Michael  Gazzaniga sets out to explain in "Human," using the latest research in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. But it's one thing to look at the evolution of structures in our brains, or at antecedents of our behavior in ape behavior, or even at the activation of neurons during different aspects of our consciousness, but Gazzaniga wants to elucidate what it is that makes human beings unique and to do so without any reference to ego or soul or psyche or supernatural agency. And its kinda interesting that he kind of ends on a concept of "left brain interpreter" that sounds suspiciously like it could be any of those.

Gazzaniga comes with some major bona fides as the head of a cognitive science institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he has done some major research on the cognition of people with split brains. The roster of people he has worked with is something of a who's who of neuroscience, people like Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Dennett. He cites the big guns in the field, so much of the important reseach going on in cognition and neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.

So why is it that I'm being talked down to with this book? It's like Gazzaniga decided to write a book on neuroscience for a popular audience and felt like he had to adopt a popular voice and make a number of cutesy asides in order to reach his audience. This was a book that I enjoyed a lot more in retrospect when I was able to look over my highlights and see past that voice. It does have a lot of good information that I was able to pull together better through reflection than on first reading.

Gazzaniga begins by looking at evolutionary antecedents for different stuctures in the brain, making a number of comparisons with ape brain and behavior. He presents evidence that the brain is continuing to evolve, with major growth spurts occurring as recently as 40,000 years ago coinciding with the development of speech and culture or even 6,000 years ago with the rise of urbanization and agriculture. (So where would that leave a climatolgical explanation of the domestication of emmer or eincorn wheat as advanced by someone like Jared Diamond?)  Perhaps as importantly as growth, however, has been a number of structural changes such as hemispheric differentiation, allowing more specialization and automation of certain brain functions, or the growth of particular areas of the pre-frontal cortex, especially those involved with memory, planning, abstract thinking, and cognitive flexibility.

Part of the "relentless progression of increasing relative brain size during the evolution of hominids," came about as "an adaptation to the complexities of social living." Groups became larger and more complex, and the cognitive demand for living in these groups "drove brain size expansion." I think that this gets at the heart of a lot of what Gazzaniga has to say: "what the human brain does best, what it seems built to do: think socially." Our ability to live in large, complex groups really depends on what seems to be a uniquely human characteristic, the "Theory of Mind," or our ability to accurately predict another person's moods, intentions, states of mind. Theory of Mind now seems pretty dependent on the existence of "mirror neurons" in our brain that are specifically attuned to others, especially allowing us to mimic them, perhaps the root of language and learning. 

Language facilitates social reciprocity with larger numbers of individuals (it's a whole lot easier and more efficient to talk with people than spend an inordinate amount of time picking lice from their fur), increasing the odds of survival, but also introducing the ability to lie and cheat. Protecting the validity of social reciprocity underlies what Gazzaniga and others (like Jonathan Haidt) call "universal moral modules," built on feelings of guilt or shame to prevent our own cheating, or on rage and anger to deter cheating in others. Patricia Churchland calls this "constraint satisfaction" in her new book, and it leads to a whole discussion about how much of our morality is biological and how much is rule-based, how much of our moral thinking is based on the kinship based hunter-gather groups that dominates so much of the human past, and how germane that past is to living in large multi-ethic urban environments.

For if we are left with biological constraint satisfaction for basing our morality, we also have to deal with the fact that we are hardwired for nonreflective beliefs and a bias toward negativity in our preconscious apprehension of new things and novel stimuli. First off, we have a "hot" emotional system that responds quickly and automatically to fear, anger, rage, and disgust. It operates directly through the amygdala, bypassing the "cooler," more reflective circuit operating primarily in the hippocampus and frontal lobes. But even then, most of the information that reaches consciousness has already been processed, classified, stored as a memory, and compared to other memories  prior to its emergence into our awareness. Most of our beliefs about the world have already been formed before we even know that they exist. "Nonreflective beliefs are the default mode of our thinking." Not only that, but they control most of our reflective thinking, since "the better  a reflective belief merges with a nonreflective belief, the more plausible it seems, the more intuitive and easier to learn or accept." We look for these plausible explanations, then, even if our information isn't all that accurate, making any approach to analytical, non-intuitive thinking extremely difficult, and in Gazzaniga's eyes, extremely rare. I guess that Nietzsche was right all along. We continually seek bad reasons for confirming what we already know.

If Gazzaniga seems to confirm Nietzsche on the one hand, he perhaps confirms Kant on the other. For what sounds kind of like "a priori" thinking to me comes from the idea that a major part of our nonreflective belief system is built on the concept of essentialism: we are hardwired to believe that things have inherent properties and characteristics, "a thing perceivable to the senses can have an embodied unobservable essence that is real," a quality that develops in our thinking by about the age of four or five. We also seem to attribute consciousness to animate objects investing them with "theory of mind" much like our own. We naturally assume that they have agency and purpose. Gazzaniga is saying that while we endow our pets with personalities, it just ain't necessarily so. We do the same with nature, a trait that Richard Dawkins calls  our HADD, Hyperactive Agent Detection Device: "we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent." (Dawkins, The God Delusion) We are Idealists and Cartesians before we are even aware of it.

One of the major essences that we buy into is the idea of ourselves, that which I feel makes me, me and you feel makes you, you (Spinoza called  it the conatus.) We each of us believe first of all in our own essences, which Gazzaniga says comes from specific processes in the brain. But then he gets a bit vague about these processes. When we take in information and store it as a memory, we first try to make sense of it. We fit it in with what we already know and use this knowledge to construct scenarios and give meaning to things and events. Gazzaniga says that we have a "left hemispheric interpreter" that forms hypotheses about all sensory inputs and processes going on, continually constructing meaning and narrative: "the left hemispheric interpreter constructs theories to assimilate perceived information into a comprehensible whole," even if the information turns out to be faulty and the theory demonstrably false. That's just  a part of who we are. And one of these theories is the sense of self: "I submit that it is the left-brain interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative, and the self-image, taking the information from various inputs, from the “neuronal workspace,” and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input."

But this left brain interpreter is a theoretical construct on Gazzaniga's part. There is no specific part of the brain, other than left hemisphere, where it might reside. It seems to be an "emergent property" that comes from "distributed processes throughout the brain." So, really, you could call it ego, or psyche, or soul, or whatever, and it would have as much validity as "left brain interpreter."

So, yes, Gazzaniga's book has a lot of good information, so much more than I've touched on here. But I guess I'm still left with a number of questions about its significance. Do I not have any say in the way that I think and the way that I feel? If I've already made up my mind before I make up my mind, then where does that leave the ideas of free will and responsibility? I feel like I've made a lot of important decisions, both good and bad, that have determined the directions my life has taken, and done so after a lot of careful thought and deliberation, at least sometimes. I guess that I need at least the illusion that I have some control over my life. It might be one of those demonstrably false theories developed by my left brain interpreter, but it does give me a reason to keep on keepin' on.

Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S.

Date Published: 2008

Length: 464 pp

electronic print