The Saunterer

Clive James on the requirements for book reviews

    Book reviews should provide rounded information. In Clive James’s words:

    A good book review should do an evocative job of pointing out quality. “Look at this! Isn’t it good?” should be the critic’s basic attitude. Occasionally, however, you have to say: “Look at this! Isn’t it awful?” In either case, it’s important to quote from the book. If more book reviewers had actually quoted from the mortal prose of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” hardly anyone would have thought it was wonderful, although they all would have read it anyway. Criticism has no real power, only influence.

    (Quoted from page 8 of The New York Times Book Review, April 14, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Clive James, click here. For images of or relating to Clive James, click here.

Edward Abbey on the mistake of having effortless means of encountering nature

    One of the delights (maybe the chief) of reading Edward Abbey is he never beats around the bush:

    All of this [the new road], the engineers and politicians and bankers will tell you, makes the region easily accessible to everybody, no matter how fat, feeble or flaccid. That is a lie.
    It is a lie. For those who go there now, smooth, comfortable, quick and easy, sliding through as slick as grease, will never be able to see what we saw. They will never feel what we felt. They will never know what we knew, or understand what we cannot forget.

    (Quoted from page 59 of Roads in the Wilderness, by Jedediah S. Rogers. The University of Utah Press, 2013.)
    For information about Edward Abbey, click here. For images of or relating to Edward Abbey, click here.
    For Jedediah S. Rogers’ home page, click here. For images of or relating to Jedediah S. Rogers, click here.

György Doczi on why nature awes us

    György Doczi has it:

    When we look into the patterns of an apple blossom, a seashell, or a swinging pendulum we discover a perfection, an incredible order, that awakens in us a sense of awe that we knew as children. Something reveals itself that is infinitely greater than we are and yet part of us; the limitless emerges from limits.

    (Quoted from page 3 of Orion Nature Quarterly, Volume 4, 1985.)
    For a brief biography of György Doczi, click here. For images of or relating to György Doczi, click here.

Herbert Spencer on the connection of education and civilization

    From Herbert Spencer we have this large truth in a few words:

    Education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

    (Quoted from page 83 of Herbert Spencer on Education, by Herbert Spencer. Cambridge University Press, 1932.)
    For a brief biography of Herbert Spencer, click here. For images of or relating to Herbert Spencer, click here.

Chris Hadfield on how being gifted can limit you

    Strange as it may seem, pity those to whom proficiency comes easily. Hear astronaut Chris Hadfield:

    The astronauts who seem to have the hardest time with it are, interestingly enough, often the ones who are most naturally talented. Just as some people can pick up a golf club for the first time and play incredibly well, some astronauts are simply more gifted than the rest of us. They have great hands and feet -– the first time they got in a plane, they could fly as well as or better than the instructor. Or they’re academic superstars with dazzling interpersonal skills. Whatever their particular combination of gifts, they’re standouts, and until they got to JSC [Johnson Space Center], everything was easy: they won the flying competitions, aced all the tests, told the best stories -– all without breaking a sweat.
    Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.
    Even the most gifted person in the world will, at some point during astronaut training, cross a threshold where it’s no longer possible to wing it. The volume of complex information and skills to be mastered is simply too great to be able to figure it all out on the fly. Some get to this break point and realize they can’t continue to rely on raw talent –- they need to buckle down and study. Others never quite seem to figure that out and, in true tortoise-and-hare fashion, find themselves in a place they never expected to be: the back of the pack. They don’t know how to push themselves to the point of discomfort and beyond. Typically, they also don’t recognize their own weaknesses and are therefore reluctant to accept responsibility when things don’t turn out well. They’re not people you want on your crew when you’re laboring in wicked environmental conditions with very specialized equipment and a long list of goals to accomplish in a short period of time. They go from being considered rock stars to having a reputation as people you can’t count on when things are going badly.

    (Quoted from page 100 of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield. Little, Brown and Company, 2013)
    For a brief biography of Chris Hadfield, click here. For images of or relating to Chris Hadfield, click here.

H. M. Tomlinson on humanity’s sins

    We write this from the Cache Valley of northern Utah, once pristine, now polluted, overpopulated, its people a confirmation of H. M. Tomlinson’s observation a century ago:

    Of all the infernal uses to which a country can be put there is none like development. Let every good savage make incantation against it, or, if to some extent he has been developed, cross himself against the fructification of the evil. As for us whites, we are eternally damned, for we cannot escape the consequences of our past cleverness. The Devil has us on a complexity of strings, and some day will pull the whole lot tight.

    (Quoted from page 336 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of H. M. Tomlinson, click here. For images of or relating to H. M. Tomlinson, click here.

Krome Barratt on the meaning of beauty

    Note this goes beyond “beauty: you know it when you see it”:

    The word beautiful is defined as eminently satisfying to the senses and the mind. It seems to be applicable whenever a series of disparate elements are brought together to form a memorable pattern, a cohesive whole, a physical or conceptual unity.

    (Krome Barratt is quoted from page 127 of Lessons in Classical Drawing, by Juliette Aristides. Watson-Guptill Publications, 2011.)
    For images of or relating to Krome Barratt, click here.
    For a brief biography of Juliette Aristides, click here. For images of or relating to Juliette Aristides, click here.

E. Y. “Yip” Harburg on the magic in song

    Yip Harburg tells how composers make the magic happen:

    The magic in song only happens when the words give destination and meaning to the music and the music gives wings to the words. Together as a song they go places you’ve never been before.
    The reason is obvious: words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought. That’s the great advantage. To feel the thought. . . . And that’s why . . . you can teach more through song and you can rouse more through song than all the prose in the world or all the poems.    

    (Quoted from the front matter of Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?, by Yip Harburg. The University of Michigan Press, 1995.)
    For a brief biography of Yip Harburg, click here.
    For Yip Harburg, composer of the lyrics of Over the Rainbow, singing it, click here.
    For images of or relating to Yip Harburg, click here.

V. S. Ramachandran on how caricature works

    With this, V. S. Ramachandran takes the mystery out of caricature:

    Consider the way in which a skilled cartoonist produces a caricature of a famous face, say Nixon’s. What he does (unconsciously) is to take the average of all faces, subtract the average from Nixon’s face (to get the difference between Nixon’s face and all others) and then amplify the differences to produce a caricature. The final result, of course, is a drawing that is even more Nixon-like than the original.

    (V. S. Ramachandran is quoted from page 25 of The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, by Victor S. Navasky. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)
    For a brief biography of V. S. Ramachandran, click here. For images of or relating to V. S. Ramachandran, click here.
    For a brief biography of Victor S. Navasky, click here. For images of or relating to Victor S. Navasky, click here.

Janet Frame on how we are all exiles

    As Janet Frame puts it:

    At the moment of birth, or at the moment of consciousness of the first thought, every human being is an exile.

    (Quoted from page 57 of Musicologia, by Robin Maconie. The Scarecrow Press, 2010.)
    For a brief biography of Janet Frame, click here. For images of or relating to Janet Frame, click here.
    For a brief biography of Robin Maconie, click here. For images of or relating to Robin Maconie, click here.