Old or defunct literary & philosophical hotspots in Vienna

I've made a Google map of some of the old cafe locations and other favourite haunts of philosophers and writers in Vienna (with a focus on the early 20th century). It's a work in progress.


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Here's a listing and map of current Vienna cafes:

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Brian Moore published The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (originally called simply Judith Hearne), in 1955 after he had left Belfast for Montreal. For this book Moore won the Author's Club First Novel Award (although it wasn't really his first novel). The book appears on the Guardian's list of 1000 books 'everyone must read'. A 1988 movie of the same name starred Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. Graham Greene apparently called Moore his 'favourite living novelist' (though I can't find the source of this quotation). Here's more about Moore by Ralph McInerny, and a review of this 1955 novel by John Self.

Moore here plumbs the turbid soul of a desperately lonely woman who's on the verge of becoming an old spinster. She's done in by the repressive mores of her culture, which she has internalized and of which she's largely uncritical. (Moore based Hearne loosely on one of his mother's friends, Mary Judith Keogh.) The other character whose thoughts are probed at length is James Madden, Hearne's last chance at a husband. He, too, has outlived his dreams and (like Hearne) drifts though his days in fear and frustration, which are relieved only by vices that promise short-term relief but long-term doom.

Moore's story is marred by some heavy-handed symbols (an empty church, e.g.), and I grew impatient with the protracted torments to which the author subjected poor Judy Hearne. Nevertheless, the book is a thorough and disturbing study of the corrosion and eventual demolition of a life by loneliness.

Hearne seeks refuge from her isolation in weekly visits with a happy and prosperous family whose patriarch she has known since childhood. She half knows that the family members generally dread her visits, but she goes to them anyway out of sheer desperation for some human contact. These portions of the book are pretty painful, for Moore makes it clear that the family members don't take Hearne seriously as a person. They treat her more as an ongoing bad joke.

This dismissiveness is echoed near the end of the story by the other tenants in Hearne's rooming house. Hearne drops from even this sad little society after a night of drinking that leaves her singing and talking to herself for hours on end in her room. After that, her housemates stop taking her seriously. They see her as a 'nutter' who needs to be evicted. As in her visits with the happy family, then, she's surrounded by people who don't respect her as a somewhat rational agent roughly on a par with themselves. Instead of recognizing her as a person, they see her as a nuisance and soon-to-be outcast.

In the end, Hearne is deposited in a residential hospital, where her interactions are largely with people who are, well, paid to interact with her and the other patients. In a cruel paradox, her life is now marked by not only a dearth of meaningful relationships but also a lack of privacy.

Another Roadside Attraction

Tom Robbins serves up a hippy-fied Nietzsche: God is dead -- more accurately, Jesus is dead, and so, too, is the 'God the Father' myth that co-opted him and that has structured our society. The old habits of thought, feeling and practice that underpin this structure are now just constricting. Their demise is liberating and should be celebrated. But what replaces the old system? Apparently, it's some sort of nature mysticism -- we are all 'slowed down light', at one with the energy at the heart of everything.

Okay, this sort of thing can easily become a big, flaky mess, but after about fifty pages I succumbed to the grooviness of it all -- well, I enjoyed the story but wasn't swept up by the early New Age philosophy.

I prefer Robbins' next book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but that might be because I read that one in my 20's, which is apparently when one is most susceptible to Robbins' magical-mystical writing.

Allegedly, Elvis Presley was reading Another Roadside Attraction just before he died. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing....

Neat articles on Coetzee and Munro

I started a subscription to The Raritan, a quarterly that is published at Rutgers University. It's too bad their articles aren't on-line, because their latest issue has an article by Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and philosopher at the University of Chicago. The article concerns the ethical dimensions in J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. I haven't read Coetzee yet, but have been meaning to do so, partly because he's known as a philosophical novelist and partly because his book Slow Man has a character named Paul Rayment.

Another nice article I've happened upon is Margaret Atwood's introduction to the Everyman collection of Alice Munro's stories. Atwood introduces the term 'Sowesto' to refer to southwestern Ontario, an area from which my father's side of the family hales and where I spent part of my childhood. I've started reading some Munro as part of the Canadian Book Challenge. Atwood's article (and AR's note about regionalist authors) has got me looking for other Sowesto writers.

Posting and reading are slooooowww this term ....

This academic term, I decided to teach five courses (post-secondary). I have about 410 students, many of whom send me e-mail within three days of an assignment due date or test.

I have some very bright students and some great discussions in class, but it was silly of me to have taken on this many courses.

As a result, I'm not reading much fiction. Wait, I suppose much work in bioethics and logic counts as fiction, so let's say I'm not reading much literary fiction.

I hope soon to post something about Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, which I'm reading as part of the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge. After that, I wasn't (until just recently) sure of what Canadian books to read. Shamefully, I've read maybe two Canadian novels, so the world is my oyster.

Fortunately, just last week I met Virgil Duff, an executive editor at the University of Toronto Press. There I was on the patio of the Artful Dodger, drinking a pint while reading Fifth Business,* when a man at the next table, Virgil, put down his own book and inquired about what I was reading. After some discussion of Canadian authors, he offered me a 6-page photocopy of a list of Canadian novels that he's read, with the best ones listed in bold. Actually, he said, he's given copies of this list to anyone he meets who has an interest in CanLit. He used to be an editor for the Macmillan Company of Canada, and in that capacity ushered some novels through the publication process.

Needless to say, I take this chance meeting as a divine intervention in my aimless CanLit reading and will duly include some of these titles in my Book Challenge endeavours. Thanks, Virgil, for your reading advice.

*Hold on -- wasn't I just whining about my heavy work load this term? And yet, there I was on a pub patio just last week?! Well, you must understand that in Toronto, when in October one happens upon a lovely, sunny day that is so warm that the pub patios are open, and one has just finished a hard day's work, one would have to be possessed of superhuman powers of puritanical self-abnegation to saunter, amble or meander right on past the patio at one's favourite pub. After all, one thinks at the time, this is likely the last 'quality patio time' until May.

Tillich on instrumental reason

"… [A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means." (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, pp. 136-7)

Best of e-reader posts

I'm collecting here some of the more interesting items I've found about the continuing evolution of e-readers:

Sony opens its e-reader to 'outside' publishers (allowing for a greater selection of books on its device).

Good critical feedback on Sony Reader.

Prototype of a more flexible reader (Plastic Logic's more flexible device has an 8.5 X 11 display, which allows for a pop-up, touch-sensitive keyboard; and since it loads Office documents easily, it might take over some of the functions of a laptop -- and it will still work after you beat it with a shoe).

Dual-display prototype from Berkeley and Maryland researchers (you can hold it like a book, seeing two pages at once, and the pages can be from different documents; or you can fold it to see just one page at a time).

Update (Sept. 6): New versions of the Sony and Kindle readers will soon hit the market.