Monday, October 20, 2008

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.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Posting and reading are slow 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.  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.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

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)