Follow-ups on earlier posts

Follow-up 1: Almost one year ago, I posted a list of UK philosophers who were among the combatants in WWI. I've added another name to that list: Leon Roth, who served in the Jewish Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. Like Rupert Clendon Lodge (see previous post), Roth won Oxford's John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy and taught at Manchester University before leaving England. Roth then taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

It's been easier to identify French or German philosophers who fought in WWI. I guess that's because France and Germany sent higher percentages of their male populations to one of the fronts, including many more middle-aged men, who were old enough to have begun a career in academic philosophy.

Follow-up 2: In October, I posted a note on Caporetto. Since then, Mark Thompson has written in the TLS about Hemingway's sources for descriptions of the battleground in A Farewell to Arms. Other American writers who volunteered for ambulance duty in WWI include John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. John McGrath Morris has written a book about Hemingway and Dos Passos: The Ambulance Drivers.

Follow-up 3: I ended my recent post on Hegel in Canada with a note about Rupert Clendon Lodge. As I noted in 2016, one of Lodge's undergrad students was Marshall McLuhan. Lodge also taught the novelist W. O. Mitchell, who based a character (Dr. Lyons) partly on Lodge in Since Daisy Creek. So, add this to my "philosophers in fiction" set of posts.

Also, while there's no Wikipedia entry for Rupert Clendon Lodge, his relatives are certainly well represented there. One of his uncles was a physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge. Another uncle was a historian, Sir Richard Lodge. Rupert's aunt was also a historian, Eleanor Constance Lodge (CBE). A third uncle was the mathematician Alfred Lodge. Rupert's grand-uncle was Rev. Samuel Lodge. Among Rupert's 1st-cousins were Alexander Lodge and Oliver W. F. Lodge. Still more of his relatives have Wiki entries.

Links mostly about German novels

T. T. Heine's poster for a Munich cabaret (depicting Marya Delvard)

The Tablet launches a series of monthly podcasts called 'Long Story Short' with an interview of Vivian Gornick about Rosa Luxemburg

Tom Wolfe on Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Norden's 1969 interview of McLuhan for Playboy

From Robert Zaretsky's review of The Pursuit of Laziness: an Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment: 'Diderot’s Rameau is a loafer for whom artistic creation means mimicry and regret. ... Other creations of Diderot... delight in doing nothing by the traditional standards of the West: the Tahitian natives in his Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville for whom mocking those same western standards is about as busy as they get; or Jacques and his master in Jacques the Fatalist, content with interruptions and detours in their own lives that mock our traditional standards.'

Bomb Magazine's1988 interview of Gregor von Rezzori (via Three Percent), and Three Percent's review of Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Two of Irmgard Keun's books have just been translated into English:

1. From Other Press: 'Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was [Keun's] The Artificial Silk Girl.'

2. From Melville House: 'Now, at last, [Keun's] After Midnight is available in the United States, the first title in Melville House‘s Neversink Library.'

Jenny McPhee discusses both of these books by Keun, and Salonica Monica reviews Artificial Silk Girl. Here's more about Keun by Sarah Bakewell.

Daniel Mendelsohn analyzes the women in Theodor Fontane's novels, and Jane Librizzi reviews Fontane's newly re-issued Irretrievable.

Michael Wood reviews five of Heinrich Böll's books, which have been re-issued by Melville House.

Kenji Fujishima on a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra: 'Whereas Mahler often laid out his struggles right on the surface, to the point where some might find his music impossibly overwrought, Bruckner—in his symphonies, in particular—often finds more serene, if sometimes no less anguished, expressions of his musical quests for God.'

From Glenn Gould's 1979 documentary on Toronto: 'I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colours of any kind depress me.' The documentary is about 48 minutes long. In it, Gould appears to like Toronto mainly because it doesn't much intrude on his consciousness. And he sings Mahler to elephants at the zoo. In case the above link to the documentary doesn't work, here's the first of the six YouTube clips from it.

Here's a passage about a strange crackpot named Alfred Schuler, which I came across while reading about fin-de-siècle Munich: 'Nietzsche was even the intended recipient of Schuler's occult therapy. For two years Schuler made preparations to cure Nietzsche's madness through the freely interpreted rite of an ancient Corybantic dance. It was never implemented, partly because of the difficulty of enlisting suitable youths for the cultic dance.' (Quoted from p. 79 of The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany -- 1890 - 1990, by Steven E. Ascheim)

McLuhan in the Walrus

The latest issue of the Walrus has an article on Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer. I knew that McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism, but I hadn't realized how strong was his antipathy towards Protestantism. Heer says that McLuhan blamed pretty much all that's wrong in modern western culture on Protestant attitudes. For McLuhan, the Reformation was a long, slippery slide into a real slough of despond. According to Heer, McLuhan reached this conclusion during his sojourn in a vast, blighted waste that the Protestants had left in their path (Winnipeg). I wonder if his dislike of Protestantism is one of the sources of the friction between McLuhan and some of his United Church colleagues in the English Department at the University of Toronto (such as Northrop Frye and N. J. Endicott).

Heer refers to some McLuhan clips on YouTube. However, the one from which Heer quotes most extensively is a longer piece on Google Video in which McLuhan goes head to head with Norman Mailer. The discussion was recorded by the CBC's The Summer Way in 1968. Heer includes this neat quotation of McLuhan from that broadcast:

Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

 Here's the whole discussion:


While poking around on the Walrus' site, I found this older piece on McLuhan by Lewis Lapham. Lapham quotes McLuhan as follows:

Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I’m resolutely against…it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button.

Finally, here's a reminiscence of McLuhan by an acquaintance of his.

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Walrus Magazine has an intriguing article about Wyndham Lewis, an unlikeable English writer and artist who, sadly, was born in Canada. 'Sadly' for him, since he despised Canada (especially Toronto), and 'sadly' for us, since he was a racist and anti-Semite, which is clear from his political tracts in the 1930's. Indeed, of all the literary and visual artists whose sense of judgment was impugned by their political allegiances in that 'low dishonest decade,' it's hard to imagine anyone who was as thoroughly discredited as Lewis, whose 1932 book on Hitler included a chapter called 'Adolf Hitler a Man of Peace'. To his credit, Lewis did at least come to oppose the Nazis (shortly before WWII).

It says a lot about Toronto in that era that when Lewis lived there during the war, he (bigot though he was) came to detest the city for its intolerance. That is one theme of the Walrus piece that did not surprise me. European intellectuals seldom had much good to say about 'Toronto, the good' before the 1960's. Another Englishman who spent some time in Toronto during the war was A. J. Ayer. He was learning how to kill a man 'with his bare hands' (according to his autobiography) at a secret spy school east of the city. He characterized the Toronto of that time as a 'cold, Scots Calvinist town.' Actually, according to what I've heard, the northern Irish did more to shape Toronto's Calvinist ethos than the Scots did (which might explain why the Belfast of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne seemed so familiar to me).

(This Irish Protestant influence was more pronounced in eastern Ontario, where the Orange Lodge still operates, and one can find an Orange Hall in several towns [such as Peterborough].)

A surprising discovery for me in the Walrus article was the revelation of Lewis's strong influence on Marshall McLuhan, as is attested by a 1967 interview in which McLuhan credits Lewis with the insight that 'the man-made environment is ... a programmed teaching machine.' Here's an excerpt: