Bob R. Bogle (Author of Frank Herbert)

Bob R Bogle rated a book liked it Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
For some several decades now I've spent a great deal of time musing on literary matters. Not brooding over such matters, nor delving in deep study. However, literature has been on my mind generally, and more or less perpetually. It all started when I ...more
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Bob R Bogle rated a book liked it James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays by Mary T. Reynolds	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Featuring 19 essays, or excerpts from essays, written by various critics, and spanning the life and works of the celebrated author, 1993's James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mary T Reynolds, is a mixed bag. I see I purchased this ...more
Aug 01, 2025 11:36AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book did not like it Dracula (Signet Classics) by Bram Stoker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
We're cautioned to resist appraising the actions of our predecessors through the distorted lens of contemporaneity. But we can admire the writing of the likes of Homer or Shakespeare as they have come to us while appropriately disdaining more timely ...more
Jul 14, 2025 01:33PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book really liked it Pound-Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce With Pound's Critical Essays and Articles About Joyce by Ezra Pound	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. E ...more
Jan 13, 2025 09:43AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was amazing Notes for Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Don Gifford	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of D ...more
Sep 08, 2024 09:39AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book liked it The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us ...more
Aug 09, 2024 01:20PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was ok The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design by Peter A. Lawrence	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and His ...more
Aug 09, 2024 08:35AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book really liked it The First World War by John Keegan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innoc ...more
Jul 21, 2024 02:35PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was ok Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue trans ...more
Jul 21, 2024 01:17PM · 1 like · like · see review
Bob R Bogle and 6 other people liked dohutch's review of Cellular and Molecular Immunology: "this book is my villain origin story."
Jul 21, 2024 01:15PM · see review

Bob R Bogle rated a book liked it

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
by Raymond Carver

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For some several decades now I've spent a great deal of time musing on literary matters. Not brooding over such matters, nor delving in deep study. However, literature has been on my mind generally, and more or less perpetually.

It all started when I For some several decades now I've spent a great deal of time musing on literary matters. Not brooding over such matters, nor delving in deep study. However, literature has been on my mind generally, and more or less perpetually.

It all started when I was 4 or 5 years old and my mother took us frequently to the library. Anyone who thinks physical libraries are outmoded in our electronic era today is mistaken. The magic of borrowing physical books, at least for the youngest readers, cannot be overstated. A few years later, through some book club or something, I was given the first three books of my own: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Story of Doctor Doolittle, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I read these all several times. The Lewis Carroll is the only one which remains a favorite.

What are these "favorites?" Why do I remain fond of Alexander Pope when he's so little read today, especially in contrast to his contemporaries? Moby-Dick was never assigned reading for me, but when I eventually got around to it, I recognized its power as a masterpiece right away. Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, and I think many would-be readers who give it up never persist long enough to penetrate Joyce's screening layers of ironic erudition to perceive its comic core. The Cyclops episode I've long thought to be the funniest in that book, but now that I'm currently reading The Cattle of the Sun very closely, I'm beginning to believe that this episode is even funnier.

One of my literary questions, seldom called into full consciousness, has been whether or no there is some general innate magic in what we call literature. Surely the professors would have us believe so, waxing poetic as they do about innumerable authors and their works. And yet again and again I've encountered readers, myself included, for whom some classic or other falls flat. Madame Bovary was one, for example, which didn't work for me. Was the translation the problem? Maybe, but I doubt it. I feel guilty when this kind of thing happens. Everyone loves this book. What have I done wrong? What have I missed? Dracula was another, which I found to be awful. And don't get me started about Lord of the Flies.

I'm now starting to move beyond these guilty feelings, however, for when I consider the novels and stories which are resonant for me, I'm realizing it's not the implicit literary magic which appeals so much, even though that is often there. No, it has to do with the mind of the author with whom I am in communication across dividing decades, or centuries, or more. Lewis Carroll, Alexander Pope, Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, James Joyce, and so on: these are my people in ways that Hugh Lofting, Frank Baum, Gustave Flaubert, Bram Stoker, and (Heaven forfend!) William Golding never can be. It is the mind-to-mind connection that matters: not the literature-for-literature's sake.

Which is why, although I'd looked forward so very much to reading Raymond Carver's first collection of short stories, Will You Please be Quiet, Please?, powerfully recommended by so many advocates of literature whose opinions I respect, I must say that this book does not do it for me. I don't dislike the book: I simply do not strike a harmonious chord with Carver's authorial mind in the way I wanted and expected to. I do know that I am in the minority, and if you read it, your milage may vary quite a lot from mine.

Don't put too much credence in the reviews people scribble down about books they've loved or hated. The main thing is to remain on your own reading journey, because really life is mostly about the stories we hear and tell: that's how we make our passage through the world. Find the authorial minds you can relate to, and be prepared for a sense of awe as you witness the world expanding dramatically all around you. ...more

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James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays
by Mary T. Reynolds

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Featuring 19 essays, or excerpts from essays, written by various critics, and spanning the life and works of the celebrated author, 1993's James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mary T Reynolds, is a mixed bag.

I see I purchased this Featuring 19 essays, or excerpts from essays, written by various critics, and spanning the life and works of the celebrated author, 1993's James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mary T Reynolds, is a mixed bag.

I see I purchased this book 8 years ago and have only got around to reading it now. (The Amazon webpage claims it is 99,998 pages long. My copy has only 238 pages.)

Some of the essays, or excerpts, propose insights I hadn't considered before. Richard Ellmann reads the early pages of Joyce's Portrait as a kind of flashback, thus: "We gradually realize that Stephen has a fever, and that what we have been reading is not a history but a deliberate hodgepodge of memories of his earlier school days and holidays at home, rendered with the discontinuity and intensity appropriate to fever." I certainly never considered this possibility before; I'm skeptical that I buy it now. But it is at least an interesting reading.

Denis Donoghue improbably attributes the phrase from the Portrait, "a day of dappled seaborne clouds," to Hugh Miller's The Testimony of the Rocks; or Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Perhaps he is right.

Phillip F Herring points out that, regarding "Eveline" in Dubliners, Hugh Kenner once asserted that our heroine saw that ships from the North Wall dock sailed to Liverpool (rather than directly to Buenos Aires), and so she suspected her sailor-boyfriend of duplicity. Seems dubious (unless Eveline was simply looking for an excuse to remain in Dublin).

Cheryl Herr considers Ovidian transformations in the Portrait: the "goatish creatures with human faces" in the sequence of Father Arnell's hellfire sermon and later, on the beach, Stephen's artistic transformation of the birdgirl.

Speaking, as we weren't, of chiasmata. Addressing the structure of the Portrait, Hugh Kenner cites Hans Walter Gabler's discovery that " . . . in Chapter I everything between the first row of asterisks and the second . . . takes place in a twenty-four-hour span . . . [and] the three episodes and diary of Chapter V reverse the overture and three episodes of Chapter I . . . "

In a kind of alchemical formula, A Walton Litz assures us that "It was Joyce's intention to disintegrate the well-made 'novel' into its origins, and then to perform a prodigious act of re-integration." Well . . . maybe.

James H Maddox creates a striking proportional equivalence respecting the comparative outclassing of pairs of characters in terms of confidence, presence, and authority, from "A Little Cloud" in Dubliners and Ulysses: Ignatius Gallaher:Little Chandler::Buck Mulligan:Stephen Dedalus. Maddox's insights continue, and boil over, as he ponders the conclusion of Joyce's initial style in Ulysses as Scylla and Charybdis gives way to Wandering Rocks: "That usurpation [of style] is the most notable formal characteristic of Ulysses, and it constitutes the most momentous change that ever took place in Joyce's conception of his art: after these new styles take over, the composition of Finnegans Wake seems to become virtually an inevitability." Bang: perfect clarity regarding our man Joyce.

Margot Norris points out that there is "ample evidence that [Joyce] read [The Interpretation of Dreams] with care and applied the techniques of dream-work to the Wake. Virtually every one of the 'typical dreams' described by Freud constitutes a major theme in Finnegans Wake." Examples are provided.

As with all such collections, there are nuggets here, but they have to be panned from an overwhelming amount of gravel and sand. ...more

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Dracula (Signet Classics)
by Bram Stoker

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We're cautioned to resist appraising the actions of our predecessors through the distorted lens of contemporaneity. But we can admire the writing of the likes of Homer or Shakespeare as they have come to us while appropriately disdaining more timely We're cautioned to resist appraising the actions of our predecessors through the distorted lens of contemporaneity. But we can admire the writing of the likes of Homer or Shakespeare as they have come to us while appropriately disdaining more timely pop romances that enjoy a season's popularity before dropping forever through the sieve of enduring literature. Some criticisms which might be casually dismissed as a failure to judge a novel as a product of its time are in fact verdicts handed down concerning the improper mechanics of writing, no matter when they were committed, whether by means of curlicues of ink scratched onto a page, or a series of type bars successively clattering home to a platen, or electrons duly lodged on a hard drive, or consigned to the faithless cloud.

I have, over the years, been an admirer of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, to one degree or another, but I never felt eager to read Bram Stoker's celebrated 1897 novel Dracula, which long sat unopened on my shelf. I think this reflects my preference for science fiction (which at least theoretically portrays events within the realm of possibility, no matter how implausible) to fantasy (which portrays events which are impossible of occurring). This is my personal preference and is not to be read as a blanket criticism. All reading appeals to personal preference, which is to be expected and is perfectly acceptable. I have read both science fiction and fantasy, and many other genres as well. I would not have read Dracula now except for a certain podcast I enjoy, during an episode of which a guest made a strong case for reading the book. I soon found my copy and began to read it.

I'm not here to knock vampire stories. I fully understand the importance of Stoker's contribution to the sub-genre of gothic horror. I also understand the comparative difficulties of editing longhand pen-and-ink manuscripts in contrast to simple cut-and-paste operations which we enjoy today. Still, Dante managed to surmount the same technological challenges which confronted Stoker. This is the basis of my criticism: why are the compositional mechanisms of Dracula so clunky? And who's to blame?

Bram Stoker.

I estimate Dracula to be about five times longer than is necessary, merely due to repetition, or long sequences of unnecessary text. Economy is vital to good writing, and many writers never succeed in recognizing this. Every sentence not deleted from the manuscript must contribute to the art form of the novel. Many writers feel that the long form of the novel frees them up to become more breezy. Not so. All forms of writing require sharp focus and revision to clear away the dead wood. Stoker's novel is about four-fifths dead wood.

His characters are notoriously flat. He sketches them in with tags: the women are "sweet" and "kind" and "beautiful" and blah blah blah; the men are "strong" and "courageous," although they do seem to cry pretty often. Stoker's epistolary approach to the novel becomes tedious by about page 5. It too is unhelpful to the reader and so is an unnecessary and uselessly intrusive gimmick. Johnathan Harker is a wimp with the intellectual aptitude of a six-year-old. His (eventual) wife Mina is, we're endlessly assured, an angel, her most important virtue seemingly being that she is quite the typist: take that, clickity-click-click click, you darned undead varmints! Van Helsing is said to be uncommonly intelligent and wise (although it sure takes him a long time to convince himself of the basic problem of the plot), and his klutzy use of English syntax is a bonkers authorial ploy that makes the reader grind his teeth in storm. Renfield's impossibly inconsistent character is swept under the rug of his "madness." All the other characters are equally thin of motivation and agency. Everyone is tugged along, however awkwardly and belatedly, by our Great Logorrheic Author, who dictates their turgid mental processes and lengthy travels, whether across Europe or across the street.

The improbabilities of the story are endlessly eyeroll-worthy. Could this have happened? Never! Never mind. We're another page closer to the end.

Dracula is a poorly written, and an even more poorly edited, pastiche of lifeless (so to speak) characters dawdling about in confusion. You'll hear that Dracula is a classic. Then again, I've heard people claim that some record or other by Whitesnake is a classic. The novel is probably more important to what came after in the gothic genre than it is a "classic" in its own right, according to any fair use of the word.

That's more than you can say for Whitesnake. ...more

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Pound-Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce With Pound's Critical Essays and Articles About Joyce
by Ezra Pound

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The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. E The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. Edited by Forrest Read, Pound/Joyce also contains Pound’s critical essays and articles written about Joyce in the early years of the latter’s rise as a literary legend. Pound was an early champion of Joyce, and in no small part he is personally responsible for Joyce’s rise to prominence. Joyce’s other most important boosters include Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach. By serendipity, all three individuals entered Joyce’s life at just the right time to keep him afloat financially and, especially in Pound’s case, to sustain the conversation about Joyce’s artistic importance in the public arena.

Emerging from this subset of Pound’s letters alone, one soon discerns that he was an eccentric and energetic powerhouse of a man. Terminally dissatisfied with what he viewed as the cultural wasteland of America, Pound was living in London and ardently trying to build up a new artistic movement at precisely the moment that WB Yeats called his attention to young James Joyce. The year was 1913. Because of the timing of the beginning of their correspondence, Joyce was able to send Pound a typescript of Dubliners, an early chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and word that he was finishing a play. In Joyce’s prose Pound identified the power of an author whom he wanted in the coterie which he was trying to assemble.

As in so many aspects of life, timing is everything or, if not everything, as much as 90% of everything. The Great War forestalled the meeting of the two trailblazers until June 1920, yet a vast tide of information and support nevertheless flowed between the two in their letters. Pound became Joyce’s conduit: Joyce would send new work first to Pound, who would pass it on to a series of editors for serialization. This meant Pound was an early reader of all the chapters of Portrait, of the play Exiles, and of Ulysses. Pound thus was able to provide feedback to Joyce about all of these in near real time. (How Joyce took this feedback is another matter.) This continuing reading and reflection and consolidation of coherent criticism was an aid in Pound’s evolving analysis of Joyce’s work and its importance, much in the same way all first-time readers experience Joyce’s work if read (as it usually is) in chronological order. This germinating and flowering criticism also entered the public forum by way of Pound’s many essays about Joyce and his works. Pound was the greatest promo man Joyce could ever have dreamed of.

This is peculiar because the personalities of the two men could scarcely have been more at odds. Pound was a bewildering, dynamic, overwhelming American expatriate, while Joyce was a disaffected Irishman sheltering on the continent, in possession of an intricate and obsessively orderly medieval mind. In his time Pound became maybe the greatest champion Modernism ever had, avidly promoting artists while striving to create poetry of his own to meet the moment. Joyce did not disparage Pound’s own artistic efforts, but then Joyce never praised Pound’s poetry, either. It is impossible to imagine that it could have moved Joyce.

Pound outlived Joyce, who died in Zurich in January 1941. The Blitz was still on in England at the time. The first bombing had struck Dublin eleven days earlier; Franklin D Roosevelt had made his Four Freedoms speech a week before Joyce’s death. The Great War had revealed that 19th Century culture and traditions were unsustainable in 20th Century realities, and at the time of Joyce’s death World War II was still in its initial stages of driving the point home definitively and wiping much of the slate clean. As Pound later pointed out, Joyce’s Ulysses was a bookend for the 19th Century: not the novel to end all novels, but to allow for new kinds of expression to follow.

Unfortunately for Pound, either he had spiraled into a form of actual madness, or a lifetime’s theorizing about economics and artistry and American backwardness had led him down dark alleyways toward a fascist nightmare. Maybe both were true. The end of his life is not well-documented in this book about his correspondence with Joyce but, having peeked over his shoulder as he wrote his letters, we readers must feel at least a little saddened about Pound’s decline. ...more

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Notes for Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by Don Gifford

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Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of D Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s 1967 classic Notes for Joyce. Sometimes I’ll save the receipt in a book so later I’ll know when I obtained it. In this case the book had been on my shelf since I purchased it at Dunaway Books in St Louis on Halloween 2017.

By irrelevant coincidence, the publication date of my last novel was also on Halloween, exactly four years after that purchase date, and I was busy working on early revisions to that text while I was living in Missouri. More on that in a moment.

Now I’ve always had a good memory: since early childhood I’ve engaged in deliberately committing to memory small, seemingly irrelevant details from life and experience, and rehearsing them over and over until they became fixed. It’s a habit that anyone can practice, I think, but few prefer to do so. It’s a hard enough burden to deal every day with the here-and-now. It’s also surprisingly easy to recover one’s past and to organize one’s recovered memories in chronological order. A great place to start is with old photographs, for example, which provoke a lot of auxiliary and lateral memories. The more of your biography you recover and order, first decade by decade, then year by year, the easier it becomes to add more detail in its proper place and time. Of course it’s also the case that we don’t have true memories but only reconstructions that our organic brains have abstracted into what we call memories, sifted and streamlined and cross-indexed, so the earliest versions of how events occurred are always to be much preferred to later retellings of events. All of this is unavoidably stained by personal bias, of course. And then there’s the whole Rashomon effect by which every observer of any given event experiences it from a unique perspective and in irreconcilable ways. Consideration of such matters causes prudent persons to bracket presumably objective observations within fitting bars of uncertainty. All of which is prelude to saying that, while I don’t know how universal the experience is, I find that as I grow older my relationship to ideas about historical truths, or to what words like “fact” may mean, but also to what they certainly do not mean, keeps changing. For some of us, the scales fall steadily from our eyes as we age, and we take an ever harder, more critical look at the lives lived by those around us who dwell in a world which has become a cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier . . . etc.

Lately I’ve found myself wondering what, if anything, all this life experience means, of taking on culturally acquired “facts” from admittedly random sips from the firehose of world events unfolding, and assembling that hodgepodge into a more-or-less jumbled yet cross-referenced assemblage of memories which determines how we confront the world, and what expectations we form about the world, and how those expectations are so often dashed. That is to say, if we thinking entities are mostly composed of randomly processed exposures to the memes the world feeds us, then what is the point here? Aren’t we all designed by our biological heredity to be propaganda-fed taping and playback systems, programmed to jabber responses in response to certain stimuli based on what books we’ve read and what movies we’ve seen and what music we’ve listened to? One might conclude then that it matters a good deal which books we read, which movies we watch, and which music we listen to, but if that’s true, aren’t we really talking about seeking out a certain brand of purity in our echo chambers of choice?

Folks, what is it we’re doing with our lives? Or what ought we be doing? Or does the word “ought” betray fundamental misunderstanding? Or do those questions have any real meaning in a global, multidimensional-metacartoon landscape that has left Vonnegut and Orwell looking like rank amateurs in the soup well over their heads?

I built up a life over long decades from chaotically assimilated memes plundered from the cultural scrapheap as I lived it. In my novel I sought to document and preserve as many of those memes as I could, and I think the result may inspire some measure of fond recognition by those readers of a certain generation who passed through the same eras of cultural fruitfulness and terror and hostility and greed and noise. Already, however, those lived experiences are opaque to new generations. That doesn't lessen the validity, or the veracity, with which they inflate the text. I lose patience with least-common-denominator fiction which aims for universal understanding as if human lives are orderly start-to-finish affairs. We will always have to struggle to make sense of the forgotten memes which comprised the lives of earlier generations, and I want to encounter those bewildering puzzles in stories and novels. There is great joy in mining a story for its forgotten memes and trying to recover their native brilliance: that is one way of immersing one’s self more fully in the lapping tides of an ever receding past that just-the-“facts”-ma’am journalism can never do.

Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, brings me at last back to Notes for Joyce.

This is the first compilation of annotations by Giffford and Seidman, in this case of James Joyce’s books Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not always exciting or epiphanic, nevertheless it is, of course, brilliant, maybe even necessary. The authors lay out for us the memes informing Joyce’s early books written before the Great War. Being very familiar with both books I did not need to read them side by side with Gifford and Seidman, but rather I read Notes for Joyce straight through by itself, start to finish. I admit I never before appreciated the full imprisoning effect of turn of the century Irish Catholicism before delving into page after page of Notes for Joyce. Also, although I’d long since been bemused by those who deny seeing politics in Joyce, Gifford and Seidman expose how his texts are absolutely slathered with and drip the enduring impacts of centuries of political intrigues. Folks, it is precisely for these reasons that Joyce left Ireland corporeally but remained ineluctably bound to it psychically for all his short life.

It is difficult for us today to grasp how Dubliners in particular could have been so feared as a literary property by publishers before it finally emerged into the light of day. A note about the virulent public reaction to the first performance of Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen in1899 at the Irish Literary Theatre (pp 174-5) is illuminating in this regard. The mimetic artistic tradition demanded only a certain kind of mirror to be held up to nature: a mirror which reflected an approved and disinfected storyline of history and current events (which reverberates with disturbing familiarity in our own time). The paralytic divide separating Dublin as Joyce lived it from a fanciful, mythic Dublin others insisted on seeing in artistic portrayals doomed Joyce’s book to a problematical gestation, and probably informs Stephen Dedalus’ famous recasting of Oscar Wilde (ah, another source meme) in Ulysses: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.”

It is the evolution of the psyche of Stephen Dedalus, from very young child to very young adult, that is so strikingly depicted in A Portrait, and already I’ve made a case that this kind of evolution is one of taking on board and trying to make sense of a steady stream of randomly accumulated cultural memes. It is the intersection of the innate properties of Stephen’s mind with these externally originating memes which flowers into a remarkable young man indeed. In the novel the greatest intellectual leap occurs between the last two chapters as Stephen is approaching adulthood, and we can (some of us anyway) think back and remember that our own mental development was not a steady, arithmetic process but a geometric one. It’s unsurprising, then, that the greatest revelation I took from Notes for Joyce involves this final chapter of A Portrait. Having read A Portrait many times, I was still unaware of the depth of Stephen’s literary erudition as unpeeled by Gifford and Seidman: if nothing more, I will probably want to go back and read the last chapter of A Portrait side by side with this part of Notes for Joyce. A Portrait anticipates the subtlety of both the Stephen of Ulysses and of Joyce as a writer at this stage more fully than I had previously recognized.

So yes: if you already appreciate Gifford and Seidman’s masterwork Ulysses Annotated but you don’t have Notes for Joyce, you need to correct that omission. ...more

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The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien

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In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us could have anticipated the last few decades in our time, when big-budget science fiction movies are a staple celebrated by the masses. The bigger difference today is how few high school students appear to read books at all.

I bought a copy of The Silmarillion a year or so after it was published in 1977, and I think I was first able to work my way through it in about 1980. It's hard going. I think I re-read some or all of it again a few years later. I read The Lord of the Rings several times many years ago and listened to various audio performances a number of times, and watched the Peter Jackson movies far, far more times, but I'm far from being a Tolkien scholar. I always preferred science fiction, which was more plausible (see below). But a few months ago, when I had an opportunity to read a new (or old) book, I fondly reached for The Silmarillion, which I probably hadn't touched in, maybe, 20 or 30 years.

Already familiar with what I was getting myself into, I must say that this time around I was impressed, and a little surprised, with how coherent and harmonious the various tales which the book contains are in truth. Christopher Tolkien is to be congratulated for this achievement, regardless of the difficulties which the text presents to the reader. It's generally accepted now that these tales are foundational to understanding all of Tolkien's corpus, and easy or hard, The Silmarillion is a mountain which any fan or student of Tolkien must climb, even though it's also true that JRR Tolkien himself almost certainly (certainly) would never have authorized the book to be published. I'm most struck by the darkness of the story of Túrin Turambar, as it seems so out of step with the kind of story which Tolkien otherwise most often preferred: those in which light triumphs over darkness. I'm especially curious about the origins of this story, but as I said, I'm no Tolkien scholar. Still, several more volumes of Christopher Tolkien's contributions remain unread on my shelf, and maybe eventually I'll learn more.

Recently I've become aware of controversy concerning the literary credentials due JRR Tolkien according to those in the literary Establishment, and I'd like to address a few words to that dissonance. Specifically, it's said that those who refer to themselves as "the literati" in general reject Tolkien and what is referred to as "high fantasy" wholesale. Although jealousy is implied to be a cause of the conflict, inasmuch as The Lord of the Rings continues to enjoy broad appeal and to be a smashing success among the, er, "unwashed" book-buying public, it seems to me more probable that the root cause of the conflict is the nature of fantasy-writing itself. While the intelligentsia prize most literary heroes possessed of depth of character who confront the problems of a plausible world, high fantasy tends to be most concerned with intricately detailed worldbuilding and heroes who confront the problems of implausible worlds. The presence of fanciful races (Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, monsters, etc.) are intrinsically fanciful and so are implausible. (Science fiction presumably bivouacs between these poles, as its most compelling works involve intricately detailed worldbuilding that produces presumably plausible worlds.) Another problem with Tolkien, or so I imagine the literati might argue, is the brooding presence of Fate, or a kind of constitutional Destiny, controlling all drama in the world. Surely WWI, if nothing else, annihilated any lingering reliance on a higher power guiding our sad world through its fits and pangs. Belief in, or reliance on, such antebellum belief structures absolves us of responsibility for the world we create, through our deeds and, more often, by our misdeeds, heedless of any but the most immediate consequences, usually measured in dollars. Doubtless it's startling to some that a WWI veteran, as Tolkien was, could have emerged from that carnage with such an antiquated belief system intact. It smacks, in a deeply psychological way, of the very escapist nature with which fantasy is often pejoratively branded. More importantly, an abiding sense of moral predestiny necessarily causes damage to the story-production engine which drives a writer of fiction. If the very nature of the universe conspires to inevitably overthrow Dark Lords, properly dressed in the mantles of those ultimate deus ex machinas, the Ainur of the Far West, the writer's task becomes easier to bear: create a depressing, disastrous landscape and send in the godly beings to restore order. Indeed, it could be argued that the rejection of Destiny is central to the project of the Lost Generation and all who came after. Few of today's politicians, however, embrace that notion that we've moved beyond primordial Good versus Evil, as doing so might require them to fulfill roles as stewards of the world rather than as both auctioneers and profiteers of dwindling resources.

Some readers possess a brand of monomaniacal fervor concerning the intricate details of their preferred texts: Tolkien, Joyce, Melville in Moby Dick, Frank Herbert's Dune universe, and so forth. I am attracted to such complex and multilayered texts, and probably that's what has appealed to me most about Tolkien. Still, I must admit that in my recent reading of The Silmarillion my mind wandered now and again, or maybe more than that, and the reason was because of the implausible world problem I mentioned before. I mean, I'm deeply vested in reading about and learning about history and science, and when I'm reading about Elves and imaginary worlds where all the rivers run north to south and the mountain chains show no evidence of underlying geophysical processes but only a need to fit the story being told, well, I have to ask myself: why am I bothering with this when I could be reading about something with a firmer connection to the real world? Even mainstream fiction takes place in a stand-in for the real world, or at least for a plausibly believable world. An intricate history is probably necessary for compelling fantasy, but is it sufficient? Or rather, can fantasy ever be made sufficient to stand on its own as creditable literature?

I'm not going to answer these questions, which many have already debated. I've already explained why my attention wandered while reading this book. This re-read I found to be better than I remembered, though not so potent to keep me spellbound. And maybe too that's partly because of the different seasons in life when I've come to Tolkien. ...more

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The Making of a Fly by Peter A. Lawrence

The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design
by Peter A. Lawrence

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I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and His I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History. Peter A Lawrence's 1992 book The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design, purports to be something of an overview of what we'd learned about the developmental embryology of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster by the time of its publication. Having myself just finished reading a very complicated book about immunology, I was eager to zoom out on broader-scale issues in biology, which I expected to come as a relief.

Near the end (p195) of his book, Lawrence acknowledges that "embryologists and geneticists never used to see eye to eye," but he might better contrast the points of view of embryologists and molecular biologists. All these many schools of understanding have changed radically over the last many decades, with ever-increasing emphasis on molecular biology. The concern of the developmental biologist has been to try to account for the emergence of symmetry and patterns in a developing embryo, which might then suggest the emergence of asymmetric yet reproducible organ systems: consider, for example, the external symmetry of the human body in stark contrast to some (but not all) of the arrangement of internal structures. But traditionally developmental biologists have focused more (but not exclusively!) on metaphor than on mechanism, as Lawrence very much does in his book. One problem with The Making of a Fly is that such thinking now seems not simply out of fashion, as Lawrence asserts, but positively out of date. Except as a history of a relatively small group of investigators, the value of the book seems prohibitively and narrowly restricted indeed. At issue is not changing fads in science as Lawrence insists (although that is a true enough phenomenon too seldom acknowledged), but that teasing out molecular mechanisms now lies at the heart of biological science: this is the necessary scale at which organismic biology must be explored, no matter how difficult that makes laboratory experimentation. The metaphors cry out for molecular models featuring signaling pathways and genetic control systems, but this knowledge generally (but not entirely!) postdates Lawrence's story, and its absence here leaves a hollow space at the book's core. A distinctive spurning of molecular science prevails. In the end, without precise mechanisms, the models and metaphors around which Lawrence's whole book revolves tend to collapse into the naïve speculations of an earlier age.

Another important shortcoming of this book is its structure. Lawrence is aware of this, telling us in the preface of the "need to understand other things and these cannot always have been described previously." I certainly learned about this when tangled up in the aforementioned immunology book, and I was willing to accept this kind of approach in an admittedly technical book. Lawrence concluded: "By keeping it short, I hope the reader will be able to soldier through it without giving up." But the true problem is not the one Lawrence mentions: the true problem is that he has forgone any pretense of effort at creating a coherent, linear narrative so that the reader might acquire useful information and vocabulary that build steadily and lead to increasing understanding as he or she proceeds. Conveying meaning is perhaps the most critical job of any author. How easy, and at what reward, it would have been for Lawrence to have made the effort to provide definitions for complicated vocabulary as it first appeared. This is no book for the layman, but who is it for? It is for, I conclude, that relatively small group of investigators who had taken the same journey with Lawrence, and who already understood the vocabulary and concepts. Lawrence concerned himself very little with any helpful elucidation for the rest of us.

Also, when I took embryology in college, we spent a lot more time on the structured narrative that carried us from zygote to adult. Fruit flies pass from egg to larva to pupa to adult, and almost all of Lawrence's book is set in the egg, with a little in the early larva. There is no mention of pupation. Strange choices, given the book's title.

On another level, for various reasons, including the cloying scent of faddiness, I've been growing increasingly skeptical of our generally accepted conception of stem cell biology with its branching lineages of differentiation progressing forward in one direction. It seems to me that problems of regenerative biology and the relatively recent development of induced pluripotent stem cells ought to be causing more scientists to question the predominating stem cell dogma. Reading certain parts of this book reinforced some of my doubts. In a nutshell, regenerative organisms seem to survive quite nicely without adhering to the one-way stem cell catechism.

The Making of a Fly is perhaps best considered as a portrait of the mind of a certain kind of scientist who is, alas, not very proficient at conveying his knowledge and insights beyond a small cortège of peers. ...more

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The First World War
by John Keegan

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I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innoc I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innocently enough dip down into a topic like this one, I end up going all-in. So it's been with WWI. Besides Keegan's book I've also listened to some ridiculously extensive podcasts, I've dug relentlessly into maps, I've watched many more video series, etc., and so it's a little big of a challenge for me at this point to remember specifically what I've absorbed from Keegan and what has come to me from other sources. At least with the book close at hand I can skim the table of contents and flip through the pages for immediate reminders. So here goes.

I'm going to start by saying something that everyone knows but which has only truly been driven home to me in the last few months, which is that the Great War was godawful. I've spent an awful lot of time learning about the American Civil War in which you have a lot of campaigns across vast swaths of country, with armies led by colorful commanders, love 'em or hate 'em. Of course you have none of this epic composition in the Great War: only death, death, death, and mutilation. There are no heroes or villains, there is next to no drama, and it's all useless and depressing as hell. Things I've learned in the last few months have made ideas like Modernism and the Lost Generation far, far more meaningful to me. I now have some proper context. WWII also makes a lot more sense to me given my now expanded context of the Great War, needless to say. It seems there are people out there who spend their professional lives, or even personal lives, thinking and re-thinking the Great War. Sounds infinitely dreadful to me.

Anyway, I gather that some Great War aficionados are none too keen on Keegan. But Keegan is the first (and very likely last) book I've read on the war and I can't compare it to other books. For the most part it seemed pretty good to me, given that it's a short, general history. The maps are probably about as good as can be expected. There were two times when I was not satisfied. In the chapter "The War Beyond the Western Front" I could not always follow or imagine the conflicts being described in the East, but then again, the Great War was huge, and Keegan was writing a book of a certain length, and choices have to be made. In a similar vein, the last chapter, "America and Armageddon," was very, very rushed, but certainly it was severely compressed for the same reason: most of the space in the book is reserved for more famous events earlier on the Western Front. I get it. Still, the end was very hotfooted.

I am not, and have no desire to be, anything close to an expert on the Great War. Did I mention that it is godawful, depressing reading? Still, I'm glad I read Keegan, and that I now know enough about the horror to not spend a lot of time revisiting it in the future. ...more

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Cellular and Molecular Immunology
by Abul K. Abbas

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In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue trans In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue transplantation. But a great deal of advancement in cellular and molecular biology has happened since those earlier times. The major impetus for the enormous expansion of our knowledge was work on HIV, followed by the Human Genome Project and other associated omics studies, development of next generation sequencing, in our improved understanding of oncological processes, and in the still nascent field of epigenetics. My fond memories of the first edition therefore made me very eager to read the 10th edition of 2022 and to see how far we've come.

A common trope frequently repeated about the Human Genome Project is that while we finally found a parts list of how to make a human, it reveals next to nothing about how those pieces are assembled and work together in health and disease. I submit this problem is the Mount Everest confronting all biologists at this stage of the scientific endeavor. Most scientists, it seems to me, are very narrowly focused on their own intensely complex projects and scarcely have time to look up and see the harrowing bigger picture. This is not a bad thing: at this point in science very close scrutiny paid to all the moving parts is vital. But one consequence is that it becomes a serious challenge to discriminate between the near-trivial minutiae and more significant insights. We accordingly get fact-crammed books that are overloaded with both kinds of insights (doubtless more that's near-trivial, far less that's significantly insightful), and only with time will we be able to more fittingly winnow the wheat from the chaff. This is all probably an unavoidable outcome of the dispersive time in which we are living. It may be that artificial intelligence will be able to distill out myopic human biases and lead us out of this prevailing chaotic wilderness. For now though we must work with what we have.

Biologists are notoriously bad at coining useful terminology, having little or no sense of the importance of syntax or etymology. Whether consciously or no (and usually no), we rely on context all the time to infer meaning in conversation or in text, and the source of context is often related to either how the words are assembled in sequence (syntax) or in what other, more familiar words they remind us of (etymology). Biologists ignore such niceties and give important concepts sterile names like NF-κB, TLR, Th1, Th2, Th17, Tfh, CD16a (also known as FcγRIIIA), ADCC, CD247 (also known as TCR ζ chain), c-KIT ligand, TSLP, interferon-λs (also known as type III IFNs), and so on ad nauseam. This jargon is not, as is sometimes claimed, invented to conceal meaning from the layman, but has a more prosaic and all too human source: egotism. Names given by original sources tend to stick, even when the original assumed meaning of a name is later proved either wrong or a minor feature of a much broader physiological activity. That is to say, even if a covert etymology is present, it is often enough misleading. Toll was originally named for a gene involved in fruit fly development. Mammalian homologs to the Toll protein, which play a central and vital role in innate defense against viral invaders, thus became Toll-like receptors, or TLR, second in my list above: a role far more important than their relatively obscure original mention in fruit fly ontogeny. So it goes.

We can't blame Abbas et al. for the syntax- and etymology-free jargon with which the 10th edition is copiously littered, but this philological junkyard necessarily prejudices this book, and others like it, against comprehension by mere mortals. One simply cannot hold in one's mind all the diverse and unsystematic assemblages of molecular structures, molecular families, main cellular expression tissues or cells, and known or proposed functions of 369 or so cell markers distinguished only by the letters CD followed by a number, for example. The same kind of problem exists with interleukins, interferons, cytokines, etc. On the other hand, we can blame Abbas et al. for other shortcomings unique to this volume, which unnecessarily interfere with understanding. Unfortunately, the 10th edition is painfully, annoyingly, and irritatingly repetitive: in style, it is far from user-friendly. In the preface this repetition was presented as a feature, but don't be fooled: it's a bug. But even the repetition is nowhere near as annoying, irritating and positively infuriating as the recurrent tic of inserting a parenthetical "(described later)" on every second or third page of the text, particularly when what is to be "(described later)" crops up, more often than not, a few hundred pages further on, by which time you've encountered so many "(described laters)" that you've given up on trying to keep track of them all. This is sloppy writing in open rebellion against the usual goal of an author's attempt to communicate with his reader, who therefore only wants to fling the book against the far wall with every new iteration of "(described later)". This sin is so frequent in the text that if we take Abbas et al. literally, as we expect to do in nonfiction, then we cannot fully understand any of the book until we've read absolutely all of it and, presumably, have taken the relevance and meaning of all those infernal "(described laters)" onboard. Gah! Awful.

I come from a background in which I think immunology is about the coolest thing ever. A good immunology text ought to convey the majesty, almost the magical wonder, of the human immune system. Unfortunately, the 10th edition does the opposite of that. I read this book cover to cover and found it unbearably repetitive, with dull, tedious writing. The effect was often soporific. My guess is that after 10 editions of adding layer upon layer to the original skeleton, it's time to rethink the project in its entirety, scrap the old model and start from scratch. I'd also add that one of the things I loved about the 1st edition was the stylized line-drawing graphics: it was always easy to immediately recognize which cell types were involved in various intercellular interactions. The fancy, colored graphics now in use are far worse and are not immediately recognizable, again interfering with comprehension.

I really, really expected to like this book. I did not. This was a much more difficult slog than, say, was reading Finnegans Wake, where the etymology at least is always present, even if it takes a lifetime to dredge it forth. As I took some time here to point out, the complexity is not entirely the fault of the authors, but sadly for me, enough fault does lie at their doorstep to disallow a favorable review of the book. ...more

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