Song Reviews and Such

Marian4 Comments

So – I mentioned back in September I was starting a second blog about songs, poetry, and writing. After much ado, I finally got around to actually launching it…

giftedwthought.wordpress.com

There is not much yet; soon there will be more, since I’ll likely be posting more frequently there than here. If that sort of thing interests you at all, feel free to check it out. 🙂 I may also start posting film reviews on that blog instead (haven’t quite decided on that detail yet).

Also, if you have any good ideas for songs or albums to review, I’m open to suggestions! I like many different genres, lately more on the acoustic side of things.

Why I Moved to WordPress

Marian13 Comments

Well, folks – after blogging for over a decade on Google’s Blogger platform, I’ve decided to move to WordPress.com.

It took me a long time to come to this decision. Apart from sentimental reasons, there were numerous features I loved about Blogger, including:

  • Short learning curve
  • Free and ad-less
  • Fully customizable
  • Integrated with Google (yes, this was a plus for me)

I stayed with Blogger patiently through its recent major milestones: Followers replaced with Google+, user interface overhaul, evolution of the Reading List, removal of third-party gadgets, and two rounds of new themes, plus other changes I’ve probably forgotten. I didn’t like every change, but for a number of years, there were plenty of improvements and nothing got in the way of my blogging. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I got my computer science degree, discovered the Blogger API, and dreamed of developing my own themes. Overall I was happy with Blogger and planned to stick with it indefinitely.

A few things have come together in the last year which finally changed my mind:

  1. Mobile design. I think I have tried every one of Blogger’s mobile designs and found it problematic in some aspect. While most of my site traffic comes from desktop computers, this is a deal-breaker for anyone wishing to reach a wider audience.
  2. Social media. After starting the podcast and rebranding as Classics Considered, I realized the need to integrate better with Instagram and other social media platforms. This is completely doable in Blogger, but WordPress has tools to make it faster (in great part due to its better selection of themes).
  3. Ease of use. I think WordPress’s usability has greatly improved since I last tried it (years ago). I’ve been using Medium and LinkedIn for my professional blogging and have been spoiled by their post editors and friendly formatting. Having that capability in WordPress, I feel like blogging will be much faster, and these days I’m all about time efficiency.
  4. Blogger makes me sad. Only half-joking. Seriously, it seems like every so often, Google remembers Blogger and puts in some development to improve its features. But it still feels like a neglected corner of the Google empire, which is a pity since it has incredible potential. As a software developer, I am not seeing iterative design on a continual basis, and that saddens me. Blogger no longer seems like a competitor to WordPress – it feels like a legacy product Google is supporting for sake of the people who still use it. I don’t know if that is the case, and I hope not. That’s just how it looks from the outside.

I have transferred Classics Considered over to WordPress, but there are still plenty of broken links I’ll need to fix, so please bear with me over the next month or two as I get those cleaned up.

Also, if there’s any features or nice-to-knows about WordPress you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them!

Septober, Octember, Nowonder…

Marian4 Comments

WHERE did October go??  Two weeks since my last post, can’t believe it.

Book-wise… I did finish The Art of Loving and need to write up my final post this weekend.  For a short book it was quite a journey, and thought-provoking – I’m grateful Cleo hosted it as a readalong!

Also in non-fiction land, I read Permanent Record, Edward Snowden’s new autobiographical memoir.  I knew very little about him previously, and it actually blew me away.  It might be because I’m a millennial: I saw bits and pieces of my own life experience in his, and it was kind of surreal reading it in book form.  Of course it focuses on his path from dutiful employee to whistleblower, which was fascinating from a psychological and technological perspective.  Definitely recommended.

The one classic I read was Macbeth.  To be honest, I found it massively underwhelming, which is probably just me.  I may try to share some thoughts about it.

I am still reading Moby-Dick for Brona‘s readalong…and hanging on by a thread!

Life-wise… Some of you may know I left my beloved first workplace and started a new job working entirely from home.  This has radically changed my lifestyle and schedule (EST, yep!), so I spent most of October getting acclimated to it.  The upshot is, I now have a great deal more free time than I used to.  In November I plan to work on writing/editing, plus plowing through the stack of books left over from my botched 24-hour readathon.  I am still trying to figure out the logistics of starting up my podcast again as well (can’t make any guarantees yet).

On a personal note…I did travel by myself for the first time last month, not a small feat for this armchair traveler.  It is a weird experience and I can’t say I’d recommend it unless you have to.  But I am pretty pleased I managed to make it There and Back Again without missing a flight or wrecking the rental car!

It’s been a year of surprises, tough emotions, and unlikely decisions, and I don’t know to what extent my reading has influenced that, if at all.  For probably the first year, out of 25 books-read the majority have been non-fiction.  I haven’t read a single novel this year that I really loved.  The year’s not over yet, so here’s to hoping that changes!

The Art of Loving – Questions on Chapters 2.2-2.3

Marian7 Comments
Jordan Peterson (45550029955)
Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Previously: The Art of Loving – A Ramble on Chapters 1–2.1

This post will be rather more disjointed than my first one, as these sections left me with more questions than conclusions.  Bear with me!

As for the picture – especially in this part, I was having flashbacks to 12 Rules for Life, and anyone who found value in that book should probably read this one (and vice-versa).

Chapter 2.2, “Love Between a Parent and a Child”

The big theme of this part was Fromm’s definition of fatherly and motherly love.  He describes motherly love as unconditional, forgiving, and organic to the mother-child relationship – C. S. Lewis’s “Gift-Love,” in other words, with no limit.  Motherly love and validation of the child is present whether the child “deserves” it or not.  Fatherly love, by contrast, is rules-based and must be earned in order to be granted:

Since [Father’s] love is conditioned, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not outside of my control as motherly love is. 

Either type of love can be abused or misapplied; the key is to achieve balance and a smooth transition from the emphasis of motherly love (in early life) to the focus on fatherly love (adolescence and up).  This concept ties neatly into Peterson’s model of Chaos (feminine) vs. Order (masculine) and the individual’s need to walk the fine line between them.

I am not sure I subscribe to this concept, though on the surface it seems to make sense.  If it is true, I would ask what does this mean for the present-day situation, where in the U.S. some statistics suggest there is a fatherhood crisis, leading to a sort of fatherhood renaissance ranging from the popularization of “dad jokes” to the Fatherhood.gov billboard campaign.  And if adolescents are receiving more unconditional motherly love than fatherly love, is there any correlation to the widespread depression, including a higher percentage among adolescents?  It could either indicate motherly love is not unconditional (which is what I would argue), and/or that the lack of fatherly order/rules-based system causes a deficit linked – in some inherent way, maybe – to self-esteem.

Chapter 2.3, “The Objects of Love”

In this section, Fromm elaborates on his theory of true love as an act rather than emotion.

One key concept he highlights is the idea of “paradoxical logic” – the idea that “X is A and not A.”  (Sort of like quibits, for fellow nerds.)   In a way that I found frankly a little difficult to follow, Fromm ties this into his study of man’s love of God.  He compares Christianity to Aristotelian (or binary) logic and Judaism to paradoxical logic: the former emphasizes belief and the latter emphasizes a way of living (though he does point out Christianity does not exclude the latter).  This goes back (obliquely) to his conviction that love is primarily an act rather than a thought or a feeling.  Again, there are echoes of Peterson, who – rather than say that he believes in God – said in a recent interview that he lives as if he believes in God.

I hope I have sufficiently emphasized how philosophical this section is.  Apart from the religious commentary, Fromm covers all kinds of love as well, including the necessity of loving one’s self in order to love others (completely agree!).  At one point, he acknowledges “erotic love requires certain specific, highly individual elements which exist between some people but not between all.”  This doesn’t quite appease my disgruntlement with the first chapter, but at least he acknowledges there must be Something other than pure formula or will-power.  🙂

This statement did raise questions for me: “In erotic love there is an exclusiveness which is lacking in brotherly love and motherly love.” I may have missed something but I’m not sure what the basis for this is.  Though frowned upon in Western culture, parental favoritism is common in other cultures, whether it’s gender-based or simply individual-based.

And here again, I do agree: “If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.” I would put the emphasis on “only,” because again, I do believe some feeling is necessary, even if it is simply the primal affection we feel for other human beings because of our shared humanity.

The Art of Loving – A Ramble on Chapters 1–2.1

Marian8 Comments

This month, Cleo is hosting a readalong of The Art of Loving (1956) by Erich Fromm and On Friendship by Cicero. It’s a sequel to the Four Loves Readalong – which feels recent but was actually back in June(!!).  Fromm and C. S. Lewis were contemporaries (and Lewis’s book was published just four years later), so it adds interest to see how their perspectives correspond or differ.  I’m also looking forward to Cicero, as I haven’t read many ancient classics.

You can find the full schedule on Cleo’s post.  I felt the need to break down my check-ins a little more, so this one will cover the first 1 1/3 chapters.

Chapter 1, “Is Love an Art?”

Fromm opens with his short but pithy thesis – that love is not just a flurry of feelings, but an actual scientific art, like music or medicine, which must be learned and practiced.

He posits three interrelated societal problems.  First, culture is overly focused on the state of “being loved,” particularly for superficial reasons, instead of giving love.  Second, people are misguided in thinking they need only to find the right person to love, rather than determine how best to love someone.  This quote from J. R. R. Tolkien comes to mind:

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.  – Tolkien, Letters, 51-52

(I do not know if I agree with this…but, it’s memorable.)

Fromm’s third point is that people will not put in the work – or do not understand how – to sustain a state of love, being obsessed instead with the romanticized concept of falling in love.  Of such a couple, he adds, rather cynically:

…they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.

There is much truth in this first chapter; in spite of that, my gut reaction was not positive.   Fromm is right in that love is sacrificial and requires effort and even strategy.  He is right in that people often let their heady feelings carry them away without any logic or wisdom. On the other hand, I would regret for someone to read this and then conclude they could simply “self-help” their way to a good relationship.  I think it takes more than that.

Fromm describes the action of love as polar in the next chapter, but I see the state of love as being polar as well.  To paraphrase my comment on Cleo’s post – I believe a relationship needs both the “infatuation” and the “art,” just as a country needs both heart/culture and good laws/policy.  In some cases, I think this can sustain a relationship, especially where love is not reciprocated.  More on that in the next section…

Chapter 2.1, “Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence”

Here we get into Jordan Peterson-esque territory.  Fromm examines the issue of human isolation, which is directly contrary to our innate desire for unity with others.  Humans will do anything to escape the feeling of separation, from allowing themselves to be dominated by an aggressor to sadistically forcing others into submission to themselves.  Sometimes this takes a purely voluntary form:

…the democratic societies show an overwhelming degree of conformity.  The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd conformity becomes the predominant one.

The tragedy is that we believe we are individualistic.  But as Fromm so relevantly observes, we are so eager to identify ourselves by group labels, such as our political party, our handbag designers, and our charitable organizations. 

On the same note, he addresses the concepts of mental/metaphysical masculinity and femininity and his belief that certain “masculine” or “feminine” traits, while present in both genders, exist in higher ratios in one or the other.  I can’t remember if it was Lewis, Wollstonecraft, or Peterson (or someone else) who said something similar, but I’ve read that elsewhere and do not find it very convincing.  He suggests this polarity is necessary in love, and where we lose our differences, we lose individuality and the kind of connection that is established by attraction rather than force or conformity.

But back to the “problem” of human existence.  Fromm sees love as the only healthy option to solve the issue of loneliness (the non-healthy option being sadism).  Here I do agree with him.  From a Christian perspective, mankind needs God’s Love and nothing else will fill our emptiness.

Need-Love was a theme in Lewis’s book, and I am not sure Fromm recognizes it here.  Rather, he seems to be focused on what Lewis called Gift-Love.  Fromm breaks gift-love down into four common elements: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.

Love as a Means or an End?

There is a lot I could say about this chapter, but I want to zoom in on this statement, where Fromm qualifies gift-love by its reception and mirroring:

If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.

To me this is an understandable perspective, but problematic.

Several years ago I read Works of Love by Kierkegaard, which was a life-changing experience – I actually didn’t blog about it because I didn’t quite know how.  Anyways, this one thought of his has always lived with me since then:

Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle again.

In the spirit of “love your enemies,” what Kierkegaard is saying is that even unrequited love has value.  If his love is not returned, he would not call his love “impotent” or a “misfortune,” because the love itself has an inherent, inseparable value that is not altered by the response of the recipient.  It may change the relationship, but it will not undermine your sacrifice.

There are times the relationship must change or even end, for the wellbeing of one person or both.  But if the relationship can reasonably stay intact, continuing to love the other person could be the one link to bring the two people back together on the other side.