Minor Wisdom

The Seven Storey Mountain

I’m reading The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s autobiography. The intelligence and beauty of the writing are breathtaking. Here’s how it starts:

“On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.

“Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.”

To which I say, “Wow!”

1 Dead in Attic (2d ed.)

If you want to read a first-hand account of the harrowing days in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, then get yourself Chris Rose’s new book, 1 Dead in Attic. Chris is a columnist for the  Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ daily newspaper—he also happens to be my neighbor, one block up Magazine Street. His post-Katrina columns made him a runner-up for a Pulitzer. This book is a collection of those columns.

Actually this book is the second, expanded edition. The first edition, released in early 2006, was self-published—it sold 60,000 copies. This edition, much thicker than the first, is published by an outfit called Simon & Schuster.

Song for My Fathers

If you love New Orleans or its music, then you may like this book: Song for My Fathers, by Tom Sancton. It's a memoir by a white guy who grew up in New Orleans in the 1950s to 1960s; developed a taste for traditional New Orleans jazz; took lessons from George Lewis, Creole George Guesnon, and others; became a good enough clarinetist as a high-school student to be invited to join the Olympia Brass Band and to sit in occasionally at Preservation Hall; and who eventually went off to college at Harvard and embarked on a career as a professional writer. You can get a taste of Sancton's writing on this Vanity Fair web page, where you'll find an essay that, with a few additions, became the introduction of Song for My Fathers.

Gifts of depression

After my mother died last year, my siblings and I decided to donate her books (boxes of them) to charity. But in one of the boxes, I found one book that caught my eye: Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. When I glanced at the table of contents, the title of chapter 7 caught my eye: "Gifts of Depression." I decided to keep this book for myself.

Moore believes that the dark moods are parts of our being, to be accepted and learned from rather than suppressed. "Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections.... Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness."

Not so long ago, Moore says, "melancholy was identified with the Roman god Saturn. To be depressed was to be 'in Saturn,' and a person chronically disposed to melancholy was known as a 'child of Saturn.'" Moore suggests that if we returned to those older expressions, we might accept, even embrace, our dark moods:

What if "depression" were simply a state of being, neither good nor bad, something the soul does in its own good time for its own good reasons? What if it were simply one of the planets that circle the sun? One advantage of using the traditional image of Saturn, in place of the clinical term depression, is that then we might see melancholy more as a valid way of being rather than as a problem that needs to be eradicated.

Moore has many interesting things to say about what the dark moods can teach us. But for those of us who have been through the darkness, it may be more interesting to reflect on what we ourselves have learned or how we have grown as a result.

Letters From New Orleans

Just before January 1, 2000, writer Rob Walker moved to New Orleans. Shortly before Katrina, he moved to New Jersey. In between, he lived in Faubourg St. John and explored the seamier sides of the city. He wrote his observations in his "Letters from New Orleans," a series of e-mails to friends and acquaintances, bringing to this task an outsider's detachment and a writer's keenness in observing people and things. Those letters are collected in this book, the first edition of which was released about a month pre-K. After reading it, I can offer this high praise about it: it's authentic. He loves this city, warts and all.

Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

There's an old saying that a fish does not notice the water it swims in. Similarly, natives of New Orleans probably don't notice the many things that make New Orleans unique. Only an outsider who loves this city and spends considerable time here can notice those things. One such outsider is Roy Blount Jr., who has visited this city dozens of times, has explored its nooks and crannies, and compiled his observations in an excellent book, Feet on the Street.

Another such outsider is Tom Piazza, who moved to New Orleans twelve years ago. His latest book, Why New Orleans Matters, captures the soul of pre-Katrina New Orleans in a way that compares favorably with Blount's portrayal. It's all here: the people, the atmosphere, the food, the music, the celebrations, the poverty, the crime, the decadence. That's Part I.

Part II describes what post-Katrina New Orleans is like, from the perspective of one whose home, like those of hundreds of thousands of others, was destroyed. People sometimes ask me "what's it like" to go through something like Katrina, and I can't answer adequately because my home, though damaged, remained relatively intact. If you really want to know "what's it like," read this book, and you'll understand the scope of the tragedy.

To conclude his book, Piazza answers the title question. New Orleans matters to the nation strategically for the same reasons that motivated Thomas Jefferson to acquire the city. The nation needs a port at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and that port needs a city to support it. On a deeper level, by losing New Orleans, the nation would lose a large chunk of its own heart and soul.

If you're one of New Orleans's fish, this book will increase your appreciation of the water you've been swimming in. If you're not, this book will help you understand why New Orleans must be resurrected.

Ruggero J. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers

Update (2/24/06):
Commenter Ashley pointed out a typo in the logic problem below: "criminal procedure" should read "civil procedure." I apologize for any confusion or heads banging against walls caused by the typo.

Original post:
I've been on the road the last couple of days, and for my airport-airplane reading, I brought along Logic for Lawyers, by Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert. To my knowledge, this is the only book dedicated to teaching the classical principles of logic and applying them to common-law legal reasoning. The book was written for law students, but it's of great benefit to practicing lawyers too. As Judge Aldisert says in the preface, the book "is as much a checklist for clear legal thinking as it is a guide for the conduct of a case.... It is designed to be a lawyer's tool -- to ensure soundness in one's own arguments and to expose structural or material flaws in those of adversaries."

At the end of chapter 3, Judge Aldisert threw in three logic puzzles. Yesterday I had fun figuring them out. Aldisert advises readers to not only figure out the answers, but to construct logical arguments proving that the answers are correct. If you want to test your knowledge and application of logic, click on "Continue reading ..." below and see if you can solve the first puzzle. (In a couple of days, I'll post my answers and explain some of the logic by which I arrived at them.)

Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic

Chris Rose is a columnist for the Times-Picayune who lived through the aftermath of Katrina, and wrote contemporaneously about his experiences. Some of you may remember Ernie the Attorney's post about Chris's writing. Chris has now collected those columns in a new book, 1 Dead in Attic.

In today's issue of Gambit Weekly, Clandy DuBos says that Chris is the Picayune's "most gifted writer," and that the columns comprising this book are "Pulitzer-worthy." I agree. But don't take my word for it. Read the title essay, and judge for yourself.

If you live in the New Orleans area, you can pick up a copy at one of his readings and signings. (I plan to get mine at the Monkey Hill Bar on 2/14.) If you don't live near New Orleans, you can order a copy on-line.

Libros de Bruderhof

A month ago, I lamented the end of Bruderhof's web presence, including the Daily Dig and the free e-books—a dose of spirituality that we need and miss. Today, I received an e-mail from Colin McConkey, letting me know that Bruderhof's e-books are available on the Plough web site. If you have a Palm PDA, there's more good news: Plough has Palm versions of most of the books. Many volumes are also available in Spanish, and a few are available in German. So go there, browse around, and download something.

For writers (legal and otherwise), a suggested New Year's resolution

If you resolve to improve your writing in 2006, I have a few books to recommend to help you keep your resolution. All of these books focus on the structure of writing. Read them, and you'll see that good expository writing is a science more than an art: anyone can learn how to do it.

First, read A Grammar Book for You and I ... Oops, Me! by C. Edward Good. Or to save a few bucks, read Who's (Oops) Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway?, also by Ed Good—same book sold under a different title for a slightly lower price. Either book will teach you to analyze writing grammatically, and to come up with better grammatical structures to express the idea. For example, when you see a dependent clause functioning as the subject of a sentence, you'll remember that nouns work excellently as the subject of a sentence. You'll study the clause and perhaps come up with a noun phrase or a noun that serves the purpose. Good's mantra is to convert clauses into phrases, and phrases into single words. You accomplish the conversion by grammatical analysis.

After you've a Good grammar book, read The Sense of Structure and Expectations, both by George Gopen. Like Good, Gopen analyzes writing structurally. The idea is that readers expect to find certain information in certain specific places. If you deliver the information that readers expect, where they expect it, you bridge the gap between writer and reader, and greatly increase the chances that the reader will get the message you're trying to deliver. Sense of Structure is written for all expository writers, while Expectations is written for writing teachers. But don't skip Expectations just because you don't hold classes in writing. If you care about writing, you've probably been teaching yourself how to improve—in which case the self-teacher in you will benefit from Expectations.

These books have in common a valuable quality: by focusing on the structure, they show you how written English works. If you know how language or any other tool works, you can use it more effectively.