The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- II.5- On conscience.- Overall, I found this essay to be kind of ‘’meh’’ until nearly the end when the very contemporary topic of torture arises.
Torture is a dangerous innovation; it would appear that it is an assay not of the truth but of a man’s endurance. The man who can endure it hides the truth; so does he who cannot. For why should pain make me confess what is true rather than force me to say what is not true?
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-The Resident Patient- Generally, I prefer the stories collected in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to the stories collected in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. However, the freshness of the plot, the relentless pursuit of the answer to the puzzle and, really, a quite open, untidy conclusion to the mystery in The Resident Patient reminds me more of the quality of work in the older volume…this is the finest story in that I have read in the Memoirs collection to date...and it does have the barest hint a sort of crime syndicate the like of which...well, we know who is probably behind that.
...in those cases in which Holmes has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified inlaying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish.
...and in the next Holmes story, we meet...Mycroft Holmes...
I am reading:
In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel Delany: Vol 1 1957-1969- I have slowed to a crawl on this as I have been fiddling around with a collection of Henry James’ literary criticism
and, of course, the blog Literary Hub always has good stuff…
On James Baldwin’s Radical Writing for Playboy Magazine by Joseph Vogel- An overview, specifically, of James Baldwin’s “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” published in Playboy magazine in 1985 and collected in Baldwin’s volume of collecteed essays, The Price of the Ticket.
’’Freaks...’’is a Baldwin essay that I always enjoyed but if you have read Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Another Country [a novel that I have nicknamed ‘’Portrait of a (Black) Lady’’], then the theme of the protean self and society as opposed to artificial and, to an extent, insignificant, social categories like black and white, straight and gay, masculine and androgyne was already a familiar and consistent Baldwin theme.
It was good to be reminded of Baldwin’s essays that were published in Playboy magazine under Playboy’s first African American editor, Walter Lowe, Jr., a pioneer in his own right.
Junot Díaz’s New Yorker essay is painful for to read.