This is the problem as I see it....

1. This book is only appealing to a very select audience. This is the biggest problem for us. Most people visiting BookTalk are not looking for niche books like this. This doesn't mean that Responsibility and Judgment isn't a worthy read. But most people won't even recognize it as a good read. They see the pictureless cover and academic title and move on. Yes, I know that you cannot judge a book by it's cover and that the book isn't meant for the type of people that would see the cover and move on. The point is the book doesn't appeal to enough people. So when the total traffic coming by our site is low the problem is compounded.

2. Traffic is on the rise, but this book is a "Current" selection. Visitors see that we're well into the reading period and they opt to pass on this discussion. This is precisely why we MUST select our books well in advance and announce those selections loud and clear at the top of the home page. Visitors need to know what we have for upcoming books so that they have time to purchase, receive and read them. I just started advertising and the increase in traffic is arriving too late for this current selection.

The solution:

1. Pick books of appeal to a broader audience for our official selections. Keep niche books such as this one in the Additional Book Discussions forums.

2. Pick books well in advance and advertise/announce these upcoming books months and months in advance.

3. Get current members to help promote BookTalk more. This is going to be my next focus. I need help writing press releases and ad copy. I also need help from current members with placing BookTalk links in their signatures on other forums.

This is all about traffic. We need to increase our total traffic by about 5x. And it is headed slowly in that directions.

misterpessimistic wrote:I will move on to another essay (at least one more) so which do you suggest? Are you DONE reading this?

No, I haven't read much beyond "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy". I've had a lot of demands placed on my time lately, and since no one was discussing the book, I felt safe in reserving it for some later date when I had more time to enjoy it. Now that people are getting involved in the discussion, I fully intend to start reading again. Do any of the essay title pique your interest?

Chris OConnor wrote:This book is only appealing to a very select audience. This is the biggest problem for us.

I disagree. Book clubs and discussion groups create their own appeal. We're certainly no Oprah's Book Club (at least, not yet), but if you look at the way that book club works, you'll see what I mean. On the strength of a trusted recommendation and the promise of other readers to converse with, that club basically creates bestsellers. It doesn't follow trends, it creates them. They've put "The Grapes of Wrath" back on the NYT list, for Chrissakes!

Look back to our discussion of "The Third Chimpanzee". That book is currently at #7373 on Amazon's ranking. It was, no doubt, higher when we read it as a group. It was on a number of bestsellers lists, is by a Pulitzer Prize winning, best selling author. And yet, that discussion never took off.

Or look at the introduction forums. How many newbies posting in that forum say that they're looking for good book recommendations? Seems like a lot to me. The people who drop in just because we happen to be discussing a book they've already read or are reading tend not to hand around for long.

People are looking for book recommendations, and they're looking for good discussion. Our discussions are a kind of recommendation. If visitors drop in, see a book they don't recognize, and see that there's virtually no discussion on that book, they assume it's not worth talking about. But we could be reading books on statistical analysis, and people would join in so long as the discussion looked fun and made the book sound interesting.

3. Get current members to help promote BookTalk more.

I'd say the best way to do that is to have interesting vital discussions. If we're not discussing books because we're not interested in the books we've chosen, then we should definitely be choosing different books. That's a problem probably best solved by revamping the selection process. Incidentally, I don't think that's the case -- if it were, then wouldn't we still be talking about non-official selections in the additional reading forums?

But if we're not discussing the books we've chosen for some other reason, then the first order of business ought to be figuring out how to stimulate discussion. That isn't just a matter of how many people are on the member list. You can have a good conversation between 2 people; the 7 or 8 currently active members that we have ought to be enough for much more active discussions than we're currently having. It's the small end of the wedge -- if you can get discussion started, the members will take over from there. And we'll likely retain more visitors if they see a site with already actively involved members, ie. someone to talk to.

misterpessimistic wrote: She seems to have a very odd writing style and I find her overly verbose.

MadArchitect wrote:I think the oddness you're picking up on may be due in part to the fact that English is not Arendt's mother tongue.

Actually, I'm going to go back on what I said earlier. I think the difficulty that most of us are having with Arendt is due less to her learning German first and English second, and more to the fact that modern readers simply aren't accustomed to literary eloquence. Consider, for example, the following passage from "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy".

Hannah Arendt wrote:The thoughts of many of us, I suppose, have wandered back during the last weeks to Winston Spenser Churchill, the greatest statesman this far of our century, who just died after an incredibly long life, the summit of which was reached at the threshold of old age. This happenstance, if such it was, like almost everything he stood for in his convictions, in his writings, in the grand but not grandiose manner of his speeches, stood in conspicuous contrast to whatever we may think the Zeitgeist of this age to be. It is perhaps this contrast that touches us most when we consider his greatness. He has been called a figure of the eighteenth century driven into the twentieth as though the virtues of the past had taken over our destinies in their most desperate crisis, and this, I think, is true as far as it goes. But perhaps there is more to it. It is as though, in this shifting of centuries, some permanent eminence of the human spirit flashed up for an historically brief moment to show that whatever makes for greatness -- nobility, dignity, steadfastness, and a kind of laughing courage -- remains essentially the same throughout the centuries.

As far as introductory passages go, this is one fairly complex. Surely we don't mistake that complexity for an awkwardness with English, and I apologize for trying to dance around everyone's sensibilities by placing the blame with Arendt's mastery of English. Stylistically, she tends to follow what Aaron Copeland, referring to the unity of a musical piece, a long line. If we concentrate on what is being said, we can certainly discern the unity of each part of the quoted text, even if we're not entirely sure just what it is she's getting at. The upshot of this approach is that, by arranging thought into a particular structure, she is able to suggest as much as she outright says. There's a richness to the passage, and for a generation whose literary education has been symptomatically anemic, that richness may sometimes prove more than we can handle. It may seem like an "overly verbose" paragraph, to have plainly stated everything that is by other means conveyed therein would have taken pages and not a mere paragraph.

So there's a trade off in time. A paragraph of equal length in an author like, say, Vonnegut, would have taken very little time to read. To really assimilate what is being said by Arendt in the same number of words requires that we read more slowly and think more closely about the way adjacent words relate to one another. A simpler style would have allowed us to read more quickly, but it would have required that we read more to get the same amount of information, so on the whole, we save on the sheer quantity of time. And what we get is a passage so densely packed that, once you've absorbed what it says explicitly, it begins to open up and show layers of implicit meaning. That, in part, is what I mean by eloquence.

(Incidentally, I don't mean to say that Vonnegut is not, in his own way, an elegant writer. I think his show of speaking in plain vernacular often masks his technical ambitiousness. Vonnegut's eloquence is largely a matter of structure -- the whole of a Vonnegut book tends to have that effect of unfolding nuances that can't be seen in individual passages themselves. The bits and pieces of which that whole is made up tend to be, more often than not, quite simple, almost homely. His fascination with time travel, for example, often functions as a way of adding layers to even the most straightforward of narrative scenes. But returning to Arendt...)

Take for example one of the shorter sentences in the quoted text: "It is perhaps this contrast that touches us most when we consider his greatness." That seems straightforward enough, maybe even a touch sentimental. Functionally, it seems to achieve little more than a transition to Arendt's next thought. On the whole, we might think we could have done without that sentence. But if we really absorb the point she's making there -- that the contrast between Churchill and the age he worked in touches us especially -- it will open up for us layers of meaning that it would have been tedious to have had spelled out (as you'll no doubt see when I spell a few out in the next few sentences). It speaks mostly to our sense of moral history. That is to say, that we're touched by that contrast in the man says more about us than it does about Churchill. The events of the last 100 or so years have made it difficult to accept some of the received wisdom of eras that had no World Wars, no totalitarian regimes, no death camps to confound human nature. In telling us something about Churchill -- eg. that he was capable both of having one foot in a lost age and of being one of the decisive influences on the modern age -- sets him up as a kind of emblem that will echo through the 100 pages of discussion that follow. It also serves as the occasion to raise some problems that arose in a specific historical context that Churchill not only inhabited but also recognized as inherently mercurial and problematic.

If you read a passage like that with care, if you strain to absorb not only the factual information it conveys but the sense that arises in the juxtaposition of words, phrases and sentences, it will resonate through everything that follows and give it a kind of dimensionality that it might otherwise lack. Even something so simple as sentence length plays a part in the effect. We might complain that some of her points would have been easier to recognize has she replaced a few ands or buts with periods. But bracketing two thoughts within a single sentence makes them into a seamless whole, whereas dividing them one from the other may underplay their importance to one another. Simply framing two thoughts at once, colliding them as such, can give rise to a related thought, a synthesis, and a good author will look for ways to encourage that kind of synthesis.

Consider these the following: "He has been called a figure of the eighteenth century driven into the twentieth as though the virtues of the past had taken over our destinies in their most desperate crisis, and this, I think, is true as far as it goes. But perhaps there is more to it." She could have divided those two sentences into any number of smaller sentences, or could have combined them into an even larger one. But by keeping "and this..." within the first sentence, she pays a kind of homage to someone else's estimation of Churchill. But bracketing "but perhaps..." off into a second sentence, she reserves her objection, refuses to utter it in the same breath, and thereby make faint her praise of the truth of the foregoing. It's a simple thing, really, and maybe not much worth pointing out, save that it might illuminate for us the gestural but still tangible nature of much of what happens between the lines in an eloquently written piece of prose.

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that the task that Arendt has set for herself is, itself, complex, and that requires a certain complexity of handling. Eloquence is almost always demanding, but it repays the effort by presenting to us thought at a level that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve any other way. It's probably unreasonable to expect to find the same thoughts packaged in a less demanding format, so the only other options left to us may be, take it or leave it. It's unfortunate (and this is a point that we've discussed elsewhere) that modern education does so little to prepare us for encountering eloquence, particularly given that some of the most impressive and important achievements of the modern world are built on a foundation of eloquent thought. But the best we can do is make an earnest attempt to admire and engage the eloquence that we do find, and hope that the future finds us more adequate to the task of assessing eloquent thoughts on something like their own level.

Mad, I appreciate your essay here. I've seen you, before, hint at the idea that contemporary writing is not eloquent in a way that say modern writers were writing. And to a certain extent, sticking to contemporary non-fiction, of the stuff I've been reading you really may be on to something.

When I read Mr.P.'s suggestion that perhaps the writing was verbose, I thought that didn't quite get at what I was experiencing. But I'm not sure that Arendt's eloquent style is what is different for me either. I do agree that Arendt is a dense writer, and it takes a rigorous reading, a sort of dissection, to get at what she has actually transferred to page. But, I can't say I'm unused to reading this style. (And let me clarify, I don't think you are claiming that none of us read eloquent authors. I think more you are asserting that Arendt may be one such writer, rather than a writer struggling with a second language.) Back to eloquent styles. I know what you mean about spending time on a pregnant passage. What can be superficially read in two minutes takes much more time to fully comprehend. And if we try to read Arendt as we would a more direct non-fiction passage say by Thomas Friedman, we're not going to get much from it.

The first time I read Virginia Wolf's To The Lighthouse it meant very little to me; I got very little from it. And part of that is because very little action actually takes place in the text. But it is modern fiction, and that explains a lot. Having torn the book apart at least half a dozen times now, I've taken so much from those passages that seemed, at first, to being saying nothing in very beautiful ways. Now they speak to me profoundly, and every time I go back to the text I find whole new passages that I missed before. But at, I'm guessing, under 200 pages of fiction, To The Lighthouse would take days to properly read, rather than an afternoon or two as we'd read through most 200 page fictions. This isn't verbosity; it's care and attention to a particular style. And having read Susan Sontag and, to a lesser extent, Margaret Mead, I'd argue I've read that kind of care to non-fiction writing too.

Yet, Arendt still seems different to me. And this is where I'm going to have to end with a mere suggestion. I think, rather than her style, it is in her structure that I am finding difficulty based on unfamiliarity. Arendt seems to organize her thoughts in a way that is different to me. This may, in part, be informed by the fact that this is a compilation of work that was not completed in essay format by Arendt herself

I am officially dropping out of this discussion. I just have too many books that I just got from the library and I cannot breathe! So I am going to dump on this since I find this book holding my interest the least.

I will still get around to finishing up my thoughts on the R&J essay.

Mr. P.

No prob, Mr. P. I definitely understand the pressure of having too many books on your platter at once. Thanks for at least chiming in on the "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" discussion, and I hope you'll continue to check in on any other conversation that might go on in this forum.