Bourgeois Surrender

2012-02-10T02:10:00.013-05:00

Anatomy of Melancholy VI

Since the site is essentially dead as far as both readership and creativity goes, I was going to open this entry by indulging myself in an examination of the forms favored by my romantic imagination, which I suppose is more generally called fantasy, because for most people that is what being alive and attuned to the manifold physical possibilities of life is. An open-ended essay proved to be too difficult for me to rein in in my current sleep-deprived and mentally unfocused state, so I am going to present my findings in the form of categories.

Imaginative Scenarios Which Do Not Figure In My Fancy, and For the Most Part Do Not Appeal to Me: Hot tubs/scenes generally requiring me to be shirtless during the courtship phase of the relationship. Far-fetched scenarios (shipwreck onto abandoned island for long period of time with no or insignificant male competition, unlikely displays of domination on my part, etc). Very expensive or prestigious settings where my personal wealth or breeding would have to carry the day. Any time of life after about the age of 3o. I think it is actually criminal for most people to imagine themselves as a sensual being after that age; enough so that I seem to make a pointed and largely succesful effort to avoid doing so.

Scenarios Which Do Appeal to me, But Which I am Incapable of Bringing Myself to Imagine. People in movies who are supposed to be kind of dangerous are always persuading women to get it on with them in stairwells and closets and other semi-public places, frequently on a casual acquaintance. This image is a stand-in for all the relaxed, casual, routine type of encounters that most people actually never have, though it many instances the idea of it consumes thousands of precious hours of their lives, including so much of their youth as to seriously impinge upon and curtail their education. I have been able to incorporate aspects of this type of encounter into my dream-life, but always in a more surreptitous form. I cannot plausibly envision myself plunking anybody in the stairwell, however much I might want to do so.

What Does This Leave? Obviously high school and especially college scenarios, in which I am essentially myself--just slightly cooler enough to make things happen a little. Maybe a small harem of regular visitors to whom I can avoid getting overly emotionally attached. Maybe I study my math or my ancients a little harder and can offer such assistance or tutoring which leads to admiration and unforeseen escapades. The Christmas vacation fantasy has always been especially strong, suits my sensibility perfectly. This is where you are sitting around the house either the week before or the week after Christmas when out of idle boredom you decide to call up some person from your college who lives in your general area or someone from your old high school whom you did not know particularly well (or perhaps they call up you), and you make vague plans to meet, one thing leads to another, etc, etc. I heard of several instances where something along the lines of this scenario took place, and it seemed quite wonderful to me. I began to write a short story about such an encounter (happening to somebody else) once. The idea quite obsesses me. In addition to school, I also can call up a whole set of travel-related possibilities, as well as many at lower-class jobs full of sassy working-class girls who are good to go; even though I also hold these low-status jobs in these scenarios, I am somehow understood by everyone to be above them--I dress better than everyone else, am obviously smarter, my circumstances are less desperate, etc. I am really just there to amuse myself, and bring some excitement into the girls' lives, I guess.

"canis ad vomitum (like a dog to his vomit), 'tis so pleasant he cannot refrain." Great saying. Refers to melancholy.

On to the Second Partition:

St Hilary's (a male saint, by the way) bed was on display in the church in his hometown of Poitiers in western France for many centuries, and was said to cure madness in those who lay in it. It does not appear to be on display anymore. I cannot find any information as to why this is the case, though perhaps at some point it ceased to work its former effect on madness.

There is a discussion about the purity of water: "The waters in hotter countries, as in Turkey, Persia, India, within the tropics, are frequently purer than ours in the north, more subtile, thin, and lighter, as our merchants observe, by four ounces in a pound, pleasanter to drink, as good as our beer, and some of them, as Choapses in Persia, preferred by the Persian kings before wine itself." The residents of Bohemia, in particular the area around Plzen, frequently touted the unusual softness of the local water as one of the keys to the country's world-famous beer. I have noted at various times in my life that the tap water in Portland, Maine and in New York City struck me as superlative compared to that of other municipalities. These may have been sentimental impressions based upon some giddiness I was experiencing at the time, but I recall seeing my opinion as regards the surprisingly excellent taste of New York City water back up in the New Yorker magazine or some similar publication sometime back in the 90s.

"By overmuch eating and continual feasts they stifle nature, and choke up themselves; which, had they lived coarsely, or like galley-slaves been tied to an oar, might have happily prolonged many fair years." Worth considering?

"Tiberius, in Tacitus, did laugh at all such, that after thirty years of age would ask counsel of others concerning matters of diet; I say the same." O.K, that settles it. I'll stop obsessing.

I am so far behind in my book reports that in my notes the transition from considering myself as a real literary person to the vegetable I am conscious of being now has not yet been fully completed. It is almost touching to see these remnant of my old self. I would say my old earnest or naive self, but I'm sure I am still earnest and naive compared to what I need to be.

"Ficinus and Marsilius Cognatus put Venus one of the five mortal enemies of a student: 'It consumes the spirits and weakeneth the brain'." This is certainly true, but who are the other four? Later on in the same paragraph Aristotle is invoked as having determined that sparrows were short-lived due to their salacity, which makes an impression, but I am not sure it is really to the point even if true.

"I would see those inner parts of America, whether there be any such great city of Manoa or Eldorado in that golden empire, where the highways are as much beaten (one reports) as between Madrid and Valladolid..." Oh Spain, you ancient country. Little as I dare to protrude myself into experiences that should be reserved for more deserving people going forward, I would still really like to go to Spain sometime when I still have some stamina for walking long distances and staying up after dark. I am also still excited by the thought of going to the Prado, of seeing windmills, of going to Salamanca, of doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I am even somewhat tempted to want to go to a bullfight. The idea of my having any capacity for being affected by these things I know is ludicrous at this point to anyone with a real education or artistic sensibility, or who is even physically attractive, but we all need something ludicrous to look forward to and keep us going through the dreary grind of middle age.

"I conclude...as Munster doth of cranes and storks; whither they come, whence they go, as yet we know not. We see them here, some in summer, some in winter; 'their coming and going is sure in the night; in the plains of Asia' (saith he) 'the storks meet on such a set day, he that comes last is torn in pieces, and so they get them gone." Eh? Yet I can picture this scene and the general impression of the world which the book gives quite vividly. The thought process at work in it is in sync with the way the imagination seems to operate.

"...or Delos, as the fabulous Greeks feigned (to be the center of the world): because when Jupiter let two eagles loose, to fly from the world's ends east and west, they met at Delos." I never heard this story before. I thought the Greeks regarded the oracle of Delphi to be the center of the world, energy and spirit-wise. That is what I took the idea of omphalos to mean anyway.

"Why so many thousand strange birds and beasts proper to America alone, as Acosta demands? Were they created in the six days, or ever in Noah's ark? if there, why are they not dispersed and found in other countries?..." Uh-oh.

Are lice really instantly consumed in the Azores and other warm places by a secret virtue in the air?

There is a charming section on the restorative qualities of views of beautiful vistas that I am tempted to reproduce in full, with its myriad examples. Since I am currently in great need of spiritual restoration and uplift myself, I think I will do this:

"The citizens of Barcino, saith (Gomesius), otherwise penned in, melancholy, and stirring little abroad, are much delighted with that pleasant prospect their city hath into the sea, which, like that of old Athens, besides Aegina, Salamis, and many pleasant islands, had all the variety of delicious objects; so are those Neapolitans, and inhabtants of Genoa, to see the ships, boats, and passengers go by, out of their windows, their whole cities being cited on the side of a hill, like Pera by Constantinople, so that each house almost hath a free prospect to the sea, as some part of London to the Thames: or to have a free prospect all over the city at once, as at Granada in Spain or Fez in Africa, the river running betwixt two declining hills, the steepness causing each house, almost, as well to oversee as to be overseen of the rest. Every country is full of such delightsome prospects, as well within land as by sea, as Hermon and Ramah in Palestine, Collalto in Italy, the top of Taygetus or Acrocorinthus, that old decayed castle in Corinth, from which Peloponnessus, Greece, the Ionian and Aegean Seas were at one view to be taken. In Egypt the square top of the Great Pyramid, three hundred yards in height, and so the Sultan's palace in Grand Cairo, the country being plain, hath a marvellous fair prospect as well over Nilus as that great city, five Italian miles long, and two broad, by the river-side: from Mount Sion in Jerusalem, the Holy Land is of all sides to be seen: such high places are infinite: with us those of the best note are Glastonbury tower, Box Hill in Surrey, Bever Castle, Rodway Grange, Walsby in Lincolnshire, where I lately received a real kindness by the munificence of the right honourable my noble lady and patroness, the Lady Frances, Countess Dowager of Exeter; and two amongst the rest, which I may not admit for vicinity's sake: Oldbury in the confines of Warwickshire, where I have often looked about me with great delight, at the foot of which hill I was born; and Hanbury in Staffordshire, contiguous to which is Falde, a pleasant village, and an ancient patrimony belonging to our family, now in the possession of mine elder brother, William Burton, Esquire. Barclay the Scot commends that of Greenwich tower for one of the best prospects in Europe, to see London on the one side, the Thames, ships, and pleasant meadows on the other. There be those that say as much and more of St Mark's steeple in Venice. Yet these are at too great a distance..."

"They know not how to spend their time...like our modern Frenchmen, that had rather lose a pound of blood in a single combat than a drop of sweat in any honest labour."

The last one is supposed to be funny.

2012-02-02T23:27:00.013-05:00

The Old Neighborhood

The New York Times a few months back ran an article accompanied by some maps of the greater Philadelphia area in 1970, 1990, and 2007 with the intent of demonstrating the growth of income inequality over that period (Link gear, King Lear). On the maps the areas colored darkest green represent affluent municipalities or neighborhoods, those colored darkest purple poor ones, etc. The most striking impression one gets, no doubt intentionally, is how overwhelmingly poor the city of Philadelphia has become even since 1990. I have noticed this to an extent on my increasingly rare visits back there, in that neighborhoods on the edges of the city near where I used to live and in which I used to walk around quite frequently, such as Olney and the neighborhoods in the northeast around Cottman and Rising Sun Avenues, have gone markedly downscale in the last 15 years. Most of the local businesses, restaurants and drugstores and so on that I was formerly familiar with appear to be long gone, and the chain stores in these neighborhoods, the Rite Aids and KFCs, have grown decidedly scuzzier. The main revelation of the graphs that seized my interest was that my own ancestral stomping grounds--the Cheltenham-Abington-Jenkintown area, the exact location of which on these unlabeled maps is roughly the corner niche right on the north and west border of the city--were designated as affluent in 1970, largely affluent in 1990, and drifting downwards towards merely upper middle and even middle-middle income in 2007. Among the numerous reasons for my finding this interesting are that the area did not seem particularly affluent in the 1970s, certainly by the standards we would apply to that term today, while today it has, like so many places, seemingly become more expensive and competitive and difficult to maintain either one's former social position or even one's household; yet at the same time one senses that there is some truth in these designations. There are more highly educated and professional people, more and more of whom have no previous familial connection to the area than was common when I was growing up, but there also more seem to be a lot more people of an extremely low quality of education and culture--numerous of my own extended family members fall into this latter category as well now--then there used to be. Indeed, I can think of several families where either the ascent or descent from a common 1950s middle class origin is growing increasingly marked with each succeeding generation; and of course those individuals who have fancier educations and serious professional pursuits are much more likely to have left the area permanently.

The 'affluent' 1970 neighborhood, into which I was born, as I have noted, didn't seem all that affluent. I suppose there were a high number of professionals, a substantial Jewish population, lots of people who never went to college but were still smarter than most people with master's degrees seem to be today who worked in insurance and advertising and things like that, just like on Mad Men. In retrospect, everybody was quite comfortable, they had the finished basement with the bar and the extra fridge and four televisions and all of that, but of course that was made fun of by sophisticated people, and if you were smart you were supposed to be ashamed if you came from this kind of vulgar environment. Now it is increasingly difficult to afford to live there and make any sort of decent income without highly specialized training, at the same time that the overall quality of the population appears to be declining, and this declining segment of the population to be growing. It seems to be easier to follow a pseudo-bohemian lifestyle, provided one has some sense of how to do that, which I was never able to develop; this no longer seems to depend exclusively on social access to somewhat elite artistically and politically active groups in major cities and college towns and select rural outposts. The market has found a way to bring certain aspects of this particular need to the suburbs.

(I could only get the 2007 map to transfer to my page. See the link above for the other two) While I am on the subject, I have a few more anecdotal stories about the old economy, so many aspects of which are fascinating in the light of our current situation, where scarcely anybody is deemed to be adequate for the job he has, let alone to be hired for any new one.

In 1971, my grandmother, 50 years old and out of the labor force since the end of World War II, having no schooling beyond high school of any kind, decided, her children being grown and it having I suppose become dull hanging around the house by herself all day, decided to get a job. She was able to get a position with "the Township" in their offices. I don't remember exactly what her position was, but she used to dress up to go to it, and at Christmas she would get a bottle of booze each from the police chief and the controller and all the other local bigwigs, so I took it to be a pretty grown-up job. She worked there for fifteen years and got a pension, heaven forfend, and they probably would have given her health insurance too but my grandfather worked for Blue Cross for 39 years so he had about the best health insurance you could possibly have when he retired.

When I was a child there was this enormous house in Jenkintown that we used to drive by on occasion which my father was fond of saying he could have gotten for $11,000 in 1969 if only his in-laws, whom he liked to recount as having been hostile to him (with good reason, as it later turned out) from the day they laid eyes on him, had been willing to lend him the money for the down payment, which evidently they had not (people did used to be quite harsh that way. Nowadays no one actually has the money to lend, but back in the day they did have it, and wouldn't give it up). He developed, or at least claimed to have developed, the belief, that our lives, which were evidently less than they might have been, would have turned out completely different had we been able to live in that house. I did used to wonder if indeed this might really have been the case...but I doubt it. I wonder if the bit about the house costing $11,000 is even accurate. Probably not, as my father is fond of embellishing and telling fantastic stories. But even if it was $25,000, that still would have been a pretty good deal. The place must be worth 400 today at least.

Given all of this talk about real estate, I looked up the house we eventually did live in on the internet, and I see that it was caught up full bore in the house flipping craze. The price history, which goes back to August, 2004, shows that it was sold at that time for $197,000. This is pretty crazy, considering that this is just a typical little semi-detached house in the kind of neighborhood where Archie Bunker lived. My parents I know paid $30,000 for it in 1977, and I don't remember exactly how much they sold it for in 1985, when they had to offload it rather quickly due to their impending divroce, but I think it was probably around $60,000. Anyway, March, 2005, seven months after the previous sale: Sold, for $250,000! And it gets worse! December, 2005, sold again, to some lunkhead for $300,000! You've got to be kidding me. Whoever this was got left holding the bag. The place went on the market in May, 2008 for $300,000, and the price kept going down, down, down until it was sold in August 2010 for a $130,000, which still sounds like too much to me. The great question regarding this house, which all the real estate sights seem unable to answer, is whether the wallpaper I had in my room featuring 1910s-1930s baseball cards is still there. Something tells me it probably is not.

2012-01-28T00:58:00.014-05:00

A Few More Notes on 'Poirot', a Modern Book Review, and a Telephone Poll

Still going through the Poirot programs; now up to 32 of the 36 episodes seen, including, most recently, "Triangle at Rhodes", which is often named as one of the highlights of the series. I did learn something I had not known before in this episode, which was that Rhodes, along with a number of other islands in the eastern Aegean, was a possession of Italy from 1912 until World War II (prior to that it had belonged to the Turks since 1522), and has only been a territory of Greece since 1947. I don't how I missed this--of all things I thought my knowledge of 20th century European territorial changes was airtight and whole. Had I actually discovered it on the internet I probably would have been annoyed, but once the program was over I pulled down my 1938 atlas, laid it open on the dining room table in the late night stillness and saw that sure enough, marked out by a fair-sized circular crimson blob with the chalklike texture of 1930s colored ink, the islands commonly known as the Dodecanese were outposts of the Italian Empire, and the aesthetic and private aspects of this discovery proved highly satisfying to me in a way that I cannot foresee the computer will ever be able to duplicate.

My favorite episodes tend to be those which pack the most extensive and various examples of my preferred types of persons, events and scenes of life into them, irrespective of the ingenuity of the plot. I like trains and train stations, art galleries, theatres, chop houses, London parties, nightclubs, the seaside, especially Brighton, explorations of high and low representative cuisine; outstandingly pretty girls don't hurt either. I suppose a top 5 to date would be (in no particular order): "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" (Artist who won't sell his coveted paintings murdered, main clue revealed in chop house); "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" (murder at a posh London house party, jealousy over a beautiful noblewoman at center of case); "The Affair at the Victory Ball" (really awesome Venetian carnival-themed costume party, caustic show business people, and one of the foremost collections of 17th and 18th century continental porcelain in the world); "Yellow Iris" (great looking English tourist babe murdered amidst the chaos of a military coup in Argentina); and "Dead Man's Mirror" (obnoxious art snob murdered at his castle, theosophy, and a secret love-child).

Like all sidekicks, Poirot's Captain Hastings leads a most enviable lifestyle when viewed through the eyes of such as possess a similar lack of cleverness or useful job skills and have to pay for this with lower occupational status and a dull social existence (Hastings does appear to have some mechanical ability, but practices strictly at the amateur level). By tagging along with Poirot Hastings is able to scoot around an England uncrowded by motor traffic in his sports car, travel 1st class by rail, golf, shoot and ride horses while staying at country estates, eat fine dinners for he always has a tuxedo, or more likely several, to hand, lounges around Poirot's apartment reading the papers and listening to cricket matches, travels on ocean liners, visits Egypt--again always with the appropriate attire for every activity and locale. If I weren't married--for it does not appear they can be married--I might be tempted to advertise for a position as a sidekick myself.

Regarding the last bit above, I say tempted because I suppose these men of genius/sidekick of pedestrian ability relationships always suggest a homosexual connection, that, more often than not when they occur in real life anyway, does indeed seem to turn out to be the case. Poirot has an appreciation for well-executed feminine style that he is able to cloak in a Gallic dress, and upon meeting a great diva of the theater or opera he will even succumb to gushing; but his admiration is purely upon artistic grounds; there is clearly nothing recognizable as sexual or romantic interest at work. Hastings at times seems to be more affected by women of overpowering (i.e., unsubtle) physical charms, and will take a more aggressively chivalric attitude than Poirot does; however he has even less real rapport with them, or the nature of the mental world which they inhabit. It is not clear to me how aware Hastings is of the true nature of his friendship with Poirot. He's a pretty unsophisticated guy who tries hard to be agreeable to almost everyone. Acknowledging the sort of thing under consideration here even to oneself would not do.

My latest off-topic reading project, which took me about two and a half months to get through, was a rather clunkily executed work called A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by an Englishman named Jim Endersby. I finished it because I always try to finish books on subjects that I do know not know a good deal about. The premise of the book is to give an outline of the history of genetic studies especially, with each chapter devoted to a particular plant or animal or virus that had has been instrumental in moving these sciences forward--oenothera, drosophila (fruit flies), phage, maize, silverfish, a type of cress whose scientific name I have already forgotten. One cannot help but be impressed with the progression of this work, both the results and thought processes leading to the results of which contain much of great beauty and elegance, which are always the identifying characteristics of perceived truth. Unfortunately the processes of determining which plants or tiny animals might be suitable for experimentation, collecting and breeding various specimens of them, making meticulous records of their traits, isolating certain desired traits and breeding these apart from the rest, making more meticulous records, and so on, while the essential part of the science and doubtless important to work into the narrative, grows rather tedious over the course of a 432 page book to read about.

I have to confess that I greatly appreciated the all too brief interludes when we were given peeks into the more prosaic aspects of the scientific life. As most of the people featured in this book were identified as serious talents early in life, career progression for them was a relatively orderly affair--not everyone was always supportive of their aims, but most were able to procure good university or foundation positions--even if they themselves made the positions better than they at first appeared to be, the opportunity to do so had still been present. There was not a ton of romance--a few guys ended up marrying women who had worked as their lab assistants, but in all of these instances there appears to have been a prolonged relationship strictly relegated to the intellectual realm before evidence of a more animal attraction presented itself. While Cal Tech is not known for its party scene in most of the outside world, if you are a legitimate science genius it is a social as well as intellectual mecca; Nobel Prize winners host spaghetti and wine dinners where lighter but worthy topics such as Shakespeare and serious high level music are often discoursed upon as well as current mathematical and scientific conundrums. Scientists who complete their course of study in Pasadena and depart to take up positions in cultural backwaters where social life resolves around football such as the University of Oregon naturally long for this camaraderie and often have a great struggle to recreate some semblance of civilized intellectual life in their new locale, though, being energetic geniuses, they often succeed. Indeed it is one of the great disappointments of my own life, even moreso in some ways than the lack of having an interesting vocation, though both of these states I suppose are of a piece, that I have been unable to recreate anything like the charged and elevated mental atmosphere one can find, in pockets anyway, at a decent college even in my own home, let alone the wider community where I live. I have enough of the props--books, musical recordings, an antique house and furniture, a decent liquor cabinet--that our life need not be totally devoid of connection to the higher realms of activity and understanding; however I am not capable of transmitting the spirit of these realms in the least degree via my own agency, especially by way of discourse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I received an automated phone call the other day that was administering a political poll. I usually go along with these polls until they come upon a question I don't like or for whatever reason don't want to commit myself to an answer for. On this particular poll I was done at the first question, which was "Do you believe marriage should be between one man and one woman?" I did not want to answer yes, because the way the question is framed annoys me--you just know that whoever decided that this was the proper form to present the matter think that they are clever as hell--how about just coming out and asking if you support gay marriage, since that is all this is about? However I could not bring myself to say 'no' either, because, even at the risk of being hateful, I just cannot muster any enthusiasm for gay marriage and the prospect of coming out publicly for it in any way makes me feel ridiculous. If it were to come up as a plebiscite in my state--which I do not believe however that it can--I suppose I would abstain from voting on it. Pretty much everyone I know is virulently pro-gay marriage and talks as though anyone who harbored any reservations about it must be completely deficient both of brains and human decency. I do not agree with this position, but one must recognize that it is how people seem to regard the matter, and to me it is not worth losing friends and family members over. It is already the law in my state as it is, and no, it has not as yet noticeably affected my life, (though neither to this point have the laws regarding abortion, torture, capital gains taxes, eminent domain and many others which we are nonetheless expected to take positions on). Yet I cannot feel any sympathy for it or take it as an institution as seriously as I would doubtless be expected to. I suspect the sense that I am being browbeaten into claiming to hold a viewpoint I would prefer not to hold, or at least am not yet ready to embrace, or risk total ostracism from such respectable society as I know feeds into this resistance a little. It will be suggested that I have not given any reasons for even this emotional opposition I seem to feel, and that therefore the opposition is groundless. I suppose someday, if I cannot come around on this issue, I will have to examine with a finer eye the basis of my attitude on this subject. But right now I am going to leave that examination for a later day.

2012-01-24T01:36:00.010-05:00

Anticlimax: Greatest TV Themes of All Time #s 1-5 (!!!)

I am combing my brain trying to think of a way to make this worth the exercise of both doing and reading it, but I am forced to admit at this point that that likely cannot be achieved.

5. Hogan's Heroes

For the drumroll alone. Reminiscent to me also of the opening theme to Closely Watched Trains. Both have a similarly punchy mock-martial style. Obviously his program was ridiculous on numerous levels, but it did have a kind of raucous quality about it that I like, and that I don't encounter much in my own life. It is not so much that I am (other people are) deadly serious, but I (they) seem to have become deadly humorless. Real time instances of any kind of spontaneous or irreverent mirth are few and you know the rest...

4. The Munsters

I never cared for the show, the reruns of which old Philadelphians will remember to have aired on the now defunct WKBS-TV Channel 48 for many years. I associate this song with the quiet and retired life of my childhood, old people, the momentary illusion of mischief or the promise of some kind of youthful assembly or party, goldfish crackers, glasses of ginger ale, and a fleeting sense of freedom and relief from the peculiar oppressions which I have always felt to dog my life.

Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, lived in Maine for some part of his retirement, which coincided with the years I lived there in high school. He was a devoted fan of high school basketball and was often spotted at big games all over the state, though as my team was terrible and did not play in any of these, I never ran into him personally. I believe he may also have held some important official position, such as grand poobah of referees or some such thing, though my memory as regards this is hazy, and I cannot find any confirmation of this on the internet, which with regard to his involvement in youth basketball only mentions that he was a "scout". Though seeing as there is not really anyone to scout in Maine, I am not sure what kind of scouting he could possibly have been doing.

3. The Mary Tyler Moore Show

I was too young to develop the emotional attachment to this much-beloved show that the late Silent and early Baby Boomer generational cohorts did, but the song makes one remember those 70s as an almost heady time. Its anxieties were not our anxieties, and indeed the problems which dominated those years seem in hindsight either so trivial or so easily resolved that we look back at things like the comparative economic security, the ease of obtaining health insurance, the cheapness of real estate, the more carefree attitudes to eating and drinking, with more longing than perhaps they merit. It's still a great song though.

2. I Dream of Jeannie

A great number. I have added words to it to sing to all of my children and bounce them around after I've changed one of their filthy diapers and made them smell like they're supposed to smell again, which is close to what Barbara Eden no doubt smelled like when she came out of the bottle. If there is a TV hall of fame, Barbara Eden should be a first ballot inductee. There were multiple 1960s, the serious civil rights/Vietnam 1960s, the indulgent Woodstock/LSD 1960s, etc, but how about the insipid content but with really gorgeous babes 1960s? I find I'm starting to like that 1960s a lot lately.

1. All in the Family

It was not a clear-cut number 1, but the sentiments in the lyrics are timeless all around. I almost identify with them myself now. I have always found it interesting that Carroll O'Connor was only 46 when the show started, and, I am pretty certain, was supposed to be around that age in it. I am 42 and I still often feel like I am not fully accepted as a real adult by most people around me, and that my life could still take some unforeseen positive and rewarding direction that I just have not become aware of yet (unlikely). The program worked of course because he was not atypical of his generation. People who were 45 and 50 were 'older' than people are now at that age, and of course their station in life, even if it were a modest one, was also well established and conveyed meaning, which also seems a rarer occurrence nowadays. I feel (yes, I am emoting here) like people my age have little solid ground on which to relate to anyone else. Everything is discounted except for professional station, which a good many people do not have, or do not have in anything like the degree required. At least I feel that way myself.

Carroll O'Connor was almost a dead ringer for my father-in-law. The latter gentleman had many similarities of habit at least to his television counterpart, though he was staunchly liberal in his politics, far more than almost anybody I know in my own generation who is possessed of any sense where such matters are concerned.

The last video is a bonus track. Remember a few months back when I determined that 1964 had been a really good year for attractive women? I've been mining the archives of Youtube to find some further proofs for this position (I confess I've been contemplating a Dianne Lennon versus Marianne Faithfull 1964 smackdown post in which I argue, against overwhelming sentiment, the case of Dianne, which I believe to be a strong one; I fear I won't be able to carry it off in such a way as will allow those confused in the business to see the light however). As a kid and even a teenager I never thought Elizabeth Montgomery to be especially sexy--she always came across as a kind of generic 30ish mom/wife who was like to nag you to death; but boy does she look good to me now. As well as very: 1964, which was, as we have established earlier, a great year in the annals of feminine beauty.

2012-01-19T22:31:00.016-05:00

More Pictures From My Vacation in Alabama Last Summer

I realize it is the following January. I am behind, though, after all, I do strive to be as non-topical as possible. As far as that goes, I went to a wedding last night where they had great food. Especially the hors-d'oeuvres. I imagine wealthy people as eating the equivalent of a good wedding spread every day. I would. Anyway it was a good time. Large Irish Catholic family (the bride was one of twelve children), an open bar which, for the first time in some years, numerous other people at an event were hitting as much as or even more than I was. Thus despite not knowing anybody (the bride was an old friend of my wife's), I was in my comfort zone. In recent years I have actually begun to prefer going to parties where no one knows me; such is the shame I feel upon encountering any old acquaintance worth seeing in my current state of development. The day was beautiful, around 14 degrees, with a light snowfall of around 2 to 3 inches, the temperature dropping to 6 degrees by the time we left the reception in the evening. Winter weddings in a cold climate are great (I had one myself). People are really eager to go to a party, but they usually don't realize it until they get there. I had myself forgotten all about it until the night before, but I enjoyed myself when I got there. Hopefully I still have a few parties left to go to in what remains of life to me, though certainly the vast majority of social activity for me is now behind me.

But to return to Alabama in July: Above, you can see we got in some night swimming in the pool. My children are great at swimming and diving, or at least leaping into water. I never took any pleasure in these--I was a real dud of a kid, it's no wonder my parents weren't motivated to stay together and devote themselves to promoting my wordly success--and while I can by some means struggle from one wall of a pool to the other without having to touch the bottom, I cannot really swim, and certainly not with any kind of force. So this is another physical skill that I am pleased with in the children.

Here is part of the Talladega National Forest. I believe that is the waterfall that we hiked to. This one was only a 1/2 mile along the trail. There was supposed to be a second, bigger and even more spectacular waterfall around 3-3 1/2 miles in, but we did not get there, for reasons which will be relayed in due time.

I am a poor botanist, though I am getting better than I used to be. These plants I am going to go out on a limb and identify as some kind of fern. Because the internet and modern life in general are starting to have some effect in convincing me that the only people with any solid claim to being intelligent are those with high competence in science and mathematics I try occasionally to read books vaguely connected with those subjects. One book about biology that I spent about two and half months slogging through recently in the pursuit of greater awareness had an anecdote about lab geneticists who map the genomes of plants and engineer genetically modified food and so on being unable to properly identify weeds that were the subject of years of their researches when looking for examples in the wild. I'm not really in a position to accept this as some kind of belief even if it is true, but I thought the idea was amusing and sad at the same time.

Here we are about 2 or 3 hours into the same hike, shortly before we gave up and turned around. I don't know how far we got or how close we got to our waterfall because while there was an identifiable trail there were no signs indicating whether we were on the right trail or any distances as there are in most National Parks and Forests that I have been to. I was really ailing at the time of this picture. It was well over 90 degrees, I was carrying my 2 year old boy who has the density of a computer hard drive, and unfortunately my cardio-respiratory fitness is not all it could be at this point. About five minutes after this picture however a very intense lightning storm swept through and while I did have some concern about members of our party being struck by lightning or hit by falling trees, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees and I found my energy for hiking much revived. It was the kind of outing that is fun to look back on now as having done.

This is the porch of our 1940s CCC cabin, with my then 2 month old (now 8 month old!) daughter. It is curious how these state parks in the supposedly poor southern states can stay open year round and maintain these really nice facilities such as cabins and restaurants while in New Hampshire and Vermont our parks are only open and staffed from Memorial Day to Labor Day and have very little comparable in the way of facilities, and yet our legislature in New Hampshire at least considers it practically the height of extravagance to (barely) fund this. This last summer I went to 2 parks that were not staffed at all, at which the bathhouses and toilets were locked up and the parking lots cracked and sprouting mini meadows (Clough State Park in Dunbarton, which is really starting to look skanky, and Forest Lake State Park up near Lancaster near the White Mountains, which for the moment at least is still redeemed by its beautiful setting). I believe I have read that New Hampshire is the only state in the country that expects its state parks to pay for themselves. I think it's an embarassment that a huge part of the eleectorate can't bear to even fund our state parks. What do people think is going to happen?

This is Pulpit Rock, a large promontory/lookout also right in the Cheaha State Park. A lot of people say this is the most beautiful place in Alabama. It's a prime spot.

Pulpit Rock overlooks a very long and easily mortal drop, so we kept child #4 safely away from it.

These weren't so bad. I think I am also going to do a couple of sets from when we went back to Tennessee after leaving here, which we did within a half hour of this last picture, and then I'll be all caught up, since I haven't gone anywhere else since.

2012-01-15T23:02:00.007-05:00

Anatomy of Melancholy V

As I slink wearily over the keyword to produce this post,
With nary a spark of the human vigor of our Enlightenment forefathers,
My mind a broken shadow of a machine, vaguely recollecting images of coherent ideas now shattered.
I dreamt in confusion of old breasts and stale Christmas candies,
I gave a go at subconscious self-abandon, but my brain and vital power were not in it.
To sleep, to wallow, to procure an abacus and tally the days till death,
Is the only remaining instinct.
There are no prospects for productive action,
No universes, no signifiers to be revealed.
I am perhaps dangerous, but only to myself, and only in an absurdist state of existence,
Which we may however inhabit.
Don't tempt me, don't tempt me, don't tempt me.
But of course you won't.
Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cancun, Ibiza, Johannesburg, Bombay, St Petersburg, Beograd.
Albany, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Newcastle, Glasgow, Gdansk, Kaunas, Vichy.
All offer the equivalent life, the equivalent temptations to me.
I overheard a woman say she wanted to quit her job and go to the Burning Man Festival.
If I quit my own job and went to the Burning Man Festival I would not even have any fun there.
If I checked into a Super 8 in Rochester and pulled the curtains tight with the goal of sleeping in I would be stone awake at 7:30am with nothing to do.
Whether I pay for bottle service on 5th Avenue or go to $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon night in Crown Point,
Whether I go to the concert or the exhibition or the film festival of the Earnest and the Trite,
My own proper crowd, with our shared secret knowledges and confidential intrigues, is never to be found there.
It doesn't exist.

Now that I have had my little amusement let us move onto Burton:

"...it is better to sharpen toothpicks than to beg the favour of the great with literary productions." This is true.

On the neglect of learning by the contemporary European aristocracy: "Thus they reason, and are not ashamed to let mariners, prentices, and the basest servants be better qualified than themselves. In former times, kings, princes, and emperors were the only scholars, excellent in all faculties...Julius Caesar mended the year, and writ his own Commentaries: '(from Latin--Lucan) In the midst of warfare he found time to study the stars, the heavens, and the upper world.' I would write out the Latin if I felt I understood it and had some sense of the literary quality of the passage. In most instances however, I do not.

A ten year's lawsuit, inevitably unhappy for the personage referenced by Burton, is described as "as long as Troy's siege".

There is a whole section devoted to Bad Nurses, the premise, on the authority of "Favorinus, that eloquent philosopher", being "that there is the same property in milk as in the seed", which provides several good anecdotes. Cato, for instance, "...for some such reason would make his servants' children suck upon his wife's breast, because by that means they would love him and his the better, and in all likelihood agree with them." There is also an unnamed "...Queen of France, a Spaniard by birth (I don't recognize this person offhand), that was so precise and zealous in this behalf (viz., that a mother should suckle her own baby), that when in her absence a strange nurse had suckled her child, she was never quiet till she had made the infant vomit it up again".

Burton is those authors who is fond of making a very long argument on behalf of some point, to which the average reader will long have submitted, and then switching and making an equally long and persuasive argument against it.

Burton seems fascinated by the idea of Iceland. He refers to it a lot.

"...milk in gold cups, wine in silver, beautiful maidens at his beck..." When the rich man goes a-visiting.

On the learned and noble but impecunious man: "'If he speak, what babbler is this?', his nobility without wealth is more worthless than the seaweed on the beach, and he not esteemed." The expression and the expansive understanding of man's unhappy lot--not much is neglected--is what makes for the appeal of these otherwise long-acknowledged truths.

There is much that is wise in the depiction of the lives of slaves and servants, but I am going to pass over it because taken out of context the examples come over as crass and gratuitous, I think.

"A Sybarite of old, as I find it registered in Athenaeous, supping at the public tables in Sparta, and observing their hard fare, said it was no marvel if the Lacedaemonians were valiant men; 'for his part, he would rather run upon a sword-point (and so would any man in his wits) than live with such base diet, or lead so wretched a life'."

"If we may give credit to Munster, amongst us Christians in Lithuania they voluntarily mancipate and sell themselves, their wives and children to rich men, to avoid hunger and beggary; many make away themselves in this extremity". My people.

These last few examples are all from the section "Poverty and Want". Continuing in that vein:

"Dante, that famous Italian poet, by reason his clothes were but mean, could not be admitted to sit down at a feast." The citation for this is Gomesius (no, I haven't heard of him either; he does turn up on internet searches on pages that are basically catalogues of antique books, but I don't see any casual information about him). This (Dante) besides being perhaps the greatest Western poet of all time other than Homer, is the personage Ruskin called "the central man of the world". Yet even he was unrecognizable as such in inferior clothes, which is to me really a major point to be grasped here.

I don't like to recount atrocities, which sorts of things people know to happen even if they usually suppress that knowledge in their conscious daily life. But I suppose I need to remind myself of what people can really be like more frequently than I do. Because even if Burton's anecdotes are not completely accurate, one knows similar actions of the sort happened sometime.

"Alexander commanded the battlements of houses to be pulled down, mules and horses to have their manes shorn off, and many common soldiers to be slain, to accompany his dear Hephaestion's death; which is now practised amongst the Tartars, when a great Cham dieth, ten or twelve thousand must be slain, men and horses, all they meet..." This is from the section "Loss of Friends".

"Conradus the emperor would not touch his new bride till an astrologer had told him a masculine hour".

2012-01-09T23:23:00.000-05:00

The Anatomy of Melancholy IV

It's been a while, but I thought a few book-notes might make for a good space-filler right about now.

Theory of the aid of pictures in conception, with examples: "Persina, that Ethiopian queen in Heliodorus, by seeing the picture of Perseus and Andromeda, instead of a blackamoor, was brought to bed of a fair, white child. In imitation of whom, belike, an hard-favoured fellow in Greece, because he and his wife were both deformed, to get a good brood of children...hung the fairest pictures he could buy for money in that chamber, 'that his wife, by frequent sight of them, might conceive and bear such children.'" Should I have put up pictures of geniuses? Or hipsters?

"...Tully (Cicero) confessed of himself, that he trembled still at the beginning of his speech; and Demosthenes, that great orator of Greece, before Philippus." This would be surprising to me if it were true. I tend to think of fear as one of the many unfortunate qualities of which superior men are blissfully unburdened, particularly in their especial areas of superiority. Nervousness suggests doubt of success, which largely means doubt of one's own superiority; which it would seem impossible a truly great thinker would be capable of feeling, especially when one becomes accustomed to the bombast and self-assuredness of the more prominent men of intellect at work in public life at any given. The longer view assures us that this is not always the case however.

The book is a compendium of human life, or at least human life as understood by a certain kind of male intellectual mindset, which formerly was often mistaken for the thing itself. I am not as yet always persuaded that it is not the thing itself, but it is true that old habits die hard, especially in the aged.

Of envy: "...the Sicilian tyrants never invented the like torment." That's funny. Sort of.
Alexander's ambition to emulate Achilles is described as "modest", followed up by this observation: "'Tis a sluggish humour not to emulate or to sue at all, to withdraw himself, neglect, refrain from such places, honours, offices, through sloth, niggardliness, fear, bashfulness, or otherwise, to which by his birth, place, fortunes, education, he is called, apt, fit, and well able to undergo..." This should be read as a lesson at my funeral; preferably by a winner, if any can be found to show up at it.

The brazen bull, the horrors of which were oft-reported by Roman authors--now that was a torture device. For anyone not familiar with it, this was a hollowed-out bronze cast in the shape of a bull in which the victim would be placed while the bronze was heated over a fire. Seems to have been frequently employed as entertainment at dinner parties, I presume among the more rapacious segments of the Roman elite, as the writers pretty clearly disapprove of the practice.

"This for the most part is the humour of us all, to be discontent, miserable, and most unhappy, as we think at least...Hadst thou Sampson's hair, Milo's strength, Scanderbeg's arm, Solomon's wisdom, Absalom's beauty, Croesus his wealth...Caesar's valour, Alexander's spirit, Tully's or Demosthenes' eloquence, Gyge's ring, Perseus' Pegasus and Gorgon's head, Nestor's years to come, all this would not...give thee content and true happiness in this life..."

"For particular professions, I hold as of the rest, there's no content or security in any...To be a divine, 'tis contemptible in the world's esteem...to be a physician, 'tis loathed; a philosopher, a madman...as he could find no tree in the wood to hang himself, I can show you no state of life to give content." He is honing in on the essence of the case in these last two snippets..

The life of royal courts with its attendent ambitions, jealousies, lusts, etc, is described as "the suburbs of hell itself", which I thought not only humorous, but consoling, that a person who lacked not some capacity of force should state the idea. Of course I am only just now figuring out that in their own lifetimes most of these now celebrated writers were not substantial players in the power games of their times, and that that does matter to a greater extent than is often allowed for, for even if the writer is telling truths, it is usually only a small and limited view of matters that does not reflect how even the vast majority of clever people experienced at the time; which I think is more problematic than perhaps I was wont to formerly.

"Others, I say, are overthrown by those mad sports of hawking and hunting; honest recreations, and fit for some great men, but not for every base, inferior person..." The problem here of course is that ultimately most of civilized, or at least advanced life is not properly fit for inferior people, which is inevitably most of them.

There are a lot of quotes about the desperate quest for fame, the multitudes of books that died with their authors, and the like, which I am going to skip over as ground well-covered. It is never tedious however to be reminded that Xerxes was a moron:

"Such a one was Xerxes, that would whip the sea, fetter Neptune, in his stupid pride, and send a challenge to Mount Athos; and such are many sottish princes, brought into a fool's paradise by their parasites."

There is an extensive section on excessive devotion to scholarship as a source of insanity and a sapper of general vigorous powers. The anecdotes here include a Thomas Aquinas at dinner story, which is always promising (Aquinas is usually depicted in paintings as having the physique of a small tank):

"Fulgosus...makes mention how Th. Aquinas, supping with King Louis of France, upon a sudden knocked his fist upon the table, and cried (in Latin), 'This proves the Manicheans were wrong'; his wits were a-woolgathering, as they say, and his head busied about other matters; when he perceived his error, he was much abashed."

Sanicidae. = killers of healthy people. Funny name (I thought) for notoriously incompetent physicians and other quacks.

2012-01-02T00:41:00.001-05:00

Knife In the Water (1962)I don't have anything personally unique to say about this movie, which I do however think is quite good. It is, rather incredibly in a way, the first film of the controversial director Roman Polanski's that I have seen. As most people know, it is also his first full-length movie, and the only one he made before leaving Poland. Successful movies are more collaborative affairs than is sometimes acknowledged by hack fans like me, and there was a good amount of artistic talent collaborating on this one. Still, cinematic and theatrical talent seems to flourish best under superior direction, and it is apparent that Polanski in his youth at least had something of the soul of an artist. The movie is distinctive, forceful, bracing, and, most importantly, attractive. Doubtless many people possess these qualities, or the germs of them, in youth; few however seem to benefit enough by technical instruction or the association of comparably talented artistic or near-artistic spirits to make any kind of real artistic impression.

Idle thoughts about the movie:

It would have been interesting to have one or two more films from this director made in Poland before he left the country, though I guess his first few movies after his emigration are among his better ones, and among the defining movies of their time. He was not bound to a particular place or system or culture--I suppose we are all bound to a particular time to some extent but he at least exerted a greater influence over the direction and character his time assumed, for better and for worse, than most people do.

I like the depiction of the men in this movie. They have personalities, everything they do in the film, and one supposes in their lives, has a purposefulness to it; the direction of the young man's life perhaps is still in doubt, but one is certain that it will not be totally devoid of assertive action, conflict, sensuality, all of which are certainly hallmarks of the director's persona.

While the film is most handsome to look at, and contains a lot of outstanding camerawork, it still consists entirely of three characters who are on a small sailboat on an otherwise empty lake for 95% of the movie, so that most of the interest of it has to be generated by the dialogue. The skill with which this was accomplished I found admirable.

The DVD, which I believe was from the Criterion Collection, had 8 of Polanski's short student films, some of which were clearly exercises in shooting conventional type situations, others of which were narratives told in a pretty conventional form, and others that were early attempts at expressing something of his distinct spirit. None of them were anything great, though a few had bit parts for Polish college girls, which is always appreciated. While it did not exactly show how he progressed from having conventional instincts to be able to illustrate a more interesting vision of humanity, it is important to be reminded that that is a process that even talented people have to struggle through.

I don't have anything else to add about Knife in the Water.

Despite the long break from movie reviews I don''t have anything else to write on at this time because I have gotten bogged down watching the Poirot television series from the late 80s and early 90s, which one of my video guides rated as 5-star fare. It is not that, but is bearable and often entertaining enough, and the break from cinematic films will have me raring to go when I start up with those again. I believe there are 36 50-minute episodes of this series, and I have gotten through 23 of them. I am pretty confident in saying that I am not much of a fan of the murder mystery genre either in literature or film, or at least not of the Agatha Christie portion of that genre. I don't usually figure out who the murderer is, but I don't actually care all that much. The interest for me in the Poirot program, of which I can watch about two or three episodes a week with modest enjoyment, is in its nostalgia for 1930s Britishness (even though the title character of course is a foreigner), which comes across as an especially pure and well-developed strand of that historical phenomenon, and which the series does a good job of evoking.

I noted to my wife that the world of the Poirot stories, echoing those of other writers of the time like Waugh and Graham Greene, was for the most part almost entirely devoid of children, the prospect of which seems odd to me now, to which she made the sensible rejoinder that children and murder mysteries are not a natural mix, and probably wisely avoided.

The murder rate of aristocrats and other wealthy men with ambiguous wills or lines of hereditary succession while being visited by/attending a social event with Poirot is so stratospheric that one wonders after a while how the man can get invited anywhere. It is also remarkable that despite the high incidence of murder that takes place on properties where he is known to be present, he himself never comes under scrutiny as a potential suspect. I know this is arguing along the same lines as to say that in real life Sir Topham Hatt would be fired as director of the Thomas the Tank Engine railway if his trains kept continually plowing into buildings full of people like they do on the TV show, that (adherence to certain aspects of reality--there is a better word for this idea that however I cannot remember now) is not important in this particular instance. However I find this aspect of the stories to be so incongruous as to diminish my sense of their quality considerably.

Other than Poirot, who is distinguished and talented and non-needy for acceptance enough to be generally accepted, foreigners are depicted uniformly negatively. At first I thought the Americans were the only ones getting the cringe-worthy treatment, but since then there have been equally gruesome representations of Egyptians, Russians, Italians, Germans of course. The Argentines got off all right in their individual depictions. People seem to like them.

It is a good series for fine-featured Anglo-Irish actresses wearing beautiful clothes, if you lke that sort of thing.

2011-12-28T23:06:00.001-05:00

End-of-Year College Football Post

This has been an annual event the past few years, despite the circumstance that I never actually watch any of the games. Old readers will know that most of these reports include a recap of my favorite team's season, that being (*cough, cough*) the Nittany Lions of Pennsylvania State University. The scandal there so overshadowed everything else that went on this season that nearly the whole of this year's review will be in reference to it.

As I often note here, I am a native of the state of Pennsylvania and lived there for most of my childhood. Almost all of my extended family, including both parents and siblings, though most of these are estranged from some part of the rest in various ways, still live there, and many of them, as well as numerous other old family friends and other acquaintances, are alumni of the University that Joe Paterno built, most retaining a comparatively high degree of school spirit many decades after graduation. While I did not attend PSU myself, I did apply there, and they actually did accept me. While the place held some appeal to me, deep down I knew I would be eaten alive socially and that this would cause me to be depressed and probably to flunk out of school. Indeed I barely functioned socially at my eventual alma mater, of which a friend of one of my classmate's visiting for the weekend declared while perusing the scene in the cafeteria during Friday night dinner, "I have never seen so many unhip people in my life." But I digress. Even later in life, up to as recently as 6 or 7 years ago, I was given to contemplating the possibility of taking the whole family down there for a couple of years to get some kind of master's degree, the subject of and purpose for which, other than as an excuse to get away from my routine work and home life and be once again, temporarily at least, in an academic environment as a plausible actual participant in the life of the mind, always remaining nebulous, nothing ever came of it.

Nationally the school, which is of course humongous, came in for a scourge of consternation, mostly focused on the culture surrounding the football program and the fecklessness of the administration or anybody else in a position of potential moral authority to stand up to it, but there were certainly plenty of voices suggesting that the whole atmosphere of the place must be infested with spiritual and moral rot. I appreciate that it is easy when one has no previous positive sense for a place to imagine that the whole culture must be awful. I felt something of the sort regarding Virginia Tech after the mass murder there, my reaction being heavily influenced by the extreme distaste I felt for the people and lifestyle in the D.C. suburbs in the northern part of that state during a brief period when I lived there, and which general area I knew the murderer and doubtless many of the people he perceived to be a major cause of his misery to be from. However tenuous and fanciful my emotional ties to Penn State are, I was nonetheless unable to react to the crisis there with the same instinctual repulsion as regarded the place as a whole.

Once the story broke, it reached an extremely high degree of intensity within a few days. Large numbers of people were furious, not merely at all of the parties implicated in abetting the crimes, but at seemingly anyone in the general public who was not sufficiently indignant and unforgiving on every point regarding those above-named, and in some instances the entirety of the university as well. Obviously as a soft person by nature, I felt myself to be implicated among those not responding with proper heat to what I was hearing. This is not simply the result of toadying to Joe Paterno and the football team, of which I am not exactly the most devoted fan--I have never attended a game, or any college game, in person, and I don't think I have watched a full one on televsion since probably the mid-90s--it is more the curse of my havinga mild temperament. I know very well that people who sexually abuse children have to be imprisoned and ostracized and disgraced--but I do not seem to be able to feel the same release or sense of vindication at seeing this comeuppance exacted that others do. A person in shackles is almost always a wretched spectacle, depressing, in most instances emblematic of civilizational failure. I can take no relish or sense of satisfaction in it.

Regarding Joe Paterno's demise as a result of the scandal, unhappily revealed to be necessary the more the story played itself out, there is little I can say. While I had been for the most part ambivalent towards what I took to be his setting a good example for the New America by never retiring even though he was well into his eighties, in hindsight it is clear he probably should have stepped down a decade ago at least; the picture painted of the program and the administration of the university as a whole was sclerotic, hidebound and sheltered in a way not only unbecoming but unsettling; especially in terms of the dynamic, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking ideals which are supposed to govern institutions such as major universities in our time. I do not know that this would have prevented his former assistant coach from committing the crimes alleged against him, though perhaps the university would not have been so intimately entwined in the case as it finds itself now. I know that one of the main thrusts of the public outrage was that no one, including Joe Paterno, called the police immediately upon discovering what was happening, though I have never heard of an instance in any powerful, high-status hierarchical masculine endeavor where someone in any position of prominence turned over to the police a high-ranking associate of long-standing who had demonstrated loyalty and professional competence and been instrumental in any substantial degree to the group's success for any crime not personally directed upon the associate's own persom, and not even always then. Such things are not done in that kind of environment. I must admit, I find the idea myself of turning an ancient friend, or, God forbid, one of my children over to the police and legal system even though I knew them to be committing unacceptable crimes to be highly distasteful. Is there no other means of reform? No, there isn't, I suppose, and I shall have to be on guard as to what my conscience is telling me about the seriousness of what I am privy to in the thankless event that anything of this unpleasant nature ever comes to my direct knowledge.

On the other hand, following my conscience may not do any good either, since I do believe that Joe Paterno had a real blind spot concerning the seriousness of what was going on. The impression I got from his body language and his statements in the aftermath of the breaking of the scandal was, initially, bewilderment, followed by a steadily dawning realization that this was a much bigger deal than it had ever occurred to him. I may be wrong, but I do not have the sense that whatever knowledge he had of the crimes were tormenting him on a regular basis over a period of years, that his mind was constantly uneasy with the fear of being exposed. The whole thing really seemed to catch him somewhat by surprise. I have observed in other instances people of his generation not responding to confirmed reports of child sexual abuse with the horror that it is now expected a respectable adult would feel instinctively. When the Catholic priest abuse scandals first began to break I remember that my late grandparents, who were around Joe Paterno's age, were indeed outraged--at the accusers. I do not know whether they were simply unable to visualize apparently normal-functioning adults, especially ones in respected positions, performing the acts they were accused of, or if their instinct was not to trust the word of an adolescent or much younger person against an adult of proven responsibility, especially when the incidents were alleged to have taken place many years previously. I think we do underestimate how strong this latter instinct was in people of that generation, since we do not hold it very important in our own time.
Having been listening to Joe Paterno speak and watched him coach the team most of my life, while I obviously cannot claim to know him, and have always recognized that like all human beings he obviously has multifarious limitations which previously did not seem overwhelmingly important to dwell upon, I confess that I had always had a generally positive opinion of him, considering him as a football coach, as opposed to followers of other professions, and while I find the end to his career disheartening to say the least, he was I think at his best a genuinely positive force in his field, his sport, his university and his state; certainly he tried to be these things, and succeeded in them to a greater degree than most people are able to do.

My one non-Penn State note in this year's review refers to the first LSU-Alabama game which I saw about a half hour of between either falling asleep or performing one of my endless domestic duties. I am generally anti-SEC in my football sentiments, though in a sporting kind of way, and as the traditional poster child of old-school southern football, Alabama's team has always been especially pernicious to my northern eyes. As I noted previously on the site, I finally went to Alabama for the first time this past summer, and while I admittedly only saw about 20 people, they were decent and well-mannered and presentable enough, and the state-run park and facilities I stayed at were beautiful and well-maintained, so while I still can't abide the football program, I have a more positive impression of the state than I had formerly. All that acknowledged, I have to give some credit to the many Alabama fans and students (the game was in Tuscaloosa) who turned up smartly groomed and dressed, which outside of the Army-Navy game, you almost never see. Almost all of these people I am talking about of course are the kind of white, wealthy southern Republicans that make most of the people I would know reflexively gag, and I would probably think they were evil myself if I actually met most of them, but truly, young people who take some pride in their appearance and dress with some sense of a classic style really look great and stand out as above the crowd whether you like them or not.

This will close the posting year, which was a weak one. There is no direction where this site is concerned, so we will probably continue to go on in 2012 pretty much as we have been.

2011-12-26T22:27:00.000-05:00

Post-Mortems

Christopher Hitchens: I used to read him and listen to him on television quite a bit around the time of the buildup to the Iraq war, of which he was of course greatly in favor. Since he was the most forceful and apparently most intelligent advocate among the prominent pro-war government or media figures, as well as the only representative of that type whose enthusiasm was not compromised to my sense by blatant self-interest. My thought at the time was that the whole episode was a great test of the ability of the people, or that significant portion of them who were opposed to George Bush and the agenda of his administration, to resist, not just politically but intellectually, this course of action, in which, needless to add, said people--or at least their ideas concerning right policy--were routed, humiliated and exposed as impotent and insignificant in the current configuration of society. As such I was quite anxious at the time about the outcome of the controversy. Hitchens was very convincing not only that he understood the case thoroughly and that military action was necessary beyond all reasonable doubt, but that anybody who did not arrive at the same conclusion was likely stupid, certainly cowardly, morally bankrupt, obtrusive to the progess of history, had completely missed the important lessons of the whole of western civilization in school, and other imprecations besides which such a hapless reader as myself was hardly going to be able to offer much of a defense against in his own behalf. At one point I actually considered writing him a personal letter in which I would try to explain reasonably the various objections to the war which I seemed constitutionally incapable of overcoming, well aware of the constant drumbeat from half of society, and apparently the more vigorous half, that anybody who had any objections to the main points in the case had something severely wrong with either his mind or his spirit, because for some reason--probably because he had a good literary education and sensibility--I did regard him as the sort of reasonable person who would be able to recognize that surely there were grounds on which another reasonable person could be skeptical of the war. But I got over that idea pretty quickly.

After a while I stopped reading him regularly because however clever he was, his main interest seemed to me to be to demonstrate on nearly every occasion that he was right on some matter relating either to literary interpretation and world affairs while various other people were wrong, and not merely wrong, but wrong in such a way as to render them stupid or contemptible, usually both; which perhaps they were but I came to find it tiresome after a while.

In spite of a few detractors I have come across who claim to be unimpressed by his literary education, I'm sure he had a pretty good one, certainly by any standard that prevails in the present English-speaking world. While the large range of his reading and the extent of it he committed to memory have been frequently attested to as well as demonstrated, it was his success in incorporating this knowledge into both his professional life as well as his social persona such that it seemed an inherent part of his character that served to inform and enhance it at all times that made the greatest impression, as this effect is something a great many people would like to project themselves, but very few, especially perhaps Americans, ever seem to be able to no matter how many years they devote to reading. Of course the formal education of the Hitchens-like people is perhaps a little broader than the typical American English student, such as to include history, with a strong emphasis on political and military affairs, elocution, probably some philosophy and European belles-lettres, as well as carries a greater expectation that the student will attain a serious proficiency in these areas useful for adult thinking, which is a very rare expectation to be found among American professors...I could go on about what appear to me the myriad glories of Hitchens's social life, especially the carefree and evidently brilliant London set he ran with in his early 70s youth, which included Martin Amis, at that time handsome and irresistible to women of an intellectual bent in a way that seems to have no parallel in our own age (at least that we know of yet), but I have already written more about him than most of his actual friends did.

Vaclav Havel. I had the impression when I was in his country--he was still the president at the time, though that office was considered to be politically largely ceremonial--that most people trusted him and respected him enough to consider whatever he had to say worth listening to even if they disagreed with him. There was not to my knowledge a substantial portion of the population which absolutely hated him on either personal or political grounds, which needless to say would be almost unthinkable for either a politician or a substantial literary figure in this country. At the same time Havel's image in the Western mind, so far as one exists, probably has more of a heroic, and certainly a more romantic, tinge than that which his own countrymen have of him. Being a small nation speaking an obscure language and without even any delusions of grandeur on a global scale, the Czech conception of a hero, if they would even call it that, is a lot more subdued than certainly Americans would be accustomed to thinking of it. His signature qualities as an author were a concern with the manipulation and corruption of language an advanced and particularly subtle sense of the myriad ways in which human existence, when subjected to pointed consideration, does not make any sense (I would have said absurd, but that word in English has connotations of lightness which do not always capture the sense intended). He struck me as having a mind that was not necessarily spectacular and was certainly not bombastic, but was well-organized and uncluttered by the excessive nonsense that has been the intellectual Achilles heel of the English-speaking world probably since the Restoration. Of course the price of that mind was having to grow up under oppressed circumstances, such that he himself would argue it was not worth it, though the writings and other artistic products of the people who had them contributed particular insight and beauty and seriousness to 20th century culture that was absent from their counterparts in the free West which I consider important.

Kim Jong Il. I know these guys are pound for pound maybe the worst people in the world. I of course find their country fascinating, because unlike a place like Afghanistan, where the whole mode of existence is somehow mentally inaccessible, a lot of aspects of North Korean life are superficially similiar to that in Western countries, or Western countries fifty or seventy-five years ago anyway, albeit in a kind of fake way, as if the whole society is a kind of giant model train set. Of course like most people who do not know how to hold bad opinions and still be cool and the object of fascination by women, without which qualities such opinions really are not worth having, I sincerely want the regime to fall and for North Korea to become a regular country with global banks and cell phones and a modern airport and all the rest of it, because I know the people are suffering terribly and unfairly. The more the rest of the world becomes more tied together and alike in its social and economic values however, the more interesting North Korea will continue to become to people who desire a respite from all of this modernity.

2011-12-23T22:58:00.002-05:00

Merry Christmas II

One could fill up many posts on the subject of Christmas music--I was just revisiting 'Christmas in Hollis', another blast from my youth that I don't expect I will ever be hearing on a regular basis in these parts--but I have had my eye on this song for this spot for several months, and as it's still working for me, it will stay. This is a good number for them. Their interpretation embodies the spirit of the song.

There is always a danger, not so much in being wrong, but in being facile, to make some comment such as that 1959 was likely one of our sweller Christmases. I am quite certain that by the standards of the people who love the American-style Christmas the most, the 1959 season played out as close to that ideal as any other (in my family either '65 or '66 was the template for the perfect Christmas because it snowed a beautiful powdery snow in Philadelphia, nobody on either side of the family had any significant problems, and my parents were young, beautiful and in love, which must indeed have been something to see). While I have heard some bad words about things individual people did in the year 1959, I have never heard anybody speak poorly of the year itself, and heard many people affirm it was a good year for them. I even once met a guy hiking in the woods in Maine who it turned out had grown up in Concord and graduated from the high school in 1959, which was the same class as my father-in-law, whom of course he knew, and his parents and brother as well, as which revelation my wife turned to me and said, 'didn't you just know he was going to say the class of '59?' to which the man said 'yes, I guess I just have the look about me that says 1959. It was a good year.'

2011-12-22T22:43:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas I

I have noticed in recent years that the radio stations where I live at least have largely dropped this song, and indeed most of the 80s contributions to the holiday canon. A few years back I noticed when I heard this song around December 21st that it was the first time I had heard it the whole season, and I made a point of looking out for it during subsequent Christmases. The next year it made its appearance early, around the 10th, but last year I went right down to the wire again, not appearing until the 22nd or 23rd, and this year, as of 9:46pm on the 23rd, I have yet to hear it on commercial radio, Rite Aid radio (I spend a lot of time at Rite Aid), other stores. I haven't been to a party in years but they probably aren't playing this at the parties I would be most likely to be invited to either. Yet for some of us d'un certain age, this is as much a part of the fabric of the season as White Christmas and Dick Clark on New Year's Eve. Granted, the scenario in the video of being stuck in a cabin in the mountains with a bunch of 80s yuppies couples, two of which include George Michael and Ridgeley, his erstwhile Wham! bandmate, approaches very close to my worst nightmare not involving prison or homelessness or starvation. In fact, I actually hate it. I don't even really like the song that much, to be honest, but I find I am unable to fully engage with the spirit of the season until I hear it in a public setting, where it must set loose several vital associations with Christmases past that enable me to move forward.

Along with several other Wham! songs--"Careless Whisper", "Everything She Wants"--which describe romantic strife in much more detail than is ordinary in popular music songs, I was at the age of 14 greatly impressed by the sophisticated adult relationships I imagined George Michael and Ridgeley must have. They argue, they cry, they are way beyond expressing any kindness for the other person, she's having his baby even though she doesn't seem to like him and he is openly indifferent about the matter as well. This was heavy stuff to me, who primarily related to the traditional trifecta of boy-meets-girl-boy-asks-girl-out-girl-likes-boy-they-get-married-and-live-happily-ever-after, boys-sees-hot-girl-boy-wants-hot-girl-boy-gets-hot-girl-hot-girl-starts-to-annoy-boy-so-he-shows-her-the-door, and the one I was most partial to, boy-sees-girl-boy-wants-girl-boy-cannot-get-girl-boy-is-wretched. So Wham! seemed to be operating on a totally foreign level. Which ultimately of course they were.

2011-12-15T00:31:00.000-05:00

The Rally Against Hate

I have been debating whether or not to write about this incident which took place in the town where I live around three months ago. It struck me at the time as being revealing about the psychic state of current respectable society; and as that sense has not substantially diminished, I have decided to do a (hopefully) short posting about it.

The backstory: Sometime around the middle of September, some racist and xenophobic graffiti was discovered written on the walls of three houses where families of African refugees were living (Article here). The perpetrator(s) of this deed remain, as far as I know, unidentified to this hour. The ordinarily sedate local professional class immediately rose in impassioned and unified outrage to denounce this action and express to the all immigrants and people of diverse cultures and races in the community, how truly welcome they were, and how much the town had already been, and could expect to continue to be, improved in every conceivable way by the newcomers' presence. The incident was a godsend--no pun intended--for the creatively strained clergy at our family church, providing fodder for over a month's worth of sermons. Area schools held panels on the disturbing event in which such students as might be considered to be most impacted by it were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings on the matter, and reassured that all of the school and other civic authorities were 100% on their side in opposition to the evil lurking among us. No less than two full blown demonstrations on the state house grounds were organized. The first and more impromptu of the pair, staged in the first flush of heat a couple of days after the story hit the papers, was dubbed the "Rally Against Hate"; while the second, held about a week afterwards, under the influence perhaps of slightly more sober deliberation, went by the sobriquet of "Love Your Neighbor". Among the distinguished speakers at the second event was the Episcopalian Bishop of the state of New Hampshire.

I have to confess at the time I found the response a little over the top, and partaking of perhaps a slight--very slight--portion of phoniness, as well as somewhat amusing. As usual my wife put me in my place by asking if I would rather live in a town where people did nothing, which naturally was not how I had been looking at the matter. Of course I do not approve of scrawling anonymous racist messages on the sides of houses and recognize the importance of demonstrating that such acts are unacceptable and will be unambiguously and publicly condemned whenever they occur and all the rest of it. But still. Even though there are apparently no leads as to who the criminal was, one presumes almost automatically that it was a white male of a low social origin and level of education, possibly a kid (meaning roughly anywhere from a teenager up to an especially developmentally arrested 22 year old), possibly a generic 30 to early 40-something failure of a person, but in general somebody whom the class of people making up the bulk of the rally participants (who, as you may have gathered, were educated white professionals) would have found easy enough to despise and feel anger towards.

On the occasion of both rallies I took care to drive by the state house at the time of day when they were in full flower with the intention of observing them up close and attempt to feed off the emotions that had overcome most of our town's leading citizens, but both times once I got to the site the idea made me uncomfortable and I neglected to get out of my car. Partly this was because each time I had my three youngest children with me, aged (at the time) 4 months, 2, and 5, and the prospect of carrying or monitoring them amongst a decent sized crowd brimming with righteous intensity was suddenly daunting in a way it had not seemed to be at home. But partly it was also because I knoew I could not bring myself to really identify with the crowd and the instinctive revulsion that they were tapping into, though at some level I obviously desired to. I had read quotes and, by the time of the second rally, seen pictures from the first in the newspaper, which featured several people I had a passing enough acquaintance with, and several others who seemed to me representative of a type, whose generosity of spirit in the context of day-to-day American society, however sincere their regard for the refugees might have been, and I have no reason other than my own personal prejudices for doubting that it was, I cannot help having some reservations about. So having determined that I was not going to be able to enter the necessary spirit, from whatever angle I would approach it, for engaging with the event, plus having all the children to take care of, I elected to sit it out.

All this said, I still think the response, while perhaps noble after a way, was a bit overwrought. I am convinced that the way people immediately jumped on this was as much an expression of their frustration and dissatisfaction with present political life than outrage at some racist grafitti written in the greatest likelihood by a totally inconsequential lowlife. Present day progressives especially do not know how to effectively combat the business interests and their political representatives on the economic and social justice and environmental issues, among others, that are dear to them. But everyone of any significance knows, and more importantly agrees upon, exactly what to do when an open display of racism, especially one by some hapless individual, rears itself, and they waste no time mobilizing all their available forces for action. I was surprised by how many serious and busy adults well into middle age felt that this incident called for their involvement and leadership in order for it to be gotten through satisfactorily. I am convinced there is some compensation happening here--guilt over not being able to prevent, or even disturb, the war, imposition of the security state, the concentration of wealth and the cavernous disparities of income, the total implosion of the lower third of the population, the decline of education, of culture, etc, etc. A protest against racism--which officially no one condemns or dares to ridicule--takes the form of an assertion of one's own relevance and virtue...

This essay is mostly complete. I was unable to nail the ending, but I have run out of time (self-imposed).

2011-12-07T22:32:00.000-05:00

Is New England Dying?

The political leadership in my state has lately embarked on another lame campaign to try to persuade young people, especially recent college graduates, not to leave at the first opportunity. Several of our neighbors have started their own initiatives along these lines, or at least have openly expressed similar concerns about their own rotten demographics, and the ongoing exodus of the best of their young people. Good luck with that. In addition to those referenced in the article above, here are some pertinent numbers: Maine and Rhode Island were both estimated to have declined in absolute population in the year 2009, which given the current low death rate, is generally regarded by demographers as indicative or forboding of catastrophe; the under-18 population during the decade of the 2000s declined in every New England (indeed every northeastern) state, led by Vermont (14% decline), Maine (10%), Rhode Island (9%) and New Hampshire (7%--this is even with my own children figured); Vermont has had the lowest birth rate (around 1.6-1.7 per woman) of any state in the country for most of the last decade, with the rest of the New England states making up most of those right behind it, usually around 1.7-1.8, meaning that barring much more substantial migration/immigration into these states than has already occurred the child population will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. The largest age cohort in all of these places in the recent census was that in the 45-54 range, and the 55-64 range is still the second largest. Even to bring in anecdotal evidence, until about 2 years ago, when I was 39, and had been on staff for 12 years, I was still the 3rd youngest person out of about 20 in my department at work, which included more people over 70 than under 40. This age distribution seems to be pretty typical throughout the organization, with the exception of the excessive number of septuagenarians. My particular city, which has no college or youth-oriented cultural scene to speak of at all and is dominated by sober professionals, seems to suffer especially from a dearth of people between the ages of 23 and 35. Though while this situation is not quite so extreme everywhere, and there are certain towns that appear to be attractive to decent numbers of relatively energetic, if not world-changingly innovative young people (Brattleboro; Portsmouth; Burlington (VT)), most are even worse off than the place I live, which at least has a few possibilities for achieving a modestly prosperous career.

It could be objected, of course, that New England, especially the New England in which the laconic, industrious and resourceful character of the Yankee is the predominate figure, has been pronounced to be dying before, that indeed the sense of imminent death is a permanent feature of the local zeitgeist. The literature has certainly inclined in this direction. Hawthorne's gloomy depictions of a hidebound, mirthless society hounded by doom on all sides were set in the period when Europeans had scarcely been settled in the region for fifty years, in some instances less than 20, come to mind. Though Hawthorne was writing at a distance of two centuries, such specimens of literature as do survive the early colonial era as Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom and Jonathan Edwards's epic sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God reinforce the idea that this was not the most optimistic, life loving and earthly future directed people, though in reality of course they were to some extent. Immigrants poured into Massachusetts and diffused all over the region throughout this era, while the birth rate was around 6-9 children per women over a period of several generations, which is one of the highest credible numbers found anywhere in history. Moving on to the post-Civil War Go-West-Young-Man era, in concert with the ascension of New York to melting pot colossus and one of the handful of most important cities in the world, New England comes to stand in symbolically as a graveyard for the living dead for literary types once again. Does American literature contain a more grim community and landscape than the town, presumably in western Massachusetts, in which Ethan Frome is set? Eugene O'Neill milked these themes to good effect throughout his illustrious career; the stunted sons hopelessly tilling the rocky soil of their overbearing father's farm in Desire Under the Elms and the beautiful but faded and oppressive summer home in Long Day's Journey Into Night being two notable instances of this. In this era immigrants from Ireland and Italy and French Canada streamed into the region in large numbers and the population consistently grew from 10-20% every decade. In the recent (Post World War II) era the New England = death motif in literature and movies has hardly abated, though the sense where it appears has become more of nostalgia for some more refined ideal that possibly existed in the past and to which the vulgarity of modern existence will not permit ascendance. A Separate Peace, the 'haunting' nostalgia films Summer of '42 and its underappreciated sequel Class of '44, even by my reading more highbrow efforts like the poems of Robert Lowell partake heavily of this quality. In my later teens and early 20s when I was living outside the region and confused about where I should tell people where I was from, when I would say Maine/New England the response of my interlocuter would frequently be to express the sense he or (rarely) she had that the region was dead, that they had felt the deadness viscerally on some visit or even collegiate stint there, implying then of course that the future dynamism of the country--this was before everybody had adopted the globalist mindset--both cultural and economic, would come from elsewhere, Texas and California and the southwest and west generally being considered the favorites for this leading role at that time. People are comfortable with the idea.

At bottom of course all of this concern is about the increasing desperation to grow the tax base--especially via the much vaunted entrepreneurship/innovation that a properly educated young workforce is supposed to spawn if congregated in substantial enough numbers--bring consumers into the economy who need to buy houses and furniture and baby clothes and so on, and to subsidize, or at least ease the burden that the needs of the increasingly aging population are threatening to overwhelm the various states with. Anybody who reads the papers knows that all hope for maintaining the living standards that North Americans have become accustomed to is invested in attracting entrepreneurship and innovation to one's community, with the holy grail being any kind of industry that will produce thousands or at this point even a few dozens of middle class jobs. Trends and statistics would seem to indicate that in the current situation (much-maligned) theater graduates have about as good a chance of making a living in their chosen fields as the would be entrepreneur does of seeing his business succeed to the point of providing him with a middle class income for himself over a period of several years, let alone one that will come to the economic rescue of entire regions, yet unlike in almost any other field with a similar rate of professional failure (most estimates seem to agree between 80-90% of new businesses), the leadership of society continually calls for more people, smarter people, harder working people to direct their energies towards innovative and imaginative business creation--as the only possible solution to all our problems.

With regard to myself, after finishing high school I too left the region for about 8-9 years, and returned when I was 27. Looking back, I should have made a greater effort to spend another couple of years overseas; even though I was out of money and was not having much luck getting jobs, it's something I should have forced myself to do, as it might have had the effect of shaking me out of my lethargy and enabled me to join one of the energetic and interesting segments of society. There was certainly no reason to rush back and grasp hold of a lowly position in the regular workforce that could not have been put off for a few more years. Anyway I came to New Hampshire for romance--my wife is from here--and because at the time I was not in an immediate position to find any better arrangement in the US. Plus I did retain a general affection for the area as I had lived in Maine, and entertained some idea at the time, as I have noted before, of eventually settling there. I was still technically one of these young graduates that are always supposedly so much in demand, though not an entrepreneur, and without any verifiable job skills. Still, I thought must be intelligent enough to eventually figure out the game of the professions, or make a positive impression on somebody who would be in a position to "set me up" somehow (this is one of the drawbacks of reading too many novels--characters in them are always getting "set up" by people they have made an impression on). Also it must be remembered that I was still expecting at the time to finish writing my book within a couple of years, and for the book to be both good and recognized as such. I suppose I ought to be embarrassed to have actually ever thought this now, and to offer a different and more reasonable explanation for what I expected to happen with my life, but I don't see what it matters. Of such conventional careers as might have been realistically open to me, I still cannot think of any that I have any great desire to have now.

But I have gotten a little off track. The object was to examine what a state like New Hampshire offers to an enterprising young person. My answer, even though I personally seem to have stagnated in many ways, is still, I think, quite a lot. Of course there are a lot of careers that it would be impossible to pursue here to any great height, or even at all, but there is enough proven substantial brainpower deposited around the state to demonstrate that one is not dooming oneself to a life devoid of meaningful accomplishment in many fields by staying here. The overall quality of life is very high, especially once you get past your early thirties--every time I go to visit any of my other old haunts in the Mid-Atlantic I am reminded how many extra years of life I have managed to preserve by not having to spend several hours in traffic jams every day--and largely accessible. The last time I checked the statistics, which was within the last 5 years, New Hampshire had the lowest income inequality of any state in the country. While this might sound distasteful to super-achievers, this is mostly due I think to the comparatively low numbers of absolute wastrels in the state compared to almost everywhere else. There is certainly a healthy population of rich people, though evidently they are not quite as rich as rich people are in other states, or else they leave the state, which is not hard to do, to indulge in any extreme high-end consumption; for I am not aware of any restaurants or stores or leisure activities anywhere in New Hampshire, or the southern half of Vermont for that matter, that it would be completely impossible for me to contemplate going to even once due to their expense (I'm sure some probably exist, but I do not as yet know about them). The unemployment rate is much lower than elsewhere in the country--officially 5%, maybe double that in reality. That number is deceptive though, I think, because a lot of people do leave the state because the job situation is limited, and the economy being on such a small scale it is easy to perceive when that is the case. If you live in a town of 15,000 people surrounded by woods and the largest employer in it closes down, it doesn't require the acumen of John Kenneth Galbreath to see that waiting around for things to pick up again is probably not a smart idea, as might be the case in a place like California or Florida. There is a notable influx of professional people who come back in their mid-30s after having failed to make it really big/burned out on the super-competitive lifestyle in Boston and New York, especially if they have children. One of my children's friends' father spent his youth trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood (he is an energetic and active Republican in the comminty now). They still want to impress upon each other that they played and achieved no small success in the game of life though.

The population of New Hampshire it should be noted did increase by 6% during the last decade even though the child population declined substantially. We seem to be becoming a popular retirement/late career destination for baby boomers fleeing the oppressive taxes, and, some assert, the diversity that have overwhelmed their native haunts to the south. There is also a libertarian movement called the Free State Project whose goal is to get libertarians to settle in the state in large enough numbers to be able to begin getting elected to office, which has apparently attracted a few people...

This essay is garbage and it is incomplete but it has been 8 days, my kid won't go to sleep and I have to get ready for an appointment, so I am letting it go now.

2011-11-30T21:00:00.000-05:00

So Unfocused I Can't Even Come Up With a Credible Title

Still not up to writing much lately. I seem to be going through some further life transition, which seems unfortunately to be steering me even further away from mental activity of any passable quality than I was before. What is the nature of these afflictions which beset me? The usual busyness. Anxiety and mild depression. Sentimentality--despite still having 2 babies and a 5-year old, I find myself of late missing the years when my oldest two boys were little. At the time of course I was doubtless as anxious and I was certainly quite a bit poorer than I am at the moment at least, but the past, being safely gotten through, is easily remembered as a happier time. And in fact, I was younger, and there was more time and less housework with 2 than there is with 5, and I still perceived myself to be able to write halfway decently, which, while almost certainly a deception, did still inject a joy and sense of purpose into my private mental life that I have had trouble accessing the past few years. I am unable to find pleasure in many of the things I formerly found pleasure in, and while I think my children are likely to be worthy human beings who would be capable of being contributors to a worthy society where they will feel themselves to belong, I have grown overly pessimistic that they will ever inhabit such a society, not for any long term. And also before they were in school we used, it seemed, to go so many places. All over New England, Montreal once a year, the Mid-Atlantic three times or more. Gas was much cheaper. I still have one of the cars I had then. It cost $16 to fill the gas tank at that time. It's around $35-40 now.

This used to be the time of year--from October through New Year's Day--in which I formerly took the most pleasure. Lately I scarcely notice it in passing, such is my general distraction. I am lucky if I manage to spend three days in the whole of these months in the observance of some ritual of the season--but enough of this weak-headed lamenting. I would like to be able to have some more time to appreciate the spirit of the seasons though, especially around Christmas. I haven't got all that many left anymore.

This post was originally going to be, not an insistence on, but a defense or attempted justification of going to college in certain circumstances, even of liberal arts coursework, in response to the ever-growing ranks of those who think almost anything would be a more constructive use of a capable young person's time and money, let alone an incapable one's. My main problem of course in attempting this task is that all the doubters as to the virtues I would be espousing would have to buy into the idea that I am, in the heart of midlife, an acceptably developed or educated man by the most minimum standards denoted by those words, who could be demonstrably shown to have acquired any knowledge or experience in the course of my education that I carry with me through life that is even roughly equivalent to the expense which Somebody incurred to have it imparted to me; and my impression is that this is exceedingly unlikely to happen. I am not merely in most people's eyes, including, frequently, my own, a poor advertisement for expensive 'humanistic' schooling, but the very portrait of the fate people congratulate themselves as avoiding when they choose to concentrate in other fields. At the same time I do know a few people who studied the same course and received the same degree as I did who do strike me as excellent advertisements for this same (though this does not seem to cut any ice with the naysayers). And even with regard to myself I still have a hard time convincing myself that I would have been any better off, or significantly happier, forgoing the course I did take, for the army, or the pursuit of a trade, or entrepreneurship, or what would have been a likely futile course of study in the hard sciences or engineering or even computers, for which I had no significant preparation up to that age. My essential problems are deeper set in the way I relate to the world, my general level of comfort in it, etc, which have always been uncertain and confused, and have always been largely impervious to attempts at improvement. I have never been very much in any harmony with my surroundings--the things I write about most on the blog are those where I feel closest to attaining this sense.

I think the defenders of humanism should drop the "it teaches you how to think" meme for a while, since non-believers don't seem to be buying it, and anyway if it were true and people were honest with themselves it should be largely manifest when you met such a person. I am coming around to Ruskin's view on this matter, that genuinely intelligent people think as naturally as they breathe. I do not think at this point particularly well, though I during and for a few years after school my studies and the generally higher caliber of everyday discourse and interactions did inculcate some stronger habits of thought, attentiveness, attunedness to environment, etc, than I was wont to have formerly. Now however I have been removed from higher intensity mental environments for so many years that I seem to have regressed back to that more confused and sluggish method of thinking and perceiving.

So if humanistic studies don't teach you how to think in some superior way, what good are they for exactly? First of all, they may well teach you to think in some way highly prized by the better classes of society--I just don't think people should insist upon it where it is not evident in itself. Done reasonably well of course, they should give you a strong foundation of general knowledge, not merely practical facts, but a better awareness of what kinds of things (smart/smarter) people think about, and the way that they think or came to think about them. I think for introverts of a high academic intelligence quotient it has a social value that seems to be woefully underappreciated. Yes, people do a lot of drinking and wasting time in school, but above a certain threshold of intelligence social and intellectual life are not really capable of being separate entities. To be brief, it is important for smart people to be predominantly around other smart people sometimes. Of course there is much examination of and guidance on the nature of existence as a whole, how to approach life, to become attuned to and become somewhat at home in all the various part's of one's mental and aesthetic world, one's language, physical environment, sense of proportion, and justice, perhaps it enables one to discover and understand strengths within himself, though this never quite happened for me. Unfortunately emphasis on mastering demonstrable skills--in languages, composition, rhetoric/public speaking, music, as well as those areas of math and science in which a general competence is well within the capacity of the intelligent non-specialist--before the degree is awarded has never been strong in this country, so this realm of learning as a whole has come to be seen as less difficult and therefore the province of less substantial men and women than the hard sciences especially.

Article about young writers in New York--seems something like the kind of scene I would have liked to have found at that age, though they seem a little too nice and devoid of edge to make much of a literary impression. As usual in modern literary circles, vital male heterosexual energy seems to be lacking, as well as any sign of a genuinely unconventional take on life, and usually where these are absent, there is not much hope of compelling work being produced. Still, it is hard not to think that if I had been able to achieve success in my chosen career, these are the types of girls who would likely hold me in high esteem and even awe now, and those thoughts are pleasing to me.

2011-11-22T21:10:00.000-05:00

How Good Was the Economy in 1965?

I was doing some light researches into how the sudden collapse in the season referenced above of the New York Yankee baseball dynasty that had dominated the sport for the previous 45 years was perceived at the time, which has always seemed to me a more interesting event in sports history than I have found to be reflected in the existing literature regarding it, when I came upon this Sports Illustrated article of June 21, 1965. The issue featured a weary-looking Mickey Mantle on the cover with the pulsating headline "New York Yankees End of an Era". Mid-June is fairly early in the season to be writing the post-mortem on a team that had won the pennant 14 of the last 16 years, including the most recent 5 in a row, which indicates that they must have looked really spent, though a few of the baseball people interviewed for the piece were still wary of their making a run for the pennant, "if their (aging, in some instances washed-up) stars got healthy" (this did not happen). The article is pretty pedestrian. It identifies the team's obvious problem, namely that their remaining longtime superstars were suddenly in decline, and, for the first time in the modern era, they did not have any young players of comparable talent to replace them. The speculations on the reasons and social forces behind why this had happened appear wild and ridiculous when reading about them now, but there are various inadvertent commentaries in them about the economic and social world that Americans, particularly men, lived in, or perceived themselves to be living in, at the time, which caught my interest and formed the germ of this posting.

To get a couple of asides out of the way first, it is remarkable how well the economy functioned in the 1960s, given that none of the grown men involved in this article, including the writer and the ownership and management of professional baseball teams, seemed to possess what we could consider a sophisticated understanding of economics. Related to this, the way baseball organizations were run in the 1960s were laughably amateurish by our standards, when single-A minor league teams have full time marketing departments and corporate strategies in tandem with the cities they play in. Among the odder circumstances which emerges from the various scouts and general managers interviewed for the article is the seeming conviction that there was in 1965 a shortage of available talent...i.e., the Yankees couldn't replace their star players because unlike in 1938 there weren't dozens of Yankee-caliber prospects emerging from the sandlots and cornfields every year to replenish the farm system. This is ironic in part of course because in 2011 our society is supposedly in dire condition due to severe talent shortages in numerous areas, math and science most famously, but also entrepreneurship, diplomacy, the mechanical trades, even to a certain extent in cultural areas. One area in which we perceive ourselves to be far superior to the past however is in the development of athletes, apart from a few exceptions like boxing that have extreme lower class connontations and have lost popularity with the social classes and institutions that have resources to pour into athletic training. In most sports no one believes that the top competitors or teams in 1965 would stand a chance against their contemporary counterparts--indeed, even I believe that, albeit grudgingly. Baseball's management class in the 1960s appeared to have no idea where they might reasonably find or encourage the development of baseball players if they did not emerge organically from the soil of middle America. Though the sport had integrated in the 1940s and the tapping of the immense talent pool of Latin America was underway to a small degree at this time (60s), as was the case in the other major sports it was simply assumed that having more than 5 or 6 black or foreign players on a team was not commercially viable; hence the primary source of talent by necessity, as was perceived to be the case in most areas of national life at the time, had to be the white American male population. And although no one in baseball at least seemed to be thinking all the way through the ramifications of it yet, there was a growing sense, though not consciously perceived as such, that this group on its own was not up to the task any longer to the extent that the age required.

I must get on with the quotations however. First here is Johnny Johnson, the (evidently inept) director of the farm system, after declaring in the previous sentence that Roger Repoz was going to be the team's next superstar*, "...we don't have the quality of player we used to have. But neither does anyone else, because it just isn't there anymore...kids are getting married younger, some of them at 18. They give baseball a year or two shot, and if they haven't made the big leagues by then they want to quit; their wives are putting pressure on them to make more money...They find out there's better money in industry. They all want security, or their wives do."

Next. a despairing Joe E Brown, GM of the Pirates--who, unlike now, were actually a pretty good team through most of this decade--chimed in with "These days everybody is security-conscious. A boy takes a job and his first question is, what is your pension plan?"

Looking back to the apex of Yankee organizational supremacy, 1938, when their top two farm teams were stacked with major league level talent, the author writes that while in those days "Minor league pay was a pittance...it beat the CCC camps and it was easier to swing a bat than an ax," after the war "the G.I. Bill of Rights began to convert second basemen into certified public accountants". That is rather horrible to contemplate.

I don't know how much of this would hold up to close scrutiny--I suspect very little, especially on the baseball side of things, (i.e., I doubt many major league-caliber 18 year old talents were really passing up chances at baseball careers to become accountants)--but the perception of the possibilities open to ordinary, unspectacularly educated 18-20 year old American boys at the time from the vantage of 2011 is to be thrust back into a different world from that we have known in our time. To be honest, it starts to seem almost incredible that such a state of society could ever have existed, so conditioned are we to suppose that the economy that exists now is somehow more natural and even more just than the affluent society of the postwar era.

Mickey Mantle played four more seasons, '65-'68, after the collapse of the Yankee dynasty, finally retiring because, as he put it, "I just can't hit anymore", and indeed, especially looked at with the naked eye, these seasons were a significant decline from his standards up to that point. However, in the context of the league at the time, which saw offense drop to levels unseen since the deadball era of the 1910s, he was still a well above average hitter, and certainly the best on his own team in most of those seasons. He was limited by injuries to 122 and 108 games in '65 and '66. In '66 he hit .288/.389/.538 with 23 home runs in 2/3 of a season. In '67 and '68--the depths of the neo-deadball era--he moved to 1st base, which enabled him to play 144 games, during which he walked 107 and 106 times respectively, numbers more appreciated now then they were then. While his batting averages of .245 and .237 in these years looked weak, though they were still higher than the league averages (and the '68 Yankees as a team hit .214, which I am pretty sure is the lowest team batting average in any season since 1920), his on-base percentages were .391 and .385, which were the 5th and 3rd highest (respectively) numbers in the league in those seasons. He also finished 10th and 9th in the league in OPS in those years, which though obviously a decline from his peak, when he finished 1st or 2nd in that category 9 times, shows that he was still a very skilled offensive player even on his last legs. His 22 home runs in '67 were 8th in the league. His runs scored and RBI totals were in the 55-63 range in these seasons, doubtless limited by playing in one of the weakest offensive lineups in one of the weakest offensive eras of all time. I'm not arguing that these were great seasons, but I do think they are underappreciated, as the perception I have from what I have read about this decline phase is that it was painful to watch him play out his career when in fact he was still the best offensive player on the team when he retired.

*Roger Repoz was traded early in the 1966 season to Kansas City after amassing 63 hits, including 12 home runs, in his 127 game career with the Yankees. He went on to play 9 seasons in the big leagues, admittedly in a pitching-dominated era, in which he compiled a .224 batting average, 480 hits, 82 home runs, and for the modern stat-hound, an OPS+ of 105. His best season was probably with the Angels in 1970, hitting .238 18 47 in 137 games, with 41 extra base hits. He did lead the American League in sacrifice flies in 1968, with 8.

2011-11-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

More Music Videos--Whether You Want Them or Not

Rediscovering some of the hits of my early childhood, from the viewpoint of a half-lifetime of experience.

("Without You"--Harry Nilsson--I am writing in the titles for the benefit of any future scholars who do not come to the page until after all the videos have been removed).

My response to this even now is that it is the sensibility of the time distilled to about as fine a point, while remaining somewhat tasteful, as could be reached. I don't say it was an especially deep or intelligent one, but I immediately recognize the feelings and emotions at work, and even though they still make me uncomfortable, they nonetheless make sense on some level which most contemporary manifestations of emotion do not.

This song was featured to striking dramatic effect in a suicide scene in the nihilist college movie The Rules of Attraction, which is where I was reminded of it recently. Here is that video. It is rather grim, and a lot of people don't like it, or the entire movie for that matter, which runs in much the same vein. I have to admit, I didn't hate it, even though it is probably pointless and there is much that is disgusting in it. Nonetheless it hits at several of my weak spots, being about rich, good-looking and cruel people who are more verbally adept and probably smarter than I am, though this last is evinced more in the style in which they speak than the content. So I have a hard time taking it seriously when unspeakably awful things take place in the movie, because the characters still seem to me better than I am in all the most important ways. The movie also has a stylish flair to it--at times and in certain scenes--that I found attractive (the scene where one insouciant asshole type recounts his year in Europe meeting women and unapologetically spending tens of thousands of dollars of his parents' money is everything I fantasize about my triumphant enemies brought into thrilling clarity). The girl who killed herself should have gone to St John's. Not that such things are important of course, but she would have been considered practically a beauty there. She would have fit in better anyway. I found it amusing that even though the film appears to be set in the 2000s (I realize that the book was set in the 80s) no one uses cell phones, or computers/the internet, except for the purpose of accessing porn.

(Albert Hammond--"It Never Rains in Southern California")

All right, kind of a run of the mill early 70s hit with a run of the mill look and performance video, but, I find it a pretty catchy song, and there is something in it that encapsulates a number of phenomena that at the time seemed like they would go on forever. Such as the idea that a substantial portion of the coolest young people would naturally flock to California above all other places to frolic together in the sunshine into the foreseeable future. Granted, I don't have a lot of contacts among cool people, but one doesn't seem to hear of anyone going out there to just be part of a scene, without a specific economic or professional purpose, anymore. I even know cool people who grew up in California and have moved away, which would have been unthinkable in 1973. What else? The centrality of popular music in the culture? The preeminence of the fairly conventional straight white middle-class male singer-songwriter type? (I know they are still trying, but they don't seem to be breaking through at a comparable rate to the past). For that matter the similarly-oriented, homogenous audience for the same. The socio-cultural fragmentation of the former mass middle class, which one admittedly looked forward to and despaired of any possibility of its happening in the 1970s and early 80s, is one of the more significant developments of my lifetime, and whatever boat I needed to be on when this iceberg began to break apart, I seem to have missed. I thought it would have worked out better for me.

(Abba--"Waterloo")

Nice video.

(Kiss--"Beth")

From 1976. This song, along with Player's "Baby Come Back", from '77, and maybe a few other numbers from the same period, strike me as reflecting in some sense the high tide of the entire rock and roll worldview. Not the peak in terms of artistry by any means, but the mentality that the rock song was the dominant mode of musical expression such that no other form could be imagined. I was only 6-7 years old at this time, but my sense was that the rock ethos was solidly entrenched in the culture. The idea that the medium as it was known in the mid-70s would be effectively dead within 20 years I think would been shocking to people. I find it shocking still. I thought Rock would rule at least for the duration of my lifetime, and at the very least I did not think it would be replaced, as far as the mainstream goes, with effectively nothing.

Lennon Sisters Interlude. The Lennon Sisters were on TV every week for 13 or 14 years. There is a lot of footage of them to work through, and it's looking more and more like I am going to work through a substantial portion of it. I don't know if there is another musical act whose fortune stands to gain more from the ascendance of internet video than the Lennon Sisters. No one, including me, was ever going to sit through years of episodes of the Lawrence Welk show in order to rediscover them, and while they released records throughout the 50s and 60s, none of their singles ever attained radio immortality in any form (though their brilliant version of My Favorite Things was featured on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas soundtrack). They were destined, under the old media model, for ever-increasing oblivion. But when you can come upon them in 3 and 4 minute video clips, their appeal, especially in the current environment where their type is not especially well represented either in the popular culture or society at large--though plenty of people sure would like it to be--is direct, and striking. To some people, anyway.

For this edition we are going to have a couple of solo efforts from the two elder sisters, both at age 19. First is Dianne's rendition of "Our Love is Here to Stay", which among other thoughts, encourages the idea that taking a vacation to 1959 once in a while might not be such a terrible burden after all.

Peggy doing "Oh Johnny!" in 1960. A excellent singing performance, probably too precious and adorable to be acceptable to enlightened modern audiences, of which I however do not constitute a part, so I can appreciate it fully.

"Melodie d'Amour"--1964. A reprise, as they also sang this song on the air in '58. In '64 their age range would have been 18-24, so they are pretty close to peek group beauty here. While the 60s in general were an all-time great decade for female beauty, '64 seems to have been a high point among high points, with regard to hair and clothing styles and the general zeitgeist, all of which went off the rails at various junctures during that turbulent period.

Dianne gives a peppy little introduction to the song here, in what appears to be her comeback performance after having had to go off the air for several years in the early 60s after getting married (when Peggy became engaged around this time and it finally dawned on Lawrence Welk that he was on the verge of losing his most popular act entirely, Dianne was abruptly called out of retirement to save the show). In case you haven't figured it out, there is someone in this group of ladies I am kind of in love with, and that somebody is Dianne. There is very little that is more attractive, character-wise, in a person than discovering that they are smarter and have more fortitude of spirit than they let on they are aware of having. Such people seem, unfortunately, to be exceedingly rare, especially nowadays, when the importance of presenting one's self as highly intelligent is so great. Anyway, Dianne Lennon strikes me as one of these affable but subtly strong and exacting people. Of course I know nothing about her but the impression is a powerful one. The sisters made an appearance on "Family Feud" sometime around 1983-84 (on which they chirpily but methodically took apart Sister Sledge--it was music week), at which time they would have been in their late 30s, early 40s, their golden years behind them, matronly in some instances, and the effect of the whole group is that they were still these delightful women--Richard Dawson was practically in raptures--but Dianne still stood forth as the leader, the smartest, the most aware of what was going on, not forcing any of this on the observer but just being completely comfortable with who she was and steering what I was anticipating would be an embarrassing appearance by a bunch of washed-up old singers desperate to get back on television by any means into a rather effervescent display of womanhood where if you watched the show everyday you'd have been sad that they were going away again so soon.

Edie Gorme--"Button Up Your Overcoat"

Edie Gorme is another favorite old singer of mine, at least for certain numbers, such as this one. I had kind of forgotten about her for a while until a few weeks ago, hence her appearance here. She was a real nightclub/lounge singer for the most part, so there are not a lot of filmed performances of her up on Youtube.

The Beatles--"You Won't See Me"

Holding the position of my current favorite Beatles song. It was one of the last of the songs-I-knew-but-didn't-realize-it-was-a-Beatle-song in my youth. I'm pretty certain that the real peak Beatles was in '65, the Help!/Yesterday and Today/Rubber Soul period. These records, already perfect after a fashion, are yet still better than they announce themselves to be, which is largely impossible with everything that comes after them; and as such, one's pleasure attains a level that he can never reach with the later albums.

2011-11-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

The 1988 Time Capsule

The companion post to the 1987 time capsule I put up back in June (I like to have a lot of different unfinished series going on at a time), based on the important catch phrases of the year according to my high school's yearbook staff. A cursory glance indicates that this list is even lamer than that of '87, and that I am not going to have much to say about most of the subjects on it. However I feel compelled to go through with the exercise.

White Snake Isn't it Whitesnake, just one word? Long-haired, pop metal group whose videos were ubiquitous on MTV that year. The singer had formerly been in another band which I had never heard of but seemed to have great respect in the hard rock community. They did nothing for me at all.

Fawn and Rob I presume this is Fawn of Iran-Contra fame. I don't know who Rob would be (A search for "Fawn and Rob 1988/7" turns up very little. Perhaps refers to Robert MacFarlane, National Security Advisor?). Overlapping episode from '87. I really had no interest in this or sense of what the big deal was at the time.

Winter Olympics Calgary. The Olympics of the inept ski jumper Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards and Commie glamourpuss Katarina Witt. The eastern bloc countries, especially the USSR and East Germany, were dominant. The U.S. did so humiliatingly bad (and looking at the medal standings it was even worth than I thought--a grand total of 6 medals, 2 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze) that shortly thereafter the I.O.C. began declaring recreations such as snowboarding and double-cross X to be Olympic sports in a shameless ploy to pump up the U.S. medal total and protect their television fees. I remember it as kind of a fun Olympics, obviously the last winter games featuring the communist sports machines, though the severe beatdown at the hands of our mortal enemies at the time, who then appeared as driven to make a mockery of our entire way of life via athletic dominance as the Chinese do now by standardized tests, was wince-inducing, at the very least. To reiterate, the tally in total medals was, USSR & East Germany, 54, the US of A, 6. Restricting it simply to gold, the Commies had the advantage 20-2. Woe!

Platoon Also on the '87 list (Did they even check it?). Oscar-winning Vietnam film that seems to me to have been downgraded in stature in the years since.

Iran Contra hearings Zzzzz.

Godspell Must have been the school play that year. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was. I didn't really pay attention to the student productions, either in high school or college. I'm sure I didn't miss that much artistically, but it wouldn't have killed me either. Plus it seems like would have been an easier way to meet girls than attempting unsuccessfully to play sports.

Andy Warhol I think he died that year. I don't remember its being much of an event at school. The listmakers of '88 were much more enthralled with national and world events at the expense of local trends than their predecessors in '87. As to my general impression of Andy Warhol, I find his art to be amusing. He obviously had a good instinct for what would sell, catch the eye, what have you, and there is a lot of cleverness in it--a lot of the things he does seem simple or obvious, only no one else would have thought of them, or thought to execute them, in just the way that he gets right, as far as it goes. Whether any of it means anything substantial in world-historical terms I have no idea.

illegal aliens There was a controversial amnesty around that time, which primarily effected California, I believe. The issue wasn't a pressing day-to-day concern in Portland in the late 80s. In the last decade there has been a decent inflow of immigrants into the city, particularly from Somalia (I am always tempted to make a joke about the wisdom of settling Somali refugees right on the ocean like this, but that's the kind of thing that the people I need to try to be friends with don't think is funny). Given that they are designated as refugees, I presume that they are legal. Our school appears to have about a 10% nonwhite population now, which still seems pretty low, though the school district at a whole is around 21% (which suggests that most of the immigrants attend the other, more 'inner city' high school in town). Of course these figures are up from essentially zero in the 80s/early 90s, so it is not an insubstantial change. I don't really have a point in all this--obviously, the standard line coming from everybody respectable is that the schools and everything else in town is better as a result of this modest diversity than they were before--I find demographic studies of all kinds to be interesting, especially of course when they involve places with which I am familiar. I read the book Outcasts United, which is about a soccer team of refugee kids from a lot of different countries in a suburb just outside Atlanta, not long ago. It's a journalistic read, though it was engaging enough that there was no doubt that I was rooting for the refugees when they played the team of evil blond kids with $300 shoes and aggressively Blackberrying parents (even though my children are mostly blond, they couldn't make it onto that team either). It does provoke a lot of interesting questions about the future of America, given that very poor immigrant children whose parents have quite low levels of education such as these make up a substantial portion of this next generation. If the children of ordinary married college-educated parents--and less than 20% of American children under 18 currently live in such a household--have, as we are often told, little hope of leading productive and fulfilling public lives unless they step it up in a big way, how are we supposed to be optimistic about the prospects of kids like this? Something has to give here. Sorry to go off on that digression. A lot of thoughts on these kinds of things strike me and I have a hard time putting them all together.

divine Possibly a slang word? I don't remember it. Perhaps it refers to the grotesque movie actress from the films of John Waters, who I see died in 1988. I still have never seen any of the immortal pictures featuring this icon. This list isn't resonating with me. I didn't hang out with the yearbook kids, obviously.

John Huston He also would have died during that school year, though again I didn't notice that his work cast much of an influence over the personality of our school. I have written about him elsewhere. I think he even has his own category on the sidebar.

Aids Aids was big news in 1988 even in Maine, which I think had around 2 confirmed cases at that time. Nonetheless, since getting it seemed to involve doing naughty stuff with exceptionally naughty people around 99.8% of the time, no one I knew figured there was much of a realistic threat of their contracting it. Even the depraved people in Maine are modest about the extent of their depravity compared to what they surmise goes on out in the great world.

Presidential elections They would still have been sorting out the primaries when the book went to press. I did vote in '88 in the general election, though I certainly would have had no idea on what basis I was voting, other than that I vaguely sensed even at that age that Republicans seemed to be hostile to people like me--my idea of a desirable life at that time was the avoidance of business and the adoration of money to the greatest extent possible--so I figured I would not be doing myself any favors by voting for them, which assessment was probably correct, as far as it went.

Dirty Dancing The great hit of the season of course, whose legend has only grown stronger in the years since. Never a favorite of mine, naturally. My sensitive feelings were hurt right in the beginning when Swayze sneaks the girl out of the lame, parent-sanctioned party and they go to the real party, with rock and roll, black people, drugs, and, you know, dirty dancing. Which crowd do you think I identified with?

SuperQuest I have no idea what this was. (It looks like it's some kind of computer competition. The first one was in 1988. I could not have been more out to lunch as far as computers were concerned during the entirety of my youth. I had no interest in them whatsoever).

Wok In...crawl out The real expression was "Wok in...Fuck out!" This place was open until 2 or 3 in the morning, which made it besides Denny's the only place in town open after 10 o'clock or so. This meant that from around 11pm to midnight on weekend nights it was swarmed with obnoxious teenagers such as myself, many of whom were inebriated to some degree. The night manager's English was limited, so when he had to dispatch of an especially unruly patron, not being able to summon up the entire expression "Get the fuck out!", shortened it to "You! Fuck out!" Looking back from the vantage of Police State America 2011, it's remarkable how much was tolerated at this restaurant. To begin with, the dining room would be utterly trashed, not necessarily on purpose but as an effect, after this nightly rush, with chairs and condiments and trays and dishes moved all around the room and left as they were when people were finished with them. Especially during the winter the floor was about as filthy as you can imagine with everyone tracking in snow and sand and mud and then moving constantly around the room the whole time they were there. Sometimes fights would break out, usually in the parking lot. The police certainly made a point of stopping in on their rounds most days and if there was a substantial crowd lingering outside they would order everybody to leave. I don't recall anybody ever getting arrested for doing anything that was not blatantly provocative however.

The Wok-Inn is still in business, and apparently as successful as ever. I stopped in a couple of years ago when I was in town. I used to go over to Portland a couple of times a year when I first moved back up this way, but lately I've only been making it every 2 or 3 years. I also always used to make a point of stopping in whenever I was passing through on the way to somewhere else, which I still do a few times a year, but lately I've stopped doing that too. It still has some meaning to me but it has ceased to be in any way a place I could claim to belong to for a long time now. I used to entertain sometimes the idea of moving back there too but my wife, not having the same connection to the city that I do, never developed much enthusiasm for it and in time I suppose I have come around to looking at it more through her eyes and less through those of my 16 or 17 year old self. So it is more like a lost love that has long moved on and left me behind now rather than an organism with which I maintain any sort of active engagement.

California Raisins You've got to be kidding.

"This is drugs, this is your brain on drugs" My personal favorite anti-drug ad was the Jon Bon Jovi spot which began "I've partied with the best of them. But drugs were never a part of my scene." Please.

Jim and Tammy Not interested in them.

Donna Rice Not much interested in her either, though she is admittedly still in the front rank in looks of political mistresses (post-Kennedy era) all these years later.

Vacations in Florida I didn't go to Florida at that time, but I have acquired the habit since and come to respect the power of the ritual for New Englanders.

Jesse Jackson Active in the primary campaign that year. Reputedly came to my wife's high school in New Hampshire, which may have been even more extremely lily-hued than mine was, that year, and had the progressive part of the student body anyway whipped into a frenzy to go out and demand retribution from the power structure for its many sins.

mini skirts I do remember mini skirts being a trend, especially denim ones. This may be because a girl that I imagine to possibly have liked me is wearing one front and center in her class picture in the yearbook. In other words, I imagine I could actually have been immersed to some extent in the very fine details of this fleeting fad, if I had been a little more alert and ready to spring into action during the brief two week period when this window of opportunity may have been open. Probably not though.

"I don't remember saying that."--R.R. More Iran-Contra stuff. Somebody on the staff was really into this. By '88 it was widely accepted I thought that Reagan was in cognitive free-fall and was in no way actively participating in the running of the country's affairs.

Colors L.A. gang and drug movie starring Sean Penn and featuring the dramatic Ice-T title song (from the same era as his sublime "Girls Let's Get Buck Naked and Fuck Tonight"). This was big at the time. I haven't seen it referred to in some time. I have two memories associated with this film. The first is during one of the drug busts in the film a woman was arrested, handcuffed and taken into the police station completely naked, which is absurd. The second is of a guy who used to sing the song all the time as a kind of nervous tic. He was one of the most socially hopeless people I have ever known in my life, who actually tried. Everything was just not working though. Brillo pad hair. An exceptionally weak chin area. Thick glasses, a doughy body, mouth always appeared agape. Not very smart. Just a disaster. He latched on to this other guy who was in contrast almost preternaturally winning; square jaw, fiercely chiseled body, irreverent, shoulder length hair and mustache, but in a handsome way. One weekend the handsome guy took care of business with a girl who, according to this sidekick, "could have been in Playboy", which was doubtless the highest compliment he could think of. When the stud came into school on Monday he had put the episode behind him, but his chinless friend had not yet recovered from the contemplation of his master's deeds, because when saw him in the hallway he literally began to foam and pulsate with the second hand excitement. "That's what I'm talking about! That's what I'm talking about! That's what I'm talking about!!! My boy got paid! My boy got paid! My...boy...got...paid!!!" It was truly one of the most bizarre, as well as funniest displays of behavior I have ever seen in my life.

Broadcast News Another movie? Never saw it.

Stress I was not very stressed myself, at least not about attaining a dominant GPA and succeeding in the college sweepstakes, which I'm sure is the stress being referred to here. I suppose I should have been more stressed, but I was bizarrely in love with what I perceived to be my abilities at this time, and was sure that wherever I ended up going to college that my teachers would love me and my fellow students look up to me as a genius and everything in my life would magically take off. In general I have had a very stress free life, though a woefully uneventful one.

Oprah Winfrey Her show was just starting to take off. She never meant anything much in my life.

puffetts I don't have the slightest idea. Are they the puffy sleeves that adorned certain articles of girls' clothing? I liked that look all right.

Fatal Attraction End it with the movies already. I never saw this either.

Exchange students There were four at our school that year, a boy and a girl from Spain, a girl from Germany and a boy from Austria. They were all of well-above average hotness and social graces for us, which was unusual among exchange students. The Spanish girl fell in with the haughty artsy clique and didn't have much to do with people outside of that, but the Austrian propelled our soccer team from the middle of the pack to the #1 seed in the state tournament (though we were upset there), as well as took a number of American girls to bed, the Spanish guy smoked a lot of weed and enjoyed no insignificant amount of feminine companionship himself, and the German girl came to all the parties and school activities and glared upon everyone with a contemptuous scowl; she was highly attractive in doing so, however, which inclined most of the weaker people to forgive her.

No "Appetite for Destruction?" Yes, the exchange students were the end of the list. How out of touch were our DHS elite not to have noticed that Guns and Roses breakthrough record was the album of the year in 1987-88? I swear to God I did not go anywhere that whole year where this did not get put on at some point. Portland was seriously loving G n' R. Major omission. Throws the credibility of the whole list into disrepute.

2011-11-03T21:47:00.001-04:00

Blog Wind-Down

I am not planning this. It is happening organically. I don't seem to be able to write much anymore, or rather, I should say, think anymore. Certain mental processes which I formerly took some pleasure in are no longer available. I have lost confidence in them, without being able to replace them with another mode of thought that produces an equivalent satisfaction. The wise and knowing nod in unison. It is the course of life. The weaker minds, constitutions, et al, falter increasingly with every passing year, until finally the point is reached when their owners themselves realize they are pretty much tapped out, and then they collapse altogether. This is where I seem to be at the moment. We have reached Peak Bourgeois Surrender, and may even have entered the Death Spiral, out of which very few minds have ever managed to pull themselves.

Is it impossible at this point for us all to pick up and move to Park Slope? Is there anywhere else like that? Am I even at all really like these people? I need to find some community of adults somewhat like myself. I have already established that I am literally losing my mind. Maybe it won't help.

I have to give up trying to make sense of economics and economic theory with the intention of justifying my continued existence in the society. I wonder if this fixation will someday be regarded as the folly of our age. It's causing me to become peevish, at the very least, as I increasingly find myself unable to argue the intention stated above.

But how about a little light-hearted fun:

Hot Women of the OWS--Link Here

Almost makes you want to be there. You always have to pick a favorite, so I am going to take Miss Occupy Maine (aka #4), because even though I am plotting my move to Park Slope I obviously still have a soft spot for those elusive, though not so extraordinarily rare creatures, women of New England (and especially the 3 northern states of that region, whose ladies are frequently maligned, unfortunately not always without cause, as being less generally beautiful than their counterparts elsewhere) who are actually pleasant looking. I like to show support for anyone credibly representing the home team in this regard whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Part of my increased peevishness stems from the circumstance that I know the culture is awash in foolish arguments which the real aristocracy of the intelligent obviously would never treat as serious amongst themselves but which they choose not to prevent from circulating endlessly among the masses, the effects of which I cannot prevent myself from being absorbed into nor can effectively slaughter. It is infuriating.

I am not sure how to convince young people that they cannot harbor ambitions separated from a serious consideration of money reality; nor am I sure that it is really desirable to do so in spite of everything. Life should be taken fairly seriously, moreso perhaps in many regards than it is, but it is also brief and evidently insignificant. Most of my real regrets in life involve not pursuing more adventures, not living in more exciting places, not pushing harder at figuring out how to eke out a living doing something I am interested in, as well as not being a better student when I had the chance, though it isn't clear that I really have the mental/psychological makeup to be a successful professional in any event. Likely none of those things would have worked out economically in any event, but those are still the things that I think about. Much conventional wisdom seems to be that this mindset in a man is indicative of a failed upbringing. Obviously the likelihood that this is true weighs on me more and more as the years go by.

The common riposte whenever someone suggests that taxes could be higher that if the suggester wishes to pay more taxes nothing is preventing him from writing the government a check is officially tiresome. Anyone who thinks this is what anybody means is willfully missing the point. I am probably guilty of willfully missing the point on various of my more treasured topics, but that does not make it any less annoying to have to deal with such people.

Is there anything I can practically do to make my children become serious capitalists, financiers, engineers, scientists? I don't know that I can even properly inculcate the necessary work ethic, since I do not really understand what it consists of myself. And then there are legions of people who work hard but are too stupid to make anything of themselves in a competitive field, so they are essentially worthless too. Obviously one of my major goals for my children is that they believe they are not worthless, that they are able to contibute to the common weal in a way that is commensurate with their abilities, gives them dignity and merits respect from their fellows. But being serious about anything real smart or knowing people would consider worthwhile, really seems to be an impassible barrier to me. I don't understand how one breaks through to experiencing work, study, life, etc, on that plane.

Try as I might to disdain the whole ethos, I did not evidently, as I remarked earlier, have a strong upbringing, and so I probably am a socialist in my heart of hearts, though even I find the concept of forcible 're-distribution' less than desirable, if not distasteful. Unfortunately I find the direction which large sections of formerly middle and working class society are heading, if they are not already there--a world increasingly devoid of strong institutions (apart from the police and debt collection agencies) that actually have any interest in them, a basic sense of how to organize life, even such educational and career/income opportunities as used to be considered mediocre but at least passable for getting through life with some dignity--to be even more distasteful, so I am more concerned with shoring up or re-organizing what has collapsed for much of the bulk of society than I am in preserving the legitimacy of individual fortunes, if no less obtrusive means can be found.

Also, I always had the impression, growing up--perhaps I misunderstood--that one of the pillars of American society was the belief that there must be limits on the political power any individual is allowed to have. Given the close, and seemingly growing ever closer, relation between the two, I do not see why it cannot be discussed whether the public has an interest in placing limits on the ability of individuals to accumulate massive quantities of wealth as well. Again, maybe outright taxation/confiscation is not the best ends to achieve this, but surely there must be a way to introduce regulations of some kind to prevent the kinds of systems generating fortunes wholly incommensurate with the scale on which any other level of society operates. I know people like to bang on about how Wall Street and the financial industry for example pretty much carry the entire tax burden of New York, but does that sound like a healthy way for a city of 8 million people to be organized anyway? The Wall Street champions repeat this information as if they resent it, even though it would indicate that they are the only sector of the entire economy of the city that is thriving at all.

I tried to express something of my opinion on this on Facebook, of all places, in response to an article I had linked to. It was naturally found lacking, one of the commenters going on about how taxing capital gains (I cannot recall how the dialogue was steered towards them), the wondrous virtues of which relative to the economy at large it is probably obvious I have no understanding of, would cripple any hope of recovery for the immediate future. This commenter also demanded I name precise figures for how I thought income should be distributed, which question he claimed to have asked of dozens of liberals, and surprise, surprise, no one had ever been able to give him an answer. I spent about two hours trying to compose a response and finally gave it up. In honesty I find this demand for an exact figure to be rather stupid and beside the point, but I don't know how to convey that in a way that will have any effect on the kinds of people who look at things in such a way. My basic answer is something like this: I think the distribution of income which prevailed generally in the Western world from the late 1950s to early 1970s was preferable to that which we have now, so that could be a starting point, at least. If there are benefits from this concentration of wealth in terms of research/development, extreme high end educational improvements and the like, the positive effects of them on the mass of the population seem outweighed by the negative ones, such as widespread aimlessness, lack of purpose, pessimism about one's future prospects, such as I increasingly see all around me, and even in myself, because one can sense the proximity to so much in life that contributes to its value growing ever more inaccessible and remote because the costs of those things seem to be primarily driven by the capacity the top people have to pay for them. Of course we must try to improve ourselves, draw on our inner resources, define value for ourselves and not allow other people or the market to do it for us. But if one senses through constant experience that he is no match in any arena for those who have better credentials, resources and so on, and likely never will be unless as it were he can discover the mental secret which is the key to their power, it is going to be difficult for him to willfully shut himself off from consideration of these sorts of matters.

On a reading note, on November 3, I finished the last of the books in the 2nd of the 6 tests in the 1994 GRE test guide that has been the basis of my reading list. I am now on pace to finish this program in 2045, when I will be 75 years old, which is a three year improvement on my pace when I finished the first test. I began the list November 20, 1994 (the 1st book was Wuthering Heights, by the way) and finished the 1st test February 2, 2004. I suspect that my pace will continue to accelerate rapidly, as, one, many of the books that appear in the questions henceforward are ones I have now already read, and two, there don't appear to be very many of the extremely long books left such as Plutarch, Proust, Powell, The Bible and so on that take several months to read. There also don't appear to be very many new novels left to read--there is apparently a hard core of novels that everyone is expected to read and the questions just keep referring back to them. What I have mainly going forward are more short stories, a lot of poetry, a lot of criticism, essays and general 'letters'.

2011-10-25T21:50:00.000-04:00

Movie Set (Common Theme: Oscar Winners, Especially Foreign Category)

These are all pretty good. I confess to being a benevolent judge, and am heavily influenced by my sense of how difficult it is to produce something which can be generally said not to be a failure even on mechanical grounds alone.

The Official Story--(1985)

From Argentina, won the Oscar for best foreign language movie in its year. It is about a politically naive, or at least willfully oblivious history professor married to a right wing businessman who discovers that their adopted daughter is likely the biological child of a communist agitator/leader shot during the country's infamous "Dirty War" of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I admit that I know virtually nothing about this war. The internet reference sites describe it as a near decade-long period of state-sponsored violence against the citizenry, presumably concentrated on the political opponents of the ruling regime. Between 10,000 and 30,000 people are estimated to have been killed. The movie, all of whose characters have recently lived through this upheaval, is serious and adult in tone. Conversations, relationships, political beliefs, professions, eating, dress, are engaged with an impressive, even almost unnerving, purposefulness. Characters are brusque, direct, knowing, competent, composed, and full of conviction. Even the main female character who is nagged by doubts and whose naivete is shattered during the course of the movie was an accomplished and put together professional, if politically and socially too submissive to the influence of her husband.

To an American sensibility the depth of conviction of the filmmaker's leftist/Communist sympathies is practically breathtaking. Hollywood people, however left wing they are supposed to be, have never been able to muster up this degree of heartfelt and unconditional hatred of the wealthy bourgeoisie, let alone the 0.1% or whatever precise stratum qualifies one as one of the truly rich. There is one scene where the plodding and increasingly successful businessman has Sunday lunch with his father and brother, socialists who cling to the woefully outdated small family concern that has no hope of being competitive in the modern international economy that even in the 80s was beginning to be recognized by more astute people. In the course of a political argument that becomes heated the successful brother calls them both out as losers and lays out for them how capitalism and the modern world works, how they would be foraging for roots and living in hovels without people like him, how he creates more economic value before lunch they have done in the last 40 years, and in general the rest of the standard argument that we have heard countless times from Republican party media and politicans over the last 30 years. Having had it deeply impressed on me that no one, no matter what they do, will ever be conceded to have won a political or economic argument in opposition to the core principals of capitalist enterprise on the merits of his case by anyone in a position of real authority, my impression of the scene was that while the socialist relatives might have been more endearing humans, the businessman had effectively demolished them, and demonstrated his strength, seriousness of purpose, and superiority over them to the extent that they, and the audience, must confess as much, at least when confronted by thriving capitalists of similar power and ambition. It was not until much later in the movie that I realized that we were actually supposed to hate the businessman, and that his speech, far from being conceived by the director as containing any force of truth, was intended to be despised for its grasping and petty conception of human affairs.

I gather that the characters in the movie represent a fairly privileged and elite class--even the professors and high school teachers work in more intellectually rigorous schools that most middle class Americans will ever have been exposed to--but the picture of Argentine society as depicted here looks more sophisticated and interesting at the ground, day to day level than ours does.

Madame Rosa (1977)

French, won the foreign language best picture Oscar in its year. It stars French cinema legend Simone Signoret, whom, incredibly I am seeing for the absolute first time, in one of her most acclaimed roles. Despite all of this that it has going for it the movie does not appear to be presently available on DVD, so I had to dredge up a copy on videotape. Simone Signoret is a retired prostitute (and Auschwitz survivor) who lives by taking in the children of active practitioners of her former occupation that they cannot, or don't want to, take care of themselves. They are supposed to send Madame Rosa money for this. The movie is about her relations with these children, one in particular, as well as the household's general relation to the bohemian-multicultural-immigrant neighborhood where they live. It is characteristic of its era and nation of origin: pretty original conception, good plot/character development through the first half of the film, retrospectively attractive cityscapes and people--the Parisian neighborhood where Madame Rosa lives is a little run down but vibrant and still recognisably connected with the French cultural tradition, and French people below middle age in the 1970s always strike me as being extraordinarily healthy looking even with the ridiculous fashions of the time. It is somewhat marred by a unsatisfying Godardesque ending that is also endemic to the period. I used to presume that these endings, being obviously symbolic of something, were possibly profound, and that my inability to make any sense of them was a tremendous loss of life-quality to me. I suspect now that they may be merely intended to be challenging or illustrate a quality of nihilism which is only pleasing, as well as accessible to, people of exceptionally refined intellects. I would still like to be such an intellect, and qualify myself for inclusion into a more desirable segment of society, of course, though I no longer believe that dutifully straining my wheezing brain for another 20 years to try to figure out the meaning of this class of inscrutable ending is an especially productive use of that organ.

Simone Signoret in her younger days. She was a commanding presence on the screen even in her dotage, but I was curious to see what the vintage version looked like. Not surprisingly, very like what I take to be the average attractive Frenchwoman's idealized self-image. Will have to get around to seeing some of her old movies.

The French Connection (1971)

Won Oscar for regular Best Picture in its year. I had never seen it, though it is certainly one of the iconic movies of its time, which time being my early childhood is one whose attitudes have effected an especial influence on my development. For a long time the combination of the 1970s, drug dealers, car chases (there is a very celebrated car chase scene in the film) and Gene Hackman, while not wholly turning me off from seeing it, did not encourage me to make a special point of doing so either. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it is--and as with The Godfather, fun is really the right word for the experience, despite the circumstance that the movie is filled with all manner of violence and blood and criminal activity--when I finally saw it.

It is very similar to The Godfather, which of course came out the next year (and also won the Best Picture Oscar) in the formula of its success. Besides the highly stylized killing, the plot has the same kind of classic construction that for whatever reason had a brief revival in the early 1970s and then largely vanished again, although Steven Spielberg I must say has maintained something of this talent even up to the present, which is doubtless one of the secrets of his continued success. The individual scenes, many of them become classics in themselves (the car chase scene lives up to the hype; it is legitimately thrilling, probably not least because such a scenario, indeed most of the scenarios in the movie, would be impossible to even conceive of with contemporary communications and surveillance technology in play) are highly vivid either in action, setting or dialogue and always clearly build further on what the viewer knows to be going on in the movie and continually move the story in the direction of the climax. This sounds elementary, but hardly anyone active in mainstream filmmaking seems to have a sense of how to do this, let alone with any mild interjection of vigor. Also, again like The Godfather, there is a certain amount of sardonic humor even in murder scenes that can be irresistible--the part where the French hitman after gunning down the Marseille cop in the hallway of his apartment in cold blood breaks off a piece of his victim's fresh baguette to snack on on his way out of the building comes immediately to mind.

As noted in a previous post, I've lately become more interested in the era around when this film was made ('68-'74 or so, which also happens to be the time right when I was born) than I had been previously. Indeed, for most of my life, it had been one of the periods of the 20th century I was least interested in. This disinterest was perhaps because the media focus on this era has always been on the extreme political and social turmoils and movements that defined it, which usually being depicted in broad and sweeping images never captured my imagination. It may also have been because the time, much of it my own childhood, struck me as not a particularly good one to be a child in. It also did not strike me in my 20s as a great time to have been in one's 20s, though the people who were that age, as people always do, certainly liked it well enough. It does strike me now however as not a bad time to have been a 40 year old man. The economy up until '73 was strong--you pretty much had to assault your boss with a baseball bat or embezzle money to lose your job--you weren't expected to do a lot of housework apart from mowing the lawn and simple repairs, you could still drink and smoke anywhere you wanted and not be the only person doing so, there seemed to be more leeway as far as flirting with women went, not that I would have been able to do that anyway, but the knowledge that some such possibility existed might have added a certain excitement to the day to day prospect of existence. Of course at the time all of this would have seemed so unremarkable that it would not have been any relief of depression anyway.

The city looks great in this movie too, even when it is supposed to be shabby and/or dingy. There seem to be so many interesting things for regular people to do, whereas the sense is that now this is not the case, that Manhattan at least is wholly the province of mega-millionaires and even nightclub life is become wholly organized around their status games. Against this backdrop, 1970-era New York suddenly looks less chilly than we remember it, though I know one must be wary against being taken in by appearances.

This is Arlene Farber as Angie Boca, the girlfriend of the small time middleman trying to make his first big score on the French drug deal. I thought Angie Boca was pretty sexy (she often disguised herself in blonde wigs as a 22-year old) and was taken with the idea of her for several days after watching the movie. I even posted on my Facebook status that "Angie Boca is the real dream NYC girlfriend", which observation alas garnered no responses, not even a like.

William Friedkin, the director, followed up this, which I believe was his first feature, with the Exorcist, after which he attempted a remake of the great 1950s French film Wages of Fear which proved disastrous, and after which his career never really recovered. He was evidently so arrogant and obnoxious in the period where he was successful, not least towards film studio executives, that many took pleasure in his downfall. I listened to his commentary on the film and he is obviously pretty intelligent, with some sense of humor, as well as at times rather self-deprecating. Probably he was on his best behavior.

Hud (1963)

Did not win the Oscar for Best Picture in its year. In fact, it was not even nominated, which, especially as foreign language films don't seem to have been under any consideration at that time, seems almost a travesty now. While '62 saw a number of big time classics hit the screen, '63 was kind of a wide open year for the awards. There was no dominant English-language film casting a shadow over the rest of the field (Foreign-wise, I know 8 1/2 and Jules and Jim at least came out in '63; I can't remember anything else offhand). The winner was Tom Jones, which is sometimes listed among the worst Best Picture winners, and is detested by lots of serious film watchers. I have written elsewhere that I actually like it, though today at least I am pretty sure I would have voted for Hud over it for the Academy Award. I haven't seen any of that year's other nominees, but none of them stand out to me as anything highly regarded as great movies today: America, America, Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and Lilies of the Field. Anyway, Hud is a real American movie with a lot of poignancy, it's from the tail end of the old days before the general personality of the country underwent the dramatic change that still informs it to a certain extent today, it's got Paul Newman in his prime years as a star taking on a role that requires him to play a rather small and unsympathetic man, it's got Texas in its full epic grandeur mode that Larry McMurtry, who wrote the source novel for this movie as well as that for The Last Picture Show, which has a very similar atmosphere to this, seems to have been able to tap into so well. There's a lot to like.

While the idea of the traditional rural Midwest in the collective national as well as international imagination seems to grow ever fainter, Texas seems to have retained something of that mythology of the remote place set amidst the vast open spaces, distant from population centers or other significant physical contact with the wider mainstream culture at all. The idea seduces you with the promise of its purity, you can feel the landscape and the tumbleweeds rolling down the main street of the town, uncorrupted by extreme postmodern developments, though you can still get Coca-Cola and toothpaste at the 1950sish drugstore. Professional cynics think it's a lie, just as they doubtless think the quaint New England village motif is a lie. They are not, not wholly however, at least if you have the imaginiative power to see them.

I haven't said much about the actual movie. It's heavy on the midcentury Freudian-type themes, the conflicts between fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, the mysteries and deep significances of female sexuality. We largely avoid these themes altogether in our generation, as well as the one behind us; such relationships as we do manage to have seem to be small by the traditional standards of the humanistic tradition, and do not involve a very substantial engagement with the question of how to live. I didn't take much from the story, which struck me as a framework in which to express more sweeping general themes--the dying of old ways of life, the ever more elusive quest to attain fully realized manhood, the (supposedly) elusive depths both of female desirability and desire--in a picturesque setting, with exquisite-looking people. I usually try to take things on their own terms, and I have a certain degree of sympathy with these terms, so I liked it well enough.

I do not want to go on a long aside about Paul Newman's sideline of above average food products (I just had his raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing tonight and I think it has a temporarily positive effect on the sharpness of my thinking), but I do think that the emphasis on the labels on how all the proceeds go to charity is illustrative of the broad change in our society's attitudes towards wealth over the last 30 years, which younger people will never have known and a lot of older people claim to have no memory of. Nowadays if a celebrity opens a clothing line or a fine wine division it is regarded a savvy move promoting the brand or whatever, and no one expects the entrepreneur to give the money to charity. This would not have been the case in the mid-80s, which if I remember correctly is when the Newman products first appeared. People like my grandparents, whom it should be noted were Archie Bunkeresque welfare-hating Republicans, would have somehow thought it bad form for a presumably already very rich celebrity to be able to muscle in by virtue of his name recognition on a lucrative but traditionally unglamorous market. Frankly it is difficult now to try to remember or conceive what the rationale against Newman's making himself a pile of money was, because nobody thinks this way anymore, but obviously Newman himself had something of a similar mindset, because customers were assured right from the start that any money earned from the sales of his salad dressing and salsa would not be going directly to him.

I had a Contemporary Bonus as well, but I think I will save that for another post, as we are already over a week on this one.

2011-10-19T18:16:00.000-04:00

The Anatomy of Melancholy III

The Anatomy of Melancholy II was a weak post, with little elaboration or personal input on my part, so I am going to take up III straightway as a corrective to that barren effort.

Fairy sightings: "Pauli, in his description of the city of Barcino in Spain, relates how they have been familiarly seen near that town, about fountains and hills." There is lots of stuff like this throughout the book.

"...prodigies frequently occur at the deaths of illustrious men...as in the Lateran Church in Rome, the Popes' deaths are foretold by Sylvester's tomb." The tomb of Sylvester II (999-1003) is still marked by a memorial, which dates from 1910, in this church. According to this informative web page with regard to relics, this monument "is said to 'cry' before a pope dies (its marble becomes moist)."

"Men's miseries, calamities, and ruins are the devil's banqueting dishes."--Lactantius. To be honest, the ideas at work in most of these quotations are at such a remove from my usual thought processes that I am hard put to say much of anything about them. As they are so different and imaginative after a fashion however, I like to have such expressions around me to a degree.

Stories of possession: "A nun did eat a lettuce without grace or signing it with the sign of the cross, and instantly possessed...Durand...relates that he saw a wench possessed in Bononia with two devils, by eating an unhallowed pomegranate, as she did afterwards confess, when she was cured by exorcisms." Bononia appears to be the Roman name for several different cities, including Bologna, Italy, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France, Vidin, Bulgaria and Banostor, Serbia. I am guessing Durand was referring the one in France. Burton is obviously fascinated by any incident or story which introduces to human life some element outside of ordinary existence, the cause both of the interest and the invention I suspect he would take to be Melancholy. The section on palm-reading and astrology went over my head because I was unfamiliar with and could not get a good grasp of the terms.

Witches are said to have carnal copulation with the devil, after which their brains are crazed. The devil of course being the ultimate bad-boy alpha male.

"...in all ages there should be (as there usually is) once in six hundred years a transmigration of nations, to amend and purify their blood, as we alter seed upon our land...to alter for good our complexions, which were much defaced with hereditary infirmities, which by our lust and intemperance we have contracted." Well, here we are. Burton was looking for the Northern Goths and Vandals, innocuous, and free from riot and diseases, to come and reinvigorate the faltering stock of mainstream Europe. There is a lot of circulation of peoples in our time of course. I am not sure yet which carry the freshest and most vigorous reinforcements of blood however. I don't think it is supposed to be people like however, and indeed, I am almost certainly a double-barreled transmitter of the melancholy gene.

"...if a drunken man gets a child, it will never likely have a good brain, as Gellius argues..." I love to think of myself as a drunken man--it would give some texture and the possibility of unpredictability to my existence--but I really have not been one in a long time, and compared to serious drinkers, never.

The chapter on Bad Diet as a cause of melancholy is one of my favorites in the whole book, as numerous of my favorite foods, and the damage they do to one's body and mind, are investigated at length. For example: "Carp is a fish of which I do not know what to determine. Franciscus Bonsuetus accounts it a muddy fish. Hippolytus Salvianus, in his book de piscium natura et praeparatione, which was printed at Rome in folio, 1554, with most elegant pictures, esteems carp no better than a slimy, watery meat." They eat a lot of carp in the Czech Republic, especially fried--it is even the traditional Christmas dinner. There are ponds stocked with them all over the country. For home dining the custom is to bring home a live one--and they are rather large fish--as we do with lobster, and have it swim around in the bathtub until dinner time, at which one kills it by clubbing it in the head with a mallet. My impression is that having this huge fish swimming around in your tub makes it less of a bother to beat it to death, if one is queasy about such things, by the same principle that one doesn't have a problem setting traps for or setting loose a cat to feast on the mice that share one's abode. You are highly motivated to get it out of there.

"Among herbs to be eaten I find gourds, cucumbers, cole-worts, melons, disallowed, but especially cabbage." What? Cabbage is bad too? here is a poem, translated from Plautus:

"Like other cooks I do not supper dress,
That put whole meadows into a platter,
And make no better of their guests than beeves,
With herbs and grass to feed them fatter."

Another translated poem, from an author called Crato, on the black Bohemian beer of middle Europe:

"Nothing comes in so thick,
Nothing goes out so thin,
It must needs follow then
The dregs are left within."

"Venus omitted produceth like effects...some from bashfulness abstained from venery , and thereupon became very heavy and dull; and some others that were very timorous, melancholy, and beyond all measure sad. Oribasius...speaks of some, 'that if they do not use carnal copulation, are continually troubled with heaviness and headache; and some in the same case by intermission of it'...Villanovanus...saith. he 'knew many monks and widows grievously troubled with melancholy, and that from this sole cause'."

"Felix Plater, in the first book of his observations, tells a story of an ancient gentleman in Alsatia, that 'married a young wife, and was not able to pay his debts in that kind for a long time together, by reason of his several infirmities: but she, because of this inhibition of Venus, fell into a horrible fury, and desired every one that came to see her, by words, looks, and gestures, to have to do with her..." Among the charms of Burton is that he writes as if he is talking to himself, oblivious to any kind of outside audience, which has the effect for the reader who can find some commonality with him of having a greater intimacy than is usual. It also has the effect of making all of the incidents and reactions that appear in the book seem as if they could happen to anybody at any time, and in an atmosphere of exalted intelligence such as is extremely rare in real life but is strongly desired by the most desperate readers.

We move on to another favorite chapter, that on Bad Air. This sentence regarding the effects of heat is nothing I can really gloss on, but it is the sort of sweeping anecdote packed illustration of a facet of human experience that gives a lot of pleasure, (even where it depicts things that are actually extremely unpleasant): "At Aden in Arabia, as Lodovicus Vertomannus relates in his travels, they keep their markets in the night, to avoid extremity of heat; and in Ormus (located in what is now southeastern Iran, on the Persian Gulf), like cattle in a pasture, people of all sorts lie up to the chin in water all day long. At Braga in Portugal, Burgos in Castile, Messina in Sicily, all over Spain and Italy, their streets are most part narrow, to avoid the sunbeams. The Turks wear great turbans, to refract the sunbeams; and much inconvenience that hot air of Bantam in Java yields to our men that sojourn there for traffic; where it is so hot, 'that they that are sick of the pox lie commonly bleaching in the sun, to dry up their sores'."

We are reminded that cold air is almost as bad as hot however, and the list of places condemned for having air both cold and bad is too long to fruitfully include in the post here. Lithuania was among those locales singled out however, a very rare reference in literature to the land of 25% of my ancestors. If you follow food trends at all, you have probably observed that the Mediterrenean diet, especially favored by persons with ancestral roots in those countries, wins a good deal of approval. Unfortunately the Baltic Diet favored by my generations of my people--centered around whitefish, sausage products, heavy breads, beer by the hogshead, cabbage, potatoes, cream sauces, etc--does not seem likely to be embraced by the global foodie community any time soon. Which is kind of a shame.

2011-10-13T19:10:00.000-04:00

The Anatomy of Melancholy II

Countries free from melancholy according to Burton: "Italy in the time of Augustus, now in China(?), now in many other flourishing kingdoms of Europe." The defining characteristics of these happy countries are obedience to God, a state of peace, quiet wealth, a well-tilled countryside, many fair-built and populous cities, and, "as old Cato said, the people are neat, polite and terse." I would not qualify to be a citizen of such a place.

"...he that teacheth the King of Macedon, teacheth all his subjects."--Antigonus. I liked this in the moment. I am going to skip writing out the Latin where it is appropriate in these quotations for the time being.

"Where they be generally riotous and contentious, where there be many discords, many laws, many lawsuits, many lawyers, and many physicians, it is a manifest sign of a distempered, melancholy state, as Plato long since maintained..."

Further regarding lawyers, quoting Sesellius ("a famous civilian sometime in Paris"): "...he must be fee'd still, or else he is as mute as a fish, better open an oyster without a knife." I should note that the style of the book is that once a topic such as the venality of lawyers is opened, Burton runs with it for many pages, relates about 50 pertinent quotations and episodes, mostly from obscure Latin authors, and exhausts the subject as thoroughly as he can without losing the vigor of his narrative. His approving readership must really love this.

Burton felt that Ireland was allowed to lie uncivilized too long: "...it would turn to the dishonour of our nation, to suffer it to lie so long waste."

He considered Edward III (r. 1327-77) to be England's most renowned king.

To give a further indication of the book's rambling nature, there is a long recount of all of the major irrigation and canal projects going back to antiquity--unnavigable rivers being a sign of barbarism and thus to Burton a source of melancholy--that takes up several pages, still in the introduction.

He suggests a number of rules for lawyers that are intended to promote justice and de-emphasize financial interest, of which my favorite is that "all causes shall be pleaded suppresso nomine, the parties' names concealed, if some circumstances do not otherwise require."

He was hard on debtors too: "A bankrupt shall be publicly shamed, and he that cannot pay his debts, if by riot or negligence he hath been impoverished, shall be for a twelvemonth imprisoned; if in that space his creditors be not satisfied, he shall be hanged." I admit I could never figure out how seriously one was supposed to take these proscriptions, many of which were of a violent severity that we would find appalling if uttered by a gentleman-scholar of our own age.

At page 124, I noted that my book (I had the edition featured in the 1st picture above), was already dirty, and the main body of the treatise still had not started yet. Though it did begin immediately thereafter.

After a long litany of the woes of human existence, we are reminded that, "...and the latter end of the world, as Paul foretold, is still like to be the worst."

The number of bones in the human body was evidently still unknown at this time, popular estimates according to Burton being 304, 307 and 313.

As this point I was up to around page 150, where I noted that neither Shakespeare nor Spenser nor Chaucer nor any other English poet had yet been quoted, or even mentioned. I remember that Shakespeare and Spenser were eventually alluded to, which I doubtless commented on when these occurred, though it was still not more than a couple of references in the entirety of the Anatomy.

" 'Fear and sorrow' make it differ from madness; 'without a cause' is lastly inserted, to specify it from all other ordinary passions of 'fear and sorrow'." Definition of melancholy.

During a catalogue of various tyrants and other highly placed people who were known to have been punished by God for their wicked actions while still in life, there was a reference to Tiridates, an Armenian king, who as retribution for violating some holy nuns, was deprived of his wits. At the time I guess I thought everybody loved the idea of nun violations, since it is a theme that seems to come up a lot. But of course they wouldn't.

2011-10-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

Senso (1954)

I needed a break from all the modern movies I have been seeing--to say nothing of the general atmosphere of contemporary life--so I got this, which has many distinctions, among which is that it seems to have attained the status of a classic without quite being universally acclaimed as a particularly great movie. It was, as sometimes happened, exactly what I was looking for however. It has a great director--Luchino Visconti--and it is well-made, and elegant, but most importantly it is able by enough authentic touches and details to credibly conjure up another world, one that was already fading pretty rapidly in 1954, and which now is scarcely psychically accessible to us at all; one feels in seeing this that later variations on similar themes were not depicted with the really knowing accuracy, that of spirit. I refer of course to the world of old aristocratic Europe, or at least the residue of it, and not the British version of it either that is most familiar to us in the anglosphere, but that of the realms huddled around the Alps, where the traditional lands of the Teuton and the Latin and the Slav come into collision, the Catholic heart of the continent. Visconti was a product of the last flourishing of this culture, as was the star actress Alidi Valli, for whom I cannot find an adjective that accurately represents the responses which her mere existence on the screen arouse in me. She is routinely described, especially by modern critics, as "cold", is said never to smile, et cetera. Look, she is beyond any necessity of smiling; for all intents and purposes of conventional magazine criticism, the woman is nearly perfect. She is also, as it were, the embodiment of a world that is mainly dead, which persona also precludes the propensity for smiling. If genetic manipulation were to prove capable of producing persons of this type on a consistent basis, it would have no more enthusiastic advocate than I. I suspect it cannot, however. A being like Alida Valli is the result of centuries of deep human culture that I don't think can be replicated in the current conditions either of actual life or the laboratory.

Alida Valli is obviously in my personal pantheon of favorite female movie stars.

This movie was formerly known in English by the title of The Wanton Contessa, but especially with Italian movies and other art-products, such as the best-selling records of the blind and supposedly (according to the music snobs) terrible singer Andrea Bocelli, the trend in recent years has been to go with the Italian titles, at least if they are simple. It is a period piece, set in 1866 during the uprising of Italian nationalists against Austria, which at the time controlled much of northern Italy, including the Veneto. I do not remember seeing an Italian period piece before, at least that was so convincing in terms of attitudes, manners and the like. I have not seen the movie of the classic book The Leopard, also directed by Visconti, which is set in roughly the same time period as this and is generally supposed to be the greater movie of the two. The climactic scene where the dissolute lieutenant coolly lays bare to the contessa how their whole affair was a fraud on his part to extract money and services from her, mixed in with lamentations about the way the world--their world--was passing away, and how neither of them would be fit nor have much interest to live in the new one, followed by the scene where my dreamboat the Contessa Serpieri nearly as coolly condemns the man she loves to death as revenge for his betrayal, were thrillingly beautiful to me as an education in the meaning of living and being human under the auspices of civilization, as was so much of the film, which begins of course in the legendary Venetian opera house La Fenice during a performance of Il Trovatore. All of which one can argue means nothing to me except to say, within the bounds of this story there are standards, of propriety, of manners, of expression, of beauty, which must not be trangressed, and which have nothing to do with being a nice or decent or well-meaning person. I really need a shot of that into my system once in a while.

I have been loosely following the We Are the 99% page and the Occupy Wall Street movement. I support them insofar as it is obvious that some major changes in the economic and structure of the country are inevitable, and I would like the concerns of people outside the power elite to have some influence on the nature those changes take, and political activism, though I have never engaged in it due to a lack of absolute confidence in the merits of what I believe at any given time, is effective when carried out on a large scale:

1. The Distresses of Middle-Aged People, Whose Situations are in Many Instances Truly Dire, Seem to be Causing Young People to Panic More than is Probably Necessary. If you are 25 and don't have a ton of extraneous issues, your bleak-looking financial/career situation should improve, or your present penury at least should take on a much different character, over the next 40 years. I admit I am naive but common sense seems to suggest that if everybody, or a critical mass of the important actors in a generation, has a terrible credit score and unpayable loans, that, seeing as society still has to carry on somehow, the problems represented by these circumstances will out of necessity either be resolved or cease to carry the same importance that they supposedly do now. I could have made a sign in 1995 detailing woeful financial circumstances and a lack of grand career prospects similar to a lot of those on the 99% website. I know the kids today have been more ambitious and competitive from an earlier age than people generally were in my generation, and so I guess they are more aware of what is happening to them as far as being shut off from any kind of good professional track at an early age, which I didn't really figure out until I was around 35.

I didn't have health insurance either until I got married and my wife told me I needed to get it, mainly for her sake. I did not think it likely that I was going to develop any medical problem that would rack up 10s of thousands of dollars in bills that would also involve not dying, and while this may have been stupid, even today I am 41, probably more than halfway through life, and, while I have insurance now, have still never required medical attention that cost more than $300. All of which leads to my next observation on the 99ers...

2. I can't believe how many people in their 20s have serious health problems. Obviously some people have conditions that are unpreventable, cancer being the most obvious, but if you're in your 20s or 30s and you have some kind of dubious disability or just chronic health problems, I don't know, that sets off red flags in a lot of people's minds.

I do advise keeping up with going to the dentist though as much as you can. My wife, who understands a great deal about the most essential practicalities of life that escaped me at least, impressed this upon me before I had let my teeth go unattended too long, and I am much obliged for that wisdom now.

3. I was wondering if prostitution/stripping was making any inroads among the former middle class due to the economic crisis. Apparently the answer is yes. My 1st thought of course, as it always is, was I'm missing all the action again, but that is really just me taking a little psychic indulgence into my fantasies of the steamy underworld where people have relations with other people that are primarily or almost purely carnal, and understood to be such. I used to be really obsessed with other peoples' sex lives, if I could imagine them to have one; even people I was not attracted to, overweight cashiers at Rite-Aid and the like, I would think, someone is taking or has taken this person to bed, what kind of a person is it, what did he do to get her to say yes and so on. Even looking at the laments of the 99ers, for such of the women who are good-looking my visceral response is, 'but at least you're hot'--because to me, being sexually desirable is one of the two or three, and easily the most common, be-alls and end-alls of existence, and I imagine that having this quality somehow renders all other aspects of life, including a comparative lack of money, irrelevant. But I know rationally this is not how life really is. Really, this development was probably inevitable. There are too many reasonably attractive young women walking around with children, terrible finances and dim prospects of marriage, along with, one presumes, still a fairly sizable population of men with disposable income who are most keen on sexual activity but are not able to get the quality or quantity they would like by means of their personal charms and attractions alone...I have seen some commentaries to the effect that the number of people who claim to have taken to prostituting themselves or stripping are exaggerating, but I am not sure--at a certain level of society, which includes an ever growing percentage of the population, and is still, apparently, blissfully a long way from the world in which most journalist types inhabit, the income potential in such pursuits is considerably higher enough than such other jobs as are available--if there be any at all--that they will be seriously considered or taken up by lots of people more than eminently qualified for the work.

4. I am glad that the student loan fiasco looks like it is coming to come to a head soon. Having five children, people often helpfully point to me that "you have to educate them all", which though it makes it sound as if they suspected I might be planning to gleefully spring a bunch of people in a state of subhuman ignorance onto an unsuspecting society, what they really mean of course is, "I hope you aren't expecting other people, i.e. me, to pay their way for you". I am optimistic over the long term, and I believe it possible in 10 years, when my oldest boys would be of age to go to college, and likely in 16-18, when the turn of the two youngest comes up, that the system will have been reformed to some resemblance of sense again, one way or the other. That is not to say college will become affordable again, or that it will be accessible to anyone who is not of the very best quality of intellect, but a lot of the sources of the negativity that seems to be currently overwhelming much of the public perception of whether what most people are doing between ages 18 and 25 is doing them any good at all will be addressed. In this climate, and when I hear the way other people talk about college and so on, whether they attended it or not, I increasingly have to regard my own college experience, which seemed perfectly normal and reasonable to me at the time, as a great privilege...but I have another post in the works somewhere down the line about all this.

My main points here are: the current levels of student loan debt are so ludicrous relative to the incomes of the people who have them, including people who actually have good jobs, that they are obviously never going to be paid back, regardless of how horrible the consequences will be to the economy. If you are in your 20s I have to believe this is going to be a short-term crisis that will not still be crippling people 20 and 30 years down the line. Adjustments will be made. As regards college costs...and taxes, and the mentality of businesspeople, and credit scores...I am going to save those for future consideration so I can post this.

2011-09-25T01:17:00.000-04:00

The Game of Art APPENDIX B(?): Household Art Edition

What do the art displays of disaffected provincial petit-bourgeois bloggers tell us? Today we are going to explore that very question.

Picture #1: Title unknown. Artist is the father of an acquaintance.

One of the few actual paintings in this collection, the small canvas hangs in the attic on some paneling near a chimney, and the whole arrangement gives that softly lit part of the room a cheerier appearance. It has been up there ever since I moved into the house, and for all these years I thought it had been left behind by some former tenant, an anonymous work, but now that I have been discovered/caught snapping photos of all the pictures in the house, the true identity of the artist has been revealed to me.

I assume that the painting depicts a New Hampshire scene. The rust on the roofs of the barn is the most intimate detail of place. The seasonal appearances of the natural elements--sky, grass, trees, light--strike me as perhaps more incongruent than one would like. Still, I find something in the picture reassuring. It projects an idea of existence as more or less benign, which is a sentiment I confess to being open to.

2. Renoir--Flowers in a Vase

I am not making up the title. On the pouring shelf in the refrigerator/pantry area, formerly known as the interrogation room for its charmlessness, lack of windows, and single severe lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. The fingerprints and other smudges on the glass make for a nice symbol of our current familial relation to the fine arts. Almost all of the pictures here are not mine, either by original ownership or inspiration by the way. I do not know what the origin of this particular print was, though the original is supposed to be in the National Gallery in Washington so perhaps it is a souvenir of a visit there. If I were decorating myself I would almost certainly have neglected any flower pictures and wondered what touch of delicacy or other the establishment was missing.

3. Gustave Dore, Illustration from the Inferno, Canto XIII (about the suicides)

In the upstairs "office", where I spend less and less time as the years go on. We had to pay some homage to the Great Books, I guess--it's a part of the household narrative. Back in the late 90s a used book store in our town that has long since gone out of business had an art section from which they sold color plates and illustrations that had been torn from or removed from books singly, almost as prints. These Dante pictures were from that stash. I recall at the time that we got and framed four of them. There is a second one further down on this page but I don't know what happened to the other two.

4. Harald Sahlberg--From Roros (Side Street)

Souvenir from our trip to Norway in 2000. We did not go to the actual town of Roros, famed for its copper mines, which is quite far north. Norway was a fairly poor country and was not even independent until late in the 19th century, so its art museums do not have much in the way of major foreign collections and are heavily domestic in orientation. This was good, as besides the considerable amount of Munch there was to see, I liked their old pre-World War I realist/academy school well enough at the time.

5. Vermeer, Milkmaid

Poster from an exhibit that we actually saw in London in 2001 (this painting is normally in Amsterdam, which I have never been to, though I once stood in a train station in Paris contemplating buying a ticket there and possibly seeking out a Dutch girl I had been pen pals with. It was only a couple of hours away. But, of course, I allowed the costs and practical difficulties for which I had not planned deter me from this romantic and possibly--why not?--fruitful plan). This is in the refrigerator room, on the wall opposite the Monet flower picture. I'm kind of surprised it's still up, though I guess it does have a kind of kitchen theme and it is a reminder that even I once had a different life before I had to fill out paperwork for kindergarten assuring my kid's 25 year-old teacher, that Yes, we have books in our home.

6. Alfons Mucha, Poster for Sokol Festival, which is a Czech Gymnastics-Calisthenic type thing.

Not one of my favorite efforts by this painter, whom I wrote about in one of my old "Favorite Women of Art" posts (#6 or 8, if I remember correctly). This poster had a companion, which was the illustration I used for that other post, but that picture was put away some years ago and I don't know where it is at present. This one is hanging up in the downstairs bathroom, or powder room, as we used to call it in Philadelphia (that would be the old Philadelphia). That wallpaper dates from the 1940s or 50s and is peeling badly in places, but I am going to cling to it as long as possible because whatever replaces it will never be as cool.

7. 1980s Tourism Poster, Limousin, France

This probably shouldn't count as 'art', but I tend to regard it as part of the visual collection. This is also in the attic, just below painting #1 and, as you can see, approaching the floor, or at least the top of whatever pile is stacked against this wall. As noted elsewhere, I am a bit of a nostalgist for the days when countries were a bit more a world onto themselves, less globalized, slightly fewer people speaking English and walking around with degrees from American and other great universities that get indigestion at the mere thought of people like me setting foot on their campuses even as a tourist. I regard France in this light maybe more than anywhere else. It had a lot of glamour and romance to lose by adapting more efficient and convenient modern habits, as well as becoming generally more accessible and accomodating to the global economy, and to my imagination it has lost a bit of it, but then again how reliable of a source am I on these sorts of things? The attic is a very suitable place for the poster.

8. The World of Mother Goose.

This is a print of one of my father's illustrations. Naturally it is in the children's room. This artist is not afraid of producing a busy composition, as you can see. I suppose I have inherited something of this same quality in my own outlook--my instinct is to pile up facts or names or other people's ideas and mistake them for detail. Detail is more akin to penetration. It is honing in on what is most significant, and that is why it is considered an important property of high art.

9. Gustav Wentzel, Sjaakspillere

Yes, I believe the title in English is "Chess Players". Unfortunately I could not get a good picture of this. If I turned the flash off it was too dark. Bear in mind I had a break of about 10 minutes in which to go around the house and take all these pictures or I probably could have figured it out. Here is a link to the picture as it is supposed to look. The flash notably obscures the tasty-looking mug of beer set beside the board.

This is the other print brought back from the Norway trip. Its appeal, formerly its air of a kind of gentlemanly bohemianism, is now augmented by that of leisure and relaxation, but still in a cultivated context, all of which is largely inaccessible to me at the moment. The picture's placement contains one interesting coincidence, in that as you can see our own chessboard is stored right beside it--and it does get a good amount of use, though as yet our games are not very relaxed affairs--and one irony, in that the major item of furniture beneath it, atop which all of these miscellaneous items are sitting, is an antique piano, which however, no one in our house knows how to play, and which is so badly out of tune that even people who come over to the house who can play cannot play it, because the sound is too painful to them.

10. The other extant Dante illustration, from Inferno XIX

The simonists. Those guys get it good and hard in hell. Also in the office. Everything framed in that room is small in size, no larger than a standard sheet of typing paper. There are also barometers and such kinds of things as people like to look at and be surrounded by when they are taking refuge from their actual lives.

11. Covered Bridge, Somewhere in Pennsylvania.

This is one of my father's early pictures from the 60s, when he was taking after the style of Andrew Wyeth. I am about to contradict what I wrote in my last entry, in that this picture is also in the office but is somewhat bigger than an ordinary leaf of paper. However it is set atop an enormous and nearly immovable wardrobe that is in the corner of the room, so that if one is sitting down in the room he does not notice it too readily.

This picture was around during my childhood, and then it came into my possession after an interval of some 10-15 years through a third party whose hands it had fallen into. I don't know what it represents to me, other than a time--which the tendency is to imagine as a happy one though in reality it was no more or less happy than any other time--before I was born to which I have some relation. My father is not like me where his painting is concerned, angst-ridden and constantly suffering from crises of confidence and inferiority complexes. He paints not in a desperate attempt to become vital but because he is actually is vital, and as a celebration of that vitality. Obviously I can't really relate to that mindset.

12. Constable, Dedham Mill, Essex

Doesn't this remind you of the painting in Mr. Rogers's kitchen? This, along with at least one other picture in the same style, decorated the paneling in my grandparents' basement for around 35 years. Now we have it up in the children's playroom. I don't know what happened to the rest of the set.

I have written elsewhere about my affection for this school of painting. It shares an attitude in common with other things I like, which is a kind of hopefulness or even optimism judiciously larded with a sense of authentic melancholy. As ways to understand existence go this seems to me a reasonable and comforting one, especially if a grander understanding is inaccessible due to limitations of the intellect or spirit which prove impossible to overcome.

13. A print, but who the artist is or anything else I do not know.

The figure in this picture bears some resemblance to Mrs Bourgeois Surrender. It was given to us as a gift for that reason. It currently hangs in one of the niches of the dining room, above a couple of items I did not include in this survey, one a framed, waterstained tableau of some antiquity featuring a black and white image of some woods with the oft-maligned Joyce Kilmer poem "Trees" incscribed beneath them, the second a poster of Neuschwanstein Castle, which I have never been to, but which the children like. If it helps them develop an interest in learning about/traveling to Europe someday--apparently nowadays getting boys especially interested in anything traditionally associated with learning or culture has become a Herculean labor--then it will have served us well.

14. Postcard of our house, circa 1905

It is largely obscured by the elm trees, which unfortunately of course all died in the great elm blight of the 60s which devastated this quintessential New England tree (it is still the state tree in Massachusetts) all over the region. We have planted one. It remains rather frail-looking even after a couple of years, but it is still alive.

A curious note for baseball fans, the house next door to us on the left, which is not visible in this postcard, was, I have been told, the boyhood home of Red Rolfe, who was the 3rd baseman for the Yankees from 1934-42, played on five championship teams, had several outstanding years, especially 1939 when he led the leagues in hits, runs scored and either doubles or triples, and was arguably the best player at his position in the history of that storied franchise (though granted, he would have batted 8th in the lineup of that all-time team) until the arrival of Alex Rodriguez.

This item hangs in the dining room above the china cabinet.

15. Degas, Portrait of the Belilli Family

The bourgeois family extraordinaire. To be honest, I flatter myself by insuinating that I am bourgeois. Real bourgeois are actually quite rich by the standards of the median income or wealth. Five years ago when I began this page my ego, believe it or not, was still nowhere near deflated to a level correspondent to the truth; it still is not all the way there, nor am I ready for it to arrive at that point, though it continues to make a slow and grinding progress. Anyway, I thought at the time that by being bothered with conventional things like jobs and children meant that one was bourgeois, which seemed bad enough. That the truth is, in fact, probably even worse is something that will take a further number of years to come to terms with.

This picture is big and used to hang on the large wall in the staircase. It has since been replaced by photographs of the children and has been retired to the attic.

The public library in our town used to have a collection of framed copies of famous artworks they would allow you to check out for 28 days. Sometime in the early 2000s they ended this service and had a sale of the pictures. This is one of them. There is another directly below.

16. Henri Rousseau, Family Outing

This is the other picture from the library fire sale. This is the 3rd picture in the very artsy refrigerator room, above the Vermeer.

I admit I was not a particular fan of Henri Rousseau, but my wife finds a lot of joy and life in his paintings, especially this one, and she is not somebody who goes around liberally declaring enthusiasm for artworks.

17. "Travel"

One of my father's prints--such money as there is in this type of art is the ability to sell prints. I have a reputation for being fond of travel, so I received one of these as a present. It is true, I have never been much of a homebody. I like to get out of the house, especially if I am not going to be able to read or write. This is probably the main reason I always envisioned myself living in a big city and renting, so I wouldn't have to be bothered with the responsibility of upkeep on a house, for which so many other people seemed to me so much better suited than myself, while I seemed so well suited for bohemianism and reflection and sensualism and all that.

18. The Prophet Jeremiah from the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

In the dining room. I like it, though it does not really fit in with the rest of the collection.

19. Postcard of the Former Union Station, Portland, ME

I doubt I need to tell you what my opinion of the destruction of so many of America's great railroad stations is. A few years ago I saw a calendar/postcard type book featuring pictures of various stations in New Hampshire alone that were no more...but time is up. I will save my ruminations on America's lost train culture and how that may or may not have negatively affected my life in another post. It is 9 days since I started this, and it is time to move on.

2011-09-15T11:19:00.000-04:00

Some Pictures From the South

I went on this trip back in July, so (as with everything else) I've been a laggard at writing anything about it. Being the digital age there are of course about 7 or 800 pictures. I won't put them all up, but I will probably do 3 or 4 postings worth. They are easy and usually fast, so I can inflate my pathetic post total for the year a bit. Judging by the page views no one looks at the trip photos, and it is true that people do always talk about how much they hate looking at other people's vacation pictures. I do like seeing them however, provided there is anything at all interesting in the presentation. Unfortunately I have very little ability to judge my own presentation so you will have to take my word that the presentation is not meant to be boring. Like the movie of Forever Amber, a lot will still have to be cut out. As I have done before, my plan is to take a more or less random selection of pictures and incidents and hope that they give some idea of an overall story.

I was not certain we would be going on this trip until about three weeks beforehand, due to the new baby. Ladies often do not feel up to traveling for some months afterwards in the wake of childbirth. Mr Bourgeois Surrender was feeling pretty robust after just a few weeks however and decided she would be up for it. Given the short notice, combined with the circumstances that everyone had enjoyed going to the Smoky Mountains the previous year and my own sense that we had not had enough days there on this previous occasion, we decided to head back in that direction; for, despite all the commercialism and lowbrow culture surrounding it, it is one of the great national parks of the country. I thought we should go somewhere new as well. So returning to what has worked so well for me these past few years, I returned to my 1966 Encyclopedia, with its 431 different travel recommendations for earnest middle class white families, and played the lottery game I have devised for it to see what should come up.

The first draw was Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. This doubtless would have been spectacular, but as it was not reasonable for the travel gods to expect me to make it there on a few weeks notice this particular summer, I excused myself from the obligation to undertake this particular trip at this particular time, filed it on one of my to-do lists (the vast majority of which items are of course never going to be done, but it is always good to have a reserve supply of ideas) and selected another destination. The second 'winner' was the Talladega National Forest in Alabama.

This one was less easy to dismiss outright than Hawaii, though it was not unproblematic, mainly because one still has to persuade others to want to go there, and it is easy to imagine the many arguments that might be made against it. In the first place, it is about five hours drive beyond the Smoky Mountains, which are already nearly two full days from home for us, and this with five little children, including an infant. In the second place it is in Alabama; and people from the north are wont to recoil instinctively from the idea of Alabama, especially if they have never been there. I was not wholly immune to this reaction myself.

Over the past few years I have documented the breaking down of my apprehension of traveling in the south, which, not having been to much at any time of my life, and not at all between approximately 1981 and 2006 or so, I had become convinced through my extensive exposure to internet and media accounts of the area's dominant socio-political passions, that as a comparatively effete and probably liberal yankee, I was going to be treated with cold hostility at best, and should expect the occasional encounter with someone whose anger was worked up to a hotter and less restrainable state. I was pretty sure that the days of the Deliverance-style treatment of unwelcome intruders were over; but in such matters one is never really certain either. Of course I told myself I must embrace such challenges and be eager to defend my own choices in and situation of life if I were unable to sniff haughtily upon such detractors as I might meet from a secure height, which is supposed to be the educated northerner's preferred stance in such matters. But after passing at various times over a period of several years through parts of southern Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee without any unpleasant incidents--there was the one gas station in the mountains of North Carolina whose windows were plastered over with pro-gun and anti-Obama signs where a crowd of unsmiling guys in overalls were looking over me a little overly hungrily, but even here nothing openly antagonistic transpired--as well as through the power of the internet slowly came to realize perhaps more palpably than I was able to through the haze of myth and reputation that the south is overwhelmingly populated with people who are in fact normal for the most part. But still...

A third problem was that, especially compared to the Smoky Mountains, there was a real dearth of practical information about the Talladega National Forest, and apparently not much of a developed tourist industry. This last of course offered itself as a potential bonus, though it might also have been an indication that the place was comparatively boring, since the competition for tourists is so well-developed nowadays that any place which does not have a sophisticated organization for promoting itself and is not well known to be favored by rich people is almost suspicious. Also I was concerned lest camping was the only option in the area, as we were not going to do that with a baby, and, to be honest, though I have become more enthusiastic about nature and exploring America and all of that in the past few years, I have not yet gone so far as to prefer this to sleeping indoors with showers and those kinds of things. Finally I found a guidebook (Lonely Planet's Southern Road Trips) which had a very short section on the Forest, in which it revealed that the best, and practically only accomodation requiring less than an hour's driving each day was in the Cheaha State Park, which is located on Mt Cheaha, which is Alabama's highest mountain, and is in the middle of the national forest. This state park was built in the 1930s by the CCC and had a hotel, cabins, chalets, and a restaurant, attractive enough in themselves and in a lovely setting, but not expensive. Friends of the hotel on Facebook gushed about it as well, so all this was enough to sell me on staying there should there be any spaces left for seven people on such short notice, which there was.

The fourth concern was that going to Alabama in July in itself seemed an invitation to ridicule from anyone in the north who should hear of it, though I reminded myself that the place is much more populated than Northern New England and presumably people go outside and do things in the heat. Though I must admit I was worried about what it would be like.

1. I-78 between Allentown and Harrisburg, PA, after stopping at Wawa.

As we travel frequently to Philadelphia to visit my relatives we are no strangers to Wawa, most likely the world's greatest convenience store chain. As Wawa's fledgling empire is still largely confined to southeastern Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey, and Delaware, with a few outposts as far afield as Maryland and northern Virginia, it was not a given that we would have the good fortune to come across one on this trip, as our route barely skirted the northern boundary of this territory in the Lehigh Valley. But we did.

2. Rolling hills adjacent to Exxon station, Natural Bridge, VA, off I-81.

The Natural Bridge itself is a famous attraction, considered by some to be an overhyped one, though Jefferson and Patrick Henry, among other early patriots eager to promote such sublimities as were to be found in these lands as equivalent to their celebrated counterparts in the old world, were reputedly fans. We did not take the opportunity to see it this time, though maybe someday we will be back. It is among the 431 sites highlighted in the 1966 encyclopedia.

3. We are arrived at the Chalet in Cheaha State Park, Alabama.

Alabama, along with Mississippi, and maybe Arkansas, about which nobody in the north knows very much at all, are still regarded as the hard core of the south and maybe, especially when one gets away from the interstates, still trapped in something of a nightmarish pre-civil rights era time warp. One sort of knows this is not true, but until you get there...

The first day we drove from Concord all the way to Harrisonburg, Virginia (the home of James Madison University), arriving around midnight, at which time it was still around 90 degrees, which only added further to my concern that we were driving a third of the way across the country only to find ourselves unable to do anything once we got there due to the weather. The second day we proceeded through southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee, which latter has a rather comforting geography, hilly but with a lot of green farmland, horses, etc, visible from the road practically all the way to Chattanooga, which itself is situated in an interesting and dramatic setting, amidst mountains and a serpentine river, I presume the Tennessee River. After Chattanooga we went through a small slice of Georgia--about 20 miles--on I-59. This stretch of land is unihabitated, largely empty of traffic, hilly and profusely forested and green, almost junglelike, with lots of kudzu. The road is not in the best repair. It was well over 90 degrees of course, and there had been a shower or even a light thunderstorm, though not enough to clear the air of tension, and the sky was cranberry red. I was a little spooked out. When we finally made to Alabama darkness was starting to fall, and this somehow made it calmer, less sinister-looking than I was anticipating, though there was at least a further hour of driving through deep, dark woods with very few indications of human presence. My image of 'Alabama' had consisted of endless cotton fields, one (blinking) traffic light towns with brick city halls and austere white churches presiding around a tired looking grassy square. I knew this probably only described a small number of real places anymore, but I was not anticipating that the whole of northeast Alabama was basically sparsely inhabited hill country, with comparatively few black people or immigrants, at least that I saw.

4. View of the Talladega Forest from the Cheaha State Park swimming pool area.

This is the only nature picture that made it into this first set. This place was more beautiful than I thought it was going to be, and it was very uncrowded. Other than fifteen or so families staying at the park and a small number of day trippers/hikers there were scarcely any people for 20, 30 miles around in any direction, which when you have lived on the east coast all your life, even in New England, is practically unheard of roominess. It was extremely pleasant and rejuvenating. I could happily have stayed there for a week.

5. Making the trail mix for the next day's hike.

When we arrived--about midnight, after about a half hour of driving through pitch dark woods without seeing a single other car and only the occasional haunted looking sign directing us to our destination--it was a still sweltering 87 degrees or so and the chirping of the crickets/locusts/cicadas/boll weevils or whatever the local insect life was almost terrifying. Right now as I type this it is around 1:45am and I can hear some crickets outside the window. If the volume of these crickets is a "1" then that of the crickets in Alabama was about a "17". If these things had somehow been able to decide in unision that they wanted to swarm over and eat me, my life expectancy would have been about 4 minutes. As I clambered up to the office to get my keys I was still having my doubts as to whether this place was going to be fun or not, and I was really hoping that my semi-rustic chalet somehow had air conditioning, which in New England of course, such places never do. But in Alabama I guess they know and accept the evil necessity of air conditioning, because our cabin had it going full bore the whole time. I am something of a connoisseur of air conditioning--I spent most of my formative years in the very hot mid-atlantic, remember--and this was good air conditioning.

6. Antique Playground Equipment of Cheaha State Park in Twilight.

This place had some of the oldest playground equipment still in use that I have ever seen.

Of course anytime you go somewhere in the south that is more than 40 years old and that is at all nice, you are aware that at the time whenever the place was originally built black people would almost certainly not have been allowed to go there. It is not that one has never been in such places before. My college in Maryland for example did not admit its first black student until 1947 and most of the buildings long predate that, and it is something one scarcely thinks about at all. But in Alabama one is highly conscious about all of these kinds of things, especially as when we were there every single person staying at the park was white, and in our whole four days there apart from one hispanic family that was having a picnic we did not encounter any non-white people in the entire preserved area at all. The atmosphere was really kind of 1950sish, which obviously I kind of was going for, though I guess I am always surprised to actually find it. As always in the south the other people were pretty outgoing and friendly to us, even though they were almost certainly pro-business, pro-Jesus, family values Republicans who think of themselves as disliking hand-wringing, goody-goody, meddling, socialistic whiny New Englanders, though I suppose we do not present ourselves as blatantly being of this type. There were two families, one from Texas and one from Florida, that I suppose regularly came up to the mountains of Alabama in the summer to "cool off" for a few days. I found that amusing.

7. Baby Susanna in Alabama.

She is only half the age she is now here.

8. A redundant playground equipment picture.

Should have made another selection. However I will do another set from Alabama before we go back to Tennessee.

I really would like to post more frequently. I have a lot going on, and I am a slow writer and thinker. The time constraints will not always be this way (I hope).

2011-09-11T20:50:00.000-04:00

The Price of Art?

I am going to open this posting--every new one holds, at the beginning at least, the promise of attaining its aims, which are, tritely, liveliness, interest, and a suggestion of timelessness--with a very short excerpt I have read recently. The story, fictitious as far as I know, though perhaps it was based on a similar 'real' legend, regards the history of a piece of fine art, a spectacular ebony statuette of a turbanned, muscular moorish slave:

"Two hundred years ago (note--the time intended would have been circa the 1460s) there was a Venetian lady--very beautiful, as all ladies in legends are--and she owned a gigantic black slave whom her husband imagined to be a eunuch. But he was not and when the lady bore his black child she had the infant killed and a white one put in its place. The midwife, from some motive of jealousy or revenge, told the husband of his wife's infidelity and he killed the slave before her eyes. She had the ebony statue made, secretly of course, in her lover's memory."

This passage occurs about three-quarters of the way into Kathleen Winsor's scandalous 972 page 1944 novel, Forever Amber, a Gone With the Wind-style blockbuster set in the first decade of Restoration England which was my bathroom/poolside reading for much of the summer. This was from my "B" reading list, which consists of things I take up that have piqued my interest for whatever reason and which I do not feel compelled to read all the way through if I don't want to. Sometimes I write about these books here, though usually I do not. Forever Amber is not quite refined and penetrating enough in its perceptions to be literature, I suspect, but there is nonetheless some skill and vision in it that approach to being enviable. It is not a book that I would always pick up eagerly, but I did find often upon getting started that it was easy to become absorbed in the frequently outrageous story and be carried for 20 or 30 pages at a stretch without being conscious of keeping up an effort either to follow the author's genius or endure her banality. I suspect that Kathleen Winsor, a 28-year housewife, and evidently a rather boisterous one, at the time of the book's publication, was plenty bright; as a normally adjusted middle, probably professional class, midwestern American of her time, subtlety and the inclination to experience life as something which primarily took place in one's own head were perhaps not overly developed in her. As can be seen below, she was quite conventionally attractive, and by most accounts enjoyed, and was capable of having, a good time in the conventional sense of parties, drinking, dancing, flirting with men and so forth. This book is almost certainly most famous for all of the sex in it, almost all of which occurs in a very direct, matter of fact manner, that is much in accordance with the probable way most men, and to judge by the sales of the book, apparently many women as well, dream that their own sex lives were like, though far contrary to the way they usually actually are. To cite some statistics, the attorney general of Massachusetts, in banning the book, noted 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, and 7 abortions (as well as 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men). It seemed like there were a lot more than 70 instances of the Grand Act that to so many people is for the most part something not quite real. Sex in this book is bluntly understood to be for men a token of and duty paid to their personal power, and for the women a currency through which to obtain resources and position. Such people as do develop tender feelings for particular individuals are quickly made to suffer for them, frequently onto the point of death. Amber is supposed to be "in love" with Carlton, but it seems more that she is obsessed with the glamour he represents that, by the end of the book practically alone, she can never have. It's not surprising that such themes resonated deeply with the mass American public.

Kathleen Winsor appears to have had an even more extreme than usual hunger for what are known in contemporary parlance as alpha males, in her case the highest of the high, as well as a complementary eagle eye and searing contempt for male weakness or inferiority in any form, and delight in its exposure. She would have fit in well at Duke or Southern California or any of our other contemporary universities where the social competition is especially noted for its ruthlessness and lack of pity towards losers. Bruce Carlton of course is the ultimate male of this story--the recent civic disturbances in Britain would have been very short-lived if men like Lord Carlton and his pals still predominated in the upper ranks of that nation. He is a noble born cavalier, he recoups his fortune privateering, he is the greatest swordsman in England, and probably the world, he has rock hard abs and a gorgeous dark complexion. He does not come on to a single woman, that I remember, in the book; they beg him to ravish them, heedless of all possible consequences. He promises them nothing and openly goes to bed with whomever he wants, and the women remain powerless to do anything but nurture irrational hopes that somehow he will be moved one day to commit to them more or less exclusively while expending their fury on the rivals with whom they share his love. When he does get married it is to the most beautiful and purest virgin of the noblest birth imaginable, who lives for nothing but to serve her husband's happiness. The other main alpha males in the story are the "sexually driven" (as the book's introduction, written by a woman, approvingly puts it) King Charles II, who gets to pretty much order up whomever he takes a fancy to to his bedchamber, though those receiving an invitation are invariably delighted with the honor, unless they're supposed to be getting it on with Lord Carlton that same night; and the sadistic, brilliant and impeccably, for social purposes, educated and bred Lord Buckingham, who also has his way with pretty much whomever he wants, sexually and otherwise, and makes them feel his domination of them to the innermost core of their psyche. These are thus our role models of what a man should be.

The great book I suppose for getting a sense of what English society, and particularly London, was like during this period, is Pepys' Diary, which I have not however read to this point. Forever Amber attempts to paint an idea of this world within a fairly wide, if not deep, scope, and I think it is handled pretty well. The different aspects, of nature, of social classes, of historical events and personages, of amusements, of the idea that the various characters and customs in the book constitute a single people or nation, do not hold together at all times in the reader's mind, as complex ideas are supposed to be able to do in superior works of literature, and often are temporarily forgotten about or neglected all together, which is doubtless a flaw in the composition. Still, I was reminded at many instances in the book of the flow of history, and of the rise and decline of peoples and generations and institutions and beloved customs, set against a background, in some cases more or less permament than others, but all at least longer lasting than a single generation or even three, of nature, climate, geography (including human settlements, roads, etc), language and human lineage. Perhaps the picture produced was an especially superficial and inaccurate one, but the effect at least was produced.

I have strayed a bit from the opening question, as it were, of the post, which was essentially whether the capability of producing great art, clear thought, and an overall high level of culture required long centuries of hard and dispassionate action with severe and frequently deadly consequences for weakness and failure as the working ethos of a society. This idea was very popular in the 1940s--it is redolent of Orson Welles's famous cuckoo-clock speech in The Third Man--and can be found as well in numerous 20th century works chronicling (sympathetically) the passing of the old aristocratic Europe. This was doubtless a result of some insecurity on the part of the more sensitive and astute representatives of the New Order, with the comfortable and self-consciously 'nice' masses of America leading the way, both with regard to the desire to live up to the cultural achievements of their predecessors, as well as justification for the brutality of the wars and harshness of other political and economic policies they had undertaken to maintain and expand their newfound power. The main problem with modern culture, America perhaps especially, is not that they are too nice and naive to produce art, but that at the mass level there are too many nice and naive people who want to produce art, without having any idea what they are about. There are people at the heart of the culture who know exactly what is going on and what being a human being in present day society really means, and some of them doubtless are expressing this artistically and beautifully, but is there a substantial and coherent enough audience for this work to make it influential in any social milieux?

Linda Darnell as Amber in the 1947 Film Version of FA.

The movie of Forever Amber is not supposed to very good, and I regret to report that this is an accurate assessment. Given my usual affinity for the period and the fact that Linda Darnell, whom I wrote about positively in these pages for her role in the Letter to Three Wives ('49), was starring, I thought it was worth a try. In the first place, the length of the book necessitated cutting out 80-90% of the story right off the bat, and otherwise often combining two or more episodes into one scene. Various characters make a single 60-second appearance whom, if you had not read the book, you would have no idea who they were.The sex also had to be toned down quite a lot, though not to the extent that it was not still more than a little tawdry; the effect that was needed however was that of total and unrelenting moral dissipation, which is not achieved. The prolific and ubiquitous (not in a good way; rather in the way girls who were tired of seeing me at beer parties in my youth used to say that I was ubiquitous) Otto Preminger was given the assignment to direct the movie by 20th Century Fox--this is getting scary, I am finally starting to pay attention, in the old movies anyway, to which studio was behind each project, like a real film scholar--which was envisioning a possible Gone With the Wind-like success. Preminger apparently hated the book and called the movie the worst one he ever made, but compared to the greats and very goods I have been concentrating on these last few years, the clunkiness of the direction really stands out. The material is not perhaps ideal, but no one involved with the movie seemed to have much of a feel for it. It seems that someone could have wrung some spirit or magic out of it, but it is for the most part just dead on the screen.

Bruce and Amber Seeking Refuge in London During the Plague of 1665

Unlike, apparently, most people with a pulse, I did not feel much emotion with regard to the 10th anniversary commemorations that were everywhere in the media this past week, and wherever I found them I usually skipped over them or changed the station. I do not handle talking about that kind of thing well, and neither, quite frankly, does almost anyone else. That said, the event for whatever reason does not seem to have had the same impact on me as it has on other people. Of course I did not personally know anyone who died, nor am I a New Yorker or a fireman or any of the other people who felt the impact of this in a personal way which is hard for me to understand. To me the whole episode felt extremely random and impersonal, and perpetrated by people who knew very little about either America or New York City. While at the moment the event was certainly terrible and shocking, I did not find it surprising that such an event should ever have happened, as evidently most people did, and still do. I was surprised by the form, bordering at times on hysteria it seemed to me, which the emotion aroused by the event took. I had not recognized it as such a predominant character in the American people up to that time. I suspect a good number of my countrymen would take great issue with my fairly blase response to these phenomena and would feel compelled to question what was so horribly neglected in my upbringing, education, and so forth, to leave me so devoid of ordinary human feeling and instinct, and I do feel a lack in this area which does bother me; which is why I felt compelled to write anything about the matter at all.

Some good searches found their way to the site this week. My favorite was "females being taught to surrender sexually", a subject on which I thought there would be more expert information than that which I offer here, though "what did they wear for clothing in norway in the early 1900s" a subject which to my knowledge I have never addressed here or anywhere else, was also inspired.

2011-09-04T22:22:00.001-04:00

The Best and the Brightest

Though it may not be evident to the reader, I do know that it is unseemly for me to protest too stridently that I am just as good as people who have achieved exponentially more worldly success than I have, and this does effect some restraint upon my writing. Still. my heart dies a little whenever I see Wall Street multimillionaires extolled as the best and brightest minds of my generation. That this frequently occurs in articles or other fora decrying the deprivation of all this dynamic talent from other fields such as the arts, academia, and even science, which have presumably been left with very little for themselves, rubs the wounds of failure that much harder. All I can say, since I personally seem incapable of either effectively combating the image of this as truth, putting some curb on these people's ability to amass such an extent of power and wealth within an evidently largely closed system, or to succeed to a comparable extent in some alternative system, is, I dearly hope it is not true.

I was re-reading some Plato lately--yes, it is ridiculous, especially as I seem to understand anything important about it less now than I did when I was twenty, though I still do not think reading it is completely valueless--and I was struck by a statement in the Republic in which Socrates (I assume) observes that the "best and strongest natures are most thoroughly corrupted in bad environments". I thought this might apply to certain aspects of the contemporary scene, where the perception among much of that part of the public that are not possessed of the best and strongest natures is that for a critical mass of their superiors life has gone beyond mere triumph and claiming the positions of leadership and wealth that are rightfully theirs, but of actively making life more unpleasant and unnecessarily difficult for everyone beneath them. I know this has been the case more or less in all times and all places, but the degree and kind of the pressure fluctuates in different eras, and it is my impression that currently we seem to be in a fairly severe downturn in the cycle, in which the brightest and strongest people, or those who are supposed to be they, are dissemenating very little in the way of joy, or optimism, or sense of shared humanity through the greater society, and are applying the hammer instead. I am probably more optimistic than most that the mood and tone of society, if not concrete economic and social conditions, will eventually improve from what they are today; while I don't see myself ever taking much of a part in that change, my children, if they live, will be able to pass much of their youth and young adulthood in, I hope, a more generally positive atmosphere than what I have perceived to be the norm in my own life. Properly, it seems one should take some delight in the most intelligent and energetic people, or at the least a good many of them-- else the alleged desirability of these qualities seems difficult to conceive; yet I find most of the people who are supposed to be the best educated to be nearly as dreary in personal intercourse as I am, which leads me to believe that something is missing.

Why are the strong so strong? What is the source and nature of this mental power? This is not a minor question, for whatever this quality is the lack of it not infrequently has the effect of rendering a human life in a post-religious society, in particular that of the male of the species, essentially worthless, whatever other positive qualities he may have. Not necessarily unpleasant or devoid of simple delights, but not usually, except in rare instances of unique talent, a life befitting a Man. This life properly demands a high, or at least comparatively high degree of testosterone combined with an equally virile and energetic intelligence, the two traits constantly feeding off of and amplifying their counterpart. Other than working harder and more purposefully than most people in our society have any idea how to go about doing, there seems to be little the person of mediocre mind can do to actually improve his intelligence; what seems to be hoped for in his case in that education will persuade him somewhat of the breadth of his limitations and he will defer more readily to those of greater understanding. It would seem that the testosterone deficiency could easily be cured by medical means, and that the general population would be pleased by this, as it hates languid and effeminate men, but the tendency to be over- and perhaps unnaturally aggressive seems as yet to outweigh any of the more positive effects of this treatment.

On Debt

I have to finish this post in the next 25 minutes--as well my 2-year old is refusing to take a nap--so I am going to truncate this section on debt in order to rush it to the press. In short, I have always for the most part been afraid of it, and have tried whenever possible to avoid it assiduously, and now I realize in middle age that that was in many ways as foolish as indulging every idle whim. When I think now of certain experiences I missed or places I did not go to or improvements to my appearance I neglected to undertake because I didn't have 50 or 100 dollars and I refused to even consider the possibility of enhancing my daily life through the power of credit, I wonder if it was really worth it. Men with high testosterone and self-regard do not let the lack of present funds get in the way of living, and they tend not to worry about or be much stressed by the consequences of being in or even defaulting on debt comparative to what I would be. The regrets I have in life are primarily the lack of interesting experiences and social interactions, and the failure to develop either proper adult talents or skills. Money obviously was not the only obstacle preventing me from attaining these things, but allowing myself a little wider vision (of that substitute for real money, credit) to operate in might have allowed for a little more expansion of life itself, wherein the world I inhabited was not such a pinched and constricted one, both of experience and possibility to generate income.

I also note that while I have at various times taken out loans, for college, cars, household necessities, etc, and while in the past especially this debt always weighed heavily on my mind and sense of possibility, the instant they were paid off all memories of the worry they caused me seemed to dissipate into nothing and seemed as if they never existed; yet as this worry was a dominant part of my life, the result is that it seems as if my life has consisted of very few actual episodes or events or periods even of fervent mental activity, spaced out at very long intervals.

Titles/Phrases Read in Youth That Stick in the Mind All Life Long

1. Ja, the Rebels Eat Babies

This was the title of Chapter 1 of Gettysburg from the 1950s Landmark series of children's history books. This expression pops into my head about once a week. The bit about eating babies referred to wartime propaganda, but I never figured out where the Ja came from.

2. You Can't Do Business With Hitler

This was the title of a Reader's Digest article from 1938 or thereabouts that had been ripped out of the magazine and stuffed into the pages of an old (but cheap) book I bought at a book barn in Bucks County, Pennsylvania when I was a teenage (circa 1985). I'm sure the article was ridiculous, but the title caused my grandfather, who rarely laughed at anything, no small amount of amusement for a few minutes, enough for the incident to be memorable more than 25 years later.

2011-08-23T21:35:00.000-04:00

Four More Movies I Have Seen Recently

Sophie's Choice (1982) It is probably apparent by now that my primary interest in movies, and most other forms of art, is escapist, so as to imagine myself communing with modes of life that have more camaraderie, mental activity, sensualism and so on than my own has. While I am not adverse to occasionally learning something or even having my comfortable world view 'challenged', provided the challenge is presented in a way that appeals to the idea of my having a better self that has for whatever reason not had the opportunity yet to properly consider whatever the matter is that the artist thinks himself impelled to call to my attention, I do not feel any obligation to seek out works that I sense may be calculated to make me overly uncomfortable or even merely unhappy. Perhaps it is true that one often does learn something by being made uncomfortable in this manner, but I have never found such learning to lead to anything either better or more useful than such learning as takes place under rosier conditions. At the best, it is a supplement to one's mental core rather than a replacement.

As the only thing, or one of the only two things, I knew about Sophie's Choice, whether the book or the movie, was the incident which provides it with its title, I had always avoided having anything to do with either of them, because I thought that this constituted the bulk of the narrative, and I did not see what good could possibly come out of reading or watching such a story, at least to me, as it was always presented to me as being like a kind of literary or historical medicine without any obviously redeeming benefits, and as such I had no interest in it. In time however it came up on my list as a 'great' movie, so I submitted to see it. I am still not sure if ultimately there are redeeming benefits in it given what everybody knows happens, but I was surprised to find that before you get to the infamous part, which doesn't come until nearly the end, there was a fairly mentally lively and energetic movie set mainly in late 1940s New York. I have seen it argued by some critics that the story is implausible. There is something in that. I think the problem is that the interpretation of the situation and its effects is an overly, even audaciously, American one, and it does seem off. It is hard for me to see an Eastern European artist-director treating the material in this way, certainly not from this particular angle, if he would have chosen to treat it artistically at all.

The other thing I knew about the movie beforehand was that Meryl Streep blew everyone away with her Polish accent. While I am always looking for an excuse to find fault with Meryl Streep, it does sound good to me too, and overall I have to say I can't find much wrong with her performance. Indeed, she is appealing enough here that one almost wishes she could have adopted the Polish accent as her permanent voice. You still always notice the work, the craft in her acting though. She is one of those people who forces you to confess that she is admirable at every minute, and never allows you the pleasure of making the case to yourself upon some overlooked or unconsidered point, for she admits no such points to exist in her work. This is why so many people find her annoying or only grudgingly give her the credit that is due her.

Kevin Kline is like a male version of Meryl Streep. Obviously very talented and capable at acting, but numerous qualities of his appearance and demeanor annoy me to no end. I don't derive any pleasure from watching him in a movie.

The director of this was Alan J. Pakula, whom I did not recognize as a household name, especially among the many celebrated directors of his generation (roughly late 60s on), but he made several well-known movies. All the President's Men was a big deal when it came out, though it does seem to have been forgotten in recent years. I saw his first film, The Sterile Cuckoo, which is a 60s college movie, on TV a long time ago and thought it was pretty decent, despite its having foisted the song "Come Saturday Morning" on the world (I actually kind of like the song, of course, but I doubt you will find anyone alive who is at all knowledgeable about music who does).

Respiro (2003)

In a similar vein as other those other modern Italian movies written about here recently, I'm Not Scared, and The Best of Youth. Like both of these, it makes heavy use of the incredible light and barren ancient scenery of southern Italy--Sicily in BOY, Basilicata in INS, and here the remote island of Lampedusa, which is out near Malta. Like I'm Not Scared, children are featured heavily, and also like that movie, despite being set in the present, or near present (1978 in the case of INS) the economic and communal lives of all the characters in the film appear to have much more in common with that of the 1940s and 50s than more contemporary times. The general consensus even within Italy is that the nation is sclerotic and dying, no one is able to move out of their parents' house or get a decent paying job until they're pushing forty, the birth rate has been so low for so long that even with immigration the population is already declining, the last golden era of Italian culture and style which flourished in the postwar decades is long dead, Venice has been almost entirely depopulated of native Italians and is probably sinking, the Pope is a German--the point is, these movies are indicative to me of this sense of decline. Their subject matter and sense of the world seems small. The attraction to remote corners of the country with great natural beauty where people lived as they did 50 years ago seems a confession that the filmmakers do not know how to set a story in the world of present society but need the familiar structure of the village, the square, the land and sea, the non-abstract occupations, etc, as a base (I notice something of this same effect at work in American movies set in Maine or other rural New England locales, as well as in some of my own efforts--indeed my own life even). Or perhaps I misunderstand, and Italy is such an ancient country that unlike America, where people and fictional characters and industries and everything else need be always on the way to some other destination than where they currently are, it is taken for granted that most people are going to live and die pretty much as people have for the last 5,000 years for the next 5,000, and that if you are living in a fishing village in Italy there really is not effectively anywhere else for you to go. I do not think that is the reality however.

These nagging thoughts aside, I enjoyed this movie more than either of the others I have associated it with in this post. I don't know how memorable it is however, since I actually saw it several years ago and had no recollection of it whatsoever when I read the title and even the synopsis of the plot (which in a way is a justification for keeping this diary of all the movies I see) and while I knew in the early parts that I had once seen a movie with a similiar milieu some years before, it was not until about an hour in that I recognized 2 distinct scenes as ones that I had definitely seen before, at which point the memory of the other elements of the story began somewhat to return to me. I don't know how I could have forgotten about Valeria Golina, aged 36 at the time of the movie, and a mother of 3 adolescents in it, but acting and dressing about 20 years younger in erotic terms, and pulling it off rather well; but as I have noted here before, the rather astonishingly sensual late-30s mother character, often from a traditional or working class background, has become a staple of the modern Italian cinema. This development may say something about the psychology presently at work in the Italian nation, though it may also just reflect a real phenomenon. I remember when I was staying in a perfectly adequate but modest one-star hotel in that nation--I forget which city, possibly Mantua--and one of the maids working in the place, who looked to be around 40, was absolutely mesmerizing to look at, and at the time I was 27 or so and generally had a very scant interest in women any more than a year or two older than I was. Her poise and grooming and sense of self were remarkable, a realization of mature femininity that was very much of the old world, though one recognizes it for what it is when one sees it. And this was a chambermaid.

Melvin and Howard (1980)

This is about a more or less regular, though impulsive and not doggedly steady or responsible guy (Melvin) living in Utah who picks up a stranger by the side of the road after a motorcycle accident one dark night out that way who, unbeknownst to him at first, happens to be the legendary reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. A few years later, when Hughes dies, he leaves Melvin, along with bequests to about ten other obscure people, 156 million dollars. This was evidently based on actual events. Needless to say, Hughes's family and other important interests intervened and got the will declared invalid so none of the nobodies ever got to see any of the money. While this last is part of the narrative, Melvin kind of knows that the powers in society are not going to let the likes of him walk away with the cash, so the movie is more or less about the possibility of his rather uneven lower middle class life being dramatically altered. I didn't love it, but I liked it. It gets the feel of what life was like in that time and place and stratum of society pretty good, or at least as good as any movie I have seen lately. Melvin's major problems in life seem to be largely the result of his having an excess of vitality for his social station. He is not able to just while away his life in the boring jobs that are available to him and the restraints of social conventions and periodically has to blow up the aspects of his life in which these inconveniences were involved. He is the kind of guy who, to the extent that he still exists, gets slaughtered in short order in the economy and legal system today. No chance.

Hearts and Minds (1974)

Anti-Vietnam War documentary. It's a little dated, and I didn't find that the different parts of it had quite the coherence that I would really like, but it's worth seeing, if for nothing else than to be reminded of how events that seem all-consuming and hopeless of resolution at a particular time eventually exhaust themselves and enter the realm of history. I would say as well that it is also a good reminder of how stupid most wars are, especially when carried to the totally unnecessary extreme than this one was, though the determination of so many of the Vietnamese people to persevere unto the point of death through decades of this dreadful conflict also reminds that when you are fighting against a foreign power in your home country your experience of what is happening necessarily takes on a different sense. The movie of course was made several years after the main fury of both the American involvement in the war and the domestic protest movement had attained their peaks, and the prevailing atmosphere is one of weariness. There are a number of interviews with important American military and political figures in which these men say what seem to us incredibly stupid things, and reminded me (again) of how clearly stupid all of the rhetoric and chest-beating of this whole period of history we are living in now will seem to most sensible people in 30 years time.

Though these are not the object of the movie, the glimpses of America circa 1973 are of some interest, just to see how things have changed just in the course of my lifetime (I was 3 then). The fashions and hair of course were atrocious, though that is a minor point. Most of the regular people over age 45 or so look much older than people the same age do now; their skin is sallow and rather nasty-looking--I remember this in the older people I knew at the time too--perhaps from smoking and drinking too much hard liquor. A one point they were interviewing a soldier who had been a POW for seven years on the back stoop of his parents' house in New Jersey and the screen door and the iron railing were the exact same ones that my grandmother had at the time. There was a section where they interspersed scenes from a high school football game in Ohio with some of the war footage, including a genuinely insane halftime speech delivered by one of the coaches, which did not quite work, though there was an awesomely cute cheerleader who admitted to the camera that she was too wrapped up in her own life to think much about the war in Vietnam.

It is ironic that global communism, which wide swathes of the American populace were so obsessed with for so long to, at times, the point of madness, at the moment looks like it may have been the best thing that ever happened to the American laboring classes.

This film was produced of course by the legendary so-cool-it-was-actually-scary 70s Hollywood mogul Bert Schneider, who was one of the more interesting characters of that era to me. His rougish production company backed Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces among other iconic films of the era. Babes and cocaine were part of the workday at the BBS offices. Given how cool he was, his downfall shortly after this film is puzzling to me. I guess he made some powerful enemies, but still, a guy with that much charisma and sense for the business seems like he should not have receded from any position of influence that easily.

The 4th movie in these sets always gets the sloppiest review. I know I should cut them down, and do one post, one movie, but then I might be tempted to go on forever about each movie and I don't want to do that.

2011-08-19T01:24:00.001-04:00

Greatest TV Themes of All Time #s 10-6

#10 Car 54, Where Are You?

I went through various periods in my teens where I would watch a certain TV show, or sometimes two, every day for what seemed like several months, though maybe it was as little as 4-6 weeks, as part of my daily routine, and then something would happen where the routine would be broken, or changed, either on my part or that of the programming station, and I would never watch the show again. "Car 54" which originally aired in the early 60s, was one of these shows. On the surface it seems to be an even more than usually silly show, yet there was an exuberance in its absurdity that my young self found satisfying, and which was of a quality that is not much prevalent in the current culture. My favorite episode was the one where Gunther confesses to not having read a book in his entire life and everyone nags him about it until he agrees to try The Robe, which proceeds to consume him to the point that he ceases temporarily to be the guy everyone loves such that by the end of the show they are begging him not to read any more books.

When I was a very young child, my grandmother had a dog named Gunther J Toody, so I gather the program was popular in that household as well.

It is worth noting that despite the show's protagonists being New York City policemen, its storylines rarely centered around any actual crimes, and when they did I cannot recall anything much more serious than petty fraud or running red lights, though it is possible my memory is faulty in this.

#9 Dallas

They aren't letting me embed the themes from any of the early seasons, so I will have to link to it here.

As far as embedded material goes, I can offer some footage of the great Victoria Principal disco dancing.
http://youtu.be/Bmv3SIzuTL4

Dallas was to me the opposite of Car 54 in terms of the emotional reassurance it offered, and I often wonder if it did not mark a significant stage in the decline of the overall morale and spritual well-beings of the mass of Americans during this period. This was the first television show I can remember that openly reveled in the total ruthlessness and moral depravity of wealthy and powerful people rather than affecting to be appalled by it, indeed even presented it as a central component of their success. And make no mistake, compared to the average schlub viewer, they were indisputably successful, and the schlub viewer was not so gently warned that if he should ever run across people of this type he had best get the hell out of their way as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, unless he has a taste for seeing the entire edifice of his pitiful life collapse in humiliation and ruin in a matter of seconds that those inflicting the pain upon him probably would not even notice. I am quite certain that the show scarred me at an impressionable age when I ought not to have been watching it. There was in particular one episode in which J.R. had just finished financially destroying a minor rival in the oil business and giddily delivered the news by telephone from bed after ravishing the rival's woman. I realized all at once that this was what serious people were really like; and all the years of optimistic and supposedly uplifting movies and books and TV programs about adhering to the bourgeois virtues were swept away in a single blow, and I don't think I have ever had true faith in them again.

#8 The Jeffersons

Whoever owns the rights to the Jeffersons theme song is adamant that no one be allowed to hear it without a royalty, hence the silent video.

Obviously one of the great songs of all time in this category.

#7 Green Acres

While I don't remember it, Green Acres apparently vied with Petticoat Junction as my favorite TV show when I was four. I would love to be able to figure out why these 2 programs appealed to me so strongly as they did, but thus far I cannot do so.

#6 The Odd Couple

I've been having one of my retro-crushes lately on New York in the early 70s, or more precisely from around 1969-73, roughly the apogee of the Joe Namath and Tom Seaver era. In the case of New York it seems to be especially true that the heyday of sporting icons roughly parallel a particular character in the epoch of the city, and they start to fade when the character of their time fades, or perhaps vice versa--for while the changes in the city's character are fairly easy to mark through most of the 20th century, and the 1965-1980 period can almost be identified season by season, I find I have lost track of any sense of the subtleties of such changes since the late 90s--perhaps until Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera fade from the scene and are replaced by new heroes everything will seem to me fundamentally the same as they were then. As far as New York in the 70s goes, it is only this early part that I have as yet come around to finding somewhat attractive. The disco era, perhaps because I have some actual memories of it, I still have not been able to warm up to, and the Death Wish/Taxi Driver-era New York of the mid-70s, and even of the later seasons of this show, while fascinating, also seem yet a little too dark and despairing, as well as representing the period when certain appealing aspects of the old New York that were still lingering into the early 70s seem to have been, if not entirely killed off, stifled to the point that they became overwhelmed by other qualities and difficult, or at least more difficult, for people like me who are perpetually starved for them, to imbibe at second or fifth hand as perhaps it was possible to do formerly. What were these mystical qualities of which I speak? I am going to have to try to identify what it is I mean, only because it is an important matter to me, and I experience it when I do sense its presence as some absent or lost vigor that I should be partaking in, but am not. But this will have to be saved for a future post.

2011-08-11T00:53:00.000-04:00

Robert Burton--The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) {I}

Often extolled as one of the most remarkable books in all of European literature, I think I may have come to this at the wrong time of life. Like Thomas Browne, Burton's most ardent admirers tend to be men past the age of 50 who have a lifetime of committed reading behind them and are tired even of most of the classics. Among the testimonials left by fogies of this class, Anthony Burgess, a noted linguist and composer of music as well as the author of dozens of books, A Clockwork Orange being perhaps the most famous, stated that "Most modern books weary me, but Burton never does"; gruff middle-aged male man of letters extraordinaire Samuel Johnson declared it "the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise"; Llewelyn Powys, whose late Victorian son of a clergyman to Cambridge to Africa to country retirement biography is practically the template for the kind of reader who has traditionally found Burton most engaging, called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing". In addition Anthony Powell in the 10th volume of Dance to the Music of Time (Books Do Furnish a Room), which is set in the couple of years just after the conclusion of World War II, has the world-weary character who is supposed to be the stand-in for himself undertake a book about the Anatomy as his means of finding some bearings again in a world gone mad. Thus I will leave open the possibility of reading this again when I attain that time of life and have more time to bestow on it the concentration it evidently deserves. This is not to say that I did not to some extent enjoy the book this time around. For a 1,132 page tome written in the 1620s it was not too much of a slog nor took an unusually long time to get through, and it is full of interesting and ingenious anecdotes and stories and observations, enough to fill up 11 pages of notes, which is much more than I usually take down. My problem was that I could not keep the overarching structure of the book, and the way that these anecdotes were supposed to be relating to each other, straight in my mind, so that all of the amusing and interesting parts I was experiencing in isolation, and not as part of this highly fascinating personality and worldview that one presumes these other celebrated readers were commiserating with. Now it is possible that this aspect of the book was simply over my head as far as being able to appreciate it went, but the truth is I did not put in the necessary effort to grasp Burton's very complicated system of melancholy in all its types with their origins and effects and treatments, presented in the form of a medical treatise, which besides being difficult seemed too ridiculous to expend the energy to keep properly straight in my mind, assuming the real brilliance of the book to lie elsewhere. Apparently the exquisiteness of this system and the peculiar genius of the man who conceived it are where a considerable amount of the beauty and appeal are to be found, and I, reading under the constraints of time and the various distractions which afflict me in my current state of life, was not able to focus my concentration on these with the attention they required.

If I had read this when I was 26 or 27, I probably would have put in more of the required effort, or at least would have been able to more easily. Whether my overall understanding of the book would have been good, or better, I am not certain, but I would have been able probably to enjoy a more unified and coherent sense of reading.

I'm really going to try to keep the transcribing of quotes and half-legible observations from my notes to a minimum here. With Locke I allowed myself to get carried away, in part because I did not think his book worked on the level that a "Great Book" properly ought to--which I thought I had become pretty adept at over the years, especially with English language authors--and could not think of how else to to demonstrate my meaning, in part because I probably will never read anything else by him again and wanted to have some sense of why he was, and sometimes still is, considered great, but I need to show some restraint here.

Unfortunately for my purposes he gets off to a good start with a lawyer joke in the introductory poem: "Should crafty lawyer trespass on our ground/Caitiffs avaunt! disturbing tribe away!"

Another poem follows immediately after, titled "The Argument of the Frontispiece", which refers to the illustration above depicting various types of melancholics. which hopefully is still visible. This was a inspired and helpful idea. Of the Inamorato (pictured middle left), for example, it is pointed out that "His lute and books about him lie,/As symptoms of his vanity." Of his own picture (middle panel below the title), the author notes:

"It was not pride, nor yet vainglory

(Though others do it commonly)

Made him do this: if you must know,

The printer would needs have it so."

This is followed by yet a third poem, "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy", which features these choice lines:

"Now desperate I hate my life,

Lend me a halter or a knife..."

There is very little I derive more enjoyment from in literature than the hilarious rhymes of 17th and 18th century verse.

After these poems comes the "Introduction to the Reader", which is 106 pages long, and is full of riotous sentences and thoughts, of which I will give a sample below:

"I am insignificant, a nobody, with little ambition and small prospects".

"So that oftentimes it falls out (which Callimachus taxed of old) a great book is a great mischief." The concise quotation referred to ("Mega biblion. mega kakon.") was included in one of the early exercises of the Greek manual at SJC, at the stage before most people began giving up any hope of learning that language to any substantial degree, and as such was a favorite phrase there, especially among people like myself who scarcely knew any other fragments of Greek thought to toss about in company.

Referencing Proverbs XXX.2--Burton was a walking encyclopedia of quotations, perhaps rivaled only by Montaigne among authors I am familiar with--"Surely I am more foolish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man in me."

I think I will stop there for now.

2011-08-07T03:02:00.000-04:00

Checking Up on my Class Markers

I'm suddenly missing some big ones.

My passport expired last summer, so I now make part of that oft-cited figure--is it 70%?--of Americans, most of whom are presumed to be benighted, who don't have one. Sadly, I probably won't be getting another one any time soon either--certainly I won't need to--unless something spurs me with great force to desire to go to Canada again, as I think you need one even for there now.

I also don't have a master's degree, which I did not think of as a socially crippling lack formerly, but it seems in the past few years, especially since women have started getting the sizable majority of them, to be the new cutoff in some quarters for qualifying as officially educated. Real men don't care about this, but lacking a high degree of authentic competence, as well as basic horse sense, I have a pathological need to retain some means by which to plausibly deceive myself that I can claim to other contemporary people to be an educated person, or at least comparable in mental development to what they are themselves. It is doubtful that my projected M.A. in theology or whatever will make much of a difference in how I present myself socially, but by not having one I am almost making it too easy for people to dismiss me out of hand.

I went to my local Borders the other day, which is already in full-fledged shutdown mode--they have already taken out all the chairs. While I haven't spent as much time in bookstores in the last couple of years because seeing all the books that had made it successfully to publication was depressing to me, it never impressed itself upon me that they would literally begin disappearing. Librairies doubtless will be next to go--I think half the people running for my local city council in the next election are doing so just so they can close the library down. A lot of people want to put college online too and turn the current campuses, or least the non-STEM portions of them, into tract housing or something. When I was young of course these places were inspiring to me--wrongfully so, apparently, though in my defense children generally are still not allowed to hang out in and poke around insurance offices or medical research labs or other places serving useful purposes--and these are very sad changes and passings for people like me (I seem to be too old to be able to imbibe from the computer screen the physical and aesthetic atmosphere and more appealing conception of life that the presence of actual books, pictures, oak reading tables, etc, suggests, and while it doubtless sounds ridiculous to someone who did not pass many significant hours in one's early life in such places, I do experience many aspects of the new age as a loss which I won't be able to wholly recover with the new and improved methods). I do enjoy tormenting myself by reading the myriad commentators who find these developments cause for celebration, directing laughter and a surprising amount of contempt at English majors and other sensitive idiots whose cherished and already irrelevant world continues to collapse around them. I can sort of grasp the hardcore technophilia, and the exhiliration of feeling one is fully on board with the creative destruction ushering in a new cultural paradigm and all that. The total disdain for the era that is passing away does always catch me off guard. I don't get that.

As I had another weekend of staying behind to work whilst the family was away I tried going out to dinner again. This place was not as bad as the Olive Garden though the dining room was full and I had to sit at the bar, which I would have preferred not to do. There were a pair of distracting TVs on--in my inexorable march to unmitigated crankiness, I find I increasingly dislike televisions on when I am eating in a restaurant, which formerly did not bother me, and which indeed I often enjoyed, especially when in a foreign country--one of which had on COPS, which really puts one in a great frame of mind for enjoying one's dinner, and the other was showing a competition from the "X Games" in which a bunch of guys oozing some kind of I'm-better-than-you attitude whom I still have no real desire to be like other than that they get to sleep with tons of the kinds of girls I would have wanted for myself were doing some skateboarding thing on a U-shaped wooden track kind of structure. Shaun White, the multiple Olympic snowboarding gold medalist, was one of the competitors in this event, though I did not notice where he finished. This guy seems to get a lot of publicity, and I don't really see why. Is he genuinely popular among any segment of the public? I have seen that he also has a clothing line with an alternative sportswear type theme at Target. There isn't a lot in his presentation that I can see would be appealing at all. He is the dominant figure in his sport, but what kind of a sport even is it? I did watch his turn at skateboarding expecting to see clear evidence of unique athletic abilities, but nothing jumped out at me. It does seem to be true in general in the winter sports, especially those contested on mountains, that the most skilled practitioners are the kingpins (and sometimes queenpins) of a fairly vibrant social scene, with groupies and disciples and the rest of it. This is not the case in every Olympic type sport. Top runners are greatly respected by other runners, but as compared to skiers their lives seem rather boring. They neither rule over a desirable party scene nor exude much sexual charisma. But does Shaun White exude sexual charisma, or any other kind? He probably does, but it's so original I can't even see it.

The main thrust of this post was going to be a short discursion on the subject of immigration, but there really is no short discursion on that subject. Politically I have the problem that I can rarely refute the arguments of either of the more extreme positions, so I end up having to stake the moderate ground where you mainly hear the furious demands coming from both sides simultaneously that you grow a pair and declare for one side of the confrontation or the other. None of this namby-pamby I-can't-make-up-my-mind-stuff. So my article, at least for now, was not going to be intentionally inflammatory, and indeed likely would not have had anything in it that hasn't been written a million times. It would mainly have served the purpose of adding support to a few particular positions which already exist, and which strike me as reasonable enough, and not callously offensive. Questions such as What is the plan in instances when say, several thousand Somalian refugees begin turning up in places like Lewiston and Portland Maine? Should there be a plan? Why are the perfectly legitimate and natural concerns of the native population regarding quite drastic demographic changes as well as strains on existing institutions not treated seriously, and indeed with contempt, by so many of their fellow citizens, including most of those in positions of influence? What is the source of the ideological refusal to even address these concerns as adults and equal partners in the future of the country. Why has the leadership of the country seemingly given up on developing intellectual talent and other desirable qualities for a vital civic life in the native population? or, Why has the human capital and spirit of the native population collapsed so spectacularly that the top people increasingly prefer to deal with any other people but them? (For me a lot of the emotion on this subject is the sense of shame and rejection by the elders and leading people of my own country and seeing them extol foreigners as preferable and better than I am. I can't claim that I didn't deserve this rejection, I guess, but it still hurts).

All of this would have taken a long time to write.

2011-07-31T21:13:00.000-04:00

Going to Close Out John Locke (#6)

Book IV, Chap. XVI ("Degrees of Assent"). There is a section on the difficulty of changing or giving up one's opinion (try doing this on the internet), as well as an observation about the most thoroughly instructed people being less imperious towards others, which latter argument however I think, speaking as a less thoroughly instructed person, is dubious. The older I get, the more I am inclined to think the real reason it is difficult for people to change their opinions about anything is less stubbornness than because they no longer trust their brains' capacity to perceive any ideas, especially new ones, with the degree of clarity and totality needed to embrace an understanding of existence completely opposite to what has informed them previously, however airtight the arguments in its favor are laid not. I certainly cannot.

Locke on the subject of miracles (quotation from a footnote, from a work called Discourse on Miracles): "A miracle I take to be a sensible operation, which being above the comprehension of the spectator, and in his opinion contrary to the established course of nature, is taken by him to be divine." This seems a reasonable definition, or did to me at the time I read it. Now I think it is not solid enough, unless "the spectator" refers to the entirety of humanity.

This chapter closes with the assertion that faith was "nothing else but an assent founded on the highest reason", which is complemented in the notes by a quote attributed to Coleridge ("Christian faith is the perfection of human intelligence"). Would that it were that easy, "easy" striking me here as an ugly thought, in the face of these fine and very beautiful sentiments. I mean this sincerely, and I even believe it is possible that religious faith may in fact be the perfection of human intelligence, especially if ultimate 'truth' is either unknowable or fails to rise above what the most refined minds would consider to be prosaic. Or perhaps these are two of those deceptive statements, at which the naive reader, reassured perhaps, or at least satisfied that he grasps the author's intent, is content to stop considering the matter, while the real intent of the words lies behind this apparent meaning. Or at least one hopes so.

Book IV, Chap XVII ("Reason"): "Secondly, another way that men ordinarily use to drive others, and force them to submit their judgements, and receive the opinion in debate, is to require the adversary to admit what they allege as proof, or to assign a better. And this I call argumentum ad ignorantiam". This is an excellent point.

Book IV, Chap. XIX ("Enthusiasm"): "Hence we see, that, in all ages, men in whom melancholy has mixed with devotion, or whose conceit of themselves has raised them into an opinion of a greater familiarity with God, and a nearer admittance to his favour than is afforded to others, have often flattered themselves with a persuasion of an immediate intercourse with the Deity, and frequent communications from the Divine Spirit." Hmm...No, it is just that I would have had a lot of these traits I'm sure if I had lived in that age.

Book IV, Chap XX ("Wrong Assent, or Error") "Take an intelligent Romanist, that, from the first dawning of any notions in his understanding, hath had this principle constantly inculcated, viz. that he must believe as the church...believes, or that the pope is infallible, and this he never so much as heard questioned, till at forty or fifty years old...how is he prepared easily to swallow, not only against all probability, but even the clear evidence of his senses, the doctrine of transubstantiation? This principle has such an influence on his mind, that he will believe that to be flesh which he sees to be bread." The further we move from an intellectual universe where Anglo-Saxon antipathies toward Catholic doctrine and culture constitute one of the primary energies and points of contention--and we seem to have gone a long way down that road just in the last 25 years--the more passages like this, which are to be found all through the major strains of English literature and even philosophical writings, from the Elizabethans up to World War I at least, will serve to call into question the seriousness and even cognitive abilities of the authors who fall into these kinds of traps, especially of course if their powers of reasoning are supposed to be the main basis of their fame. Questioning Catholic beliefs and their origins, or those of other systems one finds distasteful, mind you, I do not see as the problem, but rather to do so, especially as a philosopher, from an attitude that takes for granted one does so within an inherited belief system of his own that is superior without making it clear why this is so that is unacceptable.

"Tell a man passionately in love that he is jilted; bring a score of witnesses on the falsehood of his mistress, it is ten to one but three kind words of hers shall invalidate all their testimonies."

2011-07-25T21:43:00.000-04:00

John Locke 5

Book III, Chapter X ("Abuse of Words"): "...he that will look into that sort of learned writings, will find the words there much more obscure, uncertain, and undetermined in their meaning, than they are in ordinary conversation." There are some good points in this section about idle, useless pedants, as well as something useful, which word unfortunately I can no longer make out in my scribblings, which I too often forget.

"He that hath words of any language, without distinct ideas in his mind to which he applies them, does, so far as he uses them in discourse, only make a noise without any sense or signification; and...is not much more advanced thereby in knowledge, than he would be in learning, who had nothing in his study but the bare titles of books, without possessing the contents of them." O.K., they have me figured out.

Book III, Chapter XI ("Remedies of the Abuse of Words"): "This exactness will, perhaps, be judged very troublesome; and therefore most men will think they may be excused from settling the complex ideas of mixed modes so precisely in their minds." The "excused" is well-chosen here.

I believe I have already mentioned that the guy who wrote the footnotes is more obscure than Locke, but he must have been really bad, seeing as I felt the need to note it a second time in the course of the reading.

Book IV, Chapter I ("Of Knowledge In General"): "Nobody, I think, can deny, that Mr Newton certainly knows any proposition that he now at any time reads in his book to be true; though he has not in actual view that admirable chain of intermediate ideas whereby he at first discovered it to be true." Perhaps not the whole view, but I would guess that he had a lot of it.

Book IV, Chapter IV ("Reality of Knowledge"): "...the truth and certainty of moral discourses abstracts from the lives of men, and the existence of those virtues in the world whereof they treat: nor are Tully's Offices less true, because there is nobody in the world that exactly practises his rules, and lives up to that pattern of a virtuous man which he has given us, and which existed nowhere when he writ but in idea." Morality as an abstraction comparable to mathematics. Or art.

"...where God or any other law-maker, hath defined any moral names, there they have made the essence of that species to which that name belongs..." The influence of lawgivers and other authorities is a serious matter with Locke.

In Book IV, Chapter VII ("Of Maxims") Locke discusses unlocking and opening the "secrets of knowledge". For the most part it is all just a big secret, isn't it?

"The Schools having made disputation the touchstone of men's abilities, and the criterion of knowledge, adjudged victory to him that kept the field: and he that had the last word was concluded to have the better of the argument, if not of the cause." Someday wisdom is really going to have to learn how to project itself better.

Book IV, Chapter X ("Our Knowledge of the Existence of a God"): "If, therefore, we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning; and what had a beginning must be produced by something else." Pretty clever, I guess. It caught me napping at first, but on a closer look you can see all the assumptions that are embedded in it.

There's a translated quote from Cicero, or as Locke refers to him, Tully, on the same subject: "What can be more sillily arrogant and misbecoming, than for a man to think that he has a mind and understanding in him, but yet in all the universe beside there is no such thing?" I believe much of this line of thinking with its fairly wild range of generalities was later clarified by Hume and perfected by Kant. Not that I would know.

Remember Aristippus, who placed happiness in bodily pleasure? I was a terrible philosophy student and would be hard pressed to name ten general principles running through the history of the pursuit if my life depended on it, but you sure will never be able to persuade me that happiness lies in bodily pleasure. That teaching I cannot seem to forget.

"Hence I think I may conclude, that morality is the proper science and business of mankind in general,...as several arts, conversant about several parts of nature, are the lot and private talent of particular men, for the common use of human life, and their own particular subsistence in this world." I have never developed an effective program of my own for how to live/approach life as an active agent in its course. This being after all the purpose of philosophy, I would have to say that my education was really not a success. This is besides that it is hard to participate in any kind of social intercourse requiring a decent level of thought when one does not have (or does not wish to reveal) a coherent explanation of why one's existence is playing out the way it is in any way and in what directions one might wish to direct it in the future.

Locke does not appear to be one who is especially impressed by nature (as in outside, the natural world) as something more interesting or grand than the human mind. One would have spent a lot more time grappling with it in the 17th century than we do today, and it doubtless seemed less wondrous than the possibilities of rigorous thought to the intellectuals of that time. It is a tone that I think few thinkers would take, and maybe even feel, today.

2011-07-07T00:27:00.000-04:00

Movies 1981-2002 (Common Theme: Great Depression)

The Road to Perdition (2002)My main impressions while watching this movie:

What is the point of this story?

I'm not buying Paul Newman and Tom Hanks as ruthless gangsters, especially to the extreme they are supposed to be in this movie.

I can more easily buy Daniel Craig and Jude Law as sociopaths, I guess, though I don't get the point of their characters either.

Despite a lengthy trail of corpses and bank robberies, no police ever appear. They do not exist in this movie. The characters only have to worry about other gangsters.

It might be worth seeing just for the sets and clothes and heavily artsified 30s ambiance. If they hadn't actually gunned down a child and his mother in their own bathroom I would probably say it was definitely worth seeing.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, in the period (1931) dress and hair, looks quite a bit like my wife in this, which probably caused the scene where she is murdered with the child in cold blood to upset me more than it ordinarily would have. I know this is at least the 3rd time I have said a movie actress resembles my wife (Shirley Maclaine circa The Apartment and Sybil Seeley from the Buster Keaton movies are the other 2 I can think of off hand), but in each instance something in the resemblance was striking enough to make an impression that I thought it worthwhile to take note of.

I wondered how differently the history of cinema might have developed if the United States had not been the dominant filmmaking country during the formative years of this art. Specifically I was assuming that the genre of the super-violent gangster film would not have attained quite the place of esteem in the cinematic repertoire that it has attained, to the point that nations as disparate as Britain and Korea, who do not have much of a history of their citizens engaging in machine gun massacres and shootouts in their streets and places of public business, feel impelled to regularly make movies in which as many people are blown away by advanced weaponry in a single scene as normally die in such manner in a couple of decades in those countries.

It may be argued that my quibbles about the lack of realism in certain instances in this movie are prosaic and beside the point, that the narrative does away with these restrictions because it is really about other things. In the present case however this is where the movie, which is otherwise almost impeccably made, most falters. The departure from probability and consistency within the parameters it sets out, especially given the excessive brutality of its violence, I found to be too great. Most stories that attain a degree of cultural importance require some suspension of literal disbelief, to be sure, but the psychology of the characters has to be believable and consistent within the parameters of whatever imagined or idealized world they are inhabiting, which also necessitates the mental and emotional universe of that world being comprehensible to the audience. That did not occur to my satisfaction here.

Tarzan (1999)

In addition to the undiscriminating reviewer who overly loves TV movies, my system suffers from another critic who has caused me to suspect him or her to be in the employ of the Walt Disney Corporation, so uniformly and emphatically partial to the works of this studio he be. There are a few Disney movies that I will admit to liking, though they were all made before 1960; the artistic sensibility of the pre-1945 productions especially, middlebrow though it was, is of an entirely different order from what they seem to be able to muster lately.

This late model Tarzan, following in the train of the big 90s hits like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, wholly escaped my notice on its initial appearance. I was willing enough to like it if it had moved me to do so, but I did not see anything the least noteworthy or at all different from any other 90s Disney movie.

King of the Hill (1993)

Another movie set in the Great Depression ('33 I believe was the year in this case) which seems to have been a recurring theme with me lately, or perhaps the time is such a good one to set movies in that more of them turn up on my list than they do from other periods. While Road to Perdition was based on a comic book/graphic novel and had a more mythical atmosphere about it, this was based on a memoir by a more conventional earnest writer type (A. E. Hotchner, of whom I had not previously heard). Despite being directed by Steven Soderbergh, whom I thought was considered an A or near A-list director, having a largely recognizable if not star-studded cast, and receiving almost uniformly positive reviews, the film is still not available on DVD. (I still have a VCR, so I bought an old videotape and watched that).

The sets and props and costumes lack the calculated grandeur and overall sense of Sturm und Drang, so in keeping with the post-millenial spirit, that we got in Road to Perdition, and are more in what I would consider the 'traditional' Depression period-piece style, iron bedsteads, print dresses in muted colors, peeling wallpaper and flaking plaster, scratchy radios, dusty streets, all of which motifs I am much more comfortable with. They boil some hot dogs--never destined to be eaten, as it happens--in water in a big heavy pot at one point which for some reason I found extremely pleasing, as if the image summed up all of my most superficial feelings about the 1930s in a single blow. While there is a plot, and a not wholly insignificant one, the interest in the movie to me rests on the effectiveness of these images from the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents and what relevance we can be persuaded to think they have for us now. It is about half-successful in this.

This movie has a couple of early 80s era actresses whose careers never really blew up big but whom I always liked a little, Lisa Eichhorn and Elizabeth McGovern. Lisa Eichhorn is 41 here, my age exactly now, and she still looks like her sweet senstive self. Now she is 59 and she looks old and not like her sweet sensitive self at all. This is nothing to the point except that I probably had not thought about her since around that time, so it came as rather a shock to realize that she was nearly 60 now. 1993 in certain things does not seem to me a long time ago. I was already with my wife in that year, for example, and she is still only in her 30s, and does not seem to me to have changed all that dramatically. Elizabeth McGovern probably is not much my type personality-wise. However she always reminds me of my main junior high love interest, who was also named Elizabeth, who also had an Irish surname beginning in McG--, who also had short cropped curly brown hair, and who due to the custom of forcing students to sit in rows in alphabetical order in class which was the rule in my middle school was seated about 2 feet in front of me around five hours a day for two years. Though she engaged in some mild teasing, on the whole she was cordial to me, and even danced with me twice at the Christmas dance in 1983, which was practically the highlight of the entire decade of the 80s as far as I was concerned; nonetheless she expertly managed me so that my passion remained always at a fairly low boil and never threatened to burst out in an unseemly spectacle, which looking back I think is quite admirable. She was flirty and playful without being conniving or narcissistic, and at least in junior high and early high school she always maintained a genuine respectability without being a killjoy, all of which are qualities I like in females. But all of this has very little to do with Elizabeth McGovern outside of my own head...

On Golden Pond (1981)

Just a few postings ago I mentioned that I had never seen this New Hampshire-set movie, a few days after which my system predictably turned it up to go on my list. This summer happens to be the film's 30th anniversary, so there are a number of events in New Hampshire commemorating the occasion as well, such as local theatrical productions of the original play and so on. I am not planning on attending any of them, but I think it is of interest to note that these goings-on are in the atmosphere as I try to make some sense of this old--in many ways really prematurely old--movie for myself.

In the first place I suspect that the most noteworthy aspect of the picture is the performances of Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, which appear to be so strikingly good that one almost wonders if it is not somehow an illusion, and that either the rest of the cast, or the writing of their characters, are abnormally terrible, or that there is something in the old legends' superior, almost effortlessly self-assured bearings that hoodwink the viewer into thinking their acting work grander than it really was, because we have become unaccustomed to seeing these particular qualities in our contemporaries. The dominance of the aged stars also contributes to the film's seeming to belong to a more remote past than it really does, Hepburn and Fonda's careers of course dating back to the earliest days of talking pictures, nearly half the entire history of which is (remarkably) contained within my own lifetime, but which are such a ubiquitous part of our cultural lives that its early era psychologically feels nearly as distant to us as artistic movements hundreds of years old.

The story is also dated in other of its concerns. Its primary theme is the generational conflict between the hard core of the Depression/WWII generation (Hepburn and Fonda) and their children, the Silent Generation that came of age in the 50s and early 60s. Unlike the baby boomers, who though usually obnoxious even they aren't being dangerously wrong-headed are at least adversarially strong, the Silents were never much of a match for their elders, and even in this movie which was clearly written by one of their number (it has been noted that the cohort of Americans born in the 1930s has been highly prolific and accomplished in most of the arts comparative to most of those which followed it), which I gather was intended to present their situation in a sympathetic light and try to reconcile especially the Henry Fonda character's overbearing and stifling qualities with his strong ones, they come across as almost hopelessly weak and stunted in their development when juxtaposed against their parents. One of the major plot threads is that Henry Fonda and his daughter (played by his actual famous daughter Jane, whose limited acting ability contrasted against her father's brilliance while essentially on his deathbed only further emphasizes the previous point) are estranged because he was hard and emotionally distant. In 2011, with middle class society on the brink of collapse and when our concerns are almost exclusively socio-economic, these 1970s era complaints about domineering and emotionally unavailable fathers strike one as almost quaint. From our vantage point, Henry Fonda hardly seems like such a terrible father. Besides being married and having a better relationship with his children's mother than most contemporary men are able to manage, he not only had a career, but quite a prestigious one (professor at an Ivy League university! think of the advantages! the connections!). The children doubtless were all sent to private schools. He was a competent outdoorsman and was a good role model as far as not being a total pussy or woman-dominated man goes. No evidence is offered that he beat his children unduly. Who cares that he was not the most cuddly guy in the world? Where is all this sensitive new age fathering getting us anyway?

This was filmed at Squam Lake in New Hampshire, about a 45 minute drive from my house. While I have driven past it numerous times, I have never actually gone in or on it, though I believe there are points that are publicly accessible. There are a multitude of other lakes around that I have been to, so it is more a matter of chance that I have not been there rather than socioeconomic deprivation, though I am under the impression that it is one of the more expensive lakes in the area as far as property values. Although I don't think of myself as having any friends, I have still managed over the years to get myself invited to a few private cabins on other lakes, several of which were older and a lot like the one in the movie, though the ones I visited were probably a little smaller. It has been a trend since affluent people began to really rake in the bucks in the mid-90s to knock down these older cabins and build something more in keeping with one's contemporary level of grandeur, but there are still a good number of old New Englanders of more modest means clinging to the old cabins their family bought in the 40s. These are the people I mainly know. Of course the temptation to sell out when mom finally passes on is increasingly great, and if Mitt Romney (to name one noted summerer on the New Hampshire lakes) or one of his buddies is the buyer, you can be sure they won't be keeping the old house standing, unless it is to store boats and take showers in.

2011-07-04T17:16:00.000-04:00

Human Understanding--Part the Fourth

***(Picture, see below)

I seem to have already exhausted all the pictures of John Locke that are in circulation, so this post will be words only. Not even any girls today. I could not find anything that fit the mood.

Book II, Chap. XXVII (Idea of Personal Idenity): "...I once met with one, who was persuaded his had been the soul of Socrates." I think I met that guy too.

Chap. XXVIII (Idea of Moral Relations): "...mankind have fitted their notions and words to the use of common life, and not to the truth and extent of things." Yes, but if you do not have something of the thought process of a philosopher, this idea will have no meaning for you.

Chap XXXI (Of Adequate and Inadequate Ideas): "And so each sensation answering the power that operates on any of our senses, the idea so produced is a real idea, (and not a fiction of the mind, which has no power to produce any simple idea)..." I like the clarity of this. I have very few distinct ideas which would contribute in any way to a general understanding or world view. This sounds correct to me, but I have a very hard time adhering to any singular, precise viewpoint where abstractions are concerned.

"Thus by having the idea of a figure with three sides meeting at three angles, I have a complete idea, wherein I require nothing else to make it perfect." The perfection of the idea of the triangle is one of the pillars on which my old school was built, and the extent to which you are able to internalize this idea and allow it to become a guiding tenet of your life plays a great role in determining the nature of your experience there. Not necessarily the quality of your actual learning, but definitely the nature of your experience.

I thought that the breakdown of true and false ideas was clear and sensible.

I am finally through my tidbits from Volume 1. I am pretty sure I have much fewer notes on Volume 2.

Book III, Chap IV (Of the Names of Simple Ideas). "I say that the names of simple ideas, and those only, are incapable of being defined." His reasoning was that a definition is an explanation of the meaning of one word by the use of other words, but these cannot describe a basic idea that is not a composite of other ideas but has only a single attribute that it signifies, and is in fact meaningless itself until brought into relations. My impression is that this difficulty has been overcome.

Old philosophers in general are concerned with (......? I cannot make out my note here. It is a big word too) the mind, which is not only the locus of knowledge but the most important repository of it. I am not certain that going forward this is going to be regarded as the case.

***Chap VI (Names of Our Ideas of Substances) "...and our idea of any individual man would be as far different from what it is now, as is his who knows all the springs and wheels and other contrivances within of the famous clock at Strasburg, from that which a gazing contryman has of it, who barely sees the motion of the hand, and hears the clock strike, and observes only some of the outward appearances." I would have liked to have gone to Strasbourg. Some major segment of the EU governing apparatus operates out of there, so it is modernized and trendy to a greater degree than I am usually comfortable with, but the cathedral and the old quarter are still reputed to be remarkable, and the food is supposed to be very special as well, the Alsatian cuisine being as far as I can make out something like the marriage of Germanic ingredients and Gallic sensibility, both of which I like.

I thought that the bit about necessity applying to ideas rather than things themselves uncontemplated was ingenious. Of course without mind, what does the entirety of creation signify? It is preposterous.

"There is not so contemptible a plant or animal, that does not confound the most enlarged understanding." I know these forays into high Civilization must be profoundly boring and singularly uninstructive to everybody else, but they restore my equilibrium.

There is a reference in this same chapter to Thomas Aquinas's "ordines angelorum"--gradations of angels. This evidently invoked a reminiscence at the time, though unfortunately I forgot to record what it was.

Personal anecdote: 'November 19, 2008--Oscar (my oldest son, then 6 1/2) said "Is everything I do something?" A Lockean question. I answered, "If your mind is capable of perceiving the action, it is something."' I would never have remembered this if I had not jotted it down hastily in the margin of my book.

Locke quotes a story from a French miscellany of anecdotes and bons mots that I think will make a good end for this post:

"When the abbott of St Martin was born, he had so little of the figure of a man, that it bespake him rather a monster. It was for some time under deliberation, whether he should be baptized or no. However, he was baptized, and declared a man provisionally [till time should show what he would prove]. Nature had moulded him so untowardly, that he was called all his life the Abbot Malotru; i.e. ill-shaped. He was of Caen." Caen is not so distinctive and remarkable as Strasbourg, but I should have liked to have gone there too. I believe it is a run down old seaside resort in Normandy, and was frequented by many of the Impressionist painters. It sounds like my kind of place.

2011-06-30T12:11:00.001-04:00

Anatomy of a Failed Dinner

So tonight I went to the Olive Garden--why is not important, but it was a combination of not being dressed properly to go somewhere else, wanting to eat a meal the rhythms of which resembled that of a real dinner but without requiring me to do a lot of thinking, and laziness.

It did not go as I had hoped.

Most of this was my fault, though in most of the offending incidents I could twist the facts enough to cast some of the blame on the establishment.

My main problem was that I was not prepared to concentrate on what I was doing and be 'in the moment' to the extent that it was necessary for me to be until it was too late, and my good time was irretrievably lost. Granted, I went to the Olive Garden largely because I wanted to think about other things and not have to pay close attention to the progress of my meal, but that is beside the point.

I was alone, which is unusual for me. My family went to Vermont for the weekend but I stayed behind because I had to work. This may, as it turned out, have thrown me off, because I have become unaccustomed to going out alone. My first disappointment, albeit it a mild one, came when I was given a cocky male server instead of the attractive, or at least young, lady I had been subconsciously expecting, and which is (admittedly sadly) one of the main reasons one goes to such places. I would have gotten over this disappointment easily enough, but the guy immediately began trying to manipulate me to buy a more expensive wine than I had been planning to do.

Being the kind of person who spends a lot of time getting in a stew over my various failures to broach the realm of high level drinking, the thought of getting worked over or embarrassed in wine etiquette and knowledge on the floor of the Olive Garden caused my ego to circle every wagon at its disposal (which unfortunately was not many). Immediately after dropping the menu he whips out a bottle of some cabernet and asks me if I would like a sample. I should have cut it off right there, because my intention was, as it always is, to order the house wine, as I am foremost a quantity-oriented drinker, and require at least two glasses to properly enjoy myself, preferably three. However, I agreed to try the sample, still imagining I would easily be able to control the exchange to my satisfaction. A glass was set before me and a small portion of wine was poured into it, I imagine approximately like they do in a real restaurant, though it has been so long since I have been to one that I forget. As I do not remember all the parts of the wine-tasting ritual exactly, I merely took it up and emptied it in a draught, which is anyway my impression of how Samuel Johnson and company dealt with their wine in the 18th century. It was tasty enough to me, enough that I made my first big mistake, which was to distract myself by trying to scan the menu to see what the price of it was.

It was $8.25 a glass, so I was not having it, and I thanked the man for the sample and said I would stick with the house wine.

He was uncertain about whether I would like the house wine--many people found it strong, even overpowering--and strongly encouraged me to try a sample of that before I committed to ordering.

I should definitely have refused the sample here but I still felt myself to be in command of the situation and regarded the offer as an opportunity to steal an extra mouthful of drink at no charge. Yes, I said, bring it on. He had to step away for a moment to fetch the bottle, which time I used to make a cursory examination of the menu.

At his return with the other bottle I had to confess that it was not very good in comparison with the wine that was $8.25 a glass, and my eyes began to flit over the menu again in search of a possible substitute, though I refused to succumb to the product he was pushing on me. I felt myself becoming more and more uncomfortable however and said, probably in an irritable voice, that I was going to stick with the house wine. I was now distracted however, and, though I did not realize it at the time, I became careless. I ordered fettucine alfredo when I actually wanted, and meant to ask for, chicken alfredo. Though there were four soup choices, I did not bother to inquire about what they consisted of, and quickly ordered minestrone, and when asked if I wanted a bowl of some sauce or other to dip my breadsticks in, said yes without thinking about it.

All of these distracted orders led to mild but frustrating little incidents which accrued to the point that I could not repair my mood and ability to enjoy the meal.

Campbell's minestrone soup, I believe, is made up of little chunks of beef, the little white noodle-like things that share a common shape with Sugar Crisps cereal, small carrots and pieces of potatoes and beans, etc. Anyway, a heartier version of that was what I was expecting. What I got was a meatless stew filled with enormous quantities of vegetables, such as crunchy beans and zucchini, that I don't like. This was not the fault of the restaurant of course, but as it represented an anticipated pleasure that failed to achieve fruition, it had the effect of lowering my mood, as well as my ability to resist further disappointments, the next of which came when the fettucine alfredo I had ordered arrived without chicken in it as I had expected. My inward overreaction to this disappointment was no doubt the result of its being the second dish within ten minutes to arrive which I had anticipated to contain meat which turned out to contain none, on top of the sting with which I was already agitated after my blundering during the ceremony with the wine.

At this point, especially as I knew that if I ate the meal before me without the chicken I was craving that the whole enterprise would be irretrievably ruined, I know I should have explained my situation to the waiter and requested a change in my order. However, I knew that technically I had ordered the plate they had brought me, it was a busy Saturday night, I did not want to come across as a dick when I was the one who had made the mistake, and so on. So I ate my plate of noodles, rather miserably, out of all proportion to what the circumstances called for, and though I had intended to have a full dining experience with dessert and coffee, decided before I had finished to just give up after the main course and get out of there.

When the check came there was a $3.50 charge on it for the bowl of sauce that had been brought me to dip my bread sticks in.

This was the breaking point. I knew that if I did not offer some official protest that I would have no inner peace for the next week. My immediate thought was to deduct the sauce charge from the tip, which would have reduced that sum to a quarter. It occurred to me that my waiter would likely have no idea why I was stiffing him in this way, so I thought to write a note on the blank side of the check approximating the substance of this post in explanation. But as that not only would have taken too long, but seemed weaselly, I resigned myself to having to declare my intentions, and the reasons for them, aloud upon the man's return.

I commenced by informing him solemnly, as I handed him the settlement of my account, that I would not be able to leave him a tip.

He was practically enthusiastic at the reception of this news and assured me it was no problem at all.

I asked him if he did not want to know my reasons for taking what seemed to me this rather momentous decision.

Not at all, he said, it did not matter, whatever I wanted to do was fine with him.

This obfuscation of my gravity and its intended effect annoyed me and I stated directly that I wished to tell him my reasons, at which he consented to hear them.

It was at this point that my most egregious failure was realized. No, they did not laugh at me--indeed, the $3.50 charge for the dipping sauce which I felt I should have been informed of was immediately struck from the bill, though the spirit was much more "please don't come back and shoot me, O.K." than submission to my overpowering will. Midway through my retracing of my various complaints with the entire evening's progression, I became incoherent and I could feel my voice quavering. I am in my 40s. And I cannot dress down, let alone dominate, the staff at an Olive Garden in New Hampshire without faltering. I had once imagined by this point of my life to be able to enter any establishment or social setting in the world and be able to hold my own with anyone present. This was ridiculous, obviously, but not being able to take control over my dinner at Olive Garden represents a serious failure of development, that at this point probably cannot be corrected. As I wrote in my novel when I was 25 years old: "He had sunk his head and asked how his parents, his schools, his country could have allowed such a boy as he to have drifted into that degree of useless and cowardly adulthood under its auspices." If anything, I have only gotten worse since then, though I acknowledge that that is my own fault, as anybody over a fairly young age--fourteen maybe--is responsible for directing his own further development.

I view this as a snapshot illustration of why our country is in such a mess. People like me who are reasonably intelligent and in the prime of life who should be helping to resolve some of the problems besetting us cannot command a simple situation in a forking fifth rate restaurant. It's very frustrating.

2011-06-21T01:32:00.000-04:00

In Which the Author Opens a Time Capsule

This is the greatest idea I've ever had (there is going to be a renewed emphasis on positivity on the site henceforward).

Each of the two yearbooks I have preserved from high school contain a two page spread dedicated to the various phrases and words which defined the year. These phrases are not listed in any kind of linear order but float over grainy images of largely unidentifiable groups of students. Some of them are strictly school or regionally specific references, while other are broader in origin and would be familiar to anyone inhabiting this country in a state of reasonably developed consciousness at the time. I thought it would be curious to examine whether they signify anything now. For what it is worth, I went to a public high school in Portland, Maine from 1986 to 88. Like most places, Northern New England seemed at that time much more culturally remote and isolated from the rest of the country, to say nothing of the world, than it is now. I gather that for most intelligent people, the intervening political and social and technological changes have greatly improved the quality of their mental lives and social discourse, and they have no desire to go back. Neither do I, of course. I only spend most of my writing energy in the past because that is where such paltry references and experiences as I have primarily reside. I regret to report haven't found much of life that I have discovered after age 30 to be terribly interesting compared to what I did up to that point.

Without further delay, especially as there are so many of them to break down, here are the vital terms of 1986-'87.

Staph Infection. This is a local reference, there being an outbreak of this malady during the winter. Its ravages were mostly limited to the wrestling team. I remember that their mats had to be burned, or something like that.

Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill. The now legendary album of course, which famously "caught the guardians of popular culture napping" in 1987. We did have MTV (and not much else) in Maine, so we knew about the Beasties.

Mousse and Styling Gel. It was certainly big with the girls at the time. Is it still? Perhaps not. One does not see the rather spectacularly teased hairdos among the younger set nowadays that were so prevalent in the 80s. I tried to put some gel in my hair exactly once and predictably, it was a disaster, unless you consider looking like a regular on Dance Party USA to be a triumph.

Converse High-Tops. I assume this refers to Chuck Taylors? That retro fashion statement lasted well into the early 90s, at my college anyway. I never had Chucks, because I had an idea of presenting myself as a quasi-"real" athlete in those days and considered most of the people who wore them to not belong to that category. These are many of the people same however who now run triathlons and eat gluten-free diets. I currently dent the scales at 230 and can barely run 200 yards without collapsing, though I'm pretty sure I can still beat 85% of the 'men' half my age in a footrace at that distance, as well as 99% of the guys who actually are my age. Not that this means anything.

Driver's Ed. I took driver's ed the year before, when I was still in Pennsylvania. If you're usually in the 'college-bound' track, this was one of your chances to take a class with the regular population. It was not an inspiring experience. Looking back of course I should have taken the opportunity to try to bond with the two girls in the class who were fellow refugees from 'honors' English, etc. and who clung to each other pretty tightly in their revulsion at everyone around them, not least the teacher, who was one of those unctuous JV coach types whom no one was ever going to entrust with running his own program. It was really dismal.

Homecoming. I didn't go.

Feathered-Back Hair. I associate this more with the '81-'84 period, though I guess a few laggards were still squeezing the last dregs of fashion out of the style in the winter of '87.

Intense. A popular catch-all adjective of the season, applicable to the gamut of teenaged experience. I used it sparingly, and almost certainly never accurately.

It's Harsh. See entry for "intense". There was one very cool and decidedly affluent guy, who wore plaid shorts and sunglasses with straps around his neck and knew all about Camper Van Beethoven and even Vigil (to be honest, I'm not sure that he really belonged at our school), who expanded this to the--when he spoke it--somewhat hipper sounding "You're harshing my mellow", which no imitator among our student body could really pull off. I can't find this guy on Facebook, but I have no doubt that his current profession involves words like "investment", "securities" and such.

The Iran-Contra Scandal. I cannot pretend that I was paying terribly close attention to this at the time. My main association with this episode of history involves a kid who was called "The Dumpster". This was the most accurate and all-around brilliant nickname given to anybody I have personally ever known, by the way. By the time I came along no one could even remember where it originated; the second you heard it, it was immediately obvious to whom it referred, and why, such the word could never thereafter be separated from the image of the man. The Dumpster was a rather intelligent, if strange fellow, who looked like and carried himself in every way like a 46-year old man who had been working in some dreary bureaucratic office for seventeen years, never married, or remotely close to being married, ate a greasy grilled meat and cheese sandwich every day for lunch, manhandled multiple newspapers daily while reading them front to back, and took driving tours to famous battlefields on his vacations. He was a diehard Republican, champion of Reagan and sworn enemy of communism in all its forms; the stridency with which he expressed all this was decidedly singular at our school. Along with lunch, it appeared to be the great joy of his life to shake his head with a bemused smirk at such effusions as the various committed liberals of the class--mainly earnest girls, several of whom I was mildly in love with at the time, fey boys, and a handful of would be rebel boys whose fury at various social injustices came across to me at least, who was admittedly jealous of them, as slightly put upon (they certainly did better with the chicks than either I or the Dumpster)--were wont to make. When the scandal broke big, I remember that he took to regularly wearing an Oliver North t-shirt to school both to show his solidarity with the president and to antagonize his political enemies. Update: I have found the Dumpster on Facebook! And he has 30 more friends than I do! It looks like he is a high school teacher in rural Maine, which I would not have thought would be his destiny (the teaching part). His info also says he has been to China seven times, which I really would not have thought to be his destiny.

Football Games. Our program was not very powerful in those days; the team went 1-8 both of my years at the school, which was pretty pitiful considering we were the 3rd largest high school in the state and were close to twice as big as most of our rivals. I never played organized football. I thought about giving it a try before both my sophomore and junior years but due to various circumstances, I was not settled at a school in either of those years until the day or two before classes started, long after practice had started. So I gave up the idea.

Macdonald's. I think it is supposed to be McDonald's, isn't it? I'm not sure why this made the list. Obviously people went there, but they went to other places just as much, and which were much more conducive to hanging out, and had more poignant atmospheres as well.

Couching. Must have been a slang term, but one that seems to have passed me by.

Snow Days. This was actually notable, as the Portland schools hardly ever closed since A) most people lived within a mile of school, which was considered walking distance, and B) people expected it to snow in the winter in those days, and nobody seemed to worry too much about the roads and accidents and slipping on ice and all of that like they do now. The school had to close because the roof was leaking as a result of all the snow that was piled up on it; not the roof of the original 1924 building of course, but the one on the addition that had been put on the back and was less than 10 years old at the time.

Tretorns. I have no idea what this is (ed--I looked it up and it apparently is some kind of sneaker). Whomever these were a big deal among, I did not know them.

Ronald Reagan. Wasn't this around the time that he really began to be affected by his condition and largely cease to appear publicly though?

Penny Loafers. They were kind of a trend among a certain crowd that seemed to me to have something going for them, though exactly what I do not remember at present, and I must admit I had a pair myself, and put the pennies in them. They probably were an improvement over whatever shoes I had been wearing to school before, but they didn't propel me into a new realm of social success or anything like that.

Road Trips. When you live in Maine, you do get in the habit of roadtripping quite a lot, even in high school. The main destinations on these trips were Boston and the beaches further south (i.e. Mass and even New Hampshire!) where inherently tougher and sexier people and more dangerous vices were supposed to be found. Montreal, which is 4-5 hours away, was also popular, among other things because the drinking age is 18 there. There are also lots of strip clubs and I suppose other illicit entertainments to be had as well, and at discount Canadian prices. The Mexican versions of these expeditions for the underaged crowd--Tijuana, Cancun--are more celebrated in popular lore. I suppose they are technically more wild, more decadent, and host more spectacular physical specimens than their Canadian counterparts. As is the case with Las Vegas and bascially anywhere warm however I cannot imagine myself among such scenes having any fun and suspect I would have been totally lost in them. Therefore the Montreal/Niagara Falls-type drinking and (attempted) whoring weekends have always held a greater interest for me. I never went on one of these trips myself, it probably goes without saying.

MTV. It was a big part of day to day life. '87 was the year they started switching heavily to the pop metal bands (Def Leppard, Poison, etc), which most people I knew were not too happy about. There was still hope at that time that it would become cool again, maybe another girl like Martha Quinn would be hired, and so on.

Platoon. The movie. Won the best picture at the Oscars that year. In case you have forgotten, it was directed by Oliver Stone and starring Charlie Sheen, and I am guessing this has contributed to the eclipse of its reputation as a significant work of art in the ensuing 25 years.

Denim Jackets. These were pretty big.

Norweigan Sweaters. I guess these were big too, though I did not notice it at the time. I assumed everybody wore them all the time because it was a cold climate. In general, during the vital years of my youth--approximately 1985-95--young women really were not flaunting a lot of skin in public. Anytime you look at pictures from 1990 or so, they've all got the heavy sweatshirt over turtleneck look going on, and the stirrup pants. It's probably for the best that girls were not regularly going around in heavy cleavage-revealing tank tops with visible thongs in the places I was when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. I probably would have had to be institutionalized.

Dances. The dances at my high school were actually really lame, which surprised me, and still does surprise me a little. People just didn't know what to do at them, there was no organization or direction emanating from anyone enough people trusted, and the majority of the attendees suffered from bad inhibitions. They (the dances) were just a mess. It didn't help that the all-boys Catholic school and statewide sports powerhouse a half mile away threw dances open to any girls who wanted to come to them which were major and much looked forward to happenings as far as many of the ladies were concerned for miles around, especially when they were scheduled on the same night. Especially when they were scheduled on the same night that this rival school beat us in basketball 92-59.

SATs. The yearbook was run by the ambitious, GPA-calculating, prestigious university striving crowd, so they made a lot of fuss about the SATs. Believe it or not, I was not part of this crowd. I wanted to get high test scores and go to a hoity-toity college and all that, but I kind of kept that to myself, mainly because I knew my effort would have looked pretty ridiculous compared to these people, and I didn't want to expose myself to having that pointed out.

Benetton. I didn't realize anybody at our school actually wore this. Whoever it was never came anywhere near me.

Funneling. Now this was an activity that I achieved a reasonable amount of proficiency in, enough that I was a little disappointed that the opportunity to demostrate my prowess never came up in college, the drinking culture there being too sophisticated I guess for the introduction of silly contraptions into the process. Of course I could have made my own funneling apparatus and brought it to the party, but you see that would not have worked, because I certainly would not have been the best or most prolific funneler, the idea was merely to show modestly that, yes ladies, I do know my way around the world of binge drinking and wild parties and thus if you feel the urge to indulge in a session of sloppy, non-committal sensual intimacy, you can trust that you will be in secure hands. Needless to say, this idea was never effectively communicated.

Closing the Gym. I cannot remember if this was on account of the staph infection or the leaking roof. Perhaps both.

College Application Deadlines. See SATs, above.

Macbeth. This must have been the drama club's offering that year, which I would have ignored, being preoccupied with my own obsessions. Our school was the kind that always had a pretty good drama program however. The auditorium was part of the original 1924 building, maybe even its highlight. It was beautiful. It had a balcony, arched stone doorways, plush red seats. Portland is a comparatively liberal and cultured city, or at least a significant part of it is, so any stigmas that existed against boys acting in plays, or even presenting themselves as pretty blatantly gay, were somewhat less pronounced than they would have been in many other places, especially at that time.

Skiing. I never learned how to ski, though it is still a big social thing that normal people do in New England. My wife of course knows how, and I've had my two oldest sons take lessons through their school the last few years, and I'm told that they're very good at it, so that pleases me. It is one of those things, like piano playing, that it is good to know how to do. It is done all over the world in invariably pleasant places by good-looking, healthy, affluent, and usually reasonably well-educated people. Skiing locales in Europe, especially, are filled with gorgeous women looking to party and whatever else, but you're kind of cut off from this pleasurable scene if you can't ski yourself. This all sounds calculating, but I don't mean it to be. As somebody who doesn't have, in the parlance of Napoleon Dynamite, a lot of skills, I would like to see my kids be a little more able than I am, especially in areas like skiing that are easy to learn when you're six, not so much when you a long-legged 6'3" adult with a high center of gravity and precarious balance.

The Red Sox in the World Series. This was of course the infamous 1986 World Series when they lost to the Mets. This all took place about a month to six weeks after I moved there, so it was a good introduction both to the relationship and its accompanying angst of the Boston Red Sox to the collective life of the entire New England region. The spring of '86 had seen the last, and most dominant, of the Larry Bird championship Celtics teams, following shortly afterwards by the drafting of Len Bias and his death by cocaine overdose the very same night. So I missed that, but the spirit was still high through '87, when the Celtics miraculously beat Detroit in the Eastern playoffs and lost to an admittedly superior Lakers team in the finals. I was at a party the next year when they lost to Detroit in the rematch in the Eastern finals and the minute the game ended everybody knew immediately that that was the end of this team, which it was. The point is, for all these people Larry Bird, Parish, McHale had been around since they were little children, 8 or 9 or so, and now they were finally vanquished and done and it really was like a part of their life, albeit a minor one, was over. It was actually kind of dramatic, not in a hysterical way, but it was sad (and yes, those players played on for a few more years, increasing old and injured, but they were no longer a great team after '88).

Sweet! Another popular expression. I think this was in one of those army bootcamp movies, Full Metal Jacket or one of those. I did not use it. My word I liked to throw out was "treacherous" which is really an awful word, especially when it's being flung around indiscriminately by a 17-year old.

Dissecting in Biology. Something else the smart kids did. Obviously I did this too, but it would not have stood out to me as a vital memory. The only thing I remember from high school biology is the day the teacher, who was the kind of guy that you just knew hadn't had sex in 30 years, and maybe never, talked about animal reproduction, sperm-and-egg, testes-enlargening nuts and bolts kind of stuff, with diagrams on the board and all the rest of it. Naturally this now conjures up the vision of a certain blondish individual who sat in the front row of the class in the far left seat with her well-formed face visible to me in profile, the rows of chairs being arranged in semicircles as in an amphitheatre or traditional lecture hall. This was not one of those girls you consciously connected with animal behaviors though the instant you saw her, at least I didn't at that age. The association was doubtless always there, but had always been convoluted, and the two memories maintained separate existences. Until now.

Crew Cuts. I had one. It did not look good, and I have never gotten another since. It took six months for my hair to grow back to a normal appearance, so I guess I saved some money on haircuts. Looking back, it is odd that this fashion statement suddenly became popular again. I don't know what I was thinking when I got it. I have always had a certain amount of angst about my hairstyle, and believed there was some elusive look I could capture that would make me appear more commanding, dapper, serious, or whatever. Doubtless some guys I thought possessed a winning look had gotten the buzz cuts and these seemed to be working for them, and I figured I had nothing to lose. It didn't work.

PDA. I don't remember much of this going on at our school, with the exception of the (admittedly sizable) heavy metal contigent. As I thought these people, the females included, were almost uniformly gross, I suppose I tended not to count them. No one could deny however that on the whole they were getting a lot more action than the more conventional community was, for whatever it was worth.

Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. Had to have been the album of that year in Portland for 1987 (the album of the year for 1988 will be revealed in that year's post). It was almost all because of the girls of course, and not just the metal ones (though nowadays, judging from the size of the hair, they all look like potential metal girls, there were major gradations of metaltude within the female population, and one learned pretty easily what these were) though Bon Jovi himself was not as widely despised among the males at our school as elsewhere. This was because a lot of the male social leaders were Italian and they thought he was cool. Unlike at the school I had gone to in PA, where only fat people and obvious losers listened to music a mainstream person would ever have heard of, in Maine there were really pretty girls who not only listened to lame contemporary top 40 pop but even old stuff like Simon and Garfunkel. I cannot overstate the extent to which this state of affairs struck me as almost quasi-miraculous at the time.

Parking Bans. I don't remember this. I didn't pass my driving test until around April, so these did not effect me.

"Twist and Shout" I assume this refers to the Beatles version of the song becoming a minor hit again that year due to the Ferris Bueller movie, which (the movie) I never liked.

Guess Jeans. Needless to say, I wasn't getting close to any girls who wore these.

The Health Clinic Controversy. I didn't even know we had a health clinic. Wherever you are, it turns out there is always something going on with the health clinic that is enraging certain people, and I never have any idea what it is.

Detention. I never had detention in high school. I had it once in 7th grade for throwing a couple of tomato slices at a girl who physically excited me. I have no recollection of what the thought process was that inspired that particular gesture.

The Bonfire. I missed the bonfire, both years. Once I had to work, and the other time I think I was depressed or something. They had them in mid to late October. In New England this is an extremely poignant and sentimental time of year anyway, and I think something about the whole scene, and feeling that I was not really a part of the community, was somehow too much for me at the time. I kind of regret not going now. The poignant falls of youth are fleeting.

Chemistry Labs. I wish I had done better in science throughout my life. I suppose I could try to learn it now, but given that guys who are science whizzes in high school go to college and are immediately slapped down and told they don't understand anything, it seems that any self-taught knowledge I might acquire would be unreliable.

Bruce Springsteen Live 1975-1985. This album had like 5 records in it. And everybody got the set with the records too, never the cassettes. A lot of people got this as a Christmas present from their parents or other older family member, I think. I did. The package was substantial, the perception of Springsteen among adults was that, unlike say, Billy Joel, he was cool enough that a teenager could play his records among friends without becoming a social outcast, but also acceptably retro and unannoying, unlike the Beastie Boys or Guns and Roses. I have dragged the thing around for all these years and probably still have it, though I haven't listened to it maybe even since before college. When I did show up at college, I actually made small talk about this album with a guy who spotted it in a crate I was carrying in who became one of my best friends and remains so to this day, as far as I know (there was a moderately unbalanced girl who tried to convince me that he was not my friend and had done terrible things to me, but she wouldn't specify what they were, I never received any other hints or clues as to the veracity of her accusations, and the man himself seemed genuinely puzzled and bemused when I related the story to him, so I did not bother myself about the matter any further). I don't know that we ever got around to listening to any of the album, though. Maybe briefly that very first afternoon, but I'm pretty sure some real music aficiondos arrived and took over the record player.

That marks the end of this journey into the depths of lost time. It took me an embarrassingly long time to write this post.

2011-06-17T00:54:00.000-04:00

Photo Update

We haven't had any straight picture posts for a while. Between the pregnancy, and not going to Florida, and the camera's going down for a while there isn't a ton of riveting material. Still, it's a whole season or two of life, and even ten random selections can put a little coherence to it and help you remember it.

1. All the way back to the aftermath of Christmas. Children #4 and #2. That red toy in the center of the frame is a device for scooping sand/making sand castles, though in the winter we use them with snow for the same purposes. 2. Line for Snowtubing, Ski Lifts, et al

3. The Making of a Triple Decker Bunk Bed. #s 3 & 2.

4. Easter. My annual Easter verses are visible on the table, though happily I don't think anybody will be able to read them.

5. On the Verge of Spring. This may even have been the first day the buds were out. #2 learned to ride in literally a single afternoon. Lest I be mistaken for a modern safety nut, I try to discourage them from wearing the helmets, but the kids today think it's de rigueur equipment and it's cool. Like I would have thought about playing baseball without a glove, even though the tough kids in the Dominican who grew up to be real ballplayers didn't need any stinking gloves. I would have thought it was declasse' at the time though.

6. 9th Birthday Party for Child #1. At the bowling alley.

7. The End of the Party. Deer Hunting

8. #5, a Few Hours Old

9. We Did Go on an Outing to White Lake, Near the White Mountains, on Memorial Day Weekend.

10. #5, 2-3 Weeks Old. Her head still looks like the other guys, but the rest of her looks more like a girl, especially her limbs, fingers, toes and such are daintier and more refined in appearance.

3 quickie posts. I probably won't be able to get up anything quasi-reminiscent of a piece of writing by a legitimate intelligent male adult until the middle of next week at the earliest.

The only Google search that led anyone to the site today was for "paul eskey". Who wouldn't be intrigued?

2011-06-15T21:53:00.000-04:00

A Few Songs to Cover the Gap

Maybe it is better to be honest about our habits and try to work through them than to keep them hidden.

"I've Told Every Little Star" (1961, Linda Scott). It was evidently featured in a David Lynch movie (Mulholland Falls) and is accompanied by clips from his various films.
One thing I will say about David Lynch, unlike many people in the visual entertainment field over the last 20-25 years, he has an eye for good-looking white girls, and a sense for how to bring out some of the latent and sadly underutilized appeal that a lot of us have been missing during that time.

My Lennon Sisters fetish is perhaps getting clinical. I'm going to have to bleed my sentiments until I am purged. Now I've stumbled upon a treasure trove of their really old Laurence Welk appearances from the 50s and early 60s, when they were just little girls and teenagers. The arrangements are better and the performances more poignant than those I've been putting up from the mid to late 60s, when the show began to get really corny and the girls' genuine wholesome good looks and assuring poise were about the only things it had left going for it.

In their early years on the show the girls mostly just stood in a little group on the stage in tasteful but unspectacular dresses and sang, no ridiculous costumes or props or little skits. To be honest the skits from the 50s were not even that bad, were in fact often in keeping with the times, and the program does not appear to have started becoming the paragon of bad taste and total uncoolness that it is famed as now until sometime in the early 60s. This one below for example, from 1959, would not have been far out of place on any music-themed show of the era. (The three older Lennon Sisters only provide backup in this one but at ages 16, 18 & 19 they display the mainstream teen-age girl styles of the day in all their considerable glory).

Linda Scott was good-looking in the matronly way young women sometimes have, where they are twenty-two and good-natured but already have the features and movements of a fifty year-old. I've known a couple of women like that and I remember thinking, not so much at the time but an hour later, or the next day, or the next week, that gosh, that girl was really sexy (followed by, why was/am I so unresponsive to my own instincts in real time?).

2011-06-12T01:02:00.002-04:00

New BabyI figure I had better announce, before she starts popping up, without formal introduction, in photos of writers' graves or outhouses or whatever, that I have a daughter, born May 18, 2011. This is a surprise, and perhaps an additional comfort for my declining years, even if society does descend into the total barbarism and chaos that is frequently predicted. Her name is Susanna. One of Shakespeare's daughters was named Susannah, you may recall, though that had nothing to do with my daughter's name, in fact I did not remember it until after the fact. It does give it a certain poetic glamour though, I think, which cannot be harmful to its bearer. Susanna was also the name of the bride in The Marriage of Figaro. I am sure I will remember or come upon other ancient or modern Susannas who further add to this lustre.

Since I recounted when my last son was born all the books I was reading at the times of the children's various births (The Golden Bowl; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; The Spectator; and The Tower of London), I should report that the reading on this occasion was On Approval by Frederick Lonsdale, which is a champagne-fizzy British drawing room comedy from 1927. There are worse omens to be born under. On the other hand, my wife's own mother was reading The Gulag Archipelago at the time she delivered Dearest, and this has not resulted in any ill-effects thus far, so most likely there is nothing in these literary circumstances that surround ones birth.

2011-06-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

Football Scandals, Death of a Sex Fiend, and, Why Won't the Literary Itch Ever Just Die?

With USC and Ohio State football both being handed big punishments recently after some scandals, or at least blatant rulebreaking, by various of their coaches and players, much of the progressive sports media has been reviving the call for paying college athletes, or at least football and basketball players at powerhouse programs. I do not follow college sports that closely so I don't really care whether things move in this direction--I would prefer it didn't, though it doesn't look like the college presidents and other people who would be in charge of this have any intention of (officially) implementing such a system. One suspects a modest stipend would not be satisfactory to some of the more prominent talents; and anything more than that would remove most of the remaining pretenses that the players were students and would require them to be dealt with as employees, with all that that entails, which I don't think the university powers are interested in doing.

The primary source of amusement for me in these debates is all the hand-wringing about how the players on scholarship, many being from disadvantaged backgrounds, don't have any money to so much as go to a movie or take their girlfriends out for pizza (and presumably milkshakes). They aren't allowed to hold jobs anymore, apparently because of the probability of abuse at the most extreme football-mad schools (i.e., $10,000 for putting in a couple of hours sitting at the desk at a prominent alumnus' car dealership). For some reason one never hears about the football players at Appalachian State or Arkansas-Pine Bluff having to forgo dates or be consigned to their rooms for the weekend because they have no walking around money, yet they are presumably from similar backgrounds as athletes at most of the big time schools. My father was a scholarship athlete back in the 60s at a fairly major sports school (Villanova) in track and field, now a minor sport but more significant at that time. Everything having to do with life at school--books, meals, laundry, etc--was completely free. He was fond of telling the story that he was given so many 'snack tickets' (i.e. for free snacks) that he ended up giving most of them away. My father was intelligent and had gotten a very good education in the pre-Vatican II Catholic school system--much better than the public education I received 20 years later--but due to parental alcoholism, chronic unemployment, marital separation--the usual story--his family was quite poor at the time he was in school, and he certainly would never have attended a comparable private university without the scholarship. I realize this was a different era, and people were in general accustomed to living more austerely, especially at school, but he regarded himself as having gotten the break of his life. He was able to work in the summer, and though he gave quite a bit of that to his mother, what he had left was sufficient to support a perfectly reasonable social life. I doubt that the problem today is that the players are so materially deprived, but that their expectations and grandiose self-conceptions, as well as those of their coaches and institutions, have 'gotten out of hand'. I would say 'transcended far beyond the bounds which a proper foundation in liberal learning might have had the effect of inculcating', but the use of phrases like "liberal learning" as if it represented something that actually existed seems to send more college graduates into a state of fury nowadays than any number of scandals involving athletes and money, crime, etc.

Another anecdote about my father's career is that the Villanova team, which was in those days, and generally still is, a powerhouse in college track, got to travel several times a year to big meets in places in New York and Boston, and I think they even went to Tennessee once. This going to New York and staying in a hotel and being taken sightseeing and all--even though the college was just in Philadelphia--was considered kind of a big deal, a real perk, as it were. Even when I was a kid, there would be footage on TV of the players from Iowa or Ohio State visiting Disneyland when they made the Rose Bowl as if being able to go to California must be the thrill of their lives. Nowadays of course the top high school teams in most sports fly all over the country to play each other, often televised on ESPN 2 or 3. Of course they expect to get paid.

I know the colleges--or at least a handful of them at the very top of the pyramid--make a lot of money off of these players, and unlike the institutional networks at Harvard and places like that, the players' affiliation with their school does not seem to be of much help to many (though not all) of them later in life. The amount of money at stake clearly contributes to corruption, compromises of integrity, and so forth, at many of the schools, and the institutional energy and resources expended on athletics in general at most places I think has become really disproportionate even compared to what it was in the 1970s. I also think it puts the schools in a bad position vis-a-vis the players, many of whom obviously consider that they should be getting a cut of this largess beyond their scholarships and the benefits of their prominent affiliation with the university. I think there is a place for athletics in collegiate life, but it should never have been allowed to get to the point where it is so much about money at all, and especially the kind of sums that are involved now.

I was going to write something a sex maniac I read about who killed himself at age 73 while facing trial for thirteen separate rape charges. He was the guy wrote the song "You Light Up My Life"--which I thought was about God or Jesus or something but never mind--and he had been a moderately succesful, if not critically respected, figure in show business, with the peak of his career coming during the 1970s. My immediate impression was "Gosh, this guy has had a lot of sex in his life, and, at least in his own desire and expectation to fornicate, he remained voracious into his old age (He lured the girls he is accused of raping--all aged 18-30--to his apartment via ads for a 'casting call'). Obviously the guy was a total sleaze even on his good days and was revealed as a criminal in the end, but for somebody like me who goes through life feeling as if I so much as put a hand on a woman's shoulder in a moment of spontaneity authorities are going to instantly descend upon me and make sure that I am forbidden entry to any pleasant corner of society ever again and that my life will be generally ruined, the audacity and sense of entitlement of people like this just blows you away. I could have used just a little of it, and it would have made a enormous difference in my life.

Literary Nudgings?

Several incidents happened this week which made me wonder if I should not go back and try writing again. In short, I found out that a couple of people I vaguely know, who were decidedly outsiders of the publishing world at the time that I knew them, have succeeded not only in having their books published, but have received some good acclaim and more than enough validation to bear the title and status of 'writer' among all but the very uppermost reaches of the educated classes. I am a long way from getting to such a point now, farther than I was 10 years ago, but...there is still something there, some material, some idea that I would like to see presented in a way that may be peculiar to myself. It needs to be organized and thought through with a clearer head than I have at the moment, but my instincts for the type of writing I would want to do are still pretty good, and I am still pretty secure in their value, assuming they could be skillfully executed. But as I say, I am now a very long way from being capable of doing that...