The title is another one of my catchphrases. It's my go to expression to myself to cope every time I walk past or espy an especially attractive group of people who are socializing and appear to be really enjoying the experience. Of course it is ridiculous, I have never struggled any near to the extent that I ought to have, and that would have been good for me, but like many pampered modern people who are occasionally unable to get everything they want on demand, I like to think of myself as a social victim and the idea has always had a very prominent place in my conscious thought.
I haven't done a post of videos in a while. The imbeds do not generally last, so these posts age especially poorly. However, it is another record of where my mind is at particular points in time, so I like to do them occasionally. This is a sample of what I have been looking at lately. I am probably missing something that was actually really good, but if it isn't coming to me it isn't coming to me.
Jo A Ram--Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
One of those things that is kind of infectious, at first anyway. And what can I say, she is very cute. She has many videos, but this is the best one I have found.
The Dream Academy--Life in a Northern Town
Somehow I missed ever seeing this back in the 80s. Wherever they filmed this is amazing. It doesn't look quite like where I live now, though it has similar weather, but it does remind me a little of some of those hilly towns in the interior of Pennsylvania, Pottsville or Hazleton or Wilkes-Barre and places like that, which are quite dreary in the winter, though poignant.
Texas Real Estate Lady
I don't know how I came upon this, but something about it held my attention. My northeast bias is really going to come out strong here, but I cannot imagine living in a place like this (even though it is apparently in the very desirable Austin area). That kind of landscape and climate is more alienating to me than almost anything else I have seen in the United States. I would feel more at home in the town in the last video. However, maybe if I went there I would feel differently. I used to have a revulsion towards Florida and the south before I went to see it for myself, and I enjoyed my visits, though I still think I would be depressed if I had to live there.
Wolters' World
I've been watching a lot of travel videos lately--I was already in of those states where I was fixated on when I was ever going to be able to fly somewhere glamorous and cosmopolitan again before the current situation in which many commentators are giddily speculating that most regular people won't be doing much traveling in the future even if the pandemic ever does end. I still like Rick Steves's shows, not going too upscale, but still having a nice view and getting to linger over dinner and drinks in an atmospheric setting, and I found this guy, Mark Wolters, a university lecturer from Illinois who has a very affable personality and is very positive, qualities that I admire but sadly have never been able to attain. Most of his videos are just him standing in some picturesque location talking about various aspects of travel, but his presentation of his experiences I often find to be interesting. His videos seem to me to have gotten better over time as he has gotten more practice. He seems to be about seven years younger than I am and in light of my own recent experience he strikes me as a heart attack waiting to happen within a few years, so I hope he will be all right. These things sneak up on you as get towards fifty.
Jo Stafford--You Belong to Me
I come back to Jo Stafford at various intervals. I had one of her records when I was in college that I did not play all the time, but on certain occasions and times of year that seemed extra-significant or prescient of a change or transition of some kind, this always seemed to fit my particular emotions at such hours. Her voice always reminds me of ice cream.
The Sundays--You're Not the Only One I Know
The epitome of ca. 1990 wimp rock, no doubt--the Megadeth fans at my high school would have wanted to beat the brains in of any male who expressed the slightest affinity for this stuff, to what end it is not exactly clear to me but the emotion behind this desire I believe was genuine. I like this song though, I find it resonant and nostalgically wistful in my advancing age, and this video is one of the best in the pop-song-meets-classic-movie genre that I have seen. Everything about it screams out "Where my youth go? Where did our youth go? Where did our art go?" emotions which are very cathartic and congenial to me.
New Edition--If It Isn't Love
I heard this on Rite-Aid radio, which has been a surprising source of forgotten hits for this page over the years. I don't think I had heard this in decades, and couldn't remember the title or who sang it, I had to try to call up some of the lyrics from the darkest depths of my memory. This is pure me-wandering-around-suburban-Philadelphia-in-the-summer-of-'85-waiting-for-something-exciting-to-happen stuff here. Nothing particularly exciting ever did happen, which may be for the best, because if anything had, it would have been so monumentally great that perhaps the rest of my life could not have lived up to that memory. Or perhaps I would have been launched on a lifetime of building on my early positive experiences to generating ever-better ones by habit and expectation. One never knows.
I haven't done one of these posts in a while. I probably waited too long, since I was going to draw heavily for this post from a great YouTube "channel" called Munrows Retro, which had dozens, if not hundreds of cool videos of 50s-70s pop songs, mostly featuring vintage film clips of attractive white people having what appeared to me to be fun. But apparently a video was put up in which someone was naked--I missed that one--and the whole channel was taken down, and has not been put back up again. But there are a few other ones I have liked lately.
Francoise Hardy--Tous les Garcons et les Filles
I can't believe it has taken me this long to delve into the oeuvre of Francoise Hardy. She is really something else. I used to find certain American new wave singers like Debbie Harry annoying even though I liked a lot of their songs because they always had that extra gear of coolness that kept people like me at Bridge-and-Tunnel's length. But Francoise Hardy is somewhere beyond even needing to be cool. I have been gabbling a lot here lately about how great 1960s Paris was anyway, and then I find this stuff, which is a veritable compendium of everything people like me imagine that era to have been like.
Francoise Hardy--Une Fille Comme Tant d'Autres
I could do a whole post on her, but here is one more keeping with the 60s in Paris theme. I know the present is great if you understand how to engage with it (I don't), but the atmosphere they had going on back then, or at least were able to conjure up, really suits my sensibility.
The Smiths--Well I Wonder
This is the kind of video the Munrows Retro channel had with the 1950s or 60s film stock, although those were usually jollier. This is the Smiths though. I listened to them a lot as a teenager, so I can't hear most of their songs with particularly fresh ears now. However a number of the songs from the Meat is Murder album, this one, I Want the One I Can't Have, and That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, as well as Bigmouth Strikes Again, seem better to me than they did when I was younger.
Actually I can't embed this one, so I will link to it.
Walter Egan--Magnet and Steel
One of those 70s songs that sounds pretty good 40 years. Plus I like this guy's face. Most singers, to be honest, look like people I would find obnoxious, but I can imagine hanging out with somebody like this. I like the ghostly nostalgic 50s imagery slipped in at the end too. An all around crowd-pleaser.
Steely Dan--Dirty Work
Munrows Retro had an awesome video of "Hey Nineteen", which is probably my favorite song by this group, though this is my second favorite song, and this is a good video too, lots of ridiculously beautiful people, the effect of which is about the same as a full three minutes of Francoise Hardy by herself.
The KCTU Dancers
Wholesome high school kids on public access TV in Wichita, Kansas. I did at first think they were college-aged. The low production values combined with the retro sensibility and the positive energy make it appealing.
And another one
The Romantics--Talking in Your Sleep
Inexplicably, I am kind of fascinated by this song and video lately. Doesn't it have an oddly clean sound?
Barbara Mason--Yes, I'm Ready
One of those songs I heard in the drug store that got through to me, so I decided to look it up when I got home.
Obviously I haven't been listening to much variety or discovering a lot of new things (that I like) of late. I've also gotten away from seeing much in the way of older movies, and then a lot of the videos I was going to post got taken down. I need to set myself up with some kind of music program--even the classics both of high European culture and jazz I am not really that familiar with--rather than just aimlessly falling into the old ruts.
On that note I will seek inspiration in this quest by closing with another great Francoise Hardy video
Since for most of my adult life I have not had the time or quite enough excess money to undergo a course of really good psychiatric treatment, I have had to try to figure out on my own some possible causes for why my mind and will turned out the way they did, which has been a source of considerable dissatisfaction for me over the years. Some time ago now, before it became a well known and widely diagnosed condition, I read about Asperger's Syndrome in a fairly highbrow publication, where it was presented as an eccentric and even interesting condition associated with stronger than ordinary intellects, and I thought that some of the characteristics of it were not unlike things I had observed in myself. I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife at the time. In those days of the late 90s and early 2000s when it was more associated with people who were difficult and odd but generally quite brilliant she was hesitant to attribute the condition to me, but once it entered the mainstream and began to be treated more as something of a handicap and socially undesirable (a diagnosis qualifies you for special education in school) she seemed to become much more open to, even convinced of the possibility that I indeed had this, with connotations that seemed to me more negative than positive, as if to infer that had I been properly identified and labeled as being this sort of person earlier in life, for which such a clear definition did not exist at the time, she would had better insight as to my likely future and perhaps have been able to avoid getting so involved with me. And this for something that I have never been clinically diagnosed as having but mentioned in passing once 20 years ago.
I came across the "Lost Child" (also known sometimes as "The Invisible Boy") while reading a history about Ronald Reagan's rise to prominence. Reagan apparently struggled with Invisible Boy type behavior in the early part of his childhood but somehow managed to overcome it between the ages of 10 and 14 or so, to which some psychologists attribute the subsequent lifelong artificial-seeming nature of his personality and worldview. One website I found ("Dysfunctional Family Roles") describes this condition thus:
"The Lost Child is usually known as "the quiet one" or "the dreamer". The Lost Child is the invisible child. They try to escape the family situation by making themselves very small and quiet. (S)He stays out of the way of problems and spends a lot of time alone...Because the Lost Child is rarely in trouble, the family can say, "He's a good kid. Everything seems fine in his life, so things can't be too bad in the family." This child avoids interactions with other family members and basically disappears. They become loners, or very shy. The Lost Child seeks the privacy of his or her own company to be away from the family chaos. Because they don't interact, they never have a chance to develop important social and communication skills. The Lost Child often has poor communication skills, difficulties with intimacy and in forming relationships. They deny that they have any feelings and "don't bother getting upset." They deal with reality by withdrawing from it."
This admittedly sounds a lot like me. Some things about my behavior that I think are related to this include:
1. While it may not seen that way from my persona on the blog, in real life I almost always accept the position that other people's goals and desires and successes are more important than mine, and I am very conscientious about never being actively obstructive to them. I used to have something of an idea that if I possessed the value I believed myself to possess, that I would in time be able to achieve some things that I wanted anyway without ever having to inconvenience anyone else (in effect I would be rewarded for not being obnoxiously pushy), but it is pretty obvious now that the world does not work that way.
2. Despite having some self-esteem, which is necessary to being able to function and go out in public at all, I have always tended to avoid interacting much with other people, usually because it seemed impossible that I would have anything to say to them that would be interesting to them, and especially when the case was vice-versa. There are in truth very few people I know at any given time that I have any interest in talking to anyway, but at this point in my life I cannot really do it because I am so long out of practice unless the other person is able to engage me nearly on my approximate level a good portion of the time, which seems to be rare.
3. It is true that most of my mental engagement with life, and even with language itself, in my youth was through older books and to a lesser extent older movies, and as such I have never had any success socially with people whose minds are informed entirely by the contemporary environment. This is why I will always maintain that St John's was on the whole good for me, because everyone there has some degree of this kind of consciousness of the past. Since leaving school I have met very few people possessing any amount of normal attractiveness with whom I have been able to establish any rapport. Of this small number most either seemed to come from large religious families or have gone to the same kind of small, unorthodox or anachronistic schools that I went to.
4. One of my hopes in having so many children and why I was for the most part on board with doing that was my consciousness throughout my life of always being alone, not having anyone with any force helping me or ever being on my side, and I thought that having a lot of siblings might help to mitigate those kinds of problems. I am not sure that it is quite working out that way with my older children, though to me their high school years do not appear to be as full of the Sturm und Drang that I remember having gone through myself, though it is possible I am not attentive to it. I also don't know how much help in navigating this 21st century I and the rest of the family will be for anyone either, though given the effort put into it I have to believe it will be something.
There was another point I wanted to hit on but I lost it, cannot remember what it was now.
I heard this song from my later youth on the radio the other day for the first time in some years, and remembered that I liked it. I couldn't find a vintage MTV video of it, but I think this one of what looks like someone's girlfriend wandering around is actually better (though apparently the city is San Francisco, not New York, though I would not know whether it really was San Francisco).
I remember how all the cool people, even if they were otherwise dedicated U2 fans, trashed this song when it came out. I don't really get what's wrong with it, it's catchy, and the lyrics in the beginning of the song about arriving in New York in December in the rain and hearing a song on the local radio evokes a real feeling of the excitement and thrill of such an arrival, I have had similar feelings, or close to them, upon arriving there by train at that time of year, when I was younger. The critics seemed to think that the attempt to pay homage to Billie Holliday was, at best, cheesy, but on the whole pretentious or ridiculous. I don't know. I like listening to Billie Holliday in the right atmosphere or in the right company, though she was never a great favorite of mine. I think the U2 song works, at this remove in time I like the enthusiasm and the joie de vivre even if all of the lines don't strike a perfect note.
Another 1950s-ish pop instrumental that I have lately stumbled upon. This footage appears to have been shot somewhere in our mountainous Northeast. The people in it, if they are still alive, would be around 80 years old now. Some of the girls are admittedly goofy-looking, but a few of them are quite lovely, though one wonders whether they ever really knew it (or maybe they were progressive enough that they didn't care). I am still kind of depressed but I think I am slowly coming out of it. My wife indulged my low feelings for a couple of months as a common side effect of going under anesthesia and some other reasons, but at a certain point in March she said it was time to snap out of it, at least around other people. So I am doing much better compared to what I was feeling in January and February, and I don't feel right now like I am going to die or become incapacitated within the next couple of years at least, so I am going to try to be in a good mood during this time now and enjoy living, especially since I really don't have any terrible problems. I have the usual problems people in my position have, many of which are only "problems" as far as you choose to regard them as such. You must excuse me, this is my pep talk to myself to project more joie de vivre. I'm becoming more attached to church and related events as a sort of comfort. Yet what do I need comforting for? While I am increasingly appealing to supernatural powers to help me, none of my wishes are for particularly spiritual or noble or disinterested things. When I recall the past my major regrets are still not that I was a better person, but rather that I wish I had been more successful at being somewhat immoral. But I am finding the rituals and trappings of religious practice to be more and more essential to my psychic well-being.
I still think of this as a "new" song, but it is from 2001. This is a very cheerful video. I don't know much about the people in this group, but I like their faces, which is something that I am not often struck by. The video is full of good faces, actually, which the world seems to be sorely in need of. Even though this band was quite popular in the late 90s/early 00s, I haven't found any other songs of theirs that I like.
There are times, often provoked by some pop culture artifact, when the 80s feel as remote, or even more so, in time to me than the 60s or even the later 50s do. Perhaps this is because I do not have actual real life memories of the 60s so that there is no sense for me of that time being lost, as it has always been lost. Or perhaps it is because so many of the familiar songs and images from that period are still ubiquitous enough that they seem to exist on some kind of continuum in the lives of many of us into the present, having never exactly gone away. One is unsure. However, this song does not have the same kind of life independent of their time I don't think, and even in its hour was only a hit among a much smaller segment of the population than most famous songs are. I don't know where this was filmed--it appears to be a Mediterranean locale, but in which country even I cannot pin down--but it is a quintessentially 80s vision of travel, that due to all of the changes we are all aware of, including the eclipse of exclusive Euro-American economic domination, can never be recaptured. It still very much informs my ideas when I dream about traveling however.
One of my missions in the upcoming months is to become familiar with more jazz, at least the more famous artists and pieces. I usually like it when I hear it in a restaurant or on a film soundtrack, but I haven't followed up. For one thing, as here, the individual cuts tend to be pretty long, and I am somewhat harried for time. But there is a spirit in it that I often like, so I have to try to carve out a space to immerse myself in some of this. This piece of course working off of the familiar Rogers and Hammerstein tune is a good starting point for me and my particular needs. These are not the greater society's needs and they certainly aren't any artist's needs, but I am fully outside of all of those kinds of discussions now for my own purposes. But I am out of time and this needs to go up now...
It's time for another music video post but I seem to have either run out of things I like or, in keeping with my general weariness of life, have ceased to like anything at all. The old familiar veins appear to have been mined clean, I have not hit on any new lodes in recent months that perk me up, and I am not hearing anything randomly or on the radio that is nudging me in new directions. The AM station I have been listening to in the car changed its format from Golden Oldies to political talk, which has left me with a plain old Oldies station which, besides having worse music, does not even have hourly syndicated news broadcasts or affable program hosts. This has been more of an ongoing cause for sourness with me than I might have realized. The differences between Oldies and Golden Oldies may appear minor, but "Golden Oldies" covers a much broader range of songs, from the crooners of the 50s to the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole to movie themes and showtunes as far back as Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman and Judy Garland and even mixing in some modern elevator music and versions of standards and other new releases by museum acts, while "Oldies" is restricted pretty much to top ten pop hits from the 60s. It would seem that the time would be ripe for me to begin a serious immersion in the real classic genres of music, Bach and untamed-period Louis Armstrong and all of those kind of people, but if I am going to write about them I need to connect with them in some way that is both meaningful with regard to what they really are and I don't think I am in the right mind frame to do this right now, I am too distracted, jittery, disorganized--I need a program for this serious music like I have for other serious things--to reach my aim.
I had not known that Pat Boone and Laurence Welk came together one night in 1961. I always kind of liked this song ("Moody River"--it evokes things about the texture of life at the time that I associate with my grandparents' houses, their neighborhoods, the books and furniture they had, that holds some pleasantness for me) though like "Love Letters in the Sand", I never realized the singer of the most familiar version was Pat Boone until I was well into adulthood. If I had caught this at a more intense and impressionable age when if I knew anything I knew that it was of vital importance to despise the music of Pat Boone, I think I would have taught myself to despise them, as I learned around the age of fourteen/fifteen that it was meet to despise Billy Joel's music, and found it easy enough, if not quite to hold the man and his fans in absolute contempt, to be indifferent to and unmanipulated by his efforts. It is very odd, but I am much more fascinated by Pat Boone than I ever was with the late David Bowie, who was clearly a man made to speak to other people. But with Boone there is just as much to marvel at in the perfect execution of supposed Caucasian inoffensiveness (though his existence has certainly always been plenty offensive to many), the clothes, the extreme state of clean cut-ness--his haircut and shave are so pointedly neat and unthreatening as to be almost belligerent. In these old clips too the sexual attraction that the girls and women feel for him seems to be genuine as well, the lesson of which is that if women are sheltered enough from real, pulsating sexuality, they will go for any surprisingly weak version of it that may offer itself...
Depeche Mode, "People are People". They've been playing this a lot lately both on the "80s on 8" and alternative/mew wave channel on satellite radio, I find the sound bearable, though the message of brotherhood and love, delivered with a perfect sneer, doesn't sound as if it is intended to include me. But I keep telling myself, it is I who am strong, who (undeservedly) has everything everybody else wants. who has all the power and backing of society, if I ever want to tap into it. They are hostile to me because they fear me, and my latent superpowers.
This was on in the supermarket the other day. I always liked this song, though it doesn't fit with any particular memories or times or experiences, and doesn't seem like it could fit with any such things, it is a song that evokes an eternal waiting for something to happen, in which nothing ever does or could happen.
Failure to produce art is a failure at living and understanding life and being human, one kind of failure among myriad others, but a significant one insomuch that it is a failure that collectively weakens and diminishes the surrounding culture.
I had run out of Lennon Sisters videos, and hadn't found anybody else who could cheer me up in quite the same way, but then I came across this. It is not a secret than many of the cuter girls you will meet are at bottom rather corny. I don't mind it obviously though the corny types don't usually go much for me, as they prefer someone more demonstrably masculine in all ways. It is not like there is a type that consistently goes for me as it is, but most of the women who seem inclined to at least put up with me (and are not insane) seem to be pretty matter of fact, self-directed, witty, do not need to be constantly entertained and excited, etc.
I was tagged on Facebook a few weeks back to write 25 things about myself. Being a narcissist and luster after attention of course I was interested in doing it, rationalizing the undertaking by saying it was a good exercise, but I don't really have time to do it there (the thing would take several hours to write and you don't seem to be able to save posts in progress), and the nature of that space makes me wary--the majority of the people who seem to read and comment on everything I write there tend to be the people I am least interested in letting in on my secrets, and they are never the people I am thinking of when I am considered whether to put something up. But this is such a private space--I think my last comment was in 2012--that I am considering maybe doing it here, for as far as I know, the people who read this blog are not the people I am trying to avoid on Facebook, though you never know I guess. I'm not sure if there are 25 things about me that anybody who reads this would not know or have guessed already however.
Consistent with the theme that has predominated with me of late, I haven't been enjoying much in the way of music recently, even any of the usually reliable awful stuff. My schedule tells me it is time to do a music post however, so I am going to try to remember a few things I have clumsily groped with over the past few months.
Dance contest to the Jackson 5 on Top of the Pops from 1970. I like the enthusiasm of the English girls in this period. Yes, they were reaping the great fun that the atmosphere of the age promised and provided, but they were also instrumental in the generation and diffusion of it as well. There was almost a virtuous cycle of fun, with boys and girls equally capable, it seems, of giving the opposite sex something of what it wanted, for a brief period there.
Here's another episode from the same time. The girls are even better in this one. I think the song is quite good, too. I had never paid close attention to it before. It possesses the realized form as well as interior fullness that is the first source of success in all human endeavor, whatever the scale.
For a while they were playing this song a lot on the golden oldies radio station I usually have on in the car, and it kind of grew on me, though of late it has been growing away from me again. Several of the comments on the video posit that it may be the worst music video of all time. I think it is a contender. Very creepy, full of static, odd-looking people and repetitive camera shots; even the cuteness of the waitress can't redeem it.
This is my favorite Carpenters song.
All right, it is the epitome of a bland white-guy pop song. It does have the kind of sound that is comforting when it comes on in an empty Rite-Aid on a gloomy winter afternoon in a remote corner of the country. Granted, something Greater would doubtless be even more comforting, but they probably aren't going to play that.
There were about a million guys in 1978 who looked approximately like this singer (and about half of them were named Steve, too). It was the generic white guy look at the time. Today the default for this demographic is to look roughly like Louis C K, which seems a strange direction in which to have evolved. It also seems strange, or at least counterintuitive to me both that people in the same generation should physically have certain broadly shared characteristics, and that these do not carry over to immediately succeeding generations. Yet the phenomenon is observed by almost everyone.
Towards the middle of this one there are a bunch of old men who, the minute you see them, you are reminded that that was what lots of old men looked like in the 1970s, their faces, hair, wrinkles and so on. I see hardly any old men who look like that now.
I am not a James Taylor fan at all, though I do kind of like this song and this little video, both of which are kind of New Englandy. James Taylor is rather famously from New England--granted, that part of New England that goes to boarding school and summers on the Cape, but then that is the part that most of the outside world thinks of when they think of New England. Indeed, it is the part I think of as representing the real New England when I am not bogged down in the boring details of day to day life. Anyway, there are a lot of obviously New England towns featured in this wistful and nostalgia-inducing video, several of which I am sure I have probably been to, but cannot exactly place because I was probably only there once. The only one I am fairly sure of is that the town around 2:40 is Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
I heard this on the radio the other day and remembered that I hadn't listened to any Jo Stafford for a while. It's important that I revisit her from time to time.
I have been going through one of my periodic (every 2-3 years maybe?) spells of Paris nostalgia. I couldn't find any music videos that really captured my mood. There is however, frozen forever in the late 80s period approximate to the first time I went there (1990), the good old 'French in Action' TV series, starring the incomparable Mirielle (Valerie Allein), Pierre Capretz as the excitable Gallic teacher, and Robert the American sporting around Paris with his Yale t-shirt under a blazer. I like Robert's character too. He seems practically laid back, unobsessive about burnishing his resume and modest about his intellectual prowess to be a candidate for the Ivy League nowadays, but I suppose the pushing fifty version of the character might have snapped to attention when this new zeitgeist came in around 1992-95 and allowed these aspects of his persona more play. The city I suspect is radically changed from what it was even when I was last there, which was in 1999. Paris is the city above all others (well, Paris & maybe Prague) that I have the most attachment to in the particular version in which it existed in my youth. My love for it, even stripped of and beyond the idea of it, or ideas in general, is one of the few things I feel to be real in the whole of my existence.
I had one of those intense dreams the other night that I was there, though I was actually only in the conference room of a mid-level American chain hotel eating breakfast. There was a black preacher running a service for a largely black congregation at this breakfast, during which however I was drinking and, most uncharacteristically, laughing giddily and otherwise acting out, much to the consternation of everyone present, so that my wife, who had not been there previously, had to come in and get me and lead me out of the room and down something like an airport corridor and then suddenly back to our own kitchen. I had been whisked straight back from Paris before I had seen anything, before I had even gotten out on the street. My wife told me I could fly back later on in the day or week, but you know the dream never got to that point.
This particular style of singing, with its exaggerated, but still in a certain sense somewhat earnest, affectation of passion and a soul in torment, has never really been imitated satisfyingly in the English-speaking world. I guess some soul singers go for this effect, but I generally don't like them. I suspect this is because I feel like everything about their performance is ultimately about them more than about me, which puts a different spin on the affectations. Julio Iglesias, who has sold 38 million records, slept with 5,000 women, driven the best cars and drunk the best wine and hung out in the most beautiful places in the world for the last 50 years and seemingly enjoyed every second of it, is decidedly not singing for or about himself, at least the way other people do. His job, for which he has a great instinct, is to use his talents and gifts for showmanship to express the passion and torment of others in a more pleasing and entertaining way than they are able to do themselves. Highly gifted entertainers grasp this without needing it spelled out for them.
I generally find this group annoying, but I heard this song somewhere the other day--already I can't remember where--and it struck me as poignant. So I've been listening to it for the last few days. I still don't like any of the other Talking Heads songs that I know. This band was wildly important to a lot of people just a few years older than I am; by the time I was at the age where one is deeply susceptible to pop music whatever emotional power they exerted over young people seemed to be in decline, and it never made much of an impression on me. But for a brief time they really got to people.
I have to admit I think this is a great song. In fact I like quite a bit of Zooey Deschanel and the rest of her group's pop music. I did not want to succumb to the too-obvious charms of this woman, and for a long while I did not allow myself to do so, but she kept after me with a persistence that I found both touching and admirable; indeed I was almost flattered by her seemingly perverse determination to please me and bring happiness into my life, on which point most female celebrities of the moment doggedly maintain they will never stoop to do if they can help it.
While we are on the subject of performer's instincts as far as how to approach/deliver a song and present oneself as a vessel through which to articulate a more palatable version of your audience's sense of the world, hers are as good certainly as any mainstream pop star currently out there that I am aware of. She is filling a (presumably lucrative) niche in the popular culture that seems rather obviously to have been screaming to be filled, but that no one else seems to have had the right combination of instinct, personality, type of brain development (I suspect she is pretty smart by most standards outside the realms of professional mathematics and science) and connection to this particular corner of the culture to fill.
I haven't gone back to the 40s for a while. This first song was referenced in a short story I read ("Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth--the mother sings a verse from it while they are in the car on the way to Ocean City on Independence day in 1943). The other selections here kind of followed from that. I like the voice of this singer Kitty Kallen here, whom I had never heard of previously. She was a serious looker too.
Going to have a bit of a Harry James fest here. This is another one that always puts me in a positive mood, no matter how far down into the existential abyss I am gazing. Terrific song.
Kitty Kallen again on another old favorite. Girl could sing.
This is a singer named Francey Lane, whom I find to have an interesting face, in that it looks to me more like the face of a woman born in the 1960s or 1970s than the 1920s. This clip (in which she sings while ironing dollar bills) is from a 1951 TV and is only one of two videos of her I have found, and the only one in which she sings.
The only other Francey Lane video I can find, evidently from the same TV program as she is wearing the same dress and interesting headpiece as in the other one. Here she is merely serenaded with a classic by future talk show host and game show producer Merv Griffin, who like so many of us got our start in the business as a singer.
Biographical information on Francey Lane is scant on the internet, but it seems she had something of a career on the fringes of real mainstream success, without ever really breaking through. Her name turns up in various projects or promotions dating from 1945 to 1956. Besides this TV appearance in '51 she appeared in two short movies as a singer ('45 & '52). She is probably most identified as a singer with the Johnny Long Orchestra. They put out a release of "Winter Wonderland" (1947) and an album of "College Favorites" (undated), at least. In 1949 Francey Lane had a hit song called "Easy Does It" and appeared on the cover of TV Guide. There are at least four different "busty" vintage promotional photos of her available for sale online. By 1953 she was posing with her arms and shoulders and neck covered up and was apparently heading her own orchestra. By '56 she was apparently still hanging on in the game (and was back to posing in strapless gowns) but her hair has been cut and the smile is forced and it isn't the same old Francey Lane I have taken such an interest in.
An old friend of mine, after expressing incredulity that I did not as yet have a kindle or other high-tech reading apparatus, had a actual 600+ page hardcover book sent to me in the mail.
The book was a new biography of the Smiths, called A Light That Never Goes Out.
We had once been fans together at an important juncture of life--the one where you clamber over the roofs of buildings in the dead of night after listening to the Smiths for several hours in order to find an open window or courtyard door by which to access the cigarette machine--and seeing it must have inspired in him a sentimental memory of those days, which affliction he expresses mainly though these kinds of gestures, for in his personal interactions, written or oral, he is generally a blunt, present-oriented, bottom line-focused man who is not always able to spare the feelings of the emotionally brittle even when he is trying to.
As such, it was the least I could do to read the book.
Big biographies are one genre of letters I have never much taken to as far as reading through entire volumes.
The details of the lives of even the greatest people seem not to be fascinating enough in themselves to command, in the hands of most biographers, my attention for more than about 300 pages of narrative.
Ancient and early modern writers seemed to have a instinctive knowledge of this.
Perhaps it was only due to a dearth of material to record, but they kept their biographies, such as they were, brief, to the point that even the lives of people like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great and Jesus Christ are rarely commemorated by more than 100 pages of prose from any single source, though an essence of these characters is captured all the same.
I was a fan of the Smiths during the emotionally important years of my late teens and early 20s. (I still am, but the present years are not emotionally important ones).
Their best songs do hit upon a mixture of despair, sexual repression/dysfunction /failure, nostalgia and melancholy romanticism that very closely mirrors the general mental atmosphere through which some number of people, including obviously myself, tended to have experienced life in their formative years.
This does not seem to translate to 600 pages about their sessions with producers and would-be managers and tour promotors and record executives, the music and fashion scene in Manchester in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the lives of any of the members of the group themselves, being a good read.
There have been 3 or 4 attempts at Smiths biographies now. One that was satisfying insofar as explain/relating what was pertinent or interesting about the group, would appear at this point to have an upper limit of around 75 pages.
Morrissey (who did not co-operate with the author on this book) comes across as a strange, childish man (though of a genuinely artistic/creative spirit) whose life is devoid of friendship or serious relations with other human beings of any kind, including, strikingly, Johnny Marr and his other bandmates. One suspects he is frequently witty or is capable of interesting conversation, but there is very little evidence of it recorded in this book; and if you don't have a lot of humorous or provocative Morrissey material, or there actually is not very much such material to begin with, then there almost is no point in writing such a book.
Morrissey aside, there are hints throughout the book of heavy partying, drug use, and presumably sex by the other members of the group, mainly on tour, which in the absence of anything better is curious to read about for people who have never had the opportunity to experience this lifestyle. But the author shies away from describing any of this in much detail either.
It is remarkable how much romantic/nostalgic feeling is inspired by these old British kitchen sink films, since the later lives and marriages in the milieu in which they were set are generally considered among the most doomed and miserable in human history. Obviously there were a lot of exceptionally good-looking actors in these films--Albert Finney, Richard Burton, Shirley Ann Field, Claire Bloom, Julie Christie, etc--who made the squalor and the working class clothes look cool, and evidently make the genre something people identify with strongly. I myself have said about Look Back in Anger, that I felt like the characters in it, nasty and grim though they are, were also like long lost friends I ought to have had. There is no logical reason why I would think this, other than I must have some latent desire to be angry, violent, alcoholic, rude, really good-looking and irresistible to movie-star level women. Which desire I obviously do have.
I don't usually read two 'literary' books at the same time, but I sort of am at the moment; the contrast between them is such that the moods and thought processes one enters into in reading them do not much overlap. The first, which is for my stodgy reading list, is Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton's long-forgotten 1849 novel--I don't think it has been in print since before World War II--The Caxtons: A Family History. This book was not, I am pretty sure, intentionally referenced by the source of my reading list. It was a passage from an obituary of Edgar Allan Poe that was referenced. However, the passage in question that was used to describe that author was itself a quotation from The Caxtons. Figuring that TheCaxtons would be both difficult to get a copy of and a poor book, I attempted to find some reason to excuse myself from having to read it, or make an earnest effort to read it, because some obscure books do come up in this way and are impossible to find. However, there was no way I could do so within the rules established by my system. If it was reasonably available to read, I must read it; and it was thus available.
Bulwer-Lytton was a prominent novelist of his period and his book The Last Days of Pompeii was still included in family collections of great literature as late as the middle of the last century. He seems to be remembered now as a kind of patron saint of bad writing, author of the infamous opening line "It was a dark and stormy night", his name given to a contest celebrating awful sentences. The Caxtons however is not a half-bad book so far (I am about 130 pages in, out of 530). It is in the mainstream of pre-1900 English novels set in a comfortable upper middle class house in the provinces, with the familiar cast of characters: the amateur gentleman-scholar with his pleasant library, the younger brother who went to the military, the in-laws endlessly speculating and endlessly on the brink of ruin, the beauty a level or two higher up the ladder of rank and wealth than the novel's resident earnest schoolboy. There has not been a great deal of notable action to this point either, at least as far as the main characters are concerned, but the expression of thoughts and descriptions of ordinary activities such as walks or meals often strike me as being near to some truth in some essential way. I have lifted one such quotation for the "About Me" sidebar on this page. Here is another, the young male protagonist and first person narrator responding in his thoughts to being mocked by some rougher boys for always doing what his father tells him:
"Why we should be ashamed of being taunted for goodness, I never could understand; but certainly I felt humbled."
I like the way that is put. Certainly I am familiar with the feeling, though I would not have been able to use the word "goodness" so directly, because especially by the time I was an adolescent, I did not believe in goodness and badness, only strength and weakness, intelligence and stupidity, attractiveness and ugliness. So because of my crimped moral sense, I would never have had the ability to write such a sentence.
Here is another little sentence I like, because of the particular qualities contrasted:
"It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is intensity."
Yes, this is probably generally known, but in the book, where it is used to describe a particular character, who has been built up as both a good and legitimately intelligent and educated man, and realized by his son, it has a little more bite to it than is perhaps evident here.
The copy of the book I got is from 1902, part of a series for the edification of the general reader called "The English Comedie Humaine". I have dominated this series. Out of the 14 books contained in it, TheCaxtons will be the 9th I have read. It is a pretty good series, and would make for a decent years reading. Here are the titles, and my history with them:
1. Addison and Steele, Sir Roger de Coverley. From The Spectator, which was one of the happier reading experiences of my life, especially in the last 10 years. It was what I was reading when I started this blog, and was in fact the impetus of my starting it. Quite a few of my early posts reference it, though I tended to be quite hysterical and even less certain about how to write blog posts at that time than I am now.
2. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield. I have not read this yet, but I think it comes up eventually. I have two copies of it in waiting. I enjoyed She Stoops to Conquer.
3. Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling. Read it, but wasn't impressed by it. I did a blog post on it here.
4. Richardson, Pamela. Yes. It is a truly great book, though quite a bit more padded with words than it needs to be. It is much better than Clarissa, which I did several posts on here.
5. Fielding, Joseph Andrews. Fielding is obviously a favorite author of mine, and this was a first-rate exercise of writing, though I have read it a long time ago and don't remember as much of it as I would like to.
6. Smollett, Humphry Clinker. Entertaining book, maybe a little goofy, I don't remember much of it other than that the characters travel all over 18th century England and Humphry Clinker is rather Forrest Gump-like.
7. Austen, Pride and Prejudice. (For the record, I have no heterodox opinions on Pride and Prejudice. I suspect it is securely among the top 100 novels of all time, at least, and I thought Elizabeth Bennett was a dreamboat even before I saw the 6 part 1992 TV adaptation).
8. Scott, Guy Mannering. Never read this, nor any other Scott, but I think he is coming in a big way, though I may have to live another 15 or 20 years to get to him.
9. Disraeli, Coningsby. No. I did read Vivien Grey by Disraeli, and I thought it was incoherent and generally didn't go anywhere. Based on this, I would have to rate him a much inferior novelist than Bulwer-Lytton.
10. The Caxtons.
11. C. Bronte, Jane Eyre. This was the 4th book I read for this list, back in 1995. It was good, though Wuthering Heights, which I read almost at that same time, seemed to me the greater of the two famous productions from that household.
12. Charles Reade, It is Never Too Late to Mend. I have to say I have missed this one.
13. G. Eliot, Adam Bede. I did read this. I would put it as the third of the three George Eliot books I have read behind Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, an excellent book which I think is underrated now, but Adam Bede has the same George Eliot thoroughness and seriousness of style, and is very good in that way, though the characters and story are inferior to those of the other two books.
14. Trollope, Barchester Towers. I have never read any Trollope either, but he will come eventually, and I am excited about it, because he seems to have an appeal among grumpy middle-aged male readers of our times whose desire for encountering intelligence in their reading few novelists of any era, and especially the Victorian, are capable of satisfying (Stendhal, another author I have not read, seems to be the champion of this category of seriousness, penetration, and unblinkered understanding of the way the world; Trollope is a lesser artist and smaller all around man, but perspicacious enough to be acceptable).
The other book I was reading, which I actually finished (sort of) in the time it has taken me to write this post, was What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver's celebrated (and heavily edited, but more on that below) short story collection from 1981. I had never read any Raymond Carver, or knew much about him at all, other than that his style was revered by the writing workshop/MFA crowd as very close to their ideal, which predisposed me not to like him. And indeed, through the first few stories, I persisted in this dislike, egged on by passages like these:
"I was going over to my mother's to stay a few nights. But just as I got to the top of the stairs, I looked and she was on the sofa kissing a man. It was summer. The door was open. The TV was going...My mother is sixty-five."
or:
"Things are better now. But back in those days, when my mother was putting out, I was out of work. My kids were crazy, and my wife was crazy. She was putting out too. The guy that was getting it was an unemployed aerospace engineer she'd met at AA..."
The book (in the Library of America edition of Carver's Collected Stories; he wrote around 90 of them, no longer pieces) is 104 pages, all short paragraphs and lots of white space. You can easily read an entire story, sometimes two, in a single visit to the bathroom. It might take two weeks to read 104 pages of Golden Bowl-era Henry James, but you could read this in two hours if you wanted to. As the book went on, the style started to grow on me, and I liked the stories better, became more interested in them. They also, it seemed to me, became, or seemed to become, less gimmicky. "The Bath", "After the Denim", "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off", I thought were good stories. "A Serious Talk", while especially unpleasant, recalls pretty accurately the poisonous vibe that hung over middle American family life in the 1970s. There are a lot of stories about drinking and affairs. Raymond Carver was no stranger to either. The Library of America books always provide an informative chronology. Here was Raymond Carver's year in 1975, when he was 37 years old:
"Out of work, unable to write, and morbidly ill, Carver lives with his wife and teenage children in Cupertino (California). His drinking and extramarital affairs continue, leading to domestic turmoil and occasional violence..."
He was not the only person living this lifestyle in 1975. Of course I am fascinated by the scenarios by which all these married, alcoholic, middle-aged men were constantly finding willing sex partners. In the stories, the male characters just sort of inevitably stumble into spontaneous sex with co-workers, women selling things door to door, wives of friends, and no one has any real desire to stop it. Further demonstrating his untameable artistic soul, Carver continually lived beyond his means, and had to declare bankruptcy twice by the age of 36. Almost every year refers to the persistence of his "affairs"--obviously numerous girls every year. I am sure I once imagined my life would be something like this. I was child in the tumultuous 70s and figured I would move in these literary or collegiate circles and alcoholism and writing and academic/literary parties and affairs would essentially be my life. It would be a strain on any primary relationships I might have, but one would have to learn to deal with it. All the real artists did, one way or the other, and being an ordinary stupid bourgeois with no connection to publishing or the cultural world at all--that was a fate too horrible to contemplate.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was, as noted above, heavily, and in some circles famously, edited by Gordon Lish, who was a central figure in the literary world at the time, which, like all times, and in defiance of all assessments and predictions made during the era, will be remembered and studied and inspire fascination to some measurable and significant degree. Check this cat out:
Carver was not completely happy with the changes, though the power dynamic in place at the time effectively required him to submit to them; and the book did make his career, or certainly took it to a higher plane than it had been on before. However, the controversy and the alterations were dramatic enough that the Library of America felt compelled to include the original manuscripts of the stories that Carver submitted. These run over 200 pages, or twice as long as the book that came out. I'm mulling whether to go back and read those too. I'm sucked in enough to this Raymond Carver world of the Pacific Northwest and fishing and hunting and drinking and fellowships and writers colonies and adultery and darkness that I think may go ahead and do so.
A couple of months ago I also read Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, which is probably the best book I have read in the last several years, certainly the best fiction book, and I was going to write about that too, but that could take another week, so I won't. I am trying to pin down what makes Flannery O'Connor's books work so well and what accounts for their humor, and I think the main thing is that her books depict what the world would be like if no one in life was mailing it in, but was constantly charging ahead according to their own inclinations. All of the characters in Flannery O'Connor books possess powerful self-generating energy that is inevitably at odds with everybody else's energy. But she is so consistent in this that the world she depicts is thoroughly believable. The effect is quite brilliant.
This is about one of those coincidences when two things that have nothing to do with each other recall to one a similar time or long lost state of being.
I forget what I was doing when I heard this song--you may be confident it was prosaic--but it bore with it a heavier meaning than I would have thought, for I remembered hearing it long ago during one of those strange, semi-feverish hours when, unbeknownst to oneself and identifiable only in retrospect, one passes out of one stage of life into another. I do not remember the exact date of this event. The song however was the number 1 hit in the U.S. for two weeks from July 22 through August 5, 1989, which sounds about right. That was the summer I was 19 years old, which must be among the more important summers in nearly everyone's life. It was in mine too, and this despite nothing really memorable managing to occur. It set a tone for my future life to follow, however, and it was probably the last time that I harbored certain excitements and hopes with regard to friendship and other aspects of social life, or at least the last time I harbored them in certain milieus and aspects. I was still infused with something of this old spirit on the day I am recalling when I heard the song, though it was the last gasp of it.
This was the last summer I spent in Maine. I had graduated from high school there the previous year, but I had not yet really moved on in my life--the extra years it takes me to move on from various life stages compared with my contemporaries is a recurrent theme with me. I had at least been away a little--while I had not gotten into any colleges straight out of high school I did make a disastrous and very short-lived attempt to embark on a collegiate career starting after Christmas and had ended up living in Philadelphia with my grandmother for a while. One of my relatives had gotten a job for me in a dreary warehouse at the Franklin Mint, a company which used to be, and perhaps maybe still is, infamous for its kitschy collectibles--historical-themed chess sets, collections of classic books bound in faux leather with gilt-edged paper--probably my deepest readers will themselves own a few of these items. The Mint was an hour's drive away from my grandmother's house, and well outside of the city. I had to get up at 5 in the morning, I had no friends, I knew no girls--there weren't any girls in the warehouse at the Mint--I couldn't find anyplace to meet anybody who would be a likely friend for me. So as summer drew near, and the colleges let out, the urge to go back to where I at least knew people overcame my consciousness of humiliation over my disastrous college situation, and I decided to go back north.
Of course there was the immediate problem that I did not have any job there either. It seemed necessary and proper that I should work, as I was not doing anything else, and no one was giving me any money. I believed this in theory, of course. In practice I saw and found little enjoyable in the working man's life, and went about my task of securing employment half-heartedly at best. The obvious choice in that part of the world, restaurants, I was determined to avoid. It was already clear that due to my general appearance and bearing I was everywhere going to be deposited in the bowels of the kitchen, to be placed under the power of a tyrant, set to endlessly repetitive tasks which I would invariably do poorly, paid little, and be too diminished in every possible way to entertain the slightest hope of taking the mousiest busgirl in the establishment into the linen closet. This was long before the days of internships and other strategic preparations for post-college advancement, and most of my friends appeared to me to be keeping a fairly light work schedule, with hours that never seemed to conflict with parties or beach outings. They also were personable and competent enough at the jobs they did have that their co-workers, old and young, male and female, working class and professional class, more or less accepted them and seemed in most cases to like having them around. Sometime around the beginning of July one of these friends' fathers, who had worked there himself for more than 20 years, got me a job in the J J Nissen bakery in Portland, which was a bread and confectionary factory, Nissen's being a big company in New England (the son himself did not work at the bakery, I might add). I think I have written about the factory elsewhere on the site. I had to take a drug test, which so far is the only time in my life I have had to submit to this. Evidently I passed, though as I took the test at around 9 in the morning after drinking from around 2 the previous afternoon to 2 that morning, my alcohol level must have been near the top of the chart. I worked there for about 3-4 weeks. The pay was quite high compared to what I was used to getting and there was even overtime, but since I had no end in mind to work towards and I was having to go there overnight and on weekends and missing (as I perceived it) on all the fun, I barely cared about the pay. In many ways I would have been a perfect internship person, because when I was young so much emphasis was put on my laziness and aversion to hard work that when I began to be expected to get jobs I focused simply on getting the job and being present at it for so many hours a day to show everybody that I was not so lazy and that they could stop hating me and I never paid much attention to the pay. Even in the early years on the job I have now I did not often know specifically what my salary was (I have to be somewhat more aware of that now both for planning purposes and to be able to compare myself with people in New York Times stories).
The bread factory had a locker room like the one the coal miners had in The Deer Hunter. Besides the man I already mentioned, there was another father of a friend of mine who had also worked there for over 20 years, the thought of which is still mind-blowing. This second man is dead now. The first is still alive, though I assume he is retired by now.
There was a girl from my high school who worked there, in the cookie room, who was friendly to me and even made vague hints about us doing something outside of the factory. You would think I would have been jumping out my shorts at this opportunity but I was not attracted to her and was unresponsive to her attempts at friendliness. She was very skinny, kind of bug-eyed, had frizzy, badly-styled brown hair, and struck me as weird in the sense that she did not do anything in an endearingly girly way. In retrospect she does not seem all that bad. At the time my level of sophistication in these matters was such that all I could think was that I did not want her to be my girlfriend, as though if I made out with her in a car one time for half an hour or strung her along in some way suitable to my needs at the time or even put a clammy hand on her bony knee I would be harnessed to her for all time, with no hope of escape. Of course I am probably projecting--she probably wasn't interested in me in these ways at all. Doubtless she was taking pity on me with her snackroom patronage and airy suggestions. The whole business was really more of a Smiths song than anything real anyway. She probably talked to me twice.
Sometime near the end of July or beginning of August I had a night off from work that coincided with a party. To this day I have no idea whose party it was--it was at a house on a lake 15 or 20 miles out of town. I rode out their with some friends of mine. I do not specifically remember very much about it. I spent most my time outdoors, in a kind of grove, which had lights strung in the trees. I realize now that I reproduced this setting, which obviously was highly pleasing to me, for a party scene in the book I wrote, though I had not placed its origin at that time. A couple of girls of the sort that never talked to me spoke to me briefly. I don't remember how objectively beautiful they were, or even much of what they looked like--even with the Christmas lights, nighttime in the woods in Maine is very dark--but I remember that they were unfreakish, normal-looking girls with smart polo-type shirts and sailing shorts and their hair was obviously done by someone who knew what they were doing and they had talked to me--me!--as if I were actually a regular man. This was the most incredible thing of all. Perhaps they had mistaken me for someone else. Since this never happened on any other occasion throughout the whole of my life it is the only plausible explanation. When my friends came to me--so early it seemed--and told me they were heading back to town I could not go with them. I was happy and I had to remain where these girls were as if my life depended on it.
Unfortunately, five minutes after my friends drove away, the girls also left.
I think those girls, who of course I never saw again, must have been some kind of magical fairies or demons, because as soon as they left the party transformed into the ordinary nasty, hostile sort of party, and now of course no one left there knew who I was, so quite a bit of the hostility was expended in my direction. I soon left and began the long walk back to Portland in pitch blackness along the typical sidewalkless Maine country road, scampering off into the woods at the sound of a distant car to avoid being seen, though there were very few of these.
I walked this way until the sun began to come up, which would have been at least 4 hours. I was still not close to town. As you can imagine I was quite tired by this time so when it became light enough to see I decided to try to hitchhike. A policeman coming from the other direction duly spotted me and made the usual investigation into my affairs. It turned out there was a warrant for my arrest due to an unpaid speeding ticket from two years earlier--at that time about $75. I was carried back to Portland and placed in jail. I was only there for an hour or so but it seemed much longer, because I was so tired, in addition to having to share a cramped space with the dregs of society, of whom I was clearly one that morning--even the girls who had been at the party the night before would have recognized that. My father, somewhat to my surprise, because he was rather fed up with me by this time for many reasons, came quickly down and bailed me out of jail. He was quite certain I was on drugs, which, as I tried to explain, I probably would have been if I had been cool enough to be given or know how to get them.
At this juncture I went mildly crazy. After sleeping for the better part of twenty-four hours--and don't I wish I could have one of those long sleeps such as were only possible circa 1989 now--it was clear I could not go back to the factory. My life needed stirring up. I had no idea how I might go about doing this of course but I thought it would likely entail venturing abroad. My father was due to go away shortly after my visit to jail--I don't remember exactly how shortly, but it was not more than a day or two afterwards--and he had left me his car in spite of my supposedly erratic behavior, though it seemed to me any normal person forced to have to exist as me would have been carrying on much worse. So I got in the car and began driving, figuring it would occur to me where to go once I was out. My instincts in this matter were typically ludicrous. It would be obvious to any real person that if you are starting in Portland, Maine and tired of waiting around for something interesting to happen in your life, that you would need to go to some place full of exciting young people. But I went out of town and began heading north, and not only north, but inland, towards Waterville and Bangor and places like that. It is true that there is very little traffic to contend with in this direction. It was also true that I had already come to Maine from what one would think would be the more dynamic mid-Atlantic area because I could not compete socially or in any other way with the comparative superpeople of the latter region and thought I would be able to participate in life more successfully in the less exacting conditions of the north. This I had been able to do, to an almost life-saving extent, but it was clear that that period had reached its end; and Portland and the wealthy surrounding towns had still proven too sophisticated for me to be able to impress upon people that I was up to the task of doing some of the major late-teenager activities like going to a real college or ravishing eager young women. Of course there was no place on earth where I could have impressed these facts upon people at that particular time, but what good would it have been to know as much?
I came to the last exit on Interstate 95 and, bearing in mind both my recent visit to jail, my lack of any money or plan (gas and greasy meals at this time were extremely cheap--a $20 bill could almost cover both for a couple of days--but I didn't more than 2 or 3 of those) and my driving a car that was not my own, I thought it imprudent to try to enter Canada. At the same time I could not bear to turn around yet, so I turned onto route 1, of which there remains at that point still several hours worth of driving before you come to its end, and continued on my way.
I should pause here and say that it not occur to me at this time to go to a place like Baxter Park or some other hiking place or vacation lake up there where I might have gotten to calm down among natural beauty or even met and gotten to tag along with, or at least seen, some other young people along the trail. I did not know anyone who went to such places. I never knew what to do or where to go to find activity and social opportunities, which is perhaps one reason why I am so keen on finding and recording and thinking about visiting interesting and moderately popular tourist spots even into my 40s.
Eventually I got into the very far northern part of the state, Aroostook County. The forest on the sides of the road there has been cleared and the highway is lined with farmhouses and potato fields. It looks similar to Quebec, not surprisingly. I pulled into Presque Isle (pop 11,000). It was a sleepy and rather ugly little town, as remote border outposts frequently are. I had lunch, sensed there were no very likely prospects of getting invited to a wild party or orgy with women who had never met an exciting person from far away before, and continued to roll onto Caribou (pop 9,000) which was even dingier and poorer-looking--lots of low-slung warehouses and third rate chain stores (the Shur-fine, IGA, Pathmark family, which is when you know you're a long way from any real place). It was just before the false glory of the entrance into Presque Isle that I heard the Martika song just as I was having a kind of last hysterical fit of imagining myself as a sexual tour de force of some kind about to descend upon an unsuspecting gaggle of provincial girls. Taking two, or possibly even three of them at a single blow seemed for a delirious ten minutes to be an almost inevitable outcome. Martika was only eight months older than I was, and she was so deeply immersed in real life, or what seemed to me to be real life at the time--sex, drugs, drama-filled relationships, hints of danger--and I was going to have these things too. Why couldn't I? It was absurd. But the dismalness of those pitiful towns proved equally deflating. I continued on and the towns grew only smaller and more dismal--Van Buren, Madawaska--finally the end of the road came in view--I am remembering something like a large dam, and the edifice of the border crossing producing something of a jolting effect after so many hours of tired potato farms and boreal forests.
I have no memory of where or when I slept on this trip, which would have taken 2 days to go all the way up and back. I also have no memory of the drive home, which I suspect is because I was essentially dead in spirit at the time. All of my recollections of these northern towns and potato fields occurred under a bright and almost too domineering sunlight, somewhere between the hours of 1 and 6 in the afternoon, though unless I had left home at four or five in the morning, which seems unlikely, I don't see how I would have been arriving there at that time. Most likely, I left around midnight in some kind of frenzy of frustration, drove until 4 or so when my directionless nighttime energy would have burned itself off and pulled off to sleep on the side of the road for four or five hours until the day's heat forced me awake again.
When I got back people were largely busy, either going on one of those August vacations people go on, or, after the middle of the month, getting ready to return to college. I may have have gone out a couple of more times--it is probable--but I did so knowing that my social status was non-existent and that nothing very exciting would be permitted to happen to me. By the end of the month I too had gone back to Philadelphia. I worked at a store for about 3 weeks in September and attempted, with about $300, to set off on another traveling escapade, this time by foot and hitchhiking. I lasted almost 3 weeks on this trip, which included bouts sleeping outdoors in Pottstown and Scranton and New York City (Madison Square and Central Parks) and Litchfield, Connecticut, interspersed with some unannounced visits to friends in various colleges in New England, who allowed me to spend the night in their dorm rooms. However, by this time it was starting to get cold, I was nearly out of money, and it was becoming obvious that all of the people I really wanted to be meeting were in college. So I returned to Philadelphia and set myself to the task of getting accepted at someplace resembling what I thought of as a real college to begin the following fall, which happily I managed to do.
A few months ago, around Christmas-time, I was doing some self-gifting by way of ordering some books online that were due to come up imminently on my list and that I was reasonably confident I would not be able to find at one of my local bookstores. One of these books was Edward Burnett Tylor's Anthropology from 1881, which was still, as of 1960 at least, according to the University of Michigan press, one of the finest introductions to the subject available (it was a good book). In my original order, however, instead of Tylor, I was sent a copy of Olive Higgins Prouty's 1947 novel Home Port. I reported the mistake, and upon being informed that the seller did not care to have the Prouty returned, I figured I would have to dispose of it somehow, as I do not have endless space to store books. However, as I noted that it was largely set in the Maine woods and had a romantic element to it, which in the 1940s time period promises to appeal to me, I decided to leave it in the bathroom for a few weeks and see if it happened to be any good.
I should start by noting that while I had never heard of Olive Higgins Prouty, I had heard of some of her books, as she was a fairly popular author from the 1920s through the 40s, and her two most famous books were made into decent movies with big Hollywood stars (Stella Dallas, with Barbara Stanwyck, and Now, Voyager, with Bette Davis). She lived from 1882 until 1974, but she fell into obscurity soon after she published her last novel in 1951, and even the late Home Port seems not to have attracted much notice on its first arrival. She provided financial support to the young Sylvia Plath. She was from Worcester, Massachusetts. Her burial site appears to be unknown.
Five of Olive Higgins Prouty's novels, two of which are Now, Voyager and Home Port, concern various members of the Vale family, whose headquarters are on Beacon Hill in Boston. The books are loosely connected and are not considered to form a saga. Now, Voyager, for example was about the spirit-crushing domination of Charlotte, the youngest daughter of the central family by her mother, the ferocious matriarch, and Charlotte's treatment and awakening from her lifetime of repression. Charlotte is mentioned only in passing (as the aunt of the main character) in the later book, and in the movie version at least of the earlier book, only Charlotte's sister, the mother of the main character in Home Port, appears among that volume's characters at all, and that very briefly. The protagonist in Home Port is Murray Vale, and being a member of this prominent family he is expected to go to Harvard, be a football star and leader of his class like his father and brother before him, and join the family law firm, which of course is one of the most venerable in Boston (money worries would not seem to be a huge problem in these books; however you must bear in mind that all of this fortune is controlled by a handful of old people who would diagnosed as sadists by modern psychology, so all the young people have to do exactly what the old people tell them to or they will be cut off, and this being the 1940s, and everybody having numerous children to play off against each other, those are not empty threats). This laid out course to guaranteed success and social status would sound like paradise to everyone above the lower middle class today, but Murray would have been happy to pass on Harvard and football and study botany at a state university out west. That is not an option however, so off to Cambridge he goes, where he has a non-descript career and is best known as the younger brother of the dynamic Windy, who was paralyzed in an accident maybe even before beginning college, but was still the life and soul of the place during his years there, as he is in every place he inhabits.
One place where Murray feels somewhat at home is Camp Tamarack, which looks to be located in central Maine, on one of the "ponds" that are really small lakes that are common in that part of the world. Although Windy is a higher god at Camp Tamarack as well, Murray is generally well-regarded by the headmaster, or whatever the administrators of summer camps for rich boys are called, and he continues to go back every summer as a counselor all through his college years. The summer before his last year at Harvard, the headmaster gives him, on account of his perceived sensitivity, the assignment of befriending an unpopular new counselor who is socially inept and suffers from some kind of asthma-like physical frailty. The object is still to man the new boy up as much as possible, of course, but preferably in some context of friendship and brotherhood. One day Murray and the weakling are out rowing on the lake when a storm blows up and they are hurled from their boat. Desperately they cling to what remains of the boat for what seems an eternity, Murray having to support the weaker boy, who however, Murray eventually determines, has not been able to hold, at which he lets him go and manages, near death himself, to crawl onto the shore, where he drags himself up a small bluff and finds a soft spot hidden by brush where he goes to sleep for what seems like days.
When he wakes up, he is weak and starving, but eventually he manages to pull himself up and walk, though he has lost the sense of where he is relative to the camp and wanders for several days through the woods, the description of which resonated with me as I have spent a fair amount of time in the same general type of woods. Two or three days afterwards he comes upon a small house in the woods. The inhabitants, a couple in late middle-age, mistake him for a member of the search party looking for the bodies of the two boys who died in the storm. Murray realizes that he cannot appear at the camp, or at Harvard or anywhere else where he might be known, and provide an acceptable solution for why he is alive and the boy intrusted to him is dead. So he flees the vicinity--I forget what he does for money--he evidently had enough in his pocket to get on a bus and grab a couple of diner meals. He takes the bus to Millinocket, several hours north, in the vicinity of Mt Katahdin and the terminus of the Appalachian Trail. It was fairly remote in the 1930s and 40s. After getting into the woods again, I forget how, he gets picked up by a sputtering jalopy and taken to a hunting camp, where, adopting the proletarian-sounding name of Joe Jones, he pleads to be allowed to stay and work at the camp, soon making himself into a trusted guide to the hunters.
Now he is well out of the way of mainstream society, and everyone he knows thinks he is dead, and a hero for not abandoning the drowning boy even though it cost him his own life. He takes field notes and makes drawings of the plant and animal life of the woods and has made his cabin in spite of himself the most civilized place for three hundred miles around--breeding will always out--but surely this life cannot go on indefinitely. Maybe it could, but, in any event, it doesn't. Because of course Nora comes to the camp every summer with her uncouth and mildly dissolute businessman father. Nora is tomboyish and not completely refined, though she does live in New York City. Still, she is a girl, with an attractive curve to her neck, a sporty wardrobe that she wears well, soft features, and a crackerjack spirit. Also she is about the only girl Murray sees over a period of two or three full years, including five month Maine winters passed mainly sitting by the fire in the cabin reading, which sounds pleasant to a certain extent, but would also probably drive one mad in the end. At the end of one year's stay Murray is semi-conscious for some reason which I forget, and Nora, believing him unconscious, lightly touches his arm and kisses him on the forehead, though not out of love for him, she says, but to deceive another person. Murray has a beautiful but confused memory of this occasion, and it is only when Nora wears the same hat the next summer that he recognizes its texture. This romance only develops over several years, but eventually Nora comes to the realization that Murray is hiding something. He confesses his story. She loves him now and wants to protect him. World War II breaks out and Murray enlists in the Navy. While he awaits deployment his mother and various of his brothers and sisters who are en route to some hunting ground in Canada are forced to land their private airplane near the camp. Murray is discovered (due to various prior discoveries, his mother knew he was likely alive somewhere, though she did not know where). Nora wins over his mother with her plucky spirit. They marry. Nora has a baby and becomes a perfect enthusiastic and supportive 1940s wife and mother. Murray goes to war and redeems himself by rescuing a bunch of men who had been tossed overboard during a sea-battle and demonstrating his true heroism. Also his notes and drawings on Maine wildlife are collected and published.
This is a rather lengthy report for a book that is not great, though it was not bad up to the ending, where all of the problems of the problems are resolved too neatly and implausibly. The romantic element appealed to me, I guess. The remote location, the girl with subtle but extremely pleasing charms (who due to a lack of other options is obliged to spend a considerable amount of time with you whether she wants to or not), the 'discovery' in the face of all surface appearances by said charming girl that you are not uneducated and from the lower portion of society. I don't know, I've lost the thread here. Sometimes you come to the end and you just don't remember what you really wanted to say...
This is the alternative cover for the book, which I did not have. I did not imagine Nora as quite this boiling, or their stolen kisses between sips from the canteen while sitting on a flannel blanket to take the character depicted in this illustration, but I have to say I am taken with it. Here is a larger picture.
"I comprehended...how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind, struggling into passion under the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study." Bulwer-Lytton, "The Caxtons: A Family Picture"
