Another Diary Entry

Judging from people's social media feeds, a lot of Educated Parents (one of my favorite contemporary demographics) are having a tough go of it in the early stages of the great online learning experiment. Granted, their expectations with regard to results are probably higher than mine are, but having six children at home, five of whom are supposed to be doing online school in various degrees, which is more than I have the energy to oversee in every detail, I will tell you what my approach is with each.


1. 17 year old, 12th grade. I count on him to do his own work, besides which, he has already been accepted to college, and I doubt they are going to rescind his admission over whatever assignments he has to do during this coronavirus time. I am more worried at this point about him finishing his Eagle Scout project, which he has until May to complete. He is still going out to the woods to work on it a few days a week, and I think he is coming up to the end, but the suspension of the meetings and everything has come at an inconvenient time.


2. 16 yr old, 10th grade. I'm trusting him to do his own work too. He did approach me with an Algebra II question the other day, which I was a little apprehensive of being able to answer, but fortunately it was about the graphing of functions, which I can do.


3. 13 yr old, 7th grade. He goes to school online regularly anyway, so I am used to having to oversee him, though he does not maintain quite the pace or workload I would like him to carry. I do most of his math with him. The other classes I mostly let him try to do on his own, and only intervene when he gets a 50 or 60 on an assignment and has to do it over. In my humbled state I take some mild pride in being able to work English compositions that he has gotten a 40 on up to a 90 or even sometimes a 100, despite the rather clunky directions on the grading rubric ("in the conclusion paragraph, I clearly included a reflection that reveals what the protagonist learned or how the protagonist changed"). My kid may not have any instinctive idea of the shape an essay is supposed to take, but by gosh, I do!


4. 10 yr old, 5th grade. The elementary school teachers have taken a two week hiatus to try to figure how they are going to this distance learning, though a few general admonitions have been sent home (read 20 minutes a day! Review the spelling lists! Math worksheets!) This kid is actually pretty conscientious about keeping up. He did come to me for help on one of the math exercises.



5. 8 yr old, 3rd grade. The school is still working on the plan. I am having her read me a chapter of Charlotte's Web (which I had never read before) every day. I would have her read more, as I enjoy this, but I am actually rather busy during the day. There is a lot of housework (laundry, dishes) to do with everyone being home, I have to make something in the pot for dinner, and I am still going to work every afternoon, though for how long remains to be seen. I am also still trying to get out and take a thirty minute walk every day, which I am supposed to be doing as part of my heart rehab. When I get home from work at midnight I read a little of my current book (Bleak House, which I thought might be long enough to outlast the quarantine, but now I'm not so sure), and watch about a half hour of whatever movie I happen to be on. I can sleep in the morning until 9 or so now, as opposed to having to get up at seven when regular school is in session.


6. 5 yr old, pre-school. I'm supposed to be teaching her how to read, but it isn't going too well so far. She has a pretty good grasp of the letters and a few very short words, but working all the way through to a second consonant remains a bit of a challenge. She is also probably watching too much TV. I am sending them out into the yard a little bit, though it isn't quite warm enough to play outside calmly for an extended period. Everybody needs more attention. I'm probably taking it too much for granted that no one is going to get sick.


I doubtless am writing all of these posts out of some amount of anxiety and dread (and also boredom, and disbelief, and other more excusable reactions), though I do not feel as depressed (yet) as I have at times in the past. Whatever difficulties are looming, it is not quite clear to me at least what form they are exactly going to take, and it certainly appears that they are going to be broadly shared. Maybe they will be very terrible indeed, of course. Sometimes in these kinds of crises it becomes clear to people what their role is and what exactly they are supposed to do (right now a lot of people seem to be auditioning for a role as Leader in the Crisis in various ways who are not quite however suited for it), though this is not characteristically how thinks go with me. The main thing I am worried about at the moment, for whatever reason, is that my oldest son isn't going to make it to college in the fall, and maybe won't end up being able to go. It is entirely possible that circumstances will force him to have to do something else which ultimately would do him just as much good, somehow, but as I am not able to envision what that might be I cannot be easy about it.


A couple of years back when I was very depressed something that cheered me up in the dark winter evenings was that out the window of my office I could see, in the distance, the twinkling lights and ski trails of a mountain in the distance where, that particular year, one of my children would go on Friday nights with a group from his school. Since that time I have always taken note of it in remembrance of that difficult winter. Of course, for the past two weeks, it has gone dark, which is obviously not a great tragedy in comparison with all that is going on, but it is something palpably melancholy that has made an impression on me. I find myself looking in the direction of the mountain quite a lot now and wondering when it will be lit again, and even if I will be around to see it...That is enough for today.

A Quick Questionnaire

I haven't done one of these in a few years. It seems like a good time to see what answers I would give now.


When and where were you born?


I was born in 1970 in Abington, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia
.
Where did you grow up?


I grew up primarily in Manassas, Virginia, where we moved when I was around 8 months old for my father's work and stayed until I was sixteen when my parents divorced, at which time we finally got out of there and I moved to Maine for my last two years of high school. Apart from maybe my father, I don't think anyone else was ever very happy in Virginia. We went back to Pennsylvania frequently, almost every weekend when I was very little, every holiday, and for weeks at a time during the summer. I thus identified with Philadelphia, the longed-for home, as my real home. Everything always seemed both more fun and normal there, people were more rooted, they had a wider variety of regular jobs, they did the kinds of social things like going to happy hour and bowling that characters in old books and movies did. My parents still went to and even had me go to their old eye doctor and dentist in Pennsylvania for a long time, until I was around ten. For most of my life since I have never told anyone I ever lived in Virginia, not even my wife, until someone in my family had to let it slip in front of her and ruin my carefully cultivated image of my childhood.


What is your earliest memory?


 I have always considered my earliest memory to have been some kind of party with cake in the apartment in Virginia where we lived at the time when I was three, but this is just an image, a momentary snapshot of memory. The earliest memory of an event is a time that we went on a long ride to visit some fancy gardens somewhere and had to leave because my mother had a migraine, with my father being very angry all the way home. He always had little tolerance for sick people, so it is ironic that the woman he married turned out to be an extreme hypochondriac. My parents would only have been around 26 and 24 years old at that time.


What was your upbringing like?


There wasn't a lot of joy in the home. My parents were, as noted above, quite young and not well-suited to each other. My mother suffered from depression and a myriad of health woes from as far back as I can remember, while my father was a good-looking, vigorous young high school teacher in the 1970s with the full 1970s licentious mindset, which was not conducive to a harmonious and calm home life. I will say, at that time my father never drank, at home at least, because his own father had been a terrible alcoholic, though much later, after I was grown up, he became, or fancied himself to have become anyway, something of a wine connoisseur. My father was quite bored by family life I think and he was out a lot, while we were left with my mother who spent a lot of time lying around crying. I was always taken to the library and when I was very young, before my father started to basically go away every weekend, we went to a lot of historic sights. My father thought I was very bright because I was an early reader and displayed a rapid understanding of math and the ability to memorize facts--being a young public school teacher he was accustomed I suppose to dealing with complete morons--but I don't think he knew what else to do about it.


Do you have happy memories of that time?


No, not of family life. I have some happy memories of being in Pennsylvania.


Did you ever have nightmares?


Not as a child. As an adult I have gone through periods where I have had dreams of being in my parents' power again at which I thrash around and react violently.


Do you have any brothers or sisters?


I have 2 younger sisters.


How would you describe your relationship with them?


I don't really have one. It's my fault, they have tried to be friendly and to reach out to me, but I don't relate to them very much. I don't really relate to anybody very much at this point.


What did your parents do?


My father was a history teacher until I was 25 or so, and he was 47, when he left that profession and did a number of other things to get him to the present, when I think he is more or less retired (I last saw him 6 or 7 years ago; I piece my sense of what he is doing through 3rd party sources). My mother did not work when I was a child. Much like me, she was mentally prepared to lead the life of the previous generation, and that life only. and did not adapt strongly to feminism and the divorce wave and the burgeoning new economy of the 1970s and early 80s. Eventually she held a series of jobs in florist's shops and drug stores after she was 40 and there wasn't really any alternative to not working.


Your family: are you close to them now?


No, not at all.


What sort of values did they instill in you?


I don't know. I'm kind of a valueless person. Part of the problem is that my parents were so much in conflict with each other, that the qualities they most held dear were what they considered to be the character flaws in the other. There was no united front in anything. My father thought my mother was lazy and weak, so he promoted the idea that we all had to fight the urge to be lazy and weak, especially me, as I was inclined to be those things. However I still have no idea how to overcome those flaws and banish them entirely from my character, though I am ashamed of them. My mother on the other hand resented that my father was a jerk and was mean to her, so of course in the cliché scenario she thought the most important thing was that I be a "good"--meaning essentially a nice--person regardless of whether I developed any more useful or interesting qualities or not.


Who was your role model when you were growing up?


My father, I'm sure. I didn't know anybody else.


Did you go to church when you were younger?


No, never.


What was your school life like?


It was all right. When I was in elementary school we lived in a fairly low-income neighborhood so I was a much more able student than almost everyone else in the school, which was not great for me, as it gave me an exaggerated sense of my actual comparative cognitive ability. I don't have a lot of great memories of school, until I lived in Maine, where I really did love the school.


Did you like school?


I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. I liked the early grades. From 3rd through 7th I would be sad on Sunday evenings at the prospect of the weekend being over, but nothing worse than that. In 8th grade I actually began to like going to school again, getting to see the girls and all of that. Though I did not make the connection at the time, I did go from being around 5'6" in 7th grade to 6'2", and from then on I was always one of the bigger kids wherever I was, which has been a bigger help to me in my life than I am wont to acknowledge. The girls did not exactly begin to love me at that point, but they at least stopped laughing at me to my face as they had done in 7th grade, which was decidedly an improvement, though whether this was because I was taller or because they were more mature, I don't know. 10th grade was kind of a lost year as I went to 3 different schools as a result of my parents' difficulties, but then as noted above I loved my school where I went for 11th and 12th grade very much.


Did academia come easy to you?


To a point, after which I should have tried a lot harder. Needless to say I don't feel like I advanced to my maximum potential. But who cares? I don't wonder whether anybody else achieved their potential, unless they strike me as being really uniquely and interestingly intelligent, which is rare.


What were you like as a teenager?


I was probably even more openly desperate to be loved and for something exciting to happen in life than most people. I walked all over creation as if it were a kind of penance for whatever I had done to offend the gods that I did not have the talent, personality, sexiness, etc, that I craved, that I would in this way purge the evil spirits that were causing me to be deprived of these things. Otherwise I pretty much liked the same things I like now. I haven't developed very much, though if I had not had so many children I probably would have found some different and more adult hobbies and interests.


Did you have any school nicknames?


None worth remembering.


Were you a popular kid?


No. I was never really popular. I had some friends, but even within the larger group there were always some members who did not care much for me.


What did you do after school?


From 2nd to 5th grade I played football a lot, almost every day during the season. In the winter I don't remember what I did. Later on I walked around a lot, went to the library, cheap restaurants and diners in high school when I began to have some money. In high school I would hang around for some time after the regular day was over, often for practices, but even when I didn't have practices I would walk around the hallways and look out the windows and linger near areas where activities were going on because I liked it there so much and I did not want to go home.


Did religion have much impact on your life?


It must have had some impact. Not that I am especially religious, though I read a fair amount of Christian literature and I have attended church pretty regularly, albeit in a going through the motions kind of way, for the last ten years or so. I don't participate in any of the activities the church sponsors to help poor people or refugees, I don't regard the priests as my spiritual leaders or superiors in wisdom, and I politely resists all exhortations from the church authorities to step so much as a millimeter out of my comfort zone. And then of course to appease my wife, who feels strongly about these matters, I go to a Protestant church even though I consider myself to be a Roman Catholic, and consider the theology of that church to make somewhat more sense if one is really going to take the religious view. I like hearing the Bible readings, I like the music, I like getting an hour alone in a nice room without my children, I like communion, I like the donut table after the service. I like hanging around the parish hall, though I liked it better when the church library was in this room before the books were removed to some locked office. This is all very shallow, obviously, but at some point as with reading the number of sheer hours you have committed to it must have some effect. Most people are persuaded that if you spend enough time doing bad things like watching television or eating at McDonalds that you cannot avoid being damaged by it, yet it is easily believed that one can engage frequently in supposedly positive activities and get nothing out of them at all.


Did you ever get into trouble with the law?


No.


Have you had experiences of racism?


Probably, but nothing that was traumatic or especially bothered me. I have to confess, as long as there aren't any pretty white girls joining in on the side ridiculing me or ripping me apart on account of my racial characteristics--which has never actually happened, though I often imagined it happening--my sense of self is pretty strong.


Have you ever had a drugs phase?


No, though I would have if I had gotten in with people who encouraged me in that sort of thing.


Are you a political person?


Not like everyone else. I did not as a young person expect faction to be as much of a determining factor in how people regarded you as it has become. The last candidate I remember running who I felt any kind of trust or kinship with in my idea of what the country is was Bill Bradley, and that's going on 20 years ago.


Are you violent by nature?


No. Really, to the point that being more naturally violent might have been an asset to me, at least as a youth.


What makes you happy?


I like being out in cities and lively towns, bars and restaurants and train stations, public gathering places of a slightly highbrow nature. Some of the happiest days of my life were when I was able to be in crowds or in lovely places in Europe or the better parts of America where I felt I was among people at least at my level of sensibility and perception, and I am always seeking to replicate these feelings in my planned outings and travels, though it has been years since I have really experienced the sensation. Of course anything I can experience in real life that approximates the life I am nostalgic for in old books and films and so on. I should say my family, and I do love them and they do make me happy in a "real life", where would I be without them kind of way, but most of the times when I say I felt happy I was alone and imagined myself to be occupying, or potentially occupying, a particularly desired persona and role that was not actually real, and whenever other people such as my family members are introduced into an experience too much of my actual self rather than my perceived ideal self must inevitably be revealed, which renders the experience imperfect, in my view, in almost every instance.


Is there any difference between the way you are and the way you are perceived?


I certainly wish it were so, and in fact some belief of this sort still underpins my entire social existence, but I suspect it really is not the case.


Did you always know what you wanted to be?


I still don't really know what I want to be, and I have even less of an idea how I might go about getting there. Besides that many of the things I thought I might want to be when I was younger don't really exist anymore, at least in the forms that made them attractive then.


Tell us about the worst time of your life?


My life hasn't actually been that bad. My parents' divorce I experienced at the time more as a social inconvenience and embarrassment because I kept having to move schools and my family was presenting as not having its shit together, so to speak, at all. I was quite badly depressed last winter when I had the kidney stone surgery and did not feel well for a couple of months, sleeping and crying a lot and being convinced that I was dying. I am doing a lot better this year and am not having any of these extreme emotions. Since I met my wife, who is an unusually good-looking, positive, problem-solving sort of person who wants to have lots of babies and to whom nothing bad, or too difficult for her to overcome, ever seems to happen, I have really had nothing that could be considered a serious problem to contend with.


What's one experience that has had a big impact on you?


Moving to Maine when I was 16 was very important for me. Even though none of my classmates at that school really remember me now, the atmosphere there and getting to live in a beautiful town for a couple of years among kids who were quite smart and well-read but without the arrogance and social Darwinism of a mid-Atlantic high school was something I desperately needed at the time and probably salvaged such spirit as I had. Then St John's had similar nurturing qualities, though the more hard-headed thinkers there probably would not want to hear that, and of course my time in Prague was very important too, there would be a big hole in my life if I had never been able to travel in Europe, or somewhere approximating it, a little.


Who has had the biggest influence on you?


Probably my father. A lot of that influence seems to have come in the form of being stifled by his domineering personality, and hopelessly trying to imitate his more prominent qualities, even if some of them were ridiculous. I have not had much in the way of close mentoring-type relationships with men, no professional career or serious sports involvement such as being on a college team or something where any live people are going to be able to influence me. I suppose in school the cooler and most desirable men I was acquainted or even friendly with would have had some influence but I don't feel that that has persisted to this point in my life.


What issues concern you?


I am concerned about wealth concentration and the general degradation of the population which seems to be going hand in hand with that. The decline of college, in particular liberal arts education, even from the modest stature it attained in this country in say the 1950s and early 1960s, is sad to me. The cultural decline of the western countries in general as their populations age and the number of younger people shrinks with every generation seems like it must be some kind of loss too but no one except very bad people and idiots seem to care very much about it so I guess I shouldn't either.


Would you consider yourself a sane person?


Yes, sadly, I haven't got an un-sane cell in my body. I seem to be hopelessly, incorrigibly normal.


Who are your best friends?


Other than my wife I don't really have any friends at this point. I had friends at school, but some of them have already died and others I have seen just a handle of times in the last twenty years.


What made you pick up your instrument?


This questionnaire was originally directed to a musician, apparently. I don't play anything of course. I did take violin in school for about five years so I can read sheet music to some extent, but I wasn't very good. Not the most soulful person, which seems to be important in being good at music.


What first got you into music?


Well, popular music was always ubiquitous, so much of it has turned out to be laden with associations and meaning. Last winter when I was depressed one of the things that would cheer me a little was going to a diner that played 50s and 60s rock records. I'm sure if I had gone to a place that played 40s music or Billie Holiday-type songs that would have worked too though I am not aware of any such place near me.


What was your first show like?


I was the MC but I think I came off a little stiff and overeager to be judged good.


What was your first shag like?


I'm not free-spirited enough to answer this in any event, but...yeah. I didn't have the kind of life-is-a-great-lark carefree sex life that allows for 'shagging' and other sorts of wildness.

Is it true you ask women to shave themselves before sex?


Whoa, that one came out of the blue. I assume the question is referring to pubic hair. My very short-lived, Ryan Leaf-like career as a man about town seems to have long pre-dated the trend of shaving (down there) which I don't really understand. I like the natural look. I would want to ask a woman who had too much facial hair to shave, but I probably wouldn't do it for fear of losing the chance. It goes to show you, these questions assuming some amount of sexual agency and power are totally foreign to my sensibility.


How important is sex to your being?


Sadly it has mostly been the sole determinant of my worth as a human being, and the final tally was pretty much in years ago. I continue to exist, I suppose, but without anything like the same degree of interest or motivation. Even the ability to meaningfully affect/direct my children's lives as far as willing them onto a higher plane of intelligence or experience or economic instrumentality is not something I have proven to be driven to do to any great extent.

If you could live your life over, what would you do differently?


I'd have to find some way to be more aggressive and relentless, and everything else--the ability to insouciantly approach more women, to grapple for money, to pursue opportunities, to contend successfully with other capable people--would follow from that. But I still don't know how I would do that.


What is your philosophy on life?


Mental receptivity and adroitness are underrated and misunderstood qualities. The interplay of well-developed human minds is the height of our experience. The interposition of the machine as a more advanced, or at least faster kind of mind able to master infinitely greater quantities of data, is overwhelming the interactions between human brains and human people and is not enjoyable to this point for most of them. Practice a general macro-morality while allowing, generously but not too generously, for exceptions, it is the only way I have found to maintain sanity and positions I can be comfortable with in the face of extremists. I'm sure there are more things, these are the main ones that occupy my mind at the moment.

Some Things I Would Like to Do This Year

As the dates on the postings will bear out, this has been the longest hiatus in the history of this site, at nearly three months. Of course I thought I ought to say something about the election, and all of the ensuing drama, but for the time being at least the subject with all of its various aspects has defeated me. There is too much to it, and I don't have the concentration anymore to be able to organize all of the material I wanted to address. I still hope that some day it may come back, but I suspect it isn't (going to).


The problem I was having in my political essay was that while I acknowledged all of the awfulness that Trump is inflicting on the country, I am not seeing any element of the opposition to him that I would want to align with or desire to see in power all that much more either. The whole country is clearly a mess, and if there is one particularly evil side, it is not like there is a more reassuring one to turn to, at least if you are me. Even the supposedly good and caring people on the left have become absolutely vicious in their various antagonisms to an extent that I think has become counterproductive and seems at times to be verging on Jacobin territory in its rage. It is going to take a while now to sort all of this out and find some reasonable basis and common ground on which people can sort of begin to relate to each other again, men and women perhaps most urgently. Trump is a product of these underlying problems and certainly seems to be the catalyst for an escalation of the hostilities currently at work in society, but getting rid of him and replacing him with someone slightly less volatile does not fix the serious issues, it just moves them along more (less?) rapidly to whatever form they are going to take next.




The issues themselves I find myself constrained to talk about, because while I don't exactly agree with most of what Trump is doing, and especially with his manner of doing it, I am not as insanely angry about it as everyone else is and I think his opponents go too far in the other extreme on many things as well. Trump and his supporters would probably point out that this kind of nervous response in men--confused, reactive, revealing a lack of intestinal fortitude and control--is emblematic of some of the problems that have spurred his political ascendance. However I am not going to attempt to go on about this any more. I'm sure I will have the opportunity to give some sense of my thoughts on various of these matters in the course of writing about other things, if anyone cares about them. In truth I am still much angrier about my personal failures than about the country's descent into fascism. Maybe this will change if people are forced to choose a side or ideology and accept that the consequence for choosing the wrong one will be death.


I am going to write down some things that I would like to do, that I feel like I haven't done in a long time. I feel like I have not had any real adult fun in some years. I am going to Florida in a couple of weeks and I am looking forward to that. Most of my ideas involve going places and seeing things and not really doing activities. I like (or liked) activities if I am doing them with some kind of egalitarian group and there is a party or going out on the town afterwards, though I guess I am getting too old to do that now anyway.


I am keeping my ideas in the realm of plausibility. I would really (like) to go and wander around Spain for a few months or something, but I am a ways off from (being able to) do anything like that.




1. Go to a brew pub. I haven't been to one of these places maybe since before my children were born. I don't really want to be educated in beer drinking by some twenty four old bartender, but apart from that I generally like the atmosphere in these places. Related to this, I would love to find a Czech restaurant or beer hall somehow and have a meal there. There aren't too many in the northeast, that I am aware of. There was one in Astoria, Queens, New York in the late 90s that I went to. It looks like it is still there.




This segues into #2, which is to go to New York City again. It has evidently only been 3 or 4 years since I was there, as I have a photograph on my bookshelf of five of my children, including my still just 5 year old daughter standing upright and with fully grown out shoulder length hair, standing on the piano at the late lamented FAO Schwarz toy store. It seems like it has been longer than that. Besides, I am getting older, and there are only so many more times I have left to go there, and so many things there I have still not done. I should really make a point of getting there this year.




3. Long rides to see rocks. This is something we used to do a lot when my older sons were little, before everybody was in school and had activities and all of that. There are a lot of famous rocks in New England, and they are usually free to visit. I enjoyed those times quite a bit. I forget that the family stamina for long drives is not what it was in those days, people fighting and so on. We are driving to Florida, though my oldest is going ahead on a plane, because we can't all fit in our car anymore, and it is cheaper to buy one plane ticket than to rent an eight-passenger van. So there will probably be a lot of fighting on that trip though much of it is at night and we try to break it up (the ride, I think, not the fighting).




4. I have got to get to Cape Cod one of these years. Last summer we went to Newport, Rhode Island, which is in that general direction, and which we had also never been to, for a few days, because my wife was possessed with the inspiration/desire to see some of the mansions there, so maybe we will get to the Cape, finally, this summer.




5. The Stowe area in Vt. We did go there once about 12-13 years ago. It's only about 3 hours away and I think it's time to go back. I would like to try to climb Mt Mansfield. It's a famously beautiful area, and pictures of it feature prominently in all of the old 1950s and 1960s Vermont Life/Yankee Magazine compilations I have collected over the years. I should spend more time up there.


Along similar lines we should get over to see Lake Champlain and all the stuff going on there sometime, which we have also not done in our family, though I was there once as a child.


(Addendum--6. I've never been to a real deal steakhouse with big booths and big servings such as men's men are wont to frequent. I've always wanted to go to one of those too).




Hopefully now that I have started I can get back to blogging on a somewhat regular basis again.


(This was one shaky post. I hope to God my writing can come back a little stronger than this).

St John's Origin Story Part 2

I closed the first part with my job at the post office in Maine, which detail is incidental to the story, curious to me only because I had not thought about it in a long time, even though I have been back to the town numerous times since I returned to this part of the country and have surely driven past the building on several of these occasions. To move on, during this time it was suggested to me by a handful of people, including my father, that perhaps I should consider joining the army, since I gave the impression, I suppose, of being disorganized and lacking in direction and many people have the idea that the army can correct those problems in young men. Perhaps it would have done me some good, instilled in me some real discipline and purpose, though certainly the United States is full of people who appear to have come out of the army in little better condition either psychologically or as far as possessing other relevant life skills than when they entered it. I was a petulant little brat at that time, and my idea about the army was that it was akin to signing up for two years of virtual slavery, and why should I have to endure that when all of these other people had these great lives, going to college and parties and having women and so on. What had I done, that I was not as entitled to these things the way everybody else was? Admittedly this point of view was very shallow and foolish, and if one wishes to argue the case that with such an attitude I was not fit for or deserving of going to any college, I can make no defense other than to argue that colleges are full of people as weak-headed and morally objectionable as I was, some of whom even have worse academic qualifications than I did.




I became at this point quite obsessed with going to almost any college of the regular residential, sex- drugs-and-rock-and-roll variety, which obsession was reinforced by a few weekend visits to nearby schools which people I had known in high school attended (I realize now the true generosity and indulgence of these friends, whom I dropped in on completely unannounced with the full expectation that they would put me up and entertain me for several days). The threat of enforced sobriety and especially chastity scared me off from considering any super religious schools, where temperamentally I otherwise might have fit in. I reacted to my feeling of having been shunned by serious academia by abandoning any real concern about the nature and quality of the education I was supposedly seeking and devoted most of my energy in this search to what I thought would enhance my possibilities for engaging in mature (in the film-rating sense) relations with women. Though I did even at this time keep up my correspondence with St John's, as the reading list there still appealed to me, the tiny size and as it appeared unfavorable male-female ratio of the school raised the spectre that there might not be enough women around to satisfy me reliably produce any who might be interested in me (and who I would be interested in as well, though at the time I did not imagine there could be very many people left who would not fall into that category). I did not realize that when you have no demonstrated history of being desirable to women, the last thing you need to do is expand your options, because you don't have options. You need to limit the number of able competitors that you have to overcome. This point did not fully hit home with me until years afterwards, when I knew some people who worked at a residential home for mentally handicapped adults (from well-off families) in an isolated part of New Hampshire. There were about twelve people on the staff, evenly divided by sex, mostly from Germany with the rest from various of the old Communist European countries, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, etc. Every one of them that I knew of was at some point involved with one of the fellow staff members, and at least two of the couples eventually got married. But getting back to the main story, besides this concern about numbers, I figured that the girls there would be like the smart girls at my high school, many of whom were wonderful people, but likely to be too engaged with learning and taking part in constructive (self-improving) extracurricular activities and contributing to the advancement of various liberal causes for me to be easily able to connect with them, because I was not going to be engaged with these things to the same extent, mainly because I did not know how to be so, in the right way. If I was going to be able to get anyone like this it would only be, I foresaw, after a long and necessarily asexual vetting process which I did not want to go through, though of course I did not articulate it thus at the time. Instinctively I knew that my life was passing me by, that I needed some things that were quick and dirty but also exhilarating to begin happening immediately, though I had no idea how to make those things happen. I had become convinced however that the answer to my problems did not lie with the liberal smart girls who up to that point had shown little interest in me anyway, but among the more general, less intellectually conscious population of females; a population the overall mindset of which, alas, I understood even less than I did the striving liberals.


It is understandable if by now the reader is thinking that I did not need to go to college, but should have packed off for Ibiza or the Full Moon parties in Thailand until such time as I might have found some Eurotrash or licentious Australian girl, hopefully multiple ones, to carry me past this ailment that was psychologically crippling me. This would have been the ideal solution, assuming anything would ever have come about, which is a big assumption, but I knew nothing of such scenes at the time, and the affordability of such trips would have posed a bigger problem even than college did, for which at least financial aid was available. The world is very efficient at gathering the most desirable young women in a fairly limited number of scenes, which of course cuts anyone left out of those scenes off from them. When you are a nineteen year old boy/man out of college, particularly if you have a three digit IQ, the truth of this situation/arrangement of society becomes very salient to you. There seemed nothing else to be done but to go to school.


So on my second attempt at applying to college I applied almost exclusively to large universities that had some name recognition but did not seem overly difficult for me to get into, though a couple still rejected me anyway, as did as a couple of rich kid 'alternative schools' I took flyers on because the literature on them indicated that if you went there you could be the ugliest person in the world and still get laid, which the literature on St John's did not promise so explicitly. I ended up going for one semester to a large university in a state somewhat renowned for the ordinariness and boring composition of its people, full of Deadsvilles from one end to the other. I imagined this would be an ideal environment in which to rejuvenate my flagging enthusiasm for existence, because there would be hordes of simple, wholesome, cornfed babes that I as an Easterner possessed of a mind that seemed threatening to grow more overpowering every day would be able to manage...Needless to say I did not manage anybody. I have in fact never been so entirely invisible and nondescript to women while actually in the midst of them as I was there. The tiny number that even condescended to acknowledge my presence did so in a way that indicated that if I happened to possess any latent sexuality, its expression was something that was going to occur in a time and place very remote from the present scene. One day a very beautiful, polished sorority type girl made the rounds of the floor I lived on, selling cosmetics or something as an assignment for a business/marketing class. Her pitch to me was that I could get some "for my mother". It was fortunate that I did not have any money or I probably would have felt some compulsion to buy something even though the women spoke to me as if I were less than a full human, politely enough of course, but in the manner of a being on a plane of life with which the likes of me could never hope to have anything to do. I realize now that my approach to that whole experience could not have been worse. Going to classes held very little interest for me, and I devoted the greater part of my days to trying to procure alcohol, drinking alcohol, and sleeping off hangovers. I did nothing to improve my chances of meeting the kinds of people with whom I might have been compatible, partly because I did not have a good sense for what people with whom I might be compatible did for activities (judging by my subsequent experience and other pleasant, attractive, and reasonably intelligent women I have met over the years, squaredancing, hiking/camping, and other anachronistic types of fun would have served I guess). Unlike at St John's, where the overall environment is serious and comparatively elevated enough to wield some positive influence on a mind otherwise wholly given up to obsessions with drinking and women, there was no such tempering or uplifting atmosphere to lean on in this other place. Despite the circumstance of the semester's having been a complete failure on all imaginable fronts, since I did not know what else to do, I still planned, when school let out for the summer (I had started after Christmas my first year out of high school), to come back and give it another try, figuring that eventually I would have to have some luck. I still was not really that inferior, after all, though certainly I felt that I was whenever other people were around. And perhaps if I had quickly gotten a summer job, and that had gone well somehow, and things in general had started going in the direction of looking up for me, then maybe I would have returned after all--I left some favorite books and other youthful mementos, including possibly my high school running medals, in a storage box in the place where I had gone to school, which I never went back to retrieve--but that story I must leave for another section (I am now only fifteen months out from my matriculation at St John's College however...)     

In Which I Once Again Try to Rationalize Various Crimethoughts

So I have not had the most productive year of blogging. I suppose the main reason for this is that I seem to have ever less to say. This is disturbing of course, since I might have to live another two or three decades at least, and the possibility of being unable going forward to have any kind of intelligent thought processes that could be translated to writing is a state of existence that, due to the absence of other skills or interests at a recognizably adult level of development, I find unpleasant to contemplate. So I feel somewhat obligated to try to carry on. I am also going to cling to the hope that this bad year has been to some extent due to 1) the presence of the new baby, which, even though she is the sixth baby I have had, and is a remarkably easy baby as far as babies go, has still, given my age and the presence of five older children and their various needs--I have to spend almost one hour out of the twenty-four every school day washing out and then making up lunchboxes, for example--impeded more and more on my writing time since I am really too tired at night to do much of anything now, which formerly I could still usually put in a hour or so worth of effort; and 2) the current absence of a functioning computer for writing at home--I do have a smart phone now that has internet access but as yet I have not committed to trying to blog on it, though I suppose if I were truly alive and driven to write, I could. The obvious solution is just to buy a new one, but the timing has not been good for it. Between my wife being out earlier in the year on maternity leave, and the necessity of taking out maximum insurance in anticipation of the baby, and having to buy a new dishwasher, and keeping the children up with all of their camps and lessons and private schools, I have been holding off on the new computer, which would be pointless anyway unless my posting began to show a marked improvement.

It is true though that I don't seem to know my own thoughts, or trust them, on any number of matters, which tends to make writing about anything impossible. Lately, for example, most of the people of my general socio-economic group (or at least that to which I aspire to belong because there aren't any very appealing alternatives) who deeply believe themselves to be good and morally correct, and obviously care about being so, have been greatly excited in favor of the continued mass migration of refugees and other aspiring people from all corners of the world into the United States and other wealthy Western countries, with apparently no limits on such migrations as to number or any strict measure of social desirability other than those determined by the global marketplace and the would-be migrants themselves; to do otherwise would be a moral wrong. I tend to be conflicted about this, at least at the level, numbers-wise, that have already immigrated into these countries since about 1990, and that are being anticipated for the foreseeable future. There are any number of places in the heart of the great western cities and homelands that have had their populations transformed by foreign-born people without much of a visceral attachment or seeming cultural respect, beyond economic and certain educational opportunities, for the host country. There are a lot of old natives of these countries and cities who are deeply unhappy about the changes that have come over the societies that they grew up in, to the point in some cases of demoralization and despair, though as these tend not to be important or respected people, we are not supposed to worry about them. I am not quite in this latter condition--while I struggle some with constant change and 'disruption', I more or less accept its necessity and even its desirability, to a point. I believe I could even live contentedly enough in many places that are more diverse and heavily populated with immigrants than where I live now, provided that, first, the levels of overtly racially-motivated conflict and violence were low (low meaning, 'it is not something I have to account for in my daily life outside of the occasional extraordinary circumstance') and second, if in the United States, the local area were to maintain some strong institutional and cultural ties to the old American republic. A lot of people who occupy somewhat extreme positions, both on the left and the right, including many on the left who would be designated as belonging to the white tribe, seem to relish the prospect of some kind of racial conflict, for the leftists seemingly under the assumption that certain classes of especially distasteful white people are going to be receiving their deserved comeuppance, but I do not share this enthusiasm. For similar reasons I am not really that enthusiastic about the prospect of the western countries being continuously inundated by people from countries with whom they have had very few, and in some instances no cultural or historical ties until recently, though given the global demographic situation, I realize it would require a particular severity and arrogance of will on the part of the western societies to effectively do anything about the flow of migrants, which the powerful classes in these countries seem not to have, or be interested in having, presently.

The professed love that many leftists seem to have for almost any immigrant or person of color in the abstract, and their near ecstasy when a success or demonstration of superiority over the run of ordinary bland Americans by someone from one of these communities is recounted, while I actually think it is understandable given the bitter enmity which has prevailed in domestic politics during most of my lifetime, I also think is not truly real, and therefore not sustainable, especially when the current extreme left wing-right wing hatred dies down a little, which it will,  

I admit I am strongly affected by the stories all of the girls in Sweden and Norway who are supposedly getting raped at staggering rates by immigrant men, while their fathers and brothers and the civil authorities of their nations stand aside and do nothing, as if acknowledging their powerlessness in the face of forceful virility. Of course one hopes these stories are not broadly true, that the problem has been somewhat exaggerated as to scale or embellished as to its brutality, the impression given being that beautiful and unassuming young Scandinavian girls are being routinely attacked, captured and defiled in their own countries in broad daylight and with complete impunity by violent bands of young men of foreign origin, mainly Muslim. Of course I am affected because I imagine the women involved to be the typical beauties of their highly advanced countries, and the imagery of their being violated in their homelands by people hostile to their way of life and their very persons who could have been prevented from ever settling there in the first place is risible. People will argue that women are raped and treated terribly in various hellholes all over the world and I don't care about them. This is not entirely true, though in places where the racial composition, language and culture are completely different it is natural I would not have quite the same visceral affinity where the victims are concerned, and also the chaos and lack of social order and protection for women in these societies are not things to which I feel as direct a connection or responsibility, as I would say, do most Americans, because once you really try to confront all of the atrocities with which the world in all its glorious parts is filled, and keep them always in the forefront of one's consciousness, one must become rather humorless, and be possessed by the tireless zeal of either the saint or the crusader to live at all effectively forthwith, and those are callings that few people are equipped for. In any case one could say the same for me with regard to Sweden, but that country is not dissimilar in many ways to Vermont or New Hampshire, certainly when compared with the Zimbabwes of the world, and the breakdown of order and the safety of women there is more disturbing than it is in a place which had never quite achieved Western levels of those things in the first place.

Well, enough of this.

Report on Trip to Annapolis Last Weekend

I'm sure you're all dying to read this.

This was another reunion, twenty years out of college. For historical comparison, here is my write-up on the last one, five years ago. I am always happy to be there, though as always the place is too easy on me. The harshest thing anyone said the whole time was that smoking a cigar gave me an appearance of gravitas that I otherwise lacked. No one said out loud what I am always looking for them to say, which are things like, "Why are you here? Why were you ever allowed into this school in the first place? Have you no shame? Have we no shame that we continue to tolerate you in our presence? etc, etc", though surely someone in the administration of the college at least must think this when they see me or any other comparatively sorry graduate, of which our school appears to have at least its fair share. But I really was glad to be back in that environment, with its relaxing of the most humorless and unforgiving standards which govern most of polite society, even though it was only for a couple of short days. I was also happy to see more or less all of my old schoolmates, as was everyone else, though of course by our last couple of years there everyone was either tired of each other or, if not, had long given up hope of getting to better know the people they were not tired of and still had some interest in getting to know. But enough of the introduction. Here is the raw experience:

The Journey Down (And Back)

This used to be as big a highlight as actually getting there, but this is the first time I can recall going on a long trip where I could feel the ravages of age really affecting me. My usual plan is that I leave on Thursday after school and drive to Philadelphia, where my mother lives, inevitably getting there about 2 a.m., then I leave there around noon on Friday, usually rolling into Annapolis shortly before four, though on paper the drive should only take about two and a half hours. Then I stay over Friday and Saturday nights and, after the farewell brunch on Sunday, go the whole long way home. This time this regimen really wore me out, and even though it is now the following Thursday, I have still not caught up on my sleep, my laundry, the dishes, the lawn, and so on. I also developed some kind of infection or something the day I left which still hasn't gone away. I have had it before--it seems to have at this point an 8-10 month recurrence, during which it lasts for two or three weeks and then goes away again--but I don't like it. It made driving very unpleasant. I did not think I was particularly anxious leading into the trip--this condition always seems to rear its head at times when I am experiencing anxiety, though at that point the condition causes more anxiety than whatever it was that may have been bothering me before. I also did not have much of an appetite over the whole course of the trip. Usually a big part of the fun for me is stopping in at restaurants and so on along the way, but I was not up for any of that this time. My mother made me sandwiches when I was at her house (I also stopped in on the way back to pick up a few articles of furniture, that have also not been properly dealt with yet back at home), and I just nibbled on those when I got hungry. I did not actually buy any food in the entire four days (though I had paid for the Saturday dinner at school ahead of time). I had breakfast at my hotel and otherwise just sampled whatever snacks or hors d'oeuvres happened to be put out at the various functions I attended. My appetite has picked up a little since I got back home, though it is still not what it usually is.

Book Stores. I went into a couple of bookstores on Saturday, one a used shop in the village near the campus, and the other the college bookshop itself. In both instances I felt oddly overwhelmed by the actual books and quickly abandoned looking into any of them, though I did hang around the school shop for a little while fingering t-shirts and mugs and doing some surreptitious people-watching. I think it must have been the general social agitation that the weekend induced, because this does not usually happen to me on the rare occasions when I go to such places in New England. Of course in New England these kinds of stores tend to be in old barns or large Victorian houses and tend both to be more spacious and have numerous rooms or divisions of shelves laid out in labyrinth-like designs. Being a somewhat large person, still more tall than fat, I think, but carrying more than 200 pounds, I have always needed a good deal of room and privacy in order to read or even flip through books comfortably, neither of which the Annapolis stores provided. The used store actually looked pretty good, and they had quite a few of the books on one of my older reading lists that have fallen out of regular print, though I didn't get any of them.

Other People's Anxiety. I was surprised by the number of people at the reunion who (undramatically) admitted to being anxious beforehand, especially as these confessors included several people whom I anticipated as being more likely to be the cause of anxiety for others than to be afflicted by it themselves.I did not hear anyone elaborating in great detail about the particulars of their anxiety, but I found it interesting, and kind of comforting, that they found themselves able to say it in the natural flow of conversation and sense that the people they were talking to would know what they were talking about. This seems like a simple thing, but it bespeaks a level of unconscious intimacy that is hard to replicate with people one meets after age 25 or so.

House Tour. I went to visit the Hammond-Harwood house, which some people consider to be the purest expression of classical Georgian architecture in the entire United States, on Saturday afternoon. As I have begun reading more about old houses and the colonial era and those sorts of studies, Annapolis, which among other things has more preserved 18th century houses than any city in the country, keeps turning up, and I have had to admit a keen embarrassment at not having paid attention to this all during the nearly six years that I lived there. The Hammond-Harwood house especially, which is on Maryland Avenue and across the street from the Chase-Lloyd House, another massive colonial era pile occupying the better part of a city block, I must have walked past at least a hundred times, or fifty times anyway without stopping to take a look at it, or even noticing it. I know my thought deigned very little in those years to wander anywhere too far from the inside of my own head, sparsely furnished though that space was, but this defies belief. The docent properly chastised me the way I wish the St John's people would when I told him I had gone there but had never been over to see the house. The tour was very thorough and informative and had much of interest to look at. Near the end I could feel my agitation rearing its head though I cannot imagine for what cause. There was plenty of time left in the day. Under normal circumstances, where, however, I had nothing else to look forward to other than perhaps dinner, I would have felt the tour to be excellent, and the high point of the day.

There were several St John's connections with this famous house. The college actually bought the house at auction in 1924 when the last of the spinster descendants of the Harwood family passed on without any heirs. There was some daring involved, as a rumor had started that Henry Ford was interested in buying the house, taking it down, and re-assembling it at his Greenfield Village museum in Michigan, and the town fathers of Annapolis, not wanting this to happen, supposedly gave Henry the wrong time for the auction so that he missed it. Given that he was one of the most powerful people in the country at the time, it seems like if he had been really angry, that could have been the end for little old St John's. The college ran the house as a museum until 1932, when the Depression forced them to close it. In 1940, by which time the Great Books braintrust was running the school, and evidently seeing no use for maintaining a closed up Georgian mansion (though it would certainly seem to have potential for parties and other great social events) they sold it to the commission that still owns it today. The house also had on display several music and architecture books that had been lent or given to it from the college's collection.

Assessment of My Own Weekend. It was pretty good. I talked a little, with a greater variety of people than I usually do. I would still have liked to have talked more. I did wander off a few times for long periods and skip certain events because I am conscious of being a large presence that is often something of a void, and I wanted to give people a break from this, forgetting that the duration of the entire event is about 42 hours and then they don't have to see me again for 5 years. Even the most social people scarcely get to talk to everyone. I felt less of a barrier between myself and many people than I have felt in the past, which is good, but of course there is still, compared to others, more of this than I would prefer in a ideal world.

Women Show More Cleavage Today Than They Did 20 Years Ago (Though They Supposedly Have Less Sex)

It's Garbage time in the last game of this blog's life. We are trailing by 50. The other team has long pulled its best players and is laying back (I think it probably should be lying, but no one who uses the expression ever says lying) on defense; however we are still throwing up wild three pointers that land nowhere near the basket and off-balance running one handers from outside the lane, as even with the minimal resistance we are unable to penetrate therein. I admit I am surprised by how grisly it has been. I thought we'd be competitive in most of our games and easily make the tournament. 12-6 at the worst, never 4-14 with most of the defeats by blowout. We overrated our talent, it goes without saying, but we also never identified anything we did well, or that might develop into something we did well by the standards of our competition over the course of the season if we worked at it. This all falls on the coach, of course, and in real life would necessitate his firing (to mix sports, if I am the Gerry Faust of this blog, this post is pretty much the 58-7 Miami game).

A few months back I remember articles making the rounds about how certain aspects of the culture--namely fashion, music, movies--had stopped progressing around 1992, and that while there were easily identifiable differences from 1932 to 1952 to 1972 to 1992 in these areas, there was, in the eyes of these writers, little discernible different from 1992 to 2012 (literature may have been included in the list, though people have been complaining about its being moribund since long before 1992). My initial reaction upon reading these was to think that superficially it seems to be somewhat true, but that is of course because I am stuck in many ways, and always will be, in a 1990s (and 80s)-centric idea of how the world is. Time really has moved on, and while most people I know do still dress about the same as they did in the early 90s, all you have to do is search for "shopping mall photos circa 1990" or some similar thing to see that in fact young people do dress (and look) quite differently. The main change in fashion, other than that there are a lot more really fat people, and a lot of them don't seem to be as conscious of themselves as being grotesque as they probably would have 20 years ago, is the ubiquity of tattoos, which for the most part only hardcore heavy metal fans and a few extra-bad boys and girls who backed up the look with a lot of real attitude and debauchery had in those days. I am certain that the young women show a lot more cleavage than they were doing in the late 80s and early 90s, and you would think if anybody would know about this it would be me. I also see girls wearing bikinis on the beach, even some who have less than spectacular figures. I don't remember anybody 'normal' (i.e., was not clearly dating a bodybuilder or member of a biker gang) wearing a bikini in New England at least in the 80s. In general I think people look more and more stupid the more years that go by, and project less in the way of having any kind of interesting personality, but that is also a common affliction of aging.

Again, there does not seem to be much going on in music--I seem to hear about two new songs a year that I actually like at all at maximum--but it is highly likely that if there is any new music that is going to be considered good fifty years from now I am not hearing it, and even if I were technically hearing it, like the old fogies who doubtless heard classic rock songs in the 50s and 60s and could not discerning any pleasant sounds in them at all, I would probably not be 'hearing' what is dynamic in them. New movies and literature, the other dominant artistic forms of Generation X's and especially the Baby Boomers' most impressionable years, are not giving the most emotionally devoted, or at least most critically credentialed, segments of their audiences what they are looking for either, and I must include myself among that disgruntled middle aged group, since I find it pretty much impossible to find anything new comparable to the good old stuff before everybody became stifled by the particular attitudes and variety of self-consciousness that you know everything today is smothered in before you even see it. Still, a half-century on, there will be aficiondos of our period who will think a few things from it splendid, and wonder and be saddened that there are not, and never will be, any more works of a similar character to be discovered from it. Our generation, if not dead, will be superannuated, its essential work finished (if you think, as I increasingly do, that most artists decline after age 40 my generation's work is already essentially finished) and our descendants will have from what was done a strong sense of all that was not done, and might have been done. But they will love some of the things that were done for reasons that are inaccessible to someone already past middle age now and making a living or maintaining a persona as a curmudgeon and a scold.

I do suspect that the new technology of the last 20 years may be hindering people who may have been creative in these older forms. I am not referring to myself, as when I used to attempt creative writing I wrote all my drafts out in longhand and typed and printed up copies from which I did revisions after that. I found I could not compose on the computer, that it was too fast, that I didn't have the same sense of making the actual thing that I wanted to make. I do compose the blog posts on the computer of course, because I don't have time to write them out in longhand at present, but I am always a little jittery and uncomfortable in doing so, I am always conscious of time, I am always conscious of other points I could bring in which would necessitate changing the flow of the narrative, and it shows in the postings. I think the ever-increasing stupendous-ness of the technology is probably a little deflating to would-be artists who are trying to, or need to use it, but have no sense of control over it because they don't really understand how it works. Personally I would happily give up computers long before I gave up old-style literature or music or films, and I do not think that computers are an expression of a superior intelligence to at least the greatest works of art, but it is an expression of a very powerful and seemingly very different kind of intelligence that is wholly ascendant at present. The humanistic artist of the present and future probably has to, a la Buster Keaton with the movie camera, or even better, Vermeer and the other ancient artists' necessity of making their own actual paint and other supplies from scratch, take the computer apart (not necessarily literally, though that would probably not hurt), identify what its powers and ruling premises really are and what they really signify to man in his current state of existence, and then internalize that understanding so that it is as much as possible second nature, and the technology is no longer a hindrance. Doubtless this process is already underway, but I probably will never be able to get it. I'm kind of intellectually stranded in my early 40s, and I don't like it.

Back to the main point, however. The  physical manifestations and delivery of art even in my childhood were, though by machines and technology, were by machines and technology that one had a reasonable visual and cognitive sense of how they worked--printing presses, records, film reels, radio broadcasts. I have no sense of how clicking various buttons on the internet allow me not only to save my draft of this post, but in the event that I should fly to Irkutsk in the next couple of days, to be able to retrieve it there on any computer I might find that has internet access. I have no sense of how if I click a couple of buttons, that I not  only can hear and see video images of Tavares' "Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel", but I can have a copy of it "burned" onto my own computer and can then do I guess any number of things with it, though so far I still just make CDs out of these songs I download or upload, though how that process works I don't really understand either. The worst part is, I'm not terribly interested in understanding it, even if I could; but that is in some large sense the key to what life is in my time, regardless of whether I want it to be or not, and I should be interested in it. But back again to the main point--the computer is too powerful a tool. If you attempt to use it passively as just a cleaner and faster substitute for the kind of work you were used to doing in a way in which you had greater hands-on physical control, you will be surprised by how much power it saps out of you because it makes you aware, subconsciously or not, that there is infinitely more going on in it than there is in you.

I wanted to write some more about the negativity so many people feel about college these days, and how I do expect this widespread disenchantment to be a serious political catalyst within the next few years, and not only because of the loan debt, though that is certainly a big part of it. For a large part of the current generation especially there has been, a deep emotional investment in the whole college process from an early age, and despite the cynical exhortations and words of wisdom of their elders to toughen up, that nothing is promised or owed to anyone in this world, that they didn't study the right subjects or compete strongly enough to be successful and now they just have to live with the consequences of that failure, I don't think they are going to be so easily persuaded that it didn't really signify anything as far as the rest of life goes. But I'll have to go into that more another time. That, and I suppose other politics. Someday I'll probably break down and relate my vision of a world where published authors and professors and other intellectual authorities have attained the power of administering life and death over people who unsuccessfully aspire to join their ranks, and of my own trial and execution at the hands of this court--but yes, I should definitely stop for tonight...

Pope/Essay on Man--Part 2

This was a picture of a Bourgeois Surrender-type pretty girl (mousy black hair, black long sleeve blouse, scowling expression) drinking from a bottle of Miller High Life at a dingy bar. But I guess I am not going to be allowed to steal it. Pope takes great pains to press his argument for a supernatural power's having organized the animal kingdom in a manner designed to produce the highest good. There is another long excursion into this line of thought in Epistle III:

"Who bade the stork, Columbus-like, explore
Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before?
Who calls the council, states the certain day,
Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?" (ll. 105-8)

Here at least we have the questions prettily put, if angling for answers in a direction that later rigor would find unsatisfactory.

ll. 263-6. On the age of superstition which preceded the Christian era:

"Then sacred seem'd the ethereal vault no more;
Altars grew marble then, and reek'd with gore:
Then first the flamen tasted living food;
Next his grim idol smear'd with human blood..."

A flamen usually refers to a priest of an ancient, presumably false deity, especially Roman. I had to look the word up myself, which is why I note it here.

Epistle IV, ll 127-8. On the immutability of the natural laws recently enunciated by Pope's man Newton:

"When the loose mountain trembles from on high,
Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"

ll. 137-40, on the difference of human opinion:

"One thinks on Calvin Heaven's own spirit fell;
Another deems him instrument of hell;
If Calvin feel Heaven's blessing, or its rod,
This cries, There is, and that, There is no God."

ll. 149-50. It made me laugh:

"'But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed.'
What then? is the reward of virtue bread?"

ll. 153-6. An often-forgotten point following up the last one. Note the alpha/beta male comparison used in framing the argument:

"The knave deserves it, when he tempts the main,
Where folly fights for kings, or dives for gain.
The good man may be weak, be indolent;
Nor is his claim to plenty, but content."

ll. 167-9, 173-4. If only I could still believe it:

"What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy,
Is virtue's prize: a better would you fix?...
Weak foolish man! will Heaven reward us there
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here?"

ll. 219-22:

"Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From Macedonia's madman to the Swede (ed.--Charles XII);
The whole strange purpose of their lives to find
Or make an enemy of all mankind!"

ll 237-8:

"What's fame? A fancied life in others' breath,
A thing beyond us, even before our death."


As I stated in the other posting, I look forward, in a mechanical sort of way, to Pope and other authors of his time even though I don't really study or think about them very earnestly anymore. The early 18th century has become almost a comfort genre for me, like teenager movies of the 1930s and 40s. I still vaguely believe that Pope is good by some standard of goodness--as well as of the significance of that goodness--that was impressed on me years ago and which I cannot yet wholly disavow, though it seems to mean ever less and less in that large part of life that exists outside of my memory. Nonetheless I continue to carry out, mainly now from habit, a form of a persona I once aspired to much and pursued fairly diligently, that of a person knowledgeable about books and European history and culture especially; all of the other models desirable to me seeming at this point even more inaccessible of attainment.

Pope is not one of your universal writers I suppose, though to me he represents an atmosphere through which the English language had the good fortune at one age to pass, especially as my sense of the course of history indicates to me that there was nothing necessitating its taking this particular passage. He has an excellent style, and one that is really not like anyone else's before or since his time, which is a rather remarkable achievement in any language, to say nothing of one with the voluminous literary history that English has. Nonetheless his stature has seemed to be continually in decline, or at least perceived to be in decline, ever since the outbreak of the Romantic era. The internet age, with its love of hard data, and seeming lack of feeling or appreciation for poetic expression, seems especially unlikely to revive the idea of him as any kind of giant. I am beginning to feel more comfortable lately regarding my suspicion (hope?) of the internet's not having a more salutary or improving effect on the intellect compared to reading good books, but the general drift of events does not seem to be towards my position. Pope still endures, albeit in a minor way, such that one isn't sure how many people feel that his poetry has contributed to a meaningful enhancement of their experience of life. I suspect not many, even in comparison to 50 years ago, and this is the main value that literature ancient or modern has to offer. So while I still look forward to Pope, and still can imagine my pleasure in contemplating and sensorially experiencing life enhanced by reading him, I also cannot help but to often suspect that these perceptions of the worlds of life and thought that I have long nourished in this naive and quaintly old-fashioned way are in fact devoid of all living substance and utility, as I have understood them anyway.

On Writing Publicly For Reasons Other Than Money

I don't know whether or not offering one's scribblings to the world free of charge is contemptible, as some maintain, though I doubt that anyone, other than perhaps Plato, Montaigne, and the authors of the New Testament ever set out to write a book or any other attempt at literature with no idea of profiting by it in some way. If nothing else, being paid for the work, or even having it acknowledged by someone who is himself paid, legitimizes it in a way that nothing else can. Some people go further and consider that writing is a skill, and as with any other skill, if one does it well it is too valuable to be given away freely, if for no better reason than that it contributes to an environment where it becomes more difficult for committed professionals to make a living commensurate in respectability to their desserts. I almost wholly agree with this from the point of view of the person of talent, and the ability to coerce payment out of people for such talents as one has. The problem is that more and more people either have no talents, or skills, possessing any value, and many who do simply haven't the understanding of how to make people give them money for them. In this scenario having such an attitude really limits the number of acceptable adult pursuits one can share with other people. Still, I largely accede to this; I do and say very little among other people. People do not think that I ever properly tried to make anything of myself but during the apparently utterly wasted years between age 24 and 32 or so I really was trying very seriously to make myself into an author, in which enterprise I not only failed, but did so at the expense of developing any other useful abilities. Compounded by the further mistake of isolating myself more or less wholly apart from other people like me, the result is the perfect disaster one sees today. Thus at the same time, this variety of writing and thinking which I produce being the only thing I know how to produce in this world, I find that to keep going on I must make a gesture at turning out some kind of copy, publishing such things as I can, as if asserting that I have a function in life, though if a function implies something essential one does well and for which he is paid, this is obviously a great lie.

I didn't know about it when I was coming out of college, or maybe it didn't exist. But going to New York and latching onto one of those writers' sweatshops like Gawker or working on Henry Louis Gates's Encyclopedia Africana (most of the writers for which were young postgraduate white people) was the kind of thing I ought to have done, to be around people in the field, to get some credentials, and to be in an exciting place with some kind of concrete purpose. Except for the part about being in the exciting place, my conception of the world and of literature did not operate in this way at the time. Hacking away in a sweatshop would have diverted time away from working on serious masterpieces that already existed within me more than half-formed. Writing for ephemeral forms--magazines, textbooks, web sites--was not real writing, its practitioners not real writers, the world in which I imagined them to inhabit not the world I imagined myself to inhabit. Of course I never talked to anyone about any of this. I didn't trust anyone to help me, to make the possibility of going to New York or some other cultural mecca and making something of myself there seem plausible. No, I should have first to have done something spectacular, burst fully-realized upon the scene and give people no choice but to collapse and grovel before my genius and superiority. I could not imagine being successful in any other terms.

I Like the Feeling I Get in Reading about the Current Brooklyn-Centered Literary & Artistic Scene. I know I shouldn't, because the people involved aren't particularly tough or edgy--whimsical I think is the common word--and I think they are supposed to be spoiled and overly cushioned against real hardship to boot, but I actually think it is a positive development that some incurably soft young people with decent educations and good, heavily results-oriented work ethics, and who even seem to at least be nice to each other are back in New York. I think a lot of good will come out of it. Perhaps not anything brilliant--that will be in the ensuing generation, if we are lucky--but obviously enough people are hungry for this kind of atmosphere of artistic energy and feeling, which New York has the environment, the history, the geography, the institutions and so on to support in people without a Herculean effort on their part, as to have made something happen which from afar looks very appealing, the kind of scene I have always wanted to belong to. In my dream I could have a girlfriend, or even several of them, like one of the erstwhile queens of this scene, the "microcelebrity" Emily Gould, who actually seems like a pretty awful person, but on whom, or rather on the type of woman of which she is representative, I have a ridiculous crush. Everything about her triggers in me an odd sense that her type is the epitome of something vital I missed in my life, as the kind of girlfriend everybody I aspire to be like has more or less continually, and eventually learns to master, which seems to be essential in the development of the genuinely good male writer. Many of the other Brooklyn women one reads about, or reads, or sees in the various videos that circulate on the internet, as belonging to this scene, also look to be of the kind I was forever seeking. I am probably projecting Dorothy Parkeresque qualities, and those of the women who populate her stories, on these people where it is not really merited, but they at least seem to be conscious, to be alert to the existence of those kinds of possibilities, and have the personal desirability to make that alertness interesting, which combination I have not seen happening to such a decent-sized extent in a while.

I have a friend, an old classmate--several, actually, but I am thinking of one in particular--who has managed to avert the constrictions of marriage and children and corporate servitude and lives in Brooklyn among this very scene, apparently surviving as a musician, taking part in lots of nightlife and other cultural activities, maintaining hundreds of friendships with unusual, intelligent people, and enjoying lots of 20-something female company, cut from friendlier and better-looking cloth than that even of the frequently disagreeable Emily Gould cloth I was aspiring to. While various women with a vested interest in keeping my eyes and the eyes of men like me focused firmly straight ahead, and not noticing the freedom and energy and fun others are still able to enjoy insist that I am better than men like my friend, that such ought to grow up, etc, that partying and having relations with 23 year old women actually indicates somehow that he is a loser, he is something of a heroic figure to me. He has escaped all of that, and found a sliver of life, and one far more interesting than that in which the vast majority of men are doomed to inhabit, where he thrives at probably close to 90-95% of his absolute social potential (whereas I operate at approximately 9% of my own). He has transformed and transcended such doom as awaited him in a thousand different places. It is one of the more inspiring stories I know.


I was going to address America's political divisions, the demoralization of the citizenry, the wars, and the Tiger Woods situation, but I am going to have to shelve those for another time, if ever. I am very busy, especially with Christmas coming up, and I almost never get to write at this time.

Samuel Daniel--Part IV

(V. ii, 1428-1432) NUNTIUS (a messenger, exhorting the chorus to procure some asps for Cleopatra):

"And looke so long as Cleopatra shall
In after ages live in memory,
So long shall thy cleere fame endure withall,
And therefore though must not my sute denie
Nor contradict my will..."

The loyalty of servants onto death is a common theme in this play.

Hey! Some university in Australia has put out a selection of Samuel Daniel's poems.

(V. ii 1520-5) NUNTIUS (on the asp):

"Well did our Priests discerne something divine
Shadow'd in thee, and therefore first they did
Offrings and worships due to thee assigne,
In whom they found such mysteries were hid,
Comparing thy swift motion to the Sunne,
That mov'st without the instruments that move..."

I think this is quite good poetry. So unburdened and unstrained in its effect! The idea of the world it depicts is at such a great remove from the ordinary scenes and conceptions of my life that I must be scarcely receptive to it most of the time. However modest its power, there is a becalming, organic wholeness in the order it creates from its language that I have never been able to form out of the materials which have informed my own existence.

Another obvious point about this play not being intended to be performed is that there is not actually any, or at least not very much, action in it. The characters mostly just recite long speeches in verse.

Acting is another of those skills/experiences that as I get older I regret not having tried at some point in my development. I never thought much of it as, unless you move in (and are accepted as one of) a circle of fairly serious artistic people, it is not seen as having much value for young people as a pursuit, indeed if anything it is seen as frivolous. This tradition of course goes back a long way--in Mansfield Park for example the young people attempt to amuse themselves by staging a play only to have the master of the house come home unexpectedly and forbid the thing in horror. Now I am kind of fascinated by its possibilities and think it must have beneficial effects on one's social interactions and personality if nothing else. I look at some of the clips, especially of these old stage actors like Olivier on Youtube, here he is Hamlet, here Henry V, now Richard III, now he puts on the blackface and he is Othello, now he is Archie Rice--there must be a kind of refreshment in continually becoming someone else, someone usually greater than oneself but whose embodied greatness also depends in the instant upon your skill in infusing it with corporeal vigor.

Memorial to Samuel Daniel in the church at Beckington, Somersetshire. He is buried in the churchyard. I have not been to this place, though it is the kind of place I would go. I stole the picture off the internet.

The play closes with the chorus chanting a long bit about the Nile and death and the sun and the moon and the desert and the natural and eternal elements of the universe. I like this naturalism. It is highly satisfying to us to put and see put our language to such good use. It may not be why we invented it, but it is a craving that its existence has elicited in some of us. Here is some of the bit about the Nile, whose source was famously unknown throughout most of literary history (V. ii, 1702-11):

"And turn thy courses so,
That sandy Desarts dead,
(The world of dust that craves
to swallow thee up all)
May drinke so much as shall
Revive from vastie graves
A living greene which spred
Far florishing, may gro
On that wide face of Death,
Where nothing now drawes breath."

Eventually I am going to have to admit that my writing and insights are not as good as other people's are because they are just better and more intelligent than I am, but I am as yet still clinging to the hope that the circumstances of my life at the moment are handicapping me in such a way that someday when I am freed from them will bring me back to some parity with other people. My daily time for reading or writing or watching movies or whatever comes in extremely small increments, often late at night when I am really too tired to concentrate you know. Going to the bathroom is a opportunity to maybe read 7 pages or so of something (a goal nonethelessly frequently interrupted before it is accomplished. Here is another time where I can possibly watch 43 minutes of a movie. Oh, bother, there are no excuses. There are no excuses. There are no excuses. We are exactly what we are and if we really were what we want people to think of us as we would be those things too.

If you do a search for Cecil Seronsy, who wrote a book about Daniel that I checked out of the library and referred to in an earlier post, this blog is the #8 item--perhaps it will be higher after this post. Here is the #1 item; the contents of five boxes containing the academic and personal effects of the man's life. I like the photograph. This country was once full of people who were carrying that same basic style, for better or for worse. They're all pretty much gone now. The Daniel book was the only one Seronsy finished, at age 59. The flap on the back of it states that the professor is at present engaged in preparing a book on Shakespeare, but evidently this was never completed. He wrote his PhD thesis on Daniel also. Maybe scholars do look over this guy's class notes from 1962 or his masters-degree course papers from the 1930s. It isn't really sad in itself any more than life is sad. I think it is nice that all this stuff was preserved. I bet they threw him a swell party in '73 when he retired, with lots of drinking and smoking and literary references, who knows, maybe a few pretty English major girls in bell bottoms were there too. Who could ask for anything more?

Suicide Rates of American and British Artistic Figures

Unless I am forgetting, or am unaware of, a whole lot of Brits, the disparity is quite striking. The American side has Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S Thompson, John K O'Toole (the guy wrote The Confederacy of Dunces), Kurt Cobain, not to mention the various people like Edgar Allen Poe and Jim Morrison who drank themselves to death by the age of 40. Contrariwise the only British suicides I can think of offhand are Virginia Woolf and the singer from Joy Division. A brief internet search--I don't have the time or the fire for a longer right now--for literary suicides turns up three more American writers of some repute: Vachel Lindsay (second to last words: "I took Lysol"), Hart Crane (jumped overboard from a ship sailing from Havana to New York), and Sara Teasdale (pills; also once dated Vachel Lindsay). (--I need to verify these from some of my real books--BS/PW) I must be missing some big names on the British side, but I can't think of whom. Byron is often considered to have grown weary of life and willed his own end after a fashion, but I don't consider exposing oneself carelessly or indifferently to potential hazard to be on the same level as deliberately ingesting castor oil or settling into the bathtub with a carton either of vodka or razor blades, with no intention of ever coming out of it. I am limiting my inquiry to Britain and America because I am not familiar with a large enough sample of suicides from other societies to make a meaningful comparison. My impression is that writers and artists from the strange and (to me) endlessly fascinating lands of the former Austrian Empire had a unusually high number of strangely circumstanced deaths, including some suicides, but I would have to examine the case further. The same with Russia; in both instances the impulse of the artists to do themselves in I would suspect derives from rather different causes than those which drive Americans to the same.

What would explain the difference though between England and America? One thing that strikes an American student of British culture is that British writers and artists seem more naturally to have genuine lifelong friends, belong to literary circles, etc, and maintain them throughout life in a way that Americans don't. The American writer by comparison seems really isolated, far more likely to spend the bulk of his life among people who will know absolutely nothing of how he thinks, what his interests are, what he does. Despite the griping about the culture (and the food and the weather and the attractiveness of the girls) and the iconoclastic/rebel stance that is not uncommon for prominent British artists to make, in reality the traditions and artistic history of the country, until very recently anyway, had a stronger and more effectively consoling presence in the collective life--in the use of the language and routines of national life alone if nothing else--than anything that seems to be accessible to their American counterparts. Enough of it, anyway, to ward off total despair, which is the emotion, I would suspect, that is necessary for people to actually kill themselves. The suicidal American writer, I would posit, is writing to and for an audience whose existence is figuratively much more in doubt; the common traditions and culture are too weak to support an intellectual understanding of any degree of intensity between two people without an uncommon amount of good fortune and personal compatibility to such an extent as is hard to find. This type of mental environment will undoubtedly drive a person to despair.

Whenever someone asks me (in an imaginary conversation--I never have real conversations) why I do not kill myself, for purely philosophical considerations, given the state of my mind, value to society, etc, which would seem to argue in favor of it, my main thought is that as I did not will myself into being, something else--nature, I will say--did, and I must presume that the intention of this will, whatever it be, and for whatever reason, is that I not kill myself, at least until such time as I will have achieved full mastery over human life and can confidently pass an informed judgement as to whether it requires my continued presence in its drama. I have not earned that privilege. There is also my relentless Social Darwinist conditioning that believes that if a person fails to properly develop his mind, personality and usefulness that it is a just part of his punishment to live every day, for years on end, with the consequences of that neglect, which ought to make him unhappy; however, he has not earned the right to despair.

I apologize for the paucity and general weakness of posts lately. I get very tired late at night, but I have no other time to try and write (long beaches[?]) something...zzzzz