Quarantine Movies I

I know the riots have been going on and of course I considered that perhaps I ought to say something about them, but I don't see any good in trying to write some earnest commentary about this at the moment, especially as I don't perceive that anyone is looking to me for any, so I am going to write about what I want to and presumably whatever I think about these important societal matters will be expressed therein.

I did have a dream the other night that one of my middle aged female social media friends and former top ten crushes, who now seems to be in the vanguard of the revolution, had an appointment to come to my house to help me de-colonize my bookshelves--it's looking like putting up those pictures in the last post might not have been a great idea. I was genuinely apprehensive in the dream that she was going to just set them on fire when she arrived, even though she is a St John's graduate, because she is so ferocious now, at least online. But she was actually very polite when she arrived and we had a nice discussion about the de-colonization process like real adults rather than her telling me to sit down and shut up so she, or somebody else, could educate me, or, even worse, tell me to educate myself. She was also of course only about thirty years old in my dream, so she looked like her lovely old self. So the culture war and its effects are clearly making some impression on me.
 
Now, to the post in progress...

I haven't seen many movies lately. I have too much to do, there are too many people in my house, and they are older now so someone is up late watching TV pretty much every night (and none of them share my taste, or my lists' taste, in entertainment). Also between what my system is generating lately and what is available I've going through a stretch of movies of the sort that I don't like that much, so I haven't been in a hurry to get around to watching them.

Goodbye, Christopher Robin (2017)

This actually is a kind of movie that I do like, and now that I am fifty and have accepted that I am never going to ingratiate myself with any kind of real film-connoisseur crowd, do not even feel guilty or ashamed about liking anymore. It is a slickly produced, emotionally manipulative, middlebrow film set in a (no doubt) impossibly glorious-looking past, in this case England between the wars. Everything in it is beautiful, the language is literate if not ingeniously inventive (at this point I'll take it), and the plot is easy to follow, not devoid of interest, and I would assume must be somewhat historically accurate, since it is not entirely flattering to its subjects. I watched it a second time with the whole family, with the exception of the youngest, and all of the children (ages 8-17) found it comprehensible and/or tolerable, and several of them even claimed they enjoyed it. This is not easy for us to pull off these days.

Every chance to lay on some classic cliched Englishness is seemingly taken. Tea-drinking, cricket-playing, and rose-planting take up much screen time. Young Christopher Robin loves his nanny more than he loves his mother, in keeping with the popular idea of the period. When he goes to his posh public school he is immediately set upon by cruel bullies who continue to torment him for the ensuing ten years.  All of it is highly stylized. Still, take me back to England in 1926 any day (when I say this sort of thing, I mean as a tourist. I would like to visit it for a couple of weeks, ride the trains and drink in the pubs and see classic plays on their early runs and that sort of thing, and then return to my own time).

I don't think the Pooh books are holding up too well in the current age (they certainly aren't showing up on any of the suggested reading lists currently being promoted by the "educate yourself" crowd), even more than other older children's classics. We tried reading some of them with our older children-- sadly, we are so overwhelmed now that we don't do, or at least never finish any, literary reading with the younger ones--and they didn't really take to them, though they liked the Pooh Disney movies, which I remember thinking at the time were not that bad either. I had not known much about the life of A. A. Milne, had not realized that he was a veteran of the First World War, had been at the Somme and so on, and according to the movie he seems to have suffered a pretty severe case of PTSD and become rather withdrawn. He only had the one child. His wife, who was played by a very beautiful actress (Margot Robbie, who is actually Australian), was depicted as rather spoiled, status-seeking, unsympathetic and not especially maternal person for much of the film.

I remember reading once that the murder rate in England sank to historic and almost incredible lows during the 1920s--something like 12 in the entire calendar year of 1928--but I don't remember the book I read that in and I am not finding anything to corroborate that number in a quick internet search. But my impression from the many books I have read set in and about that time over the years is that it was an unusually tranquil era.

Tidy Endings (1988)

This was a made for TV film (HBO) about the AIDS crisis. It was written by and stars Harvey Fierstein, a longtime New York theater person and actor, who was in his 30s at the time. It is more like a play, and may have originally been written as such. I think it would work a lot better as a play in a very intimate (100 people or less) setting, because most of it is two characters in a New York apartment talking through their pain and anger following the death by AIDS of a character with whom both of the leads knew as lovers, one as the deceased's ex-wife, the other as the same sex partner he later moved on to when he embraced his dominant inclination, the intensity of which would be much more vivid in a live setting. On TV it's easier for someone like me who never had any visceral connection to the AIDS catastrophe--in truth at the time I was barely aware that it was even going on--to get distracted and find fault with the writing and what strikes me from my vantage as a grouchy middle-aged man with a lot of children as immaturity and selfishness in the gay lover character. But I do think it would be good as a play.

Conflict (1973) 

A.K.A The Catholics. Another made for TV movie, British I think. This belongs to a fairly extensive genre I didn't know existed until recently, Martin Sheen Catholic movies. This is set in a remote monastery in Ireland where the day to day life of the monks is, certainly compared to our time, pretty pre-modern, though they do have electricity, I think. I am reminded of how old-fashioned and civilized life in Europe comes across to well into my own lifetime. Anybody you run across in a school or religious institution or other profession requiring a formal course of education actually has a quite solid educational foundation and can call on it readily when talking to other adults of the same background. It's incredible. That was the main pleasure of this movie, the plot of which concerned the monastery's rebellious act of reverting to the Latin mass against the dictates of Vatican IV and the envoy sent from Rome to impose discipline on the order. Vatican IV is not a misprint, the story is nominally set in the future, roughly around the year 2000, but the cars, the clothes, the televisions, the telephones, the hair, the roads, and everything else are exactly as they were in Ireland in 1973, so imagining that this is taking place anywhere remotely proximate even to the 1990s is pretty much impossible to anybody who was alive at that time.

The Ghost in the Darkness (1996)

Not much to say about this, I thought it was completely boring and without interest. It's set sometime in the late Victorian age in colonial Africa and is about an Englishman trying to build a railroad bridge but the project was disrupted by some vicious and practically unkillable who kept breaking into the camp and mauling and eating the workers. No spark about it whatsoever. Didn't like it.

Bookshelf Pictures

I have noticed a number of people during the quarantine are posting pictures of their bookshelves. This seemed like something I could do, and I psyched myself up for the task by saying that if other people's bookshelves are of interest to the internet reading public, surely mine must be to someone. My bookcases are scattered over several rooms throughout the house and are not terribly organized, but there are some basic themes running through them.

1 & 2. This is the main bookcase of the house, and the largest, in what is now something of a front sitting room, where the children practice their musical instruments and there is a round table in the middle where people could read books and newspapers if anyone did such things anymore. The first photo is the left side of this bookcase. It has a number of St. John's books in it, including a set of the Great Books itself across the top. You can see a few Harvard Classics, though I don't make an especial point of collecting those, next to the Anthony Powells on the third shelf from the bottom. There are also a few Norton Anthologies and Foreign Language dictionaries and other reference books here. The bottom two shelves are for kind of small books with ugly covers that can fit on them.

The right side of this bookcase. On the top is the set of I.W.E. encyclopedias whose reading list forms the basis of my other blog. Just below that is the eclectic "World's Greatest Literature" set from the 30s which I have had since I was a teenager (I am still missing 2 of the set of 20 though). The bottom shelf contains a bunch of atlases and large art and travel picture books that no one looks at anymore, including me, though most of these I have had since my childhood/young adulthood and I used to look at them all the time. The third row from the top is where I stick all of my clunky clothbound 900 page 1950s era books.

3. This is in the living room. The television (not visible) sits on top of this. This bookcase was in my grandparents' basement forever, and it appears in family pictures going back at least to the 1940s, before they moved to the house they lived in when I knew them. When they had it it was full of bestsellers and book of the month club selections, which I didn't keep. I preserve it exclusively for hardcover books, mostly literature, printed, if not necessarily written, from the 20s to the 50s. There are a lot of my Modern Library books in here, including most of the "Giants", though I don't on the whole make a point of keeping all of those together.

4. Also in the living room, though in somewhat of a dark corner. This is probably the nicest bookcase I have, as a piece of furniture. This holds mostly smaller Modern Library books with one shelf of Loeb Classics and a few other old similarly shaped classic type books, small blue Oxford editions and the like. The radio on top was my grandfather's, AM only. He used to listen to it in his basement in the 70s, and presumably had been doing so for years before that, in the afternoons when he drank beer. Sometime in the early 80s he got cable TV down there and didn't listen to the radio as much in the afternoons anymore. At some point within the last decade I plugged it in to listen to the baseball games before I gave in and paid for my sons to be able to watch them on TV, and it stilled worked. It's very loud and clear actually, and the static had that whirligig 1950s time capsule quality.

5. The whatnot. This is a pretty starchy set of literary classics that my wife found set out in a box by the side of a woodland road some years back. Most of the volumes are things I either already have or am probably never going to read, though there are a couple that I might use someday. In truth at the time I think she likely got them with this piece of furniture in mind, and they do contribute something to the dignity of the room.

6. This cabinet is built into the wall in the corner of the dining room, and was probably intended to display cups and dishes. I keep a lot of my newer paperbacks in here, Penguin Classics and the like, as well as other newer (post-1990) sets, the Oxford Illustrated Dickens and Jane Austen sets are here, and newer Modern Library and Everyman's. The first four volumes of Knausgaard are here. I liked those enough that I would like to get around to finishing the series, which I have now had a several years' hiatus from, someday. There are a number of late 90s/early 2000s era tourist guidebooks here as well which I am not quite ready to get rid of yet, though it might be a substantial step forward in my development to do so.

7. This is kind of an extra shelf of my wife's in the front hallway. Her Greek and Latin collection is here along with a bunch of her occupational binders and notebooks.

8. On the staircase landing. Mostly old children's books on the top two shelves that none of my children have ever read, but that I am holding onto just in case either of my daughters, now 5 and 8, should take an interest in them. The third shelf has a motley collection of serious books (I see Ulysses, and a Euclid, and The Great Gatsby and maybe Hemingway) that are either second copies or couldn't be fit in anywhere else. The bottom shelf are photo albums, which we stubbornly kept up making with film prints up to about 2010, after which we succumbed to modernity. 

9. Another extra shelf in the ill-lit, narrow upstairs hallway. I had to reach out my hand against the opposite wall just to get a blurry partial picture. This has a lot of second copies of St John's books, gift books I've never read, gifts I've gotten my children that they've never read, a Smiths biography, a circa-2000 guide to literary agents that I have no idea why I am still keeping. The most disorderly shelf in the house.

10. A small shelf in my bedroom that contains movie/entertainment books, sports books, school yearbooks, travel guidebooks that even predate the ones downstairs, notebooks with my manuscripts from when I used to write, my wife's St. John's manuals--even I did not keep those.

11 & 12. These are boxes piled up in the sitting room with books I have no shelf space for. A lot of them are full of children's books that people have gleefully dumped on us over the books and that frankly I think we are going to have to get rid of, though around three or four of them are the books I got in New York last summer and that I need to be able to see because I cannot remember what is there, and I have already ordered one book this spring from the internet that I had forgotten I had on hand because I couldn't see it. 

The new shelf is going to be in this corner. It is supposed to be one of our quarantine projects. My wife has great plans for the design and paint scheme. I honestly just want to be able to see the books. I don't care what color the shelves are.

I am of course having a lot of mixed, inconsistent, what have you, opinions regarding the ongoing pandemic lockdown, though if I were to try to write about them tonight I wouldn't be able to get this posted, so I won't do it tonight. I am as usual unable to be in complete lockstep agreement, not least emotionally, with the educated east coast people, though God knows I would be so much happier if I could think and feel as intensely and clearly and rightly as they do, and go to bed every night knowing I was one of those lucky guys that the angry liberal women I have always loved were not angry at, but held up as a one in a thousand example of righteous progressive virtue. "That Bourgeois Surrender...he gets it," they would sigh with perhaps a barely perceptible heaving of the bosom as they lifted the wine glass to...yes, well I had better stop and explain myself more clearly in a future post...

Notes on Current Events

The most recent mass emotional trauma to convulse the internet was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. I wasn't going to offer any commentary on it because I am not intensely invested in the political aspect of the matter on either side, and everyone has already weighed in on it at great length, though without saying anything that is novel or interesting to me at this time in my life. In addition, given my life experience, or lack thereof, and position in society, I wasn't able to regard the controversy and all of the feminine rage being expressed as having anything to do with me. However while the immediate fervor of the days during the process has died down, it engulfed so much of the professional/college graduate social media conversation for several weeks and continues to influence it, that I thought I should try to make some note of my impressions in the case.


I have written several times that the idea of a Supreme Court made up of partisans whose opinions on cases will be predictable 90% or more of the time based on political leaning does not make any sense to me. The point of having it is not supposed to be merely to produce desired outcomes for one party or another but to subject legal questions and disputes to wise and considered judgment producing at times unexpected insights and decisions. This seems obvious, but this is not how the more energetic partisans who drive political discourse think about it at all.


Now the mid-term elections are approaching and I am least am being bombarded at all hours of the day with dire warnings that the Republicans must be defeated at all costs or unimaginably terrible things, evidently far worse even than the hell most people are already living in, are going to befall the country. I don't disbelieve this, and I certainly wish that Donald Trump were not the president. I did not vote for him, and even if the Democratic candidate in 2020 were to make skinning straight white men alive one of the campaign planks my conscience as currently manipulated would still probably demand that I vote for a third party candidate so as not to be 100% complicit in the dreadful consequences for everyone else that will doubtless follow upon a Trump re-election. The problem with all this of course is that for all Trump's awfulness the result that defeating him and his party will bring at present is the ascension to power of a Democratic coalition that appears to be out of its mind, and so hell-bent on revenging and punishing anybody who might fit the profile of a Trump supporter, that this prospect is actually more disheartening to me than even Trump is. Trump is one person who supposedly is not very organized, does not know what he is doing, and is hated by everyone who is either competent or important. This is admittedly disturbing but he will likely be gone in ten years and I doubt given the massive amount of opposition to him among powerful interests that he will be able to abolish the constitution and establish some kind of dictatorship. If anything his enemies seem almost equally likely to do this in the name of preventing someone like Trump from ever being elected again.


Kavanaugh himself seems like somebody I would probably not like if I knew him. I am not sure if jealous would be the exact word to describe the real nature of the feelings I had towards him apart from whatever popularity he had with girls, which seems like it may not have been as high as what it would have appeared to be from such a vantage as I would have had as a youth. It would have been nice to have grown up with a little more wealth and with a somewhat clearer vision of how to successfully embark on a career more in keeping with my self-perception but I got to go to pretty good schools and I was probably even handsome enough to have achieved most of my fairly modest social dreams if I had had any personality at all. I have no idea whether he is "qualified" to sit on the Supreme Court or not. The only Supreme Court Justice I have any personal experience with is David Souter, who lives near me and whom I have run across a couple of times and had occasion to speak to and to hear speak just in passing. My fleeting impression in these instances was that even in the casual exchange he spoke a very clear, precise English, with excellent diction, "proper words in proper places" such as I at least have not heard in the past twenty years. My wife and her family speak in a clipped, direct 1920s-1940s-ish idiom that when they are on is delightful as well, but the polish and fineness of Souter's speech is quite striking to come upon in one's day to day life. This may well have nothing to do with qualifications either, but it informs my idea of what a Court justice ought to sound like. I have also known a number of people over the years who went to public high school with him, and there does not appear to have been so much as a hint of scandalous, Kavanaugh-esque behavior attaching to that part of his life. Indeed to make the suggestion among people who knew him at that age generally elicits a laugh, so far-fetched apparently is the mere idea of such a thing.


But, (apart from partisan politics generally), the question hovering over this whole controversy was,  how seriously do you take the problem of sexual misconduct/criminality, and how angry are you about it? the correct answers to which of course are, Extremely seriously, and, I am furious about it, so much so that I cannot tolerate that any plausible suggestion of an instance of its having taken place at any time in the past should not have some serious consequences. Naturally I lack the full intensity of rage and enthusiasm for retribution that the times call for. Given the disparity between the number of alleged rapes and sexual assaults (and the fury these arouse) and the official police statistics on these crimes (which indicate that perpetrators can get away with their villainy 99% or more of the time in some jurisdictions), it would seem that either the legal system as a whole needs to revamp the entire way that these offenses are defined and prosecuted to satisfy the activist left and, if not send men to prison in enormous numbers, at least bar them from holding any kinds of lucrative or influential employment (what other retribution can there be?), or eventually the rhetoric and hysteria are going to lose a lot of their power, if they aren't already. I, and doubtless many other men, have long passed the point where the most obvious means of self-preservation from this ongoing crisis, for college women at least is, "how about not going to these damn frat-type parties?" But given the response any time this is suggested, one must come to the conclusion that the men at these events who are getting girls to do shots with them and go to their bedrooms at 2 in the morning--something that the overwhelming majority of men never experience--where they proceed to behave too aggressively and take things too far, are comparatively just too desirable and high status for this to be realistically considered. The object I suppose is to train these highly sought after men to behave better, or more in line at least with what the women are looking for, but what incentive is there for these guys, the absolute pick of the litter in their social worlds, to change their behavior when it has given them everything most normal boys would like to have whether they admit it or not, has done so pretty much forever, and continues to do so even in these supposedly more enlightened times. People complain that they are entitled. Well of course they are entitled. What does anybody imagine these kinds of parties are for? Why do people think that young men endure the ridiculous rituals they endure, such as drinking other people's vomit and eating grapes out of  another guy's bunghole, to get admitted to exclusive fraternities and other social clubs, for the opportunity to perform community service at a higher level? Of course not, they want access to good career prospects and to the most desirable women, that other (usually lesser) men pointedly do not have, and will never have, which is, while not a violent matter, a pretty serious one to many in the latter group as far as certain of their ultimate life prospects are concerned.


None of this, I will be told, is to the point, but unfortunately I cannot see how this is not at all times a substantial part of the point. The bad behavior, though I believe (primarily based on reading novels and memoirs from the 1960s and 70s, mainly by morally oblivious men) it to be less prevalent overall in current society, continues generation after generation among a subset of the population because for the most part it is from the male point of view rewarded by young women as far as attaining its objects goes. The movement over the past few decades to put some restraint on heterosexual male entitlement, ego, conduct, and in much of the population their comparative power and wealth, has been quite successful but I have got to think it may be approaching its reasonable limits. I am, I think, in my behavior pretty much the model of an inoffensive person and causing anybody trauma is the last thing I would want to do but still, as I get older and can see the end of the active part of my life at least in increasingly clear sight, the main regrets that I have are not having been able to more aggressively (though not violently or criminally) go after things, experiences, relationships that I would have liked to pursue. It's a big hole in my life and to have done it would have required risk, which people ultimately demand of you before giving you any respect anyway, and likely would have involved being offensive in some way to somebody. There are built-in conflicts to life, and certainly to most forms of masculine ambition, which if you forego in youth has the tendency to wither you before your time. I don't know how many more generations full of men with no role or positive expectations to fulfill, and consequently no fire or talent for living we can seriously expect to endure.


Yes, I know, this still has nothing to do with the topic in question, the women that Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted 35 years ago and whether this should have disqualified him from sitting on the court. If the accounts were true, given today's environment, and the circumstance that he does not appear to be regarded as such a superlative legal genius that there might be cause to overlook some (quibbles?--there is another word I am looking for here but I cannot think of it. I cannot remember words anymore), I would probably think it prudent to move on to someone else, though Donald Trump's own acknowledged behavior, to name but one example, seems to be considerably worse, and his followers don't care, or don't care very much, so why would he do that? But I don't have any cause to say whether they (the accounts) are true or not in the exact way and using the exact terminology which was used to recount them. So I wouldn't do it.

Thoughts Inspired By Uproar Over Recent British Vote*

*I refuse to say "Brexit".

As with so many political things, I had, like Levin in Anna Karenina, no especial emotional investment in whether the UK remained in the European Union or not, but, as you know if you have any social connections with the educated cosmopolitan internationalist crowd, they are rather enraged and seemingly fearful at this development as if it marked an ominous devolutionary movement along the road to Progress that they all seem to have seen as very clearly marked out for the achieving. Certainly this view of the world has a strong appeal to me--I devour magazines and other media detailing the lives of its adherents, and at one time I very likely would have counted myself among their number in spirit. However as this cosmopolitan lifestyle requires most preferably a substantial amount of money, or at the very least good modern credentials and education, to take full part in it, none of which I have or am at this point likely to obtain, it naturally holds less meaning for me as something that must be promoted or preserved as time goes on. I have never been much of an EU enthusiast because of what I took to be its homogenizing influences, though these did not seem to me quite as pronounced in England as in countries like France or Italy or Spain, which were formerly much more worlds onto themselves and quite foreign places that have to my view been pushed into becoming more like the United States and England and Germany more than these latter countries have had to become like them. The increased freedom of movement for work and travel purposes has been wonderful for people in the traditionally poorer countries and the upper, best-educated ranks of the wealthier countries, including many Americans, but the benefits to the more ordinary people in these societies of the constant flow of people into what used to be considered "their" countries and correlating constant changes in the social contract are obviously starting to come under question.

The enlightened media, and its sympathizers in the social media universe, have not for the most part been shy about expressing its horror at the result of the vote and what they took to be the motivations behind it (namely economic ignorance and racism, two of the deadliest sins of the new social order), and by extension their apparent inability to guide a too great segment of the electorate to think and vote properly on important issues. Seeing as a great part of the resentment against the establishment as I see it is stirred up by the way all kinds of stories are reported, and what is emphasized in them, I wonder if there are not some changes in the presentation of certain stories that might assuage some of the hysteria which is currently afflicting much of the electorate in what used to be known as the advanced countries:

1. I know it is boring, but perhaps run a story once in a while about some ordinary person who actually paid off their student loans, maybe with some detailed explanation of how they did it over a period of years.

I have a lot of questions about the current way student loans are administered--I don't understand, apart from the necessity of pandering to various forms of greed, why it is impossible, for example, to just go back to the system that was in place when I was in school, which was low interest government administered vanilla loans with clear and consistent repayment schedules--but nonetheless the overwhelming majority of people still don't default on their loans, especially if they went to any kind of legitimate school, but you certainly would not know this from reading The New York Times. People below the upper middle class in general I think need more detailed straightforward explanation, not necessarily negative, but something like in the manner that magazines like the old Saturday Evening Post or Edward Bok's Lady's Home Journal used to do, from their media about practical matters and how to navigate education, find careers suitable to their abilities, how to work effectively in general, not get taken advantage of financially, and so on. It seems clear that current media is not helpful in this way and is promoting a state of widespread fear, pessimism and panic with regard to these areas,

2, Two, related to this, it might be helpful sometime to run a story about an ordinary person who got laid off and whose life was subsequently not ruined; houses were not lost, children did not end up in jail for selling meth or abandoned single mothers, the middle aged ex-worker did not develop debilitating health problems but was able to carry through, and so on. Surely there are instances where this has happened. I don't want to make light of the real problems people in this situations can face, and this is something that I often worry about it in secret with regard to myself, though the people around me have made it very clear to me that it in the event of such a thing happening, my innate proclivities towards weakness and emotional collapse will not be indulged, and I will be expected, as a 46 year old (one person even went so far as to say 'white') man with a college degree and six children, to conduct myself in a manner appropriate to what used to be understood by that station regardless of whether some sector of contemporary society would diminish it or not. There is something to be said for maintaining an attitude of dignity in the face of adversity that the media could promote more effectively, and with better results than I think has come out of this last decade or so. The  Times, Post, Atlantic, etc, seem to love to go to these towns abandoned by the modern economy and wallow in how pathetic and poor and bereft of dignity and self-respect all of the people left behind in them are.

3. It is clear that in the British election, the implied threat that if people did not vote the way the establishment wanted, they would basically be thrown into poverty almost as a punishment, backfired to some extent. This implication of punishment for incorrect voting is one of the more revolting characteristics of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate by the way, because there is no pretense that she cares about the actual horrible consequences that are going to fall upon the deceived voter, it's intended purely as a threat to vote for her--or else. Something of that same dynamic looks to have been at work in the British vote. The instinctive response to this kind of threat for many people, especially men d'un certain age, is to think, jeez, if it's gotten to this state that I have to support this unappealing program or direction in which everything is moving or face imminent ruin than perhaps we had better return at once to a state of things where this was not a danger and we had more agency over the course of our lives. But this mentality is a blind spot that many people in power seem to have, or are at least dismissive of.

4. I don't know how the establishment's/media's message with regard to mass immigration can be massaged to make it more palatable to their antagonists among the backward elements of the native populace, though as it looks more and more like they are never, in the near future anyway, going to relent on their demands for welcoming endless numbers of immigrants into the western nations, and are willing to fight anyone opposed to it to at least the metaphorical death, especially if they have any sense that racism is an influence in the opposition, they might want to try. There is an emphasis and tone in most current pro-immigration stories in mainstream media that are going to be off-putting to some degree, either because the immigrant(s) under consideration is written about in a far more respectful or admiring way than the writer would ever express towards a non-millionaire or high level creative/knowledge class native citizen, especially if the native citizen is white, or the premise of the reporting is completely phony, like the story I mentioned that ran in my local paper a few years ago about a pro-immigrant rally that was accompanied by a photo of a person everyone in town knows to be arrogant and disdainful of most of her fellow citizens gleefully hugging an African refugee, or an article that ran recently in the New York Times about Muslim teenagers celebrating Ramadan against the backdrop of the Orlando shootings that was basically A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with Syrians taking the place of the Irish-Germans. I actually liked the article, and thought it would be nice if it were so. But is it so? The modern propagandist is often handicapped by his or her inability either to share and express the enthusiasm for America, or the vision of it, which many immigrants still really do have, or to feel an obligation to promote its adoption and an accompanying respect for the established citizenry, at least publicly, among the new arrivals where it is perhaps lacking. Apart from the question of how many people should be continually coming into these countries in the first place there is a conflict in many western countries over whether there are norms of behavior prevalent in the existing societies that immigrant populations should be expected to conform to in some degree, or what those norms even are, that as far as large swathes of the less-influential segments of the public are concerned, are not even being addressed.

I sat up until 3:53am on Saturday night to write this post.     

Videos from the Czech Republic

Monday evening--I had a good weekend, but now I am back in an old end-of-holiday, remembering-all-that-I-have-lost kind of melancholy mood, and wishing I were back in Prague eating goulash and dumplings and drinking beer, afterwards going out onto the dark, cold hush of the Sunday night streets there on the way back to the train, or perhaps to one of the special mysterious cigarette kiosks that were only open from 10pm to midnight on Sunday... 

Tuesday Evening--Everybody wanted to be City in those days. Everybody who mattered to me anyway. Even though in the 80s and early 90s, American cities, or at least the ones in the Northeast where I lived, were, especially in retrospect, not I think what most people really wished them to be. People affected to love the edginess and the constant threat of crime, which I think in many cases they mistook for part of the innate character of urban living; this is perhaps true to a certain extent, but not to the extent that prevailed in most northern cities by 1990. I read a query on the internet written by a younger person the other day asking why in the world people endured the now infamous inconveniences imposed by the circumstances of the at the time apparently permanent crime wave of the post 1965 era, such as not walking around after dark, barricading oneself in his or her apartment, being resigned to periodic robberies of your car or your person, and so on. In the first place, popular opinion at the time held that nothing really could be done about it, short of implementing the kinds of extreme policies regarding policing and imprisonment that finally have been implemented in our time, which was a path many people, myself included, were reluctant to go down then even in the face of massive violent crime rates. For once such large systems are in place as sources of employment or other forms of wealth acquisition, they are difficult to dismantle, and as they also face constant pressure to maintain and even grow the revenue flowing into them, they will inevitably turn their energies in directions that would have been considered intrusive and totalitarian at one time. But in the second place the love that many people have for great cities, or some idea of them, and the desire to live in one if it is at all possible for them to do so will inspire them to put up with a lot for the privilege, even when the conditions and atmosphere presently ascendant are not those of our literary or artistically informed imagination. And besides, in my day, especially if you were a man, having grown up anywhere within the limits of a great city--and it seemed the more notorious for crime and violence the better, in most instances-- made you conspicuously cool in any environment, such as college, or an ex-pat setting, that primarily consisted of the suburban-bred, the contrast with the males of whom in verve, dash, mental quickness and lightness, style of dress, and so on was so pronounced that after a few minutes in such company, any bland or timid suburban boy who still imagined he would be the recipient of any willing, free female love in the immediate future in that social circle was only embarrassing himself and establishing his inferiority further by the demonstration of such delusion...

Wednesday Evening--What I mean to say is that many intelligent but not phenomenally well-connected or wealthy people had desires for a particular kind of city lifestyle that American cities thirty years ago were not really equipped to deliver in any kind of broad way. It was necessary, in a sense, to be cooler (or at least wealthier) to get what good things there were to get out of them than it should have been. I don't know whether this state of affairs has improved in the interval or not. Most people who were not devastatingly cool in this way developed the habit of looking at the cities of old Europe and finding a model of urban living that appealed more to their aesthetic and self-image. This was certainly the case with me, especially with regard to the more egalitarian and less international corporate-finance oriented (i.e. cheaper) cities on the continent. Perhaps the amenities and cultural entertainments--restaurants, concerts, nightclubs, operas, festivals, transit, museums, bookstores, intellectual societies, etc--in a place like Prague are second-rate overall, but one can, or at least could, live a ten minute subway ride from and partake of all of these activities on a regular basis, and feel like one is living a version of a cultured urban life, which seems to be difficult for the person at a certain level to realize in America without a fortunate confluence of circumstances...     

Thursday Evening--I saw a post on a Very Concerned Traditional Serious Christian blog in the wake of the Irish gay marriage vote last night in which an apparently respectable source was quoted with the hint of a shrug that the game had been up in that country for a while; that indeed, when he had spent some time there in 1990, young Irish girls were more than willing to fornicate with American tourists. Oh my God! Why are these glorious aspects of the world never revealed to me, who has no sense of sexual morality and for whom the whole trajectory of life, had I been able to enter this world of willing Irish girls in 1990, would have been different, I cannot help but assume in a positive way. Meanwhile these poor male Christian writers, who want nothing more than to be chaste and virtuous, and to promote the same qualities in women, cannot seem to avoid coming into contact with an endless parade of horny girls signaling carnal interests to them (to say nothing of the scourge of pornography that has already gutted the souls and ability to form mature relationships of a substantial portion of what was formerly Christendom). These poor guys should have traveled with me when I was young. I probably could have backpacked around all of the most celebrated tourist destinations in Europe and the rest of the world for the entirety of my twenties without encountering a single wild party or nightclub or stray woman in a park desirous to cajole me or be cajoled by me into an immoral relation with her (for free, that is), even though that would have been all I was really looking for the whole time. But I guess the problem is that these Christians and preachers are somehow sexy guys. When you are a sexy guy temptations and offers to betray your moral system will inevitably make their way to you no matter how powerfully or authoritatively assert your antipathy to them. When you aren't a sexy guy you can leave the house every day open to engaging in any indecency attractive to you that opportunity may present but, almost as if God were shielding you from being able to commit the sins you have not got the moral sense to be repulsed at the prospect of, the opportunities never do present...

Friday Morning--As any dedicated reader of mine knows, I have been struggling over the past few years to feel the excitement and righteousness in the ongoing gay rights ascendancy that seems to come so naturally to everybody else, so the Irish vote promised to be a good test of my development in this area. When the results came in and the forces of Good had carried the day, my response was...ehhch. I must confess, my heart sank a little, in anticipation of all the triumphant braying that it was inevitable must ensue. I had obviously been holding out hope that some large body politic somewhere that included some cool people might say 'Um, no. I love you brother, but be serious now, two men doth not a marriage make'. But evidently this is not going to happen. People will doubtless think, 'What is wrong with this guy? What's it to him if I want to marry someone who doesn't meet some antiquated heteronormative standard?'...It should be nothing to me, I agree, and if I could be excused from being expected to take it seriously as marriage and didn't have to be subjected to quite so much pro-gay sarcasm and moral instruction (which is at least every bit as grating and obnoxious as that coming from religious conservatives) I would probably be more broadly sympathetic on all of these issues. At bottom, I know that for me this is all really a struggle over who is going to lead and hold authority in public life with regard to tone of discourse and standards of behavior and whose interests are prioritized and whose aren't and I am obviously not really happy that a kind of aggressively overt homosexuality has become the distinct force in these areas that it has...  

Czech version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" from a to me interesting-looking movie called Rebelove that featured Czech versions of a number of 1960s American pop hits. As far as I can tell, this scene appears to feature people leaving the country in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet crackdown. Since many people did this, and at the time it seemed likely they would never be able to return, it is kind of a poignant scene.

Tramvaje circa 1995. I don't expect you to watch this.

Pankrac Metro! My old station! The underground part actually looks exactly the same. It looks like they have built a kind of modern shopping mall with fountains and all on the street level above the station. In my time there were merely a bunch of motley stalls set up selling fruit, cheap clothing, flowers and suchlike, a throwback to the Communist era.

Goofy Czech version of "King of the Road" from 1970.

Friday Evening: I have a very memory from when I was in Florence, which would have been in 1997. I was at one of the famous sites there, and I remember this middle-aged American man who was standing near me, very affluent-looking, distinctly well-dressed, and as I was lingering near him his two extremely beautiful, expensively-dressed and doubtless expensively educated daughters came up to meet him, and they struck me, who devoted very little energy to thoughts of either domesticity or the future at that time, as the kind of family that was actually worth the trouble, and thought the man must in that moment at least be very happy. I always had an idea from that time that if I had children they must be at least as good-looking and smart as this man's daughters and that we must meet together when they are twenty-three or so in some grand place and that that would be something that would make me happy. I feel in some sense that this is a terrible desire to have, because it puts some kind of pressure on my children to be a certain way that they might not want or be able to be, and that also might be superficial, which would both be wrong. At the same time I feel that this idea I have could actually come true, that we will be able to meet in Florence or Granada or New York or walk the Camino de Santiago and I will be able to do certain things I have always wanted to do and be happy doing them just as I have always imagined...

I noted the days and times when I wrote all of these things because I am frustrated and embarrassed by how infrequently I am able to put up postings. Each dated item represents about a full hour of attempted writing.  

Very Brief Posting About Current Events

I spent nearly two weeks working on a post about Ferguson, et al, and my stance with regard to it, because I felt like I should acknowledge that I was aware of it and thought something about it, even if those thoughts were not as informed or coherent or had as much conviction as most commentators on the situation seemed to require.

I found that I was not really able to write in a natural and human tone about the matter. This was not because I was secretly sympathetic to the police. I have never thought much of the police, have always found there were too many of them and their presence too ubiquitous wherever I have lived in this country, in those places have always felt that their power to do harm far exceeded all of the supposedly wonderful things that were always attributed to them, and never understood the broad liking for them that seems to exist. Especially in New Hampshire it seems to me a far greater likelihood and cause of worry that I or one of my four sons will get caught up in the racket of the criminal justice system for some trifle or behavior that does not intuitively occur to one as being a crime than that any of us are as a matter of rule in imminent danger of being victimized in some particularly violent or horrific way but for modern police practices.

I have always had, compared to other people, a weak sense of morality, of almost anything being absolutely right or wrong, or good or bad, independent of my personal inclinations.  

While I am sympathetic with those who assert that the police are way too heavy handed in the use of lethal force, especially against black people, as in many controversies one is not always readily accepted by the partisans of either side as sharing their position unless he accepts and adheres without doubt or qualm to a number of correlating stances. And as I am much less certain about the absolute truth of some of these, I therefore cannot help but appear to be insufficiently incited by the more fervid advocates of social justice.

Many, many people in this world, including quite a lot who are quite fortunate and privileged in their lives and suffer little in the way of direct oppression, carry within them a store of righteous anger that never fails to impress me. Some of them brim with it just about all the time, while others who are usually jovial enough are able to call it up in a flash when occasion calls for it. In addition to all of the outrages they are angry about, many of these people are angry that other people are not angry in the way they are angry, which mass indifference or pusillanimity they see as a primary obstacle in effecting the changes they desire. Anger, like love, is of course an emotion, and in raw form it is as silly to demand another to spontaneously feel strong anger such as you feel as it is to demand that they feel love in the way that you would have them do so. I suppose the argument is that a moral system can, and ought to be, cultivated through education that is central to a person's waking consciousness, such that, unless he is utterly devoid of natural spirit (though this does seem to be the case with multitudes of modern people, especially Americans) he can be trained to muster up some degree of response or agitation to gross wrongs passing under his nose. It is true that most people, myself included, do not receive a moral education with anywhere near the degree of intensity needed to produce this reaction, however.

I also wonder, and this is purely a conjecture I am throwing out, whether the competitiveness of our society, and the increasing attitude that only the most serious and accomplished practitioners in any area of life really matter, is causing people with weaker levels of anger who are in the main sympathetic to an issue to doubt whether they in fact care anything about said issue, or any other, at all, and certainly whether their tepid sense of outrage could ever be of any use, since even the people who seem to experience all of life as an endless series of crimes against righteousness and possess an endless amount of fire for railing against it appear to be able to effect very little change such that their moral sense is ever satisfied for long, which ultimate satisfaction the non-crusader, doubtless mistakenly, assumes to be the purpose of employing this anger.

The racial aspect of this police and prison culture, the effects of which are obviously multiplied many, many times in black communities, even acknowledging that the violent crime rate is many, many times higher in these communities, is the problem that it is seen as incumbent on white America especially to come to terms with and address. The tone taken in many of these declamations is that this persecution can stop, or be turned off, at anytime if white America decides it wants to do so, at no real cost to it, but that it obstinately refuses to take this just action. From the 'white' point of view, and I think it is pretty safe to say that there is such a thing in general that is distinct from the 'black' point of view, or the 'non-discriminating human in the abstract' point of view, is that the general tenor of life in poor black communities tends to be totally incompatible with--to the point of non-negotiability, in truth--the general tenor of white middle and upper class life (I say general tenor so that those who are comfortable in all places and with all people and with all lifestyles and do not even perceive that there are any differences between them understand that I know and am not talking about them). I do believe this is, all else aside, the main reason why even well-meaning white people cannot achieve more progress in resolving the racial disparities with regard to justice and law enforcement that I do think many of them really do want to see resolved. By incompatible here I mean that there are very few white people, and essentially none with any middle class pretensions, who can handle on a day to day basis the stress that the level of crime, social disorganization, low quality of schools, confrontation in routine interactions, etc, etc, that prevails in many poor black communities. The degree of integration on the part of the white middle class that progressives claim that they want and that we should be achieving will never happen until there can be serious assurance that these problems, whoever's fault they may be, are either resolved or can somehow be subjected to tight social control. Otherwise, I can't see how it is ever going to happen.

Most of the policemen I have had occasion to know in my life (I am, in part, from an Irish family in Philadelphia, and there are policemen among my extended relatives or their spouses or circle of friends) would be considered appallingly racist by anyone in the liberal arts intelligentsia. There is no way to sugarcoat it and it is not even particularly subtle, but describing the form it takes in such a way as to overcome that which the enlightened liberal imagination already has in its head is a little problematic. There is a belief that the kind of nice white people who hate racism and would never work as policemen are hopelessly naive and would have their (the police's) more 'realistic' attitudes towards the black community if they really knew the kinds of things that went on there. Outside of their families and people like themselves, they really don't care about the feelings or perceptions of other people towards them in the same way that sensitive people with high SAT scores who care about the environment and animals and so on do. While I don't think it is difficult for writers and so on to believe this, I think it is hard for them to grasp what it is like to approach life with this kind of mind at every instant of the day.

These policemen when they are sitting around the barbeque grill or in the stands at the little league game or whatever will once in a while go on about their training in firearms and how they could blow your or anybody else's head off from a distance of such and such yards and so on. I don't remember anyone explicitly expressing a desire to do this, whether to black people or anyone else, but some of them didn't seem to mind letting it be known on occasion that they had it in them to do so if circumstances required it.

A number of writers felt called upon in addressing the crisis to expostulate on the various deficiencies and moral vacuity of white people as a collective entity, or blot, I guess, on the face of the earth. Many of the more zealous of these commentators could not easily escape being fingered as belonging to the blot themselves. They doubtless appeal to a certain kind of reader, though I rarely find anything in them that I consider to be insightful as far as what is wrong with me, let alone all of the much smarter and better adjusted white people whom one assumes would be in a better position to effect change than I am. A reporter from the Guardian accused the whites of America of isolating themselves in their cars and crying to the Frozen soundtrack instead of dealing with the world exploding and rising up in a fury all around them (I hate it when they get personal like that). This is a familiar, and old, attack, that white Americans in particular are the world's perpetual sheltered and fragile children, as compared with the seriousness and maturity of, apparently, everybody else. I don't really see this as being true; I think that what is meant is that the white American middle class is always perceived as having more power, if it could rouse itself from its frivolous amusements, to affect political and social change, fight racial injustice, prevent the government from starting wars, throw the bankers and torturers in jail, prevent the establishment of for profit prisons, and so on, than maybe it really does, especially anymore. Outside of a few social issues, the public certainly seems to have lost any kind of moral force as far as being able to constrain the powerful from acting on the most outrageous impulses of greed and injustice and even cruelty. But it strikes me that people seem to be more aware of and upset about these things than they were in the past, it is just that their ability to protest and contend against them has become so feeble.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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