Salvatore's Rhenish Trifles

I'm going to get back to trying to write real articles someday. The time I have to do anything is curtailed ever more, but this must be getting close to its peak. Someday I will wake up and actually have hours and days on end stretching out before me in which I can scribble away to my heart's desire. But I probably won't want to by then because I'll be too told and I'll have even less to say than I do now. Though maybe I will be able to pick up something of the habit of dispassionate reflection again, which I have not been able to indulge in for some years now. 

These are more Michigan pictures, from the other day (and a half) on which we did not go to Mackinac Island.

1. Miniature Golf Sign and (nearly empty) Parking Lot, With Lake Huron in the Background, Mackinaw City. Mackinaw City is kind of a sad tourist city--most honest guidebooks describe it as the place where all the people stay who can't afford to stay on the island. I probably could have coughed up enough to stay on the island but I actually didn't have any choice, since we didn't know we were going there definitely until about two weeks beforehand, by which time everything in a remotely reasonable price range on the island (i.e., less than $250) was booked up. Mackinaw City for some reason does not have a proper grocery store (just a dinky IGA) or any pharmacy at all, which I don't understand. You have to go a good 30 miles away to find those things, and if you have to go at night the trip is in complete darkness, because no one lives up there at all. Northern Michigan almost makes Vermont look populated. At least towns with a streetlight or two are somewhat closer together in the Green Mountain State. 

2. Golf. My children don't play properly or keep accurate score. I don't know whether this means anything. Like most modern parents, whenever my children do not immediately do something the exact way they are supposed to, nor immediately show promise of excellence to boot, I panic and assume they are doomed, if not absolutely to prison, than at least a lifetime of social ostracism and inability to ever have any hope of vocation or self-support.

3. Bathhouse/Snack Bar at Petoskey State Park, on Lake Michigan. Lower Peninsula, about 30 miles west of Mackinaw City. The beach was in an attractive spot, and I thought the shapes on this building looked interesting enough to take a picture of it (there was, for the record, also a good-looking college girl working at the counter, which gives any place a kind of instant respectability that it may otherwise have lacked). The town of Petoskey, which we did not make it into, is one of the places where Ernest Hemingway's family used to vacation when he was a kid, and of course Michigan features in many of his short stories. "Up in Michigan"--I just read it in the bathroom, it's only five pages long.

4. The Lake. A Day at the Beach. Hemingway. What do I think of him? He seems pitiless, which is a useful trait, though oddly rare in American writers, or at least good ones. And his style, with its seeming bluntness--though it is not really blunt, it is more like broad strokes that evoke more dimensions of atmosphere and character than is common in such a style--it really is a form of Cubism translated to writing, though Joyce is too, in a different way. And I do think he is important. With Americans, the question is always "How deep? How close to any essential question of life? Is his language, his philosophy of the sort to be part of the foundation of a great national culture?" I don't have a sense of what the right answers to these questions would be for anybody anymore?

5. Entrance to Motel, Mackinaw City. I think this was an America's Best Inn or something like that. Not great obviously but not bad. Three beds in the room. Very cheap. It had a good pool. Family accommodation.

6. The Breakfast Room. This was an island in the middle of the parking lot. The breakfast was not too good. Among other problems the attendant was the sort of unpleasant soul who flew into a rage if you did anything impertinent like say, ask if there was any more packets of butter when the basket was empty. My wife, who has no tolerance for such behavior whether it comes from above or below on the social scale, refused to go down after the first day, but I of course could not stay away.

7. Over the Bridge, and Zipping Along Lake Michigan's North Shore Now. 

A short (one minute) film of the beach at Petoskey. Nothing much happens in it, but it strikes me as having an impressionistic quality such as I like. Since putting up these kinds of movies seems to be easy I think I want to try to occasionally make some short videos for the site. I don't think people will want to watch or listen to me droning on about anything for 15 minutes (while slouched at my desk unshowered and clad exclusively in underwear) but there are things I can try to do to adopt an internet film persona.

The annual book meme is out where you turn to page 52 of some book and read the 5th sentence. I like to do this with my own book(s), to see how they compare with real books. The selection from Volume 1 is taken from dialogue and is fairly pedestrian: "We had it at home." Volume 2's however is a much more characteristic offering: "She happened to smile right at Erlsegaard as she said this, for it had taken but a few seconds for her to pick him out as the man present who was and always would be hopelessly in love with her, even assuming he had just seen her for the first time that instant."

How about the picks from some other books? Hemingway's Short Stories: "'The marvelous thing is that it's painless,' he said." From "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".

The Anatomy of Melancholy: "Never so much cause of laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen."

Rick Steves' Spain: "You'll raft the river of Barcelonan life past a grand opera house, elegant cafes, retread prostitutes, brazen pickpockets, power-dressing con men, artists, street mimes, an outdoor bird market, great shopping, and people looking to charge more for a shoeshine than what you paid for the shoes." Wow.

King Rat: "When Larkin saw it he smiled through his pain."

Lonely Planet Spain: "It's not that other cities don't have these things." Talking about Madrid. I am not going to Spain any time soon, by the way. That is just where I want to go at the moment so I have a bunch of guidebooks for it sitting on my desk.

Chariots of Fire

This was probably my favorite movie when I was a teenager. I know that I said it was in writing on at least one occasion, though this was more an instance of its being what occurred to me at the moment than the result of long and careful meditation. I don't know how many times I saw it--I would guess within the bounds of four and eight--and even at that age I was exposed to enough criticism to be aware that there was a substantial portion of the intelligent population that immediately recognized it as rubbish. I remember one particularly dismissive reviewer calling it a tribute to the human spirit inspired by Barry Manilow (Here is the actual quote, along with a number of other cold assessments I still remember from that increasingly distant time). Such assured evisceration, especially when combined with the suggestion of a tirelessly combative edginess, always makes an impression on me, for such attitude and clear perception are perhaps what I have always most desperately needed, but have never been able to develop. In spite of these persuasive denunciations, and my increased awareness of the lies and false assurances that the movie continues to put over on unreflective audiences, I find that I still like it. These lies and false assurances were certainly of a nature that I had a pointed hunger for in my adolescence, and doubtless still do now, for in matters of taste nothing ever comes to any kind of resolution with me, and thus I never 'move on' from even the most childish affections.

To address first off some of the more common criticisms, namely that the movie plays loose with the historical facts, that it pretends to be critical of the British ruling establishment of the 1920s and the society they lorded over while offering one of the most highly romanticized depictions of it ever to appear on celluloid, and that any depiction of this odious world as at all attractive is offensive to anyone with the most modestly developed moral sensibility, I have to admit that none of these objections has much resonance with me. Most of the alterations to the historical record are decidedly minor and were made in the service of telling a more interesting story. This has only been done thousands of times in biographical dramas and literary works dating back to The Iliad and the Book of Genesis. I suppose it could be argued that the ready availability to writers of much more accurate historical records in modern times renders the practice of expanding liberally from a basic framework in dramatic works archaic, though I think over-adherence to the exact record in small matters is to miss the point of art; though in the case of Chariots of Fire, and probably most movies, most of the critical disapproval in this area is really aimed at the unpalatable (to the critic) aesthetic or political attitude in the service of which the alteration was made. With regard to the second point, it is true that such criticisms of upper class attitudes as are to be found in the movie have more of the air of an intra-fraternal disagreement than an assault from a representative of the legitimately aggrieved. That is the personality of the movie. The two main characters are highly talented and strong-willed, what used to be referred to as 'coming' men. They are certainly developed enough in character, and the society in which they are operating tolerant and flexible enough, that it is impossible they would be entirely crushed by it. The movie depicts a lovely world whose most infuriating quality is not only that not everyone who wants badly to partake of it is able to, but, even more damning, that being left out they are usually unable to reproduce anything resembling its attractive qualities on their own. In a sense the movie serves as a reminder, though I think a pretty gentle one, that some people really are winners, really do make the most of their opportunities and talents, achieve goals and develop into accomplished people who contribute in a positive manner to the character of their society. Though on the other hand perhaps part of the offense is that the movie gives a misleading impression of the glamour of upper class life and the apparent ease, even effortlessness with which the heights of success can be attained, which is one of the primary characteristics distinguishing the second-rate from the first-rate. Nothing that happens in the movie--holding one's one against the snooty elite at Cambridge, leading a serious Christian life that manages to be both noble and unimpeachable, winning gold medals at the Olympics--is presented in a way that seems, or is, inaccessible to the typical middle class audience member, and therein is the film's primary failure, and the reason it cannot hold the interest of sophisticated people who operate at a world class level in at least one area of life (though usually once you attain that status in one pursuit, the difficulty of mastering others appears to be considerably reduced). Great things are hard, they are rare, their secrets are frustrating and obscure. To give the impression that they are otherwise is to misrepresent such real value to the human race as they have. And above all else, the person of middling intelligence and accomplishment must know this, if he is to avoid being an even greater buffoon than he already is.

All that acknowledged, whenever I come back to thinking about the actual film it seems to me to have something in it more than a bunch of pretty but empty gestures designed to manipulate the anglophilic and conservative tendencies of half-educated people. There is a good deal in it that suggests how to live a more vital life, how to maximize one's potential, what kind of people to seek out and surround oneself with, if possible, how to offer something to society on your own behalf. The movie covers a short time in the early part of much longer lives of two dead and, were it not for this movie, largely forgotten men who lived now close to a century ago, culminating in a pair of races that lasted 10 and 47 seconds, respectively, but every life depicted in any detail in the film is presented as purposeful and worth having lived, and I have always found that very reassuring, even though by the standards of the most rigorous modern thought this is almost certainly a lie.

Some footage of the real Liddell and Abrahams in their gold-medal winning races in 1924:

I haven't been able to make the case for it that I wanted to, but I also think a week is enough time to put into the effort.  

You Don't Even Want to Know What This Post is About

The Right Stuff (1983)

I had not seen this previously. I confess to finding it passably entertaining. Americans in the pursuit of grand and heroic achievements. For an almost 30 year old movie, it looks as though it could have come out last week, which suggests that it has been more influential than is usually acknowledged. Its narrative language, its fastidious concern with clothing and interior design, its reliance on cultural iconography, its attitude towards history, that is with fitting characters within the historical framework rather than having the historical setting serving as a background or added interest, are in line with what is still prevalent today. Its stylized depiction of the 50s is very much the same 50s we have all come to know and love over the intervening thirty years, though it is a departure from the usual way that decade had been presented theretofore. This has doubtless been a reflection of the prevalent zeitgeist, which is often skeptical of the possibility of autonomy and is obsessed with institutional power, media manipulation, the engines of bureaucracy and the like.

The early astronauts, it is noted in passing in the film, for all their remarkable efforts and sacrifices and risks, were not paid anything beyond their normal modest military salaries. Nor does it seem to have been much of an issue.

I've never read the book by the famous author Tom Wolfe, nor any of his other books. He is considered a great, or at least important writer by some people--with himself, it seems, often occupying the vanguard of this faction--though the official intelligentsia does its best to tamper any encroachment of this strident enthusiasm into those areas of literary taste over which it wields the most influence. Excerpts from Wolfe's books and interviews frequently appear in the popular press. He does come across to me as more pleased with himself than most of his purported insights, satire, iconoclasm, and so forth, would merit. I know he has been industrious and successful, and that cannot be taken away from him.Still, he does strike me as for the most part tiresome and not particularly revelatory. Given the theme of the movie I was anticipating a more obnoxious, in-your-face brand of machismo to be ascendant in it, but for the most part the swagger was depicted as contributing to healthy competition among men of near equal strength in the pursuit of noble ends, which even I do not have a problem with. Any such totally inferior contenders as were destroyed, dismissed and humiliated in the course of this process were left out of the film; I think this was for the best.

There was a actress in this I took a liking to, named Pamela Reed--that's a kind of name I like too--who played one of the wives. I think she has been in a lot of TV-movie type things over the years. I don't like any of the photographs of her that I could put up here though. She may be one of those people who looks better in motion.

My sixth-grade teacher claimed to be Chuck Yeager's cousin. This is not apropos of anything, since I don't know how tight their connection was or what, if any, similar qualities she benefited from. She was kind of the tough old broad type, and she did not favor me, as most of my early teachers did, so I did not like her. Obviously, seeing that Chuck Yeager was her cousin, she could probably tell I was not made of the good sort of stuff that the film celebrates. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was from New Hampshire, though that is not mentioned in the movie. I only note this because it is very unusual for anybody born and bred in New Hampshire (or Maine, or Vermont), to attain elite status in any nationally or internationally hypercompetitive field, especially one involving any extreme degree of physicality. (Chuck Yeager was from West Virginia, which is also, nowadays at least, an unusual place of origin for world class talent.)

Entre Nous (1983)

Written and directed by a woman (Diane Kurys), and based on her own memoir, about a pair of friends who  reject the stifling bourgeois life of 1950s France which, as artists are fond of reminding us, was a pretty staid and rigid period in that country's social history, in contrast with our usual image of a land awash in sophisticated and hedonistic intrigue from one end to the other. This started well, and for the first half I thought we might be getting somewhere interesting, but I didn't like how the movie played out. The Isabelle Huppert character and that of her husband I did not think developed in a way consistent with what I came to expect through the first half of the movie. The husband especially got an unnecessarily bad rap. It is perhaps true that she never loved him, though it is not clear to me why she should never have liked him, or felt any loyalty to him. The presentation of him is that he is not especially cultured or sensitive, but he is not a weakling. He runs a prosperous business--a garage, which I guess has prolish connotations, which obviously we are intended to feel sympathy with his put upon wife about. He is very personable socially, and can get along with other men. He is certainly a doting father by the standards of 1950s France that I have heard about. He also by marrying her in the first place saved her from going to Auschwitz--granted they did not know each other and he doubtless only made the offer because he found her pretty. But her character as developed was not especially dynamic or so blatantly superior to his that one felt she had a good reason for abandoning him and breaking up their family to take up with her unstable female artist friend. Also the Isabelle Huppert  husband character begins to act in violent and inappropriate ways, presumably to show she is justified in leaving him, which are however completely inconsistent with everything else we are shown about this man in the movie. So in my opinion there is that weakness in it.

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Perhaps the ultimate false nostalgia movie, though I do love it. I am going to give it its own post to sort out all the middlebrow traps I know are coming at me from the beginning of the picture, and my powerlessness to avoid falling into them.

Jaws (1975)

I had never seen Jaws until the other day, because I am a wuss and I didn't want to be scared. I grew up well acquainted with the tales of theatergoers having to run out into the lobby and vomit during the middle of the film and of grown men who were terrified to climb into bathtubs for several years after seeing the movie and my reaction was always, Do I need this in my life? Thus I was disheartened when this legendary film turned up on my list. As I plowed inexorably back towards the 70s I began to dread its approach. Finally it arrived in the mail. My wife assured me there was no pressing need for me to watch this movie. Yes, but the sanctity of my system...and also the experts it seemed had slowly begun, in recent years, to treat it not merely as a historically important summer blockbuster but worthy of respect as a work of art. The New Yorker just published such a piece within the last few weeks. My trusty video guide had rated it 5 stars. Everybody and his grandmother has seen it twenty times, and it was even, to my admitted astonishment, rated PG, so how bad could it possibly be? Everything seemed to be indicating that I ought to see it. I was ready.

The good news was that it was not as terrifying as I expected. Obviously we have become accustomed to much higher degrees of gruesomeness since 1975. Most of the scariness comes from the anticipation of something about to happen in an alarming, terrifying and unforeseeable way that however does not come about most of the time; this is I think a trademark technique of Steven Spielberg's, though in middle age I find it rather tiresome.

The promotion of this as a great movie is a stretch. There is nothing about it that I can discern that would be interesting to a intelligent person above the age of about twelve, and there aren't even any pretty girls in it, though the main character's (too little seen) wife is decidedly MILFy in the best way. The recent critical reassessments in the direction of greater praise strike me as similar to the arguments put forth for A Hard Day's Night being in fact underrated as work of cinema. Both of these films were monuments of popular culture, made a lot of people in the entertainment industry rich on a scale that evidently is difficult to duplicate, emotionally if not in terms of strict cold finance, nowadays, they remind both writers and Hollywood players of a certain age of the golden years of life, when work was joyous, the world overflowed with 19 year old white girls in memory more beautiful and gettable than what it offers now, substance abuse was socially acceptable anyplace anybody would want to be, art mattered, money was not the be all and end all of every aspect of existence...but let's not get carried away. Also the mechanical shark, which Spielberg and other people have admitted they never achieved perfect mastery, looks really fake. All my swaggering aside, had I seen the movie as a 16 year old in the summer of '75, I'm sure I would have screamed in terror and run out of the theater with my high cut shorts soaked through, and guaranteed myself at least two more long years without getting a sniff of the wild 70s free love raging all around me, putting all my hope into College...

Baby Boomer Magic Moments: Besides the opening scene where a top-heavy blonde at a beach party spontaneously flings all her clothes off while running into the ocean, the big one of course is at the end when the World War II vet and survivor of the USS Indianapolis disaster who has spent his entire life dedicated to killing animals on the water gets his comeuppance for mocking Richard Dreyfuss's Phd by becoming Jaws's last meal. I'm going to cut them a little slack on this one, because the old salt also brought up the soft hands issue, which was a particular obsession of grandfather and numerous other old guys of his generation, where they would disparage the feminine hands of the younger men because of course they had not spent any good number of years, or not enough, doing manual labor to have that coarse effect. To me as a 10-year old I was anxious about growing up to have womanly hands though I was also anxious about there being an expectation I should be spending a considerable part of my youth slaving away on a farm or in some industrial place, because of course I did not really want to do that; but if you were 30 and had to listen to old guys constantly passing commentaries about the manliness of your hands, it must have been annoying as hell. In my grandfather's case, and that of most of his friends, while many of them grew up on farms and were in World War II, after they were about 23 they all worked in offices and lived the suburban lifestyle themselves. But I guess they still had their hands to prove that they had been serious men once, and you didn't. Anyway, having rough hands doesn't seem to confer much status in current society; at least I never hear anyone bringing it up anymore.     

Anatomy of Melancholy Part X

You have to know I would stop doing this if I could. Do you think I like being a figure of fun to real art people (by which I mean the general idea of my type)? Of course I do not. (And before it can be countered that I flatter myself that real art people could ever be bothered to give the likes of me any consideration at all, I do not even mean the people at the absolute heights of the creative life, but those who have managed to find employment as sort of the gatekeepers to that exalted world; professors, critics, agents, editors and people of that ilk. It is they who will find the greatest delight in thinking on my true station). Would I could think of anything else the successful execution of which could both be a possibility and a source of real contentment. I would take it up at once. How I envy  those people whose lives have an order, a purpose, a theme, a governing aesthetic about them. They may not always have a lot of sexual tension in their day-to-day lives but they probably could have even that if they made it a priority. For me, every positive thought or feeling ultimately has to emanate from my literary output and status, which have been themselves been scant in the most recent years. There is scarcely even any foundation left on which to attempt to reconstruct a man, should a master psychiatrist desire to do so.

This should be the last book report post for a while. I would stop doing those too--I am working to modify my notes on future reports--but as in most areas of my life, they form a kind of support from the greater world to my endeavors.

After examining symptoms and examples of love-melancholy in part IX, we have moved on now to possible cures, the easiest and most obvious of which is the possibility of your desires being fulfilled. "Petrarch, that had so magnified his Laura in several poems, when by the Pope's means she was offered onto him, would not accept of her." Doubtless because he knew himself, and knew he was not really man enough to fulfill her needs as a lover or a husband. If he had been, he obviously would have taken her for one or the other long before.

Another good cure recommended, provided you can swing it, is the old trick of stringing along two girls at once, as "he that goes from a good fire in cold weather is loath to depart from it, though in the next room there be a better which will refresh him as much..." Indeed! Of course in most instances the choice is not between two robust fires, but between kneeling and rubbing one's numb hands over a tiny space heater that it is hard to tell whether it is working or not or being confined to the unheated woodshed with a bed of straw and a dirty wool blanket that only covers about three quarters of your body. Though if you are a man who has some things to offer it is good advice.

Montaigne fans will be pleased to know that that master had a remedy of his own for this affliction, though it seems a rather odd one, as it involves seeing the object of one's love naked. It is not that this is not effective in certain circumstances, but it is usually not a practicable option for the class of men that would stand to benefit the most from its implementation. It is true that men who actually see a variety of naked women--in person and on the woman's eager volition with regard to the individual man's pleasure--on a regular basis are rarely the dupes of passion. But this level of experience unfortunately cannot be replicated beyond the top 10-15% or so of the male population.  

There is a long catalog of body parts and other endowments that would be used in the construction of the perfect woman, whom you would still tire of after a few years of being with. I liked the portion of the catalog that took a geographical turn: "...let her head be from Prague, paps out of Austria, belly from France, back from Brabant (Southern Netherlands & Northern Belgium; Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven), hands out of England, feet from Rhine, buttocks from Switzerland, let her have the Spanish gait, the Venetian tire (attire), Italian component and endowments..."

"I am to be married to-day, which sounds to me like saying, 'go home and hang yourself!'" This is quoted from a Roman author (Ter. And.--probably Terence someone or other, but I don't remember). I hate to pass up an ancient marriage joke. Here's another one: "...a mouse in a trap lives as merrily, we are in a purgatory some of us, if not hell itself."

Sample of Austrian beauties. This sort of view is what populates the typical evenings of a lot of guys'--most of those whose lives count for something I imagine--youthful travels on the continent. If I were not for various forms of media, I probably would never have been aware that life existed in such a form anywhere. And as it is, I know very little of what goes on in such scenes; such glimpses as are occasionally afforded those of us on the outside of this heaven that is the possession of a potent sensualism are usually astounding enough to crush the spirit for several days afterwards.

"...Pope Gregory, when he saw 6,000 skulls and bones of his infants taken out of a fishpond near a nunnery, thereupon retracted that decree of priests' marriages, which was the cause of such a slaughter, was much grieved at it, and purged himself by repentance." This shocking--on account of the extremely high number of corpses cited--story is repeated in other places. I cannot readily make out which Pope Gregory is referred to, but I am guessing it is the First, who held the position from 590-604, was famous as a reformer, and has generally a high reputation in the history of the church, however much stock you want to put in that. I cannot readily find confirmation regarding his repealing the edict requiring priestly celibacy, though it appears another Gregory, the 7th, found it necessary to reinstate it as official policy in the 11th century. I have no further comment on it, I guess.

"...James Rossa, nephew to the King of Portugal, and then elect Archbishop of Lisbon, being very sick at Florence, "when his physicians told him that his disease was such, he must either lie with a wench, marry, or die, cheerfully chose to die." What kind of disease, pray tell, was this? And if he had picked 'lie with a wench', would the doctor have then had one wheeled into the room for him?

Off topic, but I always like being reminded of these once-great names and offices and lives. I tend to forget about groups like the medieval Portuguese aristocracy (the James Rossa anecdote is dated 1419), but they were no doubt a meticulously civilized crew after their fashion, and each of their membership a giant in the world they inhabited with the backing of a familial lineage and mythology already dating back centuries. And the extent to which they are remembered now is all dependent on how interesting their depictions in books and artworks are.

"...for scarce shall you find three priests of three thousand, that are not troubled with burning lust." Of course priestly lust is not a subject of mirth, because of the forms it must take. It seems not to consist of the same harmless quality that makes nerd-lust so comical.

On page 948 I wrote: "I am glad I read it, but I couldn't comfortably recommend it. You have to know if you need to read it or not."

"For to what end is a man born? why lives he, but to increase the world? and how shall he do that well, if he do not marry?" Paging 'Ol Dirty Bastard?

Since Burton always argues forcefully on both sides of every issue, it is to be expected that he devotes ten pages to strongly insistent arguments on the necessity of marriage and procreation, though these lean heavily on a kind of supposition that man is the measure of all things:

"Earth, air, sea, land eftsoon would come to naught,
The world itself should be to ruin brought."

This if man did not marry and fill the earth with human children. The poignancy that can be surmised from such discredited conceits still resonates with me.

The next topic taken up is jealousy. I love this story:

"R.T.(?), in his Blazon (?) of Jealousy, telleth a story of a swan about Windsor, that finding a strange cock with his mate, did swim I know not how many miles after to kill him, and when he had so done, came back and killed his hen; a certain truth, he saith, done upon Thames, as many watermen and neighbour gentlemen can tell."

"England is a paradise for women, and hell for horses: Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women, as the diverb (an antithetical saying or proverb) goes."

A (Sub?) Bourgeois in Michigan

So I never got around to putting up pictures from Florida this year; and in April I went to New York City for three days, to mark which event I had planned an elaborate post in which I laid out the logistic planning and expenses necessary to bring all of my children to town and carry it off smoothly even for so brief a visit. Of course we were limited in what we could do even more than usual, but I had not been to town in a couple of years and I have now reached an age where the number of times left me of ever going there, given my past record, is probably dwindled to a disturbingly small number, so it was still well worth it to me to go. All of the pictures from these occasions are stored in another place which I am not able at this time to access. Which is good, because it is past time I abandoned putting up photo albums altogether, and returned to writing literary generalist essays from an original point of view on a wide variety of topics of universal interest...

So I went to the upper Midwest for my big summer trip this year. It has doubtless reached the point of overkill for me with the road trips, but when you are one of those people who doesn't have any job or entrepreneurial skills, or at least finds it mildly embarrassing to have to tout such meager ones as one does have as the sum of a life's achievement--in other words, you cannot positively state that you will have always even one source of income, let alone multitudes of them, going forward--the possibility that someday all opportunity for even such modest travel will be gone inclines you to think you had better go while you can. 

We went to Michigan first. I had never been there. Michigan is supposed to be in a woeful condition, the very heart of the bad times. We bypassed the Detroit area, going up through Ann Arbor, where we stopped to have lunch. Ann Arbor obviously is a big university town, and I suppose still insulated to a degree from the worst effects of Rust Belt de-industrialization. There were at least plenty of people visible who were not completely downtrodden. Once you get past Bay City the state is largely uninhabited. Obviously you don't see much from the road. The landscape and the people you see in gas stations don't emit as obvious an air of poverty and hopelessness as comparable locales do in the south in my opinion. Again, I saw a sliver of the state, but I was expecting much worse. 

It is also true that I went to Mackinac Island, which is one of the swankier places in Michigan. This place is famous, I know now, but I did not know anything about it until I began reading up for this trip, and I thought it sounded interesting. It is interesting, and I think the older children liked it. I liked it, though again with so many young children you cannot do a lot of the things that you might like to do, such as sit calmly for twenty minutes and nurse a drink. But I would still rather go and eat ice cream and carry people up hills than stay home.

The lighthouse above is one of the iconic Great Lakes lighthouses. It is not on Mackinac Island, but on another, larger island next to it that is preserved land. These places here, in case you did not know, are in a busy little space where the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan (connected by a famous and pretty majestic five mile long bridge) and Lakes Michigan and Huron meet.

The approach to the dock. Believe it or not as I get older I do question the value of site-seeing without any more defined purpose than being in a certain place and hoping to absorb something of its value simply by being present. It doesn't work much. Perhaps it is slightly better if there is some mildly strenuous aspect to it, such as walking or bicycling, or doing research, and I do think for young people there is often some real stimulation. But for me, it is all like everything else now. I am clearly not going to change very much, and the qualities that people flatter me as having and claim to be admirable are not such as I am able to hold in any high value, so pretty much anything I do is going to be, and seem to me to be, rather flat. But for all of that, I am speaking now from the vantage point of the end of a busy summer; by February I am sure I will be eager to go anywhere. Also I have not flown or gone to any foreign country other than Canada in eleven years, so maybe that would seem invigorating after a fashion. That would be very expensive though.

Mackinac Island is famous for having banned cars a very long time ago (1898), which law has never been rescinded. I thought the carless atmosphere would be more striking, like it is in Venice, but here the effect was merely like that of being in an open-air amusement park or historical village, because the island is quite small and any sense of a local population is completely overwhelmed by the touristic apparatus. While Venice is also overwhelmed with tourists, it is still a city of some size, it is very old and different from anything to which we are accustomed, and one can still stumble occasionally, out of high season at least, on a few pockets of workaday local life. Or perhaps I just happened to be in Venice when I was younger and was more attuned to my surrounding environment.

My sons wanted a picture of the vintage water fountain with a foot pedal to draw the water. The lad in the sunglasses is not one of my children by the way. One thing I did observe, was that in both Michigan and Wisconsin, to which we went afterwards, every drinking fountain we came upon had cold, and usually ice cold water. This is almost the direct opposite of the situation on the east coast, where finding a water fountain dispensing cold water can be a more elusive quest than finding free parking. I should add that for most of this trip the temperature was 95-100 degrees, and in Wisconsin they were having a terrible drought. It was a little  cooler way up here in the middle of the actual lake. Probably the high 80s. 

My poor daughter, who has no idea where she is or what is going on, suffering in the heat. Intelligent little girl, though. She may have a chance.

View of Lake Huron some high point on the island, I forget exactly which. Despite what I just said a couple of minutes ago, the Great Lakes are, considering them in themselves and separate from my presence among them, a defining part of our country, and I would like to see more of them. I was especially obsessed when I was out there with going some day to Isle Royale National Park, which is a huge island in Lake Superior, part of Michigan but much closer to Minnesota and Ontario, which is the least-visited National Park in the lower 48. You have to be a serious person to go there. Apart from one lodge at the island's far east end, you are on your own as far as sleeping and food and water goes. All the modern guidebooks present it as utterly daunting, real adventure travel. Your bones will ache, you'll be dirty, the mosquitoes are the size of flying mice. In my 1962 guidebooks, they have photographs of smiling suburban families grilling some whitefish they have caught outside their little pitched tents, with their rowboats pulled safely up onto the shore; but to go there nowadays they recommend you undertake intensive training for a year or two beforehand, and the underlying tone is that children who are not very experienced in this type of high-intensity travel shouldn't be brought there at all.

Nice picture of one of the boys. That's all. The two older ones are only a few years probably from not wanting to go on trips anymore. Another grasping excuse to keep taking them.

Outside the fort at the high point of the island. Lake Huron in the background.

Another child, this time on the wall near the famous Arch Rock.

The famous Arch Rock. Sightseers have been making their may up here for a long time. It's a decent walk from the town, 45 minutes or so. Enough to make most people, and certainly me, feel that the drinks they'll have back at the hotel bar when they return were well-earned.

The place to stay on Mackinac is the 1880s era Grand Hotel, which has that archaic elegance and program of meals and dances and events that you can't really put a price on, which is why double rooms without much in the way of 21st century amenities start at $330 or so a night. We, alas, did not stay there, though it is one of the few hotels I have come across in my travels where I do feel I would like to stay some day, because on Mackinac Island it does seem like if you aren't staying at the Grand Hotel you are kind of missing half the point. They must allow children to stay there, though I believe there are etiquette standards, and I don't think they're allowed in the restaurant at dinner and that sort of thing.

The old fort, which kept the island in American hands over the course of more than a century. A little expensive, but, if you are going to go all that way, you shouldn't skimp on too many things--we had already bailed on the Grand Hotel., and, as well the activities and space and displays in the complex are pretty extensive, though we don't really take, or have, the opportunity to study everything in these places with the depth they deserve.

Though this looks like we are all earnestly learning about life while being stationed at this remote outpost in the 1880s (though the posting was coveted compared with being on Indian duty in Arizona or New Mexico), I assure you nobody is learning or retaining anything, me least of all.

Anatomy of Melancholy 9

"We read in the Lives of he Fathers, a story of a child that was brought up in the wilderness, from his infancy,   by an old hermit: now come to man's estate, he saw by chance two comely women wandering in the woods: he asked the old man what creatures they were, he told him fairies; after a while, talking [casually], the hermit demanded of him, which was the pleasantest sight that ever he saw in his life? He readily replied, the two fairies he saw in the wilderness. So that, without doubt, there is some secret loadstone (sic) in a beautiful woman, a magnetic power, a natural inbred affection, which moves our concupiscence.." A variation on a common story, but a good enough one to remind oneself of from time to time.

"Christ Himself and the Virgin Mary had most beautiful eyes, as amiable eyes as any persons, saith Barradius, that ever lived, but withal so modest, so chaste, that whosoever looked on them was freed from that passion of burning lust...'tis not the eye, but carriage of it, as they use it, that causeth such effects." From the scribbler's standpoint this is nothing compared to the myriad ways in which women create lust however.

"Tiberius...supped with Sestius Gallus, an old lecher, [on condition that naked girls should wait on them]..." Shocking stuff. I wonder how smooth the old Romans really were with the ladies. The impression of course is that they were light on technique and into demonstrations of brute force. Not like your modern international playboys.

"(Achilles) compressed Deidamia, the king's fair daughter, and had a fine son, called Pyrrhus, by her." Compressed?

This story is a rather long one, and the libertine set loose in the convent is another motif that has been done a thousand times, but I still have to worship studs of this magnitude: "At Berkeley in Gloucestershire, there was in times past a nunnery (saith Gulaterus Mapes, an old historiographer, that lived 400 years since), 'of which there was a noble and a fair lady abbess: Godwin, that subtle Earl of Kent, travelling that way (seeking not her but hers), leaves a nephew of his, a proper young gallant (as if he had been sick), with her, till he came back again, and gives the young man charge so long to counterfeit, till he had deflowered the abbess, and as many besides of the nuns as he could...The young man, willing to undergo such a business, played his part so well, that in short space he got up most of their bellies, and when he had done, told his lord how he had sped; his lord made instantly to the court, tells the king how such a nunnery was become a bawdy-house, procures a visitation, gets them to be turned out, and begs the lands to his own use."

"...as much pity is to be taken of a woman weeping, as of a goose going barefoot." I agree that men should not let themselves be taken in as frequently as they are.

"...or that hot bath in Aix in Germany, wherein Cupid once dipt his arrows, which ever since hath a peculiar virtue to make them lovers all that wash in it." Is this place still there? If so, it is not vigorously advertised. Maybe it is a secret only accessible to the elect.

The device in our imaginations which recreates for us the dimensions of the objects of our desire is described as "that astrolabe of phantasy". I like this expression.

Philostratus on his mistress, or, as seems more likely by our understanding of this word, would-be mistress: "Oh happy ground on which she treads! and happy were I if she would tread upon me." I used to have friends who would occasionally talk in this manner. I probably felt this, but usually was not clever enough to come up with the right expression. Early in the night, it can be amusing.

Another, unnamed lover who is not giving off an alpha attitude: "he wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged, if he might be strangled in her garters; he would willingly die to-morrow, so that she might kill him with her own hands." Meanwhile, your John F Kennedy types skip the hysterics and just begin undressing the girls they take a liking to as soon as the occasion offers itself. It is a superior system.

Now Cyrus (presumably the Persian emperor, as the quotation is from Xenephon) was a stud. Or at least the lusty Salmacis thought so: "...blessed is that woman that shall be his wife, nay, thrice happy she that shall enjoy him but a night." The forces that push and gather and raise...

"As he that desired of his enemy, now dying (he--not the enemy), to lay him with his face upward, lest his sweetheart should say he was a coward." Oh God. I am glad Burton is as humane as he is, or I couldn't take it (not that I am in the least humane, but I appreciate examples of it when I can find them).

"Cupid and Death met both in an inn; and being merrily disposed, they did exchange some arrows from either quiver; ever since young men die, and oftentimes old men dote." Clever, succinct, memorable, and illuminating. I believe it.

Prague Pictures V

We haven't done a set of these in a while. There really aren't all that many more to get through.

1. View Out the Window of the First Apartment I Stayed At There. The place we were supposed to be staying was not ready when we arrived so we were put up for two weeks in the flat of the Hobby Centrum's activities director while this lady was on vacation in Mongolia or somewhere like that. As I was not yet oriented to the town and could not understand any of the language at this time, and as we never returned to this particular neighborhood after those first two weeks, I do not have a very good sense of where exactly it was. We also had to take the tram there--no subway line ran very close by--which further seems to confirm that it was a little out of the way. As you can see it was fairly attractive for a residential Prague neighborhood--the buildings are fairly low rising and many of them, including the one we stayed in, either predated the Communist period, or were from the early part of it before the miles of panelaky, or high rise housing projects, in a couple of which we eventually ended up living, were built.

It was in this apartment that I underwent my initiation into the Czech diet, especially knedliky (dumplings), pivo (Plzen-style beer), smazeny syr (fried cheese), gulas (goulash), rohliky (rolls) parek v rohliku (hot dogs), and the whole gamut of pork products which I have unfortunately forgotten the names for, Czech grocery shopping, and tram riding, as well as acclimated myself to using Czech toilet paper, which was at that time at least was still the rough equivalent of 60 grit sandpaper (the good news is, you get used to it very quickly). 

Film being a considerable expense at the time, we only have two pictures of our brief but very intensely experienced and memorable time at this location.

2. Approach to Karlstejn Castle From Train Station. This was our first real outing outside of the city, about fifteen miles away. The castle, originally built in 1348 by the great Czech-born Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, was essentially rebuilt on the old foundation in the 19th century and is not in itself that great of a sight, but the setting is beautiful and evocative of fairytales and the medieval world generally (highly sanitized of course), the area at the time was almost completely undeveloped as far as roads and modern commercial interests, and the taverns around the village filled with day pilgrims from Prague even gave it a mild Canterbury Tales feel. Our train tickets reveal that this outing took place October 13, 1996, so it was enough out of high tourist season and there was enough of a chill in the air that it was not especially crowded.

3. Castle Turret Against Backdrop of Bohemian Hills. In my memory because we had so few pictures from that time I imagined that we had comparatively a ton from this day. We have about ten.

4. Clock Tower, Fortress Wall, Other walls, etc. All reconstructed.

Karlstejn is the setting for a highly popular but I think inscrutable to foreigners 1973 musical film called Noc Na Karlstejne (often translated by Czechs with imperfect English as "A Night on the Karlstejn"). This movie seems to be akin to the The Sound of Music or something like that. People's eyes tear up when they watch it. I have never been able to find a version with English subtitles so I am very lost as to what is the cause of this affection. Here is a taste:

5. Inside the Walls. A peaceful scene in modern times; one imagines the beautiful princess taking a stroll across the grounds; in reality of course the spot would have been thronged with peasants, animals, and various forms of slop, all of it foul-smelling--or at least that is the image the current generation of historians and intellectuals seems to want us to have.

6. One Last Picture of the Castle, Because I Don't Have Anything Else to Fill Out the Set.

7-8. A Pond Somewhere in North Bohemia. With Gloves and Postcards.

I'm glad we managed to get these. Memories of the days when she used to like me. How fleeting it always is in the end, whether you are Charles the Fourth, Waldemar Matuska, Bourgeois Surrender, or anybody else. The question of what I was not doing at the time to be, or even at that relatively late age to prepare myself to be a productive and contributing member of society, and what I imagined myself to actually be doing (which I was not in fact doing), are good questions that I think will need to be addressed down the road in this series. But this rather dreamy and hopeful set is not the right atmosphere for undertaking that.

Movies! (1986-92)

The combination of summer and a gauntlet of mostly not very enticing 80s and 90s movies forming the top of my to-see list has made for a slow couple of months in this regard. I will try to dispatch of these quickly.

Afterburn (1992)

This is another TV movie from the 80s and 90s that was absurdly given a five-star rating in one of the otherwise fairly reliable guidebooks. It is about an Air Force pilot who is killed while flying a faulty plane, the ensuing cover-up and insistence of the military authorities that the crash was caused by pilot error, and the determination of his fiery widow to discover and force those authorities to acknowledge the truth and clear her husband's name, in which effort she partly succeeded. Well done for what it is, I suppose, but not my kind of thing. Perhaps it should be more my kind of thing, as the film is all about tough, decisive, purposeful, highly competent people--in addition to elite flyers and the military high command and tenacious, fearless women, there are also big time lawyers whose main concern in taking on clients is that these may not have the stomach for the ruthless tactics the lawyer will need to employ to successfully prosecute their case. However, I found it rather flat, the characters probably too realistically depicted. Nothing sparkled. I did consider that perhaps the story was just too grown-up for me, but it also was not meaningfully artistic enough to hold my interest even if it this had been the case.

Distant Voices/Still Lives (1988)

This is one of the most unique and affecting movies I have ever seen. I can say this with the more confidence because I have not seen very many genuinely unique and affecting movies. I may not be able to adequately explain what I mean by this, nor do I have to, given the endless reams of movie commentary, adequate or otherwise, that already exists, but I am going to try, lest my capacity to use language atrophy entirely.

The basic way I would describe this film is as a sincere, unpretentious, uncondescending, sad poem, highly artistic and stylized, centered around settings and people that would be understood in almost all conventional art-language as dismal, ugly and uninteresting. in which something resembling the fleeting essence of ordinary human existence is dug for and to a remarkable degree depicted. This material could easily have been used in the service of a more 'raw' or angry film, but Terence Davies, the outstanding director, always counterbalances even his darkest scenes with a strong suggestion (or reminder) that this essence of experience, especially the moments of personal agency and camaraderie, is just as real and important and must be acknowledged as much. This is difficult, I would think, to express believably, and appreciate the strength of the effort he has made to do so.

The tone and balance throughout this movie with regard to affection towards the characters, objectivity, honesty, the use of singing as a major point of emphasis and character, all wholly untainted by a hint of pretentiousness, is classically well-managed. .

Below is a few minutes from what I believe is Terence Davies's most recent movie, a documentary/memoir about Liverpool, with heavy emphasis on World War II and the austerity period, the same in which DV/SL is set. This guy is an incredible filmmaker, especially when you consider that he seems to be very sentimental, and that this sentimentality strongly informs his work. He has mastered not only his vision, but what his feelings are about that vision, which he reproduces in his films in a way that makes them seem more substantial than such impressions usually attain. I suppose he is regarded in England as a conservative of sorts because he believes the country has gone to the dogs since his childhood and this sense is certainly an underlying, if not especially subtle, theme of his movies. I admit I am inclined to agree him on this point.

Don Quixote (1988)

This is a filmed performance of the famous Kirov Ballet of Leningrad. As I know nothing about ballet, I had a hard time both following what was going on and being overly thrilled by the art, though the sets looked lovely, and the dancers talented, skilled and artistically serious. I thought a lot about how glorious it must be to possess a brain truly steeped in the secrets and salient truths of European high culture. I have read the book of Don Quixote three or four times, and while there is a highly skilled dancer dressed as Don Quixote (and one as Sancho Panza too) who wanders on and off the stage as various points of the show, and the set for the second act includes a giant windmill, there are also long sequences involving gypsies and a romance between a barber and an innkeeper's daughter (I had to look this up) that seem to have to been based on minor incidents in the book that I don't remember. Apparently most of the plot of the ballet related to the book of Don Quixote is taken from two chapters. It is really about the dancers, of course.

My modest researches into this have also reminded me that of all the realms of snobbery which the arts have provided us, there are no snobs like ballet snobs. You would think that hardcore ballet fans were a pretty small group that is generally left alone to love their diva ballerinas, but they have a lot of disappointment and disdain to get off their chests.

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

I remember how popular this baby was among all the yuppie baby boomers when it first came out, and accordingly made a point of always staying as far away from it as possible. But the fates, which I believe to be real, were obviously for some reason determined that I should see this movie before the vagaries of my system should bring up Tokyo Story, or Vertigo, or The Searchers, or five hundred other deathless masterpieces, because when I devise a system I follow it to the death. Going off the course, except in carefully arranged cases, destroys the continuity and leads nowhere.

I should note that there are several things I enjoyed about this movie. While I was watching I thought it might have been made in Maine, because it looked a lot like it--I didn't recognize the town they filmed in, so I thought it might be the Bar Harbor area or somewhere even farther north. As it turned out it was filmed in bordering New Brunswick, which I have never been to, but which looks to be more Maine than Maine itself. The scenery reminded me of my youth, as did the time, which actually was my youth. The school reminded me of my school. The parts where they are playing football on a field covered with cold puddles and wet brown leaves? that's pretty much my adolescence in a nutshell. So I liked that.

The other part I liked was the restaurant the lead characters went to on their first date. There was a jolt back to the 80s. It was just a regular Italian restaurant, with a bar and a small place for dancing, and I think a pianist. I remember going to places like that vividly, though I haven't seen one for years now. Obviously the combination of chain restaurants and the steady demise of the middle class has killed them. What regular place employs a pianist anymore, even as a second job? Yet lots of places used to have one. So that made me very nostalgic.

But that is all I am conceding. This thing is a compendium of annoying early baby boomer tropes. The author of the original play, Mark Medoff, was born in 1940, so he predates the hard core of this cohort, and I don't know how much the spirit of the original play was altered for the film. But the director, Randa Haines (the first female director nominated for a best picture Oscar, incidentally), was born in 1945, and William Hurt, the leading man, was born in 1950, so I am giving the credit for the film's dominant spirit to them. The other lead, Marlee Matlin, somewhat well known as the deaf actress who won an Oscar, was born in 1965, which makes her a generation-Xer. So I guess she's all right.

The first annoying current running through this movie is William Hurt's smug face, which is the same smug face my father and all his friends had. I can't bring myself to want to punch out my father, but I would like to rain some pain down on William Hurt. These people have all gone through their whole lives thinking they're God's gift to the planet, and for what? The circumstances, the time they were born into, the lives they were able to lead, encouraged this. I will admit it, I really can't stand them. Having to endure this movie served as a good reminder of why.

All right, on a lighter note, we have a classic rendition of the young baby boomer job interview. Job interviews evidently used to be a lot less stressful in the old days, when you didn't have to try to persuade the person grilling you that you were the most qualified person on the planet for the position you were seeking. No, even if you were rather insouciant and blase in your interview you could still often count on being offered the position, with its full health insurance, and its pension, only with the caveat that the organization into which you were being hired had an established culture and ways of doing things, and that hires were expected to conform to the rules. What is this, the 50s? Telling a new employee in a baby boomer movie he's expected to follow procedure is the cinematic equivalent of Chekhov's ax; you know there won't be a rule left standing by the end of the movie. Which sort of segues into the next theme:

This one is such a cherished baby boomer belief that you still see it surface occasionally, though I am pretty sure its effectiveness as an educational resource has been thoroughly disproved. Of course I am talking about the idea that the insertion of rock and roll, especially from the 1960s, into the school curriculum, will foster a veritable explosion of learning. Given that in this movie the school in question is a school for the deaf (though I guess they can feel the vibrations through the floor if you crank the bass loud enough), the circumstance that  even here the rock-based program is the key to turning the moribund school around, should demonstrate just   how thorough (and perverse) the grip that this idea had on the generation of the 60s was. To me--and I mostly like this music too--and I believe most people my age, the thought that this genre of art has any substantial academic value is I think mostly ludicrous, yet it turns up in movie after movie after movie with a boomer mentality.

I should add that the boomers were still in their sexy years when this came out, so the relationship between William Hurt and Marlee Matlin gets physical pretty abruptly and matter of factly--this matter is addressed first, and any questions where things go from there can be addressed later. This is one area where I sort of grudgingly admire the baby boomers. Everybody who has come after them seems to have been hung up on determining who is worthy of sex and the appropriate expression of sexual desires (exceptions made for the obviously superior of course), before allowing that side of human interaction to develop. The boomers seemed to accept that everybody was motivated by this and was always going to act accordingly. I don't know that their approach is necessarily healthy either, but I will grant them that they don't seem to have pussyfooted their lives away in panting and not getting as so many people seem to do now.

Anatomy of Melancholy VIII

"Gold...is a most delicious object...and we had rather see it than the sun." (Burton)

This is somewhat off topic, but the idea of people, or rather their spirits, in heaven wearing clothes, which is an image that has certainly flitted across my attempts at perception from time to time, is really rather silly.

In the margins of the section on charities I wrote: "My capacity (patience) to follow philosophical arguments/concepts is weak at the moment, but I think it will come back strong at some point." I no longer entertain this delusion.

"...our whole life is a perpetual combat, a conflict, a set battle, a snarling fit."

"In the precedent section mention was made, amongst other pleasant objects, of this comeliness and beauty which proceeds from women, that causeth heroical, or love-melancholy, is more eminent above the rest, and properly called love." Nicely expressed. The following pages contain, among other things, a catalog of famously oversexed women (The Wife of Bath, Aretine's Lucretia, etc), lechery, and various other unseemly behaviors produced by enslavement to lust. They are not speaking to me tonight as much as they apparently did when I read the book the first time.

"Nicholas Sanders relate of Henry VIII (I know not how truly), he saw very few [pretty] maids that he did not desire, and desired fewer whom he did not enjoy..." It is given to few men to experience life so fully as King Henry VIII did.

"...(saith Jovius)...[there is a levy throughout the kingdom of girls of striking beauty for the emperor; and those whom he leaves go to the nobles]; they press and muster up wenches as we do soldiers, and have the choice of the rarest beauties their countries can afford..." The footnote on this section reads "in Muscov" which I assume means Russia. In our day Fidel Castro and King Jong Il are said to have been keeping this ancient tradition of scouring the countryside to fill the emperor's harem alive (the Sultan of Brunei is able to fill his by advertising in American newspapers--probably on the internet these days--and offering good coin).

"...we think, fortune is a stepmother to us, a parent to them." On renowned, rich and happy men, when these are not ourselves.

I remember this from Plutarch: "Agis, King of Lacadaemon, had like to have been deposed, because he married a little wife; they would not have their royal issue degenerate." How little was she? My wife is considered little (hence my sensitivity on the subject), but our children do not appear at present to be appreciably shorter, or less princely for that matter, than anyone else.

Given that this book is a repository of thousands of quotations, mostly from obscure authors, I thought it worth commemorating the first appearance of Shakespeare (identified by Burton only as "an elegant poet of ours") on page 771. It is from "Venus and Adonis". I suppose I might as well include it:

"The bushes in the way
Some catch her neck, some kiss her face,
Some twine about her legs to make her stay,
And all did covet her for to embrace."

"...I know not well whether...of a cold bath that suddenly smoked and was very hot when naked Caelia came into it." I would have liked to have met this Caelia.

"Heliodorus...brings in Thyamis almost besides himself, when he saw Chariclea first, and not daring to look upon her a second time, 'for he thought it unpossible for any man living to see her and contain himself.'"

"...the hairs (i.e., ladies' hair) are Cupid's nets, to catch all comers, a brushy wood, in which Cupid builds his nests..." Quotation from Arandus.

Nobody

Because it could be another week before I can finish another post. Plus we have Frances both singing and playing a library aide (real librarians have master's degrees). Can it get any better?

This is a good little song. It is simple, but it conveys one sense of not having anybody very well, which is that plausibly eligible young people who are unattached but think they don't want to be are usually funnier and always more interesting than similar-aged people who are taken, because of course there are few things in the world more interesting than a young person with eligibility, but also because a person without romantic entanglements is more absolutely himself. Anyway, I think this song does a good job of capturing that sensibility.

Have you noticed that nobody really sings funny songs about longing or being alone anymore? The Smiths and Morrissey worked extensively in this genre in the 80s but the general public doesn't seem to have appreciated their efforts. It's a more honest and appealing genre than both the I don't need anybody/nobody's good enough for me/I'm getting in the last word and dumping you not vice versa trend or the treacly earnest stuff.

Mini-Post 4: Obnoxious Liberals

These people make me really unhappy. I've been trying to write this post for a week, and I cannot seem to get down what it is that is so hateful to me about them. I have touched on this topic here before, most unsuccessfully. Yes, they are sarcastic, condescending, histrionic, tiresomely selective in their historical memory and inveterately ungenerous in their projection of their enemies' motivations and intellectual capacities--so much after the model of their counterparts of the opposite persuasion that has been so effective and demoralizing over a long period that I suppose eventually such a development must have become inevitable--but that in itself is not my real problem with them. My real problem with them is that their contempt is phony and unearned. They may well believe in what they say to an extent, but they can't believe it deeply enough to warrant the attitudes that they affect, because neither their intellectual nor moral development is developed to a point anywhere near the fullness of a serious person. What joy or noble governance can result from the tone of civic discourse being directed by such squalid people, from whichever side of the political spectrum? Any moral adolescent knows, or should know, that the most strident and loyal wings of any political faction that arises in any country, and especially this one as currently constituted, will inevitably be supporting and covering for, even if tacitly, numerous policies that millions of rational and objective people will view, with legitimate reason, as morally horrific. One would think that the realization of this alone might promote a more sober tone of political discourse among the nominally intelligent than what passes currently, but to be honest, that is not actually how the most severely brilliant people seem to think; they believe ferociously in the conclusions that they arrive at, they insist upon them doggedly, and they are impervious to any attempt at contradiction unless it comes from a mind both uniquely glittering and in some way sympathetic to their own, which is an exceedingly rare occurrence.

Obviously I have real problems with some of the issues that to my mind have done more than their part to inspire this ramping up of what I experience as snark and ugliness, the main one being gay marriage, which, while I am politically indifferent enough to it (i.e., I am not motivated to actively oppose it), I also cannot generate any passion or outrage on its behalf. I don't really understand why I can't embrace it wholeheartedly--yes, because I am a fundamentally horrible person, but God knows there are plenty of terrible people who can pretend to be what they know they ought to be--I suspect I will in time, only just now I am irritated that everybody else was able, after being collectively in the dark for thousands of years of recorded history alone on this issue, to transition to a perfect understanding that gay marriage is a civil right that is essentially the same thing as male/female marriage, and get to feel indignant at other people's not doing so, which latter is my real lifelong dream, so quickly, while I was not. I'm just not there yet. And not only am I sort of old, but I have an especially antiquated mindset, points of reference, and so on, compared to most people my age. So coming around to the point where I really feel deep down that this is all as natural and proper as that August follows July is going to require some mental exertion which I don't however think anyone else can do for me; unless they happen to be of a uniquely glittering and sympathetic mind.

One might be tempted to ask why I just don't become a Republican and go revel in hatred with them. For one thing, I am not socialized to be a Republican. I am not comfortable among them, and it is even immediately obvious to them that I am not one of their number, my whiteness and five children and fondness for bad pop music aside. Also I don't share their enthusiasm for a low wage, vastly unequal society with no strong and competently managed public institutions. Unfortunately I seem to be socialized to be a 1940s Democrat, and there aren't too many of these people left, especially that are my age. Due to my background and temperament and my life experience, however, it is pretty much unthinkable for me to become a Republican. And if I were ever to have any kind of social life and friends again, especially living where I do, these friends would almost certainly be staunchly liberal--ideally I suppose I could meet some intelligent and engaging people who adhered to the old custom of steering away from heated political expostulating in social settings, but certain issues have become so important now that many people need some assurance of what your position on them is, tacitly if not explicitly, before they are willing to engage with you.
  
One last aside, the food snobbery of this class of people I have been raving against is always good for arousing my bile. People might get the idea that I don't like good food, and prefer eating hot dogs on Wonder Bread to something made with art and passion and reverence for earth and the body and the sensation of being alive and all of that. Nothing could be further from the truth, though unfortunately I rarely have the opportunity at this time especially to have this kind of meal. I do think that the obsessiveness some people have about this food, especially when it is accompanied by snobbery, is frequently not maintained within appropriately tasteful bounds. One of the angry rants which set me off on this post in the first place was some (male) wit's disparagement of the awful 1950s--which all reactionaries presumably want to go back to, but only so they can openly practice racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc, etc (while there is a degree of truth in this of course, people's motivations for such nostalgia are usually a little more complex than merely the desire to express their racism; but that is a topic for another post). After checking off this catalogue of offenses associated with the 50s, which decade the commentator himself had evoked for the purpose of reminding us how awful it was, he added at the end, whether as a joke or a partial joke I could not make out, that by the way, the food was terrible.There are legitimate reasons to feel superior to 1950s suburbanites, I suppose, but doing so because of the way they ate makes you a twerp. And that is all I am going to say about the matter at this time because I want to finish this post.

One of these days I am going to have to purge myself here of the effects of my indoctrination in the cult of Penn State football, which, mild though that was, I still found myself instinctively bristling at some of the harsher castigations and demands for punishment coming from 'outsiders', even though I actually have no connection to the school and I guess they deserve the extreme hatred and contempt that is being directed towards them. But that definitely will have to wait for another day.