The Game of Art: APPENDIX: Homage to Favorite Painted Ladies

That the dictum that beauty is truth and truth beauty applies more forcefully in art than in life, one need seek no further demonstration than that it is not absolutely necessary to have a beautiful human being or setting or scene to make a beautiful artwork, but a great artist who is able to penetrate in some way to the truth of his subject. I find the girl in the Chapeau de Paille beautiful or desirable because the artist has seen and given her qualities, has maximized her humanity in a sense, beyond herself, and often beyond the self of the person viewing the picture as well. If one has some affinity with an artist it is not impossible that one will see in actual life what the artist sees and is able to capture. With most artists however, and Rubens is such a one for me, there is no deep affinity of mind, personality, sentiment, etc; thus the beautiful women of his paintings must remain for me exclusively works of art, without any corresponding existence in actual life.

When one does encounter an artist with whom one has more affinity, however, this enables him, among other things, to fall into love primarily with the subject of the painting, and not the painter. This is a noble goal, not merely in art but in literature and music as well, where the cult of the master artist as often as not forms a barrier between the receptive human brain and the work that in a truly perfectly realized and executed production should, in the immediate moment at the very least, be forgotten. I wanted to conclude my little series of art ravings with a commemoration of some such pictures as had this effect on me, in which are depicted such women as made me wish I had known their like in life--yes, indeed, been such a commanding lover as they and all beautiful women doubtless require--at the first encounter, rather than moving immediately from the subject of the picture to the comtemplation of the artist's genius. Not that the contemplation of genius is not a worthwhile and ultimately more important pursuit, but I think ideally, as I have indicated in other essays on poetry and the like, that the awareness of it should quietly complement rather than overhwelm the experience of the actual work.

Some brief notes before I move on to the pictures: I am far from being widely learned in art history, and thus my selections are drawn from a very small pool of paintings that I have once seen either in museums or books and happened to remember. Having culled ten pictures out of my memory as having made an impact on my sensibilities when I first saw them, I have doubtless forgotten a few, and am ignorant of many more images that I would find far superior if I knew about them. I may add supplementsin the future if I come across any new pictures of the type.

My intention is to display the pictures in chronological order. It may be objected of some of the earlier ones, that they depict very high aristocratic ladies with whom I must have nothing in common to discuss or otherwise connect in an intimate manner; however, I counter that in the pre-democratic, pre-bourgeois era, sophistication was only relative to classes of people--rustics, artisans--who were completely uneducated, and therefore likely had intellectual and sensual predilections more similar to that of modern bourgeois than those that later sophisticates developed. All the women in these paintings look to me like people I might have thought about approaching at a college dance, which means their sophistication must be within parameters that I can relate to.

I confess that the working title while I mused on this series was "Come, Come Ye Babes of Art", but I really didn't want it to be, so I didn't use it. It just insinuated itself in my brain and I could not banish it for several weeks.

Assessment of the Current State of this Blog

It is about eight months now since I began publishing this paper. There is as yet no evidence that it has attracted a single reader. The primary goal of this undertaking, to afford me the opportunity to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I was not left hopelessly far behind every capable person in the world in every area of human life that was of value to me, has not been attained. The quality and polish of the writing, which was to be the signature attraction of the blog, have been disappointments. Much of this no doubt is due to the hurriedness and half-attentive process of composition that circumstances tend to impose; however these are the conditions under which everyone operates today; and as with all developments in history, some minds thrive beyond the wildest imaginings of their owners` childhoods under the novel conditions, while others prove completely unable to adapt. Obviously the greatest question facing me over the next decade is how to give my children at least some hope of moving among the agile ones, the ones among whose language and thought all action, all vital life outside our charming but unfortunately isolated household, is led. Of course these vital, world-shaping people know their share of confusion, failure, shame, heartbreak, and all the rest, as these are the experiences that primarily constitute human life at all its levels, but there is still a quality of scale, and of the consolations and compensating activities at the disposal of the better-ordered mind and spirit that makes life worth the trouble, perhaps, I begin to worry, more worth it, than for those minds and spirits that are not so happily developed.

I do hold out hope, however, that these awful ideas, which have only taken possession of my brain because I cannot seem to overcome/disprove them through my own agency, will eventually dissipate. Anthony Powell, whom I have been referring to a great deal lately, wrote of one of his characters (the one the reader can assume is based on himself) that he had never felt so old as when he was in his mid-30s (and he lived to be 95). I suspect this is because at this age one is conscious that there is still a rather long time to have to continue existing set before one while the prospects for one's further improvement or any excitement comparable at least to the possibilities that were conceivable in youth appear increasingly hopeless. At the same time I am reminded also of the ravings of the hapless uncle Carlchen character in the movie Fanny and Alexander. This fellow looks to be in his mid to late 40s, is constantly in debt, though what for is not exactly apparent, the implication being that his income is insufficient with little hope of ever increasing. Among his better lines (in subtitles of course) are "When does a man become second-rate?" and "Why am I such a coward?" Part of the astuteness of this movie is that this speech takes place during the part of the film that will later be looked back on as the happy (or at least a happier) period. There is a lesson I suppose in both of these examples. In Powell the best and liveliest parts of the book, which are set over a fifty year period, are those that take place in this period where we are to suppose the narrator frequently discouraged and on his most uncertain footing. My theory would be that desperation, or some approximation of its sense, plays a part in this, which is of course observable in innumerable other stories as well.

I often wonder that I did not end up like one of those Japanese people one reads about in the papers who never talk to anyone, never leave their bedrooms in daylight, for whole decades, slipping out only in the dead of night to procure food from vending machines (of course the vending machines in Japan are of reputedly of a much superior quality to anything we know here, and you can get beer at them as well). I have been trying in my blog to keep the extreme pessimism, to which I am unfortunately prone, to a minimum. Like everyone else nowadays, I am really a great pragmatist, a man of respectable, rational sense. There is too much information, too much research in human biology, too many breakthroughs in the study of economics, and so on and so on, for anyone of modest sense and awareness to be ignorant of what he is and what he can reasonably expect to be able to do, or even more chillingly, what his children are likely to be and be able to do. Such at least seems to be the consensus and the primary obsession of the age's philosophers, whose tone becomes all the time increasingly impatient with anyone below international-class levels of talent and intelligence; especially such of those in the middling range who instinctly and ignorantly try to resist these salient truths, though it is actually impossible to do so. The demand for talent is so great now, the supply of it so scarce and precious, the search for it on a worldwide scale unprecedented except by comparison to that of minerals in previous ages, that it is become inconceivable that anybody of real worth should go unidentified deep into his life. This is one of the existential truths of any time, I suppose, but ours especially, given the present organization of society and and its peculiar social conditions. This at bottom is of course what this blog is really about; it is also, however, the work of an individual who has had several opportunities to be evaluated for any sign of serious ability by people at fairly high levels of intellect and achievement, and has in every instance failed to make any necessary impression to progress. Thus the blog, as well as the biography and education and activities of its author, are not de facto self-justifying, and indeed in recent years all have been increasingly called to account, both on a personal level and as a general sense of dissatisfaction that has infiltrated the zeitgeist. Thus the deep, dark purpose of the blog, perhaps a hopeless one, has been a stab at justifying my very existence, including the three sons I have propagated, of whose place in anything resembling an identifiable human community or even a normal Western-model economic hierarchy I have no sense whatsoever. I have not yet accomplished this to my satisfaction, to say the least.

I have lamented before the amount of time it takes me to write these entries; though I only post on average once a week I work on this probably five days in the week for an hour or more at a time per day. I cannot work near fast enough. As of now I have at least my next 14 posts planned out all in order, with notes scribbled on various workpads setting out images, ideas I dread forgetting, strategies for ordering paragraphs--but like having a list of hundreds of books before one and being bogged down in a very slow and very long one, you cannot proceed as quickly as you wish if you are going to do it at all well, at least if you are me.

I am literally falling asleep at the computer so I am just going to post and be done with it.

The Game of Art--Part 6


By the time I have arrived at the high moderns my connection, both emotional and cognitive, to museum art, is already grown feeble. After them it evaporates entirely. Abstract expressionism, Postmodernism, Pop Art, whatever came after those things (I have a hard time even reading about anything that has happened since about 1970, so impossible is it to find a neutral or at least reasonably phlegmatic account about what is supposed to have actually happened and why it is important) have no resonance with me. Whatever particular delights or aspirations motivate its admirers to seek it out and try to lay claim to an identity with this work remain beyond my ability even to experience them, cold and inscrutable and indifferent as most of the world and most of life becomes.

Though we have reached the end of the game for me both chronologically and with regard to the height of the social levels I can glimpse, at the end I do not remain confused and despondent among the teasing Picasso and his uptight sensualist-wannabe fans, but decamp back a few centuries in time to a moderately high ground, 2/5ths of the distance from the center to the remote edge of the landscape, an excellent position from which to view nearly all the other hills populated by Westerners anyway, from the Sumerians to the last of the pre-1945 modern Europeans. My hill is fairly sparsely populated, mostly men in proper dinner dress with a scattering of good-looking but forbidding women, all in appearance rich, capable, expensively and carefully educated, possessed of frigid taste, stridently conservative in politics and social behavioral ethics, nastily disdainful of almost everything that does not approach the (not very) various personal standards they have set for themselves. Though they are formally polite enough to me I do not enter into serious conversations with any of them but observe them from a distance. I listen in on them because they speak more often about the things I am interested in than any of the other groups, though they are rarely able to get through a whole relation of anything without encountering a particularly unsavory specimen of their ideological enemies, who must be intellectually skinned and flayed and rendered wholly impotent before they can return to the story of the expatriate poets of 1950s Alexandria or Henry Green's half-decades lost to drink or whatever had been engaging my attention. The totemic painters of this my hill, approved heartily by all my fellows, are Poussin and Tiepolo. I had never heard of either of these artists, and probably would not to this day consider them any more special than dozens of others of their stature at the just sub-Rembrandt/Leonardo/VanGogh level of fame, until I was confonted by each's having a substantial part to play in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (painting by Poussin which inspired the title, above). It is not that I consider Powell or the supremely self-satisfied men and women on my hill paragons of taste, but it is clear that they have had such an education as both makes them capable of having it, and of having a fairly indomitable confidence in such opinions as they do form.

These painters have achieved a most comfortable and, to the confirmed bourgeois, enviable position in the art-stature game by the mores of early 21-century technocentric culture, though they are never set in the very highest niches of the pantheon; they are nonetheless largely unassailable by any force that the most rigorous current criticism seems to have at its disposal. Their technical proficiency is exemplary; their taste in and execution of their subject matter is uniformly of a high and thoroughly intellectually considered nature; in them, man is a more dignified creature in his degradation than moderns are generally able to conceive him in his triumphs. Their works appear, albeit by my very limited anecdotal evidence, to be relatively rare; Poussin's scattered a painting or two at a time around many minor and major museums, though with a decent concentration in London; Tiepolo having the bonus advantage (for snob value) that many of his finest works are on the not easily transportable ceilings of Venetian palaces, many of which remain in private hands and therefore inaccessible to the general public. Indeed I do not know that I have ever seen any of Tiepolo's work--certainly not since I became conscious of who he was, and the fresco of Candaules and Gyges that Powell writes about at such length I have not even been able to find any other reference to in my researches, though I find it strange that if he does refer to an actual work that there should be any difficulty in finding out basic factual information about it. In the Game of Art that I have been writing about however this (very intimate familiarity with and understanding of a painter's work) is often not so important of course, if a certain artist, or certain works or types of works fill an obvious symbolic need in the persona that the player wants to adopt to attract the potentially superior admirers/friends/contacts he seeks by engaging in it. Certainly there are other artists who occupy a similar position with me, especially some of the hyperbolical French romantics, David and Delacroix and the like, many English painters such as Constable and Hogarth, and all manner of academic painting, which I think it is not so hard to find charming if one can find television commercials charming, which doubtless in certain conditions most people probably do in spite of themselves. All these however are vulnerable to attacks in various major points of intellectual or even artistic weakness or failure, where the other two seem on stronger ground, only lacking that highest sublimity which is so rare that very few are in a position to attack it without making themselves more ridiculous than it is possible for their intended target to be. This kind of solidity of mind and competence has always fascinated me because it is the very remotest state to my current existence--sometimes more remote than genius I think.

Thus ends the game of art.

Jeanne d'Arc Part 3--EXCURSION: Joan of Arc's France

Below: the house known as Joan of Arc's birthplace, Domremy, Lorraine

The life and travels of Joan proceeded in such a neat and convenient order--she never re-traced a step or returned to a place she had once left--that following in her footsteps makes an ideal itinerary for a French vacation, and the air of venerable pilgrimage implicit in it might even be the sort of unifying theme or purpose, consecrated by long historical distance and high associations, that the discouraged or angst-ridden tourist can grasp onto to justify himself in being there; if nothing else it might fill his heart with more hope at the outset.
Joan never made it to Paris, but since anyone coming from the Anglosphere will most likely arrive there first, or will have to pass through it to get to Lorraine, one might as well stop there for 3 or 4 days before setting out for the provinces. For this trip I would recommend a restful or at least a not high-intensity 4 days of modern culture and consumption in the capital, since it is important to try to get into the mindframe of the Middle Ages, which I have been promoting in several places as probably the most proper way intellectually to approach this area of the world, including Paris itself. One could visit the Musee de Moyen Ages, I suppose, which some intelligent people have said is good, and of course Notre Dame. I am aware that it is somewhat trendy to eschew the great masses and hucksters at this church altogether and brave the more decorous and tasteful ones at Sainte Chappelle, which is not as universally known. By all means go to the second of course. Many people not ordinarily given to deep spiritual experiences claim to have them there, and this is a vital requirement to getting anything out of our tour. Notre Dame however is, and as long as it stands, always will be the heart of the city, its most important structure, the one constant that links, however tenuously, the medieval city--and in the 1200s and 1300s, Paris was by far the largest city in Europe, and probably the world, and more utterly dominant and essential in European learning and culture than it was even in the grand siecle--to the present. The building has been the greatest and most renowned landmark in the greatest or second-greatest city of European civilization for over 800 years, a tourist attraction for 500, and it still exists; all of which carries much weight with me. And I am telling you, when I get in there, jostled and tossed hither and fro as one of the post-Christian equivalents of the animals who used to graze among the ruins of Greece and Rome during the dark ages, I love my fellows. I do not mean a mushy, weepy personal love of a bunch of random and ill-dressed nonentities, but a properly manly and aristocratic vision of human possibility in which one is oneself an actor. Such is the power of my method.
Other possibilities for medieval activities in the Ile-de-France include a jaunt up to St Denis to see the basilica where the tombs (emptied during the Revolution) of most the French kings are. This is also where Pierre Abelard lived out his days after the legendary events he became entangled in during his prime. Of course the Latin Quarter/Sorbonne has come down in history as the center of the vital life of the city in that period, though I must confess I am not familiar enough with this neighborhood to say how much, if any, of the spirit of the time survives there.
By now the pilgrim must be ready to set out on his journey. The birthplace of Joan of Arc is at Domremy (now Domremy-la-Pucelle), and like Shakespeare, the house in which she is believed to have been born still stands, though it has undergone many alterations in the intervening 595 years. The church that she would have gone to likewise apparently still stands in some form, though it too has undergone many renovations, to the extent that entire parts of it have been destroyed or reconfigurated. Bourgeois Surrender does not believe in rushing through any town of any historical significance in an hour if he can help it, so you are going to have to hang around all day and wander about a little on foot and absorb some impressions of the country.
Next we have to journey back quite a ways across the country and through the English lines, as it were, to get to Chinon, where the future Charles VII was idling with ladies and defeatist church magnates when Joan got to him. This is in the Loire Valley, so we will substitute the many wine and gourmet food tourists we run the risk of encountering for the English as our designated enemies. The chateau is largely a ruin now (note: I have not been there, or to most of the places I'm writing about). In the throne room only the fireplace remains. To be sure the exhibits feature much Joan material (4 rooms worth) and there was a claim for some time that her ashes had not been dumped into the Seine but were miraculously saved and brought to the Chinon castle, though recent testing has determined the said ashes to belong to a cat (trying to tell which story to my wife, who is one of the least credulous people currently living, she immediately swarmed over me with "how do they know it's a cat? You can't identify anything from a pile of ashes" I don't know. If scientists say they can do it, what choice have I but to believe them?) Chinon looks to be a somewhat popular tourist stop, so perhaps if one stays overnight and has a personality and some nerve there is a possibility for romantic shenanigans. This last is completely speculation however.

From Chinon it is necessary to proceed up to Orleans, where of course Joan raised the seige of that city and achieved her most glorious victory on the battlefield. Orleans calls itself the capital of the Loire Valley--I would have thought it was Tours, but that shows you how well I know anything. It has a cathedral, as well a reconstruction of the house where Joan stayed during the battle, and looks well worth visiting, as old, mid-sized cities without any particular compelling sites often are in Europe (see below). From Orleans one then must venture back toward Joan's home territory, to Reims in Champagne, which of course has the ancient and important cathedral which was the coronation site of the French monarchy through the middle ages up to the revolution. Besides several churches, Reims also has a number of champagne cellars. Something about this sounds not as bad as going to wine tastings at Chateaux and vineyards, presumably because I imagine the cellar as a dark, dank place and I can't imagine you sniff champagne and swirl it around and take a wee dram and spit it out and all that pussy stuff. That isn't how the Russians do it, and they drink a lot of champagne. I still probably would avoid the manufacturer though. Maybe there is a quasi-rowdy (by French standards of rowdiness)champagne bar somewhere in town.

The glory being short-lived however, Joan was captured and taken to Rouen, where she met her end. I have actually been to Rouen, and it was one of the better times I have had visiting any place (though I did not pay much attention to the Joan sites). It is one of those mid-sized, old, historic and reasonably-preserved European cities that have managed to escape excessive popularity. Mantua in Italy, and Chichester and Lichfield in England are others that come immediately to mind. Their centers are all attractive, and they all retain some atmosphere of the pre-EU, pre-globalization character of their respectives regions and nations. You do not have to worry about being taken in by the uncool hotels, bars and restaurants that rip off stupid American tourists and divert them from the real fun, because there are not enough such visitors in these towns to warrant such business coming into existence. In Rouen English is--or I should say was, for it is some time since I was there--spoken less frequently than it was in Paris in 1990 (which was considerably less than it was there just 10 years later). I can barely communicate in the French language myself, though I read it passably; but I find generally in most European countries that the atmosphere is more interesting and less strained, certainly less artificial, for a foreigner, when the traditional/local language is the dominant one in the scene. This is not to dismiss the great multinational spectacles, and no doubt rich cultural exchanges common in the great city squares and train stations and downtown cafes and bars of Europe's grand cities, which so excites those who already live confidently with one or both feet in the hyper-globalized future. I have a weakness for poignancy, however, a decidedly unaristocratic/unelite sentiment; and places that can evoke an air both of having a "high" past and of being always a little stuck there, and not really very much of the present, are very poignant. Likewise highly intelligent or pretty people can be poignant, can be downright luminous in such a setting. The great cities seem to be evolving to a point where only the wretched and the innately inferior can have poignancy, though if that is a state wholly incompatible with meaningful high culture then perhaps this can be a positive change. I don't know.
The Joan sites in Rouen--the tower where she was imprisoned, the supposedly tacky museum, the modern church built on the spot where she was burnt--are generally shunned by the touring establishment. But I'm going to go to them if I ever get back to Rouen, and I am going to enjoy them. Her ashes, as noted earlier, were supposed thrown into the river Seine nearby.
This was quite a lame post. I apologize to my audience. I think I won't do any more 'excursions' for the time being. I will publish it because I want to get in the habit of posting copy, and because having the mind of a democratic man, I believe that there will probably be people out there who will be amused even by this, and I neither desire nor feel the responsibility of the aristocratic intellectual to keep such low entertainments from them.

Notes on My Trip to Florida

So as I intimated in my last posting, I was recently away for ten days, about a week of which were passed in Sarasota, Florida. This is the second year in a row that I have partaken in this New England ritual of taking a winter vacation in the Sunshine State, though prior to that I had certainly not thought of myself as the Floridagoing type. I have not yet been corraled into going to Disney World, my children being still small and unaware of its existence; but can anyone doubt that I will be there someday soon, happily relieving myself of fistfuls of cash and failing to feel properly the visceral recoil any serious-minded adult must experience when confronted with such a place? I didnt think so. This however is a matter for another time.

My image of Florida, which I had only been to once, when I was eleven, a time of my of life of which I remember virtually nothing, was that whatever might be said of it, it did not appear to exist for the likes of me, nor I for it. Intimidation, in my teens and twenties at least, I must confess was a factor: I was not affluent, nor did I have any particularly rabid ambition to appear so; I did not have an appropriate physique for hanging around attractive people my own age in the sort of attire customarily worn at beaches, yachts or trendy nightclubs in that region, which I imagined to be the only places in Florida that existed for socializing with young people; besides that I did not have any of the aforementioned suitable attire and my general appearance tends to wilt in heat and humid conditions anyway; having seen too many episodes of COPS set in Miami and Jacksonville I feared I was in no state to survive a likely encounter with one of Floridas innumerable well-built, often shirtless or tank-top sporting criminals (I am uncomfortable with displays of toned flesh generally, as one scarcely ever sees such a thing in New England. Such scary people as do exist in Boston are at least always dressed and are wearing parkas half the year, which makes them much less forbidding to cope with). This was combined with a general apprehension of the hostility I supposed from listening to too much right-wing radio anybody who enjoyed hanging out in France and Vermont could expect to meet with in that faraway and very mysterious region known as The South. This last of course seems absurd on reflection, but it is true that when we first got down past Richmond on the first trip, I felt very strange until we stopped somewhere and everything went off pretty much as normal. Still though, I was more comfortable and felt more attuned to people and the psychological environment when I was in Poland, than when I was in South Carolina. The real South psyches me out. I dont get it.

Sarasota, as anybody who has been there knows, is not the real South, and in my unscientific opinion, once you hit Gainesville going the western route or St Augustine on the eastern, the northerner is actually back in a somewhat recognizable milieu, indeed among many exiles from his own country, albeit with palm trees, a much greater community commitment to football, and at least in the wealthier areas along the coast, a much healthier-looking population. Sarasota and the keys that accompany it constitute one of those areas where not much nature apart from the actual ocean has been preserved quite as one might expect to find it. Insects, for example, appear to have been eradicated from large areas, including the--I dont know what to call it, development, I guess--where we stayed (we were lodging with some older relatives). The average age of people on the beaches is about 74, which greatly relieves the pressure on ones physical vanity. It is also a wealthy town, though one thing I have observed over the years is that if you are actually poor but vacation in the same place as upper middle class people the tendency is for most of them, even if they still consider you to be not so wonderful as themselves, to assume you are wealthier or more substantial than you really are, which of course causes to quiver a little the same ego I have just been relaxing on the point of physical beauty. There are about a thousand restaurants and bars there, not that I went to any (the children you know), so I cant gauge how much fun they would be, or different from the same type of place anywhere else in America. There are actually some decent tourist sites around Sarasota itself, which for somebody like me who can tolerate about a day and a half of beach time, is a happy circumstance. The Ringling estate (see top picture, which I fear I have stolen illegally from some professional), formerly owned by the circus mogul, is rather an extravaganza: with the outrageous mansion, which resembles a circus version of an Italian palazzo (I nonetheless like it), beautifully set with a great 1920s Gatsbyesque terrace right on the water; some circus displays and artifacts which can at instants offer one distraction from complete existential despair; and a very good art museum--really--from Ringling`s personal collection, of which I was only able to see about 40%, though I did at least get to see the Poussin, which was the closest feeling to a triumph I experienced the entire trip. The Spanish Point estate and grounds, quite extensive, was another good site for people like me who feel like they ought to spend time outdoors if they go somewhere warm, but like their nature subdued by the landscapers and engineer`s art. St Petersburg, about 40 miles away, is supposed to have 2 or 3 good art/culture museums too, though I didnt make it there. One of them is a Dali museum, which is not the sort of thing I would go out of my way to see, but would go to if I were in town for a week with nothing else to do, which is a state I am never in at this point of my life, but...
So Florida is starting to grow on me a little. I still would not want to live there, but if I had a lot of vacation time I could tolerate going for a week or two most years. Most of what there is to do there are not the sorts of things that I generally like doing, or seem not to be done at least in a way that I would like; but while this attitude might be tolerable in a Parisian philosopher, in me it only confirms my longstanding reputation as an incurable stick-in-the-mud. In other words it is not getting me anywhere.

It is moderately exciting to be in vacationland Florida during spring training (the Reds are the team in Sarasota nowadays) since this is about as aged a tradition as Florida has. I haven't been to any playing sites, but it is amusing to be around them, you know, and know that Yogi Berra and Bob Feller are somewhere in the neighborhood, and I also can better appreciate any stories I come across where somebody is feigning injury to skip out on the bus trip to Ft Myers and go on a bender (of course no one does this anymore).

In keeping with the ethos stated in an earlier chapter, we drove down. According to this guy, such adventures for people at my level of society will soon be distant memories, and I can expect within a few years to be toiling in a field within walking distance of my house (assuming I have one) alongside my fellow members of a revived native peasantry. As I dislike it when people go on a vacation and tell you all about the restaurants and hotels they stayed at, however great or awful they were, I dont want to go too much into that, but the state of things along I-95 between basically D.C. and Florida is pretty grim in that regard. I put a picture of the Waffle House up here because there about five hundred of them on the way south, and I had never heard of the place in my life before these trips. I have a high tolerance for inferior chain food compared to the sort of people who ought to be my friends but are not for such reasons as this, but this place, and its doppelganger in crimes against cookery, the truly execrable Huddle House, were too abysmal and depressing even for me to endure. Imagine Denny's at 2am on Saturday night, but half the size, and the chairs and counters smaller/lower and more cramped as well (and of course you are not drunk either). Our New England chains (Friendly's, Papa Gino's, D'Angelo's Subs, etc) are almost elegant and relaxing in comparison. Though I enjoyed the idea of driving through these faraway states, I still felt slightly cheered when we got back to Washington, and then we had dinner in Annapolis (where we went to college) and then we went on to Philadelphia where my family lives and has lived for a very long time, and returning to these scenes of youth and--I won't lie--more sophisticated areas cheered me of course even more, for I had been a little melancholy just before we got back to that familiar region.

I have lamented about the decline of the affordable but not completely gross and dispiriting American hotel elsewhere in these pages, which decline is of course felt most drearily along the far-flung outposts of our highway exits. Some have tried to persuade me that it was always thus, that the rathole motel is embedded in American lore and so forth, but I am talking about something else. Something else that still exists in Canada, by the way, that is a place where you pay $50-$70 for a room, no fripperies but reasonably comfortable and not brutal aesthetically, a la the Motel 6 model, which appears to operate under a policy that people who don't want or can't afford a $150+ room deserve to be spiritually punished for it; where the coffee and muffins probably lack dynamic flavor but someone has at least bothered to check that the milk isn't rancid or the donuts stale before setting them out; where the sheets have been competently laundered and the blood entirely mopped up from the bathroom floor. Now in the current economic and cultural climate, I know that I run the danger of implicating myself as impoverished or beyond the pale of respectable society merely by indicating knowledge of such places, letting alone confessing to having stayed at them. I have to plead nolo contendere. I do not think it is seemly for the likes of me to have to spend hundreds of dollars a night on unnecessary luxuries to be assured of avoiding squalor; though to be honest, if Mrs Bourgeois Surrender, who is a frugal Yankee of the old type, were not even more adamant on this point, I would assuredly be doing just that (So you see I could never have married anybody from Texas).

It seems pointless not to comment on what everyone must observe, that a great many, if not almost all, of these ramshackle hotels in the boonies are managed/owned (I'm not sure how it works) by persons who appear to be of a Subcontinental origin, most of whom exude a singularly indifferent attitude towards most of the traditional and noble functions of hostelry apart from collecting the fees. Not that this isn't all innkeepers' favorite part of the profession, or that native hotel employees are noted for their enthusiasm; but the these are usually not displayed quite so baldly, without even feigning to care about anything else, and especially by the proprietors. I know these motels are just roadside pit stops. There are however a lot of bad elements/vibes/what have you coming together in this trend that bother me a lot. The main thing being that, in large swathes of the country, these are not lowlife places you can just avoid and easily look elsewhere, but are the dominant accommodation. Therefore they set a standard of attitude and effort and attention to aesthetics for most travelling life in this country that I would prefer the nation to find wholly unacceptable. The Indian model of business/professionalism, as well as its attitudes towards services, seems to be ideologically an even more ruthless and extreme, status-obsessed version of the American one, which is the last thing this country needs at the present time. I did notice somewhere on the way down a hotel rather brazenly advertising itself as `American owned and operated` which I assume addresses a more widespread sense of discontent with the current state of affairs in this area. These are such touchy issues of course, when you feel compelled to criticize some identifiable group of people, something or other about whom just annoys you tremendously. These hotels are awful, though. In the old world you can get away sometimes with a nasty bathroom and sheets because you have other compensations; you are overlooking an ancient street, the food is good, the bar is lively, the other guests are attractive people of some parts and learning, and most importantly probably, you are in no way at home. But obviously I am beating this to death.

I had been getting excited because every time I checked by profile my visitor total was going up...by 1. I finally realized that the only person visiting it was me.

Joan of Arc Part 2

Now I will write my impressions of the four Joan of Arc plays I have recently read. Although I am not connecting on a very immediate level with the whole Joan of Arc legend, and do not have anything to say about it that promises to contribute to the vast existing body of knowledge on the subject, there is always a fascination and thrill, you must understand, for people like me in declaiming on such classical stories as have continuous and widespread popularity among people with pretensions. When I was looking for these pictures, there were tens of thousands of images of the Maid to choose from: statues, movie stills, handkerchiefs, salt shakers, posters, medals. And yet in all my life I have never talked to anyone about this subject, or encountered one Joan enthusiast to my knowledge.

Anouilh--L Alouette (The Lark) 1952

(Note: the apostrophe on my home keyboard all of a sudden does not work. This is the one of course for quotation marks also)

I can only consider that I have half-read this, as I read the American adaptation by Lillian Hellman, which struck me as, at the very least, not getting the authorial voice of a midcentury French playwright and penseur accurately enough. Five years ago I would have made a day of going down to Cambridge, having lunch at John Harvard's ale house or one of those places that serious intellectuals and cool people never set foot in, buying a few liter-bottles of imported mitteleuropeen beer at the gourmet market and picking up a copy of the original. Now however I dashed into a second-hand store on the way to Brattleboro (I do like Brattleboro though. If it were a woman I would both desire to dance with it and feel that it was attainable to me to do so) for New Year s Eve dinner, wife and babies sitting in the still running car, grabbed the questionable adaptation and endured a witty observation from the bearded fellow at the cash register that I must have known what I was looking for. So you see how tenuously I am clinging to maintain the forms even of a provincial pseudo-intellectual.

Of the four plays delineated here, The Lark has the virtues of appearing to correlate most with the actual events of history, or such of them as seem verifiable, as well as being more about the actual figure of Joan (Arc?) herself in a more signifigant proportion than the other plays. Her trial forms the structure of the play, the great events of her career being recalled in flashbacks. The tone of the action and dialogue, while somber, is rendered rather gently overall despite the threatening and grisly circumstances; I wish I could trust my adaptress more, however. I did like that rather than ending with Joan reduced to a pile of cinders on the stage, in the translated version at least, there is a flashback to the hour of her greatest triumph, the coronation of the Dauphin at Reims. In this American version the play comes off as, if not affirmative, at least offering hope that life contains nobility, or the possibility of it, after all, which strikes me as an unusual and rather too neat position for a French artwork of that era. It is the sort of thing that would probably cause me satisfaction and comfort if I were to see it as a playgoer, and any theater that enables the likes of me to be comfortable...well, you know what must be said about that. If I ever make it back to a big city, I will have to keep my eyes peeled for a copy of the original. I know I can order it off the Internet, but...it isn t urgent.

Schiller--Die Jungfrau von Orleans-1801

Though Schiller is, as far as I can tell, still regarded in the German speaking world as one of their very greatest authors--as high as number 2 in some polls--he is hardly read at all, and even that I suspect in a very desultory manner, in the Anglosphere. His power, or perhaps it is his Romanticism (the Germans going to much further artistic extremes in this movement than the English generally did) do not register strongly in English to my mind. Five to ten years ago again I probably would have tried to at least struggle through the original to try to get some feel of the poetry; especially as I love plays written in verse, which is a method I think is ripe for a revival, and which frankly I am surprised has lain dormant so long. It gives a dignity and a grandeur, and, if done at all skillfully, a pleasure, to one's story that is much harder gained by plainer dialogue.

To give an idea of how big Schiller is in Germany, there are I believe 7 or 8 museums dedicated to him, mainly in houses where he lived, which incidentally would not constitute a bad basic tour of that important and to my thinking still largely mysterious nation: 2 in Marbach-am-Neckar, where he was born, 1 (plus his grave) in Weimar, one in Jena, one in Leipzig, 1 in Dresden, one in a town called Bauerbach. Here is the Schiller-National Museum in Marbach. This is not just a Schiller museum, but an archive of German literature generally (I think; I cannot find any substantial information in English on this institution), but still, it is named after him, it is in his hometown, there is at least one large statue of him on the grounds. The edifice is certainly most impressive. In Portland (Maine), where I went to high school, there is a very dignified late Victorian statue of Longfellow presiding over one of the major intersections downtown. This might be the only real monumental-type public statue of a poet, I mean where he is elevated and large and dressed extravangantly and is sitting in an expensive chair and so forth, that I am aware of in the United States. I cannot think of any others at the moment. I am not going to argue that there ought to be more. Such things are as they are. Our American poets perhaps do not strike us as grand or good enough to be statue-worthy, but then again good monumental statuary has the effect of making people and events more likable. On the other hand, how many Schiller museums will Germany be supporting and how many Schiller monuments maintaining in a hundred years? It is hard to imagine as many as it does now.

But to address the play: the liberties and Romanticism--Joan's falling desperately in love with one of the English leaders, her dying in battle instead of the stake--as are noted in every modern critique of this play, become too much by the end to hold the reader's confidence. The first half, before one is certain where things are leading, is engaging enough. I like the extended emphasis on the heroine's family and village life, and the nature of the setting in which she receives her visions, which was passed over more quickly or disposed with altogether by the other authors. I think a more sober or tempered Romantic treatment would work well on this story. Although Joan is more brilliant than everyone she encounters, she is not an intellectual, nor learned, nor anguished, nor emotional, nor in way real way intimately accessible in point of her actual character. She has always been understood as a symbol of a number of desirable and usually impossible human qualities, which is the essence I suppose of true Romantic art, as well as religious iconography, which ought to be taken into consideration in any treatment of this subject. The play is not rated highly among Schiller's works, and I did not get much more out of it than what I have related, so I will let it go and move on to the next.

Brecht--Die Heilige Johanna der Schlacthofe (St Joan of the Stockyards)--1929

For those not familiar with this play, it is actually set in the meatpacking district and stock exchange of contemporary Chicago, and deals rather obliquely at best with the Joan legend. The Joan character actually resembles Major Barbara more than the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of her proselytizing the wretched and the unemployed in exchange for a cup of soup are almost as if lifted from that other play, which, however, had the advantage over this one of being much funnier and having some cleverer ideas and twists of the plot. The various, neverending business scheming and manipulation of prices made my eyes glaze over pretty quickly, and reminded me of why the calls one increasingly hears from conservative and high-testosterone American critics for a new race of manly novelists to address the world of high-powered, ultra-competitive business rather than their own sensitive feelings and petty grievances is likely to go unheeded. The day to day action and conversation of the respectable business world, as well as its etiquette, its publications and the apparent inner lives of its protagonists are not simply uninteresting; most of this is deadly and inhuman, and as if willfully so. The realm of art has apparently not yet found the form or the attitude--or the necessity--to raise its players and issues to the level of high culture, such as great minds recognize when confronted with it. This is not something I am just throwing out. I have worried about this for many years, given the centrality and ascendance of business values in our society as well as the widespread sense that modern American would-be writers have holed themselves up in their bedrooms, terrified of and overwhelmed by the very vitality of their nation. Now I don't think it is wholly true that authors have ignored business altogether, though I concede the entrepreneur or corporate ladder climber is rarely depicted as a hero deeply admired by the author. And secondly, I have to say that the more time I spend as an adult around corporate and other self-consciously professional-type people, the Kafkaesque or absurdist approach to understanding the ethos of this world seems the most plausible option, which is I suppose what our author (Mr Brecht) is saying at some level too, though I wouldn't really know from reading him. I would be curious to see one of his plays performed sometime, in Germany (I have realized that I can best endure live drama, as well as opera, in the country and language of origin, in a setting that I can imagine to resemble that in which the play was originally performed; thus I enjoy the faux-Globe that was put up in London and the Statny opera-house in Prague [formerly in Austria, remember!], however inferior the experts assure me their actors and singers are, as if I could tell anyway). I am positive I would glean more of what I am supposed to be gleaning from that than from further reading in translations of this author. I am not of the school, as should be discerned by now, that lower and even minute levels of understanding, in inferior minds, of great works of art, are utterly worthless, least of all to the mind concerned, as some apparently hold.

Brecht still has his fans. Someone should get hold of her and have her write a guest piece about why she likes Brecht. I am old and conventional and not especially good-looking, so it's unlikely she would respond to me. (If my link doesn't work, which it probably won't, go to the meet-me page on Hotornot.com and search for women with the keywords "Bertolt Brecht". There is only one).

Shaw--St. Joan-1924

This was the most enjoyable to read of the four, probably because it was the only one originally written in English. I thought the preface a very good piece of writing, both as an overview of Joan s career and for the many ideas about the type and quality of mind she possessed that duller or inattentive writers either missed entirely or grasped at inexactly or without succintness. George Bernard Shaw always had very distinct, pet ideas about the world, such as that well over 99% of the human population in any age and level of society were incontestable morons whose thoughts or troubles were of no real significance, and he could not resist topical jokes at the expense, as he imagined, of the lesser end of his audience (one of the English adjuncts at Joan s trial for example argues as proof of her heresy that she claims her saints spoke to her in French and not English). Pound, comparing his writings about his native Ireland to Joyce, thought it necessary to call him a ninth-rate coward. This type of declamation is a characteristic of a certain brand of hot and quick mind that I have always been envious of; for my own part I can only say that Shaw's work has not, compared to the other, the sensibility of the totality of a human being, or an atmosphere, of, shall I just say it, the spiritual influences at work in human society and culture. How far that is a matter of courage I do not pretend to know, but it probably has more to do with it than it seems at first appearance, or that most people--most bourgeois, certainly--would want to admit.

I would write more, but it has already taken me fifteen days to write this bloody report, and I can't even remember the damn play anymore. Granted, I was away for ten of those days, but come on. My life is slipping away while I try to write one coherent idea about what I am supposed to make of Joan of Arc. And I'm not done with her yet either! I am going to give this up and start on something else. This will all eventually lead somewhere if there is enough accumulated mass in it, that I believe.

Joan of Arc Part 1

Joan of Arc is one of the favorite female subjects in all Western art, particularly in the theater and its offspring the cinema, where Cleopatra has been about her only consistent competitor over the last 500 years. An Internet search turns up a great number of people living in places like Sacramento and New Zealand who identify fiercely with the story of this maid, who indeed devote a good portion of their life's energies to taking inspiration from her, studying her legend, collecting pictures of her, dressing like her at festivals, perhaps eating Joan of Arc brand brie, and the like. Morrissey even claims an affinity. She is, or has been at one time or another, claimed as a heroine by individuals desiring to represent Roman Catholics, anti-Roman Catholics, homosexuals, French nationalists, Romantics, anti-authoritarians, feminists and loyalists to the house of Valois, as well as innumerable artists and authors.

"Et Jehanne, la bonne lorraine/Qu'englois brulerent a Rouen..."

To the early 21st century mind--mine anyway--the obvious question that presents itself, there being no easy economic explanation for the most spectacular elements of the story, is 'What really happened?' or perhaps a little less prosaically 'What should I believe?' or 'What is important within that portion that I should believe?' It also occurs to me to ask, 'If I were myself to write a play or make a film or paint a picture about these events, what form would it take and what would I emphasize?' though I don't have any immediate sense of that inquiry's illuminating anything.

The story is evocative and spectacular from almost every angle. A teenage heroine...an endless war that has resulted in the occupation of the heroine's country by a foreign army...a dispossessed, listless prince (whose mistress, at least, is renowned as the greatest beauty of her age)...the rustic teen becomes convinced she must seek the prince, procure a horse and a suit of armor and lead an army to raise the seige of Orleans...she persuades every male authority she encounters, including the Dauphin and the Archbishop of Reims, to acquiesce to her plans...she wins the intial battle...the Dauphin is crowned in the ancient ritual and hallowed cathedral of his forbears...the heroine is given up to the enemy, tried for heresy and witchcraft, acquits herself with brilliant and rational cogency before a formidable ecclesiastical court, and burned at the stake at the age of 19. This is a biblical-caliber career, partaking variously of qualities found in the lives of Jesus, Socrates, and Julius Caesar, often at the same time. It certainly makes the exploits of such modern icons of youth as James Dean and Jim Morrison look rather pitiful. It is generally acknowledged now that Joan was not by current international standards at all physically attractive apart from having remarkable eyes, the remarkableness of which appear to have been more otherworldly and mystical than sexy in nature. As well, despite the rampant speculation about her sex life during certain periods of historical inquiry, the present among them, there seems to be little concrete evidence that she was not as disinterested in the acts of bodily love, or even as virginal, as the traditional legend makes her out to be. Accepting even this has been a stumbling block to many, however.

Since the mindset of the Middle Ages began to erode from the active consciousnesses of thinking people, artists have sensed that the story of Joan possessed in it something central to the spirit of European civilization while being at the same time increasingly difficult to comprehend as "true" in any modern, scientific understanding of the idea of truth. The Joan character as remembered is among the foremost figures of history in three areas thought by the general public as well as by some serious minds, to be contradictory: war, religion, and rational elocution with regard to each. She is indeed such a singular figure in each of these areas, and her actions and movements within and between them so seamless and inexplicably and seemingly almost effortlessly correct, as to strongly suggest genius-like qualities, the possibility of which, if it frightens the mass of men and their leaders and causes them to seek the death or destruction of the possessor, also excites in them an irresistible fascination, such that the murder of such figures usually produces a sense of deep regret right away, though the sort of charismatic genius of great military and religious leaders is always meteoric in nature and never able to be recalled or captured perfectly.

I must admit, I have at this point in my life lost any sense, which I do think I possessed at one time, of what medieval Western European man understood, or experienced, by the invocation of the idea of God and saints and angels--the Church triumphant--quite distinct from the Church militant which one knew matter-of-factly as the primary institution of society, which makes it quite difficult to write anything pertinent about this story, or the age in which it took place, though even Shakespeare, as Shaw observed in his preface about Joan, could not shed himself of the mindset of a Renaissance English Protestant in this instance either. This is partly why I set myself these exercises however, tedious though my audience, if I ever acquire one, may find them. It is very rare for me to be able to read any book or episode of history long accorded veneration or importance and pronounce it rubbish on the spot, in the manner of Nietzsche or Ezra Pound, yet I want to be honest about what really appeals to me in it. Superior qualities and abilities--daring, vigorous energy, a clarity of intelligence and will that extends to and uplifts others outside one's self--the very definition of heroism--always appeals to sentient humans; but here it is combined with the very strong and almost necessary insistence that these abilities were only exercised under the submission to and direction of a superhuman agent, God or his saints in this instance. This is obviously a deeply appealing and reassuring idea to most people even today, that the great events and conditions of their lives are not being directed by ruthless egomaniacs answerable to nothing but the gratification of their own wills and intellects, but by some greater force--even if a dark force, I think--before whom all men, the powerful and the crushed in spirit alike, are the same, and who can therefore at any time be raised or inspired with abilities or motivations that had previously been inaccessible to them. This is also a purpose and effect of the highest classical art, music and literature of course, which is doubtless why for the likes of me they have come to be as a kind of substitute for religion. In this way I can reconcile Joan of Arc too as having existence both as legend and reason suggest her to to me. The legend, especially over time, always becomes more important than the literal truth, indeed becomes the de facto truth; at least, as far as art and history go, the real truth is never more than partially successful in destroying the legend, if the legend is important enough.

Travels of a Born Tourist, Chapter II: General Theory of Tourism

Somewhere in Ruskin's works--of course I cannot find it at the moment--he writes about the absurdity of imagining one took in anything while traveling through a countryside or a city at a speed of five miles per hour in a carriage. The sensible world, he asserted, could only be meaningfully experienced by the mind when the body was engaging it within the limits nature had imposed upon it. To be said to have traveled through a country implies that one passed it at no swifter speed than that of an ordinary walk, which would require one to encounter the landscape, the inhabitants of the country, one's bodily needs, etc, in a proportion appropriate to one's humanness, undistorted by the aids of machinery. I do not remember how or if he accounted for traveling over water, but I would presume that doing so in any type of enormous, loud, motorized craft providing vulgar pleasures--or flying in an airplane--were not experiences he would have recognized as having actually been somewhere in any sort of educational or spiritual sense.

Modernity in general, and especially the global travel boom of the post-1990 era which has accelerated and spread in a staggering manner trends that had been slowly evolving at least since Herodotus went to check out the antiquities of Egypt, have aroused in many--as with all phenomena nowadays, perhaps too many to be accomodated without annoyance--thoughtful people the sense, articulated with various degrees of insight and skill, that something is amiss. That the experiences represented by the airport, the tourist hotel, the guided tour, the sunglass and umbrella vendors at ancient or holy sites, the strange and jarring ubiquity of the English language and its television and popular music in places where one would not consider it as belonging all converge to diminish the status, force of intellect and personality of the would-be traveler (and are therefore felt to be in some way not "real"), has become a cliche. Anyone who attempts to visit a major international city or world renowned sight in our age for a short time without an established reputation in his field, a brilliant personality or extraordinary beauty, especially if he or she is over thirty, will be largely dependent on the strength of his imagination to perceive himself as having any contact with the vital life, intellectual, historical, cultural, sensual, of these almost suprahuman places. One shops, one eats, one is transported in machines, sometimes one gets drunk or talks to other tourists about commonplace matters which do not lead to either enlightenment or sensual titillation of any kind, and one goes home, more often than not longing to go back; for one has still, in all the layers of contrived experience in which his journey has enmeshed him, been infected with the hope of capturing the elusive, ideal experience that one has glimpsed or felt, perhaps very intensely, the possibility of. This hope is the great enticement behind most conceptions of and longings for tourism by people unsophisticated by the standards of the travel elite. In their lifeless hometowns and offices they have, not being interesting themselves, given up all hope that anything that would be really interesting or fun to an adult with a strongly developed mind will ever transpire. But it is impossible to imagine that if one spent enough time hanging about in Rome or Paris, however dull one may be, that nothing exciting would ever happen to him again.

The significant trends of recent decades in the area of tourism of course reflect different types of tourists' scheming and trying to improve their perceived chances of attaining these elusive meaningful experiences. It is hardly surprising that disappointment is the prevalent tone of most travel books written by quasi-intellectuals or people who haven't any instinct for rustling up money. Jealousy is strongest among this group because its competition is in a certain sense the most desperate one. I would guess that only around 5% at the most of this comparatively impecunious and educated group actually ever approach realizing the experiences, the thoughts, the wit, the shoes and the sex partners that they long for. These 5%, largely unknown themselves except as a type, become their idols, their authors, their dream girls who slay many a heart when they write their postcards in the corner cafe window with their purse straps secure around their necks or when the Stella Artois is flowing and "Dancing Queen" finally comes on the sound system. But I am getting ahead of myself.

One of the obvious solutions to this dilemma of the elegance-destroying hordes who have overrun the traditional tourist spots for the true sophisticate has been to go to more remote and exotic places, preferably ones that are several decades behind the West in pace of life and infrastructure development, where no sophisticated tourist industry has yet risen up to come between a traveler and his experience, where one reasonably has little expectation of meeting Westerners who remind him too painfully of himself (no one has any problem with meeting Westerners who remind them flatteringly of themselves; such encounters appear however to be rare), as well as, for most people, one where the threat of serious bodily injury or death is still low. Others have in Ruskinesque fashion gone to the extreme of seeking nature pure and spectacular almost wholly untainted by human culture. These are the people who hike across Baffin Island or kayak the rivers of Siberia and report back to the SUV-bound masses about their adventures, making themselves envied figures. Both of these groups are however inferior to the truly awesome figures of the scientist or philologist or archaeologist or even historian who arrives in Kamchatka or the foot of Mt Ararat with actual work of great importance to human learning to pursue and a detailed knowledge of the sorts of things he encounters that the average non-sportsman bourgeois tourist can only dream of having, especially if the accomplished scholars also drink quality spirits and have intense sexual affairs in the evenings while engaged in their research (at one time, at least, serious people did such things). At this level of course we are talking about people with whom the likes of me share no recognizable intellectual or erotic human characteristics. This makes it a good point at which to try to explain the general theory of tourism.

Ruskin's idea, however much truth is contained in it ultimately, of the pace necessary for a minimum of deep contemplation of strange places, has become, if not impossible, problematic to adhere to in a great part of the world today. In my youth I made several attempts to set out on an extensive tour of the United States without a car of my own, which even allowing for hitchhiking and the occasional bus or local train, guarantees that one will have to do a great deal of walking. To be a foot traveler in any populated area of the U.S. apart from such pre-1945 urban parks, college campuses, business districts and residential areas as remain is to be significantly out of proportion to the surrounding physical environment with regard to scale, speed and noise, as well as completely isolated from such human society and activity as persists in such settings. One probably does think more clearly and with more penetration while walking across a giant parking lot or along the side of a busy highway with tractor trailers blowing him several steps off his course every couple of minutes than he does when he is the driver, but the thoughts incline at least as often to despair and the emptiness of one's spirit than to any sense of the sublime. Such people as one does meet as well are more like the tramps in Down and Out In Paris and London or the disturbed loner types on the fringe of society who live in motels and trailer parks, especially in the hinterlands, who are familiar characters in many American movies and books. Any women one meets are usually so unsettling or unpredictably violent-tempered that even I quickly come to wish I hadn't met them. Many times I would spend my days on these journeys just sitting in libraries or wandering around such college campuses as I came upon (I was 18/19 and not in school myself at the time) just to have a glimpse at normal girls my own age, and the to me near godlike men of my generation who could walk and thrive among them. Clearly, I had to admit, whatever I had meant to accomplish by this mode of travelling was a total failure, and I decided I had best try to get back into any academically quasi-respectable college I could, primarily for social reasons.

Having gotten a smattering of a liberal arts education, compared at least to the near-absolute intellectual darkness in which I had previously existed, as well as having for the only real time in my life a status (recent graduate) that would present me as socially acceptable to the mainstream of other travellers and competent, educated natives of popular destinations, having an opportunity to go for a long time on the relative cheap and having nothing else of importance to do besides, I finally made it to Europe (I had been once to Paris but in such a state of ignorance and social ineptitude that I have to consider that trip as an utter failure), where I had at last a slight enough maturity and awareness to implement some methods of touring that were relatively satisfying to me.

While I love airports and flying as much as the next person, I prefer this method of transport generally only as a replacement for ocean liners, to pass over seas or between very distant points of continents, unless of course there is no other way of going. Flying within the United States, or especially Europe, even where great distances are concerned, I do not like. There is a mythology involved with say, going from England to France that insists upon departing from the White Cliffs of Dover or the shipyards of Portsmouth and emerging a couple of hours later on the beaches of Normandy, or from Germany to Italy that requires one to weather the Alps that to skip over in a plane is to in some way miss the point of. Similarly I have always felt that flying into Moscow or Saint Petersburg from Western Europe, or California from the East coast and call it travelling was to cheat oneself. If Napoleon rode a horse from Paris to Moscow, and Mark Twain a covered wagon from St Louis to Carson City to give themselves a proper idea of the space essential to these places, I can certainly at least take a train or drive myself (though the isolation of private driving I think is not really ideal either, though in America it is certainly the only practical way for a modern person to move about on the ground--long distances between even convenience stores and flophouses in the West if one is travelling on foot). For myself when going to Europe I prefer in theory to fly only to Shannon airport in Ireland or to London and to approach the rest of the continent from there along the ground and over water, and for an extended journey I would certainly adhere to this. However for shorter stays I have become more amenable to landing elsewhere, at least if I have been to the place before.

As to time I do not like the idea of going anywhere more than 300 miles distant for less than a week, and even that seems a little flimsy. It is fashionable now to fly to Paris or wherever for the weekend--heck, people are flying into Dubai and I suppose Iraq for 2-3 day visits now. I am not someone who generally lies awake at night thinking about sums of money spent or gas being used extravagantly, but something about this bothers me. I suppose if one is a highly functioning member of the global society, flying from London to Istanbul on Friday afternoon in time for happy hour at the Grand Hotel Byzantium is no different from my grandfather's hustling back on the 5:15 to meet the guys at the Dutch Inn on Rising Sun Avenue, but surely there is an element of depth, or perspective missing in this that Ruskin would be attuned to.

I do not like excessive vanity, luxury, expense or pointedly unintellectual hedonism, all of which trends appear to be gaining rather than losing momentum in our time. I believe strongly that one ought to have some nobler end to pursue if one has the privilege to journey far from home. It need not be strictly educational or altruistic, but the emphasis on sensual pleasures and gratifications of vanity as primarily goods to be bought, sold and displayed without modesty or reflection is somewhat disgusting to me. A place like Israel as currently constituted seems, if nothing else, to force people to take what they are about more seriously than has become customary elsewhere. I believe this sort of atmosphere would appeal to me, though I have certainly overestimated my attraction and devotion to a more substantial life before. True vitality, sensuality, atmospheres bursting with artistic sensibility, natural beauty both of nature and men ferocious, untamed and overwhelming, such qualities being most foreign to myself and my general type, I assume to be rare, though they are the standard language of tourist advertising. I am certain, however, that one cannot buy them, and should not seek to. I am losing my thread of thought however; so I will save my general ravings against bourgeois luxury and continue with the theory in the next chapter.

More reading.

Spenser--Epithalamium (Wedding Song)

Edmund Spenser is surely one of the four or five most beautiful poets ever to write in the English language, and probably the most committed to a pure beauty of line above any other consideration, for this purpose is never interrupted or sacrificed in his work. He is not overflowing with particularly fresh ideas or images even in the context of his own age. However the formation and flow of his words when read aloud seems so natural, so obvious as to be quite remarkable when one considers that approximately 450 million people speak English now as a first tongue, and virtually none employ it in this manner either in writing or speech.

"Early before the worlds light giving lampe,
His golden beame upon the hills doth spred,
Having disperst the nights unchearefull dampe,
Doe ye awake, and with fresh lustyhed
Go to the bowre of my beloved love,
My truest turtle dove,
Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake,
And long since ready forth his maske to move,
With his bright Tead that flames with many a flake,
And many a bachelor to waite on him,
In theyr fresh garments trim."

There are no earth-shattering intellectual gymnastics here. All the rituals of the poem are utterly conventional, the actions and personalities of the participants artificial and contrived, most of the descriptions and classical allusions border on being hackneyed, and the pagan gods invoked have the air of long refrigeration about them, at best. The exuberance is all in the writing, and that is genuine, that is the new, alive wondrous object of love, and certainly the poem takes on a much added dimension if we think of the English language in its youthful bloom as the maiden about to be cultivated, ravished and loved by an enthusiastic and virile practitioner.

"Never had man more joyfull day than this,
Whom heaven would heape with blis.
Make feast therefore now all this live long day,
This day for ever to me holy is,
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,
Poure out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the posts and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall.
Crown ye God Bacchus with a coronall..."

The consummation of the marriage, which lasts much of the night and culminates most happily in the bliss of the groom and the impregnation of the bride, takes about 100 lines to recount, most of them imploring the night to be extra dark and quiet during the poet's business, but there are some good ones which I will try to cull:

"Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast:
Now bring the Bryde into the brydall boures.
Now night is come, now soone her disaray,
And in her bed her lay;"

Addressing the moon:

"and sith of wemens labours thou hast charge,
And generation goodly doth enlarge,
Encline thy will t'effect our wishfull vow,
And the chast wombe informe with timely seed..."

His description of his lady gives us a heavy dose of ivory forehead, apple cheeks, cherry lips, etc, though it is not every day one hears this satisfying image spoken anymore:

"Her brest like to a bowl of creame uncrudded,
Her paps lyke lillies budded..."

Among Spenser's poems that I have read I would rate this behind the Amoretti (exquisite love sonnets) and The Shephearde's Calendar, which is what it sounds like, a tour of the pastoral year. These other things are a little more interesting to read and have slightly more pungency to them. Still, the essential quality of this author is that he unites one of the highest poetic sensibilities of all time to a vision of existence that is, or at least aspires to be, almost willfully happy and, what is most rare among artists of high talent, innocent. That this quality is not easy to attain is shown in the work of the major author below, born 218 years after Spenser and committed as well to the pastoral, the lyrical, the beautiful, the traditional, the authentic, in a world and a literary culture in which it had already become more difficult to believe wholly in the reality of these things than it had been in Spenser's day.

Wordsworth--"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"/Hartley Coleridge--"He lived amidst th'untrodden ways"

I have been slow in gaining an appreciation of the poems of Wordsworth, of which I have not read more than a handful, and even those at long intervals from each other. To begin with, his authorial personality has something about it that reminds me of those earnest, bearded old men of the generation of the 50s and early 60s who one still always sees hanging around used book stores and who have always annoyed me, probably because if I had happened to grow up at that time I would doubtless be exactly like them; they are neither particularly cool nor talented nor interesting, though they have been aspiring for half a century to be these things above all else, a whole mass of failed Beatnik Robert Bly types still trying to define what it is to be a man, an artist, an American, an American man artist, not very absorbingly and completely innocent of humor (the real Beatniks at least were often very funny). I have to turn tail at the sight of them. To the modern raw reader of poetry, Wordsworth comes off initially as partaking of some of these traits. There is nothing in his lines or thoughts that particularly grabs one by the throat and stamps an indelible image on the mind the way that say, Byron's or Edgar Allen Poe's poems can still do. All of the poems seem at first to be similar meditations upon the same handful of subjects. The titles themselves are very plain and somewhat hard to keep straight in one's mind, apart from "Tintern Abbey". Judging by the notes I have made in my Norton Anthology I appear to have at least read over at various times "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", "It is a Beauteous Evening" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", yet I could not have named these from memory if asked. It is not that I did not like them; however they obviously lacked for me a certain force that I had come to associate as necessary for being memorable.

Nonetheless I have come over time to a certain respect for Wordsworth's work because of the intelligent and humane manner in which so many notable, energetic and thoughtful men of the 19th century responded to these on the surface rather plain and intellectually uninvestigative musings on natural beauty. Mill in particular, who had been educated to shun poetry, Shakespeare included, as insubstantial, credited them with helping to restore his interest in life after he had suffered a nervous breakdown at age twenty, traditionally attributed to an overpreponderance of pure logical thought. Any man whose work is capable of this I consider to merit my attention more than the general run of poets. Mill attributed their power to the expression of "states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty." This strikes me as reasonable, as well as being pleasingly without being overly subtle writing on the part of the poet. Still, one has to experience something of the effect oneself to really understand what the hubbub is about.

"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" read aloud or looked at on the page, consists of 67 words that can be disposed of in a crisp 20 seconds or so either way. As far as initial time commitment goes for the student of literature, it is not Remembrance of Things Past. It is about a maid named Lucy (many Wordsworth poems feature a girl named Lucy) who lived in a remote area, was deserving of a greater degree of praise and love than it was possible for her to get in those pre-MySpace days, and died, her death strongly affecting the poet though apparently no one else. There are 3 little stanzas, of which the first establishes her worldly condition in life and the 3rd the same in death. The 2nd contains the metaphors and, I assume, the poem's meaning:

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky."

It is a slight and delicate set of images, though in this instance it suits the subject matter very nicely and subtly, which I think the 19th century appreciated more than we do, who think slightness and delicacy, even where that is the state of life or the form of idea being taken up by the poet, the exclusive province of wimps. One can extrapolate in a number of directions from the images given, which is a benefit of writing about nature and "general" subjects. The maid's beauty is, while she lives, continually in some state of fragility. First there is the matter of its being generally unseen, then there is the suggestion that it is beautiful because there is nothing else--no competing star--with which to compare it. The poet seems to have known her only at a distance--not well at all. Perhaps this is all a small but well-wrought metaphor for life. There is in a small space much suggested, all of which, however is manageable--the poet only requires the reader to recognize the suggestions, not learn a foreign manner of thinking. Perhaps I am starting to get at something of the appeal of Wordsworth.

I am not quite sure exactly what to make of Hartley Coleridge's parody. The same three-stanza setup is used, the first referring to a poet who lived in unread and unloved obscurity, and the third to the poet's book gathering dust in the shop. However if Wordsworth is the author invoked, this is all obviously opposite to his actual situation; his house and neighborhood in the Lake District were already attracting tourists while he was still living in them. Coleridge's second stanza has possibly a little edge to it:

"Behind a cloud his mystic sense,
Deep-hidden, who can spy?
Bright as the night, when not a star
Is shining in the sky."

Coleridge was the son of Samuel T Coleridge, and a minor poet himself. Basic biographical information on him is a bit of a chore to hustle up, but he appears to have been intimate and on reasonably good terms with Wordsworth all his life. It may not mean anything, but he and Wordsworth are buried right next to each other in Grasmere churchyard. I assume the parody was intended to be good-natured.

In Case You Were Wondering Where I've Been



www.youtube.com/watch?v=43FudoSf2W8

I'm working on two long posts simultaneously at the moment which will appear behind this one if I ever get them done. I am desperately trying to figure out how to put pictures on here and I haven't done it yet. I have figured out how to scan them, but how to transfer them so they show up on my page is eluding me.

I wanted to write "Entertain yourselves" and have that link above down here at the bottom clicked on by just a word. I really need some kind of basic Internet course. I am getting frustrated.

Another Reading Update

Brecht--Die Dreigroeschenoper (I cannot resist a good untranslated title in a semi-recognizable foreign language. Sorry.)

Plays make up a significant portion of the readings on my list, quite possibly 20% or 25%. I am not much of a theatergoer, especially when it comes to anything serious, and at this point almost probably will never become one. I have in the first place some slight jealousy and irritation issues when confronted at close range with actors and theater people generally, mainly because they don't recognize me as one of their kind, i.e. a fellow artist and intellectual--not that anyone else does either, but in the privacy of home or a large library one is not confronted with the contrast between himself and real people so starkly. In small theaters with fairly high status actors and an audience that one can presume to be rich, educated, expensively and carefully dressed, and to have some claim of current possession of the literary canon, such as the Folger in Washington, the almost pornographic physical and intimacy and intellectual competition of the whole environment is too much for me. The one time I was there some years ago, ostensibly to see Romeo and Juliet I was possessed throughout the performance with a strong desire to run up on the stage and yell "Look at me! Look at me! I am serious! I have read Shakespeare! I have read a lot of books! I have a high IQ too!" Of course I restrained myself, but I am always much less agitated when the show is finally over and I am safely ensconed at the bar with a mug of beer and a plate of fries and don't have to pay attention to other people any longer.

My issues with actual theater attendance aside however, I generally enjoy reading plays--most of the older ones were originally intended to be entertainments after all--though having been raised, so to speak, on the triple decker novel, the comparatively skeletal frame and scope, the brevity and swiftness of most plays when read is something I have never quite adjusted to, and as a result I often have especial trouble remembering the details and plots of them. They do not, for whatever reason, impress themselves much upon my mind, except perhaps after one has read a lot of a certain author or of a certain epoch, and then mainly as a composite of the types.

Bertolt Brecht promised strongly to be an author that I was not going to get the point of, as I am exactly the sort of man that he pointedly set out not to write for. He was moreover born in Germany in 1898, the same year as Jacob Klein and 1 before Leo Strauss, the exact contemporary to numerous other formidable, formidable minds, among whom he stood out as one of the very most important. The circa-1955 blurbs on the dust jacket of my copy of his book are also strong signals that I should probably not be attempting to read this material: "...every other living playwright seems more or less trivial." Whenever they say this you know you are not going to win. Goodness, once the totality of creative talent in the theater world of 1950 with the exception of one figure is established as more or less trivial, that more or less indicts everyone else with any connection to it not involved in a Brecht production as similarly frivolous, including the audiences, for supporting and subsiziding such a cultural desert; and having done this, what in God's name hope is there for the likes of me or one of my non-German speaking, American public school and liberal arts college-bred contemporaries to penetrate through to whatever it is that is so essential in the plays of Bertolt Brecht? The prospects are not very promising. Another blurb assures that "at last, we have Brecht...translated into a language that resembles the Queen's English rather than German-American." Oh my. This also reminds me of another author out of one of my favorite categories of modern literature, the super-serious-white-African-Communist-woman who really detests the United States for being politically unconscionable, shamelessly materialistic and intellectually frivolous, Doris Lessing, who took a moment in The Golden Notebook to ridicule the stupid Americans for turning "Mack the Knife" (which is originally a song from this serious and intellectually demanding play I am gradually getting around to talking about, for anybody who might be confused) into a swinging pop song for teenagers to dance to at the malt shop. Personally, I think this was a rare stroke of brilliance on the part of the Americans--would we could do more such stylistic pilfering and watering down of European, or any high culture, Indian, Chinese, whatever, if that is something we have a talent for--but I am both a biased and culturally blinded observer, in this instance.

Now the Threepenny Opera is modeled upon Gay's Beggar's Opera, which I have read once, and which I took, as far as I was able to take it, to be a comedy based on the hilarious idea that the moral codes, behaviors, institutions, etc of the lower orders of society bear in certain broad details resemblances--fleeting ones anyway--to those of more substantial people. While in Gay and 18th-century England the mirror showing us how repulsive we really are is played for laughs, carries little more sting than a light rebuke and seems to assume we could even improve our characters if we weren't so lazy and actually wanted to, in Brecht and Weimar Germany the laughs, while still sought, are certainly not meant to be light, the rebukes are meant to reverberate harshly through the mind of a sentient being at least, and the attitude regarding people's abilities to substantially improve their vile characters is pessimistic at best. Given the time and the place it is easy to say that such an assessment of the human condition was prescient and necessary. The whole Zeitgeist of that generation of Germans is exceedingly difficult to get one's mind past when dealing with the products of its intellectuals, even those many who emigrated and denounced Nazism and earned for themselves a place of some honor in history. I think the problem is that the general darkness that pervaded that generation's outlook upon everything, however rightly, was of an intensity that is not really common in human cultural history, yet because these people were so influential both in Europe and in the United States where so many took positions in universities and wrote for publications and directed research and set the intellectual tone in many of these for 30 years, many smart people have become convinced that this is the attitude towards humanity and its prospects that a serious person has to take, at least in the modern world, as long as certain conditions and problems persist. I don't think this is quite right; but I have a lot of diffidence when it comes to try to argue the point.

Much of this is because the German emigres were so technically and incontestably smart. When they arrived in the United States, whether they went to Hollywood or New York or Los Alamos or the University of Chicago, the natives did not have much to offer them apart from money and security, towards which many of the emigres appear to have had mixed and/or guilty feelings towards to boot, and they (the natives) seemed to have been able to offer little resistance to the newcomers' intellectual force overwhelming their own whenever representatives of the two groups collided. While this had indisputably many positive effects upon the quality of learning and culture available in America, I have always had a very ambivalent relationship to such of the emigres as survived to my own day that I encountered, and especially with those of their chosen proteges. I do not quite want to say that I have a different 'spirit', or that I have a 'more' Anglo-Saxon/Irish sort of intellect, but I do distrust the German method of categorizing and systematizing their ideas of truth, which seem to have a stronger inclination to obliterate such as are even slightly incompatible with them.

In doing some research on Brecht I discovered that he was a big proponent of the idea of "Epic Theatre" in which the ideas of the play would be more important than the story being acted out and the individual characters portrayed. Either there is more to it than this that I missed or he was extremely successful in his goal, because I have certain had it drummed into my skull for 30 years that anything serious is always about ideas first and the story and characters are handy conventions in which to dress them. It had not occurred to me that people may not have consciously subordinated plot and characterization to greater themes on a broad until the 1920s, but I suppose it is plausible.

My genuinely excellent edition of Brecht's plays has 11 pages of notes on the Threepenny Opera written as far as I can tell by the author himself under such headings as "The Reading of Dramas", "Tips for Actors", and so forth. He is an exceedingly mistrustful author. The bourgeois of course deservedly take the biggest beating, but this extends to the theater itself, as a bourgeois institution serving bourgeois audiences and bourgeois economic interests. He sees the theater as resisting his attempts to transform it, which I suppose it would do; impatience with the stubbornness and disgraceful behholdenness to the bourgeois of the institutions one is attempting to transform however is a common complaint in all the arts during that period. The great sin of the bourgeois and the art that is made for him, as far as I can make out, is that he prefers to be flattered with lies than to be confronted with truth, and the fascinating thing of course is that we are to suppose this is unique to the bourgeois, and that truth and constant moral self-criticism are subjects of intense concern to all people who have not been infected with this state. The crux of the argument I suppose is that the bourgeois is so compromised that he is neither morally good nor morally free, but unlike the slave or the wretched pickpocket, he frequently imagines himself to be both, which is disgusting to a real artist or philosopher, or any other uncompromised human being. This is probably true, but I don't think Brecht is the right artist to convince me of it thoroughly.

I have more to review, butI will put them on another posting.