Has the Internet Destroyed My Mind, or Just Exposed It Further?

I do think it may be slowly driving me insane. The patterns of thought and writing, the attitudes, etc, that I developed over the first 27 or 28 years of my life before the Internet existed on a mass scale are not really well suited to the requirements of that medium. In fact I am so distracted, so unable to concentrate on any precise idea or line of thought, so confused in my conviction that the Internet has not made me one whit wiser or better or more interesting as a person while seeming to believe at the same time that perhaps those things, being unmeasurable, no longer matter or have meaning in opposition to IQs, credentials, worldly achievements and income, the substantial qualities of Internet as well as current intellectual culture in general, that I cannot even write a coherent post on the subject.

This is going to be a week of bad, soldiering on types of posts for me. I do not know where my mind is or what has happened to it, but I sincerely hope it comes back before I start writing about girls I saw in drugstores in 1985 and that kind of thing.

Ossian--Part 4

I am going to try to complete this at an early enough hour that my thoughts do not become so maudlin...

Temora Book IV continued: "Erin rose around him like the sound of eagle-wings". I like this description.

While there is much beauty in these books, the relentless emphasis on death makes the worldview a little too bleak. The majority of the characters are killed in the first flushes of youth, unformed as men, virgins, etc. I suppose it the society represented was one devoted to war, and these are the essential facts of war, but I cannot bring myself to shed the prejudice that there is, and ought to be, more to existence.

There is a humorous note on one of MacPherson's notes regarding an absurd image in Book VIII of Temora by a contemporary commentator: "The waves of a mountain lake suddenly frozen into the form of ridges, are undoubtedly picturesque; and the only objection to an image, `familiar,` as it seems, `to those only who reside in a cold and mountainous country,` is, that it never yet was realized, as every lake must acquire a plain superficies when frozen. "

Perhaps anticipating the decline of manliness, the poet taunts those who will come later in softer ages `When thou, O stone, shalt moulder down, and lose thee, in the moss of years, then shall the traveller come, and whistling pass away.--Thou know`st not, feeble wanderer, that fame once shone on Moi-lena.`

Note: `Byron was grateful to Macpherson`s duan for providing him with a rhyme for Don Juan.` (duan: composition in which the narration is often interrupted by episodes and apostrophes. A term supposedly used/created by the ancient Gaelic bards)

In the last bit of writing in the collection, Macpherson`s updated Preface for the 1773 edition, after it is to be speculated he had been deeply engaged in the gratification of his appetites which were alluded to in Part 1 of this series for several years, he asserts that `He that obtains fame must receive it through mere fashion; and gratify his vanity with the applause of men, of whose judgement he cannot approve.`

Tour: This promises to be one of the few literary-oriented tours that might appeal to the class of people who are both at least agreeable-looking and actually understand art, beauty, life, sex, man, travel, etc, though ironically most of the sites involved have probably no definite historical relation to the legends or the books. Ossian himself is said to have been born in the valley of Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands, and his burial place traditionally was in the valley of Sma` Glen, which is somewhat to the east, in the vicinity of Perth. Wordsworth passed through the are in 1803 and noted:

`In this still place, remote from men/Sleeps Ossian, in the Narrow Glen.`

Fingal`s Cave, on the uninhabited island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides, has been a famous natural attraction for the last 200 years. It apparently acquired this named after the composer Mendelssohn visited as a young man and was inspired to write the piece Die Hebrieden, which
is known in English as Fingal`s Cave. In any event literary and artistic people have associated the spot with the spirit of the Ossian poems for a long time. I do not have a sense of how touristed these regions are (as essentially a novice traveller I have mainly confined myself to the most popular and overrun areas of Europe myself) but I cannot imagine that they are terribly crowded.

The traditional burial spot of Fingal is in the village of Killin, in Perthshire.

MacPherson himself was born in the village of Ruthven, in Inverness. He is actually buried in Westminster Abbey, and at his own request too, which given the literary persona he cultivated with such great success is most interesting.

Ossian--Part 3

There are few images more horrible to me in all of literature and history than that of fleeing armies in ancient warfare being cut down and butchered by their pursuers, as it appears without being able to offer any effective resistance. Rationally this is not more disturbing than any number of means by which history relates people to have been killed, murdered or otherwise humiliated. I think it is the sense that the battlefield is in some way supposed to be a fair test of a man`s ability and character, and that to be killed from behind comparatively effortlessly by one`s opponent while in flight, anonymous, bespeaks such an utter failure of both such as is quite painful to contemplate for any man who can easily imagine himself in the same unfortunate position.

The custom of sending the bard before one with songs prior to appearing oneself to cast accusations and issue challenges I like. There is real old-school gentility in it.

In the Dissertation which precedes Temora, MacPherson offers an appreciation of the barbaric mode of life:

"The nobler passions of the mind never shoot forth more free and unrestrained than in these times we call barbarous. That irregular manner of life, and those manly pursuits from which barbarity takes its name, are highly favorable to a strength of mind unknown in polished times. In advanced society the characters of men are more uniform and disguised. The human passions lie in some degree concealed behind forms, and artificial manners; and the powers of the soul, without an opportunity of exerting them, lose their vigor. The times of regular government, and polished manners, are therefore to be wished for by the feeble and weak in mind. An unsettled state, and those convulsions which attend it, is the proper field for an exalted character, and the exertion of great parts. Merit there always rises superior; no fortuitous event can raise the timid and mean into power..."

As in most observations of this nature, the criticisms of the weak strike more forcefully as having something of truth in them than the exaltations of the strong. This is because strength of will or wrath or personality has, in some degree, to operate in a vacuum where the sense of itself always remains relatively unperturbable. Immoral, or wicked strength seems to me have some advantage over moral, or good strength in attaining this vacuum, and by extension attaining the sovereignity in times of weak or non-existent government. Of course, such distinctions are only of importance to the impotent of spirit who are incapable of overcoming or even contending with strength, though I think it is acknowledged even by the most vigorous authors to be a shame when weak but otherwise unobjectionable people have to suffer under brutal rulers.

Still in the Dissertation, MacPherson gets in a dig at the establishment which received his work with less than the near-universal enthusiasm of the public:

"...I am thoroughly convinced, that a few quaint lines of a Roman or Greek epigrammatist, if dug out of the ruins of Herculaneum, would meet with more cordial and universal applause, than all the most beautiful and natural rhapsodies of all the Celtic bards and Scandavian Scalders that ever existed."

In ridiculing the Irish claim as the fatherland of Ossian he refers to a poem of that nation in which Ossian is made contemporary with Saint Patrick, noting that `The saint sometimes threw off the austerity of his profession, drunk freely, and had his soul properly warmed with wine.`

Continuing on the theme of the worship of Greece and Rome he argues that `Tho` their high merit does not stand in need of adventitious aid, yet it must be acknowledged, that it is an advantage to their fame, that the posterity of the Greeks and Romans, either do no at all exist, or are not now objects of contempt or envy to the present age.`

Temora Book II: `Erin`s clouds are hung round with ghosts.`

Later in the same: `The stone shall rise, with all its moss, and speak to other years. `Here Cathmor and Ossian met! the warriors met in peace!`--When thou, O stone, shalt fail: and Lubar`s stream roll quite away! then shall the traveller come, and bend here, perhaps in rest. When the darkened moon is rolled over his head, our shadowy forms may come, and, mixing with his dreams, remind him of this place.` This is a characteristic specimen of the better sorts of romantic charms to be found in this work.

Temora Book III: `I glittered, tall in steel: like the falling stream of Tromo, which nightly winds bind over with ice.`

Later in the same: `Like the bursting strength of a stream, the sons of Bolga rushed to war.` In isolation this line seems a little hackneyed, but within the buildup of the rest of the poem with its heavy images of nature and war it actually makes a more vivid impression than it would appear to.

With the human population being so tiny and, especially at the edges of the British Isles, so isolated from any contact with the greater world in the settings of these poems, the idea of personal possession and lordship over all the lands and seas that one knew was far more plausible than it is to the average man of the 21st century in these countries, and doubtless had an effect, probably positive, on the psychology of these ancient men.

Temora Book IV--MacPherson wrote a note on the sentence `In the lonely vale of streams, abides the little soul,` which deserves to be printed in its entirety. Here it is:

`From this passage we learn in what extreme contempt an indolent and unwarlike life was held in those days of heroism. Whatever a philosopher may say, in praise of quiet and retirement, I am far from thinking, but they weaken and debase the human mind. When the faculties of the soul are not exerted, they lose their vigour, and low and circumscribed notions take the place of noble and enlarged ideas. Action, on the contrary, and the vicissitudes of fortune which attend it, call forth, by turns, all the powers of the mind, and, by exercising, strengthen them. Hence it is, that in great and opulent states, when property and indolence are secured to individuals, we seldom meet with that strength of mind, which is so common in a nation, not far advanced in civilization. It is a curious, but just, observation; that great kingdoms seldom produce great characters, which must be altogether attributed to that indolence and dissipation, which are the inseparable companions of too much property and security. Rome, it is certain, had more real great men within it, when its power was confined with the narrow bounds of Latium, than when its dominion extended over all the known world; and one petty state of the Saxon heptarchy had, perhaps, as much genuine spirit in it, as the two British kingdoms united. As a state, we are much more powerful than our ancestors, but we would lose by comparing individuals with them.`

This all reflects on me, not merely with regard to war, but to business, science, technology and the other arenas of competition which sustitute for war among men of parts and abilities in our era, arenas in which I have no purpose to even be in. But I have to go to bed. I will post this and leave 1 more Ossian post for the week. This site needs to be producing copy above all else. That is the raison d`etre for it.

Ossian Part 2

Among many echoes of the Iliad in these writings, our author has an especially deft touch with blood, particularly when swords are coated with it. He shows as well a proclivity for strange flashbacks, the beating of the black waves of the ancient northern seas, the vaunting before a single combat, etc.

These works, no doubt aided by their remote setting, evoke even in warfare a sense of wild silence compared to doing just about anything in our own times. I believe modern man's capacity to produce and endure incredible volumes of noise and his acceptance of this as a normal state of existence has been widely remarked so I will not go on about it here.

One cannot but comment in writings of this type on the passion for war and willingness to die violently displayed by its characters, and especially the apparent conviction of the authors that this is the finest, most proper and most uncorrupted personality a man can attain. While such characters are undeniably exciting and irresistible to the ladies, obviously civilization can only advance so far if producing such men becomes the only end of a society. Of course many authors, MacPherson included, have expressed misgivings about the effects of advancing civilization on the manly spirit. I am not immune to such suspicions myself at times, though in truth following the progress of civilization, mainly through reading about its past and present and wondering what news of it will come to me in the future (I do not experience much of anything at first hand) is the primary interest I preserve in life. While characters who live by this sort of extreme code in the modern world do hold a certain fascination for me, I do not generally find them to be very interesting in themselves, but only in the opposition of their mode of life to, well, mine.

This description of the nature does make one desire to go on a (peaceful) walking tour of some duration in the regions where the poems are set. I would even like to go in the fall when it is really quiet and dark and gloomy (I assume if you get to a village the pubs stay open year round). That is the kind of guy I am.

There is much lamentation in the poems about the fame of the heroes dying with them after a generation or two. As Fingal the great king remarks in Book VI of the work named after him: "to-day our fame is greatest. We shall pass away like a dream. No sound will be in the fields of our battles. Our tombs will be lost in the heath. The hunter shall not know the place of our rest. Our names may be heard in song, but the strength of our arms will cease." Later in the same book, mourning over the tomb of his fallen son, he remarks that "The sons of the feeble shall pass over it, and shall not know that the mighty lie there." Indeed, even if these stories are rooted in actual personages and sentiments, and the names have miraculously survived down to our time, it would still be difficult to say what of real fame remains attached to them, since anyone currently living is separated by so many layers from the impact of their actuals deeds, personalities, etc. I am not sure where I am going with this.

There is a character named 'Connan of small renown'. This is a good appellage to carry down through history.

One of Macpherson's notes: "The practice of singing when they row is universal among the inhabitants of the north-west coast of Scotland and the isles. It deceives time, and inspirits the rowers." I can hear the Celtic Woman being cued in the background.

This was an age of truly high and unforgiving parental expectations. You were going to war, you were hopefully going to kill, but at the very least if you were inadequate you would be put out of your misery right away. Cowardice and dodging the fight was not an option, whether you were sensitive or prone to anxiety or whatever, if you wanted to see or be received by your family, by your entire community, ever again. Effectively you had to conquer in battle, or else.

For me as a reader it is refreshing to get out of 18th-century London and the south of England generally for a little bit, as if I were actually taking a vacation into the country from the literary point of view.

From the address to the sun in `Carthon: A Poem`:

`Who can be a companion of thy course! The oaks of the mountains fall: the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again: the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever the same; rejoicing in the brightness of thy course...But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season, and thy years will have an end...Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon, when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills; the blast of the north is on the plain, the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey.`

It goes without saying that medicine, or even the conception, or non-conception of it in these works is extremely primitive. Once you have a wound, apparently you are given up to bleed to death where you fall. There is not a single instance in 334 pages of anyone actually attempting to physically heal or assuage the misery of someone who has suffered an injury.

The descriptions of the ghosts forming from the mists and dissolving again in the winds are very beautiful and affecting images, as good as I have seen done anywhere. Where I went to college there was a largely deserted corner of the campus near the boathouse where there was a monument supposedly containing the graves of French soldiers killed during the American Revolution. I am not saying I ever saw ghosts there, either of French soldiers or departed students, but I used to wander there late at night a lot and be affected by the kinds of thoughts of the temporary nature of life and of the unsettling mysteries of more eternal things such as are evoked by the Ossianiac ghosts.

Death among young lovers is endemic in these poems to the point of becoming tedious. Also every maiden who appears in these poems is seventeen and the most beautiful creature her designated hero has ever seen, after which vision he immediately goes to war and is killed, his lady whom he has spent five minutes with never surviving him much longer than a hour after receiving the news.

As the book moves along, there is more rolling on the waves, something about which always grips the imagination and adds considerably to the excitement.

It is enjoyable to read about brave men of a indisputably superior bearing who are not worried about their diet and wine knowledge. In fact, apart from the feasts thrown before and after battles as a matter of ceremony, dining for its own sake appears to be considered frivolous.

I may be able to finish the rest in part 3.

James Macpherson--The Ossianiac Poems (1762-3) Part 1

This is one of those 18th century books that, while still fairly famous, and frequently referenced in literary and cultural histories, is, to judge by the paucity of easily available reading copies, not much read even by the learned, who when they do offer an opinion of its merits tend to be dismissive of them. The University of Edinburgh having recently published a complete edition of this work with notes and other scholarship, I was able to procure a copy of it over the internet . The saga of the Ossian poems is well-known, so I will only recap the major points for any curious readers who happen to be unfamiliar with them. In the early 1760s a young Scotsman printed several volumes of terse and primitive prose-poems that he claimed to be translations from the 3rd-century Gaelic bard Ossian. The critics were sceptical of this claim, though it seems now to be generally agreed that MacPherson's publications were based on ancient sources of some kind and tweaked or embellished by his art. The books were great hits in their day and even long afterwards, appealing both on account of their romantic qualities as well as their supposed illumination of the remote and little known and theretofore uncelebrated Scottish antiquity. Napoleon was captivated by the raw martial spirit, which he apparently considered to be extinct in his own time, bloody though it was, and commissioned a series of tapestries based on the
poems. As late as 1854 the future famous author Oscar Fingal Wilde, though in his own character not particularly evocative of the laconic, cave-dwelling, warlike race of men celebrated in the poems, was named by his fanatical Irish nationalist mother after two of the primary heroes in these nominally Celtic epics. The modern consensus, however, seems to hold that the magic which these works once held for men of intellect and sensibility has died, and is unlikely to ever be rekindled again. As for Macpherson, after these early successes in his 20s he did not pursue much more literary work, and according to the website from which I took the above picture of him, he moved to London and devoted himself to fornication on a scale that was notable enough to attach to his reputation forever. I am going to seek other sources to confirm this last bit of information, which to read about in literary types is always unsettling to me; for this is going into doors of a type that I know for certain I will never be entering myself, and I cannot help feeling that here I am definitely being left out of the fun, or at least the gritty reality, of life that is one of the main aims of studying literature at all.



This book is an example, to me, of the value of having some kind of list to follow and be working on as the main course of one's reading/study, for I would never have gravitated to or sought out or finished it left to my own inclinations. Though repetitive and difficult to follow at times due to the similarity of a lot of the characters, and battles, and names and so on, it has some not inconsiderable beauties and provokes the mind to a train of thought that is serious without being unpleasant or completely demoralizing, which is perhaps the primary advantage that literature dating from a time before men of a type too generally similar and identifiable with one's self existed has over more contemporary work.

Moving on to my general observations and amusements in the course of reading this book:

(This picture by the way is The Vision of Ossian by Ingres. He did a series of them, though whether this is the same work that was commissioned by Napoleon I am not certain at the moment)

I have never cared much for stories, common in ancient literature, where people accidentally slay their friends/lovers, who are usually in some type of disguise and have entered the fray out of some misguided notion of helping or protecting the hero whom they love. This is such an important motif that clearly early writers saw it as expressing something essential about the human condition, but in the Ossian poems it comes across as a tired and unwelcome convention.
The Edinburgh edition is very luxuriant in its use of paper (which I like). There are lots of blank and nearly blank sheets devoted exclusively to titles, brief Arguments, and the like.
I do try to keep in mind, especially after having read so many 18th century books, how to an English-language reader in 1762 this would have been a real departure from the usual fare, as well as exciting in its suggestions of a wild and heroic, as well as mythical past in the British Isles themselves, which learned people did not think of them as having before that time, similar I think to the sense that Americans who care about such things have now about the prehistory of their country, which is not generally looked to for inspiration or as anything with which the modern inhabitants of the nation have much affinity or relation.
The sociological impression made by the work is not one of great vitality but one in which the vast majority of the best men--and the most beautiful women, their broken-hearted lovers--are killed practically in the first bloom of adulthood, before they are able to do anything. Obviously this has happened to generations of peoples in recent times as well, but the impression is made perhaps even more strongly here, for besides there never being peace and cultural renewal of sorts there is never even expressed a desire for peace. War and early death are seen as the constant, natural and even desirable conditions of life.
The appeal of the romantic past in its ability to give us something we want that we are convinced we cannot otherwise get is really a remarkable phenomenom. Although I have never been to one, out of fear of being ruthlessly ridiculed by the semi-cool and cool friends I did have, as well as my shrewd and perceptive wife, I have always had an attraction to the ridiculous Renaissance Fairs that go on all over the western world. These fairs have a reputation for being about unattractive, socially inept, intelligent but usually haphazardly educated people having found a milieu in which they can play at being, witty, sexy, manly, etc without the interference of too many competent interlopers who will expose the mirage (though some of the women at them at least are quite good-looking and any guy who gets to dance with them, let alone rip their bodices off, even if he is wearing chain mail and talking in faux-Middle English, is going to have to have some muscles and an ability to function reasonably well in the greater society). Still, the illusion of sanctity is offered. One can imagine and perhaps even experience a world in which he has standing, and a personality, where he carries weapons and uses them successfully in contest with other men, in which he is invited to dances and is even permitted to dance with a girl showing a considerable amount of cleavage (we are ignoring that she may be a little chunky or pimpled for mainstream tastes for the nonce). People will do anything they can to experience these feelings for themselves, if they are in any way available for them to have.

All this said, the life of endless warfare must have been very taxing for non-alpha males unfortunate enough to live in these ages.
MacPherson, from the Preface to Fingal:
`Poetry, like virtue, receives its reward after death. The fame which men pursued in vain, when living, is often bestowed upon them when they are not sensible of it. This neglect of living authors is not altogether to be attributed to that reluctance which men shew in praising and rewarding genius. It often happens, that the man who writes differs greatly from the same man in common life. His foibles, however, are obliterated by death, and his better part, his writings, remain: his character is formed from them, and he that was no extraordinary man in his own time, becomes the wonder of succeeding ages.--From this source proceeds our veneration for the dead. Their virtues remain, but the vices, which were once blended with their virtues, have died with themselves.`
This is perhaps true only so far as writing of good quality goes, I presume.
I will close this post. I think Ossian might merit a 3 or perhaps 4 part recap. We will see.

1966


As all of my computer time is either at work or with my wife and children in the next room, I do not spend a lot of time looking at anything on the internet that comes with sound, especially such videos as involve young women talking about themselves or other subjects that would be considered controversial for the likes of me to be indulging in. Thus whenever I do venture onto Youtube, it is usually in search of some quick hit of inoffensive (in the context of bourgeois taste) pop culture candy that feeds whatever particular emotional hunger I have lately been feeling. Last week I stumbled upon exactly the sort of thing I happened to be looking for (I hope this works). I was indeed so much taken with this little snippet that I rented and watched the whole movie, which I had never seen, nor had had any particular interest in seeing, before; and while as expected it is not really very good, it is the sort of movie that if I were reduced to living alone in a trailer park or dreary hotel room in Arizona and it came on TV at 2am I would watch the whole thing, because I feel a connection to it, one that is obviously satisfying. But whence this connection to a really silly movie from a foreign country made before I was born? I have my suspicions.

The Song. This is odd because when I was growing up I did not like the song at all, thinking it too precious or contrived perhaps, the kind of thing that somebody in the 60s thought was cool when it wasn't. This last is still more or less my impression but the angle from which I regard it now is more attractive. That is, while it still is not cool by the standards of the authentic cool people, by those of the comotose poppy mainstream, and the dreary social and sexual lives it is well established that they lead, it is comparatively high fun without being hopelessly inaccessible. I think actually this is the secret to the whole movie, because it also has...

London. This is not today's too cool for people like me, multicultural, everybody is cosmopolitan London, but still the dowdy, rainy, somber, fish and chip eating, schoolboys wearing short pants, shabby black jacket and necktie wearing London of the postwar years. It has taken me until my 30s, probably because the idea seemed too hopeless, but I finally realize that London is, and always has been, even before I went there, my favorite city, and of all the great world-cities the one most compatible with my mind and temperament. Everybody can laugh if they want, but I am pretty certain that this is true. When I saw the opening clip, where Georgy is running up and down past all the storefronts, so many of the details, the faces in the store windows, the signs, the store displays, the staircase she runs down, the sinks in the bathroom, etc, were all familiar to me. Now I was born not long after the film was made and therefore certain qualities and details of the period, even in England, would have been recognizable or come back vividly enough to my memory, but not every movie from this period inspires such a recognition. One of the disappointments of the rest of the movie is that after the opening sequence the crowds and car traffic on the streets thins considerably, and the sense of London as a bustling city is diminished. But for me at least there are other aspects of the movie to identify with. Namely...

British Sex circa 1940-1970. The sex scenes, or at least the foreplay scenes, in the movie, even those involving Charlotte Rampling, who is of a very high type of desirability such as the most successful seducers of every age eternally contend for, are to me among the more accurate representations of what these events are really like to appear on celluloid. For me many of the most realistic, as well as endearing, sex scenes, both in writing and film, are in works made or set in Britain during the period noted above, with an especially heavy concentration between about 1960-1966. The downside of this of course is that the quality of the sex that was had in this era by the types of characters having it is generally considered to be substandard to awful by the standards of most desirable people of the present day. But as I am pretty certain I will never have sex like a sophisticated Frenchman or Spaniard; as cinematic Swedes are too good-looking, smart, deep and serious for me to relate to their understanding of the subject; as American movies and books are mainly about triumphing over one's rivals to win the cheerleader or the doctor, or scoring as a way to attain status (men) or sophistication (women, usually by having affairs with Europeans or older millionaires) rather than about actual intimacy between people with something in common; I think the old fumbling with buttons and brastraps scene in a London flat or Brighton hotel following an evening in a grimy pub will always maintain their place in my affections as a reminder that somewhere, at sometime, there were intelligent and even kind of sexy people whose life somewhat resembled my own, which is one of the more comforting thoughts available to a man of my biography and circumstances.

The year 1966 of course was a major transitional year in Western culture/lifestyle. It has always loomed much larger to me than perhaps is really warranted, on account of my having been born shortly after this year, so much after which seemed to be a complete break with what seemed to me even as a small child the far more attractive and more pleasant world that my parents and grandparents, and indeed everyone I knew, had lived most of their own lives in. Whatever was going on in the 60s that was somewhat cool, '66 was the last year of it. Without writing a dissertation on this well-worn subject, many of the developments, particularly in fashion, sociability, education, scholarship, etc that began to kick in after that year did not seem to me as an uninformed child, and still do not as an only slightly more-informed adult, to be great improvements over what had prevailed formerly.

An important part of the sense of transition adhering to the year 1966 that does not seem to me to get enough attention is that is was the last year large numbers of movies and TV shows were filmed in black and white. While there may have been a few stragglers in '67 and '68, I cannot think of any offhand. Everything pretty much went color starting in '67. But in '66, besides Georgy Girl, I can think of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as well as the great Czech new wave films Closely Watched Trains and Loves of a Blonde (Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky--sorry, but it is a great title in Czech. I'm sure there are others. Anyway, these four films look completely 'natural' in B & W, and give absolutely no indication that they are to be among the very last of their kind, which kind constitutes an entirely different experience from color, and even today continues to prop up the idea in the public mind of the cinema as something glamorous, romantic and exciting, apart from being possessed of artistic merit, which modern films, even those of a high quality, can rarely duplicate. This last is in part due to the nature of the filmviewing experience. Most movies now being watched at home, on television, the flow of the images controlled by the viewer, he is susceptible to the distractions of normal life, which is significantly different from going into a darkened theater for several hours and giving oneself up from all other stimuli and concerns, which is apparently too much to ask of busy people in the 21st century. But the shift from black and white to all color should not be underestimated either, I think. Black and white cinematography puts a much greater emphasis on the human face vis-a-vis natural scenery, furniture or other backgrounds which have come to play so prominent a part in films now, and while colors allow for spectacular effects in certain circumstances, it has changed the nature of filmmaking so strongly that characters become less existentially central to the process, and therefore less prominently delineated in the writing and the mind of the viewer.

I am going to stop here.

The Conscious Lovers (1722)--Richard Steele

Though the reputation of this play traditionally has been as a transitional piece between the more ribald productions of the Restoration era and the insipid sentimental drama that dominated through most of the 18th century, I thought it was rather enjoyable. The main characters are upright and decent without however being prudish, dull, sluggish or unsexy, which makes for a very admirable picture of humanity, albeit a difficult one to actually pull off in all its aspects. We last encountered Steele (on this site) as the decidedly junior partner of the Spectator writing team. I found his contributions to that paper so lackluster in fact that I had very little expectation that his play would bear any mark of a talented or superiorly intelligent writer at all that I was surprised by how competent, and if I may say so, mature his composition was here.


I have before offered my opinion in these pages both that the personality of our current age seems to be marked by a particularly strident worldliness, as well as that it bears some similiarities to that of the period of the reign of Queen Anne and the Hanoverian succession in which Steele flourished. Steele does not strike me as being by nature of the worldly or pragmatic type of author or man, but the atmosphere of his time seems to have inclined him to respect and submit to the prevalent status of these attitudes in his writing. In The Conscious Lovers, the result of this is largely positive. The action of the play centers upon a love quadrangle in which two of the principals, though in love with other people, have been contracted to marry each other by their families. Though the marriage is not what either desires, the betrothed do not express any idea of its being outrageous, and seek a means to avoid it without openly defying the duty owed to their parents; if this last cannot be found, each maintains that he will submit to the terms of the arrangement contracted for them. Such jokes as are made at the expense of the custom, the professions that profit handsomely from it, etc, are light, and while they hint at the absurdity and mockery of the ideal of marriage that this custom makes, it is done carefully and cynically enough to insinuate that the author has no real problem with it if it is what the ruling powers desire. Here is a selection of quotes:

The son of Lord Bevil to his father--'For as you well judge, a woman that is espoused for a fortune is yet a better bargain if she dies; for then a man still enjoys what he did marry, the money, and is disencumbered of what he did not marry, the woman.'

The same, later on, as the hour of the wedding approaches--'If the lady is dressed and ready, you see I am. I suppose the lawyers are ready too.'

The lady Lucinda(the betrothed of Bevil Junior)`s maid, Phillis, explaining to her lady why she allows her footman boyfriend to *kiss* her--'...we poor people, that have nothing but our persons to bestow or treat for, are forced to deal and bargain by way of sample, and therefore, as we have no parchments or wax necessary in our agreements, we squeeze with our hands and seal with our lips to ratify vows and promises.'

The fop Cimberton (being wooed by Lucinda`s mother to marry the daughter in opposition to the father`s wishes) affecting to be turned on (there is a good fortune at stake) by the womanly form of Lucinda, to her mother--'Madam, there is no reflection, no philosophy, can at all times subdue the sensitive life, but the animal shall sometimes carry away the man.'

I am surprised that the BBC Masterpiece Theatre/Historical drama division has not done more with the enormous quantity of material afforded by the Restoration and 18th century theater. This would seem to be an obvious step for them, having (incredibly) nearly exhausted the 18th and 19th century English novel, and wrestled with Shakespeare seemingly to a point of cinematic and audience fatigue as well. Of course a taste and enthusiasm for this often coarse and comparatively outrageous time period would have to be cultivated in the audience but that is what these types of productions most excel in. The gallery of fops, rogues, loose women, drunkards, sword brandishers would be a transition from their more sedate, measured and psychologically complex descendants who constitute the current favored programming, but if some engaging and interesting actors, who respected and could take up the spirit of the material without being concerned to be cheeky or demonstrate how cool, clever, etc they are, could be found, I have no doubt it would succeed.


In act IV the witty Phillis observes to her lover, who is showing a lack of daring and ardency in relation to a potentially dangerous scheme that might win her to him utterly, that 'we hear every day of people's hanging themselves for love, and won't they venture the hazard of being hanged for love? Oh! Were I a man--`

There is a spinster aunt/chaperone to the marriageable young ladies in the play, which is a stock character in this genre of the theater, however, this one is notable for her revelation of her age, which happens to be 34!

It took me a long time, and the reading of many Restoration dramas to realize that the fop characters who are ubiquitous in these plays constitute one of the more solid blocs of blatantly homosexual characters in all of canonical literature. It is hard to gage how hip to this the authors of the time actually were because the subject, certainly as moderns would think about it, is never alluded to. The much ridiculed Colley Cibber, at least, whom Pope made the king of the dunces, one would like to think had no idea what his stock fop character Sir Novelty Fashion was really about. Nonetheless the whole parade of Lord Foppingtons and Fopworths and Cimbertons who populate these comedies are probably the most flaming gang ever to appear in the pages of anything, and really they don`t make any sense otherwise. This whole race of character is entirely given over to fancy dress, headgear, attending the theater and other fashionable haunts, expresses little romantic interest in women apart from trying to connect with a fortune, shuns horsemanship and country pursuits entirely, does not appear to carry, or at least certainly to relish using, weapons, and endures endless ridicule from the more conventional male characters, and some of the women, all of which strikes the reader as an improbable state for any semi-intelligent man to wish to persist in, until the obvious explanation offers itself. It also explained a question that pops into my head from time to time, which was, who and where were all the flagrant homosexuals in the 1700s? particularly in England, which seemed to have fewer religious/musical/artistic societies vis-a-vis the continent for men of those inclinations to take refuge in.

Richard Steele did not have a great work ethic and was encumbered with debt most of his adult life, to the point that he had to finally leave London altogether and take refuge in Wales, which was even more of a career killer in the 1720s that it is today. Most accounts of him inform the student that he was devoted to his `beautiful wife`. I tried to find a picture of her, but was unsuccessful.

Tour. Steele was a native of Dublin, being born in Bull Alley, near St Patricks Cathedral (where Swift was dean and is buried; Anglican). He was buried with his beautiful wife in St Peter`s Church in Carmarthen, Wales, which church, and these graves in them, still stand. There is a well known painting by Constable of the view of London (the dome of St Paul`s being prominent) from Steele`s cottage at 94 Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, which is now of course an outlying and totally built-up part of the city but especially in Steele`s time was a country village. I do not know what the view is like now (the cottage is gone), though apparently there is at least a Sir Richard Steele pub in the area. Perhaps it is not worth going to as a tourist, but I must say if I could wake up tomorrow morning and go have lunch at it the prospect would be most delightful to me.

Henry Mackenzie--The Man of Feeling (1771)This book achieved a great popularity when it was first published, and is regarded as of minor historical significance today as a (very rough) precursor of the Romantic era. Its nominal subject is the travails of a sensitive and naive young man upon venturing a little into the world, a typical story, in our age perhaps considered to be rather tired, even to be draining the vitality from literature. The highly sensitive character was evidently a novelty in 1771 however. Hamlet is often considered to be of this type, though his intelligence and station, as well as the skill of his author obviously make him a rather high example of it. The quality of men constituting this family of characters had been steadily deteriorating since him as it was, and the pace of this deterioration has accelerated even more precipitously in the last 50 years. While it is clear right away that Henry MacKenzie is not a ferocious genius, the book begins in an engaging manner that is both lanquid and quirky, especially for the time period, and especially to someone who has been reading Clarissa for the previous three months. There is a potentially interesting device in which the story is presented in the form of a discovered memoir of which only fragments survive, but there are few hints given as to what the missing parts contain that add anything to the story, the parts of which that remain do not amount to much of one anyway. At the beginning of the book there was a leisurely attention to details that I rather liked (a scene I mentioned previously where a man sits down on a stone to remove a pebble from his shoe came from this book), and this is certainly Mackenzie's most notable talent as an author, but this note is not consistently maintained.

Some further observations:

This book is surprisingly quite dark too in its outlook on human nature. It is, as they say, utterly unrelieved by humor, and very little happens to the hero that is not in some way a mortification to his sensibility.

The conversations in the book are uniformly unnatural.

(Illustration: This is a picture by an artist named Rowlandson titled The Man of Feeling. While this particular scene does not directly refer to the novel, it was painted during the period of the book's popularity and it seems not unlikely that the title of this comedic drawing is in some way a play on that very earnest and sentimental work. It also seems to me to reflect something of the spirit of that time that I have always found genial.) There is an interesting passage on the nature of the poetic versus the more material(?) soul, which is relevant to the present, when pragmatism rules the day to such an extent that serious thinkers seem to be skeptical that such a thing as the poetic soul genuinely exists, and is not simply a pose intended to secure the poseur some refuge from or excuse for his failure in the challenges of economic and social competition in which he has no chance of success.

"Jack, says his father, is indeed no scholar; nor could all the drubbings from his master ever bring him one step forward in his accidence or syntax: but I intend him for a merchant...Tom reads Virgil and Horace when he should be casting accounts; and but t'other day he pawned his great-coat for an edition of Shakespeare.--But Tom would have been as he is, though Virgil and Horace had never been born, though Shakespeare had died a link-boy...'Tis a sad case; but what is to be done?--Why, Jack shall make a fortune, dine on venison, and drink claret...Tom shall dine with his brother, when his pride will let him; at other times, he shall bless God over a half-pint of ale and a Welsh-rabbit..."


There is one extremely pitiful scene where a farmer fallen on hard times is evicted from the tenancy where he has lived and toiled all his life. His old dog is unable to make it out of the yard, but drops dead upon reaching the spot where he was formerly wont to bask in the sun. The modern reader is more likely to find it hilarious than affecting.

As in all these old books, there is a generous amount of fainting among the characters. I have seen one actual person faint in my entire life, when I was eight years old (this incident took place at the historic Hugh Mercer Apothecary Shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1978. I vaguely recall that it was provoked by an explanation of colonial medical practices, which gives even this modern instance of this curious phenomenon an 18-century origin).

The man of feeling expresses some angst over the conquests and activities of the British nation in India. His objections are not argued with much manly force in opposition to the dominant-type males who drive the engines of history, but I suppose they are consistent with the attitudes of this once-neglected class of character.

I do not know that I have ever read a book that collapses so utterly as this one does at the end. With five pages to go MacKenzie, in the guise of the editor of the man of feeling's posthumous papers, announces that the remaining chapters are not really worth printing, being more or less the same as what preceded, and that "a few incidents in a life undistinguished, except by some features of the heart, cannot have afforded much entertainment". Three pages later, the man of feeling expresses his desire to "meet death as becomes a man...a privilege bestowed on few" (he had already been ill as a result of failure in love) and proceeds to collapse in death while declaring his earnest love for the local beauty who is betrothed to a more successful and desirable man on the beauty's parlor floor.

Mackenzie was 26 when this work was published, and on the strength of it maintained a leading role in Edinburgh literary life for the next 60 years. He was also an attorney and was the Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland for 32 years. He published two more novels, at the ages of 28 and 32, later edited and wrote for a couple of Spectator-type magazines, as well as published a play and some political pamphlets, his collected workings extending to 8 volumes (quarto, I assume) in toto. He married the daughter of a baronet with the unusual name of Penuel and had 11 children. The most recent edition of The Man of Feeling published in the Oxford World's Classics series came out in 2001.

Mackenzie was born on a defunct street in Edinburgh where the George IV Bridge now stands. He was buried along the north side of the Queen Street Gardens in that city. I am not certain whether his grave remains viewable or not. I have never been to Edinburgh.

The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb the Great (1731)--Henry Fielding

The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb the Great (1731)-Henry Fielding

Before going on to write Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, among other novels, Henry Fielding wrote twenty-six plays before the age of thirty. I believe he may also have been a lawyer for a while. One suspects he demonstrated a similarly indefatigable and agreeable energy with the ladies as well. While it is hard to say that he is forgotten or undervalued as a writer, he seems not to have much of a presence in the contemporary literary-oriented imagination as someone people really like or consider to be one of the foremost models of all time of a good English style. The structure and pacing of the plot of Tom Jones are always given their dutiful praise in textbooks and critical histories, but it is one of those cases where it is so unique, so impressive and on such a large scale, that is actually impossible to understand how good it is unless you have read it, because there is not really another novel like it. A close semi-recent example would be something like One Hundred Years of Solitude (a book I wanted to dislike because the kinds of people who affect to love and relate to it tend to annoy me, but it is really very good). Thomas Pynchon is famous for this kind of madcap and convoluted plotting too but it is so encumbered with brainy matter as to be not so nimble in its flow and twists of narrative as these other books. It is bizarre that in creative writing schools, if we are going to have them, people like Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, along with many other modern short story authors, are studied and celebrated and emulated to the almost total exclusion of the likes of Henry Fielding, one of the great treasures of all English literature, and a staple of every competent writer in our language`s education for two centuries. Tom Thumb is my first encounter with a Fielding play. It is a very short satire on the absurdities and manglings of the language in the dramatic writing of the day, including dozens of footnotes with humorous commentary on ridiculous lines that were in some instances lifted entire from other contemporary works. I am surprised that it is not put on more, by amateur and school groups especially. Besides being extremely short and brisk it contains much humor, mostly of the absurd variety, which would be easily understood by middlebrow or unpractised theater audiences, and my impression is that it would be an excellent play for people who are not really good actors, nor have any talent for or pretensions towards becoming such, to put on in a still entertaining manner. While it is a minor work, it is the minor work of a decidedly gifted, and probably great author. Authors of this obviously rare type are less dependent on their subject matter and the cohesiveness and sense of their plots to be interesting than ordinary writers; they in fact bestow interest on subjects and stories by their manner of writing about them. When they do harness their talent for a major work and see it through, achievements of a very high order are in their grasp; though very few even of this already small group of authors manage to accomplish this.

 

Some favorite quotes from the play, most of which involve cruel jokes at the expense of dwarves, or lechery, two weak points in my cloak of mature propriety.

One of the Princess Huncamunca`s maids, Mustacha, on the absurdity on the princess` being in love with Tom Thumb (who has just defeated an army of giants in pitched battle):

`Tom Thumb the Great--one properer for a plaything than a husband. Were he my husband, his horns should be as long as his body.`

This one is actually from Nathaniel Lee`s Gloriana, a source of many ludicrous and hilarious verses which were referenced by Fielding in this play:

`Jove, with excessive thund`ring tir`d above/Comes down for ease, enjoys a nymph and then/Mounts dreadful, and to thund`ring goes again.`

Thumb`s rival, the courtier Grizzle, on Huncamunca`s breasts:

`Thy pouting breasts, like kettle-drums of brass/Beat everlasting loud alarms of joy/As bright as brass they are, and oh, as hard/`

Grizzle ridiculing Thumb:

`And can my princess such a durgen wed/One fitter for your pocket than your bed!`

He soon returns to his favorite subject however:

`One globe alone on Atlas` shoulders rests/Two globes are less than Huncamunca`s breasts/The milky way is not so white, that`s flat/And sure thy breasts are full as large as that.`

After dispatching of Grizzle, Thumb speculates on his enemy`s future prospects:

`With those last words he vomited his soul/Which, like whipt cream, the devil will swallow down.`

The last page of the play features six murders and a suicide, which Fielding boasts in a footnote beats the previous record of five corpses lying on the stage when the curtain falls, set in the play Cleomenes, which I believe is by Dryden.

In the entertainment world, there seems to be no more surefire way to popularity and a comfortable income than the introduction of a live midget to whatever one is doing. The audience falls for it every time. In recent memory alone we have witnessed the success of the Mini-me character in the Austin Powers movies, the minor cult that formed in honor of Fantasy Island sidekick Herve Villechez, the Webster television show (and star Emmanuel Lewis's briefly becoming part of Michael Jackson's entourage of freaks), perhaps Gary Coleman (my wife informs me however that he is not properly a dwarf). The career, or whatever it is, of the repulsive music industry figure Kid Rock was going nowhere until he incorporated a leprechaun alter ego into his act. The surviving actors who played Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz film, which came out in 1939, are still in demand and getting paid hard cash for personal appearances. The flamboyant boxer Sugar Ray Robinson back in the 50s kept a French dwarf in his entourage who was supposed to be his translator, though I am certain the keeping of translators was fairly uncommon among American fighters of that period. Before World War II hunchbacks seem to have been in competition with and frequently preferred over dwarves for these positions, but this condition has apparently become so rare in our time to have become grotesque and disturbing rather than riotous to modern audiences, as dwarves remain.

Clarissa Part 4

Hopefully this will be the last Clarissa post.

I wrote at one point, evidently in a momentary lapse of despair, that what had been done to Clarissa was similar to what had been done to my writing. This was a statement of emotion rather than reason, of course. One`s writing, at the low amateur level, is not really capable of being ruined by outside agency.

Quotation p.1114. "Oh my dear, how many things happen in this life to give us displeasure! how few to give us joy!"

p.1194 Richardson's subconscious confession (through the agency of Clarissa) of his own feelings about the book?: "I am very much tired and fatigued--with--I don't know what--with writing, I think--but most with myself, and with a situation I cannot help aspiring to get out of and above."

Lovelace's repeated taunting and condescension of the bourgeois is effectively done. In fact, all the parts where Lovelace is being a horrible bully and daring anybody to do anything about it are the best-written in the book. Such scenes of browbeating and cruelty in all his works are Richardson`s specialty for the student and connoisseur of literary skill.

This was certainly a race of men attuned to the reality of death and the processes of the common (collective) human soul with regard to it.

No one in literature can single-mindedly draw out death like our author. There is a character in The Idiot who is hundreds of pages in dying of consumption, but the story leaves his deathbed alone for the most part and concerns itself with somewhat more vigorous actions and characters.

The scene where Clarissa, who is starving herself to death, orders her coffin, decorated with inscriptions from Job and other relevant texts, and has it delivered to her sickroom in order to save those who will survive her from the expense and trouble of arranging for it, is really hilarious, though of course it is not intended to be. The last 200 pages, in which Clarissa`s virtue and the exemplary attitude with which she approached the grave are delineated ad nauseum, are really treacly.

The latest Penguin classic edition sells for $24.95 in the U.S., which, given how long it takes to read it, comes out to a bargain of $7.20 per month book bill during the duration of the reading. The listed price for the U.K. is 25 pounds. At the current exchange rate, this is a $51 paperback novel.

Several of the characters who assisted in Clarissa's torments suffer immediate and painful deaths shortly after hers is achieved, their mode of departing this world in decided contrast to her model, the approach of hell being actively apprehended to the terror of the mind encountering it. I am too bourgeois of course to even conceive of hard or eternal punishment of any kind. The actions of men do not, in imagining such a system, seem important enough, nor for the most part their minds intelligent enough, for their souls to merit such intense usage in the afterlife. Obviously this exposes me as someone in whom the idea of any serious human grandeur has died utterly. This of course was a common attitude among the serious thinkers of the 20th century, but the fact that the strong sense of it has trickled down to the likes of me indicates that the strong mind now is the one that is either so far beyond this (i.e. in the realm of high science) as to no longer be able to perceive this loss as a serious problem, or is moving back in the opposite direction, with the ability to make sense of the noble ideas and mindset regarding the human race of those forebears whose achievements represent to the attentive mind what is generally thought of as civilization.

Whenever I come across the idea in a novel or poem that the sensual temptations some character is facing is due to the active agency of the devil I can not help but to ask why he never tries to tempt me with the same. The only answer I can come up with is that he must have found my soul easy enough to secure by cheaper and to me less pleasurable means that there was never any need to resort to throwing a lot of beautiful and willing women into my path.

I mentioned earlier that I read what I do read--long, largely dull 18th century novels, dozens of Restoration comedies, 10,000 line blank verse poems from the graveyard school of the 1740s--as a form of intellectual penance. This has become too very therapeutic to me, and I have come through dogged habit to actually enjoy becoming acquainted with all of these historic pieces, even though the literary value of many of them is dubious to say the least. I take the idea of penance seriously however. I failed to develop my intellect, personality or body adequately in youth to be able to participate fully and productively as a student and later as a twenty-something and thirty-something man when those times came, and I must never forget this while I live. How does reading Restoration comedies serve this purpose? I am too tired to answer this today. It will come up again, it is an important point, it informs almost everything I do. I just need time to compose the explanation of it.

Clarissa Part 3

I reason somewhere around page 850 that if the book did not ring somewhat true, it could not be so disturbing as parts of it are.

Of the incident where Lovelace has the fallen women (fallen by his machinations) impersonating his noble relations wait upon Clarissa I thought that a more athletic author like Fielding would have seized on the opportunity to introduce some humor and had the real people being impersonated happen to show up at the same time. There are several situations in the book which cry out for this kind of plot device, which probably explains Richardson`s being such an inviting target for parodists.

After endless wearying pages of Lovelace in obsessive and repeated detail arguing in defense of rape and subduing women by force ("the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporally inviolate is brought down"), I began to think the author might actually have been afflicted with some disturbance of insuperable attraction in his mind at the contemplation of these subjects.

On a lighter note, whenever I am reading a lot of 18th-century material, some of the goofy slang of the period naturally gets into my head and I take to addressing Mrs Bourgeois Surrender as "My ownest", "My dearest life", etc. This does not go over big with the object of these effusive sobriquets.

It took me about 900 pages to realize how serious our author and his heroine were about the proper preparation of the soul for the world after this. Pretty much the entire last third of the book (Clarissa is actively dying due to the loss of her honor for 300 or 400 pages at least) is given over to the excruciating details of this preparation.

I know this was one of the first novels, and that therefore the whole thing is kind of an experiment, but whereas in a normal book where a person is confined against her will in a locked room one or perhaps two hopeless attempts at escaping will be described, Richardson gives us ten or fifteen. Does it work? As far as inducing a feeling of claustrophobia and hopelessness of delivery on the part of the reader I suppose it does, though readers being free agents it is not certain why any would choose to submit to this (I view much of my own habit as a form of penance, but I will elaborate on that later.)

The time--not just a few days--that Lovelace gives up hanging out with the guys or basically doing anything to single-mindedly pursue this seduction does not convince as consistent with his character.

A major theme of the book is that once one enters on a bad course, it is hard to turn back and escape serious damage. What, you weren`t looking for something comforting, were you?

The relentless pressure and deceptions of Lovelace, aided by a large cast of hellhounds under his direction and employed upon one single person, is actually very reminiscent of the (more pretentious of course) `godgame` in The Magus.

This book arouses no desire whatsoever to spend so much as an hour living in this time period, which other authors such as Johnson, Sterne, Fielding, on and on, make appear at times at least to be a good deal of fun.

Illustration: Samuel Richardson, Surrounded By His Second Family, by Francis Hayman

With all the declamations and hysterics about Clarissa`s honor I cannot help but think of the scene in Crime and Punishment where Sonya`s (is that the right name?) mother is about to send her out to be a prostitute and ridicules her for her delicacy and pride when she recoils.

Other characters such as Lord M and the vicious members of the Harlowe family were interesting and would have helped the book considerably by being utilized more, instead of completely disappearing for 800 pages at a time.

Clarissa is imprisoned either by her relatives or by Lovelace for almost the entire novel, until she takes it upon herself to die.

Why shouldn t I believe the world is generally as wicked as it is made out to be in this book? Do I not myself hate and rave inwardly against pretty much all of the people in it?

A custom from the Isle of Man described: -If a single woman there prosecutes a single man for a rape, the ecclesiastical judges impanel a jury; and, if this jury finds him guilty, he is returned guilty to the temporal courts: where, if he be convicted, the deemster, or judge, delivers to the woman a rope, a sword, and a ring; and she has it in her choice to have him hanged, beheaded, or to marry him.- The writer of this letter, Clarissa`s sauce-box friend Miss Howe, goes on to add that -One of the two former, I think, should always be her option.-

I think I had better stop here and do one more post on this.

Clarissa Part 2

As this is only a blog that no one reads, and not a commissioned essay for the Times Literary Supplement, I am just going to post my observations singly and not try to compose them into a comprehensive piece. The theme of female obedience is a dominant one in the early part of the book. To those of us in the modern age for whom the idea of compelling any woman to do anything we should bid is beyond the scope of plausible reality, this model of society under which our ancestors operated, seemingly comfortably and confidently, for so many generations, cannot help but be a source of some fascination. Clarissa demonstrates however, albeit with its usual overkill, that this obedience did not actually proceed as the course of nature unimpeded by modern ideologies(though it was proclaimed as such), but that its inculcation was an unrelenting project undertaken by every responsible member of the society, constituting almost the entirety of the genteel and aspiring genteel young woman's upbringing and education. In cases where women are headstrong and of high intelligence, it is always taken for granted in books of these types that she must find a man worthy of her submitting to the control of, or misery and disaster must inevitably follow. The progressive writers of this era were the ones who acknowledged that it was cruel to expect a woman who was superior in spirit and intellect to her husband to submit to his tyranny. Their solution however was to secure more appropriate matches for these viragos; allowing them to run their own lives under any circumstances was the last thing to be desired.


The rapist and all-around bad guy Lovelace emphasizes repeatedly that women are especially easy to control by fear if treated and threatened with brutality, which he possesses the temperament and the will to effect to achieve his ends. This aspect of his character is convincingly and repulsively drawn, for he really is relentless in his energy and brutality, drawing women into his power, isolating and forcing constant pressures upon them that it is beyond their capacities to resist alone (for he has enslaved/bribed many minions into his service in his seductions). This energy of ruling by fear is still the primary condition of life in most economically and educationally deprived societies. In such areas as this (i.e. poor parts of the West) where the bulk of poor and uneducated men lack the ability as well as the backing of society to have authority over a home or an extended family or a community the traditional structures of child rearing/family life/community have collapsed noticeably. This is not really related to the book any longer though. Lovelace s particular misogyny is actually quite strange and perverted. It serves no purpose other than his individual pleasure, to which extremes it really seems unnecessary for him to go, being acknowledged by as handsome, intelligent, witty, rich, etc.

The narrative of the book lacks any kind of flow. I have a note that says compare with Proust but I forget now what point I intended to make about Proust.

When Lovelace is with women he is really a tiresome and repulsive character. His boasts too much and is witty too little of the time in these chapters. His elaborate contrivances are also too much to be credible. He writes and dispatches false letters, he arranges false actions and introduces false people to deceive Clarissa, involving dozens of people, all of whose actions and conversations he controls, none of whom ever stand up to him or refuse him. It is too much. Economists would be aghast at the waste of human industry devoted to these shenanigans.

When I was on page 400 I was curious to see what the abridgements were like. I am not any longer.

At some point when I was reading this the NYT ran an article on how the invention of cell phones had rendered so many devices and dilemmas of classic novels obsolete. Certainly Clarissa s physical entrapment and isolation from the outside world would seem impossible now.

There are about twenty or thirty characters in the book more evil than anyone in Fielding or Sterne. The most similar 18th century book to this I have read is William Godwin s Caleb Williams, which is about a servant falsely accused of stealing from his master and the relentless persecution he undergoes from society. It is likewise dark and oddly devoid of a sense of atmoshere or of any life outside the principal characters and settings of the story. There is a vivid part when he is prison where his drinking water is fetched out of a muddy ditch.

I will post and do a part 3 tomorrow.

Clarissa (1747-8)--Part 1

Illustration: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)For anyone who was wondering why there haven t been any of my periodical essays about my reading for a while, it is because I was tied down for 3 1/2 months with Clarissa, Samuel Richardson's small-type, 1,499 page epistolary novel that was among the first, and is still among the longest, works of fiction in the English language. It took me 104 days to finish it, a seemingly unimpressive clip of 14.41 pages per day, but I could hardly have gone much faster. Though (remarkably) this book remains in print in a gigantic unabridged Penguin edition, and can be found right on the shelf at Borders taking up space that could hold half a dozen or more contemporary novels, by page 400 I was certain no one living in modern society who was not being paid to do so could, or would, possibly finish the entire book. I was not certain I was going to be able to finish it myself, and I am an automaton where fulfilling the duties of my various lists are concerned. Somewhere in the middle wilderness of this endless and remote pine forest of words, in desperate search of any possible camaraderie, I went onto the Amazon.com site and found that 41 people had reviewed the book, which is an above average number, and an astounding one to me for this particular book. One person claimed to have read the whole thing in 8 days (187.38 pages per day, even at ten hours a day almost 19 pages an hour--I don't believe it). A good portion of the reviews came from England, where apparently a certain taste for the old warhorses of the national literature has yet to die out completely. Most were positive in some manner and I would say that half were downright enthusiastic. I cannot say whether these are people I would want to be good friends with or not but I am certainly curious about them. The blurbs on the cover and first page of the book proclaim it several times to be one of the greatest of European novels. That is misleading at the least, if not technically a lie. Within the subcategory of great novels, or famous works of prose literature, there are many more books noticeably superior than inferior to it.


While most modern students of literature are overcome with a sense of dread even at the prospect of reading a Richardson book, I was caught off guard on this occasion, having taken up Pamela a few years ago and, while agreeing that at least two hundred pages of moral instruction (not that I don t need it) could happily have been edited, been otherwise deeply impressed by it. It is a dark book--Richardson I am quite certain had the overall darkest worldview of any English author of his age, almost so that one begins to feel bad for him--but the dark parts were written with such an evident urgency and agitation in the authors mind as made them absolutely believable. I do not, as many people always seem wont to do, understand this to mean that the nasty and depraved side of human behavior is the one in the most, or perhaps the only important truth, is ever to be found. Tristram Shandy, despite appearing to be full of outrageous and nonsensical episodes and conversations, is executed in such a way, so deftly in its details, as makes it seem to have really existed, as well as to relate a story well worth relating on the basis of the very specific and peculiar charms of its narrator s and other character s minds. Clarissa being considered Richardson s real, if neglected masterpiece by seemingly most of the experts, my anticipation was of a slog, but a slog that would give me in places a vision of life that would meaningfully expand my understanding of its possibilities and myriad truths. What I found was a book that I think induced a modest depression in me, to which I am already highly susceptible, over a period of several months

The massive popularity of the book on its publication indicates to me the extent of the hunger bourgeois society evidently felt for works of fiction in those days. Though there are several episodes in the story where it appears events and plotlines are building up for a grand crisis where action follows swiftly upon action, as in, say Tom Jones, this never happens. When Clarissa is locked in a room and threatened with all sorts of imminent danger, 400 pages go by before anything happens. Colonel Morden s return to England, at which event it is indicated, things will be shaken up, is anticipated and alluded for well over a thousand pages before the man actually appears, having missed everything that his possible presence threatened on so many occasions to make interesting. Coleridge s famous observation that reading Fielding after Richardson was like emerging from a damp sickroom into a sunny spring afternoon is, especially with regard to Clarissa, most astute. I was reading another book the other day where a character was walking on a dirt road and had to sit down on a rock to take a pebble out of his shoe. This was a fairly nondescript little detail, but it leapt out at me because not one instance of this sort had happened in Clarissa in 1500 pages. The book is claustrophobic, because there is no air, no atmosphere in its world. Characters spend hundreds of pages in rooms that present themselves to the imagination as blank places, so devoid is our author of any kind of telling description. Likewise carriage rides take place in the readers mind as if there is nothing outside the windows, or if a white curtain has been drawn over it as the Soviets used to do on their trains before passing a munitions factory. The book being told by a series of lengthy letters (535 in all) the characters must needs spend a great part of their time writing, even to the detriment of their sleep, which in their health both Clarissa and her persecutor Lovelace rarely indulge in for more than one or two hours a night! Richardson s whole approach to the subject of death is extremely bizarre even among the authors of his age though I suspect it was more representative of the general population than we usually say. I will expand on this later in the other posts.

I do not know much about the Clarissa BBC movie that I have a picture from here. I don`t know that it ever appeared on TV in the U.S. Certainly they must be running out of classic novels to adapt if somebody thought this one a good candidate for the Masterpiece Theatre treatment. Unlike the aforementioned Tristram Shandy, which despite its reputation for being unfilmable, actually has a good number of sections that would make interesting scenes in a series, the possibilities suggested by Clarissa are not really very exciting, being of the standard classic-European novel variety--duels, balls, grounds of country estates, devious servants, etc--better illustrations of which are available elsewhere. This Saskia Wickham looks kind of pretty though, in the great tradition of lovely actresses who appear in some BBC serialization of a classic novel and are never seen again. Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, is a past favorite of this type, and I have to confess that I found Sarah Pickering, the mousy, tiny, almost childlike star of the Little Dorrit movie, to be rather adorable in that role. They are all probably around my age too. Where are they now?

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I have been trying for several days to write something short and humorous about how I often find myself listening to The Music Of Your Life when I drive around, especially in the morning, but the task has defeated me. It is a thin subject for humor to begin with, and this week in particular all my capacity for mirth seems to be drained out of me. When my Internet connection was knocked out during a thunderstorm at 2am as I strained to reach some conclusion to my main argument that Engelbert Humperdinck's 1976 hit "After the Lovin'" was an especially unnatural and unsexy piece of art, I accepted it as a sign to employ my life and mind on more worthy subjects.

My frame of mind this week has been unusually blank and pessimistic even for me, which makes it difficult to write about anything. I am experienced enough with these low sorts of spirits to know that it will pass, or at least be moderated, though how or why this happens remains mysterious to me. My present mode of life in my present state of mind seems unbearable to continue in, yet I lack any mental force at this time even to conceive what realistically might be done, let alone bring it about. I have at the moment lost in my mind my connection, or my imagined connection, even with literature and all other areas of learning in which I formerly believed myself to have some stake, and in which I took my consolation. This complete collapse of any identity with the interesting parts of the world will pass and maybe in a week a different spirit will be apparent on these pages. Right now attempting to think, talk, read or write seems utterly pointless and hopeless, however. Would that the burst of intelligence that only can clear mood would come upon me.

Is Toshiro Mifune the Greatest Movie Star of All Time?Unlike, apparently, many people, I am not by nature an aficiondo of Japanese samurai films. Such taste for it as I have developed has been acquired with an especially dull and stubborn diligence. My first exposure to the genre was undoubtedly in college, a film club showing of Ran or one of the big Kurosawa epics. Whatever it was I was completely lost in it, even at the level of discriminating characters from each other, which were on the same side, which were enemies and what were the gripes and competing virtues of the various camps. It was with great delight that I saw the field of battle at last fade out and the screen occupied by the sparse Japanese characters the subtitles translated as "The End", at which I burst out of the auditorium and like a crazed beast followed the movements of people and the hum of sound until the soothing scent of beer rose to my nostrils. Samurai movies must have shown infrequently there as a general rule, as I do not recall actively avoiding any that may have come up after that, though I am certain I never saw any other ones in that setting either.

As I grew older and had children, being increasingly limited in the opportunity to watch movies of any kind (about two a month being the maximum now), it no longer did for me to go about rummaging through the shelves of the video store hoping to come across something amusing, as it is easy enough to go months without finding anything that is not actually an embarrassment to the artistic tradition of the human race, and such as makes me really wonder what contemporary people think art and artists are (I mean, good God, presumably intelligent people praised the Miranda July movie!). I decided I needed a system of choosing that ensured a certain level of quality and/or historical importance, which would over time be broadly educational, exposing me to such things as silent movies, Laurel and Hardy pictures and, of course, Japanese samurai films, which I would never be inclined to endure otherwise. After a good bit of tinkering I finally decided to make a list of movies that had been rated five stars by reasonably knowledgeable critics who had five star rating systems, which require a much stronger commitment than four-star rating systems, or merited effusive notice in some august publication such as The Oxford Guide to Film. With this I do not work down a list in alphabetical or chronological order but drop in at odd places in the alphabet depending on what my secret word or phrase of the week is, which is usually taken from my current literary reading.

The point of all this is that when you make a point of watching only five-star movies, you see a lot of Japanese samurai films. The critics love Japanese samurai films, more, apparently, than they love anything else, Chaplin, Fellini, Bergman, John Ford, you name it. My wife has a running joke whenever I have a movie to ask if it is about Japanese people fighting before she will commit to watch it with me (Mrs S has bailed on the genre, though she retains a fondness for many of its most indelible images, especially the custom the warriors have of laying their heads on blocks of wood rather than pillows when they sleep, and the timeworn question of why it often happens in these films that angry speeches of fifty or so syllables will be translated as `No` or some other such laconic construction). Toshiro Mifune, and I cannot think of an exception offhand, is the star of all of these movies. Based on my system, he has starred in more five star movies than anybody else by a wide margin. If I had to guess I would say Marcello Mastroianni was (a very distant second). Charles Dickens and Jane Austen get honorable mention as sort of ghost stars hovering over numerous acclaimed projects, sometimes for different versions of the same story (Similarly The Hunchback of Notre Dame has spawned 2 or 3 five-star adaptations all by itself). For newcomers to the genre it is helpful that Mifune is in all the films, because after a while even the most hopelessly unworldly student begins to recognize him among all the other seemingly identically dressed Japanese people enacting historical periods and places and families and people that may or may not be real in various degrees, of all of which I think it is safe to say the vast majority of even clever Western audiences has little no idea. His usual persona--the manliest, strongest, most competent and impeccably self-mastered warrior in medieval Japan--thus provides the bearing around which I suspect most Western understandings of these films ultimately pivot.


As I indicated above, I forget offhand how many of these films of I have now seen, all of which rate supposedly among the all-time classics of their art. Rashomon, of course, but being one of the first I sat through, no deep emotional impression or connection with any character was made upon me. Same for Yojimbo--I inwardly experienced nothing. Recently there was a story in the New Yorker magazine where a character goes to see this film, supposedly in total innocence of the genre, and is completely blown away by it immediately. I don t doubt it could happen but nothing in the story persuaded me of it. It had the stench of a reach, which is always bad form in fiction writing. I watched Kwaidan, and was generally lost. There must have been a few more whose titles I forget, but then all of a sudden the films finally began to be somewhat intelligble and more satisfy as a whole experience, and not just a camera shot here and there.

The first of these was The Hidden Fortress, from which it is widely known, and confessed that Star Wars is a direct ripoff. I have never--and I must be about the only boy my age with good mathematical test scores who can say this--been able to make it through any of the Stars Wars movies, even the first one. I find them incredibly boring. I don t know why. Even Joseph Campbell, who apparently everybody thinks is a moron compared to themselves nowadays, though I still consider him a wise and admirable person, starts to lose me when he begins talking about Star Wars. With regard to The Hidden Fortress, it is not as if great insights began to rain down upon me: it was more that I was able to remain engaged with the plot for the duration of the film and begin to form questions, such as: Why were these stories and settings such popular themes/what purpose did they serve in their time? and Why is Toshiro Mifune the star of every single movie? I should also observe that death in these movies tends to be more cruel, violent and personal than it is in Hollywood movies, and the camera will find and linger not merely on fresh but not disfigured corpses but on bludgeoned skulls and skeletons being picked over by vultures long after we are supposed to have moved on in a Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone-type film, which tends to be extremely unsettling as one can imagine.

Another positive step was taken with Throne of Blood, Kurosawa s 1957 take on Macbeth employing the familiar setting of the samurai era. Obviously familiarity with the general outline of the story is of great assistance here in allowing for a greater attention to and appreciation of the considerable beauties of the production. Mifune, in the Macbeth role, departs from his usual persona as the good and necessary hero, which is actually a little unsettling. The strength of this movie is in its grasp and depictions of the idea of supernatural forces that is essential to most classical stories, which have rarely been executed so convincingly.

My favorite work in this genre to date is undoubtedly the Samurai trilogy (1954, 1955, 1956), directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, about whom I however know nothing else. This movie is frequently touted as the best introduction to the genre for the uninitiated, and has been heavily extolled and borrowed from by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk, so I am hardly breaking any new ground here, and if anything represent a weakening of the successful ties these movies managed to forge with people in this country. Each of the films has a fairly difficult to remember title featuring Japanese proper names and are usually packaged in our country under the more helpful appellations of Samurai I, Samurai II and Samurai III. As someone who tends to like long books and has begun to appreciate the advantages of longer BBC-type adaptations of literature, the epic dimension of the story, where we know when we begin that, like life itself, we will be ending somewhere more or less unrecognizable and very far away, appeals to me. Whether it is the nature of the terrain of that country or the Japanese people, or the interaction of the two in the artistic mind, Japanese filmmakers are the masters of creating tranquility, or at least the impression of it, in scenes set outdoors, even if a head is momentarily to be chopped off in the midst of it, and this film is especially reassuring and beautiful in that regard. The most interesting part of the film is that Mifune s great rival (he is the Samurai of course), played by the enigmatic and very appealing actor Koji Tsuruta, who was also apparently a famous singer, is a worthy man in every way who has great admiration for the Samurai, who accepts and understands that his superior abilities require him to seek out and engage in what seem to lesser men unnecessarily dangerous and brutal contests with his peers if he is to attain fullness as a man. This is a difficult concept and attitude to convey if it is not somehow embodied in one s own person; this ethos however is one of the more important currents running through all these films, that I can see.

Here is the Wikipedia article on Toshiro Mifune. I had no idea he was in so many American productions in his later years.