Author: Sysadmin

Just a brief poem today, as I am a bit distracted by a long-distance move later this month

“Flaw” by yours truly

“You have broken the flaw!”

“Haw, haw, haw.”

“I could scratch you with my paw!”

“Oops. There is something stuck in my maw.”

“Stop it with that old saw.”

“Oh, no. I need my Ma.”

Lyrics from an extremely confused cover band called One-Inch Nails with apologies to Trent Reznor, circa 1989

Am I not living up to what I’m supposed to be?
Why am I seething with  pusillanimity?
(Hey Fog) I think you owe me a great big apology

(Why are you capitalizing the letter “F”?)

Terrible guy
Terrible guy
I’m a terrible guy
Terrible guy

(Hey Fog) I really don’t know what you mean
Seems like salvation comes only in our dreams
I feel my cowardice grow all the more extreme
(Hey Fog) Can this world really be as fun as it seems?

Terrible guy
Terrible guy
I’m a terrible guy
Terrible guy

Don’t take it away from me, I am too bold. It’s true.
Don’t take it away from me, I am too bold. It’s true.
Don’t tear it away from me, I am sometimes blue.
Don’t tear it away from me, am I me or am I you?
Don’t swear it, don’t swear it, don’t swear it, don’t swear it, don’t

(Hey Fog) There’s nothing left for me to hide
I lost my ignorance, security and pride (and most of my 401(k))
I’m all alone in the world you must despise
(Hey Fog) I believed your promises, your promises and other guys!

Terrible guy
Terrible guy
I’ m a terrible guy
Terrible guy

You made me throw it all away
My florals left to decay
How many you betray
You’ve taken everything (including most of the 401(k))

Terrible guy

My head is filled with disease
My skin is begging for ease
I’m on my hands and knees
I want so much to be Steve (he’s nice)

I need someone to hold on to
I need someone to hold on to
I need dumb one
I need dumb one to hold on to
I give you everything
My sweet everything
Hey Fog, I really don’t know who I am
In this world of bliss

Even though this is a 7/11 blog, I am not a convenience store. Just a few more Bierce entries.

“I is the first letter in the alphabet, the first word of the language, the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.”

Bierce goes on a bit longer with this entry in his “dictionary,” but you get the basic idea. I think it is about male vanity. I is obviously not the first letter of the alphabet. I think he is talking about the centrality of male sexuality, how it is for some men “first.” The 20th-century U.S. novelist John O’Brien spoke in his most famous book Leaving Las Vegas of the alcoholic main character having his deathplace bed being “the truth of his life.” Some people think the film version of it to be maudlin; I thought it was rather sad but good.

“Idiot, n.  A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, ‘but pervades and relates to the whole’. He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable.”

Bierce goes on another sentence with this entry, but I think you get the gist. I had some repeated encounters last winter with local police who were very abusive, and I am not sure if they were Sadists or just idiots. If they were Sadists, they should be punished; if they were idiots, I feel sorry for them. They should have lost their badges in either case. I am leaving the area.

On procrastination

From a recent The Washington Post article: “The reason, she said, has to do with emotional self-regulation — and, in particular, an inability to manage negative moods around a certain task. We don’t typically procrastinate on fun things, she said. We procrastinate on tasks we find ‘difficult, unpleasant, aversive or just plain boring or stressful.’ If a task feels especially overwhelming, or provokes significant anxiety, it’s often easiest to avoid it.”

This article was interesting to me. A doctor in it says avoiding procrastination is about setting individual goals and holding yourself accountable for reaching them, even if it as simple as doing the dishes before watching TV. In the play Waiting for Godot that makes up a large part of my first book, the main characters keep saying they should leave but then do not. It is either funny or depressing.

I have two ideas for fictional novels but have trouble getting started on either one. There are reasons for that other than simple laziness. I think I work just as hard now as when I was getting a paycheck for my writing or teaching.

More on “Gatsby”

Tom Buchannan: “You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” while driving with the female athlete Jordan Baker. “Perhaps I am, but I have an almost second sight, sometimes that tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t believe me, but science–“. Jordan: “I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow. I could have gone deeper if I’d known– And you found he was an Oxford man?” Tom: “An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit. Oxford. New Mexico, or something like that.”

I think this part of the novel has to do with the idea of other people finding out Gatsby has self-mythologized. He was doing almost anything to impress Daisy and wanted to go to have gone to what some people consider the best university in the world. Tom Buchannan went to Yale, which many consider the best university in the U.S. So that makes the ego match between them more intense.

The novel has a lot to do with male vanity and anger. NIN has  a song called “I Just Want Something I Can Never Have.” The song is rather maudlin, but I think it expresses the same emotion Gatsby feels in the narrative.

Drama and Divorce: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, and Modern Divorce Trends

By E.C. Walsh

“I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll child; and here the children have been my dolls…That is what our marriage has been…I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now.” —Nora, Act III, A Doll’s House

Published in 1879, Henrik Ibsen’s classic play about a marriage disintegrating despite a lack of physical or blatant emotional abuse shocked audiences in its day but anticipated the rapid increase in no-fault divorce in the twentieth century. Nora’s husband Torvald Helmer has not physically abused his wife and dotes upon her extremely. However, he is neglectful of the sacrifices his wife has made to improve his health at a difficult time in the past (she apparently
saved his life but had to cut some corners to do so), and he is condescending to the point of infantilizing her. Ibsen is raising an issue that is at the heart of many broken marriages: should one member of a couple be allowed to leave simply because they are being stifled and disrespected?

Lucas Hnath’s sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2, takes place 15 years after Nora leaves her husband and children at the end of Ibsen’s play, but it was published in 2018, more than a century after Ibsen’s work. How did the intervening 139 years change playwrights’ perspectives on no-fault divorce? Hnath seems to be saying that little has changed in non-abusive but unhappy marriages. His Nora does not regret her actions 15 years later, even though she recognizes the pain she has caused and neither she nor Torvald have remarried. She continues to defy social and legal conventions that would have her defer to her husband about divorce, risking the wrath of a vindictive judge who threatens her freedom and hard-earned financial wellbeing.

The sequel is a sort of repetition and affirmation of the first play with Nora again leaving her husband behind and walking out the door of their home. Divorce data for Western Europe and North America bear out Ibsen’s prescience and Hnath’s post mortem.

The critic Vivian Mercier remarked about Waiting for Godot that the play’s two acts seem so repetitious that “nothing happens. Twice.” In a sense, the same could be said of Ibsen’s play and Hnath’s sequel. While on one level something clearly does happen in the first play in her family, on another level “nothing happens” because Torvald and Nora’s marriage has been a saccharine façade. Toward the end of the play, they acknowledge they have never had a serious conversation in all their years together. In the sequel, Nora doubles down on her decision to end the marriage, facing societal opprobrium in the hope that one day women will have more power to divorce and lead independent lives.

In the course of the play’s three acts, Nora is either belittled by Torvald with diminutive phrases like “little skylark”….etc. or she internalizes such language in a sort of painful self-deprecation and finally with bitter irony directed at the patriarchal condescension brought upon her first by her father then by her husband. About 67 instances of this sort of derogatory language occur in the play, mainly spoken by Torvald as would-be terms of endearment but occasionally by Nora herself in an apparently acquiescent way—but ultimately in a caustic, self-aware manner. In Torvald’s case, the belittling comments may reflect a patriarchal attitude toward a wife’s role in the household, the so-called “angel at the table,” which was of course more common in the mid- to late-19 th century. This condescension, combined with Torvald’s ignorance of the lengths his wife has gone to for his health and his deference to heavy-handed legal requirements, eventually push Nora to a point of no return. She realizes she has been acting in what the 20 th -century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would call “bad faith.” She has acquiesced in her overbearing husband’s conventional attitude to a wife as subordinate, a thing to be physically admired and played with, as if a doll. Her submission until the final act of the play amounts to what Sartre termed “being in-itself” (or “etre en-soi”), the powerful pull many people feel to surrender their agency to another person, an ideology, a stereotype, sexual desire, or a drug. In the third act, faced with her husband’s disdain, self-centeredness, and haughty
“forgiveness” of her past—relatively minor—legal transgression, Nora decides leaving the marriage is her only option to attain what Sartre called “being for-itself” (or “etre pour-soi”), the conscious choice of one’s behavior and position in society.

Part of the radical nature of Ibsen’s play is its heroine’s divergence from and defiance of ,religious authority and conventional notions of marriage. Nora says she must move out and be on her own, apart even from her children, to decide whether religion and its moral precepts are “right for me.” As Algius Valiunas put it in a recent essay, “the radicalism of A Doll’s House in its day rested on its presentation of Christian cultural authority as an enemy of the self..[for Nora] no authority is to be taken on faith.” Valiunas adds that the play, treated by many as a founding document of feminist social justice, dramatizes the suffering and irreparable damage caused by “some spurious ideal.” Nora has a moment of what Aristotle called anagnorisis at the end of the play, a profound recognition of her past bad faith in an unrealistically idealized form
of marriage.

The play draws much of its power and controversy from the possibility of opposing Nora’s reasoning and choice to leave at the end of the marriage. A staunch defender of the institution of marriage might argue that as a grown woman she should have known before marrying Torvald what type of man he was, and, however much he may have disappointed her after their marriage,
she should have been bound by her willing decision to wed to work out their problems as best she could without leaving her husband and children. Ibsen’s play gives no indication that Torvald has been physically abusive to his wife (he does show some unwanted amorous affection after a few drinks), nor has he apparently lied to her, been unfaithful, or consciously exploited her emotions. He is exceedingly condescending to her, but is this reason enough for ending a
marriage? Torvald does try to make amends in the third act, when Nora says she will leave him and the children, but he is left pathetically alone in their apartment at the play’s end, hoping desperately for “the most wonderful thing of all” to happen, for the two of them to change sufficiently for reconciliation. The final sound is that of the front door shutting from below as
Nora leaves.

The play is often proffered as a prime example of theatrical realism, a dramatic style that strips away all romantic, traditional, and grandiose themes to present life as it is lived by ordinary people. Nora’s determination to re-discover herself apart from kith and kin suggests she is not held back by genetic and environmental factors that play such an important part in
naturalist drama and fiction. But, on second thought, the play does suggest the social and familial oppression that build to her abrupt decision to leave amounts to an environmental factor guiding her fate. Are the patriarchy and condescension that Torvald, Nora’s father, and Krogstad show toward her an environmental determinant? Are religious, cultural, and legal conventions
about marriage further factors beyond Nora’s control that effectively paint her into a corner?

With no other way out apparent, she makes the radical choice to break all ties with her past life. She feels forced into an all-or-nothing decision.
Just over a decade after the first production of A Doll’s House, Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun published Hunger in 1890, a radical naturalist work of fiction about a writer so dedicated to what he sees as his artistic calling and worldview that he suffers poverty, alienation, hunger, poor health, and ultimately exile. While Hamsun rejected the self-determinative aspects
of realism, his unnamed protagonist in this novel makes a choice akin to Nora’s. He chooses to leave Christiana (now Oslo) to work onboard a ship. The play and the novel share a dramatic trajectory of accumulating disenchantment with a home environment building to an abrupt
departure. Both characters assert a radical self-assertion at odds with societal standards and expectations.

Readers do not learn what becomes of Hamsun’s protagonist, but his story might be thought of as a kunstelrroman, a novel tracing the development of an artist, akin to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was published 26 years later. Both Hamsun’s narrator and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus decide loyalty to their artistic calling takes precedence over social or religious conformity. Dedalus more explicitly rejects both Dublin life and the suggestion that he become a Catholic priest, asserting “n/on serviam.” But the narrator of
Hunger also in his idiosyncratic way rejects the bourgeois respectability of Christiania. As Paul Auster puts it, “pity plays no part in Hunger. The hero suffers but only because he has chosen to suffer.” He and Dedalus end their stories setting out from their home cities for more fertile grounds overseas.
For her part, Nora’s story may be thought of as a Feministischerroman, a drama tracing of a feminist, even though Ibsen averred that he meant to produce poetry with the play rather than ideology. Ibsen’s play was nonetheless described as “feminist propaganda,” And its popularity can easily be correlated to the building momentum for women’s rights in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. While Hamsun was reacting against Ibsen’s domestic realism (turning inward instead of toward a supposedly objective outward), his theme of individual liberation from societal expectations shared something with his compatriot’s topic in A Doll’s House. Still, Hamsun’s translator, Robert Bly, claimed the Norwegian novelist “blew much
moralistic work of the time, like Ibsen’s, apart.” Hamsun, in Bly’s view, wanted characters who were intellectually superior to their audiences, not just their equals. He distrusted the bourgeoisie and did not think it could be reformed. He is, in a sense, a romantic, and believed with William Blake that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Nora, for all her transgressions
and non-conformity, is more of a traditional moralist.

Ibsen’s play preceded and to some degree anticipated the emergence of no-fault divorce in the West in the 20th and 21st centuries. While readers and audiences can have differing opinions, my interpretation of the evidence Ibsen provides is that Nora would need to make a no-fault divorce petition, which was not available at the time. I do not think Torvald’s behavior reaches the level of emotional abuse. Russia, in the throes of communist revolution, was among the first countries to allow no-fault divorce in 1915. In the U.S., California led the issue by legalizing it in 1969, with once-divorced Governor Ronald Reagan signing it into law, and it has since been followed by the rest of the country. Norway legalized no-fault divorce in the early 1990s. The U.K. is in the process of legalizing it this year (the latest data from England and Wales indicate most divorces are requested by women, and their reason is mainly the “behavior” of their spouses, not adultery or outright abuse). No-fault divorce has been a complex and controversial issue, with some feminist advocates like the National Organization of Women arguing that it allows abusive spouses to escape liability for their misbehavior. It is not a simple matter to discern the effect of growing feminist movements, successive “waves” of feminism,
and increased legal and cultural gender equality on divorce rates. Recorded annual divorces did  increase sharply in the 20 th century, and it appears that in most developed Western countries about one-third to one-half of all marriages end in divorce or permanent separation, suggesting
there is some truth in the old saw that “half of all modern marriages end in divorce.”

Hnath’s sequel to A Doll’s House takes place within the lifetimes of the original play’s characters but has the authorial hindsight of the historic achievements for more equal gender rights since Ibsen’s day. In the sequel, Nora has become a successful fictional author and proponent of women’s liberation; she is both artist and feminist but remains bound by social and legal conventions even after living self-sufficiently for over a decade. If Torvald’s condescending diminutive terms for Nora were a defining stylistic in Ibsen’s  play, highly frequent ellipses, often with no words spoken before or after them, are a dominant feature of dramatic encounters in A Doll’s House, Part 2. Hnath uses ellipses 166 times in the course of conversations in this play. Towards the end, Torvald and Nora often are at a loss for words. One of their wordless exchanges is represented by ten consecutive ellipses attributed to
the two of them, followed by Torvald saying, “…I don’t know what to do around you, I don’t know how to behave…”, and then three more wordless exchanges represented again by ellipses.

On the following page, the drama is represented by seven consecutive ellipses without any words. In a prefatory note, the playwright says these silences reflect “a moment of thinking or rethinking or sussing or a look, a sidelong glance, etc.” When Torvald and Nora do talk, it devolves into shouting and cursing. By stark contrast, my Dover Thrift Edition of Ibsen’s play contains no conversational ellipses. It is as if the certainties and conventions of the first play have evaporated, and characters are left with a succession of awkward or pregnant silences. Nora has rid herself of the domestic model that made idle or offensive chit-chat possible for much of Ibsen’s play. Her feminist liberation has torn down the patriarchal edifice that propped up her marriage earlier in life, and it is uncertain what has taken its place—to the extent that characters often do not know what to say to each other.

The sequel ends with Nora essentially affirming her decision to leave Torvald 15 years earlier, while defying Norwegian legal conventions that could endanger her writing career. She is left with acceptance of her dire circumstances and optimism that society can change for the better: “The world didn’t change as much as I though it would, but I know that some day
everything will be different, and everyone will be free—freer than they are now…I just hope I live to see it.” This hope that society can improve when presented with injustice remains true to Ibsen’s realism and contrasts with Hamsun’s artistic rejection of bourgeois society in its entirety. For Nora, her own alienation within society is the price of broader liberation and gradual reform.

For the narrator of Hunger, exile seems to be the only option.
The influence of literary works like A Doll’s House on human behavior and laws can be easily overstated, but it also should not be ignored. It is difficult to compare current divorce rates with those in the 19th century, but Norway’s divorce rate as of 2016 was 42.2%, according to Wikipedia. That put it about in the center of divorce rates for developed Western countries in the early 21 st century (The U.S. rate was 44.6% as of 2017; the U.K. was at 40.9% as of 2015; the E.U. as a whole was at 45.5% as of 2017; China, Japan, and South Korea had divorce rates of about one-third to one-half in 2018-19). A rough estimate would show this as a sharp increase from divorce rates of 5% or less in the mid-1800s. Art can affect real life. Consider Shakespeare’s influence and the humanistic message of many Renaissance artists. Or the real suicides that seemed to emulate the eponymous hero of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther or the male codes of honor and sense of tragedy that Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald instilled in many young American men in the last century.

The themes emerging in dramatic performance often must be more acceptable to the general public (audience members can simply walk out if they do not like what they are seeing) than those broached in novels and poems, where individual readers might be more accepting of
iconoclastic and avant-garde issues. That Ibsen’s play was such a popular success with audiences in his time and to this day, both in its original form and extended in Hnath’s sequel, suggests the Norwegian realist had his finger on society’s pulse. With divorce rates apparently declining slightly in the 21 st century, audiences are left to wonder if a new writer should pen a drama where a character like Nora makes a starkly different decision about how to respond to her marital problems.

On a few more Bierce entries

“Scarification, n. A form of penance practiced by the medieval pious. The rite was performed, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a hot iron…”

I saw an interesting horror film last year called Haunt about a Halloween horror show where the administrators turn out to be actually insane murderers who have disfigured their faces. I have a few bodily scars but did not give them to myself.

“Scrap-book, n.  A book that is commonly edited by a fool. …”

It is vain to think others want to read what you have written when it is basically a diary. That is is basically what I did with my newly published book, but who cares? You don’t have to read it or like it.

“Self-esteem, n.  An erroneous appraisement.”

“Self-evident, adj.  Evident to oneself and to nobody else.”

“Selfish, adj.  Devoid of the consideration for the selfishness of others.”

These entries, as sarcastic as they seem, remind me of the concept of solipsism. How can you really know another person? All you can really know for sure is yourself. You know, “I think, therefore I am.” Bierce was a self-deprecatory humorist, and that can be dangerous. He lived a relatively long life but may have committed suicide.

On psych wards and a joke

This is from a The Irish Times book review

Re U.S. writer Bette Howland’s posthumous memoir W-3, the name of the Chicago psych ward she stayed in.

“Her prose is direct, unadorned, understated. Despite the horrors she endures she does not appeal for the reader’s sympathy, but rather seeks to be understood, to have her voice heard, and to have her vision of her story recounted and expressed, a story that otherwise would be put down for her by the doctors, psychiatrists, externs and others she meets along the way: ‘I would like to put this in a recognizable form,’ she writes of her experiences; and goes on to do so forthrightly, and without a trace of self- pity.”

People with mental illness are often treated cruelly, I would say in some cases tortured. The 1980s pop star Adam Ant, who had mental health issues later in life, said in a more recent interview that mental illness is “the last taboo.” I don’t think anyone who is not physically violent or threatening suicide/murder should be forcibly hospitalized.

“The Sound of Stress Ball” by yours truly

I’ve come to squeeze you yet again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping (keep those seeds away Mr. Man)
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of stress ball

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
Beneath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my hands were calmed by a soft stress ball
That split the night
And touched the sound of a stress ball

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People stressing without squeezing
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share…
No one dare disturb the feel of stress ball

Fools said I do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Squeeze a ball that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of stress ball

And the people bowed and prayed to the stress ball they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the signs said the words of the prophets are written on all the stress balls
And tenement halls
And whisper’d in the feel of a stress ball

More on Niall Ferguson’s new book Doom

Chapter Two starts: “Are disasters really predictable? In preliterate societies, they surely were not. Life was dominated by the effects of natural forces, only some of which–notably the seasons– were rhythmic and predictable.”

I think what Ferguson is talking about here is the connection between linguistic intelligence and more general smart choices  about how to deal with the world. I have said before that I don’t think language fluency really matters in personal relations, if people really like or love.

But verbal accuracy matters when it comes to dealing with the broader natural world. Words can be just as exact as numbers.

Fourth of July thoughts

I don’t have a lot to say about the July 4 holiday. There is a famous play about George III, called The Madness of King George by Alan Bennet. The title character was of course king of England when the American Revolution happened and was quite insane. It was actually written by an English playwright. There was a film version.

Some think the American Revolution was actually a mistake, but eventually the U.K. gave up on empire almost entirely by 1960 and in Hong Kong by the late 1990s.

Imperialism doesn’t really seem to exist anymore. Some liberals say the U.S. is imperialist, but I think we just protect international waterways and mole-wack terrorists. I guess you could say the U.S. is culturally imperialist through Hollywood movie influence and big international companies, but that is a more subtle issue than actual government control of another country.