Author: Sysadmin

This is going to be self-justification for why I don’t use Twitter, citing a recent conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams, a self-identified liberal with opinions seemingly contrary to the label. Williams writes on topics similar to Ta-Nahesi Coates, specifically being young, educated and black in the U.S., but fiercely criticizes identity politics.

In his remarks to America magazine, Williams says he engages with critics on Twitter, “but it also puts things in such binaries, and it turns things into a kind of team dynamic in a way that I think is really against what it means to be a writer.” He suggests writers should avoid team affiliation, adding that the process of producing a book or long essay can take months or years but only take a reader a day or week to read. The disparity of time and effort between writer and critic is intensified by Twitter, he says, because the critic’s reaction can appear instantly.

It makes me think of the well-known fallout between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre over the latter’s affiliation with the Communist Party. As a novelist, playwright, essayist, and journalist engagé, Camus may have objected to Sartre’s affiliation with any political party as much as his support for communism.

Reading a recent review of How to Be Antiracist and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. It’s from a religiously themed magazine and notes that “many have compared antiracism to religion” and that this has a literal, non-analogic, meaning.

Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. The article says antiracism includes “liturgies of purgation, and promises of redemption.” Psychologically, I think almost everyone wants forgiveness for something. Catholics have confession.

“Americans could be forgiven for confusing antiracism with racism itself,” the article I’m reading says. Well, not racism but racialism. Race and genes matter; that’s racialism. One race is better than the other; that’s racism. My personal experiences may have made me biased in this regard, but I think our bodies are hard-wired to act a certain way. It doesn’t mean we don’t still have brains and free will, but it does matter.

“I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.” This is what Charles Krauthammer said when asked why he left the field of practicing psychiatry to become a political administrator and later a columnist and public intellectual.

The medical field must  be frustrating in many ways for doctors. The broader population may envy them for making a lot of money, but dealing with recalcitrant patients can be very difficult. How can they help a patient who won’t tell them the truth?

We think of psychiatrists’ offices as places where difficult truths are told, and I think for the most part they are, but truth to me is an ideal. We should strive for it but not really expect to get it.

Picked up some items at Walmart today including a hammer and, on a whim, the uncut version of the movie Psycho released this year to mark the original version’s 60th anniversary.

At self-checkout the machine made me get the authorization of an attendant who could verify my age. I assumed it was because I was buying a hammer, a potentially lethal weapon. It was because the movie is R-rated. I remarked to the attendant, “you can’t kill anyone with a movie.”

Censors and strict moralists might disagree with me. Is art responsible for its effect on human behavior? It’s a question at the heart of my essay on realist drama that is being edited now by a magazine.

 

“There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal state bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble… and encounter any number of ghosts.” –Charles Dickens

Picked up a copy of the Life magazine special edition “The World’s Most Haunted Places: Creepy, Ghostly, and Notorious Spots” today on a whim. It was originally published in 2015 and reissued this year. It begins with the above Dickens quote. It has an interesting “one-world” design with five sections that each describe haunted places throughout the world. Here are two of its entries that attracted me at an initial glance.

First: the Psycho house where Ed Gein, the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s fictional movie, lived. When discovered by police in 1957, Gein had been living alone in an isolated farm house in Plainfield, Wisconsin, following the death of his mother. The real horror was much worse, of course, than Hitchcock’s movie. The entry notes that his father was an alcoholic who pre-deceased his mother who was a religious fanatic and appears to have told her two sons possibly misogynistic things about women (she had wanted a daughter). Gein’s story was also an influence on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.

Second: the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, built by inventor F.O. Stanley in 1909 and visited by Stephen King in 1974 on vacation with his wife and young son. King said he had a nightmare there about his son being pursued by an evil entity that inspired his 1977 novel The Shining. The Stanley is, according to a paranormal investigator, “a Disneyland for the spirts,” and the magazine entry notes rumored spirits including that of a maid who intimately joined married couples, a maintenance man strictly enforcing an 11 pm curfew, a humming ghost in the concert hall, and the wraith of a lothario offering unwanted attention to female patrons.

It will soon be Halloween.

 

 

Reading another item by Charles Krauthammer called “Genius, Insanity, Innocence.” It’s a 1993 movie review of Searching for Bobby Fischer that begins with reflections on the association of madness and genius. Fischer and Paul Morphy in the 19th century were American world chess champions who went mad.

In literature, Krauthammer cites Mary Shelley’s fictional mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein and in visual arts the mad painter Vincent Van Gogh as well as the then-recent study by Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire, which finds a connection between artistic genius and manic depression and includes an appendix of artists with psychiatric illness from Absurdist theatrical innovator Antonin Artaud to Modernist novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf.

My book includes a long section on Oscar Wilde, who became homosexual despite a heterosexual marriage at a time when many in the medical community considered this sexual orientation a form of mental illness. It also has a passage on James Joyce, whose daughter was schizophrenic and who some claim was himself a “high-functioning” schizophrenic. Samuel Beckett spent a significant amount of time in psychotherapy.

In the late 20th century, Nancy Scheper-Hughes published Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, a study of mental illness in rural Ireland and its possible cultural causes. The book, considered a classic of ethnography, was updated and expanded in 2001. In 2008 Irish American writer Patrick Tracey published Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia, trying to understand why his two sisters and several of his ancestors were troubled with the condition. The book notes that until the 1960s, Ireland had the highest rate of institutionalization in the world for mental illness.

Casting back to the blog from two days ago, which was based on an unnamed article, which is “What Waugh Saw in America” from the magazine America‘s Spring 2020 literary review edition. It’s worth a read. Here are a few more thoughts.

Consistent with remarks of my blog contrasting Lolita as a novel with Cuties as a film, one of the problems Waugh found with Hollywood film was that a book that published “a mere 5,000 copies” could shape a culture, but a film needs to placate and entertain the masses. In a 1947 journalistic article, he feared artists would “be seduced [in Hollywood] to their own extinction.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s premature death working for the film industry might bear out Waugh’s analysis. William Faulkner had more success and productivity as a novelist-turned-screenwriter. Though not mentioned in my book (which ends with Samuel Beckett), contemporary Irish playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh have succeeded toggling between stage and screen.

With the virus keeping people away from live theaters, movies give playwrights more incentive to become screenwriters whose work can be streamed into peoples’ homes. This only furthers trends toward screen and away from stage and page that technology and perhaps educational and moral failures had instigated long before.

The article on Waugh finds that part of the  acidic satire of The Loved One comes from the author playing on the cliché of Englishmen as the world’s former foremost imperialists “exiled in the barbarous regions of the world” by suggesting one such barbarous place is Hollywood. The novel notes Americans “don’t expect you to listen” and “nothing they say is designed to be heard.” It reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote in my book to the effect that if the English could be taught to speak and Irish to listen, a good conversation might result.

Spent today running errands, so just a few jokes seen while mingling with the masses.

A store’s street sign asks, “What do you get when you mix alcohol with literature? Tequila Mockingbird.”

A curvaceous woman wearing a tee-shirt in the grocery store that reads: “Guess what? Nobody cares.”

Another buxom belle in another grocery store with a tee-shirt that reads: “thanks, but no thanks.”

I try.

Thoughts today on oxymoron (an element of the analysis in my book) and Evelyn Waugh. Reading an article about the author’s experiences in the U.S. It begins with reference to his comic novel The Loved One, which he was inspired to write while in Hollywood to negotiate film rights for Brideshead Revisited, his novel about Catholic aristocracy in England ahead of World War II. The article notes one of the main characters is named Amiee Thanatogenos, an anthropomorphized version to Waugh of the U.S. as a whole, her surname meaning death/race (possibly an oxymoron and/or a commentary on the racial motivations of WWII) in ancient Greek.

The Loved One is considered a scathing satire about U.S. culture, and the article notes Waugh lessened his “ironic distance” from the U.S. upon later visits. Waugh’s cutting satire reminds me of Rowan Atkinson’s remark that comedy boils down to cruelty. This article notes Waugh “had a proclivity toward cruelty.” A friend interviewing him asked how he could reconcile such cruelty with religious faith. He responded “’rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible…and anyway would have committed suicide years ago.’”

In conversation, someone said something like Catholics are no better than other people, and another replied, “we’re worse.”

“The crux of the matter is, of course, the question of forgiveness. Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.” — Simon Wiesenthal

This is how Wiesenthal wraps up the memoir section of his book The Sunflower, the title of which refers to the author’s observation of sunflowers adorning the graves of German military after World War II by contrast with the unmarked mass graves many Jews had during the war. He notes that his silence when asked for forgiveness for the Holocaust could have been ambiguous, possibly like the Buddha’s silence (my comparison).

Here are three more responses to his philosophical question.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt uses the Talmudic concept of teshuva, or repentance, to support Wiesenthal’s behavior. Teshuva for sin is a complex process. Asking forgiveness of the aggrieved party is only the first step, followed by a turn to God through verbal confession and resolution not to commit the sin again even if given the opportunity. Finally, she distinguishes between teshuva and kaparah, or atonement. Kaparah means punishing consequences. “The question to be asked is not should the prisoner have forgiven the SS man but could the prisoner have forgiven?” She indicates he could not have. It is akin the Buddha’s silence when asked an inappropriate question.

Cynthia Ozick, Jewish American fiction and essay writer, gives a four-point reply. Ozick suggests first that Christian personification of God contributed to the German SS man’s acceptance of an almighty Fuhrer. Secondly, she says German Nazis were worshipping an idol, thereby breaking the second commandment and summoning the flesh-consuming monster Moloch; they thereby lost their capacity for human pity. Third, she quotes rabbinic wisdom that “‘whoever is merciful to the cruel will end by being indifferent to the innocent;'” paradoxically “forgiveness can brutalize.” Finally, the SS man deserves condemnation because though not a savage at heart, he let himself become one, she says.

Albert Speer, chief architect of the Nazi regime who pled guilty at the Nuremberg Trial and spent 20 years in prison at Spandau, says neither he himself nor Wiesenthal can forgive his moral guilt, but in their post-war correspondence Wiesenthal did show “clemency, humanity, and goodness.” He adds that “every human being has his burden to bear” and “no one can remove it for another,” but his was lightened by Wiesenthal’s actions.