Category: Uncategorized

Another comment on Guyland and another brief poem

This is controversial, Michael Kimmel’s book has a section on “hooking up” dealing with the idea young women and men might both be under the influence of alcohol during brief romances. An excerpt:

“To say that alcohol clouds one’s judgment would be an understatement. Drinking is supposed to cloud your judgment… While both sexes might enjoy the lack of responsibility alcohol implies, this turns out to be especially important for the women who still have reputations to protect.”

Clouding your judgment may not always be a bad thing, if your sober judgment is wrong or too socially reserved. Yes, date rape by people abusing substances like alcohol is wrong. But one of my elementary school teachers opined that some people would never socialize without alcohol,

A poem

“Range” by yours truly

Mountain range  (so pretty):

Don’t estrange.

It’s so strange.

Can make you feel deranged.

Re-arrange.

On a The Irish Times article and a brief original poem

From the article:

“Irish modernism contains its own comment on the fictionality, or stupefying reality of England in Samuel Beckett’s riff on London place names from Waiting for Godot: “Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham”.

Joe Cleary, a professor at Yale University and previously a professor at NUI Maynooth, has been an authoritative and stimulating guide to modernism, and to 20th-century Irish literature and culture generally for the last two decades. His work was shaped by the alignment between Irish studies and postcolonial studies in the 1990s.”

I have not directly read Cleary’s books, but according to the article, he seems to tap into the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said’s idea in his book Orientalism about a connection between modernism in art and imperialism. In graduate school, I was surprised Said’s book was included on the reading list for a course focused on Irish literature. I guess colonialism is colonialism all over the word.

Like many poetic writers, Beckett liked to play with words. You may find it annoying or amusing.

A poem

“Neighbor” by yours truly

Had a brief chat;

How ’bout that?

With a neighbor;

He seemed intelligent.

Knew what he meant.

“Slowly but surely,” he said.

Good advice.

Edelweiss.

Hope your Christmas season goes well. Just a summary and few comments on a commencement speech by Charles Krauthammer at McGill University in 1993 contained in his posthumous book The Point of It All.

The speech, or as Krauthammer jokingly calls it at the end in summing up, his “sermon,” makes three main points:

1. Try to remain independent of “chattering classes.” “herd mentality,” or “periodic enthusiasms that wash over the culture.” He uses the late 20th-century scare about nuclear war as an example; I think the current virus over-alarm is an example too. John Stuart Mill warned against the “tyranny of the majority.” There was an ad for an insurance firm when I was much younger that had a motto that went something like, “we won’t turn a crisis into a panic.”
2. “Look outward.” Even though one of the most famous lines of ancient Greek philosophy was that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” Krauthammer warns against “the too-examined life” in what he terms “the Age of Oprah.” He also warns against “the interior, self-absorbed, self-referential world of modern fiction,” which seems to be the main objection to post-modern stories.
3. “Save the best.” He quotes G.K. Chesterton that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Towards the end of the speech, he notes a cultural distinction between the U.S. and Canada with the former considering itself a “melting pot” of immigrant cultures while the latter considering itself a place of “shared sovereignty.” I suppose he is referring to the ethnically English, French, and Native North American.

On swearing

There is a recent interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about an apparent increase in crude swearing that the journalist links to the virus-scare stress. Last winter, I got really stressed out by the virus scare and more importantly government over-reaction to it. But I usually use non-vulgar jokes instead of swear words to vent stress.

(A disclaimer: a long time ago I wrote for an affiliate of this newspaper.)

Here is an excerpt  from the article:

“Pandemic stress, the melding of personal and professional spheres, and an exhausted slide toward casualness are making many of us swear more. It is ‘a perfect swearing storm’ says Michael Adams, a linguist at Indiana University Bloomington.”

.Two comments. I really hate the word “pandemic” in the current context.  It seems like an alarmist word created by government officials to justify their jobs.  The other is one of my high school English teachers I liked said in class that it is socially acceptable to curse sometimes, if you are really angry, but you have to be careful not to do it too much.

That same school teacher had us read The Catcher in the Rye in which the narrator famously regrets while looking at graffiti saying “F— you” that you can’t erase all expressions like this in the world. I think it ties into one of the main themes of the novel: that the narrator can’t fully protect his younger sister.

 

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Another Guyland excerpt and thoughts on today’s sermon

From Michael Kimmel’s book (page 201):

“The Absence of Expectations

One of the key defining features of hooking up is that it is a strictly ‘no strings attached’ endeavor. Young people in college–and this seems to hold true for both women and men–seem generally wary of committed or monogamous relationships.”

The author goes on to tie this attitude to parental divorce reducing young people’s hope of long-term romance and the challenge of balancing romantic goals with career ones. There is a blog a while back on this site and in one of my books that is an essay about how art (particularly the Ibsen play A Doll’s House) may have contributed to the rise in divorce rates since the 19th century.

Two other thoughts. I have said before that I think the decline of formal dating late last century may have led to an increase in “hooking up,” which can sometimes lead to allegations of sexual assault, especially if the man is insensitive to the woman afterwards. Also on Kimmel’s point about balancing romance and career: one literary critic made the argument that English novels are often about romance, while French ones are often about mainly job careers.

On another topic, today’s sermon was about a pithy line from The Bible that the people told Jesus they would “turn to you.” Of course, many of them eventually turned against him. When a college teacher, I had a recalcitrant student who would turn away from me, I think as a sign of disrespect; and a police officer recently also turned away from me when I tried to reprimand him for unjustly torturing me. Maybe that is what higher authorities tell police officers with unhappy suspects to do. One literary critic called this type of thing “gestural discourse” in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

 

On Westerners and Easterners

This is kind of a weird post, a response to a long, recent article in The Irish Times about Westerners in Asia during Covid-19.

“There’s always a sense of having to leave [Ireland] to actually grow. It’d be nice to just grow at home,” says one credentialed source in the article.

I think there is a strong sense in East Asia that cross-cultural intermingling is dangerous. One of the best-known dating websites seems to prohibit (or the countries may do) Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian women from talking to Western men. I think it has to do with concern about suicide pacts. China,  Vietnam, and Thailand seem more relaxed.

I have said this before and may be getting boring. But Covid-19 seems like a largely imaginary problem in much of the world, even though it was serious in China for a while.

More on another excerpt from This Side of Paradise and some related thoughts

In one scene of the novel, the main character, Amory, meets with a Monsignor at his college to discuss his plans to quit school (which F. Scott Fitzgerald really did from Princeton University). The Monsignor makes a fine distinction between “personality” being what you thought you were and “personage” being something more durable and less damaged potentially by society. A priest in Fitzgerald’s high school has been credited with encouraging him into fiction.

Fitzgerald must have been a fast reader (I did a lot of reading for my PhD but am normally a rather slow one). In this scene, he mentions Huysmans, Pater, Gautier, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonious, and several other renowned authors.

We read Huysmans’ Against Nature  for a grad school class. Known as À Rebours in its original French; it  is a late 19th-century novel of the Decadent literary genre about a young man who can afford to basically drop out of work and conventional society and just behave oddly at home, making it an almost entirely artistic world largely of his own creation.

It reminds me of a neighbor a few weeks ago who said, jokingly I think, “just lock your door and watch TV.”

Just thoughts on a film today, as I am sadly still rather disorganized from my cross-country  move

The movie is called New Year’s Eve (2011). It is an ensemble piece with a lot of famous actors. I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but it appears to be a series of vignettes about the holiday in New York City. The 20th-century writer Jerzy Kosinski liked the vignette form, but it can seem overly fragmented.

New Year’s is an interesting holiday because it is non-religious, but it also involves resolutions to improve your life. When I was a reporter at the end of 1999 during the worries about Y2K technological breakdowns, a Russian government official on a conference call joked that Russian people and even their reporters had better things to do on that day than worry about tech failure.

He turned out to be right.

Also,  “New Year’s Day” by U2 is one of my favorite pop songs. Bono has a good sense of political (even military) conflict and personal depression or intensity. There’s a good video for it with the band riding horses through a snow-filled forest carrying white flags.

Yet more on Guyland, the book published in 2008

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:

“‘The ignominy of boyhood; the distress/ Of boyhood changing into man; /The unfinished man and his pain.‘ –William Butler Yeats ‘A Dialogue of Soul and Self’

Jeff is 24, tall and fit, with shaggy brown hair and an easy smile. After graduating from Brown three years ago, with an honors degree in history and and anthropology, he moved back home to the Boston suburbs and started looking for a job. After several months, he found one, as a sales representative for a small Internet provider. He stays in touch with friends from college by text message and email, and still heads downtown to hang out at Boston’s ‘brown bars.’ ‘It’s kinda like like I never left college,’ he says with a mixture of resignation and pleasure. ‘Same friends, same aimlessness,'”

A few thoughts:

• The author explains in a footnote that Jeff is not his real name; I think this is proper with many journalistic subjects when writing of their personal lives, if the writer chooses not to disclose it.
• The first few years after college can be awkward. I got a job immediately after college and found a room to rent with a college buddy in a house share but had lost touch with most of my high school friends (for reasons undisclosed).
• I am 51 now, but an in-law relative reprimanding me said recently that I am like a five-year-old. It is true that I have never married.
• Yeats was a great poet and writer, but I don’t think he was often funny. I think it may have partly been because he had failed romances in his young life and because of the difficult political climate in Ireland at the time.

 

 

 

On an article and brief original poem

This is from an The Irish Times article about the connection between pornographry and sexual abuse:

“The boy began looking at pornography when he was nine or 10. By 11, he was “addicted” to it. After he turned 14, he started acting out what he had seen online. The first time he sexually abused his niece was when she was eight. The assaults on her became gradually more graphic and more invasive. The abuse was discovered when she was 11.”

I think Sartre was right that most children reach a point at about eight years old when they sexualize; I think they have to be disciplined carefully until at least 16.

But what is porn? The other sex can be physically attractive with clothes on or in paintings or statues of nudes. And our culture considers these artistic treasures for the most part. James Joyce dealt with the issue of legitimate art versus squalid porn in his first novel.

A poem

“Cost” by yours truly

In college economics, the teachers spoke of “opportunity cost,” when you have to give up something for something else.

I think of people lost.

A person  from the past now like a ghost.

“What do you want most?”

What I don’t have.