The Book of the Irish Bulls – On Sale Now
“-Less” by yours truly
“I don’t believe I have to explain this: death is not always painless, and you are killing me. Quite painfully.”
“‘Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whispering words of wisdom: let it be.'”
“‘Nobody rides for free.'”
“Just let go Wendell Gee.”
“Ahh, R.E.M.embrance of things past.”
On Fitzgerald and Brooks
One of the reasons I think people like The Great Gatsby so much is because F. Scott Fitzgerald was good writing about parties and social conversation. From the text:
[As Tom and Daisy Buchannan enter a party at Gatsby’s house with Nick Carraway]: [Daisy]: “These things excite me so. If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.” [Host]: “Look around.”
The passage from the novel brings to mind one of my favorite poems called “Piano after War” by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the novel, Gatsby hosts wild parties but remains mostly aloof; he is supposed to have tried to kill himself in World War I because he did not want to live without Daisy. The Brooks poem is similar in that it describes wanting to get away from happy social interaction because of trauma or past difficulty. Here it is:
On a snug evening I shall watch her fingers,
Cleverly ringed, declining to clever pink,
Beg glory from the willing keys. Old hungers
Will break their coffins, rise to eat and thank.
And music, warily, like the golden rose
That sometimes after sunset warms the west,
Will warm that room, persuasively suffuse
That room and me, rejuvenate a past.
But suddenly, across my climbing fever
Of proud delight— a multiplying cry.
A cry of bitter dead men who will never
Attend a gentle maker of musical joy.
Then my thawed eye will go again to ice.
And stone will shove the softness from my face.
On two Ambrose Bierce quotes and a poem
“Innate ] W adds the following sentence: ‘Locke was smarter than a whip, but when he undertook to show that brief period between cradle and gibbet… he bit off more than he could chew.’ ”
I have never been very good at philosophy. I prefer art. But philosophy does provide some ballast for analysis of art. It seems what Bierce is saying here is that life is inexplicable. Philosophy tries to explain what it all means, but that is not entirely possible.
“Intimacy ] Selditz powder (after Selditz, a village in northwestern Czechoslovakia, the site of large mineral springs) is a mild cathartic, a mixture of tartaric acid, sodium bicarbonate, and potassium sodium tartrate, that is dissolved in water and drunk.”
Bierce may have been bitter about personal intimacy after losing two sons to what was effectively suicide and divorcing his wife. I read in a newspaper article once that people often turn to material comforts, possibly including nutrients, to compensate for failed personal relations. I think it true.
“Place” by yours truly
“You, sir, need to be pu(n)t in your place!”
“Pu(n)t? It might be a pun-sgrace. Very shameful.”
“Just get the pun out. And don’t pun back again.”
“Pun-kay. Pun-bye.”
Just a brief movie review
“To be Irish is to know the world will always break your heart.” — something similar said by the late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan
Just watched the 2011 action thriller Unknown with Irish actor Liam Neeson as the lead character (I believe he first made his name as a stage actor in a performance of a famous Brian Friel play Translations before going to Hollywood). He seems good at action movies because he seems like a real adult and also expresses regret well and has a big physical presence, even if his acted American accent is a bit forced.
I liked the movie because it seems to be similar to Memento in that it deals with a central character with severe memory problems dealing with a past wife (it is not as good as Memento). The movie is set in Germany and suggests some of the country’s regret about its 20th-century past.
Neeson seems to have genuine sadness in his face possibly partly because he lost his wife, a British actress, when she had a skiing accident that lead to her death in 2009.
“Pun-t Up” by yours truly
“I feel all pun-t up in my home all the time, as if going out is a crime.”
“Do you think it is a real pun-blem? You can pun from home. Many are now because of the pun-demic.”
“Pun-ssibly, but in my case it is because of pun-anoia about going out in pun-blic.”
“Ahh, yes: pun-goraphobia.”
“You are directly on pun-t.”
“I try my best. I do have a P(un)hD in therapy.”
On The Commitments and a Stephen King short story
I used Alan Parker’s 1991 film The Commitments in a course a few years ago on film adaptation of literature; the film is based on a novel by Roddy Doyle. The film is hard to find now. It is made with an almost entirely amateur cast of actors to tell the story of a group of young working-class Dubliners who form a blues and soul band that almost achieves real commercial success.
The film is discussed in a 5/17/2021 article in The Irish Times that says the film “captures a Dublin that looks like a bomb site” and deals centrally with the issue of urban decay. It seemed interesting because it deals generally with the way people can come together to form semi-successful groups, then fall apart because ego and anger get in the way. It is also funny. I got to meet one of the supporting actors in it when I was a teacher. I also like Parker as a director; I think his film adaptation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall musical album was very good. It deals with similarly bleak urban environments, in that case fictionally caused by something like World War II.
In other news: “Trucks” was a King short story from the early 1970s about a truck-stop and diner where trucks suddenly come to life and start killing people. There have been two film adaptations of it. It was brought to mind because I have not really driven a car in a few years and live near a busy street where it can be quite dangerous to walk because the sidewalks are immediately next to the traffic, and when you cross the street, even with a walking signal indicating you have right-of-way, drivers sometimes don’t care. The vehicles have not come to life diabolically as in the story, but some of the drivers seem to be very angry or have other emotional/mental problems. King’s story was prophetic because he was actually seriously injured in 1999 when a minivan driver lost control and hit him while he was walking beside a road. There is a cost to machinery and technology.
On journaling and two poems
This was inspired by a recent article in The Wall Street Journal called “Why Keeping a Journal Matters: Readers Weigh In.” The article starts with the proposition that journaling makes life better for many, then asks for reader comments on the subject. One commenter talks about using computers to keep a journal and notes the most important thing is to “write as often as you can.”
From Wiki, on one of the most famous journals ever: “The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the diary kept by Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.”
I think women are smarter about keeping diaries and sharing personal information with friends than “strong, silent” men are. The late writer Christopher Hitchens, when asked about how he felt to be declared a great “public intellectual,” said something like “what is the point of being a private intellectual?” I liked Hitchens in some ways, but thought he was too acerbic and angry about religion.
As for the WSJ commentator talking about online journals, I do consider this blog series a kind of public diary. I may have embarrassed myself a few times but try to keep it to non-personal analysis of mainly art. I find it best to at least handwrite notes before filing a blog entry. It has been said hand-writing activates an extra part of your brain that other forms of communication do not: like a combination of painting and writing.
“Pun-possible” by yours truly
“This relationship has become pun-possible! What could you pun-ssibly want from me?”
“I only want pun therapeutic help, and you are a licensed pun-therapist.”
“Pun on, I am not omni-pun-tent. You must help pun-self.”
“Pun-t taken.”
“Recom-pun-se” by yours truly
“You will never have recom-pun-se for what happened.”
“You make good pun-se, quite logical.”
“Just pun-centrate: people are not going to pun-give you for what you have pun, and they will never fully pun-mit what they have pun.”
“Yes, what has been pun can not be un-pun.”
More on Niall Ferguson’s Doom
Ferguson’s new book notes early on that “of the big disasters in human history, the biggest have been pandemics and wars.”
Just some kind of free-associating comments. The quote brings to mind Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, about a disease that effectively shuts down the northern Algerian port city of Oran. Camus was born in Algeria, even though he lived most of his life in France. It was written just after World War II, and I think that along with Orwell’s 1984 it is one of the great fictional responses to that war.
I believe many plagues and even individual illnesses are psychological in origin or at least have contributing emotional factors. And my opinion is that some of the government response to Covid-19 was either psychological hysteria or just stupidity.
The idea of the Apocalypse, the end of the world, is powerful in human psychology. My university had an entire graduate-school course on literature of the Apocalypse that centered on The Bible‘s “Book of Revelations” but also took into account non-biblical literature dealing with the end of the world. Thanatos as Freud would say.
Yet more on Gatsby and a brief poem
This is a kind of “close reading” of a small part of Fitzgerald’s novel. From the text:
[Gatsby to Carraway, the narrator]: “Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear. I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West–all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.” He looked at me sideways–and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. [Carraway]: “What part of the Middle West?” [Gatsby]: “San Francisco.” [Carraway]: “I see.”
Three thoughts. Gatsby’s comments might be considered something like an Irish bull; the idea of San Francisco being in the U.S. Midwest is almost a comical absurdity. Secondly, Gatsby is probably the most famous literary example of autobiographical “creation myth.” Switching art forms, the film The Social Network (written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher) about Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook fame has also been described as a “creation myth” in that the writer and director had to imagine what drove Zuckerburg to his success. The plot of the movie begins with Zuckerburg being rejected by a young woman, and it seems to say he was jealous of other students in college who went to private, decadent parties. It seems to say that jealousy was a kind of energy that drove him to create Facebook. Finally, Sigmund Freud had a concept of “family romance,” meaning people often want to imagine their family is grander than it really is (hence fairy tales). Gatsby is an example of family romance.
“Pun-tius” by yours truly
“I am your imperial Roman leader, Pun-tius Pilate. Which of these two pun-minals do you want freed people: Pun-rabbas or J—– Pun-st?”
“We want Pun-rabbas! Give us Pun-rabbas!”
“Okay, I shall wash my puns of the issue. Have it your way. And will not have a guilty pun-science.”
“Pun-k you, dear leader!”
On Niall Ferguson’s new book Doom and three poems
Got the hardback version of the Ferguson book yesterday, which was mentioned in a previous blog. The book-flap begins with a boldface, large-font statement that “All disasters are at some level man-made.”
I suppose in some ways this is true because if humans don’t respect Mother Nature enough, they will suffer. M. Night Shyamalan had a movie in 2008 called The Happening that did not go down well with the public, but I thought was interesting. It was about nature taking revenge on humans.
On the back-cover in a squib, Francis Fukuyama, says Ferguson “catalogs the threats mankind has faced and the resourceful ways in which human societies have dealt with them.” Fukuyama had an interesting book in the early 1990s, really just a dissertation turned into a book about how he thought free-market capitalism had won out over any other socio-economic ideas. It was controversial at the time but seemed correct to me.
“Pun-employment” by yours truly
“Do you think long-term pun-employment has damaged your pun-chology and basic daily pun-cture?”
“Very pun-ssible.”
“Well, what do you now plan to do with your pun all day?”
“Just pun-t around. Pun-ever. But I try to give each day some pun-cture: three square meals, a bath, exercise.”
“Pun-oholic” by yours truly
“You are clearly pun-oholic. You should stop pun-mmediately and not pun-k ever again!”
“Okay, Dr. Pun, you win.”
“You seem angry, Mr. Pun-pelstilskin.”
“Not true. Not even once in pun million.”
“You may want to try meeting with Pun-ers Anonymous. It is located in PA, Pun-sburgh or Pun-adelphia.”
“Pun-xsutawney” by yours truly
Pun-xsutawney Phil. As you do, as you will.
Every day may quite be the same,
But you are still glad you came (repetition, no shame).
Break out of it into Spring.