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Sometimes this blog feels like a “diary of a madman.” There were short stories in Chinese and Russian by that name, right?

Thinking today of the literary critic John Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy.” Here is the initial Wikipedia description of it: “the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. ” Apparently, Ruskin, writing in the mid-19th century was reacting to Romantic poets of the early 19th century and possibly “sentimental” playwrights of the late 18th century. The basic dichotomy I used in one of my literature classes was realism versus romanticism.

I think most of us can feel this pathetic fallacy just by going for a  long walk. It seems like the sun, the air, the wind, and possibly a storm each contain human emotions in them. A song by 10,000 Maniacs comes to mind, “Like the Weather.” It starts with the lines: “Color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey./ Lift my head from the pillow and then fall again.” It’s on YouTube of course.

As Mark Twain put it, “God created man in His own image, and man, being a gentlemen, returned the favor.”

Update, the stories referred to in my first paragraph above were by Nikolai Gogol and Lu Xun. I have read (and even “taught” the one by Lu) but not the one by Gogol.

“The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For my part I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.” — W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing-Up

So says Maugham in his notes on a writing life in which he was a successful novelist, playwright, and shot-story teller. The quote came to mind after reading a column today by Matthew Hennessey of The Wall Street Journal titled “Jim Gaffigan, Donald Trump, and The Death of Laughter.” The analogy here would have Maugham’s “veterinary surgeon” correspond to stand-up comedian, writer, and actor Gaffigan, while Trump corresponds to “a prime minister.”

The WSJ column deals with Gaffigan’s recent twitter tirade, where the normally clean, avowedly religious, and familial comedian uses the F— word to show his disdain for Trump. I have heard Gaffigan credit his wife for his religious faith and read that he apologized to her for his recent language. Hennessey’s point seems to be that Gaffigan has made a category error by joining the angry fray about Trump because comedians provide a therapeutic outlet for people stressed by just such a fray. I recall the recently deceased great 20th-century comedian Don Rickles saying in an interview that he deliberately did not do political humor.

It is interesting that much of Gaffigan’s humor is self-deprecatory (eg. the title of his best-selling book Dad is Fat). I noted in a past blog that self-deprecatory humor is controversial because many of the comedians who were great at it, like Chris Farley and John Belushi, had tragic personal lives. To me, Trump’s humor is cruder, simpler, and often cruelly directed at other people. I suppose Maugham would say it is the humor of the “great man.”

Self-deprecatory humor reminds me of advice from one of my first bosses after college: “Never apologize.” I still wonder about the wisdom of this imperative.

 

Have done maybe too many movie reviews in this blog series to be taken seriously as an author, but I have one more. Last night I watched the new Netflix movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things based on a novel of the same name by Canadian Iain Reid.

The novel is less than five years old and by a writer who is younger than I am. I agree with more than one critic who has said that much of the dialogue (which there is a lot of) sounds like the dormitory-hall conversation of a possibly pretentious college. The plot of the movie version, penned by Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation fame (I saw but somehow didn’t like his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), was confusing to me and consciously absurd. I had to read some explanations online after my viewing to understand it, if I do now.

I won’t ruin the ending if you haven’t seen it, but there is a big reveal at the end (that you too may need help from critics to understand) that overturns much of what you have experienced earlier in the story. The theme of the movie fascinated me more maybe when I was a proverbial angry, young man. And it is a real theme in many people’s lives but not one I want to dwell on at this point. So I don’t think I will watch this movie again or read the novel.

Happy Labor Day weekend and thank you for whatever work you do.

The recent controversy over proposals in DC to rename or at least further contextualize (in regard to racism) monuments to political leaders led me to read a brief opinion piece by my recent “rabbi” Charles Krauthammer about Thomas Jefferson that is subtitled “The Sublime Oxymoron.” The Jefferson Memorial is one of the more surprising sites named in proposals the DC government made about renaming or contextualizing.

In this essay first published in 2000, Krauthammer says the complexity of Jefferson “begins, of course, with the central contradiction: prophet of freedom, owner of slaves” but also notes that the writer of the Declaration of Independence deplored in a journal entry that his signature document had a clause condemning African slavery removed at the insistence of Georgia and South Carolina. Jefferson was also conflicted in his writing on policy toward Native Americans, observing in a letter that “after the injuries we have done to them, they cannot love us.” Jefferson nonetheless took a realpolitik approach to Native American policy.

As an oxymoronical character, Jefferson “could not only hold two contradictory ideas in his head, he could also act on both,” Krauthammer claims. The ancient Greek rhetorical term oxymoron is important to my book’s analysis of Irish bulls; it is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, such as “a thunderous silence.”

My broad-brush opinion about revisiting memorials to historical figures with questionable records is that each person has to be considered as a complexity; all of us are. As Hamlet said of his deceased father, “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

Got good news today about an essay I wrote recently on dramatic realism and social policy. A magazine (they are still published, right? Those “ink-stained wretches.” Haha.) said it has accepted my pitch of about 400 words and is willing to consider the longer essay for publication.

All this self-promotion is new to me, and I can get over-excited or boastful when something good happens. But this magazine seems like a good one, not exactly a scholarly journal but still serious. I can post a link to it when (hopefully) it is published.

If for some reason, the magazine decides against publishing it, I will post the essay here. It has to do with the way art, especially drama, can affect real human behavior.

 

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” –William Butler Yeats

Thought of this statement when revisiting the British literary critic William Empson’s 1930 work Seven Types of Ambiguity. I had a better sense of Empson’s theories as a graduate student and frankly had to turn to Wikipedia now for a refresher.

Empson claims the first ambiguity is metaphor, which finds that things can be alike despite having different properties (I have heard metaphor described as using what you know to understand what you don’t know). The second is when two or more meanings can be resolved into one. The third is when two ideas can, through context, be represented in one word. The fourth is when two or more meanings don’t agree but combine to reflect the complicated mind of their author. The fifth is when the author discovers what is intended in the act of writing. The sixth (which seems Zen-like to me) is when a statement says nothing and leaves meaning to its readers (possibly in conflict with the author’s intent). The seventh is when two words, even within their context, are opposites and show a basic conflict in their author’s mind.

Two things come to mind. One is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” which seems like a statement about accepting ambiguity.

The second is that Empson’s ideas are an example of trans-Atlantic cultural cross-fertilization, a literary precursor of the “special relationship” between the U.K. and the U.S., because he was very influential on the New Criticism school of literary theory in the U.S. Again from Wikipedia, New Criticism was an approach to literature, especially poetry, that emphasized close reading of a literary work as a self-contained, aesthetic object. The movement’s title came from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics were also influenced by English formalist literary theorist I.A. Richards, and one of New Criticism’s best-known practitioners was T.S. Eliot, an American-born poet, playwright, and critic who migrated to England.

Watched a recent Australian horror movie last night called Relic. It was interesting and well-shot, but like many somewhat intellectual horror films you are left wondering about the meaning of what you just watched.

“Death can be beautiful,” one of my grad student colleagues said in his one-sentence analysis of E.A. Poe’s short-fiction obsession with women dying. I guess this film may be saying something similar. The horror may be the very real fact that many of us lose our minds before physically dying. And it raises the question what should be done with us before we do physically die. Interestingly, the film also introduces a much younger character who is mentally disabled. How should his life be treated by others who are more capable? Does life have intrinsic value? Yes.

I think Australians have been very innovative in art. I haven’t really read their novelists, though I tried to read a long novel called Seven Types of Ambiguity, the title of which was derived from a famous English literary theorist’s work. It was taken from work by the British critic William Empson from the early 20th century. I really only know Australian art from movies. To me their films are bracing but very honest. I think of Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Baz Lurhmann’s films.

Update: More thoughts on Australia. I haven’t been to the country but worked with some people there when I was a copy editor and met a few casually when travelling. Charles Krauthammer, the U.S. columnist I quoted a few blogs back, married an Australian and has an entirely unbiased (haha) opinion piece called “Why I Love Australia.”

Seriously, his point seems to be that Australians are blunt, bold, and loyal. “For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor,” Krauthammer says in this column initially published in 2006. Having supported the British empire when it was “principal underwriter of the international system,” Australia knows that if the U.S.–current primary underwriter in that regard–goes into “retreat or defeat,” it would severely damage Australia and many other countries, he says.

Hence, the land down under has been one of the few consistent allies for sometimes controversial U.S. foreign policy interventions.

This is a blog inspired by another blog I read today. If we were great writers (one can dream), critics would call this intertextuality. Full disclosure: the blog was by someone who was a year ahead of me in high school. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed smart and friendly and has published a new book called Everyday Resilience for Everyday Heroes. You can find it for pre-order on the web.

His blog today took issue with a contrarian opinion piece in The New York Times published earlier this month: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/health/resilience-overrated.html

In the NYT, the author argues, subversively to me, that resilience as a virtue can be manipulated by capitalist or authoritarian powers who want the proletariat to endure back-breaking work for the sake of elite classes. An excerpt from the piece: “What is resilience anyway but an unfair exchange of energy? But who has time to consider these matters when they’re working to exhaustion?”

I don’t agree with the approach the NYT columnist takes to the notion of resilience, and she acknowledges confusion about what the word means. She seems to ascribe to it some nefarious intention on the part of the “system.” For me, it has to do with accepting, adapting to, and hopefully overcoming an environment that is beyond your–or really anyone’s–control. To me, this is a problem with contemporary liberal politics: it seems to attribute to authorities more power, for good and for ill, than they really have.

In literature, I think Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” is a good reflection on resilience in the face of a universal, inexplicable situation, rather than one necessarily imposed or even really influenced by human authorities. As punishment by the gods for trying to defeat death, Sisyphus of ancient Greek mythology is condemned in his own afterlife to continually rolling a large stone up a mountain, a stone that only plummets back to the bottom of the incline each time he scales it. Camus ends his essay with the exhortation, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Another disclosure: Camus’ essay is considered an important source for Absurdist literature, which makes up a substantial part of the book this site is promoting. Some Absurdist writers have been accused of “reductive pessimism in a world that demands political action”(sorry, don’t remember the source of this quote). And I think there may be a tension here between those seeking agitprop from art and those looking for something else.

 

Read an interesting short essay by Charles Krauthammer today. It’s from The Point of It All, a collection of columns he wrote for the media that was published shortly after his death in 2018 and edited with an introduction by his son. As politically conservative columnists go, I prefer Krauthammer to George Will; the former seems less florid and more matter of fact.

The essay, “The Twilight of Psychotherapy,” was first published in 1985. Before becoming a political columnist and pundit, Krauthammer had been a practicing psychiatrist. My blog yesterday mentioned Freud, who has fallen somewhat out of fashion in many circles but remains a touchstone in others. The basic point of this essay, prompted by a conference on the evolution of psychotherapy, is that the field was at risk of obsolescence academically and professionally. He notes the conference included representatives of schools including Freudian therapy, behavior therapy, existential therapy, and even one thinker who believes mental illness is a myth (that it really amounts to lying). One pithy line in the essay is that “if psychotherapy is really an art, it should be supported by the National Endowment [for the Arts], not by Blue Cross [i.e., medical insurance].”

From my worm’s-eye-view of psychiatry, practitioners now seem to favor cognitive behavioral therapy over traditional Freudian therapy. In a nutshell, CBT (not to be confused with CBD, haha) emphasizes present mental and behavioral problems over past traumas or disturbances. I think the controversy over repressed memory theory since the 1980s and the simple logistical difficulties for psychiatrists to prove what may have happened in the past makes CBT more popular.

The sense that a scientific–or at least academic–discipline is diluting into a mélange of sometimes mutually exclusive opinions can also seem true of literary analysis (the subject of the book this site promotes). My book quotes the French literary critic Jacques Derrida that “Babelization does not…wait for the multiplicity of languages.” I’m thinking of some graduate-study research I did on Henry James’ famous ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” One critic said the ambiguity of the tale and the proliferation of theories about what is really happening in it call into question the entire enterprise of literary analysis as an academic discipline. And I have read that some smaller universities are doing away with English literature departments, apparently because they seem impractical or maybe too politically charged.

It is interesting that English literature and psychoanalysis came into existence as formal academic disciplines at about the same time, about the turn of the 20th century. When I was teaching college literature, I conceded to students that English teachers have a bit of an inferiority complex within universities because our field is relatively immature.

 

 

 

Had a pretty easy day today. Slept well last night and just did easy errands. The inland people seem to be at the beach today for a weekend stay. Lots of jet-skis, boats, and some parasailing for the really adventurous. A few of the boats were flying flags that had pro-Trump messages followed by slogans like “no more B.S.” Well.

I haven’t done much intellectually today. Computer problems and laziness. I read a very positive review of the movie I mentioned here in a previous blog called She Dies Tomorrow. The movie review made a point of the fact that the main character had been an alcoholic and drinks excessively in the movie when death seems near. I recall that Freud thought terminal alcoholics are really homosexuals. It may have been one of several things he was wrong about.

Sometimes simpler movies and tales are better. I plan to watch a recent one tonight starring Tom Berenger. He seems to play the part of a somewhat haggard, action star well. I thought he was good in Platoon and a few film noir and action films.

Update: Decent movie called Blood and Money. Sometimes nice scenery and a basic, somewhat violent plot are enough for me. Stephen King has certainly done well off of Maine’s backdrop, and this movie does okay too. Haven’t actually been to Maine, an “undiscovered country.”