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Thoughts about literary history and literary landmarks. I have been spending some time in Asheville, NC, for life-planning more than vacation. The city has a history for attracting writers. Thomas Wolfe wrote famously and fulsomely about growing up in rural NC. I haven’t really read him. I saw the biopic of him a few years back. Apparently Maxwell Perkins ensured he wasn’t as verbose as he wanted to be.

The Black Mountain poets who frequented Black Mountain College from the mid-30s to mid-50s were considered very influential on American art, but the college and their influence seemed to have flamed out. O’Henry spent time in Asheville but famously said it wasn’t good for his writing because the air was too clean and the scenery too pretty. Haha. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent two summers at a famous Asheville hotel, the Grove Park Inn (still exists), while his doomed wife Zelda was getting medical treatment nearby. But he only seemed to write his memoir of alcoholism and derangement, The Crack-Up, while there. It may have been a case of being too honest, if that is possible. In it, he made the famous 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.”

Charles Frazier, who wrote the well-received Civil War novel Cold Mountain, hails from Asheville and set much of that book in this area. I saw the movie but haven’t read the book. It seems to be a variation on The Odyssey, about a warrior trying to get back to his wife in an idealized home country.

And of course, Asheville has the Biltmore Estate, one of the most famous mansions in the US. It has been a dramatic backdrop for several Hollywood movies. I think it is okay for very wealthy people like the Vanderbilts to build extravagant and beautiful things. People need grand things to strive towards, even if they are beyond most of our reaches.

I am staying in a motel called The Beaucatcher, and true to the name, I haven’t caught any belles here. Haha. Sorry, it’s a bad joke. I won’t even try with my joke about the local river that is called French Broad.

I had a nice evening eating and reading on the outdoor balcony of my motel room on the second floor. I left the screen door open and a guy has come out from one of the neighboring rooms, talking crude business language on the phone like someone out of a David Mamet play. He seems to have calmed down and is just talking with a family member now.

I’m trying not to use this blog to talk about politics much. My wheelhouse, if I have one, is art and my own idiosyncratic life experiences. But I have been on a non-leisure trip so far this week, and when travelling is one of the few times I listen to a lot of cable news because, at least until now, I listen to it as background in my hotel rooms.

Somewhat self-righteously, literature majors say they prefer the type of news that “stays news.” James Joyce has a famous “episode” in his sprawling fictional work Ulysses where he compares the news business to a bag of winds that repeats cliched phrases and rhetorical tricks. Joyce may have been biased because he gave up the possibilities of both the priesthood and journalistic writing.

Back when I watched much cable news, I thought MSNBC was leftish-biased but interesting, CNN was more neutral but weirdly repetitive in its news judgment (as if it was just creating content loops for airport-lounge and hotel-lounge TVs), and Fox was of course conservative but at least intellectually honest. I think the basic problem with all three of them was Ted Koppel’s kind-of-damning comment in an interview with Bill O’Reilly: “you’ve taken a business [ie., the news industry] that was objective and boring and made it subjective and interesting.”

I’m going to be 50 next week and think I have reached a “grumpy old man” phase where I no longer want to give radical liberals my attention. I think Winston Churchill said something like, “if you’re young and totally conservative, you don’t have a heart; if you’re old and totally liberal, you don’t have a brain.” The programming, opinions, and agendas promoted on CNN yesterday made me think that even as a platform for opinions, the network just isn’t being honest.

I am hardly a political expert, but if the Democrats promote the concerted destruction of fossil energy industries (and associated jobs and tax revenue), argue that non-legal immigrants who commit additional crimes should be given another chance in the US, take the side of sometimes violent protesters over police authorities, and propose–or even really entertain–the idea of multi-trillion-dollar reparations for events of more than 150 years ago (I know it’s more complicated than that but not as complicated as some who are given disproportionate airtime on CNN are saying), I think that they are going to lose again in 2020. And the idea that Trump, for all of his flaws, is responsible for the latest coronavirus or George Floyd’s tragic death won’t make sense to most people who are honest. Biden seems like a decent person (but not terribly smart and not as sensitive as he thinks he is). He isn’t the Democrats’ problem. It’s their ideas. Harris seems okay to me too. Anyone who gets as far as she has, has a few issues in their past. Whatever.

I have been trying for most of the 21st century to get out of politics and the business world in favor of art and education and am still trying. But as one of my very liberal friends says, being apolitical is dangerous.

Thinking about travel. Today I’m taking my first flight in some time. Of course, wearing a mask for almost the entire journey is a pain in the neck, but the virus lockdown seems to have made it cheaper to fly and find a hotel room. Generally, I like travel. I moved around quite a bit when younger and think it was a good learning experience. At the time, a relative teased me that visiting many different places seemed glamorous but that I must be aware it also seemed somewhat homosexual. 

For many people, travelling is a way to use physical momentum and change of environment to counter forces of inertia and entropy that can take hold when bound to one place for a very long time. We tend to think of structure and domestic stability as positive things, but habit can also be deadening. The self-quarantining authorities are recommending during the current coronavirus has made many stir crazy. And a lockdown mentality might especially chafe for some, bringing to mind Hamlet’s contemptuous recommendation that Polonius have “the doors…shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.”

One of my literature professors pointed out in a book on post-modernism and post-colonialism that international cultures only really began to interact with each other on a large scale from about 1500 onward. In literature, I think of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy about the eighteenth-century tradition of British vacationing on the European continent, what is known as the Grand Tour, and Graham Greene’s internationally themed novels and travel journalism. In movies, the series of The Trip films with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon demonstrate how travel can be a humorous palliative for middle age. And the James Bond novels and films serve as vicarious world tourism for many.

I think the lure of travel depends on your personality and life circumstances. I had a buddy who asked why he should travel when he can more easily read of distant places and watch documentaries about them. Some are driven on long journeys by “push” as well as “pull,” getting away from awkwardness at home or weariness with the status quo.  Others may shy away from it out of concern they lack the sophistication or sensitivity to interact well with foreign cultures. Americans, with our sense of exceptionalism and rugged independence, may be especially shy of globe-trotting, and we are also working against the Ugly American stereotype and resentment of our foreign policies and influence. An old British Airways advertising slogan tried to mollify such concerns about culture clash: “there’s more that brings us together.”

Just read The Washington Post review of Jill Filipovic’s new book, OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind (325 pp., $17).  I am biased because I am a member of Generation X, which hardly seems to be mentioned at all in the discourse Filipovic wants to have. The idea of being neglected–or at least having fewer opportunities than a previous generation–was earlier the calling card of Gen X. Millennials seem to have appropriated the theme and are just being more obnoxious about it.

As far as having less security–whether through social safety net programs or “jobs for life”–than earlier generations seemed to have had, well, Gen Xers were hearing that in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a reason the 401(k) and mutual fund industries took off in the late 20th century: people were worried Social Security wouldn’t be there for them when they retired. And it remains a question how the federal government will fulfill its promises to retirees in an era of exploding debt.

As for climate change and health care as issues, I am again somewhat biased. Climate change is undeniable. What is debatable is how much time, effort, and money the government should expend trying to control it. “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” Haha. To me it’s another case where the cures can be worse than the disease, if government regulations aimed at cleaner air and water end up choking business operations and curtailing employment.  Clean air and water won’t do us much good if achieving them leads to mass unemployment, despair, drug addiction, and domestic abuse. Human existence is always going to have some impact on the environment. Yes, we should regulate businesses, but it is unrealistic to think we will leave absolutely no “footprint.” Sometimes radical environmentalists seem to be almost anti-human, as if they want other life forms or rocks to take over.

Health care is an area where there could be more reform, but I am something of a libertarian on this issue: I think a lot of health comes down to individuals making smart choices about their lifestyles.

I think diminishment of social safety nets was something Gen Xers accepted more sanguinely, taking into account that most of these programs had only really been around since FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. The Reagan revolution seemed partly about paring back possibly unrealistic expectations that FDR and LBJ had raised. Millennials seem to think it an enormous betrayal that all the goals these two 20th century leaders set have not been achieved. Some older people see it more as a return to normalcy.

As for the breakdown of nuclear families, the issue is complex. I think women’s liberation has led more women to put off marriage and pursue careers or personal fulfillment. Secularization probably also has some role, as conventional religious expectations for starting families become less influential. These things aren’t really the fault of Baby Boomers, per se. I don’t mean to get off onto a diatribe about abortion, but it seems to me any analysis of looser familial structures since the mid-20th century has to take into account Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the increase in contraception.

A professor once warned me about mentioning books I haven’t read, and I haven’t read Filipovic’s book yet. May do so. Even though I haven’t read her whole book, I can opine on the topics she raises.

For only about $3 more, you can read another book promoted by this site (and it has lots of photographs).  Haha.

Two-sentence movie review: Just watched the psycho-horror movie 1BR and am looking for a new one-bedroom apartment myself, so it was timely. If you have a strong stomach and don’t mind another “be careful what you wish for” moral, it’s pretty good.

 

 

 

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. ”  –Shakespeare, Macbeth
 
Well, at some point the tomorrows do stop creeping for us as individuals. Mortality interests me but doesn’t particularly depress me. I have a very personal sense of the afterlife: nonexistence is impossible for me to imagine. Just trying to imagine it seems to preclude it: I’m not really imagining death; I’m someone who is imagining something (It’s like trying not to think of pink elephants: the very attempt to not think of them makes you think of them). I told this to a religion teacher when I was young (I actually got the idea from my brother and agreed with it), and the teacher replied that it shows I have a strong sense of self. So, I guess my rationale for immortality is that my ego is too big to accept death as a finality. Put that in your theological proof and smoke it. Haha.
 
I suppose Ambrose Bierce tried to disabuse people like me of our tenacious sense of continuing life with his famous 1890 short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a tale whose basic narrative device was emulated by many fiction writers after him. What happens at the point of death, and how exactly does life stop? The simplest syllogism and the one often used to introduce students to this logical technique may also be the hardest one for some of us to accept: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
 
(Have you heard Steve Martin’s joke about Socrates? Sentenced to execution by the people of Athens, Socrates is presented with a chalice filled with a deadly hemlock solution. He takes a hearty quaff and is asked by witnesses, “Socrates, now that you have drunk the hemlock, do you have any final words of wisdom for us?” He replies, “hemlock?! No one told me this was hemlock!”)
 
Death was on my mind last night because I watched this new trippy movie called “She Dies Tomorrow” about a young woman who suddenly has a sense of her own imminent death and seems to infect other people with it. Sounds like a real Debbie Downer, a Typhoid Mary, or a Coronavirus Cathy. I think this woman would be a cue for me to go back to the drawing board and/or the dating website.  Sorry. I don’t think I’m misogynistic. Just like to tell jokes, and there is sometimes collateral damage.
 
Seriously though, this new movie is pretty good if you like slow-burn, meditative, and psychological fare. It reminded me a bit of the psychological horror film from a few years back called “It Follows” in that both movies deal with the subtle ways that we can negatively affect the people we interact with socially. Horror is often allegorical. I can’t help thinking of the public reaction to the current virus problem as being in some way allegorical. Is it really a respiratory infection that is causing all the alarm or is it something less physical?
 
The new movie quotes Albert Camus that “man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” Maybe we think too much, especially when much of our thought is elaborate lying.

“Alone together. So much shared.” –Becket, Ohio Impromptu

Thinking about what to write about formally next. Now might be a good time to turn to fiction, as I am no longer part of a research university and don’t have the scholarly resources that a big school might provide as material with which to write non-fiction.

Martin McDonagh, a contemporary playwright/screenwriter, had a funny remark to the effect that people say, “write what you know,” because they are “too f—ing stupid” to imagine anything. That may sum me up for the moment. It takes a leap of ego/faith/creativity to use your own life experience as material for fiction, but it is the readiest material at hand. Part of you wonders who would care. Part of you doesn’t want to divulge personal information. I think all fiction writers use their lives as material, but the great ones have a rich and carefully organized imagination too.

I am thinking of turning to Samuel Beckett again as source material. I know Beckett can be a rabbit hole because he is so ambiguous, so much has been written about him, and people like me who claim to know him often don’t know what they are talking about.

But this virus lockdown seems to be making people turn inward. I think one of the reasons Beckett repels some people is that he deals with issues like solitude, solipsism, and the desire for suicide. But if even our authorities are telling us to stay at home and avoid socializing, isn’t this a “new normal”? We are supposed to sit at home, watch screens or read books. and avoid human interaction. Dr. Anthony Fauci recently advised that people stop shaking hands forever; what are we coming to? What Beckett saw of the 20th century seemed to have made him a pessimist and something of a solipsist, as negative as that last word is in our society. Was his attitude warranted and prescient?

One critic said what Beckett was proposing wasn’t so much anti-social behavior as asceticism. It seems an austere path anyway. One of the most important intellectual influences on Beckett was the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, known as a proponent of asceticism, self-denial, and pessimism. Another important influence was the Beglian thinker Arnold Geulincx, whose saying “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil veles” or “where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing” was used as a centerpiece of Beckett’s early novel Murphy. Solitude was an important subject for Beckett from a young age. In one of his earliest manifestos, he claimed art is not expansive but rather a significant contraction, “the apotheosis of solitude.”

I suppose the problem people have with solipsism is that, if it isn’t combined with rigorous personal rectitude and ethics, it can lead to monstrous behavior. Schopenhauer was an atheist. If you don’t believe in God and think your own existence is the only thing that can be proved (not saying Schopenhauer thought the latter), what is stopping you from total self-indulgence? I don’t think Beckett was an atheist with a capital “a.” He seemed more like a radical skeptic and a pessimist. This may be a hair-splitting distinction.

What really matters in life? Sorry to be vague, but I am having trouble thinking of something specific to blog about today. We are primed from an early age to emulate successful adults we see around us in real life, or in movies, or on TV, or on the stage, or in books. A good job, a spouse, a family, a home, a car, vacations, and a plump 401(k).

But for some these objectives, as laudable and fulfilling as they can be,  are not the be-all-and-end-all, as they say. People have animal desires, yes, but most also want to be good, to make the world a better place. This is complicated. One of the perplexities of life is that it is impossible to really, fully know the repercussions of your actions. Did something you did that seemed a minor slight or even a neutral act to you scar someone else for life? Did something that seemed like simple decency change the world for the better in ways you could never know? How much can be attributed to “the fog of war” and how much is a matter of personal responsibility? I think this is why some moralists say principles are more important that ethical judgments that are based solely on consequence–because all the consequences of our actions are beyond human understanding.

The novel Middlemarch ends with the observation that its heroine Dorothea had a checkered reputation in her home town for marrying an older man and then, following his death, marrying his much younger cousin. But it finds that she was more and better than what her society–what the author, George Eliot, calls “an imperfect social state”–thought of her. The final sentences are: “her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

British Romantic poet John Keats died at 25, some think partly as a result of the stress caused by negative reviews of his work. His gravestone, written partly by his friends, reads: “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821. ” Of course, Keats, despite his premature death, had an enormous influence on literature from Emily Dickinson to F. Scott Fitzgerald and on. Dickinson was hardly published at all during her lifetime, and Fitzgerald, who titled his novel Tender is the Night after a line from Keats’ poetry, went to the grave  prematurely (ravaged by alcoholism) thinking his work was forgotten and irrelevant.

Thinking of an indie pop group I really liked a decade or so back. It is the Glaswegian group Belle and Sebastian. I don’t follow them lately, but for a while I was buying almost all their CDs and saw them live in concert. They are a big ensemble group whose lead vocalist and songwriter, Stuart Murdoch, is kind of like Morrisey in that both are fey, literate, and somewhat self-pitying. But Murdoch doesn’t seem as self-obsessed or flamboyant as Morrisey.

Murdoch was asked if the sensitivity and ambiguity of his lyrics indicate he is homosexual. He replied with something like, “I’m straight to the point of boring myself.” Me too. The lyrics are usually sad or ironic, but the music is often up-tempo, so there’s an interesting balance. Murdoch said he got into writing because he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome as an adolescent and had little to do for several years but sit around the house and read. When he recovered, he started this band.

Here are the lyrics to two of their songs that I like. You can find their videos/music on Youtube.

“We Are the Sleepyheads”

Tired like the beggar with the cold inside his bones
Looking for the pleasure that he knew was so far gone
So far gone

I took a turn to myself
And I was surprised, cause I saw everyone who ever I had loved
I felt a whole lot better after that

People look at us and they think were doing fine
People look at us cause they see us all the time
All the time
But they never take to us
We’ve been in this town so long we may as well be dead
So long as people turn their heads
And cross the street whenever we walk on by

Someone told the truth when it really mattered most
The beauty of the moment is the beauty sadly lost
Sadly lost
So I went around to your house
Over tea and gin we talked about the things we read
In Luke and John the things he said
And now it’s morning we are the sleepyheads

“Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”

Ooh! Get me away from here I’m dying
Play me a song to set me free
Nobody writes them like they used to
So it may as well be me
Here on my own now after hours
Here on my own now on a bus
Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us
With our winning smiles, and us
With our catchy tunes, and us
Now we’re photogenic
You know, we don’t stand a chance
Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story
About a boy who’s just like me
Thought there was love in everything and everyone
You’re so naive!
After a while they always get it
They always reach a sorry end
Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then
With a winning smile, the boy
With naivety succeeds
At the final moment, I cried
I always cry at endings

Oh, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all
From where I’m sitting, rain
Washing against the lonely tenement
Has set my mind to wander
Into the windows of my lovers
They never know unless I write
“This is no declaration, I just thought I’d let you know goodbye”
Said the hero in the story
“It is mightier than swords
I could kill you sure
But I could only make you cry with these words”

Oh, get me away, I’m dying…

The group is very prolific and have other good songs including “Funny Little Frog,” “Dress Up In You,” “The Blues are Still Blue,” “The Model,” and “Mornington Crescent.”

Update: I finished an essay on realist drama and social trends and have submitted a proposal for it to magazine dealing with culture and society. It’s not exactly a scholarly essay, but I did do some in-depth reading of primary sources and contextual research. I’ll hear back from the publication in the next few weeks. Now I need to revise a travel piece I wrote a while back. An editor told me it has some interesting elements but was too much like tourist promotion and should be more personal and related to broader concerns about the environment. We used to have a joke when I worked in a press room: It was a cartoon image of a grumpy, cigar-chomping editor yelling, “Get me rewrite!” Indeed.

Watched Archive last night. It’s another sci-fi mind-bender about a man obsessed with re-creating his lost wife. It reminded me of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Hamlet trying to avenge his father, Dr. Frankenstein trying to reinvent life, Captain Ahab searching for the white whale, Higgins and Pickering trying to reform Eliza, and Gatsby trying to reclaim Daisy. The vanity of human wishes.

The idea isn’t new. It’s about obsessive male psychology. But male psychology has a lot to do with technological advance for better and for worse. I recall a newspaper story a while back called it something like “the low-slung engine of progress” at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, and we all live with what became of that.

British Romantic poet Percy Byshhe Shelley, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of the Gothic classic Frankenstein, or The  Modern Prometheus (1818), penned this sonnet, “Ozymandias” (1818), about the elusive edifices of male authority.  It has a powerful volta, at the end of the eighth line, as typical of a Petrarchan or Spenserian sonnet:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

But back to the movie. It has a twist at the ending that I liked. It makes you think twice about what a man’s legacy really is.  But the main part of the movie has to do with recreating a kernel of lived life and what the French literary theorist Jean Baudrillard called “simulacra and simulation.” Again, it’s not a new idea. Art is about simulating life. Maybe that’s why some consider it immoral.

The issue has become more pronounced in this electronic and wired age, and French literary theorists like Baudrillard saw it coming in the late 20th century. I guess the basic idea is that simulacra does not have any real correspondence to life, while simulation does. It seems like a fine distinction that I don’t entirely understand. Doesn’t any image or idea need some correspondence to life? Otherwise, it just seems like non-sense. But this is something I need to study further.

Some say this movie was a knock-off of the recent film Ex Machina, but I liked this one more.

Watched Roland Emmerich’s new version of Midway last night. Thought it was pretty good. It is quite impressive what can be done with computer graphics to depict very lifelike battle scenes. The storytelling was solid, and, as far as I could tell, it hewed closely to history.

Most impressive were the courage and steel nerves it must take to be a fighter pilot. Just watching the film’s recreation of the pilots’ experience almost gave me vertigo. For some, flying and battle must reach a sort of balance among adrenalin, mortal fear, and an almost meditative calm.

In analyzing a famous poem by W.B. Yeats about a World War I fighter pilot, one critic described this sort of balancing with the Italian word sprezzatura, which Webster defines as “a studied nonchalance : graceful conduct or performance without apparent effort.” (In his memoirs, Christopher Hitchens described a similar quality in the students at his alma mater Balliol College, Oxford, what he termed their “effortless perfection.” Hitchens was snobby; I think of my pedigree as more one of “labored mediocrity.” Ha.)

The poem in question was Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” which was published in 1919 and believed to have been inspired by the death of Lady Gregory’s only son, Robert, in the service of England during WWI. Of course Lady Gregory and Yeats famously collaborated on the founding and management of the Abbey Theatre, which remains Ireland’s national theatre. At the time of Robert’s death and the poem’s publication, Ireland was still struggling to throw off England’s colonial suzerainty. Here is the poem:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

The “lonely impulse of delight” and “balance” Yeats’ airman speaks of in his monologue come through in the ethos of fighter pilots in Emmerich’s film. Aviation technology had improved considerably between WWI and WWII, but the primal fear and the sublime rush of hurtling through the air amid enemy fire remained.