E.C. Walsh Blogsphere

Thinking about generational differences today, the way they can be a strong indicator of society’s direction but can also be overdone because of older people’s nostalgia and the “grouchy old man effect.”

When I was teaching composition, I had my students one year listen to excerpts from John Updike’s 2006 speech to the Book Expo America convention on “The End of Authorship,” where he decried the effect of digital communication on literature and learning. The speech (available in full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25updike.html?ex=1153627200&en=6093995dc0ebc1e3&ei=5070 ) ends this way: “The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.” As an end-of-semester, in-class writing assignment, I proposed as one option that my students identify something in their lifetimes that they sensed was similarly in danger of being lost or degraded and proposing what could be done to avoid this. I called it my “grouchy old man prompt.”

This came to mind today because I have been reading bits of Brett Easton Ellis’ recent memoir/essay collection White. Ellis identifies as a member of Generation X and berates the Millennials who followed his generation as “snowflakes” and “Generation Wuss,” arguing that they are hypersensitive to the point of trying to muzzle anyone whom they might simply disagree with or find distasteful. Ellis should know a thing or two about being ostracized after being accused of misogyny and torture porn for his graphically disturbing novel American Psycho.

He has a point. Generation X, which I am part of, was a term popularized by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. To me it describes the way that people born between the early 60s and the early 1980s had diminished expectations in life compared with the Baby Boomers who preceded them, as well as a more wry and ironic world view. By contrast, Millennials stereotypically are more socially sensitive, literal-minded, and expectant of more from life generally than Gen Xers (my own view is much of this shift has to do with rapid technological advances like the Internet). Ellis argues the generational difference can be as simple as increased pain sensitivity and avoidance: “Pain can be useful because it can motivate you, and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art.”

But we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of nostalgic distortion of both past and present. I’m not a Woody Allen fanatic, but I thought he made an interesting point in the film Midnight in Paris that people often tend to think of bygone eras as “golden ages,” when they should concentrate on making the best of their present lives. A newspaper columnist once wrote that the problem with stereotypes like golden ages isn’t that they are untrue but that they aren’t very deep.

I also don’t really like Ellis talking about his personal life as much as he does in this book, but it is partially a memoir. And I have been guilty of over-personalizing occasionally in some of my blogs. It is material, what many writers crave.

Had trouble finding a topic for today. Have been an English grad student, and you know how it is with us: when in doubt, Shakespeare.

Thinking of two very different monologues by Richard II and Richard III, two very different English kings. Both are trapped and facing loss of their throne and death, but they respond in starkly varied ways in these excerpts. Richard II is melancholic and contemplative, waxing poetical and philosophical while imprisoned and about to be killed (like Boethius,  John Bunyan, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote some of their best known works from prison). By contrast, Richard III, the homicidal Machiavellian, goes insane as he faces defeat and death in battle.

Richard II: I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world;
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix’d
With scruples, and do set the word itself against the word,…

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again, and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eas’d
With being nothing. (Act V, scene 5)

For his part, Richard III utters a monologue prior to his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field that suggests he is haunted by all the murders he has caused in his scheming for power and revenge. His mind appears to go through a psychotic split when faced with imminent demise, becoming what one critic described as “a shivered [or fragmented] mirror”:

Richard III: 

• Have mercy, Jesu!—Soft! I did but dream.
  O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
  The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
  Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
  What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by:
  Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
  Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
  Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
  Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
  Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
  That I myself have done unto myself?
  O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
  For hateful deeds committed by myself!
  I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
  Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
  My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
  And every tongue brings in a several tale,
  And every tale condemns me for a villain.
  Perjury, perjury, in the high’st degree
  Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree;
  All several sins, all used in each degree,
  Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty!
  I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
  And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
  Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
  Find in myself no pity to myself?
  Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
  Came to my tent; and every one did threat
  To-morrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard. (Act V, scene 3)

Even a character as ruthless as Richard III cannot escape his own conscience in the end, and it drives him mad. Richard II similarly feels his mind split into competing voices but is more resigned to his fate.

It is Sunday, so thoughts turn to religion or spirituality… or maybe just lazing and reading the newspaper.

I heard a pretty good religious joke recently. A married couple die peacefully at about the same time after long lives of loyalty, faith, devotion, and good deeds. They ascend to heaven but are stopped at the front gates and seated at computer terminals that are live-streaming the joy and fulfillment of the afterlife. The husband is confused. He turns to an attendant, and asks, “why aren’t we in heaven?” The attendant replies, “you were only watching Mass streamed onto your television during the coronavirus, so you only get to see a streamed version of heaven in the afterlife.”

More seriously, Psalm 23 is rightly among the most famous of the Bible’s passages (I think because it addresses anxiety so directly):

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his names sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;

for you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life;

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

Have a good week.

Update: Another afterlife joke, which is included in my book and courtesy of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame:

CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?                                                                 HAMM: Mine was always that.

“All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.”

–Henry W. Longfellow, “Haunted Houses”

Recently deceased alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, homes are on the market for a total of $110 million, about a sixth of the estimated value of the estate the hobnobbing financier left behind after an apparent prison suicide while he was awaiting trial.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epsteins-new-york-palm-beach-homes-to-list-for-110-million-11595509221?mod=hp_major_pos3#cxrecs_s

A real estate agent is quoted in the above article saying Epstein’s notoriety shouldn’t deter buyers because it’s not as though the houses committed any crimes. I don’t know. If I were a buyer, I would want the homes thoroughly fumigated, with the cleaning costs subtracted from the purchase price. Maybe exorcisms for any genii locorum (locational ghosts) would also be in order. If you want a pretty good film meditation on a genius loci, Brad Anderson’s Session 9 is worth a watch.

Don’t usually post two blogs in one day, but I was inspired to write again this afternoon and don’t want to lose the moment. I have rediscovered the joys of everything-for-one-dollar stores today. In this case it was the local “Dollar Tree,” where I stocked up on $10 and tax worth of food and household items. Here are my lyrics:

“The one-dollar store, the one dollar store,  / They have prices you can’t     ignore / Way on down at the one-dollar store. / Don’t feel bad, if you’re poor. / Just get on down to the one-dollar store. / They won’t give you a tally you’ll abhor. / Slide on over to the one-dollar store. / Can’t afford  Whole Foods? / Don’t be sore. / You’ll find deals at the one-dollar store.”

It could go on, but you get the idea. The only problem I find with “Dollar Tree” is that the prices tempt you to buy things you don’t need. A compass and protractor set with pencil included? $1. A Disney “Frozen” coloring book? Merely $1. A headband? Yup, $1. If Kristen Wiig’s Target Lady from the SNL skits ever lost her job, she’d fit right in at “Dollar Tree.”

In an increasingly secular world, “Step forward Gaia: a god that even militant atheists can respect, if not revere. Unlike the God of the Bible, Gaia is one of those lustful, irritable and contrary gods that populate Greek mythology… Today, however, the granny god is back with a vengeance, largely thanks to the scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, whose Gaia hypothesis describes how all living organisms form part of an interconnected, self-regulating ecosystem.”

So wrote The Irish Times columnist Joe Humphreys recently in response to myth-based ways of understanding the damage from Covid-19. Humphreys compares Gaia to the universal presence or “world soul” that Plato saw behind human events and their environment. In an interview with a Trinity College Dublin Classics professor, he relates the idea that devastating events like coronaviruses may be a way for Gaia, or nature, to regulate globalization, industry, and commerce.  The TCD professor, John Dillon, remarks, “let’s face it, there are now far too many of us, if we want to live at the high-octane level that we do want to live at, and at which the pullulating masses of Asia and Africa are anxious to join us.” You can read the full interview at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/god-make-way-for-gaia-a-deity-even-atheists-can-believe-in-1.4265949 (The newspaper may have put it behind a fire wall. It costs $1 for a one-month trial subscription and you can cancel at any time).

I think the Gaia hypothesis can support a restrained environmental policy: there is only so much human regulation can do to protect the environment, as it is ever-changing under Gaia’s watch. It’s like the old debate between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, conservation versus preservation. As I understand it, Pinchot took the conservationist approach, smart and careful development of the resources nature has provided, while Muir took the preservationist tack with the aim of preserving supposedly pristine landscapes.

When I was an oil reporter, I covered the heated, 40-year-plus dispute over oil and gas development in a small fraction of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The debate over whether to allow drilling in a 2,000-acre section of the 19.3 million-acre refuge has become a symbol of the conservation-vs.-preservation struggle.  The Trump administration is going ahead with leasing drilling rights there, but the fact that the U.S. recently achieved self-sufficiency in oil thanks to lower-48 states developments may have taken some steam out of plans to drill on Alaska’s North Slope.

A few years back, The Washington Post ran a controversial opinion piece by a George Washington University biology professor that plays into the idea Gaia may be a reason to take a lighter approach to environmental policy: “Even if we live as sustainably as we can, many creatures will die off, and alien species will disrupt formerly ‘pristine’ native ecosystems…. Earth’s long-term recovery is guaranteed by history (though the process will be slow). Invasion and extinction are the regenerative and rejuvenating mechanisms of evolution, the engines of biodiversity.”  Full article:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-species-extinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658-cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.06e250e40062&fbclid=IwAR0I8AQV2mKHgKUNculC03QWb8OWzuLrGsgU1KQV3QjltZ7DBFC4z_WFIZE

In literature, it seems like some of the Romantic poets like Wordsworth adored the environment too much and needed reminding by Tennyson that nature can be “red in tooth and claw.” The literary critic Camille Paglia has made a similar observation about nature. The horror genre often turns on the notion that the environment can be hostile to human life. M. Night Shyamalan’s misfire of a movie The Happening deals with the environment taking revenge on humanity.

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world , except take up exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”  So says Lord Henry/Harry, the primary dandy character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The tragedy of the novel is partly the result of the title character Dorian taking Harry’s cool sarcasm and irony as literal advice.

My topic today is physical exercise, which was mentioned a few weeks back in another blog here (5/13/2020 blog). It is very important in my own life. I can have too much energy sitting still and need to release it by moving about. My body type is either ectomorphic or mesomorphic; I lose weight and get sickly thin in periods of despond or sloth, as my appetite declines without a certain amount of physical exertion each day. A sound mind in a sound body. But people are different this way. My Dad doesn’t get formal physical exercise but is still mentally spry and physically active in his late 80s.

In movies and novels, I thought Christian Bale did a good job showing the way severe weight loss can derive from psychological trauma in The Machinist. I haven’t read it, but Stephen King’s Thinner seems to deal with a similar issue: a man is cursed to drastic weight loss for killing a pedestrian with his car.

I still listen to pop occasionally. When I was a more avid music fan, my taste ran to alternative rock/pop. One of the groups I liked was NIN, whose front man, Trent Reznor, had a serious alcohol and drugs problem in his youth. He seems to have used physical exercise to help get clean, as he went from looking like a long-haired decadent during release of the album The Fragile in 1999 to a to a buff, crew-cut Marine when the subsequent album With Teeth came out in 2004. I think some people turn to the pleasure of endorphins from exercise to replace the fleeting euphoria of drugs.

As for NIN, I think Reznor said about all he had to say lyrically somewhere between With Teeth and his next album Year Zero. His lyrics seem to be intensely about the self and romantic frustration, and there’s only so much to be said about that. He seems to have turned more to film scoring and instrumental music.

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” –Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathian

A deeply pessimistic writer, Hobbes argued in his 1651 tract (as England was ending nine years of three consecutive Civil Wars)  on political theory that the state of nature for mankind is a war of all against all that, unchecked, would lead to anarchy and civil war. His solution was a strong , sovereign authority to keep human nature in check.

As much as I find President Trump’s heavy-handed, partisan rhetoric distasteful, I think his administration is appropriate in sending federal authorities to urban centers like Chicago, Kansas City, and Portland, where violent protests and gun shootings have got out of control (especially when some cities are defunding local police in response to pressure from protesters). In my opinion, central governments get their authority in part from their threat of overwhelming force, especially when the public self-righteously instigates violence.

To make a possibly frivolous reference to pop culture, in the film The Dark Knight, Alfred warns that “some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just wanna watch the world burn.”

Peaceful, legal protests are okay and can be good for public discourse, but the violent elements of these protests are displaying anarchic rage. Yes, property can sometimes be replaced, but unchecked violence normalizes disruption of our socioeconomic harmony and sets a dangerous precedent. In 1938 on Kristallnacht, German authorities decided not to intervene as protesters looted and destroyed Jewish stores and synagogues. Do we want to go the way of Nazi Germany?

Race is a powerful, primal force and shouldn’t be trifled with in pursuit of an unattainable utopia. When I was a reporter in Southeast Asia in the late 1990s, I saw firsthand the looting and property destruction aimed at the minority ethnic Chinese in Indonesia when a regional financial crisis struck and the chips were down. In Britain I was surprised to hear there is still some regionalism between those who trace their ancestry back further as natives, who often migrated to Wales, northern England and Scotland, and those in southern and eastern England who are often ethnically Germanic.  In the U.S. I grew up with self-segregation: people tend to associate with others of their own ethnicity. That is fine. I am mainly ethnically Irish, and my book is mainly about Irish writers. That doesn’t make it racist.

I was also young when the 1994 Rwanda genocide happened. We have to be careful about being hypersensitive to race and ethnicity; it can aggravate the problem. Consider how many books on the best-seller lists now have to do with racial difference: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bestselling-books-week-ended-july-4-11594326750 Race and ethnicity are only one aspect of our lives. It smacks of monomania. As W.B. Yeats put it, “Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream.”

Thinking about obsession. I am looking for a new city and apartment, as I am currently a bit unmoored socially and professionally. Apartment- and house-hunting can become an obsession. I was doing internet searches last night for a new place, and three hours went by in a flash. I was looking at places in Western Europe. The UK still lets Americans visit during the virus lockdowns “with restrictions” (Croatia and Ukraine too, and Mexico still lets us visit without restrictions). London is too expensive or “dear” as they say there. I found some Sonder apartments in Edinburgh that I could afford for about five months, if the immigration people there would allow me in for independent scholarship. A longer-term place in a medium-sized US city would be more practical. For a longer-term stay in the UK, my budget would only allow a studio flat, and I find those depressing at this stage of life.

But back to obsession. My point is you can be obsessed by almost anything: house-hunting, food, alcohol, drugs, sex, people, political leaders or issues, exercise, work, art, nature, trainspotting. A newspaper columnist once said the problem with obsessives is that they are boring. I think eventually they even bore themselves. Calvin Klein advertised this fragrance called Obsession heavily in the 1980s (they still sell it). I thought the name was weird, but much about the 80s was weird. Why not call your fragrance Addiction or Dog Vomit? I think SNL did a parody of the artsy European-influenced TV ads Calvin Klein ran for the product.

In literature, I think of William Blake’s “The Tyger” as a poetic reflection on obsession with evil and theodicy, even though some say it is a more direct commentary on the French Revolution. In Moby Dick, Ahab pacing back and forth on the deck of the of The Pequod while monomaniacally brooding about his pursuit of the white whale has always struck me as a stark image of obsession.

On addiction, a close cousin of obsession, I heard someone say, “there’s nothing sadder than an addict with a high tolerance for pain.” For some rock bottom isn’t enough of a deterrent. I thought it was ironic that as president George W. Bush said the US was “addicted” to oil because he had been both an oil man and apparently a problem drinker when younger (It’s interesting that US presidents for 24 consecutive years apparently had substance-abuse problems in their youths: Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama…characteristic of Baby Boomers, I guess). George F. Will offered a rejoinder to and qualification of Bush’s remark, saying the US is only addicted to oil in the sense that we need it.

On sexual obsession, I think Lord Chesterfield warned his son that giving too much attention to sex will blur and block the finer pleasures of life. “Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable,” he said in his famous letters to his son.

But I find some of Chesterfield’s sayings too prim and prudish. He thought laughter was uncivilized; I prefer Toni Morrison’s saying that we shouldn’t trust people who don’t laugh. I suppose laughter is one of those divisive issues like bow ties. I once jokingly told a bow tie-wearing roommate, “never trust a man in a bow tie;” he replied, “always trust a man in a bow tie.” Haha.