Middle Countries

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick is true to it’s title.  It’s a profoundly absurd, absurdly profound book.  To the first description, the book follows a fictional, mutant U.S. President’s rise and fall from power; to the second, it allegorizes the author’s love for his sister.

Vonnegut’s ability to connect the personal and political are on display in Slapstick.  He talks about his deep respect for his siblings via direct and indirect commentary at the same time as social-political alienation via blood and human family stories of struggle and difference.

Despite all this, I felt the end of Slapstick was a bit flat.  Perhaps this a result of the story’s great beginning.  And to his ending’s credit, he does offer this in the way of grandeur:  

“And how did we then face the odds,

“Of man’s rude slapstick, yes, and God’s?

“Quite at home and unafraid,

“Thank you,

“In our dreams remade.”

The lines are a consolation to an otherwise depressing conclusion for the protagonist (Wilbur Swain neither gets reunited with his sister nor manages to create a successful, lasting marriage.).  It seems as if Vonnegut is saying that the more publicly connected a life a person leads, the less so their private one.  It’s a conclusion in step with other mid-western writers.  For Hemingway, Foster Wallace there is no personal salvation, either.  ’[S]uffer like a man’ (The Old Man and the Sea), and ‘no one is going to save you’  (The Pale King), we’re told.  For there is only public grace.  

Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God reflects the rugged beauty and dogged sentiment of life for a young, middle-aged woman on the Canadian prairie.  The aesthetic can be found all the way down into her prose which is concrete yet flowing, occasionally flowering.

But what impressed me most about A Jest… was its ending.  To spoil it for you, it’s somehow tragic yet satisfying.  The union the reader is rooting for doesn’t happen and yet it feels very natural for it not to, not a knee-jerk counter-Hollywood contrivance.  Particularly, the last few sentences piqued my interest, “God’s mercy on reluctant jesters,” being one of them.  I admit this phrase confused me.  Jesters are not the sorts of people who need mercy?  A reluctant Jester, maybe.  But even still it feels awkward; aren’t there more worthy people of mercy?  The sick?  The poor?  I think the phrase could be a complex reference to Shakespeare I’m missing but perhaps it’s just saying that a humourous, satirical worldview is taxing (why not stop it then?) which is an interesting thought to ponder.

“God’s pity on God” is also provocation.  I suppose this means something similar to the jester line, that the prominent are not usually as flawless as they might seem, that it must be tough to be God.  

A Jest… reminds me of another great book for its dissatisfying satisfying ending:  For Who the Bells Toll.  But probably I’m getting distracted from ‘A Jest of God’ as a reference to the heroine’s lost fetus; an undesired and unintelligible event enabled (perpetrated?) by God.   

Laurence is criticizing Him, or the view of Him as perfectly benevolent.   

Wilde is either so sarcastic, he’s serious, or so serious he’s sarcastic.  That’s the message I took from the ending of IBE.  He’s obviously truly sarcastic but it’s the fact that things turn out well for Jack Worthing only after he comes clean, it causes me to wonder.  (It could also be that our age is so much more cynical that the cynicism of yesteryear appears fluffy.)  

I always thought that the title of this book was togue and cheek; that it was really the ‘unimportance’ of earnestness Wilde intended to communicate.  I suppose it still is but on this read through I felt a little different for some reason.  I guess Worthing was always acting earnestly and in the end when he finally got a sense of humour, he in turn won him the girl.  I’m not sure.

I love the first act of this play unlike any other.  It’s literature and drama at it’s most witty and scathing.  After that it becomes kind of soap-opera-ish with issues of who weds/bed whom surpassing all others (maybe this is the nature of human existence after all?).

Anyway, all satire should take a knee at Wilde’s genius.  It’s for a reader and humanist, a little hard to stomach.  I do appreciate, seeing it in my mind’s eye being performed in Victorian London, it was once a highly necessary social commentary.  I’m in full agreement over the Importance of (Appearing?) Being Earnest with historical context in mind. 

The Strength of The Stone Angel is towering.  It has voice, plot, character, setting.  It’s take-home message is profound beyond description.  But over-ambition is my calling.

Hagar Shipley - ne Currie - is a modern heroine.  Exposed to untold dangers and difficulties growing up on the ragged prarie, she endured the deaths of many loved ones, discrimination based on her gender, poverty, disappointment of all kinds.  But these are only half the story.

Hagar heroism is a rare variety.  As an elderly woman she is embittered towards the hands life dealt her and unfair to her son and daughter-in-law looking after her as she deteriorates.  What’s rare, is how this formerly self-reliance-vaulting senior learns to accept the past and the present.  How anyone who buried so many loved ones, raised without a mother in one of the most motherless environments on earth could do so is beyond comprehension.

Well, almost.  The Stone Angle is fiction, of course.  Created from real life and imagination.  Laurence does a truly stunning job of bridging the divide.  What’s incredible about The Stone Angel is that it’s a genuine tragedy in an age of glory.  Hagar, a devout atheist, is not redeemed.  She does relent to her children’s wishes but that far from absolves her from the overly-critical existence she led.  You’re left such torn emotions—love and hate for Hagar—at the end, it feels like you’ve really understood what it means to be human.  Laurences ability to tackle our hypocrisies, prejudices, negative emotions so fully and honestly is unique and wonderful.  

Mystic.  Superstitious.  Curious.  Combative.  Book-lover.

These are the words that quickly summarize my interest in reading the bible.  My reasons for reading The Gospel According Luke specifically?  I understood his rendering of Jesus’s life to be the most existential.  (I’ve since been told that this is in fact Job…Fact Check!)

Caveats:  I’m obligated to mention that my knowledge of religion is very limited.  I took a course on the old testament in university, have gleamed some facts from from pop culture, infrequent United Church services and my mother who went to Sunday school.  My aim is to comment on Luke from a literary point of view, meaning, as if it were any other narrative.  Obviously there are problems with this approach but I’m ignoring them out of the sacred principles of brevity and entertainment value.

Luke is a strange read.  Granted, it was composed around two-thousand years ago in Ancient Greek, and has been translated and rewritten throughout the millennia since.  (My commentary is based on the King James edition which was conceived in the 1500s, I believe.)  Luke’s writing style is action-centred, light on setting and description.  Characters, groups, places, dialogue and events dominate his telling of the life of Jesus.  (Interesting to think what our textes of our heros of today will look like two-thousand years from now; will post-modernism also become antiquated?)  But what was most noticeable to me were the number of villains Luke’s hero encounters:  Herod, Pilate, the Pharisees, Judas, and scribes, to name a few.  I found it bizarre that for such an apparently loving man, Jesus—or Luke or both—had so many enemies.  (I highlight this contradiction not just for intellectual showing-off, but for narrative showing off.  [I have a lot of forth-coming praise for the book, and being the even-handed pseudo-christian that I am, must take a balanced view of everything.])  

The Goods:  Luke is quite readable.  He’s clear and concise especially with dialogue (When did we decide that every time a speaker changed we should create a new line on the page?  Is this the way conversations sound in our heads or happen in life? I think not.)  And, I agree with many of the gospel’s messages such as, ’But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes ‘, and  ’And behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.’  These themes of compassion and humility have always been my favourites of christian thinking among other ideologies.  But, of course, our other oddly self-sacrificing hero, Nietzsche, who, like Christ, never lived to see his opinions adopted by mainstream society, had some choice things to say about self-abnegation; that’s a whole other bussel of hay.

The Bad-ish:  ’He that is not with me is against me; and he that does not gathereth with me, scattereth.’  This tract of christian/religious thinking so heavily referenced to to justify invading sovereign nations and ignoring human rights has always bothered me.  It’s the original sin of religion that it seeks to divide, isolate, and segment as much as it seeks to unite and make peace.   But reading the neighbouring lines of the George Bush-speak in Luke’s actual text acquiesces me somewhat.  By ‘He’, existentialist-Luke might be referring to one’s own personal doubts.  It’s a message akin to the native American lore of the two wolves said to be inside each of us—the one, good; the other, bad—and that we should actively choose the good.

Anyhow, I could just be reverse-engineering my prevailing interest in making narratives out to be the basis of morality and epistemology.  Certainly, Luke would look upon me critically; for scribes were as dubious a bunch as they came in biblical time.  In our post-modern age, one might ask, should that skepticism be extended to Luke & Co. too who are, after all, scribes themselves?  Or would that be to follow The Bad Wolf/Doubt?

I’m full of bad ideas.  In this one, I, an infrequent poetry-reader, will comment on a selection of Anne Sexton’s poems spanning almost sixty years and many serious themes.  Let’s do this!

I decided to read Sexton on the recommendation of a friend.  I found her quite enjoyable which suggests she’s a good writer.  (If I’m not understanding what you’re saying, which is often the case when I read poetry, it takes good prose to keep me reading it.)  She didn’t take my breath away at many points—which I have had happen while reading other poets—but I was certainly stimulated and provoked.

Sexton’s prose is minimalist yet content-rich.  She doesn’t seem to use a lot of imagery but you get the sense she is conveying much more than the words’ literal meanings when she writes, something I often find is the case with good imagery.  The verses also come across very contemporary not withstanding many of them were written upwards of sixty years ago.

Sexton’s themes span the political-economy of health, religion, family and relationships, depression, and gender and sexuality.  I think I liked relationships and gender and sexuality of these the most, perhaps because they are the ones where Sexton shows the most humour and imagination.  ’Some women marry houses,’ she writes in Housewife; and in The Balad of the Lonely Masturbator, she casts doubt on what seems like a pretty closed idea - that solitary sexual gratification is an entirely infurior form of sex to coupling.  Other favourites include Said the Poet to the Analyst, And One for My Dame, and Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman.

Hmm, maybe this wasn’t so bad an idea.  I’m happier to have read Sexton having written this because it’s easier now to see what a remarkably talented artist and compassionate human being she was, something that gets overshadowed by her tendency towards melancholy in much of her work and, of course, her tragic death.  Obviously, Sexton was a much fuller person than that imagery suggests.  

This book; I don’t know where to start. The first time I read it I was twenty-one or two. I read it in a single sitting; two at the most.

Like other books of my youth - and my youth itself - it’s lost its lustre. On this read through, ten years later, I felt it an embellished, ornamental novel. This is probably mostly due to the greatness I remembered it having and the suspense-less nature inherent to re-readings. All-the-same, I think a few criticisms and observations are worthwhile mentioning.

Fitzgerald-prose:  Flowery, overly-editorializing. He sounds terminally fatherly and knowing. In some places this is nice - his positive observations/assertions on/of humanity and individuals - but for the most part it’s tedious. (If Nick Carraway chooses to associate with crappy people, why do I have to read about it ad nausea?).  Sometimes the language and imagery work and sometimes they don’t. Daisy’s green dock light is an example of the former par excellence.

On Gatsby’s setting, the age of opulence, the roaring twenties: This sounds like it was a terrible time according to Fitzgerald’s book. Superficiality, selfishness, and aimlessness seem to have reigned. I’ll grant they may have had cause; the Great War was a scarring social-psychological event just behind them. And, the scene may have been set as such to contrast the story’s ultimately romantic plot-lines. But again, there is little to endear the reader to Nick in the setting.  Carraway comes across capricious and self-superior towards of his contemporaries, and its hard to take this unsympathetic voice for much longer than twenty or so pages.

On the romantic plotlines: I picked Gatsby up again for personal solace.  Jay Gatsby’s is a beautiful example to aspire to; his complete and utter devotion and submission to Daisy despite the impossibility/unlikelihood of it ever being fulfilled/returned.  As the famous last pages adroitly proclaim: Gatsby believed in the Green Light of Daisy however far she receded. But what I noticed more from my reading this time was it wasn’t the Gatsby-Daisy love story that stood out; it was the Nick-Jordan. Theirs was a slow burning love built out of friendship and mutual respect.  It is a hard ideal to attain I think - we all seek the thrills and daring of Gatsby-Daisy - but maybe be its the better type to emulate.  Fitzgerald, for what it’s worth, did.

David Ohle’s novel, Motorman is beyond summary.  It’s a bizarre story about an apparent invalid set in an even more bizarre United States where people have transformed into transgenic, semi-cooked, or deteriorating creatures.

What’s certainly remarkable about Motorman is Ohle’s control of language’s inner systems of meaning, nuance, and rhythm.  The ‘atmosphere’ (introduction writer, Ben Marcus’s term) Ohle creates feels like a Dali painting.  Terms like ‘structural moans’, ‘leafless ether trees’, ‘something edgeless’ and ‘jellyhead’ are powerful in how they convey an aesthetic, without a great deal of elaboration.  Perhaps another way of describing this feat would be as a distinct visual mood.  

On the other hand, I started to dislike Motorman the further it went on.  It was probably on account of its disjointed structure—the book’s sections are little more than two paragraph passages long, and jump quickly between scenes.   Also, it could have been a function of the absence of any traditional plot-lines.  Moldenke, the book’s protagonist, looses his nemesis somewhere a third of the way into the book without explanation; and his love interest seems to be someone he doesn’t even really want.

This said, I’m glad I read Motorman.  It’s an errily unsettling book like few I’ve read.  And, in addition, there are none I’ve read with as good character names and dialogue. (‘Junce’, the nemesis, ‘Cock Roberta’, the love interest; ‘shall we halt the amenities and face the grit?’ Junce says to Moldenke.)

The Man Without Qualities (Vol. 1) by Robert Musil is a weighty book in many senses.  It is chalk-full of profound observations and insights over the human condition and social existence.  From a writing stand-point, it’s powerful (and labourious), having multiple narrative voices and no romantic arch to rely upon to propel the reader forward.  

I have to admit I only read the first two-hundred pages carefully - and the final three-hundred, I skimmed.  One idea that was cause for reflection is Musil via Ulrich’s description of happiness.  They/he argue/s that man is happy only in-as-much as his ability to work exceeds the demands of his work, similar to the nature of a donkey.  And, his/their ability to work is primarily determined by the demands placed upon him/them, and thus, rarely is anyone much happier than any other.

I like the metaphor.  It’s comforting to me to think that most apparently happy people are not as they seem.  Maybe the secret to living happily is to have more modest expectations; to be a man without qualities, so to speak.

I’ll start with the ending of Raise Hight the Roof Beam, Carpenter, and Seymour:  An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger.  In it, narrator Buddy Glass, goes on a vignette about his brother Seymour catching him in a foot-race around the block as kids.  The preceding hundreds-of-pages are spent describing all the high-minded virtues of Seymour but it’s an apparently trivial one that Salinger chooses to elevate.  I’m not sure I understand why, but I’ll give it a shot.

Raise… is the tragic tale of the Glass family, interpreted through the lens of the second eldest son from a family of seven.  It is set in two parts; when Buddy is twenty-one and when he is forty.  The two novellas comprising the single-bound book contrast dramatically in style, and somewhat in world-view.  Raise… is narrative whereas Seymour is a free-flowing meditation.  Salinger doesn’t refrain from the profound and quotidien in either voice but the second is more direct about it.  

Unlike Franny and Zooey, another dualistic story about the Glass’s, Raise… is less critical of social and intellectual norms, preferring, with Buddy as the prime example, to skate over contentious issues such as psychoanalysis, marriage, and the meaning of writing than barrage them with his incisive mind.  

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and oddly find little to say about it.  Perhaps it’s just too personal.  Salinger turns his hyper-critical mind on himself by choosing to write about writing—perhaps I just don’t want to hear the tough things he has to say about me/him. 

In any case, there are many purely entertaining parts of the book; the cartoonishly earnest maid-of-honour in Raise…, and readers as birdwatchers, and astronauts as middle-aged hot-rodders among others.  (Aside:  The passage about ‘the grounded everywhere’ shows that the Beats owe a debt to Salinger for their style.)  And on the serious side, there are a lot of erudite statements: guilt as an imperfect form of knowledge; children as guests in their parent’s house, to be served not possessed; how writers should let all their stars shine and write their hearts out; the deconstruction of sentimentality as the over-application of tenderness to things (more than God would bestow); and art as an imperfect-able vocation and aspiration.   

My ambiguity is getting clearer.  I read (thank you internet) that Raise… and Seymour were written separately. I’m not sure why Salinger would have published them together; maybe it wasn’t his decision, a theory that could explain his notorious vexation with the publishing industry.  In clarity, Seymour is a meditation on the difficulty of artistic endeavours whereas Roof is a more traditional story.  It’s obvious why I don’t like Seymour as much as Raise… The epigraph’s themselves describe writing as an exercise in dishonesty and masochism.  The conclusion, a small saving grace, is that there’s no depression in that but rather that we should embrace the simpler things like teaching a class or walking in a courtyard.  

I’m going to honour Salinger and not attempt a synthesis or grand meaning from these books, including Nine Stories, and Catcher, my thirteen-year-old self’s holy bible.  Or better, I will, (I lied):   

Catcher made me feel more alive in the sense of being in kismet with someone, however phoney that person turned out to be; Nine Stories showed me the variety and beauty of the world even in war and despair; Franny and Zooey made me question reality, the existence of everything; and Raise… and Seymour… made me question myself.   

I might be over-analyzing this.  Maybe Raise… and Seymour is simply a love-letter to a brother - a tall, yet sentimental task for anyone who has ever had a brother, let alone a dead one.  This is a relieving point of view, one that suggests that the simple, the beautiful, is never complete or easy.  If that’s the message then I believe Salinger may have achieved what he denied: he wrote honestly if scathingly.   

John Updike and Philip Roth appear side-by-side in my anthology of American literature.  I’m sure this is not by accident.  The writers are linked in my imagination despite my having read Updike much earlier than Roth.  (Barth comes to mind when I visualize their aesthetic too.)  As an aspiring writer I want to try to elaborate on Updike and Roth’s stories, ‘Separating’ and ‘Defender of the Faith’, in order to try to sort out what effect they have had on me.  

Separating is about a couple telling their children that they’re separating in what seams to be the 60’s or early 70’s.  Defender is the story of a Jewish army sergeant on a base with a charge who is leaning on him to get their religious needs acknowledged by higher ranks. At first glance they might not appear to have anything in common with each other but, upon closer inspection, both are interested in post WWII American life and commiserate over the brutality of war.  

I might just be searching for reasons to describe this era as one defined by a kind of PTSD, alternately numb or anxious over how to be after enduring such hardship.  However lines of Roth certainly support the hypothesis.  In the first paragraph of Defender he writes: ‘After two years I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman’s heart which, like his feet, at first aches and swells, but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.’  And his protagonist, ironically named Marx, broods over his apparent cruelty towards his charges: ‘…resisting with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness…”  

Separating is more of a stretch to think of as an artifice of the shock of WWII.  It could be read as an isolated, family narrative.  And if you thought of the Richard and Judith, the separating parties, as enemies, you’d be hard pressed to find support in the way Updike describes their mature, un-warlike, if failing, relationship.

My opinion remains that Separating is a story about the culture aftermath of war.  My reasons can be found in some of the language in the story.  For instance, over having to tell his closest son the news, the narrator says of Richard:  ”These words set before him a black mountain in the darkness; its cold breath, its near weight affect his chest.”  Or after his son’s reaction to the news:  ”It was a whistle of wind, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness.  The white face was gone, the darkness was featureless.”  

Relationships ending are unquestionably difficult but is this prose really appropriate for the falling out of an upper-middle class couple?  Or, is it fitting given that all the death and destruction left the life that the war had been fought for incapable of seaming worthy and explosively charge?  I feel it’s the later.  

I’m glad for reading these stories not just for their literary merits but their social ones.  They serve as incentives the same as Hemingway and Findley not to go to war.   

I’m feeling pretend-sophical today so I want to talk about Nietzche, the saviour of soreness and prophet of pestilence.

I just finished Beyond Good and Evil.  It ended on a high note.  Fred writes: “Now the world is laughing, the dread curtain is rent, the wedding day has come for light and darkness…” I didn’t follow or like a lot of this book but the last sentence made me happy.  The idea of marriage of good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and sadness is a liberating concept, akin to Daoism’s ying and yang.

That said, I’m not sure how Nietzche proposes we get Beyond.  I guess he’d say the first thing to do is abandon the notion of capital-T truth.  I agree with him that most epistemological arguments are in fact moral ones; when we talk about what’s true we often mean what’s right whether or not we can admit it.  But given the enormity of information and factors involved in determining what’s true, it’s easy to see how morality or other dogma have snuck into the picture as short-cuts for making sense of the world and developing some degree of control over it.  How are we not supposed to take shortcuts, especially if everyone else does?  ”One must know how to conserve oneself,” Nietzche rejoins sounding oddly Protestant.  Or, he continues, we can turn to love and art, embrace dissonance and Dionysus, admonish the free, ever-rebelling spirit and despise absolutists vehemently. 

But I worry how much these ideas are useful today.  Nietzche is often associated with fascism and nihilism, rightfully scorned and defeated topics of our era.  Maybe I just lack the will or German-ness to be impolite and unashamed of my ideas or maybe Fred needs online dating.


Beyond quotations: 

To recognize untruth as a condition of life…means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion (pg. 36)

Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘creation of the world’, to causa prima. (pg. 39)

It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance (pg. 65).

…in so far as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude - such a type of man are we, we free spirits (pg. 73).

Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible (pg. 94).

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil (pg. 103).

Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover - what is rare and exceptional in him:  to that extent it can also conceal what is normal in him (pg. 104).

Pity in a man of knowledge seams almost ludicrous.  Like sensitive hands on a cyclops.  (pg. 105).

‘Not that you have lied to me but that I no longer believe you.  That is what has distressed me - ’ (pg. 107).

There is so much condensed into so few words in The Old Man and The Sea it’s intimidating to comment on. The title alone says a mountainful, two character inextricably bound together not for narrative’s sake, but survival. ( Interesting that the book could also aptly be titled ‘The Old Man and The Boy’ but I meander)

Phrases such as ‘brown blotches of benevolent skin cancer’ invigorate this otherwise innocuous story. Ernest’s prose is earnest while at the same time calm, unimposing, much like the sea. I particularly like his use of nature as point of reflection on life and death; ‘a man is never alone at sea’ rings with solemnity and truth the way psychological treatises and expositions don’t.

The ending of The Old Man is heroic. I expected him to be beaten and to curl up and die. But instead he rebels, refocuses and resurrects himself through love and his irascible spirit, the spirit he passed down to the boy an shared with the great fish

Fortunately Hemingway doesn’t muddle too much in the cosmos and mysterious implications of the sea as a metaphor for the world. It simply is, same as it is to other literary geniuses (Joyce: ‘look at the sea, does it take offence?’ Shakespeare: ‘he who has the steerage of my course take up my sail’.)

I’ve heard this book is sad. Maybe I’m insensitive but I didn’t find it such. I feel the old man is like Camus’s Sisyphus, ensconced his struggle, and as futile as it may be, it is his and it fills his heart. A rationalization for loneliness and solitude it may be, but definitely one of the best one’s we’ve got.

David Foster Wallace’s last words in to The Pale King and maybe his canon: ’It’s the ability to be immersed.’ They’re a revelation in the context of the preceding five-hundred pages of cultural and psychic questioning but also something of a ‘bromide’ ( to borrow Wallace’s term) knowing that Wallace himself has become the opposite - dispersed (at least physically).

That said, The King is a masterful work of art, alternately terrorizing and enveloping the reader in post-modern Dickensian detail like in the nearly hundred-page meditations on finding life’s purpose and Other. Wallace’s insertion of himself into the plot makes the book even more engaging and life-like.

Embarassingly full disclosure: I want to be David Wallace, a literary titan and unifier of disjointed human existence. At the same time I don’t want to a depressive and suicide, features which I’m sure bring unspeakable agony. I say these things because knowing them makes commenting on The King extremely difficult. If Wallace couldn’t find a way to be fully immersed how can I?

I know that all true art isn’t supposed to provide answers as much as provoke questions and hazard a few guesses. I’m deeply grateful to The King for its/his effort at this. My life is certainly deeper as a consequence. But I still can’t help feeling a little alienated by the fact that as much as he poured himself into his work I didn’t really know him or at least it confounds me to think his achievements didn’t bring him joy… I guess it’s like The King says, it’s an illusion we’re all the same.

I don’t know where to begin with Franny and Zooey. There are all kinds of good things to say about it—it was ahead of its time with its realism and dialogue, it has stupidly compelling characters and the subject matter is unapologetically ambitious.

But at the same time I didn’t like this book that much. It was gut-wrenching to read how all of our foundational cultural values are bunk and our heros, slaves. Cravenly delayed caveat: I probably read what I wanted in it and feel dejected that I can’t manager Salinger’s honesty and courage to tell or acknowledge the truth.

Another reason for my negarive response may be because so much of North American literature (culture?) in the past six decades is borrowed from Salinger and therefore the originator gets mistaken with the imitator. Like Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey seams to be set in the present; albeit with antiquated slang. Or perhaps the profanity and inflection of Salinger’s voice are true to all ages, its mixture of the quotidian and the cosmic shattering the image that everything before Sympathy For the Devil was all ‘golly’-this and ‘shucks’-that.

Speaking of speaking, there are many ideas worth repeating from F&Z. The one that stuck with me the most was that God is not some kind of Mr. Rogers-figure, a stern yet fair deity in a cardigan as (S)He has been conceives in my non-practicing protestant imagination. Rather, Zooey cum Salinger contends that religious life is a punishment that (S)He afflicts on those who suggest (S)He has created anything but a perfect world. This is not an idea you find in A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood.

But as brilliant as F&Z is, it is also self-contradictory. For example, if God really punished those who questioned the Her(His) designs with ‘a religious life’ then Zooey should be as religious as they get given his hyper-critical view of the world. Also self-contradicting is how Zooey rails against pendants in one breath and preaches from the pulpit to Franny in the next.

What’s the reader to make of all this? Is Salinger consciously self-contradictory or simply relating the imperfections of his characters? I imagine the former but don’t discount the latter if and only for the reason that this book - all of Salinger I’ve read actually - takes me to brink of nihilism.

Again, I’m reading from my own personal vantage. Altogether F&Z is hilarious and artfully crafted. Salinger brings to life the blunders and burdens of existence life no one I can think of. I’m definitely looking forward to Raise High The Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in my head if not my stomach.

It’s only a paper moon
It’s only a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.
-Nat King Cole

I’m breaking a loose rule I have not to comment on a living author’s work. I don’t believe in saying what’s bad art because if something doesn’t resonate with me and my unique experiences doesn’t mean it won’t with you and yours.

The reason I’m breaking my rule is circumstantial, not principled. Murakami is a nothing I say could dissuade anyone from reading 1Q84 or anything else he’s written. Also, given he has brought literary fiction to a mass audience, I assume he wants to have it discussed to some degree and doesn’t mind if it’s not all praising. If I was disappointed with 1Q84 it’s because I had such high expectations and because I feel a lot of what the book has to say I already knew from the Master’s previous books. But while for me the book could have been shortened, the message of it practically captured the brief song lyrics above, it might not have been as powerful without the volume.

As with all his writing, Murakami is a genius at creating an eerily charged yet entirely believable atmospheres. He manages to make 1Q84 suspenseful without sacrificing realness. He has an incredible eye and ear for sensuous detail like in his sex scenes which were new terrain I found as compelling as his descriptions of food and music. I’m curious as to why he didn’t have any prominent anthropomorphic animals, a favourite technique I have of his. He probably wisely thought it would detract the central theme: the preeminence of love for human life. Murakami’s non-flowery manner of talking about romance and eternity is inspiring. He has nearly succeeded in accomplishing what Ginsberg called the aim of poetry, to speak to your friend you with the seriousness of a lover, and to speak to your lover with the candour of a friend. The end of 1Q is especially balanced and anti-cliche saying love may be the highest value of life but it doesn’t extinguish the difficulties we face, only improves the encounters.

I didn’t like This Side of Paradise very much.  I found parts of it interesting but on the whole it fell short for me - granted I had high expectations.  Maybe it’s the writing’s somewhat antiquated style, its garrulousness, a remnant of an era before twenty-four-hour news and on-command.  I’ll be honest I started skimming around page 120.

Or maybe it’s Paradise’s subject matter.  It follows Amory Blaine from adolescence through early adulthood, probably to twenty-five or thirty.  It also explores the social transgressions of the roaring thirties to some degree such as the idea of living grandly so soon after Depression, but the mainly focuses on Blaine and his complex misanthropy.  Undoubtedly this stance was radical for the time but today it feels a bit put-on or mooted.  

The passages between Blaine and Monsignor Darcy are high points of the book.  Darcy, a bishop, is a confidante to young Blaine and in his last letter to him instructs him to wear his Celticness unself-consciously.  I found this, among other Darcy moments, intriguing.  It seams odd under the present lens to think of an American trumpeting any other kind of group identification above Americanness.  It led me to think that it was probably a state of affairs around from a time when the country was still carving out its own national identity.  

Paradise has romance, sentiment and sometimes poetry.  Lines such as “…they glided the silent roads…and talked from the surfaces of their hearts in shy excitement”  are  transcendent if somewhat cheesy.  And Blaine’s eventual development of a patch-work, semi-satisfactory cosmology is melancholic and honest.  He decides he will embrace a self-centred/created universe wherein he will rebel against social hierarchy and undue privilege but not delude himself into thinking it is a substitute for lost love and, in my view, innocence.    

It’s almost Presidential Election season.  Lights.  Camera…Typing!

Seriously, as a narrator/ed-person, I love this ritualized power-struggle.  Good v. Evil;  Lesser- v. More-Evil.  The characters who will emerge make me giddy with anticipation.  Who will be 2012’s Joe The Plumber? Larry The Laid-off or Bobby The Beguiled?  

More seriously, I feel that American Presidential elections are our hyper-connected/disconnected world’s modern equivalent of a campfire where all walks exchange stories of their wild adventures out in the universe.  It’s a great check-in for our collective insanity away from the day-to-day demands of life like who will win the Bachelor(ette).   

As I prepare to embark for an on-the-ground viewing of the greatest show on earth, I thought I’d do some reading of election journalism to reve up my imagination.  Enter David 2’s subject-line essay. (‘David 2’ is my short-hand David Foster Wallace.  ’2’ because of King David.)  It was published during the Republican Nomination race of 2000.  And republished in a collection, Consider The Lobster, two years later.

I can’t say it’s my favourite essay of David 2’s although it’s very good.   (His Federer piece is far shorter and flakier; just right for my testosterone-addled attention span.)  I think there’s a lot in the title of the portrait of John McCain and voter apathy.  From a lot of analysis and insight, David 2 ultimately concludes you’re responsible for your politicians; you have to get ‘up’ like Simba.  This conclusion is light-handed however D2 also shows that politicians are undoubtedly acting and in need of getting ‘up’ for their performances.  

Perhaps the second most provocative line for the purposes of summing up is “what is the difference between paradox and hypocrisy?”  The question seams apt for McCain who comes across as certainly caring but questionable in terms of selflessness.  

In true David 2 fashion, the read is alternately exciting and exhausting.  His loquaciousness is matched only by his absurdity.  

The piece finishes with a discussion on leadership and meaning in an world over-run by advertising and spinning.  Possibly you could say that nothing has changed in this upcoming election; worse, that I’m a lutz to think any of it really matters.   Paradoxically, you’d be right and wrong.  There is still the shadow of Occupy to consider, a movement not that far removed from peasants storming the castle.  At least, this is what my imagination tells me.  Let’s go.

Absurdity.  I’m undecided about the word.  On the one hand, I like it as it fits many situations and encounters in the world.  On the other, it’s a bit cynical.

I just read Waiting for Godot by Samaul Beckett who has been described as an absurdist.  I loved it.  I’m sure it’s not an unique reaction.  I partly attribute its affect on me to the fact that I started reading it as I began a hangover.  At one part, early on, one character says to another ‘…back when we were respectable…’  Relate to that. 

Anyway, it’s brillant dialogue and amazing how much happens with so little action and few characters.  I’m sure lots of us have felt life was meaningless before but to express the feeling as fully as Beckett is remarkable.  For instance, each of the characters represent some kind of variation of dispair or delusion.  I particularly liked Pozzo with lines like: “Beauty, grace, truth of the first water, I knew they were all beyond me.  So I took a knook.”

It makes you want to see it performed, reading Godot.  I wonder if jokes about suicide, homelessness and insanity would come off as well in our modern epoch.  Beckett seamed to be very light-hearted on the subject but I’m sure that they were historically situated.  

Definitely worth the read.  And besides, what else is there to do when you’re waiting for Godot?  

Filial piety is good.  To achieve it you have to have a righteous husband, loyal wife, friendly older brother, and respectful younger one.  Like any moral philosophy, these ideas are contestable yet inspiring.

The museum plaque where I read about ‘family harmony’ stated that its influence on traditional Chinese values has contributed to China’s being the only ancient civilization to have stood the test of time.  Cool.  Beliefs are like infrastructure.

Another plaque told a fable on the subject that I thought was interesting.  In C’s day, there was a boy who broke a melon stock while hoeing the family garden.  His father found out and beat him for it.  The boy acted unaffected from his beating in order to not make his father feel bad.  The boy went to Confucius to be praised for his nobleness but Confucius wouldn’t see him.  It wasn’t because the boy was a bad hoer but because his father could be punished by law for beating his son and the boy had propagated this behaviour, putting his father at risk.

I found this interesting because it contradicted my preconception that Eastern values teach children to do what there parents tell them.  Confucius said not to be a sycophant or it will be to your family’s detriment.  I found this sentiment repeated elsewhere, in commentary surrounding former Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji who has recently published a book about his time in office.  Zhu is renowned for his opposition to  ‘kowtowing’—bowing to one’s superior.

Shit, a Wikipedia search has just ruined my sweeping generalization that Chinese culture is insubordinate:  to kowtow to one’s elders and ancestors is a high priority in Confucian philosophy, the source says.  My insight has been soured like the melon the boy cut from the stock before it had ripened.

A police car turned wide around a sharp, narrow corner.  An SUV approached from the other direction.  The vehicles stopped and looked at each other.  The SUV was unable to reverse because of a line up of cars behind it on the narrow ‘hutong’ so the police car did instead.  Bicycles, rickshaws, scooters, and pedestrians waited for bottleneck release.  Nobody honked; nobody was bothered.

After the traffic jam cleared two rickshaws piled six feet high with beer bootles rattled forward.  They were in single file until the second driver decided to pass despite the width of the street and upcoming intersection.  An old man wearing pajamas walked in the opposite direction on a collision course with the rickshaws.  Neither the man nor the drivers changed their trajectories.  Just a few feet in front of the pedestrian, the passing driver pulled in front of the first.  Nobody flinched; nobody frowned. 

Everywhere Beijingers look like they’re going to crash into each other and yet manage to dance out of it.  Luxury cars and donkey carts share the the roads, old and young play table tennis and basketball, communal toilets are bastions of conversation, smoking, and other people’s stench.  She’s an ancient people who has lived with herself for dynasties, seen changes, collisions, and inconveniences everyday.  The atmosphere conveys timelessness.

Existentialism.  I studied philosophy and don’t really know what the term means.  On a literal level, it sounds as if it’s a philosophy or belief system that elevates existence as its main subject.  (Re)-reading the father of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre’s work gives me a tingle in my parts of my legs that don’t feel anything normally; for a moment, subjective, waking life dissolves and symphonic, objective reality swirls around ‘me.’  

‘Waking life’ (my term) is a less inspiring or more disagreeable section of Sartre’s work.  Sartre argues that this base-line view of reality is false and sets about deconstructing it.   (Dual, subject-object nature of consciousness consciousness demands we do away with views of us having a singular, concrete self.)  In his view, ‘we’ are purely relational beings, created by our encounter with other conscious beings.  (I am at once a subjective, thinking being and an objective one other subjective, thinking beings, and therefore not a ‘self’-contained unit.)

I feel depressed and, at the same time, uplifted by this self-annihilation.  Sartre’s philosophy eradicates at self-centredness and cynicism.  Self-centredness requires a singular, unified self that is objectively false when we admit the role that others have on consciousness; cynicism imposes a unanimously ‘guilty’ label on its propagators that cannot hold up under the reality of subject-object existence.  These modes of being are in “bad faith,” a faith that things are bad and one that amounts to intellectual dishonesty. 

Existentialism thus disposes of cynicism and self-centredness as superstitions.  However, it also calls humanistic maxims into questions such as ‘man is good’, self-determination and individuality.  (Hopefully later in the collection of Sartre’s work I’m reading he proposes an alternative moral system, or I can get some way out Nothingness in Beyond Good and Evil.)

As morally inconvenient as this last part is, I’m going to leave this messy conversation (for now) on a high note.  Cynicism and self-centredness are leaps of logic given the reality of subjective-objective existence.  Better to swirl in an ocean of honest uncertainty than categorize people and states of affairs as bad, falsely existing as I alone see them. 

Libra, by Don Delillo, is a disturbing, fictionalized account of JFK’s 1963 assassination.  In it, Delillo creates sympathy for an assassin, self-identification with spooks and fixation with a national tragedy.  There is a eery and surreal quality to this book that causes the pages to turn slowly with disgusted fascination. 

The dark sides of humanity found in Libra are manifold an exemplified in Lee Oswald’s relationship with his mother.  With it, Delillo lingers over universal features of parent-child relations such guilt and sacrifice and love and solidarity, but doesn’t offend the uniqueness of the characters and circumstances.

And as much as Libra’s characters are real, its setting is tactile.  Delillo draws 1950-60s America using trains, planes, guns, shacks, Capitol Hill bistros, Dallas delis, The White House, Minsk, Siberia, consumer products, grocery stores, blaring radios, newspapers and political pamphlets.  Moreover, the physicality of the setting points to the tension of a country that has been at war for the better part of twenty years with great machines and systems used for conquering in one form or another. 

At points, Libra’s tensions feel almost schizophrenic.  In the shadow of the Nazi’s, North Koreans and Castro, Oswald and company find themselves not having a concrete enemy to unite around, a national purpose in limbo and a lack of a definitive Other to define themselves against.  Here I feel that Delillo comes down a bit one-sided.  McCarthyism and advertising were indeed constructed in response to this shortage of enemies of America, vilifying socialists and the poor.  But Oswald was equally a result of familial let-down and collapse as broader social forces.  This point, I believe, Delillo underscores. 

Free-will and determinism are heavy, complex themes and Libra, therefore, is not a fun a read.  Delillo injects humour as best he can but on the whole this is a depressing book as the reader is forced to reel in the listless, forgotten characters of America’s Golden Age.  However, Delillo does proffer some reward for suffering, a comely moral for a generation of warriors, would-be and otherwise:  you have to have someone to hate in order to live freely.  

Thanks to Delillo, Jack did not die in vain.

• School starts at 7am
• Cat-fish, baby eels and bullfrogs piled ten-deep in an aquarium available at local grocers
• Squash hang from vines on hydro lines
• Dogs travel in bicycle baskets on hyper-busy streets; children on the book-rack and covered by parent’s poncho if it’s raining

Tonight may be the dawn of The Chinese Era.  Children squeal and cars honk in the lanes of old Beijing; kebab smoke fills the outer street.  It feels like Norman Rockwell on Mars.

My friend said that China doesn’t want to lead; that won’t stop others from following.  I may be deceived by the language barrier but this place seems happy.

I am a luddite.  I prefer paper and ink to word processors and email.  My reasons for this are deep-seated emotional problems and the fact that I find that the digital experience of writing distorts my thought process.

I am only semi-serious about the emotional problems so let’s look at the distortion part.  First, I can type faster than I can write with a pen.  This gives me the feeling that my thoughts are flowing too slowly when I’m typing; my fingers travel faster than my brain and that leads me to believe my brain is not thinking well.  (Thinking well and thinking fast are not equivalent especially when it comes to self-expression which any form of writing is to a degree.)  I think this phenomenon of fingers versus thoughts is in large part what leads to bad writing because we don’t read text as a writer but as a slow, plodding, often tangential, and always personal thinker.  (An author I read of attributes the pitfall of speed in writing on a keyboard to the ear’s wanting to hear continuous clicking on the keys.)

Second, the visual space on a computer screen is cluttered with innumerable icons and—in the case of email—advertisements.  Writing in this environment tells me that my thoughts and feelings are not all that is going on and may even cause me to question their comparative value; it’s distracting, whether consciously or not. (I just finished typing a message on facebook and if you haven’t learned how to close the right hand news feed, your typing pane occupies probably one one-hundredth of the screen.)

This has been my rant.

I left Beijing on Monday at five am.  I discovered thanks to my cab driver that I was actually leaving from Beijing West train station rather than the central one like thought.  Fortunately I still made my train from the further away station. 

I found my berth and arranged my bags.  ’Hard-sleeper’ class (as opposed to soft-sleeper) doesn’t have separated cabins for them, just a pair of three-stacked, two and-a-half-by-six-and-a-half-foot mattresses going up to the ceiling in each cubicle section.  I was on the top-top bunk with three feet of headspace. 

I sat down for a while on one of the fold down chairs in the open aisle and talked to a guy who was in Beijing for job training and was on his way back home.   I told him I was studying an MBA and he told me his country was in trouble because of MBA’s.  He explaind:  ”maybe MBA is popular in your country but not here”; and added “it’s very cheap for you to travel in my country.”  I climbed up on my bed and dozed off thinking I was leaving rich, cosmopolitan China and that my impressions of the country based on Beijing were about to be changed.

I woke up gradually a few hours later and the car was bursting with activity. Parents played with their children and men gambled and smoked.  A procession of carts of snacks and toys had started down the aisle and I sat at the fold-down chair taking it all in, drinking instant coffee I’d brought, and sketching the humanity in front of me in my journal.

Clump-clump we rolled along.  I ate some ramen noodles and read.  We must have gone been gone for five or six hours and there were still buildings and semi-urban landscape outside.  I noticed that in addition to Poplars, China has Sumach bushes like Canada. 

At this point the novel environment had lost its cache and I started to get bored.  I think I slept or day-dreamed for a bit before going to the ‘dining’ car to eat what was to be the only bad food I’ve had in the two months I’ve been here.  Think of airplane food in Chinese flavours minus ten.  Yuck.

I got to sleep soon after eating and when I woke up the next morning we were in rice fields and low mountains.  I saw some oxen out the window and other signs of rural—goats, I believe.  

Around 11 am we pulled into Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province and ancient trade-centre for the South China Sea and Canton region.  I walked out on to the station platform into warm subtropical air.  

The square in front of the train station bustled.  New people abounded from those of the North—Chinese Muslims in square hats, for instance.

I lined up to get a return train ticket (you can’t buy round trips in China) and discovered there were no sleepers available on the trip back, only a seat for a twenty-five hour trip.  Oh, well.  I’d deal with this when the time came.

I got on the subway and went to my hotel in an area close to the Pearl River.  It was in a residential area not unlike the irregular hutong streets of Beijing but with some differences:  they were built up high and the vegetation was plusher with big trees canopying some streets.  

I was tired and lay down for a while at the hotel.  The privacy was a pleasur after the train.  I went out a bit later to explore, planning to climb one of the Hong-Kong-esque mountains in the North of the city. But after taking the subway up to where the map said ‘natural scenery area’ I decided it was a bit too exploratory, no Parks Canada offices in sight just streets with Chinese signs leading into forests. 

I went to an urban park instead.  It was in the style of European parks, gated and walled-off, immaculately-kept.  Some of the plants had leaves the size of bath-mats; Snake plants grew like crab grass.

I wandered past a football stadium and an ancient watch-tower once used to look out for marauding pirates in the river delta.  I found more new sorts of people:  Africans, Australians, Arabs and Indians all of whom created a new sense of region for me, less of Mainland China, more of Oceania and South-East Asia.  

My last observations on the way home were the statues of the Eight Martyrs. I couldn’t read their plaques for details but they were impressive all-the-same, standing ten-feet in height, waving books, guns, or with hands-to-hips.  (I gather they fomented the overthrow of the last Chinese Emperor in 1911. Guangzhou is also famous for being the first place where unions protested and precluding the 1952, ‘Red Wave’.)

The next morning I went to the Chinese Import and Export Fair—the Consumerist Wave—I’d come for.  The building had an outer shell of horizontal beams that made it look like a space ship.  From top deck I looked down the hazy river at the elegant city skyline before entering the wild interior of the building.  

I found a map and charted my course around the mini-city of a convention centre.  I wanted to start with Medicines and Medical Devices, see Garments and Textiles, Foods, and Sports and Recreation. 

The cornucopia of stuff was amazing.  Among the more bizarre things were infra-red light-healer machines, Essence of Chicken (?), thermal tattoo printers, silicon infant-delivery apparatuses for midwife training, and ‘wild-buffalo’ sports drink.  I didn’t succeed in finding anyone to answer my questions of ‘why do Chinese men appear to have more hair than Westerners’ and ‘why do all Chinese seem to sleep so easily?’ (often in crowed public places), but I did find another potential health product:  moxibustion.  What it is generally-speaking, is the burning of mugwort or rose herb to create heat and stimulate blood circulation to areas of the skin.  You put a stick of the incense-like stuff in a flashlight-sized metal stick, light it, cap it with a vented orb that heats up and apply it to your skin.  I don’t know if it was the smell or the soft, indirect heat but the sensation was pleasant when the salesperson put the stick on the back of my neck. 

Tired from walking around so much, I went back to the hotel.  (I grabbed a herbal tea on my way back to help my inner fire.  Inner fire is caused by—among other things—fast food which I’d had for lunch.)  I lay down for a bit and then went out for dinner.  I had bbq duck, steamed brocoli and beef balls and two Pearl River beers, and went exploring in a new direction: South.

The Pearl River is about one-two hundred meters wide, trafficed by tour boats and Frisbee-sized turtles, spanned by numerous bridges, and lined by wide sidewalks of strolling Guangzhou-ians.  At night the bridges and boats are lit up in bright pink, yellow and green lights, flashing and morphing continuously.  It’s a circus complete with monkey handlers on the sidewalks.  (I’d never been so close to a monkey in such a human environment.  It looked extremely relatable minus the collar and leash.)

I came to sign with a map of the area and decided to go look for the founder of Zen Buddhism’s temple and ‘nylon market’, whatever that was.  I picked up a foot-and-a-half long piece of skinned sugar cane that I mulched and I sucked on on the way.

I didn’t find the temple but couldn’t miss the ‘nylon market.’  ‘Nylon’ was clearly misprinted ‘neon’ because this placed burned my retinas.  Imagine a thousand Times Squares and you’ll be a little way there.  This is what I think should be shown has a textbook example of ‘China in transition.’  

Despite the sugar cane I was tired and wanted to get a good sleep for my train ride home.  I passed some seedier parts of town outside of the nylon market where pre-teenaged boys solicited “massages” and street lights were sparse.  I made it back to my hotel unmolested.

Check out.  Train station.  Seat.  (On my way to the station I saw a living severed fish-head the size of a large Pike’s. Gross.) Only room for luggage was under my seat on the train.  It half-jutted out into the aisle-way that was packed with standing-room ticket-holders, carts and more luggage.  I drank some instant coffee and read.  

This section of the train was much less comfortable and the amount of cigarettes and ramen consumed was much greater than in the sleeper cabins.  Having no personal space let me appreciate how talkative Chinese people seam to be:  the group beside me talked for six hours straight at one point (all the seats faced each other).  One guy made use of my bag as a seat/bed.  

Coffee, ramen, dragon’s eye fruit (like lychees), soy sauce-marinated sunflower seeds, and reading passed the day and evening.  I managed a few winks of sleep and gratefully saw the Northern poplars again in the morning—Southern chaos was starting to wear on me.  We got into Beijing West train station and I walked through the Chinese Government bureaus district on my way to the subway.  I smiled at smiling Pekinese dogs and the orderly street-scape.  

But at the subway station I discovered the trains weren’t running.  I guess I was still in a different place within a much different place after all. Oh well, another cab got me safely to my destination.  

“China’s Grand Strategy” by Godfee Roberts is a thought-provoking cultural and political commentary (www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MJ25Ad02.html).  One of Roberts’s article’s many insights the following: “Since China’s leaders are not beholden to anyone for “campaign contributions” they are free to act in the country’s best interest.”  This indirect reference to the conflict of interests in the North American political/social system, the requirement of someone to gain huge amounts of money in order to hold power, has also been pointed out by the Occupy Wall St. movement.  The facts of escalating unemployment and the financial world being on the perpetual brink of disaster also call the prevailing way of doing things into question.  I’d like to sketch out some of the underlying issues of political reform dialogue as I see them and in comparison with Chinese society.

With the end of the Cold War, North America lost its common purpose, its pride, and a collective consciousness.  We live fragmented and partisan existences, and define ourselves in opposition to Right or Left, Artist or Money-Maker, and Atheist or Believer, just to name a few labels in our psychic system of self-construction.  This isn’t news to anyone but with the (re)emergence of China as a political, economic and cultural leader, the question of alternative systems rears its head higher.

China is full of divisions and boundaries not to mention a host of issues surrounding personal freedom.  But a collaborative, less polarized approach to public life has seamed to work for it.  Collectivism based on Confucian-humanist beliefs enabled China to be the most advanced society in history for two millennia before the 19th century, and it has had a large part to play in the country’s rise since the late 1970s reforms.  Similarly, a former shared purpose—one based on equality and anti-social/political stratification—helped North America become a model to the world for the much of the 20th century.   

Capitalist-democracy based on individualism has arguably lead to higher standards of living for the most people on earth than any system before it.  But this does not mean that it should be immune to criticism, nor that others aren’t worth learning about.  Probably few North Americans have even heard the term ‘socialist market economy’ which modern China admonishes or if they have, they’d dismiss it as non-sense.  In modern China, market forces determine what’s produced while ownership (read: profit) is nationalized.  I don’t have a full grasp on how this could work in North America but it is worth investigating given its increasing success and the faltering state of our status quo.

Any shift in social-economic order first requires a shift in consciousness.  Considering China’s example means considering a conversion from a doing and reason-centred set of beliefs to that of a being and motive-centred one, including a novel, almost alien attitude towards time.  For illustrative example of the differences in conceptions of time, Chinese officials’ decision to go ahead with plans to build the Three Gorges Dam took over fifty years because that was the amount of time deemed necessary to form a consensus and raise the funds to relocate the inhabitants of the would-be flooded areas.  How quickly would a majority-rule-decision-making process have taken and with what amount of dejection from the plan’s opponents?  

——

“They may rest from their labours for their deeds follow them,” is a quote from an author of what became one of the best-selling books of all time.  It begs hard questions similar to those we face with political and social reform: are we being resolute or short-sighted?  will we be able to rest on our deathbeds with clear consciences or feel we lived reactionary lives?  

I don’t know.  The jury is out over the needs of the individual and sub-group versus the needs of the whole.  I do know that while these seemingly oppositional positions among many, may never be at peace they must find balance upon pain of social alienation and unhappy death.   

Goddamn Salinger for Chrissakes damnit.  I don’t know how the Prince does it, I really don’t.  I thought he was just a one-hit-wonder, a dumb-luck sunofabitch with Catcher (I found Franny a soft follow-up read) but then I had to go and find Nine Stories.

The bastard can write.  I mean, “A Great Day for A Banana Fish” is so seamless and flowing I couldn’t catch my breath for a goddamn second.  He’s not malaise, he’s not neurosis;  he’s a savante for Chrissakes, capturing every raw perspective and viewpoint in his mind and pen.  I’d give a sweet load of loot to get to hang with the guy for an afternoon.  I feel like he’s the sort of bastard you could just shoot the breeze with and before you knew it have found a new way of seeing and thinking.  Goddamn Prince.

I’d being lying if I said I wasn’t jealous. Well, jealous might be a bit overheated.  I’m envious.  It’s like you have a mainline to the guys inner world in Nine.  ”Just before..” starts of like a lazy afternoon in the park and then, bam, runs you over like a bus.  The characters are so vivid, unmasked and complete in their incompleteness.  Dammit what am I saying.  I know,  I’m saying what I’m saying which what Salinger is saying we’re all saying all the time.  This dialogue is impenetrable.  Never a dull sentence unless it’s fitting the dull occasion or person.

Setting’s another unbelievable talent of his.  It’s sparsely mentioned yet feels palpable.  Maybe it’s the Prince’s damn ear for slang and discourse that sucks you in to the time and place; maybe it’s the verisimilitude of the inter-War period with today:  directionless malcontents and dreamers, debating and reframing their existence out of recent destruction and Depression.  These ideas really shine through in “Down at the Dinghy.”

Holy Jesus.  And I’ll bet you a cool shawbuck their there’s nobody who can transcend himself like this guy.  In “Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” you’d think your were talking to a real goddamn painter.  The effortless detail over paint-strokes and artistic technique are dumbfounding but not in the phoney ‘look at home much research I’ve done’ kind of way;  they’re obviously integral and enlivening to the plot and character.  Such a goddamn prince. 

It’s weird.  If you met Holden, Ackley Kid and all the rest of the goddamn phonies you’ll feel like you know Nine Stories when you really haven’t got a clue.  Sure these characters are of the same social milieu but they’re all entirely original, just like Salinger.  Goddamn Prince Original.

Feast of these for Chrissakes:

…I asked if she’d like to join me. 
“Thank you,” she said.  ”Perhaps just for a fraction of a moment.”

He started to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with a fright that ran through his whole body—that what he’d written was almost entirely illegible. 

I answered them cooly, overly briefly, the unimpeachable crown prince of the situation.

I sat across the room…trying to look simultaneously alert and patient and, somehow, indispensable to the organization.

I had my Experience.  Suddenly, (and I say this, I believe, with all due self-consciousness), the sun sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety three million miles a second.

“I’ll ‘exquisite day’ you, buddy, if you don’t get down off that bad this minute.”

…he had what might be called a third-class leading man’s speaking voice:  narcissistically deep and resonant, functionally prepared at a moment’s notice to out-male anyone in the same room with it, if necessary even a small boy.  When it was on vacation from its professional chores, it fell, as a rule, alternately in love with sheer volume and a theatrical brand of quietness-steadiness.  Right now, volume was in order.

Slaughter House Five.  What’s there to say about this novel.  The first time I read it I was sixteen.  I didn’t quit get it; and maybe still don’t.  It’s what’s become a classic anti-war book both in itself and as a founding member of the genre ‘there’s no sense or moral to war’—read: Catch 22. 

Obviously this latter accolade was hard to grasp for a teenager.  Having taken a second look at the book, however, there does seam to be some sense or overarching message from it.  For me, Vonnegut’s refrain is that there is destruction and evil in the world and there is also good and beauty; focus on the the good because the evil is unavoidable.  It’s a pleasing sentiment in many ways and artistically served up by the subplot of the Trafalmadorians, aliens who can see in four dimensions, the forth being time and thus everything appearing like caterpillars, eternally living in past, present and future moments, never dying.

But this leaves open the whole issue of inevitability and determinism to deal with.  It’s understandable how the approach could be welcomed by post-war generations; those in shell-shock and horror from what they’d experienced.  But how does it hold up for the rest of us?  Are we supposed to accept the idleness of our era, one comprised of fractured political life, inter-personal warring and striving against no concrete enemy but our own economic or spiritual impoverishment? 

Leonard Cohen writes in his last album we’re at war with ourselves primarily, an idea many others share.  If we’re to apply the Vonnegut approach to this war, we have to be content, or at least accepting,  of the evil within each of ourselves.  I’m not sure how to do that in the absence of fourth-dimensional vision.

David Foster Wallace’s novel, The Broom of The System, is vexing.  It succeeds at thoroughly overpowering your common sense and intuitions, at times hilariously but mostly tragically.  Protagonists Lenore Beadsman and Rick Vigorous protagonists wind up loving the books’ originally most despicable characters, ‘Wang-Dang’ Lang and Mindy Metalmen, respectively.  I encourage everyone with any post-modernist sensibilities to read this.  The Broom makes you experience the truism that the school preaches but doubtfully practices:  Bad can be good and good can be bad. 

I’ve feel more comfortable at the dentist than I did when Lenore started falling into Lang’s arms.  Why is this happening?  What moral is this that the asshole gets the girl?  We know it’s often that way in life but isn’t this supposed to be fiction? 

I respect Wallace’s integrity to tell the story we all know but hate to say:  who we end up with has little reason or justice.  I wrote and erased ‘explanation’ at the end of the last sentence because it seems that Wallace wants to say that there is one for Lang and Lenore.  ’Opposites attract’ is too simplistic.  ’The universe is moving in ways we cannot comprehend’ is somewhat more fitting but still incomplete one because Lang wanted Lenore and pursued her.  So it can’t be that everything’s left up to chance…

To be post-modern is to accept the complexity and inexplicability of the world and people.  Wallace is a disciple.  Alternatively, as Tony Kushner says, “what appears chaotic is merely the result of a limited point of view.”  Good food for thought.

What’s there to say about Joyce’s PAYM?  (That’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for you acro-illiterates.  Study your youtube!)  Is the book relevant, meaningful or interesting to contemporary life in the way a timeless work of art is supposed to be?  I’m undecided.  There are definitely passages in it that transcend space and time such as the debates among schoolmates over a practical versus principaled occupations, coming to understand ‘squalid’ adult life and infatuating and infuriating first loves and desire.  What’s not so apparent is the relevance of aesthetic worldviews or philosophies anymore.  Perhaps it’s just a by-product of living in North North America, a generally utilitarian and pragmatic place, but I struggle to see any mainstream cultural resonance with the code of beauty and mystery.  Certainly beauty, in Joyce’s primarily lyrical sense of the word, is a by-gone concept (‘LMFAO!’  ’Optimization’  ’Input’ ‘Output’).  And mystery: forget it.  Who in the information age, the knowledge economy would admit to wonder or uncertainty?  ’Google it,’ ‘Wiki it’.  (The early pages of PAYM are especially intriguing on this subject, the young boy’s musings of ‘everybody and everywhere’—‘what a big thought’.)  

The theme of mystery is of course influenced by the epoch in which PAYM is set—Catholicism-dominated Ireland—but does carry relevance to contemporary life, if even as just a counter-example to our omniscient age.  The Fall story in Genesis, man’s banishment from Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge nowadays serves as an offense to most freedom-seeking people’s consciences.  The equation of ‘knowledge = evil’ seams indeed appalling on many levels and is a sticking point even for a mystic like myself. But while I agree knowledge is good in most contexts, maybe the fable is wrongly interpreted as not dependant on circumstance.  Knowledge, when you have all your bodily (spiritual?) wants taken care of is perhaps indicative of an unbalanced soul.

But I digress.  What is this philosophy of aestheticism or Ireland that Joyce preaches and I mean to incorporate or discard from current-day thinking?  I do mean to read more scholarly work in the area.  There were Germans and undoubtedly others who proclaimed aesthetic experience as the path to god.  In practice, their aestheticism is more of the musical variety compared to that of Joyce and Ireland’s.  And Wittgenstein postulated language as central to his worldview-universe-ordering system.  But PAYM overtly denigrates ‘idealists’ and Germans typically are known to be so especially in comparison to empiricist English and Celts.  Then the latter group is not embraced by the barb, either.  He dismisses ‘black protestantism’ early in PAYM, a religion largely tethered to empiricists.  So where does Joyce fall in epistemologically, if he’s neither realist or idealist?  

PAYM points to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle for answers, thinkers I’m not very familiar with.  I do think that Aristotle believed in atomism or forms beneath surface appearances.  But how does this reconcile with Joyce extremely linguistic figuration of reality?  It’s almost as if he thought that rather than words representing objects, objects represented words.  It’s a thesis that Ulysses would support given the primacy to speech—albeit internal—over action in that book.

Objects beholden to words; signified’s as stand-in’s and reference points for what really matters and orders the universe—the signifier.  It’s not a completely new idea.  Christianity and many world religions suggest that text is sacrosanct and philosophers have argued that language is indeed reality-creating (Wittgenstein).  The idea suggests that language in its highest (poetry) and lowest (billboards) forms are visible or describable in the world of things and events.  It’s a simultaneously uplifting and damning proposition, one that leads to extraordinary and torturous realms of existence.  (Passages on the bliss of intimacy and pain of hell attest to this statement.)  I’m not sure it offers a state of mind or philosophy to aspire to; I would like to call it a humanity-affirming one but of course that word carries several connotations or objective reference points, cruelty and creativity to name a few.

In simpler terms PAYM is about a young man trying to find his place in his country and world.  Joyce vividly depicts the ecstasies and distresses that this can cause.  Likely it is still a theme alive and well today as ever but it seams to have shifted from less of a moral/spiritual/artistic location exercise to a bodily/social/scientific one—at least in North North America.  Still, for the pro-PAYM side, It’s a comforting thought to know that Joyce found a place he was confident in not-withstanding the obvious tensions he saw in any direction in life.  

onthebrod:

I was amped; a car full of hotties blasted past us, going to Mobile. We had to hook up with them. I peeled off my shirt and flexed for them. A little later when we wanted some brews, Dean cruised into a gas station all quiet as hell, saw the dude inside was asleep, busted out, stole some beers, made sure the dude didn’t wake up, and rolled off like a ninja with a 30-rack of Natty for our pilgrimage.

Order your copy of On The Bro’d on Amazon or Barnes & Noble

I’ve been reading about former US President Lyndon Johnson.  Of particular note is one historical chain of events:  When Kennedy was assassinated Johnson acted dually noble and monsterous.  In one breath he refused to leave Dallas without Jackie and then called Bobby in order to secure his endorsement for succession—his brother’s death just recently learned of.  

Clearly the same person can be alternately a hero and villain, possessing high integrity and depravity.  I hope to unearth more of these nuances in my travels with and learnings of the human condition.  

What’s it mean to say a person has emotional problems?  If you take emotions to be the basis of morals, is it the same as saying he has ‘moral problems’?  Sounds absurd.

I’ve been thinking about these questions in the context of an anti-morality kick I’m on.  I’ll never be a hedonist but I’d like to escape some of the stifling tropes accompanying notions of good and bad, just and unjust, mostly because they take up a lot of time and partly because they’re intellectually flawed.  

And at the same time, I think emotions may have already usurped more traditional moral categories in term of our vernacular.  Doesn’t modern culture expound the virtues of being positive, energetic and happy?  Terms like ‘virtuous’ and ‘noble’, ‘degenerate’ and ‘trespassing’ have virtually disappeared.  I think that emotions are the grids and channels through which the world is now shaped—at least as much as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were before.

The idea that we’re circumscribing existence in term of emotional categories raises a couple questions:  Where do emotions come from and where will they go?

To the first, simple:  The brain.  Ok, but where else?  What are the other parts to our emotional principles and formulations?   Probably our parents and community.  From house to house and place to place different emotions are emphasized and shunned for certain.  Pop culture is another input.  We all know from looking at any advertising that the highest state of pleasure is sex and celebrity, right?  

I’ve recently realized I don’t need to give my attention to advertising or Jersey Shore   and dwelling on parental influences is a waste of time as we’re all a unique collection of experiences.  So then what do people free of emotional labels look like?  Robots?  I’m not an advocate of this form of existence either but if we blindly follow preordered feelings aren’t we already there?  

Sartre said that emotions were a reordering of the rational universe into one that follows some magic logic or system to escape unwanted or ultra-wanted circumstances.  Maybe we’re living in the most magical of times after all.  

This idea comes from Jeff Eugenides’s book ‘Middlesex’.  Driving through Detroit on a freeway one of the characters remarks how much stuff is always going on; people falling in love, getting root channels, having arguments, doing homework…I thought I’d try to add to this list. 

• Funny people
• Beautiful people
• Buses
• Chefs
• Cheeses 
• Emotions 
• Families
• Failures 
• Successes

I’m feeling pretend-sophical today so I want to talk about Nietzche, the saviour of soreness and prophet of pestilence.

I just finished Beyond Good and Evil.  It ended on a high note.  Fred writes: “Now the world is laughing, the dread curtain is rent, the wedding day has come for light and darkness…” I didn’t follow or like a lot of this book but the last sentence made me happy.  The idea of marriage of good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and sadness is a liberating concept, akin to Daoism’s ying and yang.

That said, I’m not sure how Nietzche proposes we get Beyond.  I guess he’d say the first thing to do is abandon the notion of capital-T truth.  I agree with him that most epistemological arguments are in fact moral ones; when we talk about what’s true we often mean what’s right whether or not we can admit it.  But given the enormity of information and factors involved in determining what’s true, it’s easy to see how morality or other dogma have snuck into the picture as short-cuts for making sense of the world and developing some degree of control over it.  How are we not supposed to take shortcuts, especially if everyone else does?  ”One must know how to conserve oneself,” Nietzche rejoins sounding oddly Protestant.  Or, he continues, we can turn to love and art, embrace dissonance and Dionysus, admonish the free, ever-rebelling spirit and despise absolutists vehemently. 

But I worry how much these ideas are useful today.  Nietzche is often associated with fascism and nihilism, rightfully scorned and defeated topics of our era.  Maybe I just lack the will or German-ness to be impolite and unashamed of my ideas or maybe Fred needs online dating.


Beyond quotations: 

To recognize untruth as a condition of life…means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion (pg. 36)

Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘creation of the world’, to causa prima. (pg. 39)

It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance (pg. 65).

…in so far as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own deepest, most midnight, most midday solitude - such a type of man are we, we free spirits (pg. 73).

Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible (pg. 94).

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil (pg. 103).

Love brings to light the exalted and concealed qualities of a lover - what is rare and exceptional in him:  to that extent it can also conceal what is normal in him (pg. 104).

Pity in a man of knowledge seams almost ludicrous.  Like sensitive hands on a cyclops.  (pg. 105).

‘Not that you have lied to me but that I no longer believe you.  That is what has distressed me - ’ (pg. 107).

I’m a vain bastard and want to impose my views on others.  So I’m switching my blob from blogspot to here, where there are more people (2) I know.