July 9, 2013:
Three months since I've posted a blog. Shameful. I've been busy writing magazine assignments and I've felt the loss; this blog is my comfort and myself, and magazine assignments, while they're fine and often very interesting, do not leave you free to be yourself. But I finished the last one this morning, I've heard from my editor, who's pleased, not to mention prompt, and now I'm at loose ends for a little while. And when that happens, I often turn to TLS.
Aka the Times Literary Supplement, for those who are not as bookish as I am. It is the best of the big three of book reviews, the others being the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. They constitute my university in a way, certainly my continuing education. They cover all kinds of subjects I'm never going to know much about otherwise and give me enough background information to make my way around them, and they give me ideas, expand my mind, all the hard candy an odd brain like mine thrives on. For instance, in the latest TLS, just arrived, I learned, in the order in which the information came, that Joseph Duveen, the great art dealer, connoisseur, and creator of collections who flourished in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, sold to Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Jones of Pittsburgh, for a considerable sum, a very poor copy of a Gainsborough as the real thing. Which means that Duveen was a crook, much suspected over the years but here confirmed.
And then that Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press, the famous French house that first published Lolita and much of Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, as well as a great deal of elegant pornography, lost his fortune investing in a restaurant in Paris, La Grande Severine, housed in a basement next to what had been a cemetery, and when they tried to expand they found themselves inconvenienced by having to remove skulls at night, which they dumped in remote sections of the Seine. When they ran out of remote sections of the river, they dumped them in the garbage cans of nearby restaurants.
Then there's this, in the same review, a story that "Becket's use of deracinated heads in his work may have been inspired by a grisly experiment in which the heads of guillotined criminals were allegedly questioned for several minutes, responding to questions by blinking their eyelids." This couldn't happen, of course, as the reviewer pointed out, although--there's often an although--Camus pointed out in his essay on the guillotine that guillotined heads have been seen trying to speak.
If you don't find this amusing and refreshing, as well as horrid, you need to look more deeply into the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or those of the aptly named Edward Gorey.
But the best for me came a couple of weeks ago, when I discovered via TLS that Bloomsbury has just published Vol. 99 of The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, a project that has been ongoing for the last twenty-five years. It just pleased me no end. Scholarship! It's indefatigable. This series translates these ancient commentators into English, most for the first time. The volume in question contains the work of Aeneas of Gaza, his Theophrastus, along with the Ammonius of Zacharias of Mytilene. Hardly names to conjure with, and at first sight it's easy to think, my, what a waste of paper the whole project is. But think about it: what if hidden in this bulk lurk gems of forgotten wisdom, or better yet revealing comments on Aristotle's best-known lost book, the book on comedy that was the twin of his book on tragedy, which I've read and is still read; it's a standard text on Greek tragedy, it's where we get the idea of hubris. The lost book on comedy was the hinge, furthermore, around which the story in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose turned, and I've read that, too, and they made a movie of it starring Sean Connery (whom I'm said to resemble). All knowledge is not equal but it all has value. At first I thought it was a joke that they have begun to publish all the letters of Henry James, which will run to a similar frightful length; it will include notes accepting dinner invitations, or refusing them; perhaps laundry lists; in short, everything left. I have the four volumes of his letters previously collected and think it sufficient. But forty-four volumes? A hundred and forty-four? Well, I suppose so. You never know, if you're a scholar, where you'll find the facts you need to back up an idea or a theory, or guide you down the road you're taking into some arcane subject matter that, although arcane, is also fascinating, and may matter in ways you never suspected.
TLS, then. It gives me hope. It also gave me the first money I ever made writing, when they published a poem of mine, many years ago. Now they won't publish my poems at all; the poetry editor has told me not to bother, he will never publish my poems. But the late Ian Hamilton, revered on both sides of the Atlantic, was the poetry editor then and he bought my poem, which was called "The French Revolution." Pretty good poem. And to be frank about it, the poems they publish now are generally pisspoor. The fee was one English pound; the check came in U. S. dollars, about three of them. Sweet. And it published a fine full-page review of my last book. How could I not love it? It reveres learning. We fail to revere learning at our great peril.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
ODD JOBS
April 2, 2013:
You do some crazy things when you're young. I once tried to climb up a scree slope on a steep mountainside, made about one foot of elevation for every two feet I slid backward, and that was not a winning tactic. But I did make it to the trail somehow without falling to my death. Another time I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier. I've never skied in my life, but I was in a hurry, I was with somebody who taught me how to do it, and voila! I got down that mountain much faster than made any sense. Then there was the time two girls in a convertible cut me off on Rte. 101, driving north toward San Francisco from Big Sur. The road was crowded, they were weaving in and out of traffic, and they pissed me off. So I resolved to do the same thing to them, drove like a maniac, caught up to them, and then raced them up the highway. Stupid. It took me about ten minutes to figure out I could die doing this, and for what? a minor irritation? I slowed down. I'm still alive.
And then the jobs. One of my summer jobs when I was young and in college was working in a small factory that made molded industrial rubber parts. I worked the "evening" shift, which started at three p.m. and ended at two a.m. The rubber came roughly shaped to the size of what you were molding and you had to put it in a press and pull a lever. It was sort of like working a slot machine. But in a furnace. When I walked in at three every day it was usually about 120 degrees in the place, tapering off to about 95 as the night wore on. We molded rubber to cafeteria trays, made automobile parts out of rubber, and God knows what else. A country music station went all the time. That's where I learned the words to a song about taters: "Taters never did taste good with chicken on the plate, But I had to eat 'em just the same. That's why I always look so poor and have these puny ways. 'Cause taters never did taste good with chicken on the plate." I can still sing it, and with just the right twang to it, too.
I went from that job to a Johnson & Johnson factory where my job was to test the foam content of baby shampoo. You did that by pulling bottles at random off the line, pouring them into a glass container, and measuring the level of foam they produced. I wanted to go on the TV show "What's My Line?" for that one, but they weren't interested. The next summer I went to a DuPont factory in Linden, N. J., where I worked rotating shifts in a plant that produced an industrial cleanser called sulfamic acid in powder form out of crystallized urea and sulfuric acid. It wasn't exactly an ecological paradise. The powder would get into your pants pockets and eat through them. I still have scars on my thighs from that. It ate up shoes in a month, or less. I made a lot of money, half of which I used to buy my girlfriend at the time, later my wife, a diamond engagement ring. And that was worth it. Two children who are wonderful human beings. Two grandchildren, the same. Anyway, the night shift was the hardest. I would go to the roof of the factory and watch the sun come up over Staten Island, then have to drive home, totally exhausted, staying awake only by sticking my head out the window as I drove. A learning experience, no doubt about it. How many people, after all, know what sulfamic acid is, or what it cleans? Or that it comes in 400-lb. barrels? I also learned how to operate a forklift truck, which was great fun. I believe I could still do it.
But the oddest job of all was the last salaried job I've ever had. In grad school, running out of money, with no financial aid available, I took a job as an aviation pioneer's personal historian. I thought at the time it was probably the only job of its kind in the country, but probably not--there must have been one or two others. Anyway, my job was to collect documents out of his past, organize them, create an archive, interview everybody I could find who had been involved in his past, and write a book. His name was Sherman Fairchild, he was known as the father of aerial photography, having invented the first practical aerial camera, he had been involved in all kinds of early developments in aviation, he was a personal friend of Howard Hughes, had known Lindbergh and been at Roosevelt Field when he took off for Paris; he had posed with Gloria Swanson in front of the first airplane his company made; he had been on the cover of Time, been featured in Fortune, and had hired Robert Noyce, who later founded Intel, away from Bell Labs and thereby turned Fairchild Camera & Instrument into the leading maker of transistors in the country.
What did I know about aerial cameras? About airplanes and how they work? About computer technology, about a hundred other things he was involved in? You guessed it. Zilch. Nada. But I had to learn. And did I care about any of this stuff? No, I was studying sixteenth-century English literature: Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, when I was hired. But I had to care, even though this was definitely not the future I had in mind.
To my amazement, what I learned was--wow, it was all interesting. Really, really interesting. I was beginning to understand that the world was a deeply fascinating place, that everything about it was interesting if you kept your mind open to it. Even the way a between-the-lens shutter on a camera operates proved interesting, once you understood the serious problems involved in making one that was both very large, three inches across, and very fast. I won't go into it here, but that was the problem Fairchild solved, and that began the process that now allows Google Earth to take pictures from hundreds of miles in space capable of showing you tending your steak on the Weber grill on your back deck.
Not only that, but Fairchild was chairman of two companies bearing his name on the Fortune 500 list employing a total of 30,000 people, his father had been the principal founder of IBM, he was that company's largest individual stockholder, and because I worked for him individually, not for one of his companies, I got to see how the world works from the top down. I interviewed Bobby Lehman in his office, the walls lined with Italian primitives (now hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), met Robert Kennedy, met engineers, rich businessmen, financiers, socialites. A retired Admiral on one of the Fairchild boards took me to lunch and explained how things looked from his perch. A retired general did the same at the Cosmos Club in Washington. In Sewickley Heights, PA, I sat with a man on his terrace looking over a beautiful valley drinking mint juleps and when I remarked, "Nice view," he told me he owned it. Really, the whole thing was incredible, from beginning to end. When Fairchild died he left all his personal employees, and I was one, various years of salary--I got seven years--depending on how long they had worked for him. The book was canceled when he died, but the archive went into the Library of Congress, where it's the largest aviation archive they have. I used the money to launch my career as a writer.
Now I sit back in wonder--did all that really happen to me? The weird jobs, the sulfamic acid eating away my shoes, Fairchild and the bonanza of the totally unexpected inheritance? I didn't plan any of it, didn't wish for it, couldn't possibly have imagined it. It was a gift. It opened my mind, all of it, from the dirty laboring jobs to the interviews--I did seventy, eighty of them, traveled all over the country to do them--the work with archives, with technological history, with aviation history--it opened doors everywhere inside my head, let me see the world and the way it works, its incomprehensible complexity, its unfairness; it taught me how power structures function; it showed me what money buys and how it affects people, it revealed the world's richness, its mystery; and it taught me how to write. How did I get to be so lucky?
That's not a question you can ever answer. But I come away from it with this thought: so much of our life just happens to us; things are not in our control. Good or bad, life comes your way and you have to deal with it. But if you let it--if you don't make premature judgments, don't curse your fate, don't fight fights you have no hope of winning, then--well, quite often things take care of themselves. You may not get what you want, but you get what you need. And you can learn from it, no matter what happens. Because that's what the earth really is. It's a school. And as in any school, to do well in it requires an open mind.
You do some crazy things when you're young. I once tried to climb up a scree slope on a steep mountainside, made about one foot of elevation for every two feet I slid backward, and that was not a winning tactic. But I did make it to the trail somehow without falling to my death. Another time I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier. I've never skied in my life, but I was in a hurry, I was with somebody who taught me how to do it, and voila! I got down that mountain much faster than made any sense. Then there was the time two girls in a convertible cut me off on Rte. 101, driving north toward San Francisco from Big Sur. The road was crowded, they were weaving in and out of traffic, and they pissed me off. So I resolved to do the same thing to them, drove like a maniac, caught up to them, and then raced them up the highway. Stupid. It took me about ten minutes to figure out I could die doing this, and for what? a minor irritation? I slowed down. I'm still alive.
And then the jobs. One of my summer jobs when I was young and in college was working in a small factory that made molded industrial rubber parts. I worked the "evening" shift, which started at three p.m. and ended at two a.m. The rubber came roughly shaped to the size of what you were molding and you had to put it in a press and pull a lever. It was sort of like working a slot machine. But in a furnace. When I walked in at three every day it was usually about 120 degrees in the place, tapering off to about 95 as the night wore on. We molded rubber to cafeteria trays, made automobile parts out of rubber, and God knows what else. A country music station went all the time. That's where I learned the words to a song about taters: "Taters never did taste good with chicken on the plate, But I had to eat 'em just the same. That's why I always look so poor and have these puny ways. 'Cause taters never did taste good with chicken on the plate." I can still sing it, and with just the right twang to it, too.
I went from that job to a Johnson & Johnson factory where my job was to test the foam content of baby shampoo. You did that by pulling bottles at random off the line, pouring them into a glass container, and measuring the level of foam they produced. I wanted to go on the TV show "What's My Line?" for that one, but they weren't interested. The next summer I went to a DuPont factory in Linden, N. J., where I worked rotating shifts in a plant that produced an industrial cleanser called sulfamic acid in powder form out of crystallized urea and sulfuric acid. It wasn't exactly an ecological paradise. The powder would get into your pants pockets and eat through them. I still have scars on my thighs from that. It ate up shoes in a month, or less. I made a lot of money, half of which I used to buy my girlfriend at the time, later my wife, a diamond engagement ring. And that was worth it. Two children who are wonderful human beings. Two grandchildren, the same. Anyway, the night shift was the hardest. I would go to the roof of the factory and watch the sun come up over Staten Island, then have to drive home, totally exhausted, staying awake only by sticking my head out the window as I drove. A learning experience, no doubt about it. How many people, after all, know what sulfamic acid is, or what it cleans? Or that it comes in 400-lb. barrels? I also learned how to operate a forklift truck, which was great fun. I believe I could still do it.
But the oddest job of all was the last salaried job I've ever had. In grad school, running out of money, with no financial aid available, I took a job as an aviation pioneer's personal historian. I thought at the time it was probably the only job of its kind in the country, but probably not--there must have been one or two others. Anyway, my job was to collect documents out of his past, organize them, create an archive, interview everybody I could find who had been involved in his past, and write a book. His name was Sherman Fairchild, he was known as the father of aerial photography, having invented the first practical aerial camera, he had been involved in all kinds of early developments in aviation, he was a personal friend of Howard Hughes, had known Lindbergh and been at Roosevelt Field when he took off for Paris; he had posed with Gloria Swanson in front of the first airplane his company made; he had been on the cover of Time, been featured in Fortune, and had hired Robert Noyce, who later founded Intel, away from Bell Labs and thereby turned Fairchild Camera & Instrument into the leading maker of transistors in the country.
What did I know about aerial cameras? About airplanes and how they work? About computer technology, about a hundred other things he was involved in? You guessed it. Zilch. Nada. But I had to learn. And did I care about any of this stuff? No, I was studying sixteenth-century English literature: Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, when I was hired. But I had to care, even though this was definitely not the future I had in mind.
To my amazement, what I learned was--wow, it was all interesting. Really, really interesting. I was beginning to understand that the world was a deeply fascinating place, that everything about it was interesting if you kept your mind open to it. Even the way a between-the-lens shutter on a camera operates proved interesting, once you understood the serious problems involved in making one that was both very large, three inches across, and very fast. I won't go into it here, but that was the problem Fairchild solved, and that began the process that now allows Google Earth to take pictures from hundreds of miles in space capable of showing you tending your steak on the Weber grill on your back deck.
Not only that, but Fairchild was chairman of two companies bearing his name on the Fortune 500 list employing a total of 30,000 people, his father had been the principal founder of IBM, he was that company's largest individual stockholder, and because I worked for him individually, not for one of his companies, I got to see how the world works from the top down. I interviewed Bobby Lehman in his office, the walls lined with Italian primitives (now hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), met Robert Kennedy, met engineers, rich businessmen, financiers, socialites. A retired Admiral on one of the Fairchild boards took me to lunch and explained how things looked from his perch. A retired general did the same at the Cosmos Club in Washington. In Sewickley Heights, PA, I sat with a man on his terrace looking over a beautiful valley drinking mint juleps and when I remarked, "Nice view," he told me he owned it. Really, the whole thing was incredible, from beginning to end. When Fairchild died he left all his personal employees, and I was one, various years of salary--I got seven years--depending on how long they had worked for him. The book was canceled when he died, but the archive went into the Library of Congress, where it's the largest aviation archive they have. I used the money to launch my career as a writer.
Now I sit back in wonder--did all that really happen to me? The weird jobs, the sulfamic acid eating away my shoes, Fairchild and the bonanza of the totally unexpected inheritance? I didn't plan any of it, didn't wish for it, couldn't possibly have imagined it. It was a gift. It opened my mind, all of it, from the dirty laboring jobs to the interviews--I did seventy, eighty of them, traveled all over the country to do them--the work with archives, with technological history, with aviation history--it opened doors everywhere inside my head, let me see the world and the way it works, its incomprehensible complexity, its unfairness; it taught me how power structures function; it showed me what money buys and how it affects people, it revealed the world's richness, its mystery; and it taught me how to write. How did I get to be so lucky?
That's not a question you can ever answer. But I come away from it with this thought: so much of our life just happens to us; things are not in our control. Good or bad, life comes your way and you have to deal with it. But if you let it--if you don't make premature judgments, don't curse your fate, don't fight fights you have no hope of winning, then--well, quite often things take care of themselves. You may not get what you want, but you get what you need. And you can learn from it, no matter what happens. Because that's what the earth really is. It's a school. And as in any school, to do well in it requires an open mind.
Monday, March 18, 2013
BAD ART
March 18, 2013:
We were in Miami late in February for a long weekend, staying with friends, and spent a morning at the Rubell Family Museum, which has a large collection of contemporary art. We've been there before but they were showing new acquisitions which we hadn't seen.
Let me describe a few things: first, a room filled with very large, no, enormous paintings about ten feet high, six wide, covered with blobs of paint of various colors, no attempt to harmonize the colors, the paint applied not with brushes but out of buckets, thrown or shoveled on the canvas, dribbled on, gotten on one way or another, and applied in such thicknesses that it cannot dry. Already gobs of paint were starting to peel off the canvas and would soon wind up on the floor. Each canvas, the labels told us, weighed about 800 pounds. The instability of the paint was intentional, the labels also said. The painter was someone named Murillo, if I remember correctly (no relation to the great Spanish Old Master). These paintings were very ugly, and that also seemed to be intentional. Intentional and impractical. If you wanted to own them you would have to hang them in a room with a cement floor, easily cleaned. They looked like the inside of a septic tank.
In another room equally large canvases pieced together out of smaller ones, each of the smaller ones covered with dirt, dust, random lines, and some stenciled signs, in smudges and smears, representing nothing identifiable except perhaps the floor of a back alley somewhere. In this room a photographer was at work taking pictures of Mr. Rubell himself, and a woman I took to be his wife. The labels in this room told us that this was the work of a visiting artist who had spent two weeks working feverishly, night and day, to make fifty or so of these giant pieces of dreck. I thought of Rilke, writing the Duino Elegies in a similar fever of work and a similarly short time. How the world has changed!
Yet another room was occupied by a large collection of Budweiser six-packs, most of them stacked against a wall, a few in free-standing piles. This was evidently meant to make a political statement about commercialization and the shallowness of American culture. I suppose if you were utterly naive and had never thought about such things, this display might strike you as profound. As it stood it was nothing more than a footnote, way out of date, to Andy Warhol, a much wittier artist than this.
What has happened to contemporary art? It just gets worse and worse. During the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s I had a job, which lasted, alas, only briefly (it paid very well), writing art commentary for the website of the Louis Vuitton company. To see what was happening with contemporary art Lorraine and I spent a day in West Chelsea in NYC touring galleries. We saw a Damien Hirst exhibition at Gagosian, who then had only one gallery in West Chelsea; now he has them all over the world. I think the shark was there, in his giant tank of formaldehyde. Also on display inside a wire cage was a doctor's closet full of medicines and stray medical instruments. None of his dot paintings were there; I was grateful for that. On the same street we wandered into an open door in a building devoted mostly to small art galleries and found there a gallery where only one thing was on display. It was a big thing, a bathtub made out of subway tiles into which red water, meant, presumably, to represent blood, was constantly dripping from pipes in the ceiling. When the show opened there had been a naked woman sitting in this bathtub. She was gone when we wandered in, but you could watch a video loop of her sitting in the bathtub if you wanted. The gallery was empty of other viewers and the artist himself came in while we were there, looking exceedingly morose. Maybe he'd gotten a bad review, or worse, no review at all. In any case we were forced to say something, like "how interesting," because the gallery owner insisted on introducing us. I felt bad for him. He clearly believed, if what he called his art was any evidence, that life sucked big time. Even the sky pees blood on you.
At the Rubell collection I made a concerted effort to find some common ground with this art, but could not. None of what was on display was meant to be lived with. It was too ugly, too big to fit in most houses (where would you put that bathtub? what would it cost to keep the blood flowing? what would it cost to keep a naked girl in it?), and too scolding. Besides, to actually buy art involves you in the whole capitalist "art system" of galleries, auctions, money the root of all evil, and that's corrupting. This art is meant to be pure in its motives. It wants to rebel against everything, against the wall it hangs on, against the gallery system, against art as an aesthetic object and especially against the standards of beauty that aesthetics implies. It wants to criticize, to abjure all categories of gender, which is of course socially constructed and therefore inauthentic, it wants to escape all the traditional genres, it will not trust any kind of representation. It is often deliberately impermanent, so that permanence, and all pretense to permanence, can also be questioned and challenged and politicized. Thus the globs of paint falling off the canvas.
It is also angry, and as anger usually is, it feels itself to be righteous. It wants to be subversive on every conceivable level. It wants no part of subtlety, wit, grace. It wants only to make statements, usually political, and almost always they are extremely banal. Sometimes, as in Jeff Koons's case, the statements are about art objects and what they are supposed to "mean," and on a very superficial level this is presumed by those who buy Koons's piece to be witty and profound. Well, guess what? You've just wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars, because this is a one-trick pony and your heirs will curse you for wasting their inheritance. It's just not that interesting. None of it.
So this is a giant con, and it's sad. At the heart of it is a market that flourishes despite all the supposed disdain for the market, and the fashionable people flock to the art fairs, which are multiplying geometrically, along with the celebrities and the parties and the hangers-on. William Blake was wrong. The road of excess does not lead to the palace of wisdom. It leads to Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and the like, all unspeakably rich now but still wearing no clothes.
We were in Miami late in February for a long weekend, staying with friends, and spent a morning at the Rubell Family Museum, which has a large collection of contemporary art. We've been there before but they were showing new acquisitions which we hadn't seen.
Let me describe a few things: first, a room filled with very large, no, enormous paintings about ten feet high, six wide, covered with blobs of paint of various colors, no attempt to harmonize the colors, the paint applied not with brushes but out of buckets, thrown or shoveled on the canvas, dribbled on, gotten on one way or another, and applied in such thicknesses that it cannot dry. Already gobs of paint were starting to peel off the canvas and would soon wind up on the floor. Each canvas, the labels told us, weighed about 800 pounds. The instability of the paint was intentional, the labels also said. The painter was someone named Murillo, if I remember correctly (no relation to the great Spanish Old Master). These paintings were very ugly, and that also seemed to be intentional. Intentional and impractical. If you wanted to own them you would have to hang them in a room with a cement floor, easily cleaned. They looked like the inside of a septic tank.
In another room equally large canvases pieced together out of smaller ones, each of the smaller ones covered with dirt, dust, random lines, and some stenciled signs, in smudges and smears, representing nothing identifiable except perhaps the floor of a back alley somewhere. In this room a photographer was at work taking pictures of Mr. Rubell himself, and a woman I took to be his wife. The labels in this room told us that this was the work of a visiting artist who had spent two weeks working feverishly, night and day, to make fifty or so of these giant pieces of dreck. I thought of Rilke, writing the Duino Elegies in a similar fever of work and a similarly short time. How the world has changed!
Yet another room was occupied by a large collection of Budweiser six-packs, most of them stacked against a wall, a few in free-standing piles. This was evidently meant to make a political statement about commercialization and the shallowness of American culture. I suppose if you were utterly naive and had never thought about such things, this display might strike you as profound. As it stood it was nothing more than a footnote, way out of date, to Andy Warhol, a much wittier artist than this.
What has happened to contemporary art? It just gets worse and worse. During the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s I had a job, which lasted, alas, only briefly (it paid very well), writing art commentary for the website of the Louis Vuitton company. To see what was happening with contemporary art Lorraine and I spent a day in West Chelsea in NYC touring galleries. We saw a Damien Hirst exhibition at Gagosian, who then had only one gallery in West Chelsea; now he has them all over the world. I think the shark was there, in his giant tank of formaldehyde. Also on display inside a wire cage was a doctor's closet full of medicines and stray medical instruments. None of his dot paintings were there; I was grateful for that. On the same street we wandered into an open door in a building devoted mostly to small art galleries and found there a gallery where only one thing was on display. It was a big thing, a bathtub made out of subway tiles into which red water, meant, presumably, to represent blood, was constantly dripping from pipes in the ceiling. When the show opened there had been a naked woman sitting in this bathtub. She was gone when we wandered in, but you could watch a video loop of her sitting in the bathtub if you wanted. The gallery was empty of other viewers and the artist himself came in while we were there, looking exceedingly morose. Maybe he'd gotten a bad review, or worse, no review at all. In any case we were forced to say something, like "how interesting," because the gallery owner insisted on introducing us. I felt bad for him. He clearly believed, if what he called his art was any evidence, that life sucked big time. Even the sky pees blood on you.
At the Rubell collection I made a concerted effort to find some common ground with this art, but could not. None of what was on display was meant to be lived with. It was too ugly, too big to fit in most houses (where would you put that bathtub? what would it cost to keep the blood flowing? what would it cost to keep a naked girl in it?), and too scolding. Besides, to actually buy art involves you in the whole capitalist "art system" of galleries, auctions, money the root of all evil, and that's corrupting. This art is meant to be pure in its motives. It wants to rebel against everything, against the wall it hangs on, against the gallery system, against art as an aesthetic object and especially against the standards of beauty that aesthetics implies. It wants to criticize, to abjure all categories of gender, which is of course socially constructed and therefore inauthentic, it wants to escape all the traditional genres, it will not trust any kind of representation. It is often deliberately impermanent, so that permanence, and all pretense to permanence, can also be questioned and challenged and politicized. Thus the globs of paint falling off the canvas.
It is also angry, and as anger usually is, it feels itself to be righteous. It wants to be subversive on every conceivable level. It wants no part of subtlety, wit, grace. It wants only to make statements, usually political, and almost always they are extremely banal. Sometimes, as in Jeff Koons's case, the statements are about art objects and what they are supposed to "mean," and on a very superficial level this is presumed by those who buy Koons's piece to be witty and profound. Well, guess what? You've just wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars, because this is a one-trick pony and your heirs will curse you for wasting their inheritance. It's just not that interesting. None of it.
So this is a giant con, and it's sad. At the heart of it is a market that flourishes despite all the supposed disdain for the market, and the fashionable people flock to the art fairs, which are multiplying geometrically, along with the celebrities and the parties and the hangers-on. William Blake was wrong. The road of excess does not lead to the palace of wisdom. It leads to Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and the like, all unspeakably rich now but still wearing no clothes.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
COINCIDENCES AGAIN
February 28, 2013:
The last time I wrote about coincidences on this site I was thinking, as I had been for a long time, about writing an essay about them. Now I have, it was published two days ago as a Kindle Single, and I'm waiting anxiously to see what happens. It's my first excursion into straight-to-the-Web electronic publishing, and it's an offbeat subject, so you can understand my anxiety. But what good is it being a writer if you don't finally take that dirt road into the woods you've passed by so many times? I lived in the country once and used to walk regularly up a nearby country road and there was an actual, not a metaphorical dirt road that did run off it, and when I walked up it at last I found an old abandoned cemetery. Came upon it at dusk, furthermore, with the woods darkening all around, and the crows and grackles flew up in a cloud when I arrived. The bodies must have been buried in cheap wooden boxes because the graves were all caved in. Plastic flowers, badly faded, decorated the flat gray stones. It had clearly never had a caretaker. The place haunts my imagination still.
And don't coincidences haunt the imagination too? They seem like messages sent from somewhere outside our lives, uncanny events that relate only to us, and yet it's by no means obvious where they come from or what they mean. Here's one out of my wife's life. Her name, as many of my readers will know because they read me through her links to this blog, is Lorraine Dusky and she's very well known, if not famous, in the world of adoption, having campaigned a good part of her life to open adoption records to adoptees so they can find out who they are and where they come from. She herself is a birth mother and found the daughter she gave up for adoption thirty years ago, and then, about six years ago, lost her to suicide. But before any of this happened, when she was a young woman, still in college, she fell in love with a young man named Tom whom she came close to marrying and regarded for years as the first, lost love of her life. As it happened they both went on to other relationships, other marriages. Tom, too, had a daughter, and died of an aneurysm when he was young; his daughter was not yet out of grade school. Lorraine fell in love with a married man, had a child by him, gave her up for adoption, married someone else, divorced that person, and eventually she and I met and married. Within a year of our marriage she had found her child and contacted her, and we have been together for over thirty years.
About three years ago she founded her blog on adoption rights, First Mother Forum. It's quite popular and she has a lot of followers among birth mothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents. One of her adoptee followers happens to be a man named Daryl Royal, an adoptee from Michigan, who's also a Facebook friend. One day she got a call out of the blue from a woman named Jennifer who had been going through her father's papers and had found the letters Lorraine had written her father, Tom, when they had been in college. Yes, that Tom. In one of them Lorraine had put her full name as a return address on the envelope. Jennifer had then looked Lorraine up and found out who she was, and learned that she had given up a daughter for adoption. Jennifer had the wild idea that her father might have been the father of that child, and she had a sister. Tom had not fathered her child, but here's the kicker. Two kickers, actually. In the middle of their phone conversation, Jennifer's husband wanted to know who she was talking to. It's Lorraine Dusky, she said, my father's girlfriend from college. Lorraine Dusky? he said. I know her. I'm a Facebook friend of hers. Jennifer's husband is Daryl Royal. And then this. Jennifer herself makes a living finding the real birth certificates of adoptees and putting them in touch with their birth parents.
I would call that spectacularly uncanny. And it reeks of meaning, brims over with the feeling that if ever two people were meant to meet, were meant to know each other, it is these two women. As they like to put it, in the alternate universe that surrounds our own everyday universe they are mother and daughter, the might-have-been mother and daughter, together at last. And Lorraine had lost a daughter, and Jennifer and her own real-life mother have long been estranged.
So who, or what, arranges these things? How do they come about, and what is their significance as a general, and fairly common, phenomenon in life? These are some of the questions that have long puzzled me, and that I talk about in my essay. Everybody has these kinds of events in his or her life, but what are they about? Is it fate at work, and what does that signify for the way the universe is ordered? If you're interested, you can find the essay at the following address:
The last time I wrote about coincidences on this site I was thinking, as I had been for a long time, about writing an essay about them. Now I have, it was published two days ago as a Kindle Single, and I'm waiting anxiously to see what happens. It's my first excursion into straight-to-the-Web electronic publishing, and it's an offbeat subject, so you can understand my anxiety. But what good is it being a writer if you don't finally take that dirt road into the woods you've passed by so many times? I lived in the country once and used to walk regularly up a nearby country road and there was an actual, not a metaphorical dirt road that did run off it, and when I walked up it at last I found an old abandoned cemetery. Came upon it at dusk, furthermore, with the woods darkening all around, and the crows and grackles flew up in a cloud when I arrived. The bodies must have been buried in cheap wooden boxes because the graves were all caved in. Plastic flowers, badly faded, decorated the flat gray stones. It had clearly never had a caretaker. The place haunts my imagination still.
And don't coincidences haunt the imagination too? They seem like messages sent from somewhere outside our lives, uncanny events that relate only to us, and yet it's by no means obvious where they come from or what they mean. Here's one out of my wife's life. Her name, as many of my readers will know because they read me through her links to this blog, is Lorraine Dusky and she's very well known, if not famous, in the world of adoption, having campaigned a good part of her life to open adoption records to adoptees so they can find out who they are and where they come from. She herself is a birth mother and found the daughter she gave up for adoption thirty years ago, and then, about six years ago, lost her to suicide. But before any of this happened, when she was a young woman, still in college, she fell in love with a young man named Tom whom she came close to marrying and regarded for years as the first, lost love of her life. As it happened they both went on to other relationships, other marriages. Tom, too, had a daughter, and died of an aneurysm when he was young; his daughter was not yet out of grade school. Lorraine fell in love with a married man, had a child by him, gave her up for adoption, married someone else, divorced that person, and eventually she and I met and married. Within a year of our marriage she had found her child and contacted her, and we have been together for over thirty years.
About three years ago she founded her blog on adoption rights, First Mother Forum. It's quite popular and she has a lot of followers among birth mothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents. One of her adoptee followers happens to be a man named Daryl Royal, an adoptee from Michigan, who's also a Facebook friend. One day she got a call out of the blue from a woman named Jennifer who had been going through her father's papers and had found the letters Lorraine had written her father, Tom, when they had been in college. Yes, that Tom. In one of them Lorraine had put her full name as a return address on the envelope. Jennifer had then looked Lorraine up and found out who she was, and learned that she had given up a daughter for adoption. Jennifer had the wild idea that her father might have been the father of that child, and she had a sister. Tom had not fathered her child, but here's the kicker. Two kickers, actually. In the middle of their phone conversation, Jennifer's husband wanted to know who she was talking to. It's Lorraine Dusky, she said, my father's girlfriend from college. Lorraine Dusky? he said. I know her. I'm a Facebook friend of hers. Jennifer's husband is Daryl Royal. And then this. Jennifer herself makes a living finding the real birth certificates of adoptees and putting them in touch with their birth parents.
I would call that spectacularly uncanny. And it reeks of meaning, brims over with the feeling that if ever two people were meant to meet, were meant to know each other, it is these two women. As they like to put it, in the alternate universe that surrounds our own everyday universe they are mother and daughter, the might-have-been mother and daughter, together at last. And Lorraine had lost a daughter, and Jennifer and her own real-life mother have long been estranged.
So who, or what, arranges these things? How do they come about, and what is their significance as a general, and fairly common, phenomenon in life? These are some of the questions that have long puzzled me, and that I talk about in my essay. Everybody has these kinds of events in his or her life, but what are they about? Is it fate at work, and what does that signify for the way the universe is ordered? If you're interested, you can find the essay at the following address:
| ||
Extraordinary Coincidences and the Meaning of Things
Lorraine, by the way, is writing an account of her amazing life that will include this story. She's about done and hoping to publish within months. I've read it. It's a winner.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
BEYOND OPINION: THREE POEMS
February 3, 2013:
Strange things, poems. They come out of an image or a phrase that emerges, as John Keats put it in a letter once, "like a whale's back in the sea of prose," unexpectedly, out of depths you cannot imagine, and it demands your attention and you know that it would be morally wrong not to respond, not to write it up, make something of it. You have no idea what yet, and it may take a very long time to develop. But if you're wise you will hold on to that first unformed message from your unknown inner life, because it appears for a reason. Because you're stupid and you don't really know your own heart. Because you're in pain, or in love, and you haven't gotten the message yet. Because something in you needs to speak. Because your body has a mind of its own. Because you're a poet, you have talent, and this is a command.
Of the twenty-five or thirty poems I would like to preserve I find, looking back at the little pile of them that I keep track of in my incredibly crowded, messy office, that many of them were written during my first marriage, which on the surface was, I thought, reasonably happy, as good as I could hope for given my own difficult personality--moody, dark, bookish, lonely. I expected to be lonely. My first wife and I were very unlike, and I thought that was the way it was always going to be; it was just the way of the world, love bridging unbridgeable gaps as best it could. My first wife had adopted sunny as her disposition but I knew her well, knew it was her own attempt to disguise from herself who she really was. It was the who she really was--passionate, more than a little bitter, struggling to keep her disappointments down--that I loved; it was the woman who, when she discovered you couldn't broil flounder fillets, took a spatula and beat them with it until fish fragments were flying all over the kitchen. But I couldn't abide the sunny surface. It was merely surface, never real, and it came across as a lie.
Those early poems when they arrived made it clear what that marriage really was. Here is the one I like best:
WALKING ON WATER
Of the place itself I remember most
clearly the frozen corrugations
in the snow, their settled patterns
and what they seemed to reveal about
the wind; that, and hearing the water
running deep under our feet near the dam.
We were always best in winter. On ice
or snow there's no place to rest
and the cold keeps talk to a minimum.
This poem came out of an actual experience when we found ourselves walking over a frozen pond, probably in Fahnestock State Park in Putnam County, not far from where we lived then. Other poems came from walks in the country. We lived for a while when the children were very young on a winding road with few houses along it that followed a small valley bottom. Hunter Brook Road. I remember a meadow on one side, thick woods on the other, and we used to take long walks up and down this road on warm evenings, to see the light fade on the meadow, listen to the birds shutting down for the night. The following poem sprang from a walk I took by myself on that road, and the way it turned dark, and who I was then. This is one of the poems I have worked on most of my life, to get right. When poems are really short like this you cannot waste even a comma; everything has to be as perfect as your talent and attention can make it. I'm probably still not quite done. But I offer it anyway. It's called
MOOD INDIGO
While the puffy clouds slowly sponged away
the light, while birds sang from their refuges
in the darkening woods, I lost track of the time;
and the country road behind me, the old trees
leaning over it, seems to have burrowed into
the night.
Have you felt this way, friends? Do
you know how it feels to wander unthinkingly
into the darkness?
Dawn always seems so far
away, while what we call headlights plunge
and careen like the Batmobile through your mood.
Friends, yes. Anyone willing to work through a poem is a friend. The marriage lasted eighteen years but we did not come out of it friends. I see that happen with some couples and I envy them their ability to talk to one another, but it was never going to happen in our case. By leaving her I seem to have awoken the bitterness she had worked so hard to hide. I am sorry for it all, every bit of it. But I couldn't have stayed. Staying would have meant living more and more lies, hers and my own, and I believed at the time, and believe it still, it would have put my soul at risk.
Or maybe not. Hearts are devious by nature. This is why so many seem to need a god, to watch them, know them, love them despite their duplicity. It must be a great comfort. I find it hard to live without comfort, and sometimes seek it out. Great art is a comfort. Lorraine, my second wife, and I find ourselves crying at the movies of late at sentimental moments, or any moment that depicts kindness, compassion, forgiveness, love, and this is a comfort, too. Looking at Rembrandt's self-portraits, which so profoundly understand what is in a human being, this is a comfort of a higher order. Writing poems is a comfort; the process takes you out of yourself, into another space, seldom visited. I wish I had written more of them. This last one is fairly recent, written in the last four or five years, sprung from a walk downtown to the water on a summer night in Sag Harbor, where I sat by myself on a bench staring at the boats while a band played in the distance.
DEATH BY WATER
Wild music beats against the surface of the harbor
with an absolute minimum of response. It is the same
with the moonlight; watch, it is in constant motion,
like a Pollock painting, yet perfectly still. Look also
into the shadows of the boats, darkness resting on darkness.
Near Maracaibo I saw dead dogs adrift among the stilts
supporting the houses. We think there is a story
to everything, like Natalie Wood's drowning, or anyone's.
Yesterday she said she loved him, too. Today he saw her
cruising. I think it is all background, atmosphere.
The small waves they allow in here have absolutely
nothing to say, do not speak of anyone's anguish.
It is the same thing again and again: moonlight, shadows,
inappropriate music the impenetrable water drowns out.
Now what is that about? I cannot say. The whale's back emerges from the sea of prose, but whales speak with their strange music only to other whales. "If a lion could talk," Wittgenstein once wrote, "we could not understand him." Poets search for a music, a form of speech that approximates the feelings and the intuitions that hover beyond the edge of language, that call out of the darkness. Sometimes we find it, sometimes not. You must judge for yourself, friends. For me it is all background, atmosphere.
Strange things, poems. They come out of an image or a phrase that emerges, as John Keats put it in a letter once, "like a whale's back in the sea of prose," unexpectedly, out of depths you cannot imagine, and it demands your attention and you know that it would be morally wrong not to respond, not to write it up, make something of it. You have no idea what yet, and it may take a very long time to develop. But if you're wise you will hold on to that first unformed message from your unknown inner life, because it appears for a reason. Because you're stupid and you don't really know your own heart. Because you're in pain, or in love, and you haven't gotten the message yet. Because something in you needs to speak. Because your body has a mind of its own. Because you're a poet, you have talent, and this is a command.
Of the twenty-five or thirty poems I would like to preserve I find, looking back at the little pile of them that I keep track of in my incredibly crowded, messy office, that many of them were written during my first marriage, which on the surface was, I thought, reasonably happy, as good as I could hope for given my own difficult personality--moody, dark, bookish, lonely. I expected to be lonely. My first wife and I were very unlike, and I thought that was the way it was always going to be; it was just the way of the world, love bridging unbridgeable gaps as best it could. My first wife had adopted sunny as her disposition but I knew her well, knew it was her own attempt to disguise from herself who she really was. It was the who she really was--passionate, more than a little bitter, struggling to keep her disappointments down--that I loved; it was the woman who, when she discovered you couldn't broil flounder fillets, took a spatula and beat them with it until fish fragments were flying all over the kitchen. But I couldn't abide the sunny surface. It was merely surface, never real, and it came across as a lie.
Those early poems when they arrived made it clear what that marriage really was. Here is the one I like best:
WALKING ON WATER
Of the place itself I remember most
clearly the frozen corrugations
in the snow, their settled patterns
and what they seemed to reveal about
the wind; that, and hearing the water
running deep under our feet near the dam.
We were always best in winter. On ice
or snow there's no place to rest
and the cold keeps talk to a minimum.
This poem came out of an actual experience when we found ourselves walking over a frozen pond, probably in Fahnestock State Park in Putnam County, not far from where we lived then. Other poems came from walks in the country. We lived for a while when the children were very young on a winding road with few houses along it that followed a small valley bottom. Hunter Brook Road. I remember a meadow on one side, thick woods on the other, and we used to take long walks up and down this road on warm evenings, to see the light fade on the meadow, listen to the birds shutting down for the night. The following poem sprang from a walk I took by myself on that road, and the way it turned dark, and who I was then. This is one of the poems I have worked on most of my life, to get right. When poems are really short like this you cannot waste even a comma; everything has to be as perfect as your talent and attention can make it. I'm probably still not quite done. But I offer it anyway. It's called
MOOD INDIGO
While the puffy clouds slowly sponged away
the light, while birds sang from their refuges
in the darkening woods, I lost track of the time;
and the country road behind me, the old trees
leaning over it, seems to have burrowed into
the night.
Have you felt this way, friends? Do
you know how it feels to wander unthinkingly
into the darkness?
Dawn always seems so far
away, while what we call headlights plunge
and careen like the Batmobile through your mood.
Friends, yes. Anyone willing to work through a poem is a friend. The marriage lasted eighteen years but we did not come out of it friends. I see that happen with some couples and I envy them their ability to talk to one another, but it was never going to happen in our case. By leaving her I seem to have awoken the bitterness she had worked so hard to hide. I am sorry for it all, every bit of it. But I couldn't have stayed. Staying would have meant living more and more lies, hers and my own, and I believed at the time, and believe it still, it would have put my soul at risk.
Or maybe not. Hearts are devious by nature. This is why so many seem to need a god, to watch them, know them, love them despite their duplicity. It must be a great comfort. I find it hard to live without comfort, and sometimes seek it out. Great art is a comfort. Lorraine, my second wife, and I find ourselves crying at the movies of late at sentimental moments, or any moment that depicts kindness, compassion, forgiveness, love, and this is a comfort, too. Looking at Rembrandt's self-portraits, which so profoundly understand what is in a human being, this is a comfort of a higher order. Writing poems is a comfort; the process takes you out of yourself, into another space, seldom visited. I wish I had written more of them. This last one is fairly recent, written in the last four or five years, sprung from a walk downtown to the water on a summer night in Sag Harbor, where I sat by myself on a bench staring at the boats while a band played in the distance.
DEATH BY WATER
Wild music beats against the surface of the harbor
with an absolute minimum of response. It is the same
with the moonlight; watch, it is in constant motion,
like a Pollock painting, yet perfectly still. Look also
into the shadows of the boats, darkness resting on darkness.
Near Maracaibo I saw dead dogs adrift among the stilts
supporting the houses. We think there is a story
to everything, like Natalie Wood's drowning, or anyone's.
Yesterday she said she loved him, too. Today he saw her
cruising. I think it is all background, atmosphere.
The small waves they allow in here have absolutely
nothing to say, do not speak of anyone's anguish.
It is the same thing again and again: moonlight, shadows,
inappropriate music the impenetrable water drowns out.
Now what is that about? I cannot say. The whale's back emerges from the sea of prose, but whales speak with their strange music only to other whales. "If a lion could talk," Wittgenstein once wrote, "we could not understand him." Poets search for a music, a form of speech that approximates the feelings and the intuitions that hover beyond the edge of language, that call out of the darkness. Sometimes we find it, sometimes not. You must judge for yourself, friends. For me it is all background, atmosphere.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
THE EXPERIENCE OF ABORTION
January 23, 2013:
Well, how would I know, right? I'm a man; men don't have to bear the burden of childbirth, and they can't have abortions. But I've been close. I read a piece the other day, I think in the NYTimes, about what would happen if women lost the right to a legal abortion. What would happen? They would go back to having illegal abortions, without the protection of medical assistance. The descriptions were graphic: clothes hangars: poisons of various kinds; scalding hot baths; deliberate starvation--anything to shed themselves of an unwanted foetus. And I have indeed been close to this experience. Before I was Anthony Brandt I, too, was a foetus, and my mother did all she could legally do to rid herself of my particular lump of clay. Scalding baths, she told me, were one means. She jumped up and down a lot, hoping, I suppose, to loosen my grip. She ate the foods that were supposed to be abortifacients. I'm hoping my father didn't punch her in the stomach, supposedly another abortifacient; that's too painful to think about, not only for her but for me.
Actually I've often thought about it. She must have been desperate, and scared. A miscarriage has to involve a lot of blood loss, a lot of psychological trauma, and pain anyway you think about it. The year was 1936, my parents had one child already. My father, like almost everyone else in America, lived in constant fear of losing his job. They didn't think they could afford me, and probably they were right. But apparently I was meant to be. Meant in what sense who can say, but there I came, weighing eleven pounds, an extremely difficult birth at that size, born at 3:05 a.m. on Nov. 21 after an epic struggle. They did not put me up for adoption. They raised me, they were exemplary parents, tough by today's standards but loving and funny and caring, and models of stability and reliability in our none-too-stable extended family. What luck. My mother told me about her efforts to abort me when I was in my late twenties. It felt a bit strange, but I had no complaints about my upbringing, and had she succeeded in aborting me, there would have been no complaints about that, either, because there would have been no one to complain. I loved them both very much. It was all good.
And then I was married and the father of two, both born by Caesarean section, another lucky accident; my head was too big for my wife's hips, which meant the children were likely to be too big in the head to emerge without doing serious damage to my wife's body, and when her abdomen was opened and the children emerged one of them had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck--must have been my son--and would have choked to death in childbirth. My daughter's cord was twisted; something might have gone wrong there, too. And then came the accident. My wife, a visiting nurse, was driving down a road and a truck, driven by an Italian immigrant who spoke no English, ran a stop sign, made a left turn right in front of her and nearly killed her. As it was the car was totaled and my wife was rushed unconscious to the hospital for X-rays. She turned out to have a cracked skull and a broken kneecap. They X-rayed her entire body while she lay there. No one, including us, knew she was two weeks pregnant. When she missed her period and got tested, it was a month later. She's a nurse. She knew what it meant to be X-rayed when your foetus is two weeks old. It means that there's a fifty-fifty chance of major developmental problems in both the body and the brain. Neither one of us hesitated. Time for an abortion
It was 1969, however, in these good United States, and abortion was illegal. We went to her gynecologist, one of the best in New York City and an advocate of abortion rights. He suggested we go to Puerto Rico and talk to a taxi driver. (She never went back to him.) She asked around among her medical colleagues. Nobody would tell her anything. In the end we had to borrow money from my parents and fly to England for her abortion. My parents, having been through this themselves with me, were understanding. The English doctor was understanding. The whole thing was over in an afternoon.
How many women have I known who have had abortions? I can't cite figures, but I know a number of them, including a few who had them before abortion was legal. The illegal abortion one of those endured made her sterile; another had to endure being raped by her abortionist before he performed the abortion. Prelegal abortion was a nightmare.
But women will have abortions, nightmare or not. They have been having abortions for as long as there have been records, and it's not going to stop just because certain Republican lawmakers think they have the right to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. No wonder women are moving away from the Republican party in such numbers. Power is nothing if it does not include power over your own body, and what sensible woman would want to give that up? Maybe we should rewrite the Constitution, as some people have suggested. If so, we should write abortion rights into it. Plain as day, First Amendment plus one. Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of the reproductive rights of any person, including the right to an abortion. In other words, get your filthy mind out of my sex life, Paul Ryan. It's my business, not yours. This is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I've lived through the nightmare, not in my own person but in the persons of women I've loved and cared about. I would do anything in my power to prevent us going back to the Dark Ages on this issue.
Well, how would I know, right? I'm a man; men don't have to bear the burden of childbirth, and they can't have abortions. But I've been close. I read a piece the other day, I think in the NYTimes, about what would happen if women lost the right to a legal abortion. What would happen? They would go back to having illegal abortions, without the protection of medical assistance. The descriptions were graphic: clothes hangars: poisons of various kinds; scalding hot baths; deliberate starvation--anything to shed themselves of an unwanted foetus. And I have indeed been close to this experience. Before I was Anthony Brandt I, too, was a foetus, and my mother did all she could legally do to rid herself of my particular lump of clay. Scalding baths, she told me, were one means. She jumped up and down a lot, hoping, I suppose, to loosen my grip. She ate the foods that were supposed to be abortifacients. I'm hoping my father didn't punch her in the stomach, supposedly another abortifacient; that's too painful to think about, not only for her but for me.
Actually I've often thought about it. She must have been desperate, and scared. A miscarriage has to involve a lot of blood loss, a lot of psychological trauma, and pain anyway you think about it. The year was 1936, my parents had one child already. My father, like almost everyone else in America, lived in constant fear of losing his job. They didn't think they could afford me, and probably they were right. But apparently I was meant to be. Meant in what sense who can say, but there I came, weighing eleven pounds, an extremely difficult birth at that size, born at 3:05 a.m. on Nov. 21 after an epic struggle. They did not put me up for adoption. They raised me, they were exemplary parents, tough by today's standards but loving and funny and caring, and models of stability and reliability in our none-too-stable extended family. What luck. My mother told me about her efforts to abort me when I was in my late twenties. It felt a bit strange, but I had no complaints about my upbringing, and had she succeeded in aborting me, there would have been no complaints about that, either, because there would have been no one to complain. I loved them both very much. It was all good.
And then I was married and the father of two, both born by Caesarean section, another lucky accident; my head was too big for my wife's hips, which meant the children were likely to be too big in the head to emerge without doing serious damage to my wife's body, and when her abdomen was opened and the children emerged one of them had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck--must have been my son--and would have choked to death in childbirth. My daughter's cord was twisted; something might have gone wrong there, too. And then came the accident. My wife, a visiting nurse, was driving down a road and a truck, driven by an Italian immigrant who spoke no English, ran a stop sign, made a left turn right in front of her and nearly killed her. As it was the car was totaled and my wife was rushed unconscious to the hospital for X-rays. She turned out to have a cracked skull and a broken kneecap. They X-rayed her entire body while she lay there. No one, including us, knew she was two weeks pregnant. When she missed her period and got tested, it was a month later. She's a nurse. She knew what it meant to be X-rayed when your foetus is two weeks old. It means that there's a fifty-fifty chance of major developmental problems in both the body and the brain. Neither one of us hesitated. Time for an abortion
It was 1969, however, in these good United States, and abortion was illegal. We went to her gynecologist, one of the best in New York City and an advocate of abortion rights. He suggested we go to Puerto Rico and talk to a taxi driver. (She never went back to him.) She asked around among her medical colleagues. Nobody would tell her anything. In the end we had to borrow money from my parents and fly to England for her abortion. My parents, having been through this themselves with me, were understanding. The English doctor was understanding. The whole thing was over in an afternoon.
How many women have I known who have had abortions? I can't cite figures, but I know a number of them, including a few who had them before abortion was legal. The illegal abortion one of those endured made her sterile; another had to endure being raped by her abortionist before he performed the abortion. Prelegal abortion was a nightmare.
But women will have abortions, nightmare or not. They have been having abortions for as long as there have been records, and it's not going to stop just because certain Republican lawmakers think they have the right to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. No wonder women are moving away from the Republican party in such numbers. Power is nothing if it does not include power over your own body, and what sensible woman would want to give that up? Maybe we should rewrite the Constitution, as some people have suggested. If so, we should write abortion rights into it. Plain as day, First Amendment plus one. Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of the reproductive rights of any person, including the right to an abortion. In other words, get your filthy mind out of my sex life, Paul Ryan. It's my business, not yours. This is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I've lived through the nightmare, not in my own person but in the persons of women I've loved and cared about. I would do anything in my power to prevent us going back to the Dark Ages on this issue.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
AMERICAN VIOLENCE
December 18, 2012:
When I enrolled at Princeton my brother, four years older and at Cornell, advised me to join ROTC in order to avoid the draft and fulfill my military obligations as an officer rather than an enlisted man. I did. Princeton happened to have an artillery unit and I trained for four years, once a week, to become an artillery forward observer. We used to fire steel balls out of miniature howitzers in the Princeton Armory, and I got good at it. I found out how good when we spent six weeks between junior and senior years at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, in field conditions, firing practice missions with 105 howitzers, using old tank and truck bodies as the targets. I fired six perfect missions over the six weeks, then a seventh as a demonstration before 700 fellow cadets from all over the country. Six other cadets also fired demonstration missions. They all messed up. Not me.
I was also good handling the guns. A 105mm. howitzer was the Army's standard artillery weapon then and we trained on them, learning to get rounds off within ten seconds of receiving the fire order. That meant aiming the weapon, putting the right number of powder bags into the cartridges, loading the weapon and pulling the lanyard. We were between wars then. I never had to fire a shot in combat, go to Vietnam, put myself in danger. But we wound up in the Reserves and you never knew whether or when you might be called to active duty. I spent my active duty training cannoneers at Ft. Sill, teaching them to do what I did so well.
And loved doing. You can stand directly behind a howitzer and watch the shell climb into the heavens until it reaches the top of its arc and starts to descend. It's a beautiful sight. I used to wonder when I was directing fire on tank bodies whether I could direct fire on living human beings. I never had to, but I was honest enough with myself to know that if you love doing something and are very good at it, you will love doing it no matter what. Besides, those people you're killing are trying to kill you first.
I've never owned a gun, but I have hunters in my family and I have no objection to hunting; I once shot six skunks that were living under my house in a crawl space, killed them one by one at night over the course of a summer with a neighbor's borrowed .22. They used to wake us up at night trapping mice. The smell got into your clothes, your sheets. I had no trouble killing them. It's in me. It may not be in everybody, but it's in me.
It's also in the culture. American culture is saturated with killing, and we watch it all the time: in video games, in movies, on TV. The military even kills children, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they become part of the collateral damage. One of our best euphemisms, "collateral damage." Little kids getting their arms and legs blown off is what it actually is. But there's nothing new about that. We've all heard of Wounded Knee, right? The Sand Creek Massacre? Indian women, Indian children, and old men like me, killed by United States Armed Forces.
For some Americans the killing in our culture is a principal form of entertainment, especially for the teenage boys so much of American cultural production is aimed at. It has been this way since we started killing Indians in the seventeenth century. Is Billy the Kid a hero, or a villain? In our hearts, do we root for him, or against him? A talent for killing is very cool. James Bond has a license to kill, and he does it with panache, in between those martinis. We the audience have a real life, and a fantasy life. Gary Cooper, going out to face down death in High Noon, and the dozens and dozens of others like him. It hardly matters which side of the law they're on. D. H. Lawrence said that the typical American hero is silent, a loner, and a killer. Deep in our minds, for a great many of us, this is who we are. We want to be that cool, want to maintain our courage under extreme pressure. And too many of us see gunfire as the solution to all our problems. Here's a story about that. True story. I had lunch many years ago in New York with the retired commander of all U. S. forces in the Pacific, who served in that capacity in the 1950s. He told me that during the battle for Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, which the French were about to lose, the French had asked Washington to use tactical nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese forces surrounding the French base there. Washington radioed my general and gave him verbal permission to do so "at his discretion." My general, no fool, radioed back that he would require written orders to so something so drastic. Written orders never came, and the event never happened. Nuclear weapons, of course, are the ultimate in gunfire. A whole lot of American diplomacy has been based on American weaponry, and the willingness--no, quite often the eagerness--to use it.
So a young man goes mad and shoots twenty little children and six adults with his mother's--his mother's--guns. Are we surprised? Outraged? Saddened? Yeah, sure we are. But only because we refuse to know ourselves. Much will be said in the next few weeks about this young man's madness, but it will all be speculative. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people's minds. I spent eleven days in a mental hospital as a patient--they didn't know I wasn't a nut case; I faked my way in--in order to write my first book, a muckraking book about the mental health system. I got to know the patients on my ward pretty well, and I discovered what I already knew from research was true. Mental patients are not as a rule more violent than the rest of the population. They're too screwed up to be effective at anything, in fact, and that's their main problem. But there will always be crazy people as there will always be war. That, too, is in us--craziness, insanity. Breaking points.
Stricter gun control laws would help. There's no doubt about that, and only the soulless flacks of the NRA and the Senators and Congressmen they've bought will stand in the way. Guns should be licensed, regulated, and controlled the same way cars are, and for the same reasons: to increase public safety. We'll see what gives with that. But don't, in the meantime, stand next to me at a party and tell me you just don't understand how this could happen, or we should do something about the mentally ill, or we should ban guns entirely. Because more than likely it's in you as much as it's in me. There's a reason that in the United States more than 10,000 people a year die by gunfire, while the figures in other civilized industrial countries run to 100 a year or less. Gunslinger Nation, one historian called us years ago. Until that changes--and what are your suggestions about that?--this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, with the same horrified reaction and the same cowardly refusal to face ourselves, to know who and what we really are.
When I enrolled at Princeton my brother, four years older and at Cornell, advised me to join ROTC in order to avoid the draft and fulfill my military obligations as an officer rather than an enlisted man. I did. Princeton happened to have an artillery unit and I trained for four years, once a week, to become an artillery forward observer. We used to fire steel balls out of miniature howitzers in the Princeton Armory, and I got good at it. I found out how good when we spent six weeks between junior and senior years at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, in field conditions, firing practice missions with 105 howitzers, using old tank and truck bodies as the targets. I fired six perfect missions over the six weeks, then a seventh as a demonstration before 700 fellow cadets from all over the country. Six other cadets also fired demonstration missions. They all messed up. Not me.
I was also good handling the guns. A 105mm. howitzer was the Army's standard artillery weapon then and we trained on them, learning to get rounds off within ten seconds of receiving the fire order. That meant aiming the weapon, putting the right number of powder bags into the cartridges, loading the weapon and pulling the lanyard. We were between wars then. I never had to fire a shot in combat, go to Vietnam, put myself in danger. But we wound up in the Reserves and you never knew whether or when you might be called to active duty. I spent my active duty training cannoneers at Ft. Sill, teaching them to do what I did so well.
And loved doing. You can stand directly behind a howitzer and watch the shell climb into the heavens until it reaches the top of its arc and starts to descend. It's a beautiful sight. I used to wonder when I was directing fire on tank bodies whether I could direct fire on living human beings. I never had to, but I was honest enough with myself to know that if you love doing something and are very good at it, you will love doing it no matter what. Besides, those people you're killing are trying to kill you first.
I've never owned a gun, but I have hunters in my family and I have no objection to hunting; I once shot six skunks that were living under my house in a crawl space, killed them one by one at night over the course of a summer with a neighbor's borrowed .22. They used to wake us up at night trapping mice. The smell got into your clothes, your sheets. I had no trouble killing them. It's in me. It may not be in everybody, but it's in me.
It's also in the culture. American culture is saturated with killing, and we watch it all the time: in video games, in movies, on TV. The military even kills children, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they become part of the collateral damage. One of our best euphemisms, "collateral damage." Little kids getting their arms and legs blown off is what it actually is. But there's nothing new about that. We've all heard of Wounded Knee, right? The Sand Creek Massacre? Indian women, Indian children, and old men like me, killed by United States Armed Forces.
For some Americans the killing in our culture is a principal form of entertainment, especially for the teenage boys so much of American cultural production is aimed at. It has been this way since we started killing Indians in the seventeenth century. Is Billy the Kid a hero, or a villain? In our hearts, do we root for him, or against him? A talent for killing is very cool. James Bond has a license to kill, and he does it with panache, in between those martinis. We the audience have a real life, and a fantasy life. Gary Cooper, going out to face down death in High Noon, and the dozens and dozens of others like him. It hardly matters which side of the law they're on. D. H. Lawrence said that the typical American hero is silent, a loner, and a killer. Deep in our minds, for a great many of us, this is who we are. We want to be that cool, want to maintain our courage under extreme pressure. And too many of us see gunfire as the solution to all our problems. Here's a story about that. True story. I had lunch many years ago in New York with the retired commander of all U. S. forces in the Pacific, who served in that capacity in the 1950s. He told me that during the battle for Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, which the French were about to lose, the French had asked Washington to use tactical nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese forces surrounding the French base there. Washington radioed my general and gave him verbal permission to do so "at his discretion." My general, no fool, radioed back that he would require written orders to so something so drastic. Written orders never came, and the event never happened. Nuclear weapons, of course, are the ultimate in gunfire. A whole lot of American diplomacy has been based on American weaponry, and the willingness--no, quite often the eagerness--to use it.
So a young man goes mad and shoots twenty little children and six adults with his mother's--his mother's--guns. Are we surprised? Outraged? Saddened? Yeah, sure we are. But only because we refuse to know ourselves. Much will be said in the next few weeks about this young man's madness, but it will all be speculative. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people's minds. I spent eleven days in a mental hospital as a patient--they didn't know I wasn't a nut case; I faked my way in--in order to write my first book, a muckraking book about the mental health system. I got to know the patients on my ward pretty well, and I discovered what I already knew from research was true. Mental patients are not as a rule more violent than the rest of the population. They're too screwed up to be effective at anything, in fact, and that's their main problem. But there will always be crazy people as there will always be war. That, too, is in us--craziness, insanity. Breaking points.
Stricter gun control laws would help. There's no doubt about that, and only the soulless flacks of the NRA and the Senators and Congressmen they've bought will stand in the way. Guns should be licensed, regulated, and controlled the same way cars are, and for the same reasons: to increase public safety. We'll see what gives with that. But don't, in the meantime, stand next to me at a party and tell me you just don't understand how this could happen, or we should do something about the mentally ill, or we should ban guns entirely. Because more than likely it's in you as much as it's in me. There's a reason that in the United States more than 10,000 people a year die by gunfire, while the figures in other civilized industrial countries run to 100 a year or less. Gunslinger Nation, one historian called us years ago. Until that changes--and what are your suggestions about that?--this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, with the same horrified reaction and the same cowardly refusal to face ourselves, to know who and what we really are.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
WHAT I DO IN MY SPARE TIME
November 20, 2012:
My birthday tomorrow. Since it's also the day before Thanksgiving, it will be a busy day. Every day is busy, in a way, because my mind is the classic Buddhist monkey mind, flitting from subject to subject, seldom quiet, never empty enough for what Buddhists regard as enlightenment to find room. Crossword puzzles, reading, writing, more reading, errands, an occasional walk, meals in and the cooking thereof, meals out and the time they take, seeing friends, avoiding enemies, garden work, connecting with people on FB and via email, worrying about money, driving hither and yon, the movies, TV: thus my days get frittered away. Right now I'm writing a long contemplated book about Rome, started more than a decade ago, now returned to, with no prospect of publication but necessary to that feeling we all need that one's life has not been entirely wasted.
And then, once in a while, I take the time away from all this bother and to-do to write something that's purely for fun. Poetry is one such pastime. And recently, inspired by a contest in a local paper, I've started to write short stories of 25 words or less. Here's my second try, in its entirety:
"Oh, hi" [that's the title]
She was very pretty before the accident.
He dated her twice more, to be kind.
Now he has trouble recalling her name.
The first such mini-tale went to the newspaper, where it will appear soon, I'm told.
It's a real discipline, to get something that, a, makes sense, and b, has some bite, into such a short frame. Hemingway did it with six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." That's a classic. I'm going to keep on doing it, because it's such a pleasure to work with the language just for its own sake. Poetry is that way for me, too. I decided after publishing some poems many years ago to forsake it as a career and write it strictly for myself. I couldn't make a living at it; to do that you have to teach, and I didn't want to teach, didn't think I would be good at it. That same impatient mind, mentioned above. I did teach for a year. Felt like a failure. Couldn't suffer the discipline of the hour, would let my students go when I was done, not when the hour was done. Very sloppy of me. No, not just sloppy: arrogant. I was arrogant when I was young.
And then the poems. Here's one, published in TLS as long ago as 1968:
The French Revolution
At night in my garret room a crowd gathers
and you speak to them and sway them
until what they know and what they don't know
are the same thing, if it is you.
You
speak: to them it is falling in love.
What is it to you? You are walking
on the surface, on the backs of crocodiles;
you are air, or airy; you are a Queen.
One way they hold their heads up is on pikes.
Here's another, published in the old, not the new, New York Quarterly:
Airplanes at Dusk
The jets take off from Newark,
Boeings more beautiful than mathematics,
and turn west.
Angels could not seem
more single-minded, climbing the heavens.
Beneath them, turning east, and blue,
vast stretches of the imagination
lie quiet, mooning, unoccupied.
And there you go. Because they've been published they have an air of authority about them, the cachet of some editor's approval, but in both the first and the last analysis it is you yourself you have to satisfy, and I have about thirty of them that make that grade, maybe six or seven of which have been published, the rest not. (Anybody out there want to print a chapbook?) And sometimes I think, not much for a life's work. But I know poets who survive on the strength of a single poem. The anonymous poet who wrote this, for example:
O westron wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down doth rain.
Christ if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
It dates from about the 14th century, "small" in this case means "thin," nobody knows who the author was, and the first time I heard it was in R. P. Blackmur's poetry class at Princeton. Blackmur was a great critic and he read it with such feeling that I have never forgotten the moment. Who would not give a life to have written so great a poem? I spent years, off and on, in my spare time, translating just four lines of Rilke that I thought were as perfect as poetry gets. Here they are, from a poem of his called "Liebeslied," which means "Love Song":
A stroke of the bow
draws one voice from the two strings.
Whose violin are we stretched out upon?
What virtuoso has us in his hands?
This is my final version, and I'm satisfied with it.
Rilke survives in a whole body of work, prose as well as poetry, but there are other poets whose work survives in a single poem. Tichborne, for example, who wrote a poem in the Tower of London the night before he was beheaded, or was it hanged? for some political crime. It's unforgettable; I keep my anthology of Elizabethan literature specifically to have access to that poem. Or there's Thomas Nashe, whose collected work fills four volumes but who is remembered mostly for a song he wrote in one of his plays whose refrain runs, "Brightness falls from the air / Queens have died young and fair / I am sick, I must die / Lord, have mercy upon me."
Can you feel it? The language takes flight in such words. What we write about, Roland Barthes once said, boils down to just a few emotions--love, hatred, despair, sorrow, guilt, fear; and what great writing aspires to is to evoke them in such a way as to say something meaningful about life and death. What I love about poetry is that it aspires to do this in the most condensed, intense way, so that the words explode in your mind, like a sip of great wine on your tongue. To make that happen is the most challenging task a writer will ever face. All writers want to be famous, very few achieve it, but for me, I would be satisfied if just one poem, written in my spare time, endures somehow. Maybe this one, which has never been published:
The Fast
In the evening the light flattens
against the walls, but it is empty
of meaning or expression. The darkness
that follows is empty in itself,
like a long absence. If you have
a soul it grows thin waiting.
My birthday tomorrow. Since it's also the day before Thanksgiving, it will be a busy day. Every day is busy, in a way, because my mind is the classic Buddhist monkey mind, flitting from subject to subject, seldom quiet, never empty enough for what Buddhists regard as enlightenment to find room. Crossword puzzles, reading, writing, more reading, errands, an occasional walk, meals in and the cooking thereof, meals out and the time they take, seeing friends, avoiding enemies, garden work, connecting with people on FB and via email, worrying about money, driving hither and yon, the movies, TV: thus my days get frittered away. Right now I'm writing a long contemplated book about Rome, started more than a decade ago, now returned to, with no prospect of publication but necessary to that feeling we all need that one's life has not been entirely wasted.
And then, once in a while, I take the time away from all this bother and to-do to write something that's purely for fun. Poetry is one such pastime. And recently, inspired by a contest in a local paper, I've started to write short stories of 25 words or less. Here's my second try, in its entirety:
"Oh, hi" [that's the title]
She was very pretty before the accident.
He dated her twice more, to be kind.
Now he has trouble recalling her name.
The first such mini-tale went to the newspaper, where it will appear soon, I'm told.
It's a real discipline, to get something that, a, makes sense, and b, has some bite, into such a short frame. Hemingway did it with six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." That's a classic. I'm going to keep on doing it, because it's such a pleasure to work with the language just for its own sake. Poetry is that way for me, too. I decided after publishing some poems many years ago to forsake it as a career and write it strictly for myself. I couldn't make a living at it; to do that you have to teach, and I didn't want to teach, didn't think I would be good at it. That same impatient mind, mentioned above. I did teach for a year. Felt like a failure. Couldn't suffer the discipline of the hour, would let my students go when I was done, not when the hour was done. Very sloppy of me. No, not just sloppy: arrogant. I was arrogant when I was young.
And then the poems. Here's one, published in TLS as long ago as 1968:
The French Revolution
At night in my garret room a crowd gathers
and you speak to them and sway them
until what they know and what they don't know
are the same thing, if it is you.
You
speak: to them it is falling in love.
What is it to you? You are walking
on the surface, on the backs of crocodiles;
you are air, or airy; you are a Queen.
One way they hold their heads up is on pikes.
Here's another, published in the old, not the new, New York Quarterly:
Airplanes at Dusk
The jets take off from Newark,
Boeings more beautiful than mathematics,
and turn west.
Angels could not seem
more single-minded, climbing the heavens.
Beneath them, turning east, and blue,
vast stretches of the imagination
lie quiet, mooning, unoccupied.
And there you go. Because they've been published they have an air of authority about them, the cachet of some editor's approval, but in both the first and the last analysis it is you yourself you have to satisfy, and I have about thirty of them that make that grade, maybe six or seven of which have been published, the rest not. (Anybody out there want to print a chapbook?) And sometimes I think, not much for a life's work. But I know poets who survive on the strength of a single poem. The anonymous poet who wrote this, for example:
O westron wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down doth rain.
Christ if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
It dates from about the 14th century, "small" in this case means "thin," nobody knows who the author was, and the first time I heard it was in R. P. Blackmur's poetry class at Princeton. Blackmur was a great critic and he read it with such feeling that I have never forgotten the moment. Who would not give a life to have written so great a poem? I spent years, off and on, in my spare time, translating just four lines of Rilke that I thought were as perfect as poetry gets. Here they are, from a poem of his called "Liebeslied," which means "Love Song":
A stroke of the bow
draws one voice from the two strings.
Whose violin are we stretched out upon?
What virtuoso has us in his hands?
This is my final version, and I'm satisfied with it.
Rilke survives in a whole body of work, prose as well as poetry, but there are other poets whose work survives in a single poem. Tichborne, for example, who wrote a poem in the Tower of London the night before he was beheaded, or was it hanged? for some political crime. It's unforgettable; I keep my anthology of Elizabethan literature specifically to have access to that poem. Or there's Thomas Nashe, whose collected work fills four volumes but who is remembered mostly for a song he wrote in one of his plays whose refrain runs, "Brightness falls from the air / Queens have died young and fair / I am sick, I must die / Lord, have mercy upon me."
Can you feel it? The language takes flight in such words. What we write about, Roland Barthes once said, boils down to just a few emotions--love, hatred, despair, sorrow, guilt, fear; and what great writing aspires to is to evoke them in such a way as to say something meaningful about life and death. What I love about poetry is that it aspires to do this in the most condensed, intense way, so that the words explode in your mind, like a sip of great wine on your tongue. To make that happen is the most challenging task a writer will ever face. All writers want to be famous, very few achieve it, but for me, I would be satisfied if just one poem, written in my spare time, endures somehow. Maybe this one, which has never been published:
The Fast
In the evening the light flattens
against the walls, but it is empty
of meaning or expression. The darkness
that follows is empty in itself,
like a long absence. If you have
a soul it grows thin waiting.
Friday, November 9, 2012
WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA
November 9, 2012:
I occasionally write a piece for MILITARY HISTORY in a series they call "What We Learned," which describes major battles and then talks briefly about what we learned from them. The last one was on Gallipoli, a remarkable example of incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and other "--ences" and "---ances" in World War I in which British and French forces attacked the Dardanelles in an attempt to seize Istanbul and drive the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and were very badly beaten. I've been thinking of it while reading the many analyses of the election this Tuesday in which the Republicans were badly beaten trying to attack deeply entrenched forces in the electorate, about which they were poorly informed, to which they took superior attitudes, and against which they demonstrated remarkable levels of incompetence. The parallels seem striking. Even more striking is the fact that the British and French learned very little from their defeat; and from what I can tell so far, neither have the Republicans.
This is not good news. I come from a Republican family, but none of my forebears would recognize the party now. It was run then by wealthy people who had a social conscience and a sense of noblesse oblige, who were deeply interested in foreign policy, wrote about it intelligently, and did not start wars irresponsibly, or at all. I left the party after college, largely thanks to what I learned in college about what the two major parties stood for. My parents never said anything but I'm sure they weren't pleased. But in any case I understood Republicans; I knew my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and what they stood for and it wasn't what the current party stands for. These were decent people, decent inside as well as polite and well-behaved outside. They did not harbor undisguised antipathies for immigrants, for women, for the poor, for minorities. They themselves had been poor once; they were the sons and daughters of immigrants; they had worked their way up. They were still close to their roots. They were not college graduates; but that doesn't mean they were unintelligent. And I could see where they were coming from.
I no longer understand Republicans. I have been trying for some time now to figure out how they can possibly take the stands they take, what has led them into the impenetrable plastic bubble they have made their home, what makes them impervious to argument, unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue, what has happened to their social conscience. The more hysterical types, exemplified by the Limbaughs, the Hannitys, the Coulters, have managed to demonize anything and everything outside their bubble, delivering diatribes about "parasites," who seem to make up 47 percent of the population, about "socialism," and so on. We have all seen it. It seems more than a little crazy. And it's sad.
It's more than that, it's dangerous. Their only political strategy now seems to be to obstruct whatever Democrats propose in the way of legislation. That is no longer a two-party system; that is war--and to the death. But it won't work; it will, on the contrary, do enormous damage to the country, and they will lose, for the simple reason that they have refused to recognize, to accommodate to, or even to understand what is happening right under their noses. The United State is no longer a country in which rich white men control everything. In the Federal government, state governments, everywhere, more and more women, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans are taking part and taking office. Did you look at the make-up of the crowd in Chicago last Tuesday night celebrating Obama's victory? You saw everybody: white men, white women, blacks, Latinos, all the minorities, waving American flags, dancing, clapping, singing. And at Romney headquarters in Boston? With very few exceptions it was all white, and it was mostly male.
I'm not saying anything that original here, but the more voices that are raised the better. We need a two-party system, we need dialogue, not war. Modern day conservatism at its best dates from Edmund Burke, and if you read Burke, he makes a lot of sense. Institutions are indeed important, and it is important that they keep faith with the people, and that people in return keep faith with them. I am not a religious person but I would hate to see churches disappear. Tradition, too, is important. I never bought entirely into the 1960s; I could see that it was going to destroy things that were valuable, as well as reform things that were not. I also understood that most Americans want the same things, whatever their politics: a decent job, a chance to advance, family life with all its pleasures and pains, a nice house in a good community, or a nice apartment in a lively city. The left tends toward the utopian. I don't believe in utopias, or the perfectibility of man.
But I recognize hardly a trace of traditional conservatism in the current Republican Party. I recognize only a worship of wealth, and an absolute determination to keep it to themselves. The Party is living in the past, in a bubble of its own making. Their astonishment at their losses on Tuesday is revealing. Reality has destroyed their myths, and it is very difficult to detach yourselves from your myths. But they must, if they are to survive. Otherwise they will go the way of the Whigs, once a dominant party in American politics, now a memory. Facts cannot be wished away. Reality inevitably sneaks up on you. To continue to believe that we are the most enlightened, the best educated people in the world, that we offer the most opportunity in the world, when none of this is true, when it has been demonstrated clearly and convincingly not to be true, is inevitably to lose your way.
"Know thyself," it read on the entrance to the cave of the Delphic Oracle in Greece. Until you do, until you face the reality of who you are--in this case, a minority--and how ill your attitudes and beliefs accord with the world at large, there is not much hope for you.
I occasionally write a piece for MILITARY HISTORY in a series they call "What We Learned," which describes major battles and then talks briefly about what we learned from them. The last one was on Gallipoli, a remarkable example of incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and other "--ences" and "---ances" in World War I in which British and French forces attacked the Dardanelles in an attempt to seize Istanbul and drive the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and were very badly beaten. I've been thinking of it while reading the many analyses of the election this Tuesday in which the Republicans were badly beaten trying to attack deeply entrenched forces in the electorate, about which they were poorly informed, to which they took superior attitudes, and against which they demonstrated remarkable levels of incompetence. The parallels seem striking. Even more striking is the fact that the British and French learned very little from their defeat; and from what I can tell so far, neither have the Republicans.
This is not good news. I come from a Republican family, but none of my forebears would recognize the party now. It was run then by wealthy people who had a social conscience and a sense of noblesse oblige, who were deeply interested in foreign policy, wrote about it intelligently, and did not start wars irresponsibly, or at all. I left the party after college, largely thanks to what I learned in college about what the two major parties stood for. My parents never said anything but I'm sure they weren't pleased. But in any case I understood Republicans; I knew my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and what they stood for and it wasn't what the current party stands for. These were decent people, decent inside as well as polite and well-behaved outside. They did not harbor undisguised antipathies for immigrants, for women, for the poor, for minorities. They themselves had been poor once; they were the sons and daughters of immigrants; they had worked their way up. They were still close to their roots. They were not college graduates; but that doesn't mean they were unintelligent. And I could see where they were coming from.
I no longer understand Republicans. I have been trying for some time now to figure out how they can possibly take the stands they take, what has led them into the impenetrable plastic bubble they have made their home, what makes them impervious to argument, unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue, what has happened to their social conscience. The more hysterical types, exemplified by the Limbaughs, the Hannitys, the Coulters, have managed to demonize anything and everything outside their bubble, delivering diatribes about "parasites," who seem to make up 47 percent of the population, about "socialism," and so on. We have all seen it. It seems more than a little crazy. And it's sad.
It's more than that, it's dangerous. Their only political strategy now seems to be to obstruct whatever Democrats propose in the way of legislation. That is no longer a two-party system; that is war--and to the death. But it won't work; it will, on the contrary, do enormous damage to the country, and they will lose, for the simple reason that they have refused to recognize, to accommodate to, or even to understand what is happening right under their noses. The United State is no longer a country in which rich white men control everything. In the Federal government, state governments, everywhere, more and more women, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans are taking part and taking office. Did you look at the make-up of the crowd in Chicago last Tuesday night celebrating Obama's victory? You saw everybody: white men, white women, blacks, Latinos, all the minorities, waving American flags, dancing, clapping, singing. And at Romney headquarters in Boston? With very few exceptions it was all white, and it was mostly male.
I'm not saying anything that original here, but the more voices that are raised the better. We need a two-party system, we need dialogue, not war. Modern day conservatism at its best dates from Edmund Burke, and if you read Burke, he makes a lot of sense. Institutions are indeed important, and it is important that they keep faith with the people, and that people in return keep faith with them. I am not a religious person but I would hate to see churches disappear. Tradition, too, is important. I never bought entirely into the 1960s; I could see that it was going to destroy things that were valuable, as well as reform things that were not. I also understood that most Americans want the same things, whatever their politics: a decent job, a chance to advance, family life with all its pleasures and pains, a nice house in a good community, or a nice apartment in a lively city. The left tends toward the utopian. I don't believe in utopias, or the perfectibility of man.
But I recognize hardly a trace of traditional conservatism in the current Republican Party. I recognize only a worship of wealth, and an absolute determination to keep it to themselves. The Party is living in the past, in a bubble of its own making. Their astonishment at their losses on Tuesday is revealing. Reality has destroyed their myths, and it is very difficult to detach yourselves from your myths. But they must, if they are to survive. Otherwise they will go the way of the Whigs, once a dominant party in American politics, now a memory. Facts cannot be wished away. Reality inevitably sneaks up on you. To continue to believe that we are the most enlightened, the best educated people in the world, that we offer the most opportunity in the world, when none of this is true, when it has been demonstrated clearly and convincingly not to be true, is inevitably to lose your way.
"Know thyself," it read on the entrance to the cave of the Delphic Oracle in Greece. Until you do, until you face the reality of who you are--in this case, a minority--and how ill your attitudes and beliefs accord with the world at large, there is not much hope for you.
Monday, October 29, 2012
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORM/ELECTION/CHAOS
October 29, 2012:
The wind howls outside, Hurricane Sandy, and who can work? Or even read? The wind creates an internal tension. You know you'll lose power soon and not get it back for quite a while, and the President has just been on the news, having come back to Washington to take over and do his job, and has told us, in effect, not to travel, not to do anything but hunker down, and it's all very tense. And then when the wind won't stop it gets to you. You're always listening for the tree falling on your car, or your roof, or picking up a piece of lawn furniture you missed, or forcing the door on your shed, even though it's well fastened. It's nerve wracking.
On top of that we're just days away from an election as important as any since 2000, when a thoroughly politicized Supreme Court put George Bush in office, and a similar kind of chaos prevails now, twelve years later, and the effects threaten to be as dire. From my point of view a Romney victory would constitute a major threat to our well-being and our liberties. He is, what's the joke? a man born on third base who thinks he hit a triple; he has no knowledge or emotional insight into the way most of us live, he's like most people of his level of income, they live in bubbles, in gated communities, they think government is wasteful and overly bureaucratic, they have little or no respect for or understanding of public service and if they do go into government, they go to strip it. They live under the illusion, furthermore, that their good fortune is of their own making, thus failing to acknowledge the interconnections among business and government, the government created infrastructure that makes all business success in this country possible, the governmental programs that fostered industrial growth in so many fields in the first place
Wow! This wind has really picked up. Blowing now at about 50 knots, with higher gusts. I won't be doing this for long. But while I have time--somebody who's a FB friend of my son's asked the other day why anybody would vote for Barack Obama, and I wanted to answer. Here's why: first, because he understands that the huge and growing income gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is very bad for the country, and that it has to change or we'll slide rapidly downhill into a total oligarchy, instead of the partial oligarchy we have now, and people like the Kochs and Grover Norquist will be writing our laws. Second, because he's done an excellent job, although little advertised, in the face of a Republican party that announced that its only goal in Congress was to make sure he did not get a second term; despite that, he saved the auto industry, has begun to reform the educational system, got regulatory reform on Wall Street, which sorely needed it, killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda's leadership, ended the war in Iraq which the embarrassing George Bush got us into to on the basis of a whole lot of lying, and brought intelligence back to the White House. Third, because he's actually lived in Third World countries and knows their problems and is familiar with their style, and it is from there, in some such country, that the future will emerge. Fourth, because he's interracial and demonstrates pretty clearly that interracial marriage is a viable option for people; my own feeling is that only interracial marriage will ever fully change the racists attitudes so many Americans--the majority, according to the latest polls--live by. Fifth, because he believes that no government has the right to interfere with women's natural right to control their own bodies. Which is another way of saying that he has no intention of forcing his own religious beliefs onto the nation; he believes, in other words, in the First Amendment, and Mitt Romney and most of the Republican Party, determined to end abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, obviously do not.
I could go on, but these are some principle points; and of course the final point is quite simple. He's not Mitt Romney. He's not the empty, soulless, clueless human being who is his opponent, who will say anything to any audience to get elected, who thinks nothing of buying companies, selling off their assets and then bankrupting them for his own and his partners' profit, thereby depriving thousands of people of their jobs; Romney, who has never had to scramble for a job, who supported the war in Vietnam but made sure, like so many Republican big-shots before him, that he never had to serve; Romney, who makes promises he knows he can't keep, that no one could keep--12 million new jobs! 5 trillion off the debt! or is that 5 trillion in tax cuts!--and then refuses to explain how he's going to do this (because he hasn't a clue); Romney, who claims to know how to create jobs when his entire business experience has been spent outsourcing jobs to other countries, who has, in fact, never started a business or been a businessman in that traditional sense; and Romney, who won't release his tax returns because he knows they will reveal how thoroughly he has exploited the tax code to reduce his own taxes--offshore accounts; a huge deduction, more than most people make in income in a year, for his wife's show horse--while ordinary people pay at double or triple the rate. I once worked for a very wealthy businessman who had a whole team to figure out his taxes. Some years he paid less taxes than I did, or no taxes at all, and this was when I was on his payroll making about $10,000 a year. Everything the rich say about taxes is pretty much lies. It's well known that the money doesn't trickle down. The rich are not job creators; the economists know that, too. When they make more money, they don't necessarily start businesses. My late cousin's daughter is the kind of person who starts a business; she's got a therapeutic massage business in Florida, she opened a shop, she has employees, she works hard. I can see it growing, expanding, and I hope, for her sake, that it does. She's very proud of it, as she should be. Romney? He has $250 million picked off the backs of people like her. Let us not be fooled. He and his party do not have the interests of the common man at heart--not even close.
I have too few readers to change any votes, and Hurricane Sandy, the experts say, will wipe the election off the map all this week, which is probably a good thing; we're all sick of it. But if you do spread this around to other readers, maybe one person will take heed. That would be a good thing, too. In the meantime, stay safe and out of the wind. The trees are dancing wildly outside, and wind is roaring. Global warming, folks. Storms get bigger and badder with global warming, now we're here, enjoying the benefits. Well, as long as it doesn't tear down my black tupelo, I'll be content.
The wind howls outside, Hurricane Sandy, and who can work? Or even read? The wind creates an internal tension. You know you'll lose power soon and not get it back for quite a while, and the President has just been on the news, having come back to Washington to take over and do his job, and has told us, in effect, not to travel, not to do anything but hunker down, and it's all very tense. And then when the wind won't stop it gets to you. You're always listening for the tree falling on your car, or your roof, or picking up a piece of lawn furniture you missed, or forcing the door on your shed, even though it's well fastened. It's nerve wracking.
On top of that we're just days away from an election as important as any since 2000, when a thoroughly politicized Supreme Court put George Bush in office, and a similar kind of chaos prevails now, twelve years later, and the effects threaten to be as dire. From my point of view a Romney victory would constitute a major threat to our well-being and our liberties. He is, what's the joke? a man born on third base who thinks he hit a triple; he has no knowledge or emotional insight into the way most of us live, he's like most people of his level of income, they live in bubbles, in gated communities, they think government is wasteful and overly bureaucratic, they have little or no respect for or understanding of public service and if they do go into government, they go to strip it. They live under the illusion, furthermore, that their good fortune is of their own making, thus failing to acknowledge the interconnections among business and government, the government created infrastructure that makes all business success in this country possible, the governmental programs that fostered industrial growth in so many fields in the first place
Wow! This wind has really picked up. Blowing now at about 50 knots, with higher gusts. I won't be doing this for long. But while I have time--somebody who's a FB friend of my son's asked the other day why anybody would vote for Barack Obama, and I wanted to answer. Here's why: first, because he understands that the huge and growing income gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is very bad for the country, and that it has to change or we'll slide rapidly downhill into a total oligarchy, instead of the partial oligarchy we have now, and people like the Kochs and Grover Norquist will be writing our laws. Second, because he's done an excellent job, although little advertised, in the face of a Republican party that announced that its only goal in Congress was to make sure he did not get a second term; despite that, he saved the auto industry, has begun to reform the educational system, got regulatory reform on Wall Street, which sorely needed it, killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda's leadership, ended the war in Iraq which the embarrassing George Bush got us into to on the basis of a whole lot of lying, and brought intelligence back to the White House. Third, because he's actually lived in Third World countries and knows their problems and is familiar with their style, and it is from there, in some such country, that the future will emerge. Fourth, because he's interracial and demonstrates pretty clearly that interracial marriage is a viable option for people; my own feeling is that only interracial marriage will ever fully change the racists attitudes so many Americans--the majority, according to the latest polls--live by. Fifth, because he believes that no government has the right to interfere with women's natural right to control their own bodies. Which is another way of saying that he has no intention of forcing his own religious beliefs onto the nation; he believes, in other words, in the First Amendment, and Mitt Romney and most of the Republican Party, determined to end abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, obviously do not.
I could go on, but these are some principle points; and of course the final point is quite simple. He's not Mitt Romney. He's not the empty, soulless, clueless human being who is his opponent, who will say anything to any audience to get elected, who thinks nothing of buying companies, selling off their assets and then bankrupting them for his own and his partners' profit, thereby depriving thousands of people of their jobs; Romney, who has never had to scramble for a job, who supported the war in Vietnam but made sure, like so many Republican big-shots before him, that he never had to serve; Romney, who makes promises he knows he can't keep, that no one could keep--12 million new jobs! 5 trillion off the debt! or is that 5 trillion in tax cuts!--and then refuses to explain how he's going to do this (because he hasn't a clue); Romney, who claims to know how to create jobs when his entire business experience has been spent outsourcing jobs to other countries, who has, in fact, never started a business or been a businessman in that traditional sense; and Romney, who won't release his tax returns because he knows they will reveal how thoroughly he has exploited the tax code to reduce his own taxes--offshore accounts; a huge deduction, more than most people make in income in a year, for his wife's show horse--while ordinary people pay at double or triple the rate. I once worked for a very wealthy businessman who had a whole team to figure out his taxes. Some years he paid less taxes than I did, or no taxes at all, and this was when I was on his payroll making about $10,000 a year. Everything the rich say about taxes is pretty much lies. It's well known that the money doesn't trickle down. The rich are not job creators; the economists know that, too. When they make more money, they don't necessarily start businesses. My late cousin's daughter is the kind of person who starts a business; she's got a therapeutic massage business in Florida, she opened a shop, she has employees, she works hard. I can see it growing, expanding, and I hope, for her sake, that it does. She's very proud of it, as she should be. Romney? He has $250 million picked off the backs of people like her. Let us not be fooled. He and his party do not have the interests of the common man at heart--not even close.
I have too few readers to change any votes, and Hurricane Sandy, the experts say, will wipe the election off the map all this week, which is probably a good thing; we're all sick of it. But if you do spread this around to other readers, maybe one person will take heed. That would be a good thing, too. In the meantime, stay safe and out of the wind. The trees are dancing wildly outside, and wind is roaring. Global warming, folks. Storms get bigger and badder with global warming, now we're here, enjoying the benefits. Well, as long as it doesn't tear down my black tupelo, I'll be content.
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