Some recent deaths, from the world of entertainment:
Richard Wright, 1943-2008
The death of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright, on Sept. 15, leaves only Roger Waters and Nick Mason from the original line-up that included those three plus Syd Barrett. In the early stages after Barrett's departure, Wright's composing was as important to the overall product as his better-known band mates' Waters and Gilmour, particularly on the long instrumental passages in songs like "A Saucerful of Secrets" and "Echoes," and his clean, precise vocals graced songs like "Astronomy Domine" and "Echoes." From the '60s, check out his solo compositions "Remember a Day" and "Paintbox," and his "Sisyphus," on the studio disc quartered in individual slices on Ummagumma (1969); his stately and spacey keyboards -- which occasionally featured honky tonk and vaudeville excursions -- were a major factor in the Floyd's music on their soundtrack work and defined much of the sound of those two high-points: Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975). "Would you like to say / something before you go / Perhaps you'd care to state exactly how you feel / We say goodbye before we've said hello" -- Richard Wright, "Summer of '68" (1970)
Paul Newman, 1925-2008
The death of Paul Newman on Sept. 26 might just spell the last knell of my parents' Hollywood. Which is to say, after the deaths of Chuck Heston and Newman, both in 2008, I don't know who's left of the real movie stars, the ones from my parental generation. Newman, as good-looking as any Hollywood actor, ever, could've been a lightweight letting his looks carry him, but instead he was able to inhabit roles where his character has some learning to do, and that can only be communicated by his ability to render inner meanings rather than surface show. Newman was also a creditable maverick (to use a word too often used these days) in his distance from Hollywood's brainless glamor and in his work for worthwhile charities. Some of my favorite Newman movies: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958); The Young Philadelphians (1959); The Hustler (1961); Cool Hand Luke (1967); Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969); The Sting (1973); Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976); Slap Shot (1977); The Verdict (1982); The Color of Money (1986); and Road to Perdition (2002), but the one I probably prefer to them all is his aged, wise, battered, weathered, impossibly charming performance in Nobody's Fool (1994).
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
FEAR AND LOATHING, 2008
It's Thompson's pet phrase, 'fear and loathing,' and it captures so well the feeling that one experiences watching those whom HST was fond of calling 'hacks' covering the campaign. Or, if you happened to see coverage of the Republican convention, you might want to recall HST's stunning, and still applicable, description while covering it back in '72:
an ugly, low-level trip that hovered somewhere in that grim indefinable limbo between dullness and obscenity -- like a bad pornographic film that you want to walk out on, but sit through anyway and then leave the theater feeling depressed and vaguely embarrassed with yourself for having taken part in it, even as a spectator.
HST was also one who well understood that oftentimes chemical solutions were the only workable ones. So here's a link that's just what Dr. Duke himself might have ordered, written by Eli Sanders of Seattle's The Stranger. I seem to do well enough without "Electro-College Shock Therapy" (I mean I don't need "Pollzac"), but I am looking into a prescription for "Emmigratol."
Then there's this link, which I read on my friend Andrew Shield's blog. My problem with the mythopoeticizing of Palin and her apostles is that it goes too far into the kind of brainy analysis that can never play out in the Romper Room rhetoric of today's media. But what Crain's post does do well is make the point not enough commentators have made in comparing Palin to W. In other words, you can't underestimate the American people, you can't say any of the bad things about Palin will undo her political prospects. W. lowered the bar so far down that, yes, virtually 'anyone can be president.' That ol' promise of democracy is also its curse: no one needs qualifications, one merely needs to 'convince the voters.' And after seeing what W. convinced them of, anything is possible. Anything.
But I think I'll let HST say it, as he did when he realized that Nixon would win by a landslide in '72:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about 'new politics' and 'honesty in government,' is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.
McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
I'm not saying I know the answer to that last question, since I'm with King Lear: "the worst is not, so long as one can say 'this is the worst.'" But I will say this: come back, Tricky Dick, all is forgiven!
Monday, September 15, 2008
R.I.P. D.F.W.
The last time I wrote a literary obit on here was for Norman Mailer, and there one could speak of a long life, a long career, one felt one had grounds for summing up. In Wallace's case, such assessments seem somehow premature. Certainly, he accomplished enough to be notable, a challenge and an inspiration to many young writers. His two novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996) are funny, fascinating and, especially Jest, infuriating at times. Wallace possessed a mind unlike anyone who was currently writing, and his story collections and non-fiction feature writing have earned him many enthusiastic readers. Jest earned him a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1997, and he was, by reports, a beloved, admired, and engaging teacher at, first, Illinois State, and, until now, Pomona College. Wallace was a truly gifted and brilliant individual, but he also placed himself on "suicide watch" around the time his career began to take off and seems to have experienced extreme depression at times.
American letters has far too many notable suicides: Hart Crane, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, to name only a few. Besides the sense of loss -- in terms of talent and presence -- that such deaths provoke, there is always a kind of wonder: how could such talent, such success, come to such an end? We ask this because we want to believe that talent is its own reward -- something to live for -- and that success brings other rewards worth living for. And we seem to sense that somehow, if such talented individuals choose to cash it in early, we, our society, has failed them, and that it also fails to show us what the problem is.
I'm certainly not one who favors "life at all costs," and I suppose I can imagine some sort of psychic blow or emotional loss that would condone a feeling of oblivion as the best solution. But Berryman, for one, who wrote poem after poem trying to understand his father's suicide, shows how we always come up short trying to fathom death as a deliberate act. Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky's Kirilov, Albert Camus notwithstanding, suicide, while it can have an intellectual purpose, even, perhaps, an existential challenge contained within it, always arrives as "giving up." Giving up belief in change, at least, if not belief in some higher purpose. But also belief in the other people who are a part of one's life. Suicide is, perhaps, personal, private, solitary, but, if so, it asserts that solitariness over every tangible tie to life. That, I think, is what makes suicide a challenge to those who live on. Though we know that our means to defeat death are limited and will, ultimately, fail for each one of us, we seem to think that only truly inevitable death is acceptable -- that accidents and suicides and other surprising forms of death, "could have been prevented." Maybe so. But maybe we can only take what the gifted give us, for as long as they give it, until "something" gives out.
David Foster Wallace was a writer who loved facts and figures, so here are a few, from "suicide.org" (numbers are only for the U.S.):
1.3% of all deaths are from suicide.
On average, one suicide occurs every 17 minutes.
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for males.
73% of all suicide deaths are white males.
The suicide rate is highest in the western region of the U.S. and lowest in the northeastern region.
The suicide rate has decreased from the 1950-1980 rate of 13.2 to the present rate of about 11.
And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry, merry month of May,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who by grave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?
--Leonard Cohen, "Who By Fire" (1974)
Thursday, September 4, 2008
NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION
(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)
What follows is a delineation of the levels of action in a projected work of fiction (reworking material first broached about twenty-eight years ago).
Consider the tripartite 'worlds':
Inferno - Purgatorio -- Paradiso
or:
Niflheim - Midgard - Asgard
In other words: the level of reality, of the bondage to time, is the modern city, a purgatory, a limbo, a place where one either recognizes fate, divinity, beauty, or one does not; 'below' this are the areas of demonic forces, which is to say: largely 'the past' as evoked by the unconscious: understood as 'the wheel' that one is bound to (ancestors/genetics, upbringing/training -- sources of guilt, feelings of inadequacy or of arrogance, fear of the unknown or untried), from which one can only be freed by 'rebirth.' Rebirth is the attainment, in the historical present, of a sense of the timeless, of the freedom from 'sources,' from ancestry, from conditioning, from one's 'given or virtual self' in the name of one's 'true or actual self.' The hero and heroine of the piece are both moving through a present, hampered by 'below,' having to confront it in some way (as ex-lovers, they are each part of that realm for each other), to arrive at 'something new.' Traditional Hegelian dialectic, in other words.
'Evil spirits' from 'below' can be seen as the malicious forces of one's own emotional and racial and familial history (which includes their gods and rituals, to the extent that they are not true for one's own being, or to the extent that the judgments from an earlier temporal site cannot be 'true' for a later one). 'Above' is the realm of the 'timeless' gods (but only to a certain extent). In other words, this is not a tale of escape from 'the realm of illusion' that is the physical world, rather it's a tale of how to perceive a 'timeless truth' within the temporal, primarily through a psycho-sexual form in the present. The form this truth takes is 'of the gods,' in the sense that it is illuminated by what, for a given character or individual, is most perceived as 'divine.' The assumption is that such form will not, maybe cannot, be wholly original, that it will partake of mythological associations with the divine -- past forms, in other words, which might indeed be demonic -- 'pagan,' 'primitive,' in their negative connotations -- but which will find new fulfillment in the present. The connotations might be a syncretic blending of religious images, or of pop cultural images. The visionary is the one who can determine which connotations are 'divine' or 'from above,' or, indeed, what is 'for all time' in a given ephemeral form.
There is also a sense in which certain of one's predecessors may be 'from above' in the sense of spiritual guides: they inspire the right choice, provide the basis for the inner conviction. The point of the story is to delineate moments of 'inner conviction': to show how some characters are tempted (by what is, for them, false), how some are doomed (by not doing what, for them, is the right thing), how some are redeemed (by arriving at the hard truth beyond the seeming wrong path), how some are blessed (by always knowing and doing the right thing). 'Right' and 'wrong,' then, are perceived as not only relative to a situation, but relative to the individual and that individual's place in the whole. For the other point of the tale is that it is not simply one character's story -- a search for the right thing by one particular person -- but is a 'site': a place and time where a group, or coterie, go through changes for the sake of the 'right' associations, for, in a sense, the hierarchy or organization by which the site will be 'judged' or understood. So, the roles that a character may take on, relative to another character, have impact on the 'axis tree' of above and below. This may be said to be the 'drama' of the piece, the extent to which it is ultimately 'comic' or 'tragic': as depending on whether the outcomes of these interactions end in a situation of equilibrium (a celebration of being) or in a situation of disaster (an affliction of being).
The twin triumvirates, from Dante and Norse mythology, are juxtaposed just to show that the 'levels' aren't strictly Christian; in other words, the notion of tripartite levels is already syncretic. In terms of the quadruple levels of traditional allegory: the 'fourth level' is that provided by the text itself. In that sense, fiction -- or, if you prefer, art, poetry -- is both temporal and 'timeless' and is aimed to manifest that peculiar perspective.
What follows is a delineation of the levels of action in a projected work of fiction (reworking material first broached about twenty-eight years ago).
Consider the tripartite 'worlds':
Inferno - Purgatorio -- Paradiso
or:
Niflheim - Midgard - Asgard
In other words: the level of reality, of the bondage to time, is the modern city, a purgatory, a limbo, a place where one either recognizes fate, divinity, beauty, or one does not; 'below' this are the areas of demonic forces, which is to say: largely 'the past' as evoked by the unconscious: understood as 'the wheel' that one is bound to (ancestors/genetics, upbringing/training -- sources of guilt, feelings of inadequacy or of arrogance, fear of the unknown or untried), from which one can only be freed by 'rebirth.' Rebirth is the attainment, in the historical present, of a sense of the timeless, of the freedom from 'sources,' from ancestry, from conditioning, from one's 'given or virtual self' in the name of one's 'true or actual self.' The hero and heroine of the piece are both moving through a present, hampered by 'below,' having to confront it in some way (as ex-lovers, they are each part of that realm for each other), to arrive at 'something new.' Traditional Hegelian dialectic, in other words.
'Evil spirits' from 'below' can be seen as the malicious forces of one's own emotional and racial and familial history (which includes their gods and rituals, to the extent that they are not true for one's own being, or to the extent that the judgments from an earlier temporal site cannot be 'true' for a later one). 'Above' is the realm of the 'timeless' gods (but only to a certain extent). In other words, this is not a tale of escape from 'the realm of illusion' that is the physical world, rather it's a tale of how to perceive a 'timeless truth' within the temporal, primarily through a psycho-sexual form in the present. The form this truth takes is 'of the gods,' in the sense that it is illuminated by what, for a given character or individual, is most perceived as 'divine.' The assumption is that such form will not, maybe cannot, be wholly original, that it will partake of mythological associations with the divine -- past forms, in other words, which might indeed be demonic -- 'pagan,' 'primitive,' in their negative connotations -- but which will find new fulfillment in the present. The connotations might be a syncretic blending of religious images, or of pop cultural images. The visionary is the one who can determine which connotations are 'divine' or 'from above,' or, indeed, what is 'for all time' in a given ephemeral form.
There is also a sense in which certain of one's predecessors may be 'from above' in the sense of spiritual guides: they inspire the right choice, provide the basis for the inner conviction. The point of the story is to delineate moments of 'inner conviction': to show how some characters are tempted (by what is, for them, false), how some are doomed (by not doing what, for them, is the right thing), how some are redeemed (by arriving at the hard truth beyond the seeming wrong path), how some are blessed (by always knowing and doing the right thing). 'Right' and 'wrong,' then, are perceived as not only relative to a situation, but relative to the individual and that individual's place in the whole. For the other point of the tale is that it is not simply one character's story -- a search for the right thing by one particular person -- but is a 'site': a place and time where a group, or coterie, go through changes for the sake of the 'right' associations, for, in a sense, the hierarchy or organization by which the site will be 'judged' or understood. So, the roles that a character may take on, relative to another character, have impact on the 'axis tree' of above and below. This may be said to be the 'drama' of the piece, the extent to which it is ultimately 'comic' or 'tragic': as depending on whether the outcomes of these interactions end in a situation of equilibrium (a celebration of being) or in a situation of disaster (an affliction of being).
The twin triumvirates, from Dante and Norse mythology, are juxtaposed just to show that the 'levels' aren't strictly Christian; in other words, the notion of tripartite levels is already syncretic. In terms of the quadruple levels of traditional allegory: the 'fourth level' is that provided by the text itself. In that sense, fiction -- or, if you prefer, art, poetry -- is both temporal and 'timeless' and is aimed to manifest that peculiar perspective.
Monday, September 1, 2008
ADDENDUM
To add to the previous blog:
After hearing more about Gov. Palin, I realize that her choice is not quite the bad faith move that I originally claimed; it initially struck me as aimed primarily at the disgruntled Hilaryites who might decide to jump to the Republican side. But it's clear that Palin represents a very different agenda than Clinton's, so it's not a move to curry favor with those Democrat women nonplused by Obama, rather it's an effort to curry favor with the big conservative guns of the Republican Christians. In other words, it's canny politics, in the sense that McCain, if anyone, had the vote of such constituents, but he didn't really have their support -- in the sense of beat-the-bushes for votes (or for something to shoot), drop-to-knees in prayer, write hefty check for victory, spawn numerous kids for all-in-the-family photo ops, etc. Now, presumably, he has it more than ever.
Also, when I stressed the word "old" at the end of the blog, I was specifically reacting to the fact -- historic for me -- that if Obama is elected, he'll be the first president younger than I am! And the times, they are a-changin'...
After hearing more about Gov. Palin, I realize that her choice is not quite the bad faith move that I originally claimed; it initially struck me as aimed primarily at the disgruntled Hilaryites who might decide to jump to the Republican side. But it's clear that Palin represents a very different agenda than Clinton's, so it's not a move to curry favor with those Democrat women nonplused by Obama, rather it's an effort to curry favor with the big conservative guns of the Republican Christians. In other words, it's canny politics, in the sense that McCain, if anyone, had the vote of such constituents, but he didn't really have their support -- in the sense of beat-the-bushes for votes (or for something to shoot), drop-to-knees in prayer, write hefty check for victory, spawn numerous kids for all-in-the-family photo ops, etc. Now, presumably, he has it more than ever.
Also, when I stressed the word "old" at the end of the blog, I was specifically reacting to the fact -- historic for me -- that if Obama is elected, he'll be the first president younger than I am! And the times, they are a-changin'...
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