The life cycle of perpetual hope: Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens

Jonathan Lethem has been one of my favorite writers since February 2007 when I read his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” in Harper’s Magazine in my freshman dorm room at Syracuse University. I can still picture the unadorned, white-walled room with its two beds and desks. My roommate was pleasant enough, but his temperature ran hot, and he would leave the window cracked overnight to upstate winters. I’d lie awake shivering, thinking. When I stumbled across Lethem, I shivered with the electric thrill of his ideas. His worldview nurtured my own burgeoning cerebral sense of myself in the world. I do not use the “g” word lightly—I bristle that we must call the MacArthur Fellowship, which Lethem won in 2005, the genius grant—but the profundity and lasting influence of that essay tempt me. I have since read two of Lethem’s essay collections, The Ecstasy of Influence and The Disappointment Artist, and almost all of his novels: Gun, with Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and Dissident Gardens. In 2013, Lethem published Dissident Gardens into the wake of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis and the fall of 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement (“We are the 99%!”). The book incorporates these contemporary upheavals into a century of revolutionary angst and ideology. The book’s six protagonist characters are motivated by social and psychological forces which we might variously call revolutionary animus, resistance to hegemonic systems, radical hope, and persistence in defeat. In this historical novel, Lethem profiles four generations that come of age into personal and historic disappointment. Like most of Lethem's more social-realism work—he also works a sci-fi angle—the book centers on New York City, where he grew up. It starts out in the city in the 1930s in Queens and tends to return there, despite several characters escapes. Lethem’s characters are bound together by social relationships and ideological tendency towards revolutionary ideas, often subtle. Otherwise, they are very different. Lethem writes from the perspective of a disillusioned Jewish communist, Rose; Rose’s horny, nerdy, cousin, Lenny; Rose’s hippyish revolutionary daughter, Miriam; Rose’s black cop lover’s fat, black, and gay chess prodigy turned cultural theorist professor, Cicero; Miriam’s husband, the Irish Protestant turned Greenwich Village folk singer Tommy Gogan; and Miriam and Tommy’s kid, Sergius, who becomes a music teacher and Occupy Wall Street wannabe. If the list of names and characteristics boggles your mind, consider how much erudition and skill Lethem must bring to bear to master so many minds and times. This is a bit of a break for Lethem, who has rarely addressed identity so nakedly in his novels. Lethem’s mother is Jewish, and his relationship to various strands of Jewish experience is clearly important, if nuanced and layered, like anything Lethem. In earlier novels, Jewish markers hide in plain sight, requiring no special qualifications to decode, but rarely stated outright. Jewish identity is an important but not integral layer of experience, additive, but not necessary to enjoy or understand the books. Protagonists Lionel Essrog of Motherless Brooklyn and Dylan Ebdus of Fortress of Solitude may seem Jewish by their names, if nothing else. Ebdus is finally described as a Jew by his girlfriend on page 460, who observes that he has always called Jewishiness the least important part of his identity. In Dissident Gardens, Jewishness is central. Lethem illuminates identity from inside and out, the way it is experienced. Even when we see the world from a non-Jewish character, Jews play central roles. Folk singer Tommy Gogan’s manager is Jewish, his Jewishness as important in the 1960s Greenwich Village scene as that of Bob Dylan and Jack Elliott, "the most authentic cowboy singer Tommy or anyone had met." Tommy “stalks chimeras of authenticity in the counterfeit world,” pondering the unparalleled and exalted fakery of these Jewish folk figures, as Lethem puts it. Lethem seems to be both wrestling with and celebrating the history of American Jews in New York, his own history. Three of the six protagonists are Jewish: Rose, Lenny, and Miriam. They come first and Rose and Miriam cast influence on the rest. But their identity is no more vital or exhaustively plumbed than that of Cicero, Tommy, and Sergius. Lethem treats Jewish experience as black experience, gay experience, female experience, immigrant experience, Commie experience, Queens experience, radical hope, revolutionary zeal, striving and disappointment, love and disillusion, all, with great humanity and scintillating detail. To some degree, markers and boundaries blend or fade into the mosaic. More importantly, Lethem writes individuals, not stereotypes, communities, or generalities. Each character is singular and whole. Tommy Gogan arrives like any number of immigrants into New York City’s 1960s cultural ferment, invited by two older brothers to join their Irish folk trio. He soon finds himself an exalted fake, and grows disillusioned with the narrow stereotype of Irish culture he and his brothers feel forced to fit into. He doesn’t seem capable of finding himself, or fitting his found self into New York City, so he makes a new self, or is made anew. Tommy gravitates to what he sees as authentic America: black, rural blues. But can he make authentic what is not his, and will anybody care anyway? Cicero ends up in a similar mess. He escapes New York to get a PhD in the kind of convoluted cultural theory that is so deep and devious it’s devoid of meaning. As a gay black man at Princeton, in buttoned-up New Jersey suburbs, he escapes right back to New York City to participate in anonymous orgies in uptown trailers, and to visit Rose. Lethem builds this sense of recurrence. Lethem celebrates detail with a discriminating and omnivorous eye. Everything deserves his attention, a riff. Here are some examples: “The morbidity behind the sales pitch.” “Fershlugginer blues.” Shea Stadium, a "Sterno can in Band-Aids of orange and blue" that "heaved into view two stops before the Willets Point exit." Library books arranged on a bookshelf. Bob Dylan. Cicero’s dreadlocks. German chocolate. Jazz. Dim Sum is Chinese soul food. He balances the concrete with the abstract; pop culture with ideology, history and politics; sex and ideas. Kid Cicero wonders how Miriam makes it seem like "everything was secretly and sexily connected." Kid Cicero falls innocently in love with Miriam because of the “efflorescence of Miriam’s details.” You might wonder, as I did, what is efflorescence? It is the migration of a salt to the surface of a porous material, or the action or process of developing and unfolding as if coming into flower. Efflorescence is a process. Lethem's character become, find, strive, fall, hope and despair. They are born and molded into being in front us in the face of implacable forces. They play parts, affix themselves to causes, improvise identities, and clutch at each other for purchase in a world where change happens at levels entirely out of their control. They are not heroes slaying dragons. They face more prosaic and for that more heroic, more revolutionary challenges. "The true Communist pulled the tab on another tin of sardines in her kitchen...The true Communist was waiting." Dissident Gardens is Jonatham Lethem's most ambitious novel yet. It’s wise, compassionate, brilliant, wide-ranging. Not every section is a home run. Some set pieces, like Sandinistas and Archie Bunker, strain my appreciation. Some unruly demises seem more preposterous than meaningfully symbolic, or sympathetic. Lethem does a better job winding up than winding down. He has a magic for connecting everything in seamless, sinuous sentences, but sometimes I got fatigued by them, or lost in them. Still, you could do worse than getting lost in Lethem’s intricate and rich worlds.

Like the characters in Dissident Gardens, I latch on to Lethem's voice and, to me, ingenuous striving to make meaning (not to mention money) in open art. I identify myself with his many identifications. I feel the richer for it. A decade and counting, and I am still mesmerized. 

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part III

How are the medieval writings of Icelanders, notably the sagas, like contemporary American rap music? In content, each raises the exchange of threats and insults to the level of ritual. I discuss the art of dis, or trash talk, in Part I of this series. What about the conditions in which the sagas and rap music came into being? I don't want to make too much out of the similarities, but there are some.

Each was born in violence. Rap blossomed in the poverty and systemized, racialized violence against African American and immigrant communities in American cities. Following on the heels of the blues and hard jazz, hip-hop culture came of age after rust-belt declines, white flight, crack epidemic, and the draconian policing and racialized sentencing that devastated black men. The sagas were written down in relatively peaceful, settler Iceland, but following centuries of oral tradition that idolized old-time Viking ways. In historical works, Scandinavians went Viking: raiding, trading, and exploring across great swaths of the known world, from Constantinople to the mythic north and North America. During these times, Scandinavians organized into warring factions following local chieftains and eventually kings. Not only did bands go abroad in high Viking style, they also warred among themselves. In independent Iceland of the 12th and 13th centuries poverty was acute, the land was in decline due to overuse and an encroaching 'Little Ice Age', there was no centralized state, and disagreements were adjudicated in large part by numbers and the sword.

The sagas were, and rap lyrics are, meant to be delivered verbally: recited out loud to an audience. Whereas rappers often speak with their own voice in the first person, saga orators take on the voices of characters from the past, from their collective past. Artists of both cultures engage in verbal contests that are more than symbolic. At stake are honor, reputation, and economic winnings. The words are important, verbal skills valued. Dis and bragadoccio enable speakers to show off and tear down their enemies at the same time, one step short of pulling out a spear or glock. These creative forms comprise medieval flyting and reach an artistic pinnacle in modern rap music, where whole songs are often dedicated to them.

Separated as they may be by close to a century, it’s no surprise that performers from both art forms come out swinging, so to speak. There’s a neat parallel between Loki’s boasting, “If it’s just we two who wrangle with wounding words: I’ll turn out rich in my replies,” and Big Daddy Kane’s boasting, “I'm the authentic poet to get lyrical / For you to beat me, it's gonna take a miracle.” Writers and performers talked themselves up to distinguish themselves, trash their competition, and capture attention.

Each art focuses on manhood and the loss of manhood in sexual deviancy, with rappers referring to “penis envy” and the Sagas “cock-craving.” Homophobia comes as no surprise in these rather male-dominated contexts, found in the many taunts and insults from Odin saying Loki “played the witch” to Eminem commanding a would-be competitor, presumed male, to “suck a dick.” In the Old Norse Poem Lokasenna, Njord says that Loki has “borne babies himself,” reference to another myth when Loki transforms into a mare and gets knocked up by a stallion (his babies are horrific monsters). This may be akin to modern transphobia.

Much rap music, especially early rap, has been one-sidedly misogynistic in a way that the sagas and other medieval Icelandic texts often avoid. The sagas present roles for women that are often more complicated, or multiple. But there is a place in both art forms for powerful women. Female rappers, like Niki Minaj who calls herself, “A bad bitch,” have found ways to exercise their verbal, sexual, and commercial power and subvert the male-dominated preserves of rap culture. In these lady wordsmiths, we see saga women like Gunnhild, who curses Hrut not to enjoy sexual pleasure with his intended in Njal's Saga, and the indomitable Spes, who cuckolds her unimpressive husband with Thorstein, a manful Icelander, in Constantinople in Grettir's Saga.

The presence of potty and scatological humor in Icelandic and contemporary texts says much about the supposed evolution of art over time. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part II

In the Icelandic Sagas and Old Norse Myth, people routinely get so mad, over who gets to strip a beached whale, say, that they maim and kill each other. Occasionally, they demonstrate an odd kind of restraint, limiting the exchange to wounding words. It's obvious why medieval authors would have chosen to include these rich skeins of dialogue. They are entertaining.

The stylized battle of words is called flyting. Literary scholars recognize it as a compositional unit in Old Norse and also Celtic texts. In a flyting, combatants exchange boasts, threats, insults, and challenges the way they might exchange blows in a physical battle. Some have described flyting as more like a duel, a symmetrical back and forth between two speakers. But this is inessential and inaccurate in medieval Icelandic writing. I cite three examples of flyting (also called senna) where at least three people sling words and more spectate. In Lokasenna, Loki bandies words with many Aesir. In Njal’s Saga, Skarphedin trades insults and threats with various chieftains. In Bandamanna Saga, Odleif excoriates the scheming chieftains then passes off the responsibility to Egil Skulason, though some scholars see these as two separate flyting.

Carol Clover traces the linguistic, historical, and literary origins of the flyting into the muddy waters of senna, which she calls “quarrel” and encompassed the threats and insults traded, and Mannjafnaðr, which means “man-comparison” and was a social process of matching two men’s reputations, and so captures boasting. Senna is specifically a kind of medieval trash talk, whereas the proud words and phrases of Mannjafnaðr are like modern braggadocio. According to Clover, while there may have at some point been basis for delineating between senna and Mannjafnaðr, by the time Norse writings appear, they have mixed into one event we call the flyting. Clover adds a third ingredient to the flyting, nið, “the vague but spectacular category of sexual defamation for which Norse literature is rightly famous.” Each flyting is unique, although they all pull on the literary cliches and conventions of the type, to more or less degree, including nið.

The flyting can stand alone as it does to some degree in Lokasenna, or be embedded in a larger work. Embedded, it can move narrative forward. In the flyting in Njal’s Saga, Skarphedin bandies barbed words with the chieftains he and his kin are courting for support in their Althing case over Hoskuld’s killing. Skarphedin’s very presence seems inimical to recruiting when each chieftain formulaically ask the band leader Asgrim who he is, describing him as “big and frightening,” “pale-looking,” “sharp-featured,” “wicked,” “luckless,” “fierce but troll-like” and “as if he had come out of a sea-cliff.” If Skarphedin’s presence is bad for the cause, his words are worse. He calls Haf the Wealthy a “milksop.” His remarks repeatedly destroy their chance of winning support to the point that Asgrim orders him to tone it down before their meeting with Thorkel Bully. Skarphedin just grins. He then threatens Thorkel Bully with his axe, saying, “I’ve never lifted a weapon against any man without hitting my mark,” and forces Thorkel to stand down. When Gudmund the Powerful hears about the exchange, he decides to support the Njalssons after all.

The voluble verbal dialogue of the flyting flies in the face of the stereotype some have of the sagas as stark and laconic in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part I

You need not look far to find scholars effusively praising the sagas and mythological writings of Icelanders. In her book, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough says, “The sagas are medieval Iceland’s unparalleled storytelling legacy to the world.” In the Guardian, Ben Myers asks, “The Icelandic Sagas: Europe's most important book?” Nancy Marie Brown points out that the sagas are superlative not only for literary and historical merit, but because we have them: “More medieval literature exists in Icelandic than in any other European language except Latin.”

We adulate the sagas. They have inspired luminaries from J.R.R. Tolkein and W.H. Auden to David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman. It may come as a surprise to many just how smutty and wry they can be.

In a memorable episode in Njal's Saga, an Icelandic Chieftain visits Norway. He falls under the spell, so to speak, of the king's mature mother. Gunnhild arranges for Hrut spend nights with her in "the upper chamber.” She shows him patronage. Hrut gains glory in battle, as doughty Icelanders were wont to do in Norway. After a while, he seeks to return home to Iceland, much the richer. Gunnhild does not try to stop him, lavishing gifts, but inquires if he has a sweetheart back home. Hrut says no, but Gunnhild knows. She is a sorceress in truth, and curses him so he will not please his intended wife. Back home, Hrut marries Unn, but their marriage is troubled. Unn eventually confesses to her father: “When he comes to me his penis is so large that he can't have any satisfaction from me, and we've both tried every possible way to enjoy each other, but nothing works.”

The sagas are timeless because of their creative deployments of comedy, sex, rough talk, and of course violence, not in spite of them. These elements continue to entertain, surprise, and delight readers.

Nowhere is such material more concentrated than in the flyting, a compositional unit in literary theory, used in medieval Old Norse and also Old Irish literature. The flyting, also called senna, was a stylized battle of words. In a flyting, combatants exchange boasts, threats, insults, and challenges the way they might exchange blows in a physical battle. The abuse takes on a deviant sexual cast. Not all of it is funny. Misogyny is not uncommon. Homophobia is routinized.

Much of the same can be said of contemporary rap culture for much of its evolution from the late 1970s to today. I have found a striking similarity between Old Norse boasts and insults and the braggadocio and dis, or trash-talk, of contemporary rap. Like the saga writers of old, hip-hop vocalists have ritualized and raised these expressive forms to new heights.

To celebrate saga and rap affinities in off-color glory, I propose a new party game. It’s a group guessing game called “Medieval Iceland or Contemporary Rap?” The rules are simple. Someone stands and recites a line, lines, or line fragment from medieval Icelandic writings or contemporary rap. The text must contain an instance of boasting (braggadocio) or insults (trash-talk). The group’s job is to guess if the text is from contemporary rap or medieval Iceland. Bonus points for whoever can name the rapper/speaker or the song/text.

What, nothing comes to mind?

Well, let me suggest a few examples to get the party started (see references below):

1. “I’ve never lifted a weapon without hitting my mark.”
2. “If it’s just we two who wrangle with wounding words: I’ll turn out rich in my replies.”
3. “I'm the authentic poet to get lyrical / For you to beat me, it's gonna take a miracle.”
4. “I sell ice in the winter / I sell fire in hell … / I sell water to a well.” 
5. “Pass me the scalpel, I'll make an incision, I'll cut out the part of your brain that does the bitchin'.” 
6. “You have no more brains than an ox or an ass.” 
7. “Blame God, he blew breath in my lungs / Second to none, wicked, I turn wives to widows” 
8. “Why so silent, you puffed-up gods: have you nothing to say to me at all?” 
9. “Pick from your teeth the pieces from the mare’s ass you ate.” 
10. “You know we show love, motherfuckers, cause Venus sent me… / Pussies calling us assholes for penis envy.”
11. “It’s said you played the witch… / beat the drum like a lady-prophet… / that signals to me a cock-craver.”
12. “…you are the sweetheart of the troll… / he uses you as a woman every ninth night.”
13. “Suck a dick, the day you beat me pigs will fly out my ass… / The best part about me is I am not you.”
14. “Shut up … / As for each here inside … / at one time you’ve been their bitch.”
15. “A bad bitch … / First things first I'll eat your brains… / And if I'm fake I ain't notice cause my money ain't!”
16. “When you awaken, your manhood will be taken.”
17. “I never thought that you… would try to get money out of your manhood.”
18. “There are many who can’t tell by looking at him whether he’s a man or a woman.”
19. “Shut up and sit down… I don’t find it funny, though your servants laugh…, when you sit with your legs tight, rubbing your thighs together.”
20. “Even if I stuttered I would still shi shi shit on you.”
21. “Hymir’s daughters took you for a toilet / which is why they pissed in your mouth.”
22. “You’re dripping with shit, dairy maid.”
23. “You straddled your brother… / and then you farted.”
24. “Come now, you can’t have been sitting on your ear when you were standing up.”

See the answer key below.

Technological travails

Life has taken a sharp turn for the worse. I've been in a Stop n' Shop for about 2 hours. Ideally I'd never enter a Stop n' Shop or a Walmart or a McDonalds, among other omnipresent, obtrusive centers of commerce and diabetes. Stop n' Shop isn't even all that bad; it's more a matter of principle.

Nonetheless, I ended up here. What happened is this: I screwed up synching my iPhone with iTunes and, since I don't have wifi at my apartment, I had to venture forth to restore the phone's operating system. Stop n' Shop boasts wifi internet and Starbucks and cookies so here we are.

Then when the restore was on the cusp of completion, the computer lowed an emergency low battery distress signal and summarily died. Devastation! I had to restore the blood sucker and re-synch all of everything and I'm mid process. My life resides on that devilish device.

All of this has served to remind me why I don't have wifi in the apartment in the first place: technology--at least high technology--does not by and large make my life easier, let alone better.

It does, but it doesn't. I must, as always, blame myself first and foremost. I am me. And I am not an adept, precise, or meticulous problem solver when it comes to technological complexity. I'm all thumbs. My neurons are wearing oven mitts.

I believe this is because I harbor a more romantic, synthetic, gestalt-based sensibility. I mean, I want things to work and be beautiful. I want beauty to surge muse-beckoned out of my pure and unhindered soul. Things should work, should they not? I'm no concrete, technological, engineering, analytical fixer. I can't fix a chicken sandwich let alone a faulty circuit or corroded whatsit. Thus, rather than master my technology my technology masters me.

This may be a tolerable state of affairs. It depends on what I'm aiming to optimize for: poetry, motorcycle maintenance, financial analytics, journalism, funk music, teaching, child rearing. What do I want, and what do I want to do, and what do I want to do well?

I need to iron out the factors in production here, because it's not like understanding the technical, analytical relationship between factors in a poetic form inhibits poetic expression. Perhaps the dichotomy is false and quality inheres in a fusion. Let's see if unstructured intuitive creativity will solve this.
***

PS I hate how Facebook pushes its push notifications and friend lookup and other crappy crap. It's basely procreative but annoying nonetheless. And YouTube commercials now induce in me a rage that's rapidly overwhelming any pleasure I get from the site's music, comedy, Ted Talks and junk. And what about the latest iTuneses? Insidious monstrosities that make me want to commit technical seppuku. Someone save me from these technology travails

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (spoilers)

"Sometimes I get lonely
Sleeping with you," she said.
"Just great," I said, "Just great."
I was already lost.
She was the kind of girl
That'd sleep with anyone,
I was mediocre,
But OK about it.
It was improbable
That such a person as
Myself could be living,
That such a relation
As ours could last for long.

Another girl, with an
Auricular something,
"You know nothing," she said,
"For sure," I said, "For sure."
On a wild sheep chase,
Ovine totemism,
A vital dynamo,
A fixed point in time space.
Points have no names nor selves,
Suspended over all,
Sheep have both,
A Will, a whip, a host,
Scourging blood for weakness.
"People are weak," I said.
"You don't know this thing," he said,
Gangrene rot worsening,
"That exists in the world."

"Where's the time go?" she asked,
We were close then,
Closer than ever, before the end.
"Time adds up for us," I said,
"But it does not expand,"
No, time does not expand.
Time trails off into death,
Darkness alone shifting,
Like mercury motion,
Voiceless snow falling soft,
Afterward all silent,
Inexpressible cleave.
Getting back to normal,
On a cold, concrete sea,
All alone with the dead,
And ears to hear the waves.

Note: this is "plagiarized" from the text, more of a tessellation of quotes than a novel effort.

Michener's Sayonara (spoilers)

Hana-ogi:

Rroyd, Rhroyd,

When you kissed me at Bitchi-bashi,
A good punishing smooch,
I knew you were the tall stud of substance,
I had longed and waited for.

It was but the work of a moment to,
Lay your head in my lap,
Then tumble you by the Shinto shrine.
You felt millions of eyes on you,
But had eyes only for my golden glamour.

You could no more resist carnal thrill,
Than the revelation of whole to whole,
The cohabitation of one in another.
We needed no common tongue to build,
A world away, rapturous, and auto-catalyzing.

But you, you simple and lovable fool,
With your beefhead Broadway blathering,
Dreaming yourself an architect, of setting me free,

Unwilling to forsake your foundation,

Yet demanding it of me.

In the end it was eyes you lacked,
For my, our, the multivocality,
And your own home-love hypocrisy.
Japan was never a place for you,
You were a place for Japan.

And so when your friend blew his brains out,
And mine stuck a knife through her neck,
I went to Tokyo knowing the future.
A succession of small rooms and big stages,
Discipline, promotion, bellicosity,

And an end to love.

Roy Gruver:

Hayano-chan,
Lo the postillion,
Takusan-love for the tadpole on my pillow,
I'm the one's been struck by lightning,
That will never strike again.

Note: First of a series of poems on books I read.

Quotations: action, production

Note: Many of these are from the website of Elisabeth Fosslien. Look for a justification of this move later.

Kingsley Amis: For once in his life, Dixon resolved to bet on his luck. What luck had come his way in the past he'd distrusted, stingily held on to until the chance of losing his initial gain was safely past. It was time to stop doing that *.

Mawi Asgedom: Like any dream, you have to start believing that you can do it. You don't quite know how it will turn out but you start anyway. Discipline is your best friend. If you have the discipline to write two pages every day, after 150 days, you have 300 pages. I actually use this in my speeches to show students how important discipline is. Something small, writing two pages, if done repeatedly can become something big, a 300-page book. That's my motto for success: dream big, do small, every day.

Saul Bellow: what he preached at me...the thing to do: not to dissolve in bewilderment of choices but to make myself hard, like himself, and learn how to stay with the necessary, undistracted by the trimmings *... A description: wild internal disorder, or even with the fact that he was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible... At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned values? You - you yourself are a child of the mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs. On top of that, an injured heart, and raw gasoline poured on the nerves... The busy bee has no time for sorrow *.

Samuel Clemens: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than the ones you did do... so throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails... explore, dream, discover.

Benjamin Disraeli: Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Seth Godin: Comments and Twitter are like a Fresnel lens. You can use them to focus attention if you’re very disciplined and very good, or, if you’re like me, you’ll end up finding your energy and attention diffused into a maelstrom, lost to the winds of inanity, anger or trivia. * The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer: Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends. You've just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new...the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday * .

Samuel Huntington: Some people may say that people in glass houses should not throw stones... I do not mind performing a useful function by throwing stones and thus encouraging others to move out of their glass houses, once I have moved out of mine (jstor p. 304).

Rudyard Kipling: [Lurgan Sahib] 'By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly--for it is worth doing' *.

Somerset Maugham: In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change -- change and the excitement of the unforeseen (*).

Haruki Murakami: [Colonel Sanders] "We're talking about a revelation here...a revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical" (255)...

[Kafka] "But I've always tried to get stronger."
"That's very important," the brawny one says, "Very important--to do your best to get stronger" (386).

Janwillem van de Wetering: Good luck comes to those who keep trying.

Ad astra.

Notes from "American Parsifal"

"American Parsifal" is a class at Syracuse University taught by Andrew Waggoner, composer in residence and violinist. I took it in Fall 2009. The class appraises trends in the tug of war between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in America. Besides Waggoner's riffs on history and culture, we consumed and chewed on a lot of art: poetry (Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop), music (Charles Ives, Elliot Carter, early Rock and Roll, Jazz), film (Forrest Gump, Being There, Bamboozled), and essays (Louis Menand, Toni Morrison). I was pupil qua amanuensis for the course, typing away on my petite laptop to sop up the wit and wisdom for posterity. What follows are notable transcriptions and interpretations from my notes.

• "I dream up goofy, fun stuff to study.", "The history was written by men; it's really quite simple.", "I can teach any damn fool thing I want."
• Semiotics was like influenza - the US strain went to Europe, mixed with the French, became virile and nasty, and returned to the US to wreak havoc.
• Science as metaphor. Fundamental mistake: metaphors are not equal.
• "Public education in this country has been an absolute disaster for the past 50 years."
• Bush: America is falling behind in Math and Science--the same administration which had been openly aggressive and violent towards science.
• I do not want intellectual labor saving devices. The way to avoid doing that that musically is to listen to intellectually engaging, difficult music--jazz.
• "The Soviet Union was an anthill run by psychopaths."
• "The right is an easy target:" Bill O'Reily, Sean Hannity - bit players - "these are visibly stupid people."
• Three options when talking about blackness, Africanism, and other controversial phenomena:
  1. Talk about it in ultra-respectful, politically correct language with a sense of modesty and seriousness.
  2. Just talk about it.
  3. Do not talk about it at all.
  (we chose door #2 in class)
• "He wanted me to fight him, he wanted me to see him with all of his imperfections, he did not want me to turn him into something I needed; into a kind of black Dalai Lama."
• Going to a hip-hop show is a unique, black experience whites should get involved in; more black people should go to the symphony.
• There is no American music without black music, yet black music is over and over again characterized as a kind of dark, jungle music--corrosive, mad, rhythmic--capable of turning people insane or corrupting their brain with excessive, orgiastic experience.
• Forrest Gump: The film springs from the American mythos that "The truest, most authentic, and most valuable aspect of the American psyche, the American soul, is to act with innocence and out of a pure desire to remain impervious to the distractions, the temptations, the sense of chaos, all the things, in other words, that constitute humanity."
• In correspondence about this blog post: "I like the Forrest Gump quote, but maybe you could set it up so that it's clear that I hate the movie"  
• "So you can put that under your hats."

Metaphors

I am in the process of reading (and enjoying) Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March. The language of this prose-master excites me. Check out some of these metaphors, similies, and other language usage innovations from the maestro.

... he listened, trying to remain comfortable but gradually becoming like a man determined not to let a grasshopper escape from his hand (Bellow, p. 4, NY: Penguin).

I tried to explain something of this to your brother, but his thoughts are about as steady as the way a drunkard pees (p. 55).

Poor nails, he didn't look good...An immense face like raked garden soil in need of water...he turned death nosed, white as a polyp, even in his deepest wrinkles. (p. 95-96)

...as soon as he inherited the fortune it darted and wriggled away like a collection of little gold animals that had obeyed only the old man's voice (p. 116).

The spirit I found him in was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I refer to male piercingness, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers (p. 168).

Eep, eep, where are the modern science fiction authors at?

I shudder to think of the path that society is taking. I shudder not out of fear, exactly, for fear is mostly useless, but out of anticipation and curiosity. Yeah. Where are we heading? It seems as if the physical-consumer world is disappearing. Everything is becoming e-commercialized. Purveyors of physical music - CDs and records - are noiselessly falling by the wayside. Booksellers are following suit. Before that, we saw the incremental elimination of the Mom and Pops, the little guys, the stores with care and character. And, of course, the larger-than-life economic recession is not helping the situation.

I take the position that this is stuff we should be concerned about. I simply dislike the one-stop-shopping model, the humongous, impersonal, hideous factory-stores, the mass-produced, unwholesome food, the uniforms, the slogans, the sham, the glitz, and the kitsch. It is blatant and undesirable homogenization and insipidization. It is depressing.

Of course, there is a flip-side. There is always a flip-side. We must recognize that current capitalist processes are making life cheaper and, indeed, better for many if not most people. Stuff is cheap, decent, and outrageously accessible. The Walton model works wonders.

Then again, this throws a lot of uncompetitive retailers and manufacturers out of business. Simply put, they cannot compete with the monster-scale of super-corporations. Small stores' prices are higher, and so they lose.

Of course, poverty, exploitation, and social calamity are all the more egregious and hideous overseas. But...those people are poor. They are "underprivileged." Too bad. We get the cheap goods and, many previously poorer people abroad now earn an income, however meager. We love the $2-tee shirts, the mangoes in December, the dirt-cheap televisions, eye-glasses, DVD players, drugs, automobiles. The price per value ratio for stuff today is truly miraculous. Everyone has a big-screen TVs and uber-cable. The commercials impress themselves painfully on our eardrums, the glare is blinding.

If we want change, it is up to us, the informed and willful consumers. We own our current predicament. We do not have the prescience to recognize cause and effect or the discipline to stop ourselves. Some of us care enough to boycott what we see to be the biggest, meanest retailers.

But even beyond that, may the Earth-mother continue to smile upon us, some of us are ABLE to boycott the big, bad corporate bullies. Yes, yes, it is nice not to have to depend on Walmart's generous social services, bargain-buy drugs, diapers, and TV-dinners.

It is necessary to recognize corporate irresponsibility, and capitalistic excess, but equally important to note consumer preponderance. We pertain to coercive systems, sure, but ultimately we design those systems.

I just wonder, where we are going? What will this world look like in 15, 20, 30 years? We need to examine the science-fiction and dystopian-novel gospels. Maybe we need some prophets. I have ambiguous tremulousness thinking about mankind's future. It is quite exciting, no?