I note this week things aren't always the way you'd like them to be but sometimes it doesn't matter.
On August 3rd, Darrell Green and Art Monk will be inducted into the football Hall of Fame. Darrell says, "I must be the most appreciative inductee in the history of the hall. When I received the NFL's Man of the Year in 1996, I started crying. I don't feel like I deserve it."
As for Art, I had the great pleasure of spending a day fishing with him on his boat. I used to attend the annual Ronald McDonald House charity auction. When Art came up for bid it coincided with the request of the Redskinettes to sit at our table to which I responded with a definitive yes. After a bidding war erupted, the ladies would cheer my bids - needless to say, I spent more than I intended but it was worth every penny. Art displayed the same class on the boat that day in front of one person as he did in front of 70,000 rabid 'Skins fans on Sundays at RFK.
Almost two hundred years earlier, the Royal Academicians paid five shillings to watch an English boxer pose in front of the Elgin marbles, transported from Greece, to Picadilly. According to Celina Fox, "the juxtaposition suggests a desire, at least among the English elite, to measure both its sporting heroes and its artists against the standards set by the ancients."
When I contrast the modesty of Green and Monk against perceptions of Roger Clemen's bully behavior or of Brett Farve's self-centeredness, the question arises of how standards merit admiration
There is an element, whenever standards are raised, of the impossibility of objectivity. The wife and I watched Branaugh's movie of Henry the V the other night, a version I'd taped from a televised Masterpiece Theatre. In his introduction, Alistair Cooke mentioned when the play opened in London, in 1938, it was booed off the stage since its nationalistic militaristic flavor was not welcome in an age of appeasement. When the Oliver film was released in 1944, after the British were well on the way to victory over the Nazis, English audiences couldn't get enough. Shakespeare, himself, had to walk a fine line in 1609 when writing a play about an unpopular war in Ireland to which his Queen was committed.
It was always Art Monk's practice, no matter how hard he was hit after a reception to simply stand up and trot back to the huddle. He said that action conveyed all which needed to be said.
It was the practice of my all-time hero Mickey Mantle, to run the bases head down after a home run, so as not to show up the pitcher. I bought the whole Yankees pr image: the shy grinning country boy from Oklahoma who courageously worked his way past injuries to be one of the best. None of the on-field behavior was reflected off the field - it was only the Mick, knowing he was dying, admitting the distinction, which confirmed the greater qualities of which I never suspected any were lacking - or wanted to know.
It's not Darrell, Art, Clemens, Farve or the Mick, in themselves, objectivly, which instills admiration, it's what we desire to see in them and ourselves that colors the view.
On business this past week in Greensboro, NC, I attended a Grasshoppers game in one of the finest minor league parks around. It was Christmas in July night and they did it up with all the trimimngs, Santa, snow, carols and elves. Even when it's not a special night, there's Babe the dog who brings balls to the umpire in buckets, retrieves bats after hits, and runs the bases after a win, touching every one with her nose.
Its not all as innocent as it sounds. The players run through a McDonalds M to enter the field, and even Babe wears a billboard ad. Just like in the case of Mickey, though, it doesn't matter because I don't want it to matter and mar what I envision minor league baseball to be all about.
I note Greg Norman was in contention for the British Open title last week. When I think of Greg, the first thing that comes to mind is "choke." Why? Because even though I desire to think of sports in the noblest terms, it's not possible from within our culture to eliminate the Lombardi dictum that winning isn't the only thing.
It wasn't when I was playing co-ed softball. During practice, we outfielders brought lawn chairs and a case of beer. It was only when our team grew less fun and more competitive, and I heard the local pro quarterback had imported ringers from Miami, who he also employed as waiters in his restaurants, that I lost interest.
Edward Gibbons prefaced his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by writing, "to resist is fatal, and it was impossible to fly." Even though it appears nobility in sports is corrupted to the point of fatality, I don't fly though I could, because I haven't given up on what I desire sports to represent.
When Clemens is enshrined in Cooperstown, it'll be on the basis of records alone. I'm sure he thinks he deserves it. Darrell Green and Art Monk will be honored on August 3 not only for records but for their decency.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Time isn't on My Side, No it's Not
I note two weeks ago we began with friend Dave's consternation at not finishing books and ended last week with Siddartha's prescription for happiness.
Both involve time, that is, how, if you eliminate the linear time pressures of any endeavor, pleasure is increased.
You know those folks who leave the ballgame after the seventh inning stretch to avoid traffic? Didn't they miss seeing the Orioles come back last night in the bottom of the ninth? This is why we drive to Baltimore twice a year, stay in a hotel and walk to the park.
After watching The Pioneers of Television series over the past month, friend Larry and I came to independent realizations that everybody really cool is dead. The fact of the matter is Jack Benny isn't gone if we laugh the same jokes whenever we catch him on tv.
We can choose the time period in which we want to live.
For 8,000 guests at Buckingham Palace, two weeks ago, the AP reports, "Tea with the queen looked much the same as it would have 140 years ago when Victoria started the tradition: men in tails and top hats, women in floral dresses and elaborate hats."
I've chosen to live alot lately at the exquistively cosmpolitan Oxford of the Twenties as captured in Evelyn Waugh's description of a debate at the Union on Whether Civilization has advanced since this Society first met: "It is hard to give an accurate impression of this speech; every sentence of it had an unexpected form; every epithet was used; every agrument twisted obliquely from its usual significance or spun inside out."
For some, like friend-of-cousin Richard, whose dream it was to be a Bobby on a bicycle in an English village, the boring routine never met the ideal, his short attempt only providing a temporary way station. For us as well, as moods shift, we may easily shift time, place and era, by taking another book off the shelf.
For others, like Cyril Connolly, it's only after the key is unearthed that an ancient surprisingly contemporary naughtiness unfolds, as he recalls, "under the usual system of teaching Latin it was not possible for an ordinary boy to grasp the translation of anything he translates - but in my time there appeared another kind of translation - the Loeb classical library, which printed a prose version of the Latin besides the original - from that moment, several of us began to understand what we read and to find out that we had been learning the mature, ironical, sensual and irreligious opinions of a middle-age Roman whose chief counsel to youth was to drink and make love."
Something which usually signals the end of time, obituaries, can transcend instead, capturing small essences of town life, like: the woman born in 1910 on the family farmstead in Shenandoah County; an 87 year-old who delivered the newspaper for 45 years; or the fella who enjoyed 'building bird houses, his three dogs, and lending his opinion to others.' Our hometown rag, itself, was founded in 1885.
A recent New Yorker article on the consistency of cave art in Franch over two thousand years proposed, "a profound conservatism in art is one of the hallmarks of a classical civilization. For the convention of cave painting to have endured, the culture it served must have been deeply satisfying and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine."
Not so hard, really, to imagine in a town where Goolrick's 'Modern' Pharmacy is 141 years old and Crimonds has been selling shoes on Caroline Street since 1901.
Perhaps these are merely more reflections upon that which we've touched upon earlier concerning how we nest when we age so we might better remember where we last laid our glasses. Waugh, again, though, elegantly depicts something more, even a spiritual asepct, in, for example, how he admires "the way old people manage their lives. Like the founders of monastic orders they devote their thoughts to planning a harmonious daily routine."
There's a local artist who paints family portraits. Not ones, mind you, where a family dressed in formal attire stares uncomfortably ahead but pictures which capture the essence of their subjects. In the ad, a family is situated in a fictional Tiki Bar where Mom and Dad in Jimmy Buffet clothes smilingly cradle dacquiris, Sis is chatting up a surfer, and younger brother is jogging down the boardwalk. Mine might depict a contented bleacher bum sitting next to Groucho explaining baseball to the Queen.
Living beyond time is no more or less real than visiting intellectual landmarks at the time and place of your own choosing, or savoring familiar faces in the Communion line, come a bleak Tuesday, of those who clasped your hand on Sunday as they passed your usual pew on their way to the eternal altar.
Both involve time, that is, how, if you eliminate the linear time pressures of any endeavor, pleasure is increased.
You know those folks who leave the ballgame after the seventh inning stretch to avoid traffic? Didn't they miss seeing the Orioles come back last night in the bottom of the ninth? This is why we drive to Baltimore twice a year, stay in a hotel and walk to the park.
After watching The Pioneers of Television series over the past month, friend Larry and I came to independent realizations that everybody really cool is dead. The fact of the matter is Jack Benny isn't gone if we laugh the same jokes whenever we catch him on tv.
We can choose the time period in which we want to live.
For 8,000 guests at Buckingham Palace, two weeks ago, the AP reports, "Tea with the queen looked much the same as it would have 140 years ago when Victoria started the tradition: men in tails and top hats, women in floral dresses and elaborate hats."
I've chosen to live alot lately at the exquistively cosmpolitan Oxford of the Twenties as captured in Evelyn Waugh's description of a debate at the Union on Whether Civilization has advanced since this Society first met: "It is hard to give an accurate impression of this speech; every sentence of it had an unexpected form; every epithet was used; every agrument twisted obliquely from its usual significance or spun inside out."
For some, like friend-of-cousin Richard, whose dream it was to be a Bobby on a bicycle in an English village, the boring routine never met the ideal, his short attempt only providing a temporary way station. For us as well, as moods shift, we may easily shift time, place and era, by taking another book off the shelf.
For others, like Cyril Connolly, it's only after the key is unearthed that an ancient surprisingly contemporary naughtiness unfolds, as he recalls, "under the usual system of teaching Latin it was not possible for an ordinary boy to grasp the translation of anything he translates - but in my time there appeared another kind of translation - the Loeb classical library, which printed a prose version of the Latin besides the original - from that moment, several of us began to understand what we read and to find out that we had been learning the mature, ironical, sensual and irreligious opinions of a middle-age Roman whose chief counsel to youth was to drink and make love."
Something which usually signals the end of time, obituaries, can transcend instead, capturing small essences of town life, like: the woman born in 1910 on the family farmstead in Shenandoah County; an 87 year-old who delivered the newspaper for 45 years; or the fella who enjoyed 'building bird houses, his three dogs, and lending his opinion to others.' Our hometown rag, itself, was founded in 1885.
A recent New Yorker article on the consistency of cave art in Franch over two thousand years proposed, "a profound conservatism in art is one of the hallmarks of a classical civilization. For the convention of cave painting to have endured, the culture it served must have been deeply satisfying and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine."
Not so hard, really, to imagine in a town where Goolrick's 'Modern' Pharmacy is 141 years old and Crimonds has been selling shoes on Caroline Street since 1901.
Perhaps these are merely more reflections upon that which we've touched upon earlier concerning how we nest when we age so we might better remember where we last laid our glasses. Waugh, again, though, elegantly depicts something more, even a spiritual asepct, in, for example, how he admires "the way old people manage their lives. Like the founders of monastic orders they devote their thoughts to planning a harmonious daily routine."
There's a local artist who paints family portraits. Not ones, mind you, where a family dressed in formal attire stares uncomfortably ahead but pictures which capture the essence of their subjects. In the ad, a family is situated in a fictional Tiki Bar where Mom and Dad in Jimmy Buffet clothes smilingly cradle dacquiris, Sis is chatting up a surfer, and younger brother is jogging down the boardwalk. Mine might depict a contented bleacher bum sitting next to Groucho explaining baseball to the Queen.
Living beyond time is no more or less real than visiting intellectual landmarks at the time and place of your own choosing, or savoring familiar faces in the Communion line, come a bleak Tuesday, of those who clasped your hand on Sunday as they passed your usual pew on their way to the eternal altar.
Friday, July 11, 2008
If St. Paul took Alleve
I note this week a certain sheepishhness. We covered 24 out of 28 Books of Acts in Sunday School over the past four months leaving the distinct impression Paul was a pompous ass, only to encounter in the Reading from Romans: "For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it."
If Paul had merely been an autocratic teacher, a demanding theoretician, and if he'd not, when he travelled about, incurred the wrath of townspeople, been beaten, stoned and jailed, would he have possessed the matching experience to confess his faults with such a tender humility? If our faith is likewise merely theoretical, would it not follow if it is sinful to harbor lust in the heart, even if the action is not consumated, then if one harbors chartiable intentions, yet never acts upon them, it is just as well?
Basketball-philosopher, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, derives a similar lesson on the worth of theory versus experience, via a reading of Hermann Hesse' life of Siddartha, "who becomes an aesthetic man, a wealthy man, a sensuous man - he explores all these different worlds and doesn't find enlightenment in any of them. That was the book's great message to me, so I started to develop my own value system as to what was good and what wasn't"
I comprehend Siddartha the same and otherwise: after a troubled adolescence, framed by an inherited faith which emphasizes ritual, Sid seeks deeper meanings amongst wandering monks, culminating in a meeting with the Buddha, who, as a necessarily one-sided teacher, as all teachers must be, warning against other false teachings, couldn't help be suspect as perhaps a false teacher himself. Falling away, Sid immerses himself in the world of samsara, that of business, gambling and sex, and though he achieves financial success, it is accompanied by an emptiness leading to an attempted suicide.
That Siddartha, Paul, you, Kareem and myself, are simultaenously alike in some ways, and different in others, is the point. There is no one path in time to enlightenment. The equal sense experience of listening to Sid's story, on a cd in my car, after enjoying the stories of P.G. Wodehouse, each imparting and leaving their own intangible well-being, contains all the inexpressible wisdom there is to be drawn.
Unlike Sid, is it possible to find bliss, samsara-like, on the job? The NY Times reports on Sue Frederick, an 'intuitive' career counselor who says, "It's all about aligning your natural gifts and talent to your passions that will equal a career that is 100 percent about fulfillment." Well, call Midas; I must need a realignment, since my dysfunctional experiences as a bureaucrat, in the Navy, on vestry, indeed, in all institutional enviorns, hardly culminated in fulfillment, though Ms. Frederick hints at the concept of non-wisdom, when she writes, "your dream job should make you giggle when you speak of it."
What of other paths? The Baltimore Sun describes promising results of a new Johns Hopkins study where 67% of volunteers, after ingesting 'magic mushrooms,' rated it as one of the "five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives." It might, though, just be a matter, as Woody Allen says, of laughs not being credible, if the audience is stoned. Or, as reflected by one volunteer "who recalled profound grief as if all the pain and sadness of the world were passing through me, cell by cell, tearing apart my being," it proves once more, wherever you go, there you are.
The on-going struggle for justice, established through politics, is ever enticing, if not morally inescapable, though in these times, with the center aligned on an ideological scale, far to yahoo right, it gives rise, mostly to the absurd. As it recently was for the judges in a recent case who concluded Government arguments alleging statements made in court were reliable because they wouldn't have been made otherwise were comparable to Lewis Carroll's Bellman, who proclaims, "I have said it thrice: what I tell you three times is true."
Must we so quickly dismiss full immersion in samsara? Aldous Huxley writes in The Life Theoretic, that he's been "fumbling over books/And thinking about God and the Devil and all/while others have been struggling in the world/or kissing women with their brazen faces like battering-rams. God knows, perhaps the battering-rams are right."
Voyaging to India, in 1927, Huxley reverses himself, writing "going to the races, playing bridge, drinking cocktails, dancing till four in the morning, and talking about nothing, and meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows staunchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound. And there is all knowledge, all art. There are men and women, the innumerable living, and, in the books, the souls of the dead who deserved to be immortal. Heaven preserve us in such a world, from having a good time!"
Finally, years later, he exclaims, "happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness - it is generally the by-product of other activities."
In conversation with Timothy Leary, a few days before he died on November 22, 1963, Huxley spoke, too, like Jabar, of what he'd learned from reading Hermann Hesse:
The three stages of human development:
1. The tribal sense of tropical-blissful unity;
2. The horrid Newtonian polarities of the feudal-industrial societies, good-evil, male-female, Christian-Moslem;
3. The Einsteiniam rediscovery of the Oneness of It All.
We're born into a familial insular security, against which we necesarily rebel; forming strong opinions, delineating sharp edges of right and wrong, of which we, superior beings, are entitled to judge; finding, in the end, as did Siddartha and Huxley, that existence is both more complex, and simple, in its unity, like a river which flows but is everywhere at once.
On Saturday errands to familar landmarks of library and market; in the company of friends; tending to the health of elderly step-dog Max; gathered within the fellowship of a youth group, on a Baltimore sidewalk, good naturedly huddling against the freezing cold, rather than in the recall of any forgotten dogmatism promulgated within the arena itself, is wherein lies the impossibly expresible widsom.
Huxley's personal motto was lifted from the depiction of a man in a Goya painting, around whose neck hung the legend, aun aprendo, "I am still learning."
Indeed, as we watched, and the wife endured, another annual presentation of Woodstock on the VCR last week, we were drawn, not to the music, but the banter between sets.
"We sure did talk a lot in the Sixties."
"But it dosen't make any sense."
Precisely.
If Paul had merely been an autocratic teacher, a demanding theoretician, and if he'd not, when he travelled about, incurred the wrath of townspeople, been beaten, stoned and jailed, would he have possessed the matching experience to confess his faults with such a tender humility? If our faith is likewise merely theoretical, would it not follow if it is sinful to harbor lust in the heart, even if the action is not consumated, then if one harbors chartiable intentions, yet never acts upon them, it is just as well?
Basketball-philosopher, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, derives a similar lesson on the worth of theory versus experience, via a reading of Hermann Hesse' life of Siddartha, "who becomes an aesthetic man, a wealthy man, a sensuous man - he explores all these different worlds and doesn't find enlightenment in any of them. That was the book's great message to me, so I started to develop my own value system as to what was good and what wasn't"
I comprehend Siddartha the same and otherwise: after a troubled adolescence, framed by an inherited faith which emphasizes ritual, Sid seeks deeper meanings amongst wandering monks, culminating in a meeting with the Buddha, who, as a necessarily one-sided teacher, as all teachers must be, warning against other false teachings, couldn't help be suspect as perhaps a false teacher himself. Falling away, Sid immerses himself in the world of samsara, that of business, gambling and sex, and though he achieves financial success, it is accompanied by an emptiness leading to an attempted suicide.
That Siddartha, Paul, you, Kareem and myself, are simultaenously alike in some ways, and different in others, is the point. There is no one path in time to enlightenment. The equal sense experience of listening to Sid's story, on a cd in my car, after enjoying the stories of P.G. Wodehouse, each imparting and leaving their own intangible well-being, contains all the inexpressible wisdom there is to be drawn.
Unlike Sid, is it possible to find bliss, samsara-like, on the job? The NY Times reports on Sue Frederick, an 'intuitive' career counselor who says, "It's all about aligning your natural gifts and talent to your passions that will equal a career that is 100 percent about fulfillment." Well, call Midas; I must need a realignment, since my dysfunctional experiences as a bureaucrat, in the Navy, on vestry, indeed, in all institutional enviorns, hardly culminated in fulfillment, though Ms. Frederick hints at the concept of non-wisdom, when she writes, "your dream job should make you giggle when you speak of it."
What of other paths? The Baltimore Sun describes promising results of a new Johns Hopkins study where 67% of volunteers, after ingesting 'magic mushrooms,' rated it as one of the "five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives." It might, though, just be a matter, as Woody Allen says, of laughs not being credible, if the audience is stoned. Or, as reflected by one volunteer "who recalled profound grief as if all the pain and sadness of the world were passing through me, cell by cell, tearing apart my being," it proves once more, wherever you go, there you are.
The on-going struggle for justice, established through politics, is ever enticing, if not morally inescapable, though in these times, with the center aligned on an ideological scale, far to yahoo right, it gives rise, mostly to the absurd. As it recently was for the judges in a recent case who concluded Government arguments alleging statements made in court were reliable because they wouldn't have been made otherwise were comparable to Lewis Carroll's Bellman, who proclaims, "I have said it thrice: what I tell you three times is true."
Must we so quickly dismiss full immersion in samsara? Aldous Huxley writes in The Life Theoretic, that he's been "fumbling over books/And thinking about God and the Devil and all/while others have been struggling in the world/or kissing women with their brazen faces like battering-rams. God knows, perhaps the battering-rams are right."
Voyaging to India, in 1927, Huxley reverses himself, writing "going to the races, playing bridge, drinking cocktails, dancing till four in the morning, and talking about nothing, and meanwhile the beautiful, the incredible world in which we live awaits our exploration, and life is short, and time flows staunchlessly, like blood from a mortal wound. And there is all knowledge, all art. There are men and women, the innumerable living, and, in the books, the souls of the dead who deserved to be immortal. Heaven preserve us in such a world, from having a good time!"
Finally, years later, he exclaims, "happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness - it is generally the by-product of other activities."
In conversation with Timothy Leary, a few days before he died on November 22, 1963, Huxley spoke, too, like Jabar, of what he'd learned from reading Hermann Hesse:
The three stages of human development:
1. The tribal sense of tropical-blissful unity;
2. The horrid Newtonian polarities of the feudal-industrial societies, good-evil, male-female, Christian-Moslem;
3. The Einsteiniam rediscovery of the Oneness of It All.
We're born into a familial insular security, against which we necesarily rebel; forming strong opinions, delineating sharp edges of right and wrong, of which we, superior beings, are entitled to judge; finding, in the end, as did Siddartha and Huxley, that existence is both more complex, and simple, in its unity, like a river which flows but is everywhere at once.
On Saturday errands to familar landmarks of library and market; in the company of friends; tending to the health of elderly step-dog Max; gathered within the fellowship of a youth group, on a Baltimore sidewalk, good naturedly huddling against the freezing cold, rather than in the recall of any forgotten dogmatism promulgated within the arena itself, is wherein lies the impossibly expresible widsom.
Huxley's personal motto was lifted from the depiction of a man in a Goya painting, around whose neck hung the legend, aun aprendo, "I am still learning."
Indeed, as we watched, and the wife endured, another annual presentation of Woodstock on the VCR last week, we were drawn, not to the music, but the banter between sets.
"We sure did talk a lot in the Sixties."
"But it dosen't make any sense."
Precisely.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Curing a Fatty Degeneration of the Mind
I note this week Friend Dave's consternation over an admission in Sunday School that I read six books at once but don't particularly finish any of them.
Columnist Leonard Pitts recently addressed this very point, referring to Nicholas Carr's theory, in, Is Google Making Us Stupid, that the Net is rewiring our brains. Carr contends, since search engines retrieve more results than it's possible to read in a lifetime, and the length of a lifetime hasn't increased, exponentially, "it requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus."
Not necessarily.
As William Hurt said in The Big Chill, "I'm not into the completist thing."
In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents a hundred short biographies, which are anything but compendiums of births, degrees earned, accomplishments made; they are, instead, ruminations which compel a reader to follow the most intriguing clues -
-like the story of Egon Friedell, philosopher, historian, journalist, actor, critic, who jumped to his death through an upstairs window in Vienna as the Gestapo arrived to arrest him. In the introduction to the 1964 edition of Friedell's, A Cultural History of the Modern World, Alfred Polgar writes, "he was like the dowser, who does not plow the grounds bit by bit but digs only in places where the vibration in his hands indicates that he has found what he seeks."
Following clues further, we find Polgar fled Vienna, finding no real peace for the remainder of his refugee existence. You can't help but think Polgar was considering himself, rather than his subject, when he wrote, "When the Germans came, Friedell was confused, not by physical fear, but because he was afraid of a radical disturbance of his routine. He could not bear the thought that he might have to part with his old-fashioned room, with his books, so endlessly marked in the margins - he could not face the possibility that his files, tens of thousands of excerpts, would be hopelessly messed up."
Restless minds which blaze trails must first be anchored themselves. Friend Jill and I have often debated the strange compulsion I obey to shelve books in descending order, starting with the tallest, on the left. In my defense, I'm not the only one - we find the great 17th century English diarist, Samuel Pepys, built mini-high heels so all the books on his shelves would be shimmed to the same height. (Jill insists this discovery in no way negates my own personal wierdness.)
Is it then merely self-indulgence to construct and inhabit such a private inner world to the neglect of public events? In a New Yorker article, Jonathan Rosen describes the contemporary of Pepys, John Milton, as "a radical poet who, though he had imaginative power to burn, put aside his art for a decade of political activism." Yet, imprisoned in the Tower, after the Restoration, Rosen details Milton's dwindling faith in politics,' noting the devils of Paradise Lost, composed during this time, are failed revolutionaries, just as Milton earlier supported the beheading of a King by Puritan rebels.
It has come to be with distaste that I comment here, at all, on the struggle within our Episcopal Church, as if the topic, in itself, represents an unnerving intrusion into a self-contained small room, harboring shelves of books, arranged, in order of height.
Yet, the elephant barges in, even here. I note this week, after a district court decided for those who've so far already destroyed the serene gentility of all which stood in their way, the question remains, how, and if, to confront them.
Sheriff Taylor, and Mr. Cleaver, would advise Opie and the Beav, respectively, that the only way forward is to stand up to the bully in the schoolyard. My way is less direct. In response to a general "How We're Doing," email broadcast, on the part of the four displaced parishes, I offered only personal words of encouragement to the originator, who then, on his own volition, proceeded to re-broadcast them - reaching a circle, where the mother of Friend Jill, eventually responded, 'it brought tears of joy,' a reaction, knowing the source, which carries greater value than a Pulitzer Prize.
In attendance, later during the week, at a meeting where a Bishop and lawyer expounded upon the ramifications of the decision in terms of property and Constitutional rights, I couldn't help but offer, after an hour and a half, that no one speaks in these forums any longer of human rights; that the lives of people, vulnerable to harrangues of tinpot demagogues, in countries where there are no civil liberties, are at stake.
Confrontation of any sort is out of character. I find balance, an Rx for what Polgar describes as, Fatty Degeneration of the Mind, in a studious inner life, and within the continued existence of our parish, when it might have just as otherwise been erased by bullies as was the Vienna of Friedell. As Polgar wrote, "To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won't be easy. They know exactly what they're doing; they just can't imagine it."
It is hopeful to imagine the continuing study of texts which occurs in a cloistered room, or the natural inclusivity of a parish, can, in themselves, stay the murderous hands of would-be dictators in lands far away.
One of the half-dozen books presently open on the Spotsyltuckian's night stand is Don DeLillo's, Underworld, a sprawling fiction, which covers baseball, atomic bombs, and the generation of mountains of garbage by a modern society.
Oddly enough, Underworld returns us to our opening theme - reviewer Gary Marshall writes, "reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web browser; the narrative focus moves from character to character almost as quickly as we are introduced to them, and the time frame regularly changes to show further connections between the key players. This device - literature as hypertext - is particularly effective in the early parts of the novel and the technique never intrudes on the story itself." Here is the perfect blend: passages beautifully crafted; information revealed; connections made - as Thomas Mann described Polgar's prose - lightness that plumbs the depths.
Egon Friedell shatters an earlier conviction, as propogated by John Henry Newman, that true learning may only occur when you discard all preconceptions prior to approaching the text. Friedell blows that away by contending 'we can never know anything but ourselves,' and reading, through the introduction of wholly new subject experiences, allows us to discover new possibilities of our own ego's and enlarge the frontiers of our consciousness.
I can't get there, Friend Dave, reading every book, cover to cover. There's just not enough time.
Columnist Leonard Pitts recently addressed this very point, referring to Nicholas Carr's theory, in, Is Google Making Us Stupid, that the Net is rewiring our brains. Carr contends, since search engines retrieve more results than it's possible to read in a lifetime, and the length of a lifetime hasn't increased, exponentially, "it requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus."
Not necessarily.
As William Hurt said in The Big Chill, "I'm not into the completist thing."
In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents a hundred short biographies, which are anything but compendiums of births, degrees earned, accomplishments made; they are, instead, ruminations which compel a reader to follow the most intriguing clues -
-like the story of Egon Friedell, philosopher, historian, journalist, actor, critic, who jumped to his death through an upstairs window in Vienna as the Gestapo arrived to arrest him. In the introduction to the 1964 edition of Friedell's, A Cultural History of the Modern World, Alfred Polgar writes, "he was like the dowser, who does not plow the grounds bit by bit but digs only in places where the vibration in his hands indicates that he has found what he seeks."
Following clues further, we find Polgar fled Vienna, finding no real peace for the remainder of his refugee existence. You can't help but think Polgar was considering himself, rather than his subject, when he wrote, "When the Germans came, Friedell was confused, not by physical fear, but because he was afraid of a radical disturbance of his routine. He could not bear the thought that he might have to part with his old-fashioned room, with his books, so endlessly marked in the margins - he could not face the possibility that his files, tens of thousands of excerpts, would be hopelessly messed up."
Restless minds which blaze trails must first be anchored themselves. Friend Jill and I have often debated the strange compulsion I obey to shelve books in descending order, starting with the tallest, on the left. In my defense, I'm not the only one - we find the great 17th century English diarist, Samuel Pepys, built mini-high heels so all the books on his shelves would be shimmed to the same height. (Jill insists this discovery in no way negates my own personal wierdness.)
Is it then merely self-indulgence to construct and inhabit such a private inner world to the neglect of public events? In a New Yorker article, Jonathan Rosen describes the contemporary of Pepys, John Milton, as "a radical poet who, though he had imaginative power to burn, put aside his art for a decade of political activism." Yet, imprisoned in the Tower, after the Restoration, Rosen details Milton's dwindling faith in politics,' noting the devils of Paradise Lost, composed during this time, are failed revolutionaries, just as Milton earlier supported the beheading of a King by Puritan rebels.
It has come to be with distaste that I comment here, at all, on the struggle within our Episcopal Church, as if the topic, in itself, represents an unnerving intrusion into a self-contained small room, harboring shelves of books, arranged, in order of height.
Yet, the elephant barges in, even here. I note this week, after a district court decided for those who've so far already destroyed the serene gentility of all which stood in their way, the question remains, how, and if, to confront them.
Sheriff Taylor, and Mr. Cleaver, would advise Opie and the Beav, respectively, that the only way forward is to stand up to the bully in the schoolyard. My way is less direct. In response to a general "How We're Doing," email broadcast, on the part of the four displaced parishes, I offered only personal words of encouragement to the originator, who then, on his own volition, proceeded to re-broadcast them - reaching a circle, where the mother of Friend Jill, eventually responded, 'it brought tears of joy,' a reaction, knowing the source, which carries greater value than a Pulitzer Prize.
In attendance, later during the week, at a meeting where a Bishop and lawyer expounded upon the ramifications of the decision in terms of property and Constitutional rights, I couldn't help but offer, after an hour and a half, that no one speaks in these forums any longer of human rights; that the lives of people, vulnerable to harrangues of tinpot demagogues, in countries where there are no civil liberties, are at stake.
Confrontation of any sort is out of character. I find balance, an Rx for what Polgar describes as, Fatty Degeneration of the Mind, in a studious inner life, and within the continued existence of our parish, when it might have just as otherwise been erased by bullies as was the Vienna of Friedell. As Polgar wrote, "To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won't be easy. They know exactly what they're doing; they just can't imagine it."
It is hopeful to imagine the continuing study of texts which occurs in a cloistered room, or the natural inclusivity of a parish, can, in themselves, stay the murderous hands of would-be dictators in lands far away.
One of the half-dozen books presently open on the Spotsyltuckian's night stand is Don DeLillo's, Underworld, a sprawling fiction, which covers baseball, atomic bombs, and the generation of mountains of garbage by a modern society.
Oddly enough, Underworld returns us to our opening theme - reviewer Gary Marshall writes, "reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web browser; the narrative focus moves from character to character almost as quickly as we are introduced to them, and the time frame regularly changes to show further connections between the key players. This device - literature as hypertext - is particularly effective in the early parts of the novel and the technique never intrudes on the story itself." Here is the perfect blend: passages beautifully crafted; information revealed; connections made - as Thomas Mann described Polgar's prose - lightness that plumbs the depths.
Egon Friedell shatters an earlier conviction, as propogated by John Henry Newman, that true learning may only occur when you discard all preconceptions prior to approaching the text. Friedell blows that away by contending 'we can never know anything but ourselves,' and reading, through the introduction of wholly new subject experiences, allows us to discover new possibilities of our own ego's and enlarge the frontiers of our consciousness.
I can't get there, Friend Dave, reading every book, cover to cover. There's just not enough time.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
A Tale of Four Cities
I note this week, at high summer, great expectations, before you take to the road, and greater relief, once home.
Shaw wrote, "I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad." I'm more like Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary, who writes guide books describing how people can travel and feel like they've never left home.
For homebodies, the greatest joy comes, preparing; calling Triple AAA to order TripTiks, and plain old-fashioned maps, because just as much as I annoy our GPS guide-voice, the ever-recalculating Gladys, by impulsively darting off the highway onto scenic routes, I'd rather drive two-lane country roads, relegating TripTiks to find restaurant and motels, the same way I utilize MapQuest, measuring the way I'm going to go against how professionals advise I should go.
When the process is complete, navigator-wife, is left holding an annoying series of awkwardly folded maps, taped edge to edge, to decipher a sketchily pencilled oval track, incorporating an alternate return path (there was that 2-day wide-right, once, from Cape Cod to Virginia, to avoid a toll booth under construction on 95 in Delware, resulting in a night at an Allentown motel where I had to thread cable through dresser drawers, and over the bathroom sink, to watch the World Series, but, you know, life carries surprises when discovering short cuts no one's ever taken before, like Lewis and Clark, or Bear Grills, even).
It's all rather complicated but good training for special ops beyond summer vacations. When I read in the local rag that The Taming of the Shrew was to be performed on the lawn of Kenmore, an 18th century landmark in downtown Fredericksburg, I set about work, mapping Shakespare country, the same way I'd prep for any grueling wilderness journey.
First, obtain a play synopsis off the net, the purpose of which, is to isolate characters/landmarks, creating a spreadsheet, where relations can be drawn, especially in comedies where one player may possess one, or more, false identities, or have traded names, with multiple partners. In the end, the charts resemble a flow chart you might encounter at work except these resemble a plate of spaghetti.
Next, chart in hand, verify entries and notations against the plot summaries and character descriptions, including number of lines per character and act, to judge distances, using the Essential Shakespeare handbook, DK Publishers, American Edition, 2004 (many books claim to be "the essential guide" - believe me, this is the one).
Finally, sitting in the audience, after you've staked a claim by planting a beach chair in the first row, one last review before the play opens, like cramming before a final exam, perusing the "Everyman Tales from Shakespeare," written by Charles and Mary Lamb, described on the back jacket, as "First published in 1807, the tales were written to introduce Shakespeare to children by extracting an unclouded and approachable story-line from the complex texts of the plays." Children-unclouded-approachable: now you're talking this traveller's language.
Both times I've seen Shakespeare, on the lawn, Love's Labor's Lost at Wadham College in Oxford, and Shrew at Kenmore, I wouldn't have understood anything without first doing the homework. In a recent editorial, a local columnist, bemoaning today's emphasis on standard testing at the expense of the arts, wrote, it's "admirable when students are required to read plays, but it is only on stage that students can begin to see how a playwright's words come to life, and learn what it is to interact with an audience - to rouse and move them - and to improvise when a line is dropped, or the music is slow in rising, or a microphone goes dead."
Read first, then, interact: the first rule of Shakespeare.
And so it was in Padua, Italy, last Saturday night, transported to Fredericksburg, Virginia, when Petruchio offered a McNugget, which I ate, to the foot-stomping consternation of the starving Kate, and so it was in Navarre, at Oxford, when the disguised Mr. Bean-like King, and three Lords, wildly danced like Cossacks, to win the love of the Princess, and her three ladies-in-waiting, disguised as each other. I came, I saw; remarkably, I followed.
It's a rare joy when the journey exceeds expectations. Travelling to two cities, within cities, to watch plays, within plays, are such times.
Next summer, I'm already planning a trip to Cooperstown to break a curse as long and hard as the Boston Bambino hex - but that's a tale of another city for another time.
Shaw wrote, "I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad." I'm more like Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary, who writes guide books describing how people can travel and feel like they've never left home.
For homebodies, the greatest joy comes, preparing; calling Triple AAA to order TripTiks, and plain old-fashioned maps, because just as much as I annoy our GPS guide-voice, the ever-recalculating Gladys, by impulsively darting off the highway onto scenic routes, I'd rather drive two-lane country roads, relegating TripTiks to find restaurant and motels, the same way I utilize MapQuest, measuring the way I'm going to go against how professionals advise I should go.
When the process is complete, navigator-wife, is left holding an annoying series of awkwardly folded maps, taped edge to edge, to decipher a sketchily pencilled oval track, incorporating an alternate return path (there was that 2-day wide-right, once, from Cape Cod to Virginia, to avoid a toll booth under construction on 95 in Delware, resulting in a night at an Allentown motel where I had to thread cable through dresser drawers, and over the bathroom sink, to watch the World Series, but, you know, life carries surprises when discovering short cuts no one's ever taken before, like Lewis and Clark, or Bear Grills, even).
It's all rather complicated but good training for special ops beyond summer vacations. When I read in the local rag that The Taming of the Shrew was to be performed on the lawn of Kenmore, an 18th century landmark in downtown Fredericksburg, I set about work, mapping Shakespare country, the same way I'd prep for any grueling wilderness journey.
First, obtain a play synopsis off the net, the purpose of which, is to isolate characters/landmarks, creating a spreadsheet, where relations can be drawn, especially in comedies where one player may possess one, or more, false identities, or have traded names, with multiple partners. In the end, the charts resemble a flow chart you might encounter at work except these resemble a plate of spaghetti.
Next, chart in hand, verify entries and notations against the plot summaries and character descriptions, including number of lines per character and act, to judge distances, using the Essential Shakespeare handbook, DK Publishers, American Edition, 2004 (many books claim to be "the essential guide" - believe me, this is the one).
Finally, sitting in the audience, after you've staked a claim by planting a beach chair in the first row, one last review before the play opens, like cramming before a final exam, perusing the "Everyman Tales from Shakespeare," written by Charles and Mary Lamb, described on the back jacket, as "First published in 1807, the tales were written to introduce Shakespeare to children by extracting an unclouded and approachable story-line from the complex texts of the plays." Children-unclouded-approachable: now you're talking this traveller's language.
Both times I've seen Shakespeare, on the lawn, Love's Labor's Lost at Wadham College in Oxford, and Shrew at Kenmore, I wouldn't have understood anything without first doing the homework. In a recent editorial, a local columnist, bemoaning today's emphasis on standard testing at the expense of the arts, wrote, it's "admirable when students are required to read plays, but it is only on stage that students can begin to see how a playwright's words come to life, and learn what it is to interact with an audience - to rouse and move them - and to improvise when a line is dropped, or the music is slow in rising, or a microphone goes dead."
Read first, then, interact: the first rule of Shakespeare.
And so it was in Padua, Italy, last Saturday night, transported to Fredericksburg, Virginia, when Petruchio offered a McNugget, which I ate, to the foot-stomping consternation of the starving Kate, and so it was in Navarre, at Oxford, when the disguised Mr. Bean-like King, and three Lords, wildly danced like Cossacks, to win the love of the Princess, and her three ladies-in-waiting, disguised as each other. I came, I saw; remarkably, I followed.
It's a rare joy when the journey exceeds expectations. Travelling to two cities, within cities, to watch plays, within plays, are such times.
Next summer, I'm already planning a trip to Cooperstown to break a curse as long and hard as the Boston Bambino hex - but that's a tale of another city for another time.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Beach Reads 2008: The Reviews
I note this week the danger of checking out books from a University library where dust jackets are removed. Where I'd reckoned, from all I knew about Doris Kearns Goodwin, impressionistically, that Wait Till Next Year is about attending games at Fenway, with her father, that never happened. It was only after she was a parent, herself, in Boston, that she took her kids to the ballpark.
What the book is about is something just as fine; the youngest daughter of a family who'd emigrated from Brooklyn to Long Island, desiring to please her father, upon his return home after a long commute, scores Dodgers games, played in the afternoon, broadcast by Red Barber on the radio, to replay the contest intimately after dinner for her dad. In the process, an historian and story teller is born.
The geography is familiar - after only a two-week infant residency in DC, in 1954, my family moved to Brooklyn, where we lived for almost ten years, before moving to Long Island for three more. Since the Dodgers had already left for California before I reached baseball awareness in 1961, and the Mets, founded shortly after, never caught my fancy (for a youngster, even Stengel-ese incompetence isn't necessarily charming, it's just embarassing), it's the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Boyer, Kubek, Richardson, Pepitone, and Tresh, I carry, as Kearns holds Robinson, Snyder and Campanella in her heart.
Where I'd attribute the love of NY baseball to environment, I acknowledge an Anglophillia as genetic, maternally inherited, though reading The Brideshead Generation at the beach resulted in a deeper realization of something else.
Across from Persimmons Drive, where the rented beach house in the Outer Banks stands, lies the tiny Corolla Library which we frequented to check on emails. I'd told the wife, whenever I see her approaching the counter with a stack of books in her arms, it's quite sexy, and so, she didn't disappoint, filling a tote bag (at $15 a load, satchel included)! I, naturally, couldn't resist a contribution, and tossed a tome called The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasli Mitrokhin, onto the pile.
Unknowingly I'd purchased a complement to Brideshead, since Sword is the history of Soviet foreign ministry espionage and that story can't be told excluding the bio's of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge 5, who betrayed England for the USSR.
The Oxford-Brideshead Generation dismissed politics in lieu of art. The Cambridge crew committed treason, dedicated to a cause, that proved bankrupt. The arts and antics of the former, even when frivolous, outlasted the far more serious and deadly politics of the latter.
Indeed, although I didn't read so far at the beach into the Yeats biography, by Jeffares, to confirm whether Yeats' poetry was finally informed more by nationalism than Irish mysticism, at the point where I left off, the author writes, "he still wished for some system of philosophy which would include his belief that the legends, personalities and emotions handed down by poets and painters, philosophers and theologians were the nearest approach he knew to truth."
Reading, for me, is seasonal. Summer is for grand achievements in the arts while winter is for the historical reality, against which the hope, represented in the arts, is measured and overcome.
Upon return from the beach, the principles interweaved together magically at Wolf Trap, where for the first time, James Taylor performed. As he sang told tales and sang tunes like Sweet Baby James, the past 40 years of progressive politics were incoporated into a larger more enduring gentle presence which doesn't force any issue but quietly represents what it is we sought to be and how we live our lives.
Perhaps, after all he's gone through over the past four decades, publically and privately, James might not be adverse to Lewis Hyde's words, in the last of the 2008 beach reads, The Gift, "Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature."
For James, obviously, the gift is music. For me, the cultural legacies of a New York childhood, Eastern European-English genetics, and a life otherwise lived in the South, and Mid-Atlantic, make way for an inner garden not yet fully grown. That nutriments may be found in a life already existant as the political change desired, seems right; perhaps more can be explained through contemplation of the dolphins we watched at play in the ocean.
What the book is about is something just as fine; the youngest daughter of a family who'd emigrated from Brooklyn to Long Island, desiring to please her father, upon his return home after a long commute, scores Dodgers games, played in the afternoon, broadcast by Red Barber on the radio, to replay the contest intimately after dinner for her dad. In the process, an historian and story teller is born.
The geography is familiar - after only a two-week infant residency in DC, in 1954, my family moved to Brooklyn, where we lived for almost ten years, before moving to Long Island for three more. Since the Dodgers had already left for California before I reached baseball awareness in 1961, and the Mets, founded shortly after, never caught my fancy (for a youngster, even Stengel-ese incompetence isn't necessarily charming, it's just embarassing), it's the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Ford, Howard, Boyer, Kubek, Richardson, Pepitone, and Tresh, I carry, as Kearns holds Robinson, Snyder and Campanella in her heart.
Where I'd attribute the love of NY baseball to environment, I acknowledge an Anglophillia as genetic, maternally inherited, though reading The Brideshead Generation at the beach resulted in a deeper realization of something else.
Across from Persimmons Drive, where the rented beach house in the Outer Banks stands, lies the tiny Corolla Library which we frequented to check on emails. I'd told the wife, whenever I see her approaching the counter with a stack of books in her arms, it's quite sexy, and so, she didn't disappoint, filling a tote bag (at $15 a load, satchel included)! I, naturally, couldn't resist a contribution, and tossed a tome called The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasli Mitrokhin, onto the pile.
Unknowingly I'd purchased a complement to Brideshead, since Sword is the history of Soviet foreign ministry espionage and that story can't be told excluding the bio's of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross, the infamous Cambridge 5, who betrayed England for the USSR.
The Oxford-Brideshead Generation dismissed politics in lieu of art. The Cambridge crew committed treason, dedicated to a cause, that proved bankrupt. The arts and antics of the former, even when frivolous, outlasted the far more serious and deadly politics of the latter.
Indeed, although I didn't read so far at the beach into the Yeats biography, by Jeffares, to confirm whether Yeats' poetry was finally informed more by nationalism than Irish mysticism, at the point where I left off, the author writes, "he still wished for some system of philosophy which would include his belief that the legends, personalities and emotions handed down by poets and painters, philosophers and theologians were the nearest approach he knew to truth."
Reading, for me, is seasonal. Summer is for grand achievements in the arts while winter is for the historical reality, against which the hope, represented in the arts, is measured and overcome.
Upon return from the beach, the principles interweaved together magically at Wolf Trap, where for the first time, James Taylor performed. As he sang told tales and sang tunes like Sweet Baby James, the past 40 years of progressive politics were incoporated into a larger more enduring gentle presence which doesn't force any issue but quietly represents what it is we sought to be and how we live our lives.
Perhaps, after all he's gone through over the past four decades, publically and privately, James might not be adverse to Lewis Hyde's words, in the last of the 2008 beach reads, The Gift, "Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature."
For James, obviously, the gift is music. For me, the cultural legacies of a New York childhood, Eastern European-English genetics, and a life otherwise lived in the South, and Mid-Atlantic, make way for an inner garden not yet fully grown. That nutriments may be found in a life already existant as the political change desired, seems right; perhaps more can be explained through contemplation of the dolphins we watched at play in the ocean.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Beach Reads 2008: Outrageous Things in Stylish Phrases
I note this week advice Evelyn Waugh gave to his son when he met with difficulties at school. He wrote to Auberon, "Don't become an anarchist. There is no superiority in shirking things and doing badly. Be superior by cultivating your intellect and taste."
Sounds terribly British, if not downright snobbish, eh? Even so, it remains the dutiful fate of non-shirking readers, such as in this family, where the maternal, not patriarchal advice, "what did we learn from this," holds sway, an edict formed after we'd watched another episode of an idiotic, though addictive, tv series called Surface where swimming Iguanas took over the world. The lizards didn't get to where they were by cultivating intellect, I can tell you. Despite that, and why must it feel confessional?), I'm forced to admit (why forced?), or even apologize, that I intend to learn from the books I'll be lugging to the beach, though unlike Waugh's son, it's doubtful folks of my acquaintance will note any positive effect on taste nor intellect.
Speaking of the Waugh's, and English mothers, the first thick tome, weighing down the 2008 beach bag considerably, is Humphrey Carpenter's 'The Brideshead Generation,' which, believe it or not, is laugh-out loud funny, including the tale of the distant aristocratic mother who when asked which of her four children she'd like to take to church, responded, 'how should I know, the one that goes with my blue dress.'
A Brideshead's addict since the tv program, and later after taking a course at Oxford during one magical summer, reading Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation means greeting old friends as if at a class reunion. Charles Ryder had spoken of entering a low narrow door in the garden when he first approached Lord Sebastien's rooms, and for many, exploring the literary and social world of Oxford-Brideshead gains for the reader similar entrance to an exotic place whose dimming flame exists reflectedly today in only a few formidable descendents like Oxford alum Christopher Hitchens, who Alexander Linklater describes as "raffish, old-fashioned, and insolently charismatic," so much so, "viewers of American current affairs shows invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases."
To discover why we like what we like, Freud developed free association, scientifically identifying the next beach bag selection as more about wanting to like but hardly finding anything to like - namely, poetry, where there are few I've completed, only instead, glimpsing enticingly of what might have been, such as in the highly recommended A.N. Wilson history, 'God's Funeral,' which interweaves the poetry of Thomas Hardy.
Wistfully, then, I'll be packing amongst the sun tan oils, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet, where, for a start, at least, Irishness free associates comic-tragic images formed by a mystical walk through a Killarney forest of royal deer, a pint of the purest Guinness at Mulligans in Temple Bar, and a horse lying dead in a Dublin street after being hit by a car.
Yeats wrote of modern life circa 1920:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity --
capturing just the very people and things one hopes to get away from at the beach; whether Yeats will be a good vacation companion, or not, remains to be seen.
In Freud's "The Future of Illusion," Clive James reckons when he "defined civilization as the overcoming of nature," it blinded him dangerously to the murderous intent of the Nazi's. In a round-about, far less lethal way, the third book in the bag, "Wait Till Next Year," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, relies upon the inevitability of continuity through games she scored with her father at Fenway, in a country, unlike Freud's Vienna, where there's always the certainty of next season measured stately one inning at a time.
As Tom Verducci pointed out last week in Sports Illustrated, "attendance is up for the fifth straight season," and, "none of the teams with the five highest payrolls held first place," and Tampa Bay (of all teams!), in first, "winning with pitching, defense and young players, the sometimes forgotten commodities of the power-obsessed Steroid era from which baseball is trying to escape."
Indeed, the last book in the bag, a light paperback, thank God, is "The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," by Lewis Hyde, noted on the back cover, as a "brilliant defense of the value of creativity and its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities," just as baseball is likewise finally regaining a field overrun by profit, cheap shortcuts and sordid theatrics.
As with Yeat's poetry, I'm unsure whether I'll get far into The Gift - the first several chapters are anthropologically devoted to a complex Native American system of trading presents, but it does carry an Endless Summer vibe and may go down well after several Bartles & James Blue Hawaii wine coolers...
Freud might have psycho-analyzed this year's selection of Beach Reads, in common, diagnosing the Spotsyltuckian's ego as formed by an "unquenchable naivety," or per Yeats, acknowledging his vulnerability to "the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action." Isn't a week at the beach all about contemplation, undoing daily sordidness, so as to believe again in the possibilies of next season, just as at the end of Brideshead, the story culminates in the presence of an inextinguishable flame flickering in an otherwise empty chapel?
Such, indeed, is the naivety of those who reject anarchy, bullying and cheating, searching on their own, and in other's creativity, for the antidote, not by shirking, but by undertaking deliberate journeys to where there is always 'something to be learned from this.'
Thanks, mom.
Sounds terribly British, if not downright snobbish, eh? Even so, it remains the dutiful fate of non-shirking readers, such as in this family, where the maternal, not patriarchal advice, "what did we learn from this," holds sway, an edict formed after we'd watched another episode of an idiotic, though addictive, tv series called Surface where swimming Iguanas took over the world. The lizards didn't get to where they were by cultivating intellect, I can tell you. Despite that, and why must it feel confessional?), I'm forced to admit (why forced?), or even apologize, that I intend to learn from the books I'll be lugging to the beach, though unlike Waugh's son, it's doubtful folks of my acquaintance will note any positive effect on taste nor intellect.
Speaking of the Waugh's, and English mothers, the first thick tome, weighing down the 2008 beach bag considerably, is Humphrey Carpenter's 'The Brideshead Generation,' which, believe it or not, is laugh-out loud funny, including the tale of the distant aristocratic mother who when asked which of her four children she'd like to take to church, responded, 'how should I know, the one that goes with my blue dress.'
A Brideshead's addict since the tv program, and later after taking a course at Oxford during one magical summer, reading Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation means greeting old friends as if at a class reunion. Charles Ryder had spoken of entering a low narrow door in the garden when he first approached Lord Sebastien's rooms, and for many, exploring the literary and social world of Oxford-Brideshead gains for the reader similar entrance to an exotic place whose dimming flame exists reflectedly today in only a few formidable descendents like Oxford alum Christopher Hitchens, who Alexander Linklater describes as "raffish, old-fashioned, and insolently charismatic," so much so, "viewers of American current affairs shows invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases."
To discover why we like what we like, Freud developed free association, scientifically identifying the next beach bag selection as more about wanting to like but hardly finding anything to like - namely, poetry, where there are few I've completed, only instead, glimpsing enticingly of what might have been, such as in the highly recommended A.N. Wilson history, 'God's Funeral,' which interweaves the poetry of Thomas Hardy.
Wistfully, then, I'll be packing amongst the sun tan oils, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet, where, for a start, at least, Irishness free associates comic-tragic images formed by a mystical walk through a Killarney forest of royal deer, a pint of the purest Guinness at Mulligans in Temple Bar, and a horse lying dead in a Dublin street after being hit by a car.
Yeats wrote of modern life circa 1920:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity --
capturing just the very people and things one hopes to get away from at the beach; whether Yeats will be a good vacation companion, or not, remains to be seen.
In Freud's "The Future of Illusion," Clive James reckons when he "defined civilization as the overcoming of nature," it blinded him dangerously to the murderous intent of the Nazi's. In a round-about, far less lethal way, the third book in the bag, "Wait Till Next Year," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, relies upon the inevitability of continuity through games she scored with her father at Fenway, in a country, unlike Freud's Vienna, where there's always the certainty of next season measured stately one inning at a time.
As Tom Verducci pointed out last week in Sports Illustrated, "attendance is up for the fifth straight season," and, "none of the teams with the five highest payrolls held first place," and Tampa Bay (of all teams!), in first, "winning with pitching, defense and young players, the sometimes forgotten commodities of the power-obsessed Steroid era from which baseball is trying to escape."
Indeed, the last book in the bag, a light paperback, thank God, is "The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," by Lewis Hyde, noted on the back cover, as a "brilliant defense of the value of creativity and its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities," just as baseball is likewise finally regaining a field overrun by profit, cheap shortcuts and sordid theatrics.
As with Yeat's poetry, I'm unsure whether I'll get far into The Gift - the first several chapters are anthropologically devoted to a complex Native American system of trading presents, but it does carry an Endless Summer vibe and may go down well after several Bartles & James Blue Hawaii wine coolers...
Freud might have psycho-analyzed this year's selection of Beach Reads, in common, diagnosing the Spotsyltuckian's ego as formed by an "unquenchable naivety," or per Yeats, acknowledging his vulnerability to "the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action." Isn't a week at the beach all about contemplation, undoing daily sordidness, so as to believe again in the possibilies of next season, just as at the end of Brideshead, the story culminates in the presence of an inextinguishable flame flickering in an otherwise empty chapel?
Such, indeed, is the naivety of those who reject anarchy, bullying and cheating, searching on their own, and in other's creativity, for the antidote, not by shirking, but by undertaking deliberate journeys to where there is always 'something to be learned from this.'
Thanks, mom.
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