non-fiction

Hell Hath No Fury Like YA Authors Scorned

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mourning bride

image by Violet D’Art via Flicker

As I was destroying my eyesight Wednesday simultaneously watching the Impeachment Hearing /Twitter feeds on the screen of my desktop computer, I ran across a linked tweet concerning a literary brouhaha originating at South Dakota’s Northern State University. A recent graduate named Brooke Nelson has provoked outrage from several Young Adult novelists for suggesting that a novel by best-selling YA author Sarah Dessen was too simplistic to qualify as mandatory reading.  As a junior, Ms Nelson had served on a committee to select a book all incoming freshman at Northern State University would be required to read. Several members on the committee, according to the Washington Post, “were pushing for a young adult novel by best-selling author Sarah Dessen.”

A quote in the local paper, the Aberdeen, ignited the ensuing furor: “[Dessen]’s fine for teen girls,” Brooke Nelson said, “ but definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Somehow Dessen caught wind of this slight diss.[1] Directly addressing Nelson by name, Dessen tweeted the following to her legion of followers:

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally [my emphasis] how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

Let’s just say Nessen’s fans were not happy, including published YA authors Jodi Picoult and Roxane Gay.  Jennifer Weiner accused Nelson of being misogynistic:

“It’s hard to know what’s sadder: that Brooke Nelson has internalized misogyny to the extent that she can see nothing of worth in books beloved by “teen girls” but is presumably impressed with the merits of a book centered around video game culture that is beloved by teenage boys; that Nelson joined the committee not to champion a book or a genre but to keep a specific author’s work out of contention; that she bragged about her actions, as if she’s done some great service to literature, or that Nelson graduated with an English degree, is pursuing graduate work in English, and will someday be foisting her sexism and elitism on the next generation of readers.”

However, this comment ignores the question of whether the work possesses the complexity that required reading should possess. Are Nessen’s novels more profound than The Hand Maid’s Tale?  Are today’s in-coming freshman incapable of reading adult literature?  I was the English Department Chair of an independent school for six years and a teacher there for thirty-four, and I can assure you we never had a YA novel on our required summer reading list for the Upper School.

Here’s last year’s list, the last year I taught there:

9th grade  On the Beach by Neville Shute

10th grade: 1984 by George Orwell

11th grade: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

12th grade The Hand Maid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

AP Language and Composition: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

AP Literature and Composition: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The majority of complaints from the YA authors cited in the Post story ignore the quality issue and focus on how Nelson’s quote marginalizes teenaged girls.  Here’s Jodi Picoult: “[Nelson’s quote] suggests stories about young women matter less. That they are not as worthy or literary as those about anything but young women. That their concerns and hopes and fears are secondary or frivolous.”

But Nelson didn’t say that novels about teenaged girls “matter less.”  She said that Nessen’s novels essentially didn’t “cut the mustard,” as we Boomers used to say.  I suspect that Nelson wouldn’t have any qualms with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Josephine Humphrey’s Rich in Love being required reading.

Well, Nessen should be gratified because Nelson has found it necessary to suspend her social media accounts because of a barrage of incoming hatred.  And Northern State University has publicly apologized to Nessen.

It brings to mind Dylan’s line “at pettiness that plays so rough.”

[1] I consider it a “slight diss” because I believe that it’s not terribly insulting to suggest one’s work doesn’t rise to the level of mandatory reading for all incoming freshmen of a college.  In fact, although it’s considered a classic, I don’t think To Kill a Mockingbird rises to that level because of its black and white (no pun intended) portrayal of good and evil.  What I would consider a genuine diss is Carrie Courogen’s summation of Dessen’s work as “formulaic patronizing garbage of the lowest hanging fruit variety and deserves every criticism leveraged against her.” Courogen added in a subtweet “sarah dessen books are nicholas sparks but by a woman and even dumber and slightly less christian.”  I haven’t read any of Dessen’s books, so all I’ll say is that I can’t imagine they possess the ambiguity, complexity, and depth that would elevate them into the realm of serious art.

Show White, Bruno Bettelheim, and High School Seniors

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grimm-26

A few years ago, the principal at my school asked that the English Department develop elective courses to provide students with choices suited to their particular interests.

I came up with a course I called “Psychoanalytical Criticism, Modernism, and Paris in the 20’s.”

I spent the summer before its debut culling public-domain texts I could publish in a “reader,” a quite laborious undertaking —  almost overwhelming — but I managed to amass 376 pages of essays, short fiction, and poetry.  In addition,  I required students to purchase Hesse’s Steppenwolf and a copy of Hamlet.

I started with Freud, providing an overview of his theories,

then delved into fairy tales, using Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment as a guide.

I began with “Snow White” because Bettelheim does an excellent job of synthesizing Freud’s stages of psychosexual development with the plot of the tale.

He writes

While, psychologically speaking, the parents create the child, it is the arrival of the child which causes these two people to become parents.  Thus, it is the child who creates parental problems, and with these come his own [. . .] As soon as the position of the child in the family becomes a problem to him and his parents, the process of the child’s struggle to escape the triadic existence has begun. With it, he enters the often desperately lonely course to find himself – a struggle in which others serve mainly as foils who facilitate or impede the process [. . .] In “Snow White it is the years Snow White spends with the dwarfs which stand for her time of troubles, of working through problems, her period of growth.[1]

Typically, fairy tales don’t deal with a child’s pre-oedipal history, and “Snow White” is no exception.

“Snow White” begins

Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame.” Soon afterward she had a little daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow-White. And as soon as the child was born, the queen died. A year later the king took himself another wife.

Bettelheim associates the drop of blood with menstruation, “a pre-condition for conception.”

Although her mother died in childbirth, and Snow White has a stepmother by age one, she doesn’t face problems until she starts to mature, and then her narcissistic stepmother takes notice.  Bettelheim points out that “[n]arcissism is very much a part of a young child’s make-up” and “a child must gradually learn to transcend this dangerous form of self-involvement.”

He adds that “all children are jealous, if not of their parents, then of the privileges the parents enjoy as adults [. . .] Since a narcissistic (step)mother is an unsuitable figure to relate to or identify with, Snow White, if she were a real child, could not help being jealous of her mother and all her advantages and powers [. . .] If a child cannot permit himself to feel his jealousy of a parent (this is very threatening to his security), he projects his feelings onto this parent.”  The child wants to be rid of this parent, which again, according to Bettelheim, is projected onto the parent, i.e., the child perceives the parent wants to get rid of her.

So, essentially, Snow White’s oedipal struggle is not repressed. The queen hires a hunter, a father figure, to murder Snow White in the forest, but “he fails to take a strong and definite stand,” not following the queen’s demand to murder her stepdaughter nor doing his moral duty of rescuing her. Rather, he abandons Snow White, expecting her to be killed by wild animals. “A weak father is as little use to Snow White as he was to Hansel and Gretel [. . .] It is such fathers who create unmanageable difficulties in a child or fail to help him solve them.”

Since Snow White is more beautiful than the queen, she has charged the hunter to bring back Snow White’s lungs and liver, which she cannibalizes, though, of course, she’s actually devouring the lungs and liver of an animal the hunter has slain.

Bettelheim:

The pubertal child is ambivalent in his wish to be much better than his parent of the same sex because the child fears that if this were actually so, the parent, still much more powerful, would take terrible revenge.  It is the child who fears destruction because of his imagined or real superiority, not the parent who wants to destroy.  The parent might suffer pangs of jealousy if he, in his turn, has not succeeded in identifying with his child in a positive way, because only then can he take vicarious pleasure in his child’s accomplishments.  It is essential that the parent identify strongly with his child of the same sex for the child’s identification with him to prove successful.”

Which, obviously, isn’t the case with Snow White. She ends up escaping her original home and stumbling across the dwarf’s dwelling in the forest. To satisfy her hunger, she takes a little bit from each of the dwarf’s plates, which Bettelheim suggests shows that she can control her “oral cravings.” She does the same with the dwarf’s beds, settling eventually in the seventh dwarf’s bed.  When these workaholics come home, the seventh dwarf “slept with his companions, one hour with each, until the night had passed.”  Bettelheim argues that “Work is the essence of [the dwarfs’ lives]; they know nothing of leisure or recreation [. . .]  and the price of living with them is conscientious work.”  He adds, “dwarfs are eminently male, but males who are stunted in their development [. . .] They are certainly not men in any sexual sense – their way of life, their interest material goods to the exclusion of love, suggest a pre-oedipal existence.”

Snow White’s sojourn with the dwarfs symbolizes the latency period, yet it is not a time free from dangers.  Her stepmother reappears in her life and tempts her three times, first with stay laces, suggesting that Snow White is now an adolescent.  Disguised as a peddler, the stepmother laces Snow White so tightly that she faints from a lack of oxygen.  Bettelheim argues that here the queen stands “for a parent who temporarily succeeds in maintaining his dominance by arresting his child’s development.”  Bettelheim posits this incident denotes Snow White’s becoming “overwhelmed by the conflict between her sexual desires and her anxiety about them.”

Indeed, vanity also plays into the queen’s second temptation, the poisoned combs that she places in Snow White’s hair.  The final temptation, of course, is the poisoned apple, which Bettelheim argues is a symbol for love and sex, harkening back to the Eden myth and the Judgement of Paris. The queen divides the apple in half, eating “the white part herself, while Snow White accepts the red, ‘poisonous half.’”  Bettelheim goes on to add, “Repeatedly we have been told of Snow White’s double nature: she is as white as snow and as red as blood – that is her being has both its asexual and its erotic aspect.

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“Eating the red (erotic) part of the apple is the end of Snow White’s innocence. The dwarfs, the companions of her latency existence, can no longer bring her back to life; Snow White has made her choice, which is as necessary as it is fateful. The redness of the apple evokes sexual associations like the three drops of blood which led to Snow White’s birth, and also menstruation, the event which marks the beginning of sexual maturity.”

He ends the essay by stating that the tale “teaches that just because one has reached physical maturity, one is by no means intellectually or emotionally ready for adulthood, as represented by marriage.”

“Like Snow White,” he writes, “each child in his development must repeat the history of man, real or imagined.  We are all expelled eventually from the original paradise of infancy, where all our wishes seemed to be fulfilled without any effort on our part. Learning about good and evil – gaining knowledge – seems to split our personality in two: the red chaos of unbridled emotions, the id; and the white purity of conscience, the superego.  As we grow up, we vacillate between being overcome by the turmoil of the first and the rigidity of the second (the tight lacing, and the immobility enforced by the coffin). Adulthood can be reached only when these inner contradictions are resolved and a new awakening of the mature ego is achieved, in which red and white coexist harmoniously.”

***

Depending on the student, these high school seniors either dismissed Bettelheim’s analysis or had their minds’ blown.  I emphasized that Freud was not what I would call a scientist, that his theories are not empirically based, but that they do offer sometimes extraordinary insight into the realm of the unconscious.  I stressed that it’s not necessary to buy into a paradigm to be able to employ it in interpretation, that whether you believe in Freud’s theories or not, being able to synthesize them into a coherent argument is good exercise.  Indeed, for their exam, I provided them the text of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and had them provide a Freudian interpretation.

[1] Bettelheim is no fan of Disney’s version.  “[A] bowdlerization,” he writes, “which unfortunately emphasizes the dwarfs, who failing to develop into mature humanity, are permanently arrested on a pre-oedipal level (dwarfs have no parents, nor so they marry or have children.”)

Peeking into Poets’ Bedrooms

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bedroom head

I’ve only visited three famous writers’ domiciles  –  Yeats’ Tower, Thor Ballylee, in County Galway (1979); Shakespeare’s birth house in Warwickshire (1995);  and a home Frost lived in on a side of a road somewhere in New Hampshire (2007).

It felt like calling on the dead – the houses restored, sort of Disneyesque, way too un-lived in.

A while back, a friend posted on her FaceBook page a photograph of Walt Whitman’s bedroom back in the day. Alas, the image somehow conjured the Muse of PhotoShopping, Plagiaria.  Alas, I say, because no way I have the artistic talent to pull off the idea Plagiaria whispered in my ear.

Anyway, let’s take a peek into the Barbaric Yapper’s bedroom.

whitman's br

My idea, which I am bestowing to any 3-D artist out there, is to use the concept of a bedroom as a representation of an author’s interior life, his or her unconscious as it were, each installation with a window looking out (hence not an attic) onto the world the artist perceived – dingy Dublin brownstones for Mr. James Joyce/Lucy-in-the-Sky butterflies flitting just outside the window of Miss Emily Dickinson.

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Take Ernesto Hemingway, par example.

ernest-hemingway boxing

His mother called him Ernestine and dressed him like a girl.

dress

the unhairy one ~ 2 yrs

Here’s a crude approximation of Hemingway’s unconscious installed in EA Poe’s dorm room at UVA:

hemingway collage

Obviously, an actual artist could do better, perhaps creating a doll-house, each room devoted to a different writer from a different era, vestiges of influence sprinkled about, La Commedia on Eliot’s bedside table next to an overloaded ashtray of unfiltered Pall Malls.

Art On Pall Mall

At any rate, what strikes me about the actual bedrooms of these writers, except for Whitman’s, is how spartan they are.  For example, here’s where Yeats slept at Thor Ballylee:

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Barely a step up from Thoreau’s:

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Of course, there are exceptions. Truman Capote lay him down to sleep here:

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And Virginia Woolf in this swanky boudoir:

The interior of Virginia Woolf's bedroom at Monks House, East Sussex

And, finally, the bedroom where this barely published poet tosses and turns:

bedroom 3

At any rate, we all can be thankful that we’re not the inhabitant of this bedroom:

proust-on-his-deathbed1

And sleep tight, Marcel!

Note:  This post originally appeared in Late Empire Ruminations 20 November 2012

Night and Day, Henry Versus EL James

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james and James

No, I’m not one of those self-flagellating must-do-it martyrs who vow to finish every book they start, no matter how unpalatable.  Not finishing a bad book is as easy for me as zoning out during the welcoming comments at a Chamber of Commerce convention, or to keep the previous metaphor going, declining to finish an undercooked fat-choked pork sandwich.

No, I don’t have that mitigating principle to explain my finishing (it’s been several years now) EL James’ pant-fest, Fifty Shades of Grey (which I have handcuffed to a library carrel and urinated on here).

Certainly, anyone who read the above linked-to-post might find it improbable that such a severe and sarcastic critic would continue to squander the few, precious, and dwindling hours of his life’s eventide following the escapades of Anastasia Steele and Christopher Grey, characters as finely wrought as a pre-schooler’s drawing of an octopus; however, this critic did, albeit skimming through the novel’s latter emails, sex-scenes, and interior monologues with the concentration of a meth addict perusing Henry James’s The Ambassadors.*

 

*Indeed, I dedicate that one-paragraph 83-word sentence to the Master.

But finish it, I did, as I might a 32-ounce Slurpee, knowing that it was bad for me, didn’t even taste good, but that it went down easy.  However, I will give Ms. James’ high school English teacher this compliment: ol’ EL has gotten the bit about active voice/vibrant verbs.  I haven’t been exposed to so much clambering since the fall of Saigon.

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3 April 1975

Whatever the reason – the active prose, its socio-historical late empire ramifications, the fairly well-choreographed sex scenes – I finished the damned thing, and I might add that Fifty Shades of Grey’s success demonstrates that the novel as a form is far from dead.  Future story tellers need not abandon first person narration and turn to screenplays to make their fortunes.

You go, fan fiction aficionados!

***

Nevertheless, I did finish Fifty Shades, but it left me famished for something beyond solid.  Yet, I wanted it to be very roughly analogous – Lolita perhaps – but then it hit me like a revelation – The Ambassadors, a novel about another naive American’s initiation into an exotic world.  Although universes apart in style, structure, and depth of characterization, Fifty Shades and The Ambassadors do share some shading in the Venn diagram of their thematic concerns.

Not to mention authors with matching surnames.

So I clambered up ascended the stairs to my drafty garret study to greedily snatch remove the 60-cent 1965 paperback that literally falls apart in my hands as I squint at negotiate its microscopic minuscule type.

ambassador page

Oh, my sweet Buddha, but we are in different universes.  Compare Henry’s description of our protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to EL’s description of Christian Grey.

As they say, age before beauty.  Take it away, Mr. James:

[. . .] what his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something more perhaps than the middle age–a man of five-and-fifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick dark moustache [sic], of characteristically American cut, growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant but abundantly streaked with grey . . .

Your turn, Ms. James.

I surreptitiously gaze at him from beneath my lashes as he stands in line waiting to be served.  I could watch him all day . . . he’s tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, and the way those pants hang from his hips . . . Oh my.  Once or twice he runs his long, graceful fingers through his now dry but still disorderly hair.  Hmm . . . I’d like to do that.  The thought comes unbidden into my mind,**and my face flames.  I bite my lip and stare down at my hands again, not liking where the wayward thoughts are headed.

** a thought comes unbidden “into [her] mind”  – as opposed into her genitals?

Which one is talking?

“I’m always considering something else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than YOU.”

“I’ve never slept with anyone, never had sex in my bed, never flown a girl in Charlie Tango, never introduced a woman to my mother.  What are you doing to me?”

Which passage ends with “His eyes burn, their intensity takes my breath away?”***

*** Answers available at 1-900-144-5412 ($1.20 per minute fee)

***

So what’s my point?

Good question.  First of all, despite egregious flaws, the plot of 50 Shades of Grey carries you along (and it has as at least as many sex scenes as Slaughterhouse Five has death scenes). However, it’s definitely lower middle brow. (I was somewhat interested to see how the narrative would be translated onto the big screen but but not curious enough to bother to go see or rent it).  I figured that the viewer would be doomed to a thousand voiceovers and that moviegoers might perceive Anastasia as more pathological than the reader does if they didn’t hear her story in her own words.

Once, when a parent called to complain about A  Clockwork Orange’s being on our reading list after having seen Kubrick’s film, I had to explain that in the novel Alex’s quaint phrase “a malinky little tolchock to the gulliver” on screen is transformed into the objective depiction of a woman being clubbed to death.  Likewise, Anastasia’s “orgasm ripping through [her], a turbulent, passionate apogee that devours [her] whole” could come off on screen as trite pornography

Second, the tsunami success of Fifty Shades must tell us something about sex in the Late Empire.  One, women who thirty years ago might have discretely ordered the book and read it behind closed doors are now reading it on airplanes and discussing it at happy hours with their girlfriends.  Sex is a powerful obsession, an innate need, and it is probably impossible to sustain passion’s fire on a marriage bed dampened by the constant distractions and stresses of the working world – getting the kids ready for school, picking up something from Harris Teeter, opening that audit notice from the IRS.

If EL James were to follow the adventures of our heroes into the second decade of matrimony, she may very well be writing sentences like this:

My back to him, I feel his hand reach over and touch my well-worn tee shirt, and I clench, trying to stifle a yawn.  He rolls over me and his gray eyes are red-veined and floating in a puckered slough of discoloration.  Holy shit, he wants me, but I want him about as bad as I want a yeast infection.

EL James 50,000 Degrees of Ennui

I’ll leave you with this.  Check out the first and last pages of the outline of The Ambassadors that James submitted to his publishers.

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What if Lenny Bruce or George Carlin Were Gen-Zers?

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a-policeman-searches-comedian-lenny-bruce-after-bruces-arrest-for-allegedly-using-obscene-language-during-his-act-in-a-north-beach-nightclub-the-jazz-workshop-san-francisco-california

The meme “OK Boomer” is — forgive me — booming[1] on Twitter and TikTok as an expression of Generation Z’s frustration with the older generation’s outdated ideas and technological cluelessness.  It’s a mild insult, it seems to me, a sort of bored sigh of “whatever.” It says,  “You’re boring and inept and unfashionable.”  In other words, you’re outdated, out of it.

For some reason, more than a few snowflakey boomers have taken great offense at this rather mild rebuke. It could be worse, fellow boomers. It could be Lenny Bruce on steroids. It could be Fuck You, Boomers.  Imagine a Gen Y or Z  Lenny Bruce or George Carlin ripping into Mitt Romney and me.

Fuck you, you old crone/codger with varicose veins mapping your legs/porcupine needles of hair poking from your nostrils/cottage cheese masquerading as cleavage/your freckled baldpate resembling some dying planet in a third rate solar system.[2]  Speaking of dying planets, you’ve made a shithole disaster of this one, not to mention robbing us of a portion of our paychecks with Social Security deductions that could be putting a dent in the gargantuan student debt we’ve amassed (or are amassing or will amass) so you can sit around in your second home condos stuffing your fat faces watching Fox News’ anchors thumbing their noses at science while we slave away as baristas or unpaid interns with no health insurance. Shut the fuck up about our dependence on our cell phones.  It’s not like we’re bound to see anything of interest in the over-crowded infrastructurally decrepit cityscape/boring commercial suburban sprawl you’ve bequeathed us . . .

I’ll admit the above lacks pithiness.  It would be difficult to fit on a baseball cap.

By the way, the phrase “OK Boomer” has already been merchandized.

This from the New York Times:

Hundreds of “ok boomer” products are for sale through on-demand shopping sites like Redbubble and Spreadshirt, where many young people are selling “ok boomer” phone cases, bedsheets, stickers, pins and more.

This, of course,  means the phrase will be co-opted by a multinational corporation, which along with the petrol-chemical component of its conglomeration might also feature a manufacturing side business that transforms plastic sludge into OK Boomer Frisbees.

Remember the grunge craze, flannel shirts pre-faded, blue jeans pre-ripped?

Ah, capitalism, ah Bartleby.

Bartleby2

[1] This lame Dad pun epitomizes the inherent essence of Boomer-unhipness.

[2] This gender balance can be a real pain in the posterior. It’s exhausting.

On Police Blotters and Street Preachers

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Oh, the side-splitting counter-Darwinian hijinks those headline-capturing police blotter inebriates produce each week on the highways, byways and beaches of the Lowcountry![1]

Whether it be a wobbly motorist telling a cop “he’s had five beers plus one beer,” a naked bicyclist peddling towards a fast-food drive-thru, or a domestic dispute involving tire irons and trash can lids, the police blotter is sure to bring a winsome smile to even the crabbiest of malcontents.

Not too long ago, you had to riffle to the back of the City Paper, Folly Current, or Section 12B of the Post and Courier to discover who had tried to drive his car up the stairs leading to the Battery’s promenade or who had stuffed two bottles of champagne in his pants in a failed heist; however, in these latter days seeking out the absurd is almost too easy.  For example, here is a screen capture from a recent Live 5 web posting:

live5 1.0

Still, I prefer the paper, whose account of the Halloween mishaps of a luckless 21-year-old who drove his vehicle into Colonial Lake offers more details than Live-5’s recap.  For example, in the paper we learn that divers were employed to see if another passenger was in the car, the one the 21-year-old claimed had been driving.  Live-5 did, however, estimate the parameters of his intoxication, between .10 and .16.

I’m not one to talk, though. I once drove my MG Midget down the steps of a parking garage into Campus Police Headquarters, which resulted in a reckless driving ticket and six points off my license and a hefty increase in my insurance rates.

Too bad I didn’t pay more heed to those street preachers who haunted the streets of Columbia back in the day.

Street Preacher

 

 

A fire-breathing preacher named Mitch

From a street corner bellowed his pitch

He warned of the horrors of hell

Where one day I was bound to dwell,

That sanctimonious, psalm-singing son-of-a-bitch.

 

[1]  Not to mention beneath bridges, inside the cabs of heavy construction equipment, and upon picnic tables.

passed-out-drunk-toast

 

Halloween

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Hallowen

 

For this agnostic/ lapsed Buddhist dilettante, Halloween stands supreme among quasi religious holidays, towering over Christmas and Easter the way the skyscrapers of commerce on Wall Street dwarf Trinity Episcopal Church.

trinity wall street
Here’s the church; where’s the steeple?

People in the Lowcountry of South Carolina don’t decorate all that much for Halloween, a pumpkin on a porch maybe, but in suburban Atlanta a few years back I encountered some killer (literally) decorations, my favorite a mangled bike in the front lawn of a $800,000 house, a skeleton lying next to the bike, the helmet overturned not far from the skull.  Other celebrants had festooned their azaleas with spun cotton to counterfeit cobwebs; others had skeletons hanging from trees or cardboard black cats arching their backs with their hair on end, brandishing serious predatory dentistry. 

Dig store-bought monstrosity below.

half buried

 

Let’s face it, zombies trump archangels in contemporary America, the walking dead a more relatable metaphor for the populace than gravity defying beings of European descent levitating above cloud banks.

For me as a child, the joy of Christmas lay in expectation, the idea of playing with the electric train certainly more fun than actually watching it go around and around in its little circle ad nauseam until the transformer inevitably blew.

Plus, your parents never took you away on Halloween to visit great aunts and their spinster daughters, that looming visit casting shadows of dread over the toy strewn landscape of the living room.  We generally purchased from Poppelton’s Five and Dime our inexpensive flammable costumes, skeleton smocks and cheap plastic-coated masks or maybe a Zorro get-up.  I especially loved Halloween carnivals with their apple bobbing booths, candied apples, and haunted houses.

bobbing-for-apples-okay-image-1

However, my innate shyness always made trick-or-treating feel a bit uncomfortable.  Knowing what I know now, I might have chosen to dress up like a Book-of-Mormon-toting Evangelist or a Jehovah’s Witness and trade some tracts for some candy corn.

missionary-mormons1

Nevertheless, I certainly enjoyed the gluttonous aftermath of OD-ing on tiny Snickers and Mars bars and bartering less-loved goodies with my buddies. Oh, and to score some malted-milk-ball Whoppers was like copping cocaine, whatever that was.

Of course, as an adult, Halloween can be a drag if you live in a neighborhood where trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell every 42 seconds; however, it’s not a problem on Folly Beach, the barrier island where I live, where trick-or-treating is forbidden because of vacant vacation homes, unlighted streets, and the likelihood  of motorists being hepped up on something stronger than sugar.

So as the year shuffles off towards its hospice, let’s celebrate the macabre, the zombie apocalypse, an eternity spent in everlasting agony, and other terrifying possibilities.

Once there was a little boy who wouldn’t say his prayers,
and when he went to bed at night away up stairs,
his mammy heard him holler and his daddy heard him bawl,
and when they turned the covers down,
he wasn’t there at all!
They searched for him in the attic room
and cubby hole and press
and even up the chimney flu and every wheres, I guess,
but all they ever found of him was just his pants and round-abouts
and the goblins will get ya if ya don’t watch out!!

James Whitcomb Riley: “Little Orphan Annie”

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My Own Little, Dystopia — Halloween Edition

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Real World 1

Adam’s curse: not death, but labor, the rudeness of the alarm, the digits glowing heartlessly: 5:55 AM.  Henry David Thoreau you ain’t:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn*, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

                                                                                Walden, Chapter 2

*emphasis mine

No, you’re of this ilk:

Little is to be expected of the day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor [buzz or ring or melliferous radio voice]. That man who does not believe each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.

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the darkening way

You’re, let’s say, a resource teacher for severely mentally disabled students in Mississippi or South Carolina.  Cutbacks mean you’re working 1.25 jobs, that your free periods are long gone, that you’re lucky if you manage 20 minutes for lunch.  Although mandated by federal law, meetings concerning disabled children’s IEPs are virtually impossible to coordinate.  Having the required individuals free at the same time  – classroom teachers, speech therapists, school psychologists, and principals – is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube while riding a roller coaster.  They – whoever they are (the top 1%? K-Street lobbyists?  Smiling State legislators? The voters? All /none /a combination of the above?) – whoever they are literally expect you somehow to do the impossible.

No, for you, the dawn doesn’t “awaken infinite expectations.”

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Ronald Reagan’s Body Lies A Mouldering in the Grave

Somehow the nation has elected a sociopath as president who once supported choice and wrote checks to Democratic candidates but who know seems hellbent on accelerating global warning.  Despite the historical lessons that trickle down economics doesn’t work and deregulation can cause financial meltdowns a la 2008, he is gutting environmental regulations and, aided and abetted by Republicans in Congress, has passed a tax cut for the 1% that has created a gargantuan budget deficit.

Despite the Romanesque Super Bowl Halftime extravaganzas, we don’t have enough money to repair aging bridges, to hire fireman, much less to provide healthcare for our children.

The Real World 2

Meanwhile, back in Mississippi or South Carolina in a public school that possesses all the aesthetic warmth of a juvenile detention center, emails sprout in your in-box like the heads of a hydra – each expecting a prompt reply, each unanswered one burrowing into your brain like parasites, calcifying the neurons, overloading the circuitry, shutting it down – only to snap you awake at 3:41 A.M!

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Insomnia II by Jeffrey Batchelor

Where Have You Gone, Franz Kafka, a Lonely World . . .

Given the material richness of the USA, why are so many people so dissatisfied with contemporary American life?

Wordsworth posits one answer:

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

We live in a world where increasingly our time is devoured by abstractions – meetings that go nowhere, data demanding input, those hydra-headed emails, texts from acquaintances that we glance at and ignore.

A sordid boon indeed.

Of course, Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is the archetype of the harried worker, so caught up in the intricacies of his meaningless job that the first thing he thinks of when he discovers that he has been transformed into a giant insect is that it will be almost impossible to negotiate the public transportation that takes him to his office.  He, that “gigantic vermin,” should be this year’s top-selling Halloween costume.

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Real World 3

Leave School at 4:10 . . . pick up Abigail from DayCare . . . run in Publix to pick up supper  . . .   grab bills from the mailbox . . . get Abigail started on her homework . . . cycle through the voicemails . . . empty the dishwasher . . . think for a second about your ex . . . start supper  . . .  glance at Wolf Blizter’s head flickering on the screen . . . say grace . . . start the bath water . . . read Abigail a bedtime story . . . put off paying the bills . .

Sleep, that knitteth up the raveled sleep of care . . .

I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

                                                Gerard Manley Hopkins

[cue magical laughter]

Happy Halloween!

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Keep Out, By Larkin

Lindsey Graham and Me

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Lindsey and Me in the late 70s

Although I enjoyed my teaching career at Porter-Gaud, the happiest job I ever had was tending bar at the Golden Spur, an alcohol dispensary located in the student union building at the University of South Carolina in those glorious days when 18-year-olds could legally imbibe beer and wine. It was there that I met the mother of my children, the late Judy Birdsong, and there where I became known as “the Reverend” after an impromptu Dionysian sermon delivered in Afro-jazz riffs a la Dr. John to my pals Furman Langley and Steve Rhea.[1]

I always looked forward to going to work and never, as they say, took work home with me.

What brings this to mind is that I’ve been contemplating the psychological underpinnings of my fellow South Carolinian Lindsey Graham, wondering about his formative years, contemplating what mental dynamics allow him to flip flop so shamelessly, sometimes in the matter of days, from one position to its opposite. In this respect, his switch from revering McCain to pimping for Trump is instructive.

Anyway, as it turns out, the story of Lindsey Graham’s youth is somewhat sad, especially his late youth. He was born a Baptist in the small Pickens County hamlet of Central, South Carolina. Despite that religious affiliation, Lindsey’s parents ran what Wikipedia describes as “a restaurant-bar-pool hall-liquor store, the ‘Sanitary Café’.”  So at an early age, Lindsey must have grown accustomed to dealing with paradoxes, alcohol considered by strict adherents as evil manifest, the antithesis of what they considered sanitary.

Prohibition 1

He was the first person in his family to attend college and joined ROTC, but here’s where his life takes a dolorous turn.  His mother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 52, and, bam, 15 months later, a heart attack dispatched his father, leaving orphaned Lindsey with the responsibility of being the legal guardian of his 13-year-old sister.

He studied – get this — psychology at the University of South Carolina, pledged Phi Kappa Phi, and graduated in 1977, the same year I dropped out of graduate school.  Therefore, Lindsey and I were both at USC from 1973-1977, which means, in all likelihood, I served him beer either at the Spur or at Bell Camp where I also bartended for fraternity parties.  Although extremely unlikely, he literally could have been in the Spur the very night I delivered my Dionysian sermon. Back then,  I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t have given him the time of day – or in this case night.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of Senator Graham’s.  I would love to see him defeated, Trump driven from office, etc.  However, I have to admit that delving into his past has resulted in a bit of sympathy on my part.  He faced adversity at a young age and succeeded mightily as resumes go.  On the other hand, it must be horrible to be so conflicted, to have your better angels drowned out by the braying of a sociopathic vulgarian.

That said, the harm that he has imposed is real, extremely perilous as far as the American Experiment goes, and for that he can’t be forgiven.

[1] I commenced in Dr John’s voice to sermonificating on the glorification of the party impulse present in all of us – Baptist and Bohemian alike – and why that party bud must be allowed to bloom into boogie, cause if it ain’t, your existiment bound to be as flat and tasteless as BiLo brand Tonic Water what ain’t had the cap screwed on tight.

Or worser, that block-up party impulse knocked back down, squeezed back down in the reptilian recesses of your brain gonna mutate into some awful sexual dysfunctification like dwarfophilia or bovineophlia or hollywoodstar-obessification or some such other mental donemessedupness.

 

Haunting Our Days

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  We curse thee Carolina and sing our dismay,

   Heartbreaking loses haunting our days . . .

                            Wesley Moore, “A Parody of the USC’s Alma Mater”                   

 

Question 1 :  Why did WM become a Gamecock? 

A. he couldn’t break 1200 on the SAT

B. he had mediocre grades

C.  his father was unemployed

D. USC had a journalism school

E. all of the above

F. none of the above

Question 2 : Why has WM squandered so many gorgeous autumn afternoons in darkened dens or benighted sports bars screaming imprecations at cathode tubes or hi-def screens?  

A. because football is a ritualization of innate masculine territorial aggressiveness

B. because the South lost the Civil War

C. because he enjoys feeling sorry for himself as he whimpers in fetal position on floors littered with carelessly dropped popcorn

D. because the his school team, the Mighty Gamecocks, have enjoyed unparalleled success

E. A & B

F. B & C

Answers: 1. E  2. E

Actually, as a child, WM was a rabid Clemson fan, listened to the games on AM radios.  No doubt, if he had been interested in engineering or horticulture, he would have matriculated to Clemson and continued to pull for the Tigers.  Thus, the irrationality and absurdity of his banal haphazard tribal association with the University of South Carolina is not lost on him.

On the rare occasions that he has attended in person a Carolina football game, it has occurred to WM how little he has in common with the rest of the members of his frenzied atavistic tribe, a garnet and black sea of philistines:  Trump supporters, used car dealers, evangelicals – in other words, typical South Carolinians. (Picture Jean-Paul Sartre at a Tupperware party).

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Alienated at these events, he spends most of the games cringing at poor tackling and the viciousness of the invectives that pour from sub literate fans who have turned on the young men they had erst while cheered.

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Gamecock fans celebrate a rare victory over Clemson

Many scholars have underscored the obvious: for Southerners of a certain age, male and female, college football is a compensation for the ignominy of the Civil War and its humiliating aftermath, Reconstruction.*  Although it seems like ancient history to most folks now, I can remember two of my great-grandfathers and my maternal grandfather’s hateful reproaches regarding the cruelty of carpetbaggers.

The thinking (using the term loosely) goes like this: Because of under-industrialization, we lost the Wa-ah; otherwise, we would have whupped those pasty-faced, vowel clipping Yankees, the way we do every year in BCS bowl games.**

In fact, Konrad Lorenz went so far to say that team sports like football are a necessary evil, a way for testosterone-blinded cretins to channel their innate territorial aggressiveness.  Otherwise, we might have Neighborhood Watch associations taking to the streets battling one another, blinding their enemies with flashlights, pummeling each other with pitching wedges.

Unfortunately (for WM, that is) rather than offering an antidote to the ignominy of hailing from a land of losers, pulling for the Gamecocks has doubled his legacy of losing. Add over a half-century of pulling for the Atlanta Braves, and you got losing to the third power, a river-of-tears breaching the levees of endurance.

*Of course, rationally speaking, in my relatively well-educated adulthood, I’m glad the Confederacy was vanquished, but when I picked up the college football habit in the early 60s, this was not the case.

** Thanks largely to that fact that  more descendants of slaves dwell in these parts, but never mind that.

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Cry Me a River

Why devote all this time and energy inside samsara’s swirling pit of baneful desire and disillusion?

Habit?

Masochism?

Answer:  search me.