Seeing or hearing?

Gérôme was perfect, but few care to view his work these days. Once, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a would-be artist was aping Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant, and the young imitator somehow upset his easel, which toppled onto Gérôme ’s painting, tearing its canvas. I worked at the museum then, and I remember that Gérôme’s original was quickly whisked off to the catacombs below for restoration. A momentary whirr of excitement about the mishap carried throughout the administrative offices and spilled into the galleries for a spell before it all settled down. I worked there for two years after that episode, and I cannot remember when the restored painting returned to the gallery. All I can recall is that one day, as I was walking the gallery beat, I noticed The Carpet Merchant hanging in its old space on the wall. And I remember wondering about how the return of the painting to its place had escaped my attention, especially as I was rather familiar with the stretch of galleries in the modern Western European wing of it all.
Why had such a furor over the damage to The Carpet Merchant risen and died as quickly as it had? I suspect that the museum staff simply ran a tight ship, and such an affront to any work of art would have been greeted with like thoroughness. I suppose that The Carpet Merchant hadn’t been considered much of a painting after all; it was in its near-exactitude of depiction a virtual photograph. And that’s part of the problem. When painters achieved a skill of depiction nearing verisimilitude, there was nowhere for painters to go, so they veered off into odd directions. And this is exactly what you saw.
What about music, which also began to see odd variations in form at about the same time? One can’t judge Schoenberg and Beethoven with the same ruler, after all. When perfection in music was achieved, what did it resemble? Gérôme painted a photograph, and so painters had to move sideways and yield to the photographers (at least for a time, as photography resembles verisimilitude less and less). Who is the Gérôme of music? Which musician achieved the precise depiction reality? Bach? Mozart? Anyone?
There was no objective reality there. It was impossible to attain because the possibilities of music were infinite. The visual arts regress or move sideways.
It seems to me that I would prefer to retain my hearing to my eyesight if presented with a choice between the two. Hearing simply offers a greater possibility of feeling, sensation, and profundity than sight, for all its obvious practical applications, can ever hope to supply.

Prostitute is an underused term, for it suggests a proffering of something innate and dear to oneself for the prospect of flimsy gain. In its purest sense, the term prostitute defines not a single person, but every single one of them, man and woman alike; it's a common thread, like mammality is. Prostitute is often considered a pejorative term, but I can imagine it settling comfortably upon our shoulders--those angel wing harnesses were troublesome, anyway. I propose that we everywhere replace person with prostitute until further notice. We needn't seek a replacement for prostitute because our nature has reduced the original thrust of the term to a condition of terminal vacuity.

How fascinating it is to speak a living language!

My Little Kindergarten

The plumbing failed, and so we took to crapping into paper bags, which we hurled in the hammer-throw manner from the roof as soon as completed. This sort of behavior, drastic as it was, warded off even the most predatory of gangsters, for an unanticipated “flying latrine” to side of the head in the middle of a drug deal or a car-jacking proved sufficient to relieve even the most hardened gangster of a street cred years in its making. So it came about that our little hellhole turned into the epicenter of a drug-free zone whose radius extended stiffly outward for several blocks. My cousin raised his kids there.

Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

This is a terrifying book, for it lays bare the effective re-enslavement of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly set them free. Blackmon throws light on the way that unscrupulous lawmen and businessmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee seized black men and women---mostly men, incarcerated them on trumpted-up charges---typically, vagrancy--- and sold them as convict laborers to southern industrial concerns. Once purchased, these African-American men endured horrific conditions in the mines of the south; they were beaten, starved, and worked to death.



All the while, the occasional crusaders for justice--Wareen S. Reese, for one----saw their efforts at redress met by a stone wall of southern injustice. Vested southern interests had little practical reason to extend the hand of equity toward helpless southern blacks. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when improved technology rendered labor-intensive methods of production of coal and steel obsolete and the federal government feared exposure as hypocrites by the Nazi enemy, that the U.S. government enacted and enforced laws against enslavement.

Anyone who thinks that the Jim Crow period--Blackmon prefers the term Neoslavery---was a period of harsh treatment of essentially free people will find themselves summarily disabused of that notion up reading this book. The chapter "Anatomy of a Slave Mine"--whose title is a euphemism--speaks volumes.

German companies have compensated the victims of Nazi atrocities. Should U.S. Steel do the same?

Read
Slavery by Another Name and wince. And learn.

An Enjoyable Bromide

This book is a necessary book, not because the reader should agree with all of Howard Zinn's ideas--he occasionally drifts off into ranting, especially in his chapter on the Clinton presidency---but because Zinn poses explanations for events in US history that are plausible. The idea that the top one percent of US society has since the inception of this country held its position by maintaining divisions among those below it makes sense given the current distribution of wealth in this country.

What strikes me as unconvincing is his claim that the slightly privileged (mostly middle-class whites) have been used as a buffer against potential concerted action by society's losers. He provides evidence that suggests that this might be the case (uncited eveidence, as this is a history written for a wide audience), but I didn't see conclusive proof of the grand conspiracy against the downtrodden. In many cases, Zinn quotes three of four people whose cases might mean they were victims of calculated exploitation.

The value of this book, in my eyes, is as a corrective of the great men, great country interpretation of US history that I was fed in middle school and high school. Every society, after all, is made up of a small minority of winners and a mass of losers. What Zinn does is that, by strongly suggesting that the US is no different than elsewhere, he deflates the notion that this is a special land.

The culture that might be considered an anomoly to what he sees in the US was the pre-Columbus Native American culture, which held most everything in common and was ignorant of monetary culture. So in a sense, Zinn weeps for a lost, ireetrievable past.

This a book that every educated person should know about and enjoy reading--for Zinn is a fine writer. It needs to be part of the discussion of US history.

The End of the Novel

There was a time, once, when a novelist’s examination of, and rumination over, the mind of her subject made some sense, but no longer. Tolstoy devoted hundreds of pages to the slow, painful, psychological demise of Anna Karenina, for example, as did Dostoevsky toward Raskolnikov. I am now thinking of Theodor Dreiser’s account of the slow descent ofHurstwood in Sister Carrie.
The point is not that the writer’s trade has diminished or that style has gone awry; it is a crisis of a poverty of subject. That is to say, a media-addled, morally indifferent subject simply isn’t worthy of anyone’s time—on the writing or reading end of things. There is simply no depth to the recent personality—why would there be? Gameboy and immediate gratification? The novel is the improper form for such an audience. The novelist should meet them on their own terms—the 140-character (as it currently stands) snippet of comment. The nuanced commentary is decaying fruit.
I was once a research librarian at a major university. In 1999, I found myself aghast at the indifference of graduate students to the possibilities that lay within the stacks. Whenever I fielded a question from a graduate student and pointed them to the dark, mystery-ridden floors of stacks of books that loomed behind me, “Nah,” they would reply, “Way back there? Anything on the web?” With that, we would make our way, the grad student waddling some distance behind me, toward the bank of computers that lined the walls of the coffee shop/library. I can only imagine what the students are like today.
People seeking the quick out, the immediate solution, are not worth study. Why would anyone write about them?

Everson Walls

I saw people I had known exhausting their final reserves clawing their way in the direction of a wall, one that lingered lazily, whose eternal reaches lay well outside of anything that any of them might hope to achieve. When I was four, I saw some of it; the rest I saw when I was sixteen and most of the rest when I was nineteen . We used to stand in awe of it, this wall. Sometimes, you know, some southern kid or someone from a place you couldn’t imagine existed—somewhere in Missouri or a place like that—like a place from where anyone in his right head could only hope to escape---some kid like that used to carry broken baggage with him..a limp or a dragging slow sidecar….or a slut you can’t shake….,I think that some of the worst things you’ll ever see are my neighbors.

Man or Dog? Why one over the other?

They talked the man from the ledge, and he climbed unsteadily back onto the roof to safety, amid the cheering of the crowd below. It took a while, but he made it there. Now on firm footing, the man seized a small dog that had followed him onto the roof, and hurled it over the edge.

Should you stumble upon this lonely blog of mine, you might detect a note of darkness. If you enjoy that sort of thing, soldier on, for you might detect little sprouts of black humor, which is the most satisfying kind.

By way of experimentation, which of the following two jokes do you find funnier?

Joke One:

A man walking along the sidewalk comes upon a boy and a dog.
"Does your dog bite?" the man asks the boy.
"Nope," the boy replies.
The man bends over to pet the dog, and the dog bites his hand.
"Ouch! I thought you said your dog doesn't bite?"
"That's not my dog."

Joke Two:

I saw a man approach the bar dressed in shorts, orange rubber flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt. He ordered a drink.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Terrible. I just came from a funeral.”
“Dressed like that?”
“It was only a rehearsal. Hospice case.”

If the second joke strikes you as the funnier of the two, heaven help you.
And keep visiting.

Life's Conversations

The post office is open today. You said it was closed.
I didn’t say it was closed; I said that the mail hadn’t come yet.
Well, how could the mail come if the post office was closed? Answer me that!

In the Flesh

As I was driving home this evening, I listened to a rebroadcast of the wonderful On Point NPR program. Today's topic (2nd hour) was George Dawes Green, who founded a storytelling club known as "The Moth." At one point in the show a caller mentioned that he had been taking part in a group similar to 'The Moth." He remarked that those storytellers whose stories revolved around their successes tended to fall flat; audiences, however, hung on every word of those who shared stories---well told, naturally--- of personal humiliation and failure.

www.onpointradio.org/2010/07/storytelling

This comment begged the questions in my mind: does the sound-bite culture lend itself, and thuse reward, shameless boasters? Does such ridiculous grandstanding fail in the presence of a live audience, which can see the raconteur as a fellow in the flesh and thus criticize him more harshly? It is, after all, much easier to manipulate the message in sound-bite form than it is when the audience can hurl rotten tomatoes at you. Live audiences call for a measure of humility and a bit of common touch.

Do soundbites beget pompous asses?

Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald poured everything he had into this novel, and it shows. If ever an author exposes his soul and his heart to the public, FSF did so with Tender is the Night. It is clear that Dick Diver is Fitzgerald himself, and that Nicole is Zelda, beautiful and out of her mind. That Nicole grows stronger than Dick in the noevl's third act is an indication of Fitzgerald's fear--and it was indeed a fear--that Zelda might recover enough to surpass him artistically. He had always drawn heavily on his own life for the material in his novels, and it is remarkable to see how threatened he was by his wife, who in the early 1930s had been consigned to a mental institution.

Tender is the Night has been roundly criticized for focusing on the lives of the wealthy in the middle of the Great Depression. That may have hurt its popularity when it was published in 1934, but are we then to read this wonderful and tragic story only during periods of economic expansion? Isn't the demise of Dick Diver sad in any event?

My only complaint about the novel is Fitzgerald's depiction of Nicole's sudden recovery and independence. Fitzgerald certainly knew the psychological theories of the day and was familiar with the literature. Why, then, does he not explain her recovery sufficiently? Did he really think that Zelda's case was so hopeless? If so, then why was he threatened by her?

Still, the novel is worth reading for Fitzgerald's prose. Consider the closing paragraph of the novel:

After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's at Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Thsi passage speaks volumes about Fitzgerald's view of himself, always impermanently arranged, always alone--his wife must consult an atlas to place him on a map, after all. The ocean that separates Nicole and Dick is little different than the chasm that Zelda's breakdowns caused between her and Scott.

Next: The Tale of Genji, among other projects.

Love with the Left Hand

After football season the father drove his young son out to a cabin in the woods, told the boy to take serious stock of himself, and abandoned him there with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with a single shell. One evening about a week later, the son appeared at his father's door and, thrusting the gun under the old man's snout, held him to merciless account. The son then withdew into the darkness. Soon afterwards they discovered the boy's carcass, relieved of its head, in the ditch along the road that led to the middle school.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Circa 1935

After the Good Gay Times, by Tony Buttitta.


I was browsing the stacks of a univesity library recently when I came across this title wedged in among the other books about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had never heard of this title before, though I have read most of the Fitzgerald biographies---Arthur Mizener, Scott Donaldson, Turnbull.

Those biographies may be more polished than this book, but this one contains the first-hand recollections of one who had known and befriended Fitzgerald during the summer of 1935. The summer of 1935. That phrase alone summons thoughts of desperation and great want.

That summer Tony Buttitta was an aspiring writer and owner of a small bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. His description of his first encounter with Fitzgerald elides smoothly with our image of a faded author with an undying lust for alcohol, but his character soon grows wider and more complex.

By 1935 Fitzgerald was in bad shape---The Crack Up essays would appear within a year---alcoholic and still stung by the failure of Tender is the Night, the book into which he had thrown all he had. Most biographers write about the Fitzgerald of these years in piteous tones, and this wonderfully lyrical writer assumes tropic dimensions. Fitzgerald becomes a plaything. But this book gives Fitzgerald a new voice, one that bridges the long gaps between novels after 1925. Buttitta recalls a man still in possession of a sharp mind, concerned about the fate of civilization, and whether drunk or sober willing to discuss Spengler and Marx. Fitzgerald was still attractive to women; he broke off a relationship---too late, it turned out--- with an adoring woman willing to pay off his ample financial debts, in part out of loyalty to Zelda but also because he was well aware of the the ruinous effect he had on the women around him. Meanwhile, he admitted and regretted that he pushed his ailing wife Zelda into dancing--this contradicts the claims of some biographers that he attempted to prevent it. His feelings toward Ernest Hemingway were complex: a mixture of envy, respect, and tenderness.

There is a chapter about 2/3 of the way into the book, where Buttitta and Fitzgerald, with an eye to taking a room, pay a visit to the mother of Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel Fitzgerald had admired. Wolfe's mother was loquacious, and she spoke at some length about the effect that her son's autobiographical novel had had on her and her family. At the end of the visit, Mrs. Wolfe mentioned that she didn't take in drunks. Buttitta's recollection of the effect of that remark on Fitzgerald speaks volumes about the depth of his despair; he couldn't even rent a room from the mother of a far inferior novelist than himself.

Above all, Fitzgerald was alone, and hopelessly so. He spoke of friends but never seemed to have any. He had retained his honor through it all--conveying deep concern about his daughter and wife---but I got the impression of a man waiting impatiently for it all to end.

Reading List

China: Empire of Living Signals, by Cecilia Lindquist
Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Living with Jazz, by Dan Morgansten
I Will Bear Witness: 1942-1945, by Victor Klemperer
Autobiography, by Mohandas Ghandi
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas A. Blackmon
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler

It's all over the map, but so is my existence.

Hell is other people

Sartre supposedly said or wrote this---I can't remember whether he said it or wrote it---but the point is that it contained the brilliance of simplicity and Sartre was responsible for it. The problem occurred when he foolishly continued and tempered his initial insight with a bunch of prattle about our using others' perceptions of us as a window unto ourselves---or something like that---and with that the promising beginning fizzled out into nothingness. Now I grant that you--if you must--might indulge in a bit of sloppy thinking and find yourself agreeing with Sartre's window fancy. Only don't give me that crap about hell not being other people and that it was all a misunderstanding...if hell isn't other people, then what is it? A rectal abscess?

The Horror

If the young are innocent,
And the old to be pitied,
Then what are we to make of the intervening horrors?

Roger Ebert

If you don't know of Roger Ebert, you're only partly alive. Without thirty years of access to his insight, wit, intelligence, and humor, I might never have learned of such movies as "The Third Man", which I think about on a weekly basis.

Ebert once defined a four-star movie as one which a viewer would appreciate, regardless of its genre; even a fan of action films should enjoy "A Woman under the Influence", for instance.

With this in mind, I have created my own criterion for the worth of a film: Am I still thinking about the movie a week after I see it? If so, then the movie has affected me in some way, and, in my eyes, is worthy of top-tier status. Films like "Open Water" and "Paranormal Activity" fill the bill perhaps on the strength of their genre, but so does "The Third Man."

"The Third Man" contains every element certain to appall the casual movie watcher. It is a black-and-white film. None of the main actors---Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard---is a household name today. Only three people die (one of them off-screen), and there are no noteworthy explosions and no gratuitous sex.

Yet this is a masterful film for its score, acting, and cinematography. I will refer you to Roger Ebert's review of "The Third Man", as this is the review that got me interested in film when I first read it in 1985 (this is the link to Mr. Ebert's site: http://www.rogerebert.com/. Check out the Great Movies section, where a lifetime of intellectual stimulation awaits you). Twenty-five years of wonderful insight into the movies. They are a part of my life.

Roger Ebert has shaped my taste much in the same way as did certain literature professors of mine. From them I have read and re-read Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, writers I might never have otherwise experienced. Ebert has done the same for Cassavettes, Bergman, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders, among many others.

Cheers to you, Mr. Ebert.

Um...New hitting coach?

As a child, I failed to appreciate the worth of a hitting coach to a major league baseball team. Good players simply hit well, in my estimation. I was a Baltimore Orioles fan, and Boog Powell simply hit well, as did Eddie Murray and Ken Singleton. Mark Belanger, well, did other things well. I followed the Orioles rather closely in those days, and I can't for the life of me recall the name of their hitting coach. But they won World Series, those O's.

In 1980, I would catch a Reuters line telling me that the O's were down 3-1 in the ninth, and I knew they would win the game. Good pitching of course, but it was always a key late-inning hit that spelled the difference.

I can't make sense of baseball these days. Batters simply exhibit no discipline at the plate and swing wildly for the fences in the hope of a highlight. Consider the following line from the Orioles/Nationals game on May 22:


Seventh inning:

CoreyPatterson struck out.
Nick Markakis struck out
Miguel Tejada grounded out.

Eighth inning:

Scott struck out
Wiggington fouled out
Wieters popped out

Ninth inning:

Jones struck out
Itzuris struck out
Moore grounded out

A one run game. In the final three Oriole innings: nine outs. Zero balls hit out of the infield. Indeed, only two balls hit into fair territory. This is a team that scored 6 runs in the first 6 innings, but when the chips are down, it loses.

In 1980, with the O's down by a run in the 7th, the line might well have read:

Bumbry bunt single, stole second
Decinces singled to right, Bumbry to third
Murray sacrificed to deep right, Bumbry scored
Singleton homered to left, Decinces scored
Roenicke flied out to center
Dauer walked
Dempsey singled to left, Dauer to second
Crowley singled to right, Dauer scored, Dempsey to second
Belanger struck out

Now you have your strikeout. But before that came three runs scored on five hits, a walk, and a stolen base. And the Orioles won 9-7. Note from this hypothetical box score how the hitters of 1980 pushed the ball to right field, behind the runners. And Dauer coaxed the BB. And a stolen base? Where did that come from?

This little experiment has been drawn largely from my memory of how a fine team played baseball, but I think it throws light on the lousy execution and selfish play of today's players. Where are the walks, stolen bases, and bunts on this gathering of players?


All those strikeouts in the late innings. Somebody was swinging for the fences.

Musings on Mao Zedong

I've been reading a bit about China recently--who hasn't?---and for some reason my attention has been drawn to Mao. He is often overlooked when people mention the terrible figures of the 20th century, but if you read the following two books, you will get a fair glimpse into a person who saw little wrong in condeming 70 million Chinese to death. The first book, The Private Life of Chairman Mao was written by Li Zhi-Sui, who was Mao's personal physician for the last twenty years of his life. Li sheds light on Mao's personal proclivities, such as his unslakable sexual thirst, his avoidance of bathing and brushing his teeth (this must have beena great turn-on for his lovers), his keeping of odd hours and whimsical change of plans. Li's book is fascinating in its depiction of the habits--none of them endearing---of a horrible person. Li, however, lends little insight into the Great Leap Forward or The Cultural Revolution, Mao's two great programs to modernize China. Both of these came at terrible human cost, which Jung Chang illuminates in her book Mao: The Unknown Story. Jung Chang authored the popular Wild Swans, and readers of that book will recognize many of the grim details life under Mao. Where Li Zhi-Sui retained a small amount of affection for Mao---perhaps this is a product of proximity---Jung Chang loathes the man, and for good reason. These books, and there are many written about Mao to choose from---left me better informed about this dictator, and also a bit depressed. And I have even mentioned Mao's wife.

One question comes to mind: Why does a country with such a rich cultural heritage as China's seem intent on destroying so much of what others can only envy?

Why Trimalchio?

I have chosen the name Dear Trimalchio" for the title of this blog because, as I understand it, F. Scott Fitzgerald had the character of Trimalchio in mind when he created Jay Gatsby. In fact, he toyed with idea of naming the novel Trimalchio. The Great Gatsby ranks among my chosen books, if for no other reason than the beauty of the writing. I read the novel once every few years or so, and sometimes I enjoy just the prose, but on other occasions I get all wrapped up in the character of Gatsby, that dreamer. "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy." So this blog is written, I guess, by someone who dreams about a dreamer.