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Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.
Early 1950s. "Kerouac was really a solitary genius, innovating and going forward into as yet unrecognized and unmapped areas of composition all by himself, with the courage necessary to do it . . . He had no support, not only from 'society' but also from his friends, his wife, his mother, or anyone." (p. 225)
"It was my impression that very few people had a grasp of the phantom, or samsaric, or elusory nature of existence. They didn't have any idea of alternative modes of consciousness . . ." (p. 238)
"Jazz was a kind of speech that went round the world and influenced every country. The only art form, the only cultural push, that came out of America that transformed the political structure of the world through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and rock'n'roll and . . . youth culture." (p. 243)
"[Walt] Whitman thought . . . that unless the nation were made up of comrades democracy couldn't work." (p. 246)
"Kerouac saw new jazz as a clarion of a new consciousness. It wasn't only bepop, it was the whole notion of American blues and black music." (p. 247)
"Nobody had looked on jazz musicians with that kind of insight, except other jazz musicians." (p. 249)
". . . archetypal recollections were the very angelic bricks of their own lives, the foundation of their lives. Their early childhood thrills and symbols were the basis of all adult judgment and opinions and trips to the moon. . . a whole hidden memory life . . ." (p. 252)
"Jack's in there writing all by himself, for himself, for his own ear or for some universal consciousness, just for pure art." (p. 259)
Herman Melville poetry. (p. [260])
Sketching: "'like a painter but with words . . .'" (p. [264])
Little notebooks: "sketching to total mind's eye." (p. 266)
Gregory Corso. "Tailoring" poems, writing. (p. 278)
Corso: jazz, poetry. Charlie Bird Parker and Miles Davis and "Don't Shoot the Warthog." (p. 294)
From "Hello:"
"Do I wear the cloth of a man who has failed?
Am I the looney man?
In the great serenade of things,
am I the most cancelled passage?" (p. 299).
Today's Rune: Joy.
Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then . . . (p. 101).
Visions of Cody. "I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal [Cassady] reading [Marcel] Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and . . . enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. . . . as in [John] Milton, Proust used long sentences to include everything in his mind." (pp. 105-106)
"When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else's indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself." (p. 115)
William S. Burroughs. "Burroughs ascribes Kerouac's enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally . . . Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through." (p. 116)
Kerouac imagined writing an American Civil War book, with Burroughs as a "morphine-addicted . . . general." (pp. 120-121)
Herman Melville and "American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for 'the center of Saturday night in America' . . . in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him . . . which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied." (pp. 121-122
"Visions of Cody is the most serious text we'll run into . . . Kerouac . . . undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art . . . His writing and his personality become identical and becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he's a saint of writing. (pp. 128-129)
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. For Burroughs, writing "was not so much . . . redemption, but . . . a communicative activity which linked him with me and other people, with the rest of humanity, with friends." He found writing to be more practical than "a romantic thing." (p. 153)
Burroughs "sees right through everything immediately with no illusions." (p. 164)
"Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell." (p. 169)
Burroughs on New Orleans: "'The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.'" (p. 171)
Burroughs as visual writer. (pp. 179-180)
"The Waste Land is not much different from Burroughs . . . collage method . . . Apollinaire . . . I think that the thing Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is 'music down a windy street,' . . . spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past." See also Saint-John Perse, Anabasis. (p. 188)
"His unconscious life and his every day life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth." (p. 191)
". . . the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon." (p. 199)
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.
Anne Waldman: "Denver, the place of all possible crossroads." (p. x) "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (p. xi)
Each core member of the Beats "literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness . . . as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you would call visions or visionary experience." (P. 26)
"The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness." (p. 29)
"I'm thinking of 'salt peanuts, salt peanuts,' or some squiggle of rhythm in [Jack] Kerouac's head that follows that off accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of [Dizzy] Gillespie." (p. 35)
With the death of his father, Kerouac "got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself." (p. 44)
"The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space . . . you'd realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky . . . It was the first discovery [by the main Beats, in the 1940s] of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts. ' ' There's this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of things, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal . . ." (p. 52)
On meeting Jack: "Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity." (p. 55)
Kerouac later "used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching living people." (p. 56)
On meeting William S. Burroughs: "When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience." (p. 86)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a major influence. "I think it's one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everyone around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there. I would say that is hipness, that attitude . . ." (p. 88)
". . . little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in the empty sky." (p. 96)
". . . panoramic consciousness or time consciousness . . ." (p. 98)
Kerouac: ". . . the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow . . ." (p. 99)
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
Kim Thúy, Ru. New York: Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012; originally published in French in 2009.
This is a lovely short novel, organized as a series of interconnected (but mostly capable of standing alone) short chapters that look on the page like prose poems or flash pieces.
Ru has the gravitas of a personal nonfiction account. I found it completely absorbing on a first read and can imagine combing through it again soon to see what I missed.
"I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns." (page 1)
An Tinh Nguyen, the main protagonist, is born in Saigon. French and Vietnamese culture are strong in her childhood years, even after the American War when the country is unified. Eventually, she escapes with members of her family to Malaysia, until they are taken in by Canadians and relocated to Quebec.
I appreciate the fact that Ru is mostly neutral on the opposing sides of the war and its aftermath, allowing the reader to focus instead on what it's like to be a war child and refugee.
Throughout Ru, we are taken as if by the hand to see conditions in Vietnam during and after the American War, in boats and refugee camps, and in a new, unfamiliar land -- Canada. We see the family of An Tinh Nguyen and come to understand something of its structure (Aunt Seven, Step-Uncle Six, Cousin Sao Mai, etcetera), and see what it's like to become accustomed to a new country, while still yearning for the old.
Deft and memorable.
Today's Rune: Initiation.
Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
"Soviet teachers were among the strongest believers in socialist values." (page 94)
From the Young Pioneer manual: "'It will be the best, the most just and the happiest society on earth.'" (page 110)
"influence, connections, and pull -- blat in Russian." (page 118)
Soviet schools: "They instilled in their charges basic human values that would be appreciated in most societies." (page 118)
A Soviet Baby Boomer about living in the 1960s: "'We always had decent food; we went to the theatre, to the movies, to the circus, and to whatever else was of interest. We didn't differ from other average people of our time.'" (p. [120]).
Many Soviet Baby Boomers developed an "identification with a larger global youth culture;" guys in particular tinkered with space-related themes (page 121).
"Many female Baby Boomers loved theatre, ballet, dancing, reading, hanging out with friends . . . Olga Gorelik liked to read, draw, go to the movies, and spend time with her girlfriends." (page 122)
Many enjoyed sporting events. Pioneer palaces gave people places to hang out. (pages 122-124) Kids loved to play in apartment courtyards (dvor), too. (page 125)
On social relationships, Raleigh notes: "Friendship lacks a definition that works for all times, places, and peoples, because the phenomenon is a cultural and historical one that changes over time: the type of society determines the nature of friendships." (page 126) Soviet friends provided emotional and practical support for each other, and they could counter or at least alter government and family controls (pages 126-127). A fair number of high school friends remain friends for life. (page 127)
"The Soviet Union prided itself in being the 'most reading' nation," and many continue to read heartily long after the collapse of the USSR. Friends traded books and they also utilized libraries, like many sensible people still do wherever they are available. "Reading conferred status" (page 129). During an interlude in the 1960s, Mikhail Bulgakov (Master and Margarita), Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) Kafka and Kierkegaard were published (pages 130-131). Samizdat (underground writings produced in the USSR) and tamizdat (things smuggled into the country from the outside) also made the rounds (page 131) -- and made reading all the more exciting, no doubt. Eventually, photocopy machines sped up the process of underground writing production. (page 132)
Movies opened up portals to other worlds (as T. Bone Burnett, an American Baby Boomer, has put it, after growing up in conservative Fort Worth, Texas). These were real social events: "it was always something you simply had to see. . . not only so that you could take part in conversations but also because they really were worth seeing" (such as Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky films) . Through cultural diffusion, in came American jazz, Western fashion and music, and exotic tastes. (page 135)
"'[B]ut it was difficult to get hold of such things. . . and we need to "get hold of" them. The meaning of the very "get hold of" is probably uniquely Russian' . . . it means acquiring something with great difficulty." (page 136)
Tape recorders became popular when they were made available -- music could be recorded and shared, especially underground material: "'forbidden fruit is always sweet.'" (page 140)
[To be continued.]
Today's Rune: Possessions.
Halle Butler, Jillian. Chicago: Curbside Splendor, 2015.
Most often, we see things from the perspective of Jillian and Megan, but we also catch fleeting glimpses of consciousness from other characters, mostly people but also a dog (Crispy), raccoons, trees and a bird. I love this! Also, it reminds me of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), in which we briefly see things from the perspective of an alligator and an iguana and hear separate musings about the dreams of a pet fish.
Jillian: Characters central and peripheral. Jillian Bradley, her son Adam and dog Crispy. Elena, Susie, Carol -- church ladies. Julie, Tessa, Emma -- Adam's childhood frenemies at day care. Barb - day care teacher.
Emily (dog seller).
Dr. Billings, Dr. Schraeder -- at the gastroenterologist office where Jillian works with Megan.
Randy - Megan's live-in paramour, often thinking privately about breaking up with her.
Unnamed cop -- pulls Jillian over and orders her car impounded, inspiring Jillian to concoct a story about hitting a deer, requiring imaginary auto repairs and real pain killers.
Mike Johnson -- County Clerk's office.
Drug representative with dolly cart -- Jillian and Megan's office.
Carrie, Janet, Jessica, Steve, Bill, Annie, Amanda, David, Will, James, Sarah, Albert, Kelly, Anthea -- various and sundry acquaintances and frenemies, objects of jealousy and competition.
Loud Jim and unnamed guy on bus -- provide outside perspectives.
Raccoons, trees, unnamed bird -- provide outside perspectives, sort of Zen, sort of Shinto.
Not to worry: no deer is injured in the novel. Jillian does acquire TYLENOL® T3 with Codeine for her "accident," though.
Megan immediately responds to Jillian's not showing up at work: "Her absence was intriguing." (page 102). This is exactly the same way I respond when someone doesn't show up at work, so I can't help but laugh every time I read this -- as with so much else in the novel.
Off the charts: a section on "Memory Palaces" and, earlier, Megan going to a fancy grocery: "That day she thought, 'F**k it,' and went to the smaller grocery store. The store was for rich people, but f**k it, right? There were delights there."
(page [109]. "F**k" is spelled out in the original, but as I'm not sure what the censorship policies are for blog posts, here I've added asterisks to protect the eyes of delicate readers and keep Puritans at bay).
Jillian's snack choices (and her life choices in general) also inspire knowing laughs -- read and weep!
I'm truly looking forward to Halle Butler's The New Me: A Novel (Penguin Books, 2019) and wish I could read it immediately: "because life just keeps grinding on, right?" (Jillian, page [109]).
Today's Rune: Initiation.
Halle Butler, Jillian. Chicago: Curbside Splendor, 2015.
I read this twice in a row, first to see what happens and secondly, to see how things happen.
Musing on Butler's style and substance, I had a vision of Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult, Tully) working with Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bad Lieutenant) to create a variation on Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It's wacky, sad and right on.
The setting is not overplayed, but there are clues that the location is Chicago (North Side, Far North Side, Northwest Side, Palatine or thereabouts), and the time is the 21st century, with lingering vestiges of the 20th (an office fax machine, for instance).
If you approach the main characters with the Dalai Lama's discussion of Compassion in mind, you will truly empathize with them. "To be genuine, compassion must be based on respect for the other, and on the realization that others have the right to be happy and overcome suffering, just as much as you. On this basis, since you can see that others are suffering, you develop a genuine sense of concern for them." (The Essential Dalai Lama: His Important Teachings, edited by Rajiv Mehrotra, New York: Penguin, 2005, p. 22).
Jillian Bradley is, on the surface, recklessly optimistic, while her office co-worker and foil Megan is heedlessly cynical. Both are unmoored, lost, nearly alone (socially alienated, trapped in their own minds) as they deal with contemporary life, complete with its endless economic constrictions, demands and expectations. The raucous humor of Butler's approach underscores the daunting realities of their lives. It's a bit like Ulysses through the scrim of two 21st century adult female workers who must deal with the indignities, absurdities and possibilities of daily life.
Another post will delve into additional details, but the main things to keep in mind for now are that Jillian has a young son, Adam, and she adds a dog, Crispy, to the volatile mix of her household economy; while Megan, depressed and cutting -- wickedly so, at times -- has a dubious paramour, Randy, and even more dubious frenemies to contend with. It is through their interconnecting social -- and socio-economic -- relations that Jillian and Megan must operate, and with which many readers will undoubtedly relate.
Today's Rune: Harvest.
Again picking up Jaroslav Hašek's The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923), let's dive into Book Three, shall we?
Poor Cadet Biegler had gotten so drunk that he was mistakenly sent to the cholera ward. The next figure of fun is Lieutenant Dub of the Third Company, another ultra-conservative buffoon. He is always proclaiming loyalty to the idea of Making Austria Great Again, and blathering such trumpety tripe: "And the little idiot Dub ceremonially added: 'Blood and life for the Habsburg! For Austria, whole, united, great!'"
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Books Three & Four. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 64.
As a character, I love Dub! The good soldier Švejk has his hands full with him, though.
"'When there is 'attention,' then you must be bugging your eyes out like a tomcat does when he is shitting into chopped straw. . .'"
"Lieutenant Dub directed an upset look into the carefree face of the good soldier Švejk and asked him angrily:
'Do you know me?'
'I do know you, Lieutenant, Sir. . .'
"I'm telling you that you don't know me yet.'
Švejk replied again with that carefree calm, as if giving a report: 'I do know you, Lieutenant, Sir, you are, I dutifully report, from our march battalion.'
'You don't know me yet,' Lieutenant Dub was screaming once again. 'You know me perhaps from the good side, but wait until you get to know me from the bad side. I am mean,* don't think to yourself otherwise, I'll drive everyone to tears. So, do you know me or don't you know me?'
I do, Lieutenant, Sir.' . . .
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Books Three & Four. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 70.
*"nasty" in the Cecil Parrott translation.
Today's Rune: Journey.
Sally Rooney, Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018). Rooney's second novel is even better than her first.
Again, no dialogic quotation marks. Again, simple character names: Marianne; Denise (Marianne's oddball mother); Alan (Marianne's violent, weirdo brother); Connell Waldron; Lorraine (Connell's mother); Rachel Moran; Eric; Rob; Helen; Gareth; Joanna; Colleen; Niall; Elaine; Peggy; Jamie; Lukas; Yvonne, and others. The most playful name in Normal People must surely be Sadie Darcy-O'Shea's.
The nature of Marianne and Connell's interconnecting relationships to themselves and others provides the main dynamic of the novel, which is again mostly, but not always, set in Ireland, particularly in Dublin and in County Sligo, with interludes "outside Trieste" (page 157) and in Sweden.
Marianne and Connell: "as if they were acting out an argument in which both sides were equally compelling, and they had chosen their positions more or less at random, only in order to have the discussion out." (page 174)
There are many simple sentences that stick to mind. Such as: "The cherries glow dimly on the trees." (page 179)
There are plenty of arguments, varying in their intensity.
Helen: "Why do you have to act so weird around her?"
Connell: "How I act with her is my normal personality . . . Maybe I'm just a weird person." (page 214)
Marianne responds to a Facebook feed in her mind: "What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to 'like' them supportively? To scroll past in search of something better?" (page 226) Indeed, what is the aim of social media on a daily basis, in the service of communicating with others?
And finally: "Who were you? she thinks, now that there's no one left to answer the question . . . Her mother and brother are at work all day and Marianne has nothing to do but sit in the garden watching insects wriggle through soil." (page 227)
But plenty of stuff does happen, well beyond watching insects. Rooney gets at it all quite well.
Today's Rune: Signals.
Finished Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends (London, New York: Hogarth, 2017; originally published by Faber & Faber, 2017) and Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018) back-to-back. At the conclusion of the latter, my mind remained absorbed with it throughout the night. Both novels look closely at -- feel closely -- the intricate workings of social relationships.
In Conversations with Friends, the main characters are Frances, Bobbi Connolly, Nick and Melissa. Other characters include Philip; Frances' divorced parents; Evelyn; Derek and Marianne. Much of the action takes place in Ireland, but not all of it.
In the swirl of her intense relationships with Bobbi and Nick, Frances sometimes recoils. "I was a very autonomous and independent person," she tells herself, and her readers, "with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived." (page 275)
Sometimes Frances seems to be Waiting for Godot. "Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen . . . Things went on." (page 276)
Bobbi is sharp, "an active listener" (page 289) and engaged thinker/doer: "Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister [there are no quotation marks to delineate dialogue]. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? (page 291) . . . Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that's outside our control. You know?" (page 292).
Exactly! Who, indeed? Rooney makes her writing seem simple, and maybe it is. But as in war, in writing even the simplest things are complex (see Marie and Carl von Clausewitz).
Today's Rune: Journey.
The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), Gloria Naylor's first book, was adapted into a mini-series in 1989 that was filmed in Chicago. The setting for the novel is vaguer -- maybe Cleveland, or maybe a smaller Midwestern or "Northern" city.
In the course of the novel, Naylor (1950-2016) follows several interconnected women in their tatty neighborhood, an effective organizing principle that combines place, time and character. How did they get there? How do they live? What will happen to them? About most of the main characters, we learn the answers by the end of the book.
What is more important in determining a person's arc -- gender, race, class, sexual orientation, geography, or time period? The Women of Brewster Place posits that all are important, and all have some variability. Also, existential choice plays a role regardless of one's station in life, not to mention chance, or luck of the draw. Some give up, some go with the flow, some become casualties, some organize, some try somewhere or something else.
The main characters are: Mattie Michael, Etta Mae Johnson, Lucielia "Ciel" Turner, Melanie "Kiswana" Browne, Cora Lee, Theresa and Lorraine.
"Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. Mattie realized that this moment called for all three." (page 70).
A couple of expressions I particularly like: "She smiled warmly into Cora Lee's eyes." And: "She sincerely liked Mattie because unlike the others, Mattie never found the time to do jury duty on other people's lives." (page 123).
The novel earned a National Book Award for Naylor in 1983.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Pat Conroy, My Exaggerated Life. As Told to Katherine Clark. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
I found this highly valuable for its insight into the writer's craft as well as highly entertaining for its sheer cattiness.
Conroy (1945-2016) wasn't one to sugarcoat what he thought about other people or various things. He holds a good Irish grudge for all time, maybe even beyond death, although in the end, all good Catholics go home to rest, I suppose.
Most importantly of all, Conroy is adamant in his advocacy for unfettered writing: ". . . I don't like readers who point and say you cannot go there; you are not allowed to go there; you're not free to go there; that is off limits. . . . Your service is to your art, and nothing else makes any difference in the world, not your love of your mother, not your love of your children. It simply doesn't. . . . you are at service to art. And if you're not, do something else . . . There is no room for timid souls on our high dive. My writing life would be worthless if I did not write about the things I wasn't supposed to." (Page 161).
Amen to that.
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
"During the whole time since Senior Lieutenant Lukáš first became commander of the Eleventh march-gang, he found himself in a state called syncretism, that is in a philosophy of striving to equalize the conceptual contradictions with the help of compromising all the way to a commingling of views."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 196.
I understand where Oberleutnant Lukáš is coming from. Living in the world, I find myself occasionally (often) having to "equalize . . . conceptual contradictions with the help of compromising all the way to a commingling of views." Another word for this is diplomacy. And, melding. Or grokking.
An example of cultural syncretism follows. Hard to believe, but I first wrote this in the year 2006 -- twelve years ago!
Saint Lucy / Santa Lucia /Sankta Lucia presents an excellent example of syncretism. A dual saint to both Catholics and Nordic Protestants and also to some Eastern Orthodox communities, St. Lucia (traditional dates 283-304 A.D.) was a Greek Sicilian martyr killed during the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian. Some versions of her death have her stabbed through the throat; others have her eyes gouged out (she is, among other things, Patron Saint of the Blind).
So how on Earth did Santa Lucia become a Swedish / Nordic saint?
In Viking days, the Norsemen traveled, raided, and created outposts all over Europe and, to the West, in Greenland and even in what is now Canada. They sailed into the Mediterranean and landed in Sicily, among other places, where they mingled with natives and absorbed local traditions, including that of Santa Lucia, who in Swedish became Sankta Lucia. The Swedes adopted Catholicism along the way, and remained Catholic until the Protestant Reformation and the infiltration of Lutheran beliefs. Sankta Lucia's feast day survived, rather miraculously, this second conversion.
Under the Julian calendar, Lucy's feast day was commemorated during the winter solstice (December 21-22), syncretized wherever celebrated with non-Christian belief systems. As with Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, "everybody be happy." Much later, during the Gregorian calendar reforms, St. Lucy's feast day was moved from the solstice to December 13th, where it has remained on the calendar for the past three to four hundred years.
In addition to being Patron Saint of the Blind, Saint Lucy of Sicily is also a patron saint for writers, salesmen, and stained glass workers.
Today's Rune: Initiation.
Ramin Bahrani's 2018 adaptation of the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 on HBO stars Michael B. Jordan as Montag, Michael Shannon as Beatty, and Sofia Boutella as Clarisse. There's enough action in the novel to make a mini-series; it's harder to pull off in a 101-minute movie. I like the new version, however. It's updated to include recognizable social media and contemporary variations on book burning. In this version, too, the carriers of books and oral traditions are "eels" - derogatory slang for "illegals." Some technology critics seem to hate all of this new stuff, but they also seemed to have missed the boat, the train and the book. When the US is led by a man who does not read, the nation is already half in the bag of dodoville. It's a worldwide trend -- backward. In light of today's socially retarded emotional fascism, one cannot afford to be too subtle.
In the opening sequence of Fahrenheit 451, there are images of burning books and visual art and, at one point, a picture of Frederick Douglass (circa 1818-1895).
Fact number one: in
the first month of taking office, the current American president said
this: "Frederick Douglass is an
example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more
and more, I notice." (Multiple sources. Here's one: David A. Graham, "Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass," The Atlantic, February 1,
2017). Fact number 2: Douglass was born a slave and died long before Trump's
birth, but as he (Douglass, not Trump) learned to read, the
possibilities of freedom became more palpable, and eventually he escaped to
freedom.
Some folks didn't like the carrier bird in this version of Fahrenheit 451. I thought it was totally cool. Incidentally, I also just saw Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), in which books also play a big part -- as do carrier pigeons, which were also important during the Great War of 1914-1918, of which this year is the centenary of its last year.
Finally, the flames. I had an English teacher who had my class read Max Frisch's Biedermann und die Brandstifter / The Firebugs, a play that was first published in 1953 -- the same year as Ray Bradbury's original Fahrenheit 451. In The Firebugs, arsonists are stand-ins for totalitarian brutes who talk their way into people's homes, only to torch them in the end. She --- Joan Boyd -- also had us read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Ann Barlow, another inspiring English teacher, strongly encouraged outside reading, including in my case several novels by Ray Bradbury. Such wonderful English teachers would be classified as "eels" in the new movie, which is like a blend of The Firebugs, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Brave New World, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Fahrenheit 451. Dig it or douse it -- your choice.
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
