Sarah Bakewell: 'At the Existentialist Café' (2016): Part Two

Photo by Alberto Korda: March 5, 1960, Havana.

Finished a first read-through of Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others (New York: Other Press, 2016).

Let's pick it up with Jean-Paul Sartre. Though he loved to be free, “[i]t seemed that Sartre would rarely be as relaxed and happy again as he had been as a prisoner of war” (page 143). Think about that! And this: he escaped the POW camp and made his way back to Paris. 

As for Simone de Beauvoir, she “seemed more sensitive than Sartre to . . . subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity” (page 228). To backtrack a little, “existentialism is always a philosophy of freedom in situation” (page 228).
 

We make our choices within given circumstances, and we also make them within historical time. If we lived in North Korea now or the American South in 1840, our options (even our imagined options) would be different. Much depends on our socio-economic position – including literacy and knowledge of alternate possibilities. In both cases, powerful obstacles would block many of our choices in life.  

Our physical condition will also help determine the limit of our options within a spectrum of finite possibilities. 
 

What is our gender identification, what is our age? 

Throw in revolution, war, famine and pestilence and all bets are off. 

Today's Rune: Movement. 

Sarah Bakewell: 'At the Existentialist Café' (2016): Part One

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others (New York: Other Press, 2016) delivers a masterful blend of biographical details and ideas. Fantastic! This is already my favorite ever book on the Existentialists and their "fellow travelers" -- and I haven't even finished reading it yet.

You want just a little bit of Søren Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche to get you in the mood? Check out Chapter 1: "SIR, WHAT A HORROR, EXISTENTIALISM!"

Additional teasers: "The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it" (page 16). You think about things, don't ya? You do live beyond making pitter patter, right? 

Sarah Bakewell: "I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, I think personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically" (page 32).

And how about that time when Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to experience the effects of mescaline in the 1930s?  "The results were dramatic. While [Aldous] Huxley's drug adventure would be mystical and ecstatic . . . Sartre's brain threw up a hellish crew of snakes, fish, vultures, toads, beetles, and crustaceans . . . For months, lobster-like beings followed him just out of his field of vision, and the facades of houses on the street stared at him with human eyes . . . (page 99).

Seriously, comrades, anyone seriously interested in these folks and their experiences and ideas would, or will, love this book. 

Onward!

Today's Rune: Defense.    

Walter Salles: On the Road (Take II)

Now's a good time for a little something about the characters and actors in Walter Salles' 2012 movie version of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, set in the late 1940s in the US and Mexico.

To me, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is sort of like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991). Moriarty (which happens to be one of my family names back in the mists of time) is a sort of prototype for tens of thousands of Americans living in the early 21st century -- careless, reckless, chaotic and driven. One of the best details about him -- which is not the case with his spiritual descendents, I'm guessing, is his holding onto a copy of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way throughout most of the frenetic journeys depicted in On the Road. In Swann's Way (the first part of Proust's massive novel À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time), Swann's obsession with Odette is a powerful thread that ties everything together; in On the Road, obsession runs through Moriarty's psyche (obsessions with fast driving, drugs and sex -- seeking and escaping) and ties him in knots. Several other characters, men and women, are equally obsessed with Moriarty, who serves as a fast-moving Pied Piper for their scurrying activities. Dean Moriarty has some ambition to be a writer himself, so when he hands Swann's Way off, we get the idea that he's finished with that notion.

Kristen Stewart as Marylou has a damaged, mischievous Chloë Sevigny vibe. As for the other women characters, well, let's face it: Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a far cry from a feminist manifesto. Though Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe / The Second Sex was published in 1949, this is not Sur la route in France, but rather North America, and second wave feminism was not yet manifest here. In any case, there are brief interludes that include Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Marie-Ginette Guay, among others.

Viggo Mortensen is a hoot as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) -- right on.

The hardest role is that of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac). Sam Riley does a superb job with it -- despite sometimes over-the-top corny vocal delivery (this is really how Kerouac wrote and spoke). Who is this guy, this actor? It finally hit me afterward -- my God, he's the British dude who played Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis in Control (the 2007 film directed by Anton Corbijn)!  Ian Curtis -- Mr. Gloom himself -- committed suicide while (or was it right after?) listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot, while also watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek, the offbeat film that ends in the mountains of North Carolina with a Cherokee tribal deputy on the radio to a dispatcher: "We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, can't stop the dancing chickens. Send an electrician, we're standing by." It's those damn dancing chickens again, from Chagall to Pop and Fellini . . . worth noting repeatedly because yes, Virginia, everything really does connect to every other thing, plus the effort to make these crazy connections manifest keeps the synapses lively and dementia at bay -- maybe. But back to Sam Riley in On the Road -- he gets an A for his performance.

Today's Rune: Protection.  
  
 

Le deuxième sexe

Where were you born, when? What kind of "upbringing" did you have? How much "socialization?" How did you learn about the world, how do you learn about it now? All these "factors" go into our worldview, our ideology, our way of perceiving, filtering, interpreting "reality." So it's no surprise that people -- those who publically share how they think about perception and ideology -- tend to emphasize one or two elements and neglect others. "Race." "Gender." "Socio-eocnomic class." "Religion." "Sexual orientation." "Disabled Status." Political theory -- or political "leanings." Dispositions. Preferences. Response to the "laws of the land," especially those contested or challenged. All worth thinking about, as a mix and blend just as much -- more so, as far as I'm concerned -- than as isolated or stand-alone ingredients. The whole is greater than its constituent parts. Strength through diversity, as it were.  

Year of birth, location, situation. Consider that in 1967, Loving vs. Virginia overturned the status quo about "race relations" in the USA: henceforth, "mixed" couples could be together without being criminalized.

Consider that in the previous year, James Brown scored a hit with "It's a Man's Man's Man's World."

Some of the lyrics:

You see man made the cars
To take us over the world
Man made the train
To carry the heavy load
Man made the electric lights
To take us out of the dark . . .
This is a man's world
But it would be nothing, nothing
Not one little thing
Without a woman to care . . .

Consider that "adult women" (21+) could only begin voting throughout the entire United States in 1920. 

Consider that "black people" (then considered anyone with any degree of African ancestry -- did that include those of "white" African ancestry, too?) were "guaranteed" equal protection as citizens in 1868 (a direct result of secession and the American Civil War).

Consider a core component of the XV (15th / Fifteenth) Amendment to the US Constitution (1870):

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.  [Note: women therein obviously not conceived of as citizens, nor anyone under 21].

Consider the case of the War of 1812 veteran who purportedly killed Tecumseh in battle -- Colonel, Congressman, Senator and US Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850) and his "common law" wife, Julia Chinn, who happened to be "black" (or "mulatto," as she was sometimes characterized at the time).

1) They were never formally married.
2) They were an "interracial couple."
3) They had at least two daughters (Imogene and Adaline/Adeline).

Consider that upon is death, Johnson was honored with a considerable obelisk in the Frankfurt (Kentucky) Cemetery, but that after her death in 1833, Julia Chinn (without recorded birthdate) received no marker at all (so far as I can determine). Also, she'd been his father's slave. But unlike South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate Strom Thurmond (1902-2003), Johnson was quite open about his "crossing of racial barriers" in his own time and place while he (and she) lived. 

Now, pluck Julia Chinn and Richard Mentor Johnson out of their time and place and drop them into the world of 2013.  What would be different? What might be the same? How much would it matter whether they lived in Paducah or New York City, Palookaville or Phoenix, Arizona?  

Today's Rune: Journey. Pictured above: the latest English language edition of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, originally published in French in 1949 as Le Deuxième Sexe (Tome I as Les Faits et les Mythes).         

Dreaming in French, Part II: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

The first part of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) delves into Ms. Bouvier and her cohort's Smith College study-abroad residence in France in 1949-1950.  JB's status was closer to genteel poverty at the time than today's Romney rich, but she had plenty of friends and mentors. Travel across the Atlantic was still primarily by ship, and Smith students boarded with French families just recovering from the damages of the Second World War.

Kaplan summarizes nicely: "Throughout her year in Paris, Jacqueline Bouvier inhabited several worlds and managed to keep them separate -- a talent she would need to maintain throughout her complex life" (page 36).  French immersion proved helpful in the long term. Bouvier studied at the Sorbonne and Reid Hall.  Smith professor Jeanne Saleil noted at the time: "Jacqueline is so brilliant, she could be a stellar academic, but she hasn't thrown herself into the intellectual life. Her heart is elsewhere" (page 38).

Upon return to the USA, Bouvier became engaged to stockbroker John Husted, but this was ended in short order. She considered applying for a CIA job, and did apply for a position at Paris Vogue via a contest that she had for the taking, but then thought better of it.  She met JFK in 1952 and married him in 1953. When her husband became president, she drew upon her knowledge of French culture and history to act dynamically as his unofficial advisor and cultural ambassador. In 1961, the American president quipped about their official state trip to France, "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris" (page 64).

JBK brought style and insight to "La Maison Blanche," aka the White House. Later, after the  Dallas 1963 nightmare, after her second marriage, she became an influential acquisitions editor at Doubleday.

There's more to go into -- Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux and other influences and connections -- at some point, perhaps. Overall, the tone of Alice Kaplan's section on JB/JBK/JBKO is sympathetic and the details interesting. Jacqueline in all of her incarnations comes off very well, indeed.

Today's Rune: Journey.     

Breakfast at the Exit Café: First Take

Thoroughly enjoying Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels Through America (Vancouver, B.C.: Greystone Books, 2010, 2011), an on-the-road memoir by Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds, two Canadians roaming highways and byways in the post-9/11 USA.

Here's how the accompanying website markets it:
'Put two writers in a car for a couple of months and what do you get? Breakfast at the Exit Café, the story of a trip around the rim of America, against the tide of history and literature, on roads travelled by Steinbeck, Kerouac, Trollope, and Simone de Beauvoir."  http://breakfastattheexitcafe.com/

This husband and wife team alternate sections, which livens things up.  Their observations are pointed, often snarky and therefore hilarious -- even (especially?) when they're wrong about certain details. This is a case study in trying  to figure out how things work from the outside: they hit some nail heads right on, miss the mark on others. Either way, makes you think. That's part of the fun.   

Today's Rune: Journey.

Mary Johnson Blues

The destiny that society traditionally offers women is marriage. Even today, most women are, were, or plan to be married, or they suffer for not being so. Marriage is the reference by which the single woman is defined, whether she is frustrated by, disgusted at, or even indifferent to this institution. . . Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.*

Mary Williams Smith Johnson (b. ca. 1900-1905, Eden Station, Mississippi, d. ca. 1970 or early 1980s, St. Louis?) was married to Lonnie Johnson (b. 1889 or 1894, 1899 or ca. 1900?-d. 1970) from 1925 to 1932; at one point they apparently traveled to New York City together, but overall were apart much of the time. They had five kids or so. Lonnie traveled extensively, and seems to have hooked up with Bessie Smith in the late 1920s when he accompanied her on tour as musician. It must have been one crazy marriage. "Mary Johnson Blues" was recorded on September 22, 1932, in Richmond, Indiana, with Roosevelt Sykes on piano and Artie Mosby on violin. This was the same day and place Sykes recorded "Highway 61 Blues." 

“Mary Johnson Blues” by Mary Johnson

I once was a married woman
Saddest day I ever was
I once was a married woman
Saddest day I ever was
I was a young girl at home
And I did not know the world

I’d rather to be an old maid
Than to be worried and blue each and every day
I’d rather to be an old maid
Than to be worried and blue each and every day
‘Cause these worrisome old men
Can cause your head to turn white and gray

Ah, play your thing for Miss Johnson

Baby you caused me to leave my happy home
And you cause me to weep and moan
You caused me to leave my happy home
And you cause me to weep and moan
That is why baby
This band will take your place today

Ah, play it for me, ‘cause I got the blues

I’m just sittin’ here thinkin’
Baby just a minute ago
I’m just sittin’ here thinkin’
Baby just a minute ago
I once was a married woman
And I rue the day I ever was

Today's Rune: Partnership.

*The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevallier (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010; orginally published by Gallimard as Le deuxième sexe in two volumes, 1949), p. 439.  N.B.: I transcribed this en route to Greensboro, North Carolina, in a regional jet plane at an altitude of about 37,000 feet -- in case you were wondering.

Hector Cruz Sandoval: KordaVision, Part 1

In the beginning of this spirited 2005 documentary, director Hector Cruz Sandoval* provides background on how he became drawn to his subject. He grew up in an urban Catholic Mexican American milieu in the 1960s, becoming more aware of things as he went along. "The Vietnam War was a big issue, taking a toll on our families." In 1969, an uncle was drafted and served in the war. By the time of his return, group conciousness had been raised further and, with many relatives, they became involved in the Chicano civil rights movement; Our Lady of Guadalupe, César Chávez, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Che Guevara were among the movement's icons.

On August 29, 1970, the Chicano Moratorium anti-war rally in East L.A. drew a violent police crackdown. Hector Cruz Sandoval: "I realized that day that to voice one's opinions and to ask questions leads to the truth."

In 1998, he was posted to Cuba to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II. Cut to the Pope's words during that trip: "The world must get closer to Cuba."  The U.S. travel ban on Cuba seemed as ridiculous then as it does now.

Cut back to a deadly explosion on the docked freighter La Coubre in Havana Harbor on March 4, 1960, an act of sabotage (and still, by some accounts, a mystery, like the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898) perpetrated by CIA operatives. La Coubre was unloading munitions from Belgium.

At the memorial service the next day, Cuban leaders, supporters and VIP visitors Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir paid homage to those killed in the explosion and aftermath. Alberto Korda, using his Leica M2 with 90 mm lens, photographed the event. He took two shots of Che Guevara, a portrait and a landscape angle. One of these shots, "a photo that was pure chance," as Korda reflected, became the iconic shot of Che the world has known particularly since 1967, after Che's death: Guerrillero Heroico.

*Note: I'm working from the 2008 DVD; in it, the main credits go with Héctor Cruz Sandoval and KORDA VISION; other variations drop the Spanish accent mark in Héctor, modify the title slightly to KordaVision and add informal subtitles like "The Man Who Shot Che Guevara" and "A Cuban Revelation." The film itself is bilingual with Spanish subtitles during English sections and English subtitles for Spanish sections, a very effective approach.

Excellent documentary. Part 2 tomorrow.

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Also Known As "Le Deuxième Sexe"

Existentialism keeps resurfacing in books, movies and art in general. Woody Allen certainly seems to go with it, and now we can get to an expanded and improved translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) / The Second Sex (1953) by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2010).  I'm glad -- bring them all back!   Existentialism plus gender issues -- both elicit interesting, compelling questions.  What goes around comes around.

Guess how many women are engineers? Last I checked, 11% of engineering graduates were women.  Last I checked, there was an even smaller group called The Society of Professional Women in Petroleum (SPWP). Would there be any differences in approaches to engineering if women were in charge, or better represented in terms of actual decision-making? 

I have no idea -- merely asking the question.

I do feel this: that the status quo is not nearly good enough -- not for highways, urban planning, education, infrastructure, transportation, social services, foreign policy, energy policy, military strategy, longterm thinking or much of anything else. The way things stand, as a Lousiana parish leader quipped recently, it's like the world is "being run by a bunch of 7th graders" (and 7th grade boys for the most part).  Or, better things are being blocked by those with the mentality of 7th grade boys -- maybe that is also true.

Do you prefer the detail from the first painting, or the second? Why?  Le Deuxième Sexe or The Second Sex?

Today's Rune: Movement.

The Hotel Chelsea

Along with Leonard Cohen, first we’ll take Manhattan. Set up headquarters at The Hotel Chelsea, otherwise known as The Chelsea Hotel.

For anyone who really loves the arts and wants easy access to a large culturally-packed chunk of the city at a reasonable price, it’s worth checking out their website. This is not a luxury hotel, but it is a working one, with long-term residents and reasonable amenities (like a refrigerator and coffee maker). I love it for its low-key ambience, excellent location and intense history, among other things.

Here’s a sampling of people who’ve stayed (and created) in The Chelsea time-space intersection:

Sarah Bernhardt; Mark Twain; Edgar Lee Masters; Hart Crane; Henri Chopin; Thomas Wolfe; Édith Piaf; Frida Kahlo; Diego Rivera; Dylan Thomas (until the end); Nelson Algren; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Julius Robert Oppenheimer; Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend); Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir; Willem de Kooning; Jasper Johns; Vladimir Nabokov; Arthur C. Clark (drafting 2001: A Space Odyssey); Stanley Kubrick; Shirley Clarke; Arthur Miller (After the Fall); Rebecca Miller; Tennessee Williams; Gore Vidal; Brenda Behan; Brion Gysin; William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch); Jack Kerouac (On the Road); Bob Dylan (Blonde on Blonde); Bob Neuwirth; Edie Sedgwick; Mary Woronov; Brigid Berlin; Nico; Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix; Grace Slick and The Jefferson Airplane; Leonard Cohen; Joni Mitchell (“Chelsea Morning”); Kris Kristofferson; Jane Fonda; Donald Sutherland; Dennis Hopper; John Cale; Sam Shepard; Patti Smith; Robert Mapplethorpe; Iggy and the Stooges (“We Will Fall” – Room 121); Sid Vicious; Nancy Spungen; Dee Dee Ramone; Grace Jones; Miloš Forman; Uma Thurman; Ethan Hawke (Chelsea Walls); Gaby Hoffman.

Though no comprehensive history of the place and its guests has yet been published, there's Chelsea Horror Hotel (2001) by Dee Dee Ramone and the upcoming Chelsea Hotel Manhattan by Joe Ambrose, to be made available on February 1, 2007 (cover pictured above).

Don’t confuse this Hotel Chelsea with the London version or with Elvis Costello’s bitingly great song, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea.”

I most certainly do want to go back to The Chelsea.

Hotel Chelsea
222 W 23rd St
New York NY 10011
Telephone: (212) 243-3700
Fax: (212) 675-5531

Today's Rune: Growth.

Bon voyage!