Year: 2013

The Underworlds Of Literature

Brad Leithhauser contemplates various authors versions of Hell. He’s not talking about a literal Hell:

The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath. It’s a hell Huck Finn knows well, embodied in the ragtag shape of his drunken father. There’s no reasoning with Huck’s old man, so suffused is he with bigotry and outraged indignation. (“But when they tell me there’s a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote… I says I’ll never vote agin.”) He’s forever subjecting Huck—and, hence, the empathizing reader—to a beating with his hickory stick (“making it warm for him”), and eventually goes after his son with a knife.

Jesus And Jazz

Marc Hopkins investigates the trend of incorporating jazz music into Christian worship services:

Elements of jazz have been in black churches since enslaved peoples transformed Christian hymns with West African rhythms. Jazz would later emerge from gospel and blues as a distinct genre. But the music developed a stigma for being worldly, played in dimly lit smoke-filled venues, and deemed inappropriate for Sunday morning. In the 1960s, jazz artists began to shift this perception with sacred compositions. Among them: pianist Mary Lou Williams with the album Black Christ of the Andes, and the bandleader Duke Ellington, who performed three “Sacred Concerts” in churches and cathedrals across the U.S. and Europe.

What’s different now is that churches of varying perspectives and racial identities have picked up on [Rev. Dr. Henry T.] Simmons’s strategy of using jazz to attract disaffected believers, and a number of pastors have embraced the notion that jazz has something to do with prayer and can enhance the worship experience.

Outgrowing Religion

Richard L. Rubenstein spent a weekend with the late Swami Muktananda at his American Ashram, where the guru gave him this advice:

You mustn’t believe in your own religion; I don’t believe in mine. Religions are like the fences that hold young saplings erect. Without the fence the sapling could fall over. When it takes firm root and becomes a tree, the fence is no longer needed. However, most people never lose their need for the fence.

The Philosophy That Can’t Be Lived

Pivoting off Thomas Nagel’s book against scientific materialism, Mind and Cosmos, Andrew Ferguson summarizes the core issues involved this way:

As a philosophy of everything [materialism] is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense.

A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.

Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Earlier Dish on Nagel here.

A Bad Review

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Darryl Pinckney recalls when, as a young writer on the make, he trashed a book by James Baldwin, one of his literary heroes – and then encountered the man himself:

Just Above My Head is a sprawling saga about a black gay gospel singer and his family. I am embarrassed more than three decades later by the knowingness of that review, from the typewriter of Mr. Little Shit. I was young, Baldwin was young no longer, and therefore I had his number. I eased scorn on what I saw as his sentimental portrayal of a gay couple. Because the two men in Baldwin’s novel consider themselves married, I accused him of having them imitate heterosexual behavior. He’d given up on sexual liberation, I said. Mary McCarthy advises that a good way to get started as a writer is to publish reviews. I was going about the business of trying to become a writer, willing to do so at the expense of this tender, brave, and brilliant soul.

A few years later at a party for Baldwin after he read his blues poems at the 92nd Street Y, I, drunk, asked—yes, asked—if he’d seen that review. He graciously said no and I’m afraid I can’t pretend that I did not in a seizure of self-importance rehearse some of my arguments against his book right there, in the middle of a cocktail party for him, this adored figure. His smile was all forbearance and understanding. He had my number.

(Photo of James Baldwin in 1969 by Allan Warren, via Wikimedia Commons)

Getting Readers To Swallow Philosophy

Emma Woolerton reveals why Roman poet Lucretius presented his philosophy in the form of poetry:

Children hate the taste of medicine, even though it is, of course, good for them; so doctors often put it in a cup the rim of which is covered in honey. The child tastes the honey in the first instance, and by the time he is glugging down the medicine it’s too late. In the same way, we may find Epicureanism difficult to swallow at first, so Lucretius lures us in with some honeyed poetry, and before we know it, we’ve taken the philosophical medicine as well. It’s a picture that isn’t particularly flattering either to Epicureanism or to his readers, but it’s the rationale Lucretius states for his choice of verse.

This Particular Now

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Greg Bottoms pens an open letter to photographer William Eggleston:

I don’t write to dream; I write to stop dreaming, to be more present.  To tell my way toward clarity.  I think I would be a writer even if I didn’t write. I’d have that observational inclination towards the ordinary—that open-mouthed stare at unprocessed existence going by. I write mostly for the process—of looking, thinking, naming, discovering. I think this is why many who might loosely be called documentarians—essayists, memoirists, literary journalists, photographers, nonfiction filmmakers, even biographical or documentary fiction writers—do what we do.  We have an obsessive interest in presenting and pondering ordinary life, the day-to-day flow of things.

I bet you take photographs—of a light bulb in a red ceiling, a dinner table just before people sit down to eat, an old man sitting on a bed and holding a pistol, a rusty tricycle—not to dream but to come out of a dream.  To say This is, this right here is absolutely real in space and time, irreducible and ineluctable, and I witnessed it and I captured it; I lived deeply inside of this particular now.

He thanks Eggleston for a particular photo of a Mustang that triggers a vivid memory of waiting in a Sears parking lot with his father. That photo is used for the cover of the book William Eggleston 2 1/4, seen above.

Opium As Muse

Colin Dickey surveys the literary career of Thomas De Quincey, who built “his reputation as a friend and colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge with an astute and encyclopedic mind—all the while managing not to produce any actual writing.” That is, until he decided to write about the very thing that had prevented him from doing so – his opium addiction:

Long his artistic nemesis, it had now become his subject. For all its drawbacks, opium had one beneficial effect for De Quincey, that of acting as the ice-axe to free the frozen sea within him. Opium, as it happens, does not enhance one’s dreams, it suppresses them, so that it’s really as one gradually comes off of the drug that those dreams come flooding back with heightened urgency and intensity. It also seems to have freed him from the need to produce a grand, unified and cohesive philosophical treatise; part of what would come to define De Quincey’s style are his fragmentary tangents, his proto-stream of consciousness style that allowed him to move rapidly between dream, memory, and philosophy.

His style was an instant success:

The young De Quincey had wanted to be Wordsworth, but the Confessions is in many ways the complete antithesis of Wordsworth’s writing: prose, not poetry; urban, not rural; eschewing transcendence in favor of the darker side of English society. Most significantly, its approach to time was radically different. For Wordsworth, in poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the moment of epiphany came through recollection, and pleasure came from those moments, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” when memories flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” There was a magical frisson in a memory recollected at leisure over the space of years, and that gap of time was necessary to an ability to process the beauty of those past moments.

De Quincey found in opium a completely different relationship to the world around him. Speaking of the impact of music while on the drug, he writes: “Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.” Opium, in other words, could render the same kind of epiphany Wordsworth sought in recollection, but could do so in real time. Under opium, according to De Quincey, “Space also it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exact and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it on waking by expressions commensurate to human life.” In these passages, De Quincey is closer to Virginia Woolf than Wordsworth, and particularly that modernist conception of time as bifurcated between, as Virginia Woolf put it in Orlando, the “time of the clock” and the “time of the mind.”

Previous Dish on De Quincey here, here and here.

Marriage Among The Millennials

Lizzie Plaugic unpacks a report (pdf) from UVA’s National Marriage Project that “showed increased rates of binge drinking and depression in non-married twenty-somethings”:

“Thirty-five percent of single men and cohabiting men report they are ‘highly satisfied’ with their life, compared to 52 percent of married men. Likewise, 33 percent of single women and 29 percent of cohabiting women are ‘highly satisfied,’ compared to 47 percent of married women.”

It’s a vague statistic though (“highly satisfied” could mean anything from an endless supply of Cheetos to a house in the Hamptons to daily sex), and it’s potentially misleading. Increased life satisfaction could be the result of marriage being an endorphin-increasing road to happiness, or it could mean that young people are waiting to get married until they have achieved happiness elsewhere, rather than the other way around. Whereas marriage used to mark the beginning of adult life, now it seems to be a thing you do after your adult life is already settled.

Libby Copeland figures that the study explains why many celebrities get married very young:

Once upon a time, men with high school degrees could obtain manufacturing jobs with solid wages and pensions that enabled them to marry and start families in their early 20s. Now, with the chances of nabbing a pension about as good as “winning the World Series,” as the Knot Yet study puts it, young blue-collar Americans can’t pay for a wedding, let alone a house and kids. But pop stars, of course, don’t have that problem.

Nor do they, like middle- and upper-class women, need to worry about finishing college and working for several years before contemplating getting pregnant. They won’t be sacrificing a $10,000 annual bump in salary by marrying too soon; instead, they’re probably making more in their late teens and 20s than they’ll ever make again. And getting married might well help their brand. (Having a baby certainly will.)

In other words, celebrities marry young not because they’re more mature than the rest of us (clearly) but because they have the means so much of America lacks. The move may be driven by youthful impulse, but it is also, in a strange way, logical. They’re just doing what so many of us would have (ill-advisedly) done as teenagers if we’d had loads of cash and legal independence from our parents: married our first loves.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle considers society’s incentives to get married:

College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage.  Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married.  Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry?

Her theory:

[A]ll economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.  And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.