Got Stomped Today, So I Slept and Then Read About Writers

Mediation browbeat me into admitting that I needed to give up the fight over my father's trust.

Afterward, my sister and I went to Family Services. There I got an app to get my Medicaid back on track. After that, we went to lunch at La Glorieta. Great food as usual.

Back here, the mugginess had given me a headache and I went to sleep until around 7.

Since then, I did a little reading and a little posting to this blog.

Back to work tomorrow.

The Political Journey of Thomas Mann (The Hedgehog Review)

There is no real inconsistency here, of course. Conservatism is itself a venerable ideological commitment within liberalism, and there were any number of anti-Nazi conservatives who suffered as much for their resistance as those on the left did. What’s significant about Mann’s anti-Nazi conservatism is that even as he bravely denounced Hitler, he remained the author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. That is, unlike many Marxists, he could never reduce all aspects of human experience to material conditions and class conflict. He understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical. True to his conservative inclinations, Mann was drawn to metaphors of disease and infection—cholera in Death in Venice, tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, even tooth decay in Buddenbrooks. When he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he named democracy a disease, but he came to see that the opposite was true. For Mann, the method of analysis remained unchanged, but he would put it to different ends. Thinking like a man of the right, he would work for left-of-center ends—and do so even more effectively precisely because of his fundamentally conservative disposition. 

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What seems to have been a decisive factor in Mann’s embrace of democracy was the unlikely influence of Walt Whitman, whom he compared to the best of the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition even while extolling the American poet as “the lover of mankind across the ocean.” Standing before an audience of hundreds at the Berlin Beethoven Auditorium, later destroyed by Soviet bombing, Mann told the assembled that the “day came (an important day for me personally)” when he read these lines from the good, grey poet’s “Calamus”: “For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you…/ For you, for you I am trilling these songs.” In Whitman’s poetry, Mann found not only empathy and beauty in the poet’s queer sensibilities, which spoke to Mann’s own conflicted sexuality, but also enchantment in the creed from Leaves of Grass enjoining all to “despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants… take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.” 

Reverence and Memory: A Conversation with Amit Majmudar (Marginalia) is too long, too interesting in its ideas and thoughtfulness for any sort of reduction. I suggest if you are interested in writing and culture and the purpose of books and ideas, then give it a read. Please. 

In prison, I read A.S. Byatt and found I really liked her. The Literary Review released its 1985 Still Life by A S Byatt by Kay Dick. I think the opening captures what attracts me to Byatt:

Let me state with emphasis: I have not, for a very long time, read a contemporary novel that has given me such immense pleasure as A S Byatt’s Still Life. Although I usually shy away from comparison, this book makes most fiction published today spurious coinage. A quotation from this novel, ‘Good writers should be good readers. Writing is a civilized activity’, locates the roots of this achievement, because as themes interlink and develop, one is increasingly aware of participating in a ‘civilized activity’ (in the same sense in which one reads and rereads ‘classic’ fiction). That A S Byatt is herself ‘a good reader’ is confirmed by the way she pays her readers the compliment of assuming that they will be familiar with the cultural, artistic and philosophical references of her characters.

And so, good night, world.

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