Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 3)

  [Continued from Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 2). I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/14/2025] 

Why does the news from the outside bring to mind the end of empires, of destruction and wreckage to come? Too much sound and fury distracting us from the damp seeping into the soles of our feet, sinking into a mire our own making. We are no longer the last best hope for liberty in this world. We may now be the best example of what to avoid in governance. Our power excites more fear than hope.

Then I read someone like Thomas McGuane ("Hubcaps" - The New Yorker, April 21, 2014; and "Motherlode" - The New Yorker, September 8, 2014). He strikes me as a modern James M. Cain.

I do not think myself an intellectual. I come from a place where intellectuals get run out of town. Too many back home take too much pride in ignorance and illogic and make every effort possible against thinking. You can see that in these notes and my fiction. Marxism never attracted me. Although, I do admit, Michael Harrington long ago convinced me of the ethical superiority of democratic socialism. I never pursued democratic socialism  - the piracy of capitalism amused me too much. I do not mind comparing McGuane with Cain, I have no problem with Cormac McCarthy writing Westerns or historical novels or science fiction. Did not Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, and Mark Twain mix genres?

Then why did Alex Ross's "What the Frankfurt School can still teach us" (The New Yorker, September 15, 2014) bother me so? It talks about mass culture versus high; how mass culture marginalizes high culture. Go back to where I started - crime and race and the lack of upward mobility for the poor. The black who is poor, a criminal, and ambitious, has the rappers as aspirational models and also romanticizes, justifying their lifestyles. Having lived with too many black men rapping along with the radio, or just from their memories, I have seen plenty who see in rap the excuse for their lives. Not so many seem to have the ambition of publicizing their own raps. Perhaps, we will see more 50 Cents and fewer inmates. I suspect we will see plenty of kids who see themselves as heroic figures in someone else's story, committing a life of crime. And never understanding the ensnarements of the fiction they have been living out. I suspect this has been going on since Homer finished The Iliad.

While the kids strive after diminishing dollars by hustling dope, Anonymous poses as a truly dangerous counterpoint to power. The nerds strike back. The drug dealer is not Camus' rebel come to life (although Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch did a good job of making one drug dealer encroach on Camus' territory). The drug dealer turned rapper is not going to man the barricades. Who since Ice-T and his "Cop Killer" has even worried the status quo? Here The New Yorker piece on the Frankfurt School rang loudest. The rap multi-millionaires (billionaires) advocate for the status quo. No Nina Simone firebrands urging revolution. African-Americans here read The Wall Street Journal. I have yet to meet any Eldridge Cleavers. So why do they favor the status quo, which still shows them no favor?

So it is obvious that I am provoked? I read The New Yorker,  September 15, 2014, fiction entry - Danielle McLaughlin's "The Dinosaurs on Other Planets" - and it got me thinking of Nicholas and Clay. It reminded me how I had let them down. So what if I meant only to harm me and particularly my reputation? I let Nick and Clay down by not being there when needed in a capacity to help. Most annoying fact about the rest of my life: people thinking I meant to and mean to do actual harm to children.

Less grimly, Ms. McLaughlin reassured me a bit on my "Cruising Down a Blind alley". Yes, that story continues to bedevil me. She left her story in a flux - it is actually a story of a flux. Good to have some reassurance.

sch

[Continued in Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 4). sch 6/14/2025]

6/14/2025: I did find The Goldfinch a feast - Dickens meets Camus. It is also long. What I found today: Donna Tartt's New Anti-Epic (Los Angeles Review of Books)

The Goldfinch is a sprawling anti-epic, longer and denser than her previous novels, and Tartt's most intimate and mature work to date. It ebbs and flows, following the singular rhythm of an indiscernible metronome, wavering between that classic, poetic Tartt style, and a new, more casual narration. It's accessible and rewarding, and though it wanders like a drunk in a foreign city, Tartt always has control. It's a big hyperbolic novel that spurs hyperbolic reactions.

sch 6/14