Category Archives: Reading & Writing

Fedoras, Libertarians, and Russell Edson

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FedoraI have one final article relating to yesterday’s brouhaha, but this one has nothing to do with David Weigel. I was having a nice conversation with Abenomix, and I happened to note that the grainy photo he uses (of himself I assume) would look like Sam Spade if you added a fedora. He tweeted back, “whereas I am certain it was not your intention to insult me, you did just manage to.” I immediately assumed it was the Sam Spade reference but it wasn’t. After a few more tweets, I learned from Matt Christman that, “Fedora = Bad.” When I asked for clarification, I was told, “Fedoras have become the online talisman of a certain strain of man-babyish libertarian white guy.”

I had no idea! I did, however, note that “libertarian implies man-babyish white guy.” But I can totally see this. What the bow-tie was to George Will and Tucker Carlson, the fedora has become to a younger generation. There is a slight problem, however. I went out looking for libertarians wearing fedoras and found that many of them were not wearing fedoras. Part of the problem is that people have started calling just about any similar hat a fedora. Both the Homburg and some styles of pork pie hat are misidentified as fedora. As you can see, I like hats. And it’s not just old style hats or western hats. Some Islamic followers wear the most gorgeous kufi caps. And it isn’t just men’s hats, either. Women are never as beautiful as when they wear hats. Hats are great!

But this revelation that libertarians (Abenomix brilliantly calls them “libertaryans”) are using fedoras as cultural signifiers is of great concern. And I can see why it is. Undoubtedly, they look back on what they consider the good old days when men were Humphrey Bogart and women were manipulative deceivers who get their comeuppance like Mary Astor. It also signals a kind of Eurocentrism. I don’t doubt that it is an intellectual response to the baseball caps worn by those “idiots” who don’t understand the libertarian utopia that awaits them if only they will wake up—and an anti-religious response to the growing popularity of kufi caps. (See my articles: The Atheist Libertarian Connection, Libertarianism Incompatible With Atheism, and Are There Libertarian Atheists?)

Russell EdsonThe facts of my life are that I almost never where any of my old fashioned hats. When I was younger, I was a bit of a dandy. Now I just don’t care. In fact, worse than that; mostly I wear badly damaged and worn baseball caps and the occasional communist workers’ hat. (I’m well aware that libertarians might soon start wearing them ironically.) But I still love the old hats and especially the fedora. But my love for the hats does not stem from old movies that I love. (Or more modern ones; see my thoughts on Miller’s Crossing.) It comes from a poet I discovered when I first went to college: Russell Edson.

Edson was (sadly, he died earlier this year) what I will call a surrealist poet. But I don’t know of anyone else who calls him this. No one is sure what to make of his work other than that it is brilliant and wonderful and beautiful. But the thing is, Edson had this thing about hats, most especially fedoras. When I first read him, I didn’t even know what a fedora was, so I had to look it up. And thus was born my love not just of fedoras but of all hats. Here is one of those poems from what was probably the first of his books I read, The Very Thing that Happens. This is “Someone”:

A man put a fedora on a cabbage, oh please be somebody I know.
Now who it is, as the brim is low, he cannot tell, but someone is certainly someone.
Someone, who are you?
Someone says nothing.
One and cabbage and now the moon. Round things are not unavailable in a square room.
The moon comes wearing a crown of clouds, worn too low to know who it is.

Or let us consider this much more recent poem, “Let Us Consider”:

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall….

  Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity….

  Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora….

My first reaction to the fact that libertarians had grabbed the fedora as a cultural signifier was more or less Bush the Elder’s, “This will not stand, this aggression against hats and poetry and all that is good.” But I’m not up for a pointless fight. In its way, it’s nice that libertarians have latched onto the fedora. It’s the most charming thing about them. And maybe Russell Edson predicted this: who is that fedora wearing cabbage? Why it’s the next Libertarian presidential candidate!

Disc and Track Names on Books on CD

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Frankenstein - Book on CDI like books on CD. A librarian friend of mine told me recently that she had managed to make it through James Joyce’s Ulysses with some cliff note and a book on CD while she read along. That struck me as a brilliant solution to reading a book I have tried to read many times over the past three decades. She is now applying the same technique to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I consider this a less laudable endeavor. I don’t doubt Proust’s brilliance (although I’ve always found him, in translation, rather boring). After reading the whole thing, one needn’t go searching for the lost time. It was lost in trudging through the seven large volumes—Over four thousand pages!—of getting to the end of the novel where you learn that Proust has figured out the secret that he’s been writing about and will now go and write what you just read. It’s a circular ending every bit as fulfilling as that in Finnegans Wake. (You understand that I was being sarcastic, right?)

I find books on CD useful for when I’m driving or walking. And this normally requires that I rip the CDs onto my computer in the form of MP3s. And in doing this, I’ve noticed something very interesting: they aren’t consistent. I don’t mean from title to title. I mean that a single title will not be consistent with itself. Take for example, Elaine Pagels’ book, Gnostic Gospels. It comes on six CDs. But they can’t even be bothered to name the discs the same. The second disc is named, “Gnostic Gospels Disc 2.” This pattern is used for discs 3 through 6. But the first disc is named simply, “Gnostic Gospels.” I’m a being petty? Maybe. But it gets worse.

The first disc numbers the files from 01 through 16. Very simple and easy to understand, even if not helpful in finding your place if you don’t listen straight through. The second disc does the same thing. What’s more, it adds more information to let you know that the files are actually 17 through 32. Very helpful. The third disc is the same: 33 through 48. But the fourth disc provides a rather different format. Still you get the same information but in a much more flamboyant form. The first track is labeled, “The Gnostic Gospels Disc 4 Track 49.” The fifth disc is back to the old way, just numbering the tracks from 65 through 80. But then the sixth disc labels the tracks from 001 to 017. It makes little sense, but it makes more sense than many.

Terry Pratchett’s Making Money has the very same disc labeling problem. This seems to be standard. I don’t know why. It drives my mathematically inclined mind crazy. And the tracks are similarly bizarre. For the first two discs we get a very nice system of labeling discs and tracks. So the fourth track on the second disc is labeled “02-04.” But then the third disc has tracks labeled, “Track 1” and so on. So we lose useful information (the disc number) and gain useless information (the fact that a track is a track). This new system is continued on the fourth disc, but we get something entirely new for the fifth! This disc isn’t even consistent within itself. The first six tracks are labeled, “Macking Money track X disc 5.” That wasn’t a typo on my part; it really says “Macking” and not “Making.” But this problem is fixed for the last two tracks that are simply labeled, “Track X.” The next three discs go back to the same format as the first two. And the last disc is the same as the third disc.

I started looking at this because I recently got Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This one is really great, because the first disc does not go in the Mary Shelley folder. Instead, it goes in the Patrick Doyle folder. For those of you who don’t know, Patrick Doyle is a film composer who the music of Gosford Park and Brave. It took me quite a while to find the MP3s after they were ripped. But once I figured that out, they were logically put in the folder named Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Inside the tracks were descriptive, which is fine. The rest of the discs went into the Mary Shelley folder, so that’s something. But it’s also about all.

The second and third discs were named “Frank X.” That’s fine. I have no problem with brevity. And their tracks were the standard disc and track numbers. That’s fine, but it’s totally inconsistent with the first disc. The rest of the discs were named “Frankenstein Disc X.” Another inconsistency. The fourth and fifth discs give simply the chapters they are part of but with no subdividing. Then the six disc gives us something new and inconsistent. The first nine tracks are labeled, “Frank 06-0X.” So it’s kind of like the second and third discs but with “Frank” put at the beginning. But on the tenth track, it goes back to listing the chapter. The rest of the discs continue the chapter format.

There is a slight change on the last disc, but it actually makes sense. Frankenstein is a frame story. It starts with a series of letters and ends with a series of letters. So it names each of these tracks with “Final Letters” and then the dates of the letters. It’s actually rather shocking to see something done correctly. Of course, the letters are the beginning were not done the same way.

What I figure is going on here is that the publishers of books on CD do not expect that people will put them on their computers. In fact, they probably fear this and think that people will steal them, even though they really are pretty useless to keep around after you’ve listened to them. So my bet is that they don’t put out what each track should be called. And so it gets crowd sourced on the internet. And like most most things done in this way, it is done badly. And that’s how we get things like “Macking Money.”

Afterword

I was going to finish this article with, “God save us from the cult of the amateur.” But that’s not how I feel. There are a lot of amateurs who do excellent work—better than professionals. But work like entering track names is the kind of boring work that no one takes great pride in. It is the sort of thing that someone should be paid to do so they make sure it is done correctly. We would have a great society if only the really tedious work was paid. And that way, we could all divide it up and only have to work five hours a week.

Art, Opium, and Jean Cocteau

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Jean CocteauOn this day in 1889, the great writer Jean Cocteau was born. But really, it is wrong to limit him as a writer. I have this little annoyance with Wikipedia where it will list someone as “actor, director, author, musician, and political activist.” Normally, this means they are actors, once directed a play, had a ghostwriter produce an autobiography, once sang a song in public, and told Barbara Walters that it was wrong to drown kittens. But in Cocteau’s case, he really did do a lot. If he had only been a film director, he would be listed in Wikipedia. He was also a prolific poet, novelist, and screenwriter—any of which would have made him an important writer.

He is best known for his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles. It was first translated by our old friend Samuel Putnam, who most of you know for having written what I think is the greatest English translation of Don Quixote (not that later translations aren’t better, but they have the advantage of Putnam’s work). It is an amazing book about a brother and sister (Paul and Elisabeth) who play a game to see who can annoy the other to the point of exasperation. In my generation, it would be forcing the other to say “uncle.” But Paul is the passive one; it is Elisabeth who actively tries to annoy Paul while he tries to annoy her by not reacting. This game continues long into adulthood where Elisabeth actively sabotages Paul’s love life. This causes Paul to drink poison. While he lays dying, Elisabeth thinks that Paul is going to beat her so she kills herself with a gun, “winning” the game. Of course, it is all more complicated than that. Elisabeth is fundamentally in love with Paul. The game is how they show their love. And Elisabeth cannot live without Paul.

I know Cocteau best because of his book, Opium: Journal of Drug Rehabilitation. Literally, that is: “Journal of Drug Rehabilitation.” But for some reason, it is now published under the English title, Opium: The Diary of His Cure. And earlier editions were “a cure” and not “his cure.” But the latter translation of the book is probably better, because the book is more Cocteau than opium. He does a better job of describing opium than most authors because he admits to why the drug originally had a great pull but then how it turned into a trap. But when it is all done, he notes, “Now that I am cured I feel poor, empty, broken-hearted, and ill. Yeah, that’s about right. Of course, the book is more just his reflections of his life and art. It is scattered but brilliant.

Happy birthday Jean Cocteau!

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Witch Trials

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Nathaniel HawthorneOn this day in 1804, the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born. He was a highly moralistic writer who did not have a very good view of human nature. Stylistically he seems quite modern to me, even falling into the surreal at times. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, we really don’t know if there was an “A” on Dimmesdale’s chest, although I suspect in Hawthorne’s mind, it was an indication of his cynicism: people see what they want to see.

Given his writing, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Hawthorne was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne. He was one of judges during the Salem witch trials. It’s not like Salem was cut off from the world. There was much comment at the time that the town was out of control. In fact, twelve local ministers wrote, “Presumptions whereupon persons may be Committed, and much more, Convictions whereupon persons may be Condemned as Guilty of Witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable, than barely the Accused Persons being Represented by a Spectre unto the Afflicted.”

But as you may remember, after killing off the final eight, pretty much everyone came to their senses. “Oh my God! What have we done?” I can easily forgive Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. They were just children—and females at that. They must have loved all the attention they got at a time and place when not much was thought of women—much less girls. But the activity of the adults, especially the judges? That’s harder to forgive. And it is quite impossible to forgive John Hathorne. He was the most eager of the “judges”—providing the usual kind of irrefutable claims, “Why you seem to act witchcraft before us by the motion of your body which seems to have influence upon the afflicted.” He was the only judge to never apologize for the twenty who the town murdered (One by pressing!) and the five who died in jail.

Hawthorne was clearly not thrilled to be associated with great-great-granddad. He added the “w” to his last name. (Perhaps he added it because he too was a witch!) Regardless, it is nice to think that something good came out of the witch trials. Because we know one thing that did not come out of them: a change in American mass hysteria. True: we don’t kill witches today. But we freak out about about stuff all the time with far worse consequences. Think: Iraq War or crack cocaine laws.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was certainly one of the best early American writers. None other than Edgar Allan Poe (who didn’t like him), wrote of Hawthorne, “We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.” In fairness, however, Poe didn’t much like anyone. And given who we are, who can blame him. Hawthorne would understand that.

Franz Kafka and the War on Drugs

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Franz KafkaOn this day in 1883, the great writer Franz Kafka was born. He was the kind of guy you would expect: shy, alienated, intellectual. He was educated and spent most of his adult life working as an insurance claims adjuster. But he always saw himself as a writer and even quit a job in order to give himself more time for his writing. This is remarkable to me because it shows a character of will that few people then or now have. I often ask the question, why do the children of writers often become writer, the children of actors often become actors, and so on. It isn’t genetics. It is that if you are like Kafka, whose father was a small businessman, it just isn’t seen as reasonable to be a writer. It seems fanciful. That’s because everything is a commodity: it is not enough to work; one must work on something that will make money. So it is fine for Joe King and Owen King to be writers, in a way that it wasn’t for father Stephen before he published Carrie.

For the last seven years of his life, Kafka suffered from tuberculosis, which would eventually kill him shortly before turning 41. In 1918, his employer, Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, gave him a pension and retired him due to his illness. He had worked there for ten years. Can you imagine an employer doing that today? Anyway, that did allow him to concentrate on his writing, although his illness was by that point a problem. He wrote many important works during this period. But his best known works were written in the years right before World War I: “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and The Trial. (You can get the stories various places such as, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories.)

What I find most striking about Kafka’s work is how he maintains standard narrative technique, but describes a world in which the characters are alien. It has been suggested that he suffered from schizoid personality disorder, so it is possible that he did see the world in this way. Of course, it seems to me that he was more classically neurotic. He seems to have been very uncomfortable with himself. And as we see in “The Metamorphosis,” it isn’t the world that changes but rather the hero. More commonly, nothing changes; the hero just starts alienated. And Kafka’s main way of freeing his characters from this existential isolation is death.

I am most interested in The Trial. It could have been written about the modern American “justice” system in the War on Drugs. K is never told what the charges against him are. The modern drug user knows the name of the charge, but it might as well be a number. Why exactly is it that a man sitting at home doing a drug is committing a crime? How does it negatively affect society? In what sense is it a crime? And then, although nominally innocent until proven guilty, in practice all drug users are simply guilty. The arresting officer says that drugs were found and the officer is never questioned. Just as in The Trial, the only way to avoid punishment is to have a well connected lawyer. There is no case that can be made against the law. It is as if the case against K is simply that he exists. That’s a ridiculous law, but so are the drug laws. The only real difference is that drug users are told their punishment is for their own good. No such hypocrisy exists in The Trial.

Happy birthday Franz Kafka!

Afterword

Here is Orson Welles’ filmed version of The Trial in its entirety. It is reasonably close to the book, captures the feeling in the book perfectly, and yet is totally Welles:

The Wisdom of Seneca

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SenecaSomething I hate is how people expect philosophers to live up to their philosophies. Usually, people’s disappointment comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophy. That’s certainly the case with Arthur Schopenhauer, who many people think should have killed himself. But it’s also true in modern politics where conservatives complain that well known liberals are rich, as though being a liberal is the same as being a Franciscan with a vow of poverty. But perhaps the most wronged philosopher is Seneca the Younger. Yes, he was a Stoic philosopher, but did anyone really expect him to live like that? In short: yes. But that’s wrong.

So Seneca came up a little short in the “living by his principles” measure. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that he was an interesting philosopher who was damned quotable. And it is on this second point that I want to spend some time. Because I found this great little webpage, Latin Quotes by Seneca. And some of it is really great—even things I disagree with.

Aequat omnes cinis

This means, “Ashes level all.” But it is perhaps better to say, “Death insures equality.” Well, that’s not true! It’s something people say to justify inequality and injustice. But you might as well say that “birth insures equality” or “breathing insures equality.” It’s all a bunch of rubbish. And in modern America, we have a special twist. If you are poor, death comes sooner. The only way that “ashes level all” is if history does not exist. This statement is only really true is in a trivial way: when life is over, it is over. Does that make being poor the same as being rich. No. So shut up about it!

Aut regem, aut fatuum nasci oportet

This one is some seriously messed up Latin syntax, but it more or less means, “A king or a fool you ought to be born.” If I had a coat of arms, that is what I would put on it. Of course, I would add, “Aut non sum.” That means, “I am not.” I am neither powerful nor am I a fool. That is my cross to bear. To me, what this means is that if you aren’t born lucky, it is best that you be stupid so you don’t spend your whole life wondering about the injustice of the world. Which reminds me: why do people believe in a loving god?

Divitae bonum non sunt

This one means, “Material wealth is not the supreme good.” Here we kind of get into that area where people had a problem with Seneca. Because the man did like his luxuries—everything money could buy, and that included people. But I agree with the idea. Unfortunately, I live in a society that might give lip service to this idea but it wholly rejects it. The saying that would would be displayed on the coat of arms of America is, “Bonum est cupiditas.” That’s “Greed is good.”

Errare humanum est, Perseverare diabolicum

This is the best one, “To err is human, to persevere is diabolical.” This too is a saying that goes against American values. Here we believe that winners never quit and quitters never win. But that’s so much rubbish, it is hard to know where to start. There are no hard and fast rules. Sometimes quitting is exactly the right thing to do. When I was eight years old, I wanted to be a great baseball pitcher. I rightly gave up on that dream almost immediately. Since then, my decisions have been far less laudable. But here in the US, it is considered noble to pretend that you aren’t wrong and just continue doing the same thing wrong. Who knows? You might luck out! But it’s really doubtful.

Homines, dum docent, discunt

This is something I always stressed to my students, “Men learn while they teach.” Education is something that pays the teacher far more than the student. People who try to hide their knowledge only end up hurting themselves. I remember in math classes, I would help people and it seemed terrible because it only made the difference between those I helped and myself greater. But as long as they gain in an absolute sense, it is for the good. Stingy people are repaid in kind.

Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura

Ah, this one sums me up, “Leisure without literature is death, and being buried alive.” Although I would take it further. Wherever I go, I bring a book. The idea of having to spend five minutes without having something interesting to read is just too terrifying.

That’s all for Seneca now. Food for thought. But as with Seneca’s life, not to necessarily be taken all that seriously.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Paul Laurence DunbarOn this day in 1872, the writer Paul Laurence Dunbar was born. I am fascinated with the stories of African Americans after the Civil War. They were a particularly hungry people, socially and culturally—especially concerned about making better lives for their children. Both Dunbar’s parents had been slaves in Kentucky. But his father escaped during the war and then fought in it for the Union. Both moved to Ohio where Paul Laurence was born. To give you some idea of the hopes and dreams that parents had, his mother learned to read for the very purpose of teaching him to read. I know parents of all times care deeply about their children, but that strikes me as notably heroic.

Of course, despite the wishes for and work on behalf of their children, the white population of the United States was extremely stingy in the chances it provided to them. Dunbar was lucky, in terms of his talent, personality, and environment. He was, for example, the only African American student at his high school. I think that situation worked for Dunbar: one black student is interesting, not frightening to the white majority. And that’s especially true when you are pious and generally brilliant.

Dunbar started publishing while still in high school. And at the age of 18, “Dunbar wrote and edited The Tattler, Dayton’s first weekly African-American newspaper. It was printed by the fledgling company of his high-school acquaintances, Wilbur and Orville Wright.” It helps to know people with money, and the Wright brothers would be lifelong friends. Dunbar’s early career sounds like the careers of writers in the 16th century with rich men providing assistance to him. But truthfully, I’m not sure that’s really very different from the way things work today. Dunbar’s career seems to demonstrate that an enormous amount of talent and a fair amount of luck will take you far.

At first, he was exclusively a poet. But in his mid-20s, he began writing short stories and novels. Although he died of tuberculosis at just 33 years of age, in addition to an enormous amount of poetry, he managed to publish four books of short stories and four novels. He also wrote the lyrics to the historical Broadway musical In Dahomey, which is noted for being the first with an all African American cast. It was a modest hit on Broadway and then toured the United Kingdom and then the United States for four years.

Project Gutenberg was collected all of his poems, two of his short story collections, two of his novels, and a short essay. He wrote poetry in both dialect and standard English. The dialect poems are remarkable for their beauty and accessibility (that could just be me, since I normally have problems with dialect). Here is a short poem in standard English called “Encouraged,” that could mean many things but somehow to me seems like a poem for his mother:

  Because you love me I have much achieved,
Had you despised me then I must have failed,
  But since I knew you trusted and believed,
I could not disappoint you and so prevailed.

Happy birthday Paul Laurence Dunbar!

The Spencer Collins Library Controversy

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Spencer Collins - Library

Will forwarded me an article I have extremely mixed feeling about, Kansas Boy Forced to Remove Little Free Library From His Yard. Nine-year-old Spencer Collins created a little library in his front year. His grandfather built a small structure to house the books and the policy is: give a book and take a book. Well, it turns out that the city of Leawood, Kansas has a law about free standing structures. The city received two complaints about it so the Collins family was told they had to take it down. Cue outrage.

There is no outrage here. There is a little disappointment that I will get to shortly. But there is no cause for outrage. The city has laws. Citizens complained that someone was violating the laws, and the city had to act. I feel certain that if the Collins family goes to the city and asks for a variance for the structure, they will get one. Problem solved. This is not an issue of “big government destroying out freedom!” In fact, I think the ending of this story will be, “Responsive government acting reasonable.”

What is disappointing are the two complainers. I mean: really?! They had a problem with a charming and totally positive project of a local nine-year-old? I mean, this wasn’t a structure that was going to bring in a “bad element” to town: a bunch of pre-teens hanging out at the library, smoking cigarettes and reading The Phantom Tollbooth, “Dude, you gotta check out this children’s adventure novel and modern fairy tale by Norton Juster; it will blow your mind!”

So what you’ve got here are three factions. First, you have a government that I am certain will do the right thing about the library. Although I have to say, now that it has gotten so much publicity, it could (at least temporarily) bring a lot of unwanted traffic to the neighborhood as people drive by to see it. But given that the library is still open, just sitting inside the Collins’ garage, the neighborhood is probably already getting that. Regardless, cities provide variances all the time and I see no reason for Leawood to deny this one.

Second, you have what I’m sure are some old fuddy-duddies who are part of the “no fun” brigade. These are people with nothing better to do than complain about just about everything. I feel sorry for them. I know the type. They would be so much happier if they used the library rather than complain about it. Literature for people that age is generally quite good—better in general than the stuff people write for adults. But whatever. I’m sure once the library is legal, they will find something else to be angry about. Perhaps birds singing or children skipping down the street.

Third, you have young Spencer Collins who is just the best of what we are. Maybe his generation will save us. Instead of “Make Love Not War!” it will be “Build Libraries Not Investment Banks!” And in my way, I am an optimist. I suspect that even now, young Mr Collins is getting a lot of donations for his library. They may want to design a larger structure.

Image cropped from KMBR.

The Devil and Ambrose Bierce

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Ambrose BierceOn this day in 1842, the great writer Ambrose Bierce was born. Like most writers of most times, he wrote a lot of different stuff. He was especially known in his own time for his short fiction—especially ghost and war stories. Today, he is known for his satire, especially, The Devil’s Dictionary. In contained definitions like this one for “conservative”: “A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” That definition actually makes him quite a lot less cynical than I am.

Fundamentally, however, Bierce was a journalist. And that is what is ultimately most interesting about him. At the age of 71, he traveled with Pancho Villa I assume to report on the Mexican Revolution. But then he just vanishes. It’s not terribly surprising, I suppose. There was a war going on. He was probably just killed. There is a legend that he was killed by firing squad. Although that sounds far fetched, Bierce was known for his biting wit, and maybe the old man made the wrong remark to the wrong man. Or maybe one night he had a heart attack and died. He wasn’t exactly a celebrity in the United States; in Mexico he was doubtless just some old Gringo who was hanging around.

But I like the idea that it was all a final joke. He split off from the army’s advance, went to a peaceful place on the coast and drank wine and enjoyed an anonymous retirement. Regardless, he’s dead now.

Happy birthday Ambrose Bierce!

Plots Are Excuses for Hanging Out in the Writer’s Reality

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Anton ChekhovRight now I am listing Aimee Mann’s song “Frankenstein.” It’s kind of strange because I watched Frankenstein and then Bride of Frankenstein just last night. Well, it isn’t that strange. I watch those films a lot. If I like a film, I’ll watch it over and over again. But I don’t bring the song up because of Frankenstein. There is a line in the song, “I won’t find it fantastic or think it absurd; when the gun in the first act goes off in the third.” It is a reference to Anton Chekhov who noted, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” This is a problem.

Why have centuries of audiences loved tragedies and comedies? We all know how they’re going to turn out. Imagine the first four acts of Othello exactly the same: Othello has his little jealousy problem and Iago jabbing at it. Then, at the beginning of the fifth act, Iago has an epiphany, “Why am I doing this?” He runs to Othello and says, “Hey buddy! I am so sorry. I was pissed off at you about passing me up for promotion. Desdemona is pure as the driven snow.” And they both burst out laughing. “I’m really glad you told me that,” Othello says. “Because I was just about the strangle her!” Iago replies, “Well, that would have been a tragedy!” Wiping his brow, Othello exhales profoundly, “I’ll bet after I found out the truth I would have killed myself!” Then they walk out into the fog and Iago says, “Othello, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Other than those few people like me who would think that would be funny as hell, everyone would hate that ending. I mean, what was the point of those first acts anyway? The same goes for the comedies. Imagine if at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio lifts the veil and finds that it is Hero who he thought dead. But instead of rejoicing, Hero pulls out a knife and slits his throat. Actually, that’s a much better ending. But again, the audience wants what it expects. And Claudio is not the villain of the play (even though he is) and so he gets his happy ending.

Of course, I can see the two plays coming together. Because really: Claudio rejects and embarrasses Hero based upon almost nothing. And then, instead of confronting her in private, he does it in the most public way imaginable. Even if she were guilty, his behavior is abhorrent. So in the “Ballad of Claudio and Hero Part II” all it would take is a fifth rate Iago to move Claudio to strangle Hero. I think people would accept that even though the “Ballad of Claudio and Hero Part I” was a comedy.

The point is that when writing fiction, you have to walk this line where you give the reader what he expects but not so much that it is boring. The worst form of this is the Agatha Christie school of, “Oh, let’s just throw in red herrings.” Her best work is probably Murder on the Orient Express where the red herring is that there are no red herrings. But this is why I think postmodern fiction is a distinct improvement, because it isn’t about anything. It’s like the different between going to a regular party and going to a wedding. The essence of postmodern literature is that you are just going to hang out in a reality for a while and if someone gets married great, but it is hardly the point.

I think that this was always the case. Othello and Richard III are fun because of their smart villains. The overall plot of Much Ado About Nothing is stupid. The story of Benedick and Beatrice is concluded at the beginning of the fourth act. For all I care, Hero could have really died and the play end with Benedick killing Claudio. Although admit it: the play would be better without Claudio and Hero in it at all. The whole thing could be about tricking Benedick and Beatrice into falling in love. Much the same could be said about most of the other comedies.

So I don’t want random guns thrown into stories for no reason. But just the same, I don’t want everything to be important and everything to lead to something else. I just want to go to the party and I don’t want to feel like there has to be a wedding to justify it. Because I know how weddings end.

Afterword

For some reason, this song comes to mind:

Lillian Hellman

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Lillian HellmanOn this day in 1905, the great playwright Lillian Hellman was born. I was kind of amazed that on the Wikipedia page, well over half of the overview section about her discussed not just her blacklisting by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), but the fact that she really did lie at the time when she said she hadn’t been a member of the Communist Party. There are still a lot of small minds out in the world, I guess.

Something I don’t understand to this day is why it was such a big deal that people turned to the Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression. It just makes sense that when a capitalist country is going through a period that ought to repudiate the idea of pure capitalism, people would look to other political and economic systems. There was no witch hunt for fascists in the 1950s. What’s more, when Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939, that was pretty much the end of American leftist support for the Soviet Union. But for Hellman, it wasn’t even about that.

As she wrote in 1952, “I attended very few meetings and saw and heard nothing more than people sitting around a room talking of current events or discussing the books they had read. I drifted away from the Communist Party because I seemed to be in the wrong place. My own maverick nature was no more suitable to the political left than it had been to the conservative background from which I came.” But the HCUA and Joseph McCarthy’s similar nonsense in the Senate were very much about going after mavericks and trying to turn America into the same kind of place that despots like Stalin liked where dissent was not accepted.

Hellman is known primarily for two incredibly powerful plays. The first is The Children’s Hour, which deals with false allegations of lesbianism between two teachers, which ends up destroying the school and the teachers. The second is The Little Foxes, which deals with a rich southern family and their financial machinations. It features Regina Hubbard Giddens, one of the greatest evil female characters ever. But by Hellman’s standards, it’s kind of upbeat. The Children’s Hour is just horribly depressing.

She also had a long term relationship with Dashiell Hammett. Last year I wrote that she was the only one who really loved him. I think that’s about right. I think without her, he would have died a lot younger. But again, Wikipedia refers to him as “fellow left-wing writer.” Is that how anyone thinks of Hammett. I think they remember Sam Spade and Nick & Nora Charles. It’s clear that the conservatives have got to the Hellman page. She deserves better.

Happy birthday Lillian Hellman!

Who Mourns for Cursive?

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CursiveSometimes I think that Ramona Grigg of Ramona’s Voices exists just to annoy me. Don’t get me wrong. I love her work. Look over there on the right under “Friends”: she’s there. But there are so many versions of her that I find myself constantly getting confused. For some time, Google+ kept telling me that I ought to add someone named “Ramona Grigg” even though I had already added Romona Grigg. So I emailed her, and sure enough, she has two Google+ accounts. (In her defense, it isn’t clear how one gets rid of a Google+ account—just like everything Google.) Who knows, she may have have ten twitter feeds. I just couldn’t say.

Well, this morning, Ramona added something to her Google+ feed (or whatever you call it) from Constant Commoner, and on a very interesting subject, What Does The Death Of Cursive Mean? Now that was a subject on which I was sure to have something to say. So I read it and indeed, I do have a few comment. But first, I wanted to find out who this Constant Commoner was. And, of course, it was Ramona Grigg. It’s the blog she uses for her non-political writing. Fine. I just wish that she could send out a map of her various names and places! Now onto the issue of cursive.

Ramona says that she had a very hard time learning cursive. I was the opposite. It was the only part of my early grades that I seemed to be good at. And that is interesting because she quotes an educator who works with children who suffer from dyslexia. And I had dyslexia. Although, as is typical of such people, I rarely dotted my Is nor crossed my Ts. And may I just say that what is the point of having cursive if there are these two very big exceptions. I mean, the letter T is the most common consonant in the whole language. But I do remember when I was very young that people were very impressed with my cursive and even at the time I thought that was pathetic. I mean, really: it’s kind of an insult. “What you write is garbage, but the way it looks on the page is excellent!”

To this day, I have decent handwriting. This is a skill that has one and only one purpose: writing notes on greeting cards. And even still, I have to look up how to do a capital Q, which looks more like the number two than anything else. But contrary to what I learned is generally true, when writing in cursive, I am slow. But I suppose I would be faster if I ever used cursive to write something that wasn’t formal.

In the end, I disagree with Ramona. I do not mind seeing cursive go the way of Latin. And that is the way it is going. It will never disappear. It will simply be something that just a few people know how to do because occasionally you need someone to translate Horace or to make sure that our legible copies of the United States Constitution actually say what the silly looking original one says. And that’s a fine state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.

After all, Ramona admits that she does most of her writing on the keyboard. And to be honest, most of my spelling knowledge is now dependent upon my fingers just knowing the keys to press. My conscious mind is lost on anything longer than six characters. But there is, I think the ultimate reason why we should not mourn the passing of cursive and it comes from Ramona herself. She ended her article with the following image:

Sincerely Ramona

I had to look at the “About Me” page to know it was Ramona. I could tell the first word was “Sincerely.” But “Ramona”? Really?! Is that a capital R? Much of the beauty of cursive is that everyone’s is different. But that’s also much of its difficulty. It is hard to read. It is better than all capital letters printed, but that isn’t saying much. And printing is for the purpose of the reader, not the writer. And that’s why this site uses Times New Roman as its base font, and not some hellish script font.

Cursive is fine, but the only problem with 41 states not requiring that it be taught is that 9 states still do.

Sincerely Frank

Afterword

I just noticed: I still forget to dot my Is!