OF A GOLDEN AGE

Is Marx’s position as a member of the middle class an inherent problem with his commentary on the working class?

well, who the hell knows. even an anthropologist can only learn so much, and as someone in class pointed out, if you haven’t lived it you just haven’t lived it, end of story. a particularly boisterous (read: ANNOYING) member of the class, who always plays extreme devil’s advocate out of a big martyr complex, spent a long time griping about this and how it was stupid to say experience merits authority.

since we largely and historically agree with marx’s observations (i.e. working in factories in the 1800s was terrible in virtually every way), are we more likely to accept him as an authority? if he said, “I’ve thought about working-class life a lot and I’m pretty sure they’re making this into too big of a deal,” everyone would criticize that as a limited, uninformed perspective. advocacy is an interesting concept.

I realize that Edgar Allan Poe’s the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did not likely have any ACTUAL influence on Moby-Dick, but the similarities are still striking to me. both have the same creatively inconsistent prose style — Poe with two narrators and a faux-journal structure, with brief interludes of incredibly tedious boat detail and quotes from existing texts on sailing; Melville with much longer interludes of a wider variety of strange and sometimes poetic nautical descriptions.

anyway, I liked the way Poe really drove the dagger into our ribs at the end of the book, saying that although Pym SURVIVED his foray into the strange gray land with the enormous chasm and the GREAT WHITE SAVIOR, he didn’t quite finish telling the story back in regular ol’ life before he died of some other more natural cause. aargh! you think you’re so clever, Edgar Allan. last night, a friend of mine came over to borrow a book and we were talking about gray areas, how they are the only thing I really believe in. and he said, “if you believe in gray areas long enough, eventually you’ll disappear in a cloud of gray.”

speaking of Melville, a good friend of mine is writing a paper on Billy Budd. his professor, a notorious crazy, is pushing a “secret homosexuality” reading of the book. I’d imagine this is supported by a significant portion of the modern critical circle, people like Camille Paglia who tend to draw out a lot of secret sexy stuff in almost everything they read. when it’s valid, it’s VERY valid, but when it’s a stretch, I think it’s more destructive to literary studies than most other irresponsible things. this particular professor seems to be grasping at straws to make it work. (as my friend said, the word “ejaculate” clearly used to have a different or at least broader meaning: the OED says “to utter suddenly.”) but I remember our discussion of Moby-Dick in terms of “homosocial” behavior, which in my mind is a completely different and more valid angle to take.

I really enjoyed the Poe novel. his grasp of uncomfortable, desperate, and frightening situations is remarkable.

we’ve started reading Marx in philosophy class. after our unit on Kierkegaard, who was a fluid, lovely writer even when i did not agree with his ideas, Marx reads very dogmatically. his writing his dramatic and clunky sometimes. I am not digging it. also, as I told the class, the communist manifesto qualifies more as speculative fiction than philosophy.

that raises an interesting question, though. what are the criteria for philosophy? it varies wildly and is similar to what U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously used to qualify pornography: “I know it when I see it.” philosophy doesn’t necessarily need to be systematic, because plenty of writers — especially in the mid-twentieth century and beyond — tackle one particular issue at a time without tying it into any larger schematic. philosophy can also be speculative, within reason, especially when considering thought exercises and hypothetical situations.

the boundary seems to arise when Marx gives an entire narrative of what he “knows” to be the future of humankind. I’m sorry, Marx, what are your sources here?

“Pablo Neruda” by Stephen Dobyns

Pablo Neruda stands on a corner next to a poster
advertising quick weight loss diet aids when I
happen by with half my creative writing class.
He wears a black boating cap and blue cloak draped
loosely over one shoulder, and he stands very still
staring at the clouds where he probably sees the profiles
of famous poets. At his feet lies a small brown dog.
We had heard he was dead and so are surprised and
walk around him several times. He has nice fat cheeks
and after a moment I reach out to touch one, but
gently and he doesn’t notice. I look at my students
and I can tell they are ready for anything so I
take out my Swiss Army knife, open the littlest
blade and cut Pablo a tiny bit on the left arm.
He doesn’t even blink but I think he begins to
concentrate more intently on the clouds. By now
my students are becoming excited so I open a bigger
blade and carefully cut a sliver of flesh from his
shoulder. I put it on my tongue and it’s very sweet
with a faint taste of smoke. I chew it slowly.
Glancing at the sky it now seems a deeper blue.
My students see me smiling and licking my lips
and they too take out Swiss Army knives and start
cutting off small slices, although they don’t stay
small for long, because suddenly we are ravenous.
It feels like I haven’t eaten for days. I barely
pause to chew my food and I grow angry at my students
for pushing and getting aggressive over the more
succulent bits. One even eats the brown dog.
In practically no time there’s nothing left but
a quickly folded pile of clothes on the sidewalk
with the black cap on top. Then we all become
embarrassed and won’t look at each other because
we’ve eaten this famous poet, and even though he
tasted great and we could probably eat another,
and even though the city seems brighter and more
exciting than before, we still feel ashamed to have
surrendered so completely to such animal passions
so we point to our watches and make excuses and
stroll off in our separate directions, but shortly
outside a movie theater, I see one of my students
offering herself to the people waiting in line;
then I see another accosting a crowd at a bus stop;
and a little later in the lobby of a convention hotel
I see a third bothering the legionnaires. And you,
now that I have your attention at last, ignore these
imposters. They’re too hungry to be telling the truth.
Feel this arm, this fat thigh. Why would I cheat you?
Even now the moon grows more swollen and the stars
throb deep in their black pockets. Bite me, bite me!

today at the Rockford Unitarian Universalist booksale I bought a copy of In Cold Blood and started to read it whilst working at the wright museum from two to four.

when Capote describes the list of relatives who are contacted after the clutter murders, he includes Mrs. Clutter’s (maiden name Bonnie Fox’s) brother, “Howard, of Oregon, Illinois.” I did a double take and had to call my parents for confirmation. We know Howard Fox. he was friends with my grandfather. he’s a local artist. just a normal neighborly person in my small-town childhood.

“yeah, that’s him,” my dad told me on the phone. “mom went to school with his daughter. I saw him today when I was going to the dentist and he was leaving the chiropractor.”

“he’s getting small and stooped like grandpa did,” my mom told me. “when that book came out it was such a big deal and we all read it and just hid it from debbie fox because we knew it was her family. we were terrible.”

after our discussion in class, I noticed a line in an episode of northern exposure:

“spring’s about to spring, Persephone’s coming back.”

now I know what that means!

over the summer when the kind souls at LubePro told me the serpentine belt in my Corsica was cracked (“it could last another year, it could break tomorrow” — THANKS GUYS), I took my beloved car to pep-boys in Rockford and had the belt replaced. in the meantime i stopped in at circuit city and picked up two movies, the blues brothers and lady sings the blues. the former is one of my favorite movies of all time, while the latter I hadn’t actually seen but was fascinated by the description on the back. Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday? what a strange meta-music experience.

I finally watched it yesterday when a friend had skipped out on plans we made earlier in the week, and it is, though certainly not a life-changing or epic movie, very entertaining. first of all, Diana Ross completely acts circles around my preconceived idea of what her performance would be — she is all intestinal fortitude and emotional breadth and straight-up chops. she inhabits Billie Holiday the way Joaquin Phoenix inhabits Johnny Cash in walk the line, with a healthy amount of her own musical biography thrown in. people criticize the movie for being . . . well, kind of simplified and amalgamated in questionable ways. the thing is, I don’t really care. this movie is not coal miner’s daughter and I didn’t expect it to be — Billie Holiday is as much an enigma and cultural concept as she is a real person, and because she was a pioneering black AND female artist, she often stands in as a symbol and archetype. of course, on top of that she has one of the most recognizable, creative and unforgettable voices — speaking both literally and more ideologically — to ever be recorded. that’s really why I love her.

one of the great things about Billie is that she helped to shift the role of the blues singer from basically a standards jukebox to a creative and emotional powerhouse. it’s interesting to see this transition in so many popular artists throughout the entire twentieth century, though this happens less frequently now — bands or artists begin their careers as cover artists or, in the case of the rolling stones, performers of other people’s songs. they then shift toward their own creative process and find a new sound that splits artfully from their former lives.

it’s hard to be unique in the musical world, especially when it is tempting to criticize a band or artist for inspiring the bands that followed their example. (a perfect case of this is green day, who are still one of the best pop-punk acts to ever exist but who, by sort of leading to blink-182 and endless other terrible bands, have experienced backlash beyond their control.) my coeditor at the paper brought in two new cds and one of them listed led zeppelin as a “recommended if you like” band. hahaha WHAT, that’s like saying you were inspired by the guitar. choosing one of the broadest, most complex and interesting bands in history to compare yourself to is not only ballsy and foolish, but embarrassingly generic!

something I’ve been thinking about today is my level of consumption of pop culture. the wonderful thing about college, I’ve found, is that because it’s inherently isolated from the negative parts of pop culture, I can pick and choose the ways I get involved. this has given me a much rosier picture of the state of things. recently, one of my favorite music magazines (rockpile) went out of business after staying a little too far under the radar for a little too long. luckily, my two all-time favorites — the big takeover and magnet — are safe for the foreseeable future.

well, it demonstrates my class-related confusion that I can’t remember if we read Thomas Carlyle in our class or not — maybe in the “anticipations” section of the American Transcendentalists anthology? — but I just saw a quote from him in the latest issue of real simple:

“no man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”

this is topical because I came home about an hour ago from a loud, crowded, but ultimately well-behaved and unrowdy party at 810 college.

I’m pretty sure Carlyle is right about jostling. more interesting to me, though, is that the quote is on a page with the title “we can work it out,” and the first line of the article is “it can be a jungle out there” — really, now, aren’t there some original statements we can make? rather than taking a hackneyed song title and an even more hackneyed figure of speech?

then again, my big feature today was called “The United States of Tom McBride: Take the Money and Run.” oh Caroline, you hypocrite, keep it to yourself.

earlier, a beloved professor stopped me while I was walking home from work. he said he’d read my Roger Waters review and laughed.

“this happens to me five or six times a year,” he said.

he hears “another brick in the wall” when he’s listening to the radio in the morning or early afternoon.

“who plays that song when teachers are in their cars?” he asked. good question! we tried to decide which parts of that song have vocals by which member of pink floyd but gave up.

“it’s very British schoolmarmy,” I said. “that leads me to believe it’s probably Roger Waters.”

in Tom’s class we’re reading Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown books and discussing language games. to supplement this, Tom had us read Codifications of Reality by linguistic anthropologist Dorothy Lee, whose studies centered on the Trobriand Islanders and their language. they use no tense, for instance, and emphasize concepts in a wholly different way than the western world does. as another language game, Tom made a list of rules for an unindividuated language — that is, in which there were no references to anyone personally. this reminded me of the “Bugger” race in Orson Scott Card’s famous, timeless Ender’s Game. any concept of individuality was simply irrelevant and nonsensical.

to abruptly switch topics, my friend Erica and I talked about crowd control when we were at the Roger Waters concert last weekend. she went to Italy last summer and saw the Colosseum (originally known as an amphitheater!), where there are enough exits that the entire place — fifty thousand — could be emptied in eight to ten minutes. we contrasted this with the Tweeter, where about twenty thousand people have to file out through two exits. in an age of security and safeguarding and prepaid tickets, we endanger our lives so that we might be entertained. interesting!

our discussion in Monday’s class of “sublime” versus “beautiful” reminded me, unsurprisingly, of things from my other classes. first, Theodore Roethke’s poem “Root Cellar,” which we read for Tom last week: in it, the narrator is both drawn and repulsed by the impressive way in which gross basement life-forms cling to life. he feels connected to them by the “breath” of the dirt and gives human characteristics to the growths. it’s an intriguing poem in that it meta-fies itself by inspiring feelings of attraction and revulsion to the narrator AND the narrator’s attraction and revulsion.

second, in philosophy class we’ve started to wade into Kierkegaard (a very literary philosopher who uses language in beautiful ways). Kierkegaard spent most of his career assuming different pseudonyms in order to write from entirely varying world views, fitting into one of his three “spheres of existence,” which would be boring to explain here. the piece worth noting, though, is written from the “aesthetic” life, one in which large dichotomies and extremes are valued, as is pleasure and selfishness. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic persona is only known as “A,” and A emphasizes in “his” writings that the most important part of life is to maintain distance. this struck me in its opposition to the concept of the sublime, and here’s what I thought: the beautiful can be appreciated by an aesthete like A, but the sublime can only be appreciated by someone with investment and vulnerability.

furthermore, I looked up “sublime” in the OED, the closest thing to a religious text in my life. it gave a number of predictable definitions and then this one: “Of muscles: Lying near the surface, superficial. Also applied to the branch of anatomy treating of superficial muscles.” how interesting! the opposite of the deep, involved sense of the sublime that we generally have! actually, there are a number of conflicting definitions. god bless the English language.

there is a street in my town called Margaret Fuller Drive, and now I understand why.