Category: Literature

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Guest Observation

“… The U.S. military announced that a total of 10 American soldiers were killed in roadside bombings and a helicopter crash on Memorial Day, making May [with 116 troops dead] the third deadliest month of the war [for the United States].” — An Associated Press Iraq war roundup



“… Patroclus fought like dreaming:

His head thrown back, his mouth–wide as a shrieking mask–

Sucked at the air to nourish his infuriated mind

And seemed to draw the Trojans onto him,

To lock them round his waist, red water, washed against his chest,

To lay their tired necks against his sword like birds.

–Is it a god? Divine? Needing no tenderness?–

Yet instantly they touch, he butts them,

Cuts them back:

–Kill them!

My sweet Patroclus,

–Kill them!

As many as you can,

For

Coming behind you through the dust you felt

–What was it?–felt creation part, and then

APOLLO!

Who had been patient with you

Struck.

His hand came from the east,

And in his wrist lay all eternity;

And every atom of his mythic weight

Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.

Your eyes lurched out. Achilles’ helmet rang

Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of Trojan horses,

And you were footless … staggering … amazed …

Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,

Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes,

The noise–like weirs heard far away–

Dabbling your astounded fingers

In the vomit on your chest.

And all the Trojans lay and stared at you;

Propped themselves up and stared at you;

Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed. …”

–From “War Music: An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad”

By Christopher Logue, Copyright 1981

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Cultural History of The Loner

Partyofone

Once upon a time, the idea of “the loner” extended beyond the way the term is nearly universally used in media today: for destructive psychopaths, after they’ve unleashed some horror or other. I carried on a little bit earlier about the Virginia Tech official who first uttered the term in connection to Cho Seung-Hui. It was true as far as it went — and that wasn’t far at all, as Cho demonstrated both in action and in his special delivery to NBC the other day.

Anyway. Didn’t the idea of the loner once carry an aura of austere self-sufficiency, hardy individuality or at least admirable anti-heroism? In recent decades in pop culture, Clint Eastwood’s the type, especially in the Sergio Leone remakes of the Kurosawa epics. Further back, Humphrey Bogart owned the image in his Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade roles. Film noir is the loner’s genre. I could take a leap backward from there to the James Fenimore Cooper novels and his Hawkeye character. Same thing, though incredibly trying in book form. [Belatedly, I note that all the example characters above carry guns.]

But those are sort of limited, shot-in-the-dark examples and ones that rely on the distortion and romance of fiction. I went looking for a little more evidence and context, and came upon the noble example of “The Loner,” a one-season, mid-’60s western series starring Lloyd Bridges (and created by Rod Serling). Then there’s Neil Young’s “The Loner,” which focuses on the menacing stranger. Still a long way off from real life.

Finally, I hit on this, through Google Books: “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” It’s by Anneli S. Rufus, a Berkeley writer Kate and I know from our time, during the relatively enlightened and carefree days of the Reagan era, at The Daily Californian. It’s a serious consideration of the idea of the loner in history, in culture, in society. An excerpt from the introduction:

“Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions. A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required.”

The Anneli lives less than two miles from us as the crow flies. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, since before she was Anneli. Now I know one reason why. But just one.

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Vonnegut, Glaciers

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84

From “Slaughterhouse-Five“:

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead.’ ”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

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The Softball Team

Pete Dexter, the former great newspaper columnist and author of one of my favorite novels (“Deadwood”) was on KQED’s “Forum” Wednesday morning, part of a tour promoting a new book, “Paper Trails.” At the prompting of host Michael Krasny, he told this story (the MP3 show audio is here):

“It started with a column about some drug activity in a real bad part of, well wasn’t that bad a part of Philadelphia, it was the Tasker neighborhood, and this kid had gotten himself killed in a drug deal. And I wrote about it, they had a meeting that I wasn’t supposed to go to but I knew a lot of guys in Tasker, so I went to the meeting and wrote about it. It was really too bad, because this was a kid who woulda–he wasn’t a bad kid. So you’re against drugs, big deal. So I write the column and I get a call; the column came out weeks after the incident and right after the meeting. And I got a call from the kid’s mother and she was hysterical saying I’d brought it all back and stuff and I felt real bad and apologized and she wanted a retraction. I didn’t know what she was gonna retract, I mean the kid got hit in the back of the head so hard with a baseball bat that one of his eyeballs had come out and they found him dead in a stream.

“I was very nice to her, but she wasn’t having it, and then her older son called and we go through the same song and dance. And at some point in this conversation the guy started talking about how he was going to come find me and he was gonna break my legs and break my hands and all this stuff. At that point in my life, you said something like that to me I wasn’t going to come looking for you to hurt you but I was going to make myself available. I was in the gym every day then, I could take care of myself.

“I said where are you and he told me he worked in a neighborhood called Devil’s Pocket; it’s a real well-named place in Philadelphia, it’s about the worst neighborhood in that city. I went over there at 8 o’clock at night and he was sitting in there with four or five guys … we talked a little bit and I thought everything was settled and I turned away and somebody hit me, then I got hit with a beer bottle. I wasn’t hurt–my teeth were sheared and my lips were busted up–but I wasn’t hurt. And that night, it was December and I was going over to a birthday party at my friend Randall Cobb, who at the time was a–you know Randall didn’t have the talent to beat Larry Holmes, probably, but he had a fight with Mike Weaver who was the WBA champion at that time and he probably would have beaten Weaver because Cobb you could hit him with a pipe and he just could hardly be hurt. He was a pretty good fundamental boxer, wasn’t fast, didn’t have much talent or a whole lot of punch but he had beaten Ernie Shavers and he probably would have beaten this guy Weaver. Which means when he fought Larry Holmes and lost, which wound up happening, he would have come in as a white heavyweight champion of his own fighting the other guy and it would have been a huge money match. We’re just talking dollars and cents here–he would have gotten five or ten million dollars for that fight.

“I went to Cobb’s birthday party, I think it was his 28th birthday, and he saw me and asked what happened and I told him and he said, well, do you want to go talk to them about it? And it’s one of the many moments of my life where I wasn’t thinking in everybody’s best interest; I said all right and so we went back over and talked to these people a little bit. And Cobb kept saying to me, well what do you want to do? Well one of the guys sitting in there, this little fat guy, ran out the back door. The last thing I really wanted to do–I wasn’t there to get even, we just walked in there, there’s four or five guys, I don’t know, maybe six sitting there. Cobb and I–we had nothing to take care of that but all of a sudden this guy–in two minutes that place just filled up with people with softball bats and reinforced steel with little tape markings on the handles where they would use them to hit people, and crowbars. And I remember Cobb looking at the–it was snowing outside by now, and Cobb looking at these people pouring into the bar and saying to me, ‘Don’t you hope that’s the softball team?’ I was so scared I really could hardly laugh. And one thing led to another. …”

You guys got worked over pretty bad.

“I ended up–my back was broken.Yeah, giving the guy credit, he said he’d break my legs, and he did break a leg. I had bleeding on the brain. To this day things don’t work right.

“But the more expensive damage was probably done to Cobb, because he broke a little bone in his left forearm which is for a right-handed fighter, for Cobb anyway, that was all his offense anyway, he was a jabber. So he didn’t get the fight with Weaver, the fight fell through, so when he fought Holmes he got half a million dollars for it. “

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Joyce

James Joyce’s birthday. He was born in 1882. In Dublin. He’s allegedly hard to read. I’ve never tried “Finnegan’s Wake” because of the difficulty others have reported. The reading equivalent of getting lost in the Amazon jungle, or perhaps climbing Everest. Those Joyce works I have dared crack have been undaunting. No: entertaining. Obligatory Joyce quote:

Lean out of the window,

Goldenhair,

I hear you singing

A pretty air.

My book is closed,

I read no more,

Watching the fire dance

On the floor.

I have left my book:

I have left my room:

For I hear you singing

Through the gloom,

Singing and singing

A merry air.

Lean out of the window,

Goldenhair.

–“Chamber Music, V” (1907)

That’s not so hard.

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Change of Mind

A quote (from James Russell Lowell) in The New York Times crossword yesterday: “The foolish and the dead alone never change their minds.” And that leads to the popular Emerson aphorism: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Among the many places you can find that is The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. The “foolish” part of the Emerson soundbite has always bothered me; it’s sort of a rhetorical wild card that says, “My constancy to an ideal or belief is wise and brave; yours is short-sighted and cowardly.”

Just now, someone I know who has a brand-new Emerson book pointed out that the quotation, as given, is stripped of its surrounding context (in the essay “Self-Reliance“). Here’s the whole “consistency” passage.”

“… The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

“But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. …”

“Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again. …” That’s the tough part.

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Random Xmas Moment

Overhead:

Voice A, reading aloud from a recently unwrapped book: “…’When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.’

[Pause]

True dat.”

Voice B: “True dat, Karl.”

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Random Quotage

A friend has a column on Wired News today about giving spare change to a homeless guy and about the debate, within and without, that goes along with that act:

“Slipped a homeless guy a buck the other day. After he mumbled off down the street, my companion sniffed her disapproval: ‘It only encourages them, you know. And he’ll just use it for drugs or alcohol.’

“I had looked him squarely in his gimlet eye. I could smell his breath. Safe to say she was right.

” ‘Who the hell cares what he uses it for?’ I said. ‘If it kills the pain for a few hours, I’m happy to help. …’ ”

In any case, it’s not an only-in-San Francisco story. I go back and forth on this whole thing myself. But I always have Walt Whitman’s take in the back of my mind:

“Love the earth and sun and animals,

Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

Stand up for the stupid and crazy,

Devote your income and labor to others …

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

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Guest Observation

Ode to Laziness

(From “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda,” translated and edited by Stephen Mitchell)

Yesterday I felt that my ode wouldn’t

get up off the ground.

It was time, it should

at least

show a green leaf.

I scratched the earth: “Get up,

sister ode”

–I said to her–

“I promised to produce you,

don’t be scared of me,

I’m not going to step on you,

ode with four leaves,

ode for four hands,

you’ll have tea with me.

Get up,

I will crown you among the odes,

we’ll go out to the sea shore

on our bicycles.”

Nothing doing.

Then,

high up in the pines,

laziness

appeared naked,

she led me off dazzled

and sleepy,

she showed me on the sand

little broken pieces

of material from the ocean,

wood, seaweed, stones, feathers of seabirds.

I looked for yellow agates

but didn’t find any.

The sea

filled all spaces,

crumbling towers,

invading

the coasts of my country,

pushing forward

successive catastrophes of foam.

Alone on the sand

a ray opened

a ring of fire.

I saw the silvered petrels

cruise and like black crosses

the cormorants

nailed to the rocks.

I set free

a bee writhing in a spiderweb,

I put a little stone

in my pocket,

it was smooth, very smooth

like a bird’s breast,

meanwhile on the coast,

all afternoon,

sun and fog wrestled.

Sometimes

the fog was pregnant

with light

like a topaz,

at other times a moist

ray of sun fell,

and yellow drops fell after it.

At night,

thinking about the duties of my

fugitive ode,

I took off my shoes

by the fire,

sand spilled from them

and right away I was falling

asleep.

–Pablo Neruda