Thinking It Through

I seem to have neglected this blog a bit lately, and I’m going to try to remedy that. There has been an apparent distraction, but I don’t think that it has really kept me from blogging here. A few weeks ago, the minister of our church, one Robert V. Thompson, whose blog I’ve been tending, asked me to be a regular contributor there, producing a contribution monthly. I don’t remember agreeing, but that’s academic, since I’ve started posting there. His blog is a part of the marketing plan for his book, A Voluptuous God, and posts are to be related to that work somehow. Here’s a link to my first one: Now’s The Time.

I fully meant to write a post from Paris, but somehow I never got to it. We took the Eurostar from that city to London yesterday, and that’s where this post is being written. The Eurostar is the high speed train that now connects those two cities, and it is amazing indeed to go from one to the other in less than two and a half hours. We took it a week ago from London as well, and I found the newly renovated St. Pancras station in London to be shiny and comfortable, while the Gare du Nord, where the Eurostar took us, seemed much closer to its 19th century origins and its pay restrooms gave it the characteristic French touch. The train itself was surprisingly low-tech and, on the return trip yesterday, definitely shabby, with worn and torn upholstery and (both ways) a less than effective air conditioning system. On the trip back to London, there were many complaints about the heat and the staff responded by bringing cold water to us.

While we were in Paris we stayed in an apartment on the southern edge of the Latin Quarter, not far from the Rue Mouffetard and the Place Monge. It was a pleasant neighborhood with good bakeries (what Paris neighborhood doesn’t have good bakeries?), cafes, and restaurants. As we were coming back to the apartment one afternoon we noticed a church just two doors away, so we took a closer look at the entrance. Posted on the door was a notice of a concert coming up on Sunday (when we would still be there) by the Baermann Clarinet Sextet. Now, this was just too coincidental to be left alone. The price of the concert was right — a donation — so we decided to go.

On Sunday evening we filed into the church, a well-lighted Protestant church with a high-domed chancel and a round transept window that appeared to look upon our apartment building. The audience nearly filled the church, a varied group with old folks, kids, and most of the ages in between. The sextet filled on stage in the chancel area and began to play an arrangement of a selection by Handel. The six clarinets began in full cry, prompting a woman in the front row to rise suddenly, her tiny son in her arms, his hands over his years, and rush out of the church. The volume in this very live space was considerable, but the sextet showed a great deal of dynamic range, so the kid might well have been able to stay after surviving the first 8 measures of the Handel.

The program was all over the map: Handel and Mozart, but also Katchaturian, Morton Gould, some Klezmer, a Bulgarian folk dance, and two tangos by Astor Piazzola. All of the performers were remarkable clarinetists, all conservatory trained (I discovered later on checking their website:http://sextuor-baermann.com/). Bass clarinetist Marc Boutillot stood out a bit from the group because he did two improvisations, one on the Bulgarian dance and one, on regular Bb clarinet, on Piazzola’s “Oblivion.” Now, I am no proper judge or critic of classical performance, but I can lay claim to knowing something about improvisation. I loved the Bulgarian one, but I felt that he could have taken some liberties with classical clarinet tone on the Piazzola, that he could have used vibrato and some jazz feeling. As Paquito D’Rivera does with similar material. But, still, Boutillot did a splendid job, finding his way though the changes with lyricism and verve.

The concert was lovely, a delightful coincidence, a fine moment.

So now we’ll see what London will bring.

Since I’ve gotten myself into a book reviewing groove, I might as well continue:

Nicholson Baker. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

I have not been a fan of N.B.’s over the years. In fact, I once wrote a very nasty letter to the New Yorker criticizing his attacks on library directors over the microfilming of newspapers. A letter that was not published. And I felt that his rabble rousing against the new library in San Francisco was mean spirited and wrong-headed. Now that I am no longer a library director and no longer engaged in defending the use of technology in libraries and in library design, perhaps I should revisit his attacks. Well, I’ve got other things planned, but this present book has definitely moved me and opened a channel of sympathy to old N.B. (who looks old in his picture but is 15 years younger than I). Human Smoke is an extraordinary collage of quotations from newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and other documents arranged in a strict, day to day, chronological order that moves from August 1892 (the date of a conversation between Alfred Nobel and a pacifist author) and December 31, 1941. The title comes from a remark by a German general who ended his career in a prison cell at Auschwitz.

What the books is chiefly about is pacifism. There are many glimpses of the efforts of pacifists to stop the slide towards war. There is also a great deal of portraiture of Winston Churchill as a bloodthirsty maniac whose theories about winning the war were based on the notion that attacking the civilian population would bring about the defeat of the enemy. There is strong evidence here that the British incited and inflamed Hitler by blockading Norway’s Narvik harbor and bombing civilian sites long before the luftwaffe bombed any British areas. Similary, Baker presents strong evidence that F.D.R. incited the Japanese, with perhaps a little more remorse than Churchill, by arming and abetting the Chinese and enforcing an oil embargo against Japan. The States also left the entire Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor as an incitement (or an enticement?), one that was protested by the fleet commander.

It was clear to me at the time that we didn’t negotiate long and hard enough with Saddam Husain before attacking. But there were appeals to the example of WWII, claims that “appeasement” was a dangerous, slippery slope. As I read this book I began to wonder about what might have happened had cooler heads prevailed, and I realized that I really don’t know. Perhaps that’s the value of “alternative history.” And perhaps I should read Philip Roth and Michael Chabon. Or Harry Turtledove. Or perhaps I should try to envisage a more positive view than theirs. One of Baker’s implied points is that the extermination of six million Jews was not “simply” a Nazi project. He notes that the Nazi goal was deportation, not death, and he implies that the pressures placed upon the Axis by the Allies (blockade, bombing of civilian populations, etc.) narrowed the choices. No more transportation to Madagascar or, a bit less charitably, Siberia. Gas was more economical.

The bottom line, if bottom line there is, seems to be that violence is not the proper response to violence. Period. Which is basically what my minister, Bob Thompson, said when explaining his rejection of Hillary: “she voted for a war; that is wrong.”

One of the first items in the book is a note about the vote of U.S. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana against war in 1917. One of the last is a note about her vote against war in 1941. In the first instance, she was one of 50. In the last, she was alone. Not a good trend.

Though I’ve been pecking away at Proust, I confess that Marcel has landed on the back burner again for a while. What I’ve popped onto the front burner is Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), a book that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, though I’m not sure that enjoyment is what I mean. My wife and I saw Jacoby on Bill Moyers’ program and were mightily impressed. Having read the book, I believe it is an important one, one that I will probably return to often and mention here frequently.

I’ll let her sum up her points (from her preface, page xx):

If, as I will argue in this book, America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism—as opposed to the recognizable cyclical strains of the past—the virulence of the current outbreak is inseparable from an unmindfulness that is, paradoxically, both aggressive and passive. This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment. Is there still time and will for cultural conservationists to ameliorate the degenerative effects of the poisoned apple? Insofar as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the stubborn hope that it might be so.

The book wittily supports every point made in that paragraph and is well worth reading. I recommend it highly, without reservation. Read it.

There were many uncomfortable moments for me during my trip through the book. Jacoby does an excellent job of putting the 1960s into a more balanced and accurate perspective. Usually seen by those of us on the left as a time of positive if overly exuberant intellectual ferment, the Sixties also saw the birth and development of the religious right. The excesses on both sides of that coin haunt us still. Since the decline of educational effectiveness is a constant theme of her book, Jacoby is highly critical of the demise of core requirements in university curricula during the late sixties and early seventies. I was very much in the midst of that particular issue, being a very junior faculty member at a large public university at the time. I was, I need to admit, very much on the side of curriculum restructuring and reform. As I faced undergraduates every day (most of them from New York City) who were beginning to measure everything I did and said by a self-constructed standard of “relevance,” I reacted defensively (or, at least, it seems so now) by trying to find texts that would meet that standard. I remember one faculty meeting where we were selecting the texts to be read by the intermediate French classes in which I pushed for some third world francophone texts while an older faculty member snapped back, “We must teach masterpieces, only masterpieces!” The texts I was pushing were not chopped liver—they included Senghor and Aimé Césaire—and I never meant to ban the dead white males from the curriculum. At the time, what I believed was that we needed to add the new rather than subtract the old. That little twist seems to have been lost.

I was surprised and rather pleased to find as I read Jacoby that I am a product of middlebrow culture. In fact, my roots are definitely lower-middlebrow, as opposed to the culture that Jacoby describes as a part of her own background. Magazines that arrived in my parents home included the Saturday Evening Post ( where I first read Vonnegut), the Saturday Review, Life, and the Reader’s Digest. Unlike Jacoby, I didn’t see the selections of the Book of the Month Club, but I did peruse many a Condensed Book and was delighted to find full-length versions in the local library. I had to rely on visits to the doctor and dentist to meet the New Yorker. When I arrived in my teens, I subscribed, much to the horror of my parents, to The Village Voice and The Realist.

My father’s library was compact. It included the Harvard Classics and a set of Burton Holmes travelogues. When I was about eleven years old, my father succumbed to the wiles of an encyclopedia salesman, and we acquired the Brittanica, yearbooks arriving punctually ever after. I dipped into the Five Foot Shelf from time to time, but I often found the translations turgid and unintelligible. While the Brittanica was useful, and I consulted it frequently, it was off-limits for term papers, and I ended up in a local university’s library for school projects, sometimes taking the train into Philadelphia to be intimidated by the great hall and condescending staff of the Free Library. (I hasten to add that I was a librarian myself for nearly thirty years and that the Free Library’s staff today is not what it was in the 1950s).

What this middlebrow youth did to me was basically what it did to Jacoby. It made me a reader. Being a reader made me value the life of the mind. Which is why I am so taken by her book and so thoroughly delighted (and alarmed) by it and by this observation by John Updike, which she quotes on page 267:

The printed, bound and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come and and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village.

Surly hermits. Please think of this blog as a moment when this surly hermit hobbles out to bray at the electronic sunshine.

The temptation to continue with politics is strong, in spite of my pledge to the contrary, but I will resist it. Mostly. It’s simply impossible to avoid noticing Barack Obama’s extraordinary speech, but I will do so simply by referring to what my pastor, Robert V. Thompson, has to say about it. For that, click here.

For myself, in the midst of all of this uproar, I continue to read Proust. Well, Proust and a few other things. But, still, Proust. Several months ago I decided that it was time to re-read Proust’s great novel. I think I need to explain that my use of “re-read” is fully truthful. I first read the novel as a course requirement when I was a grad student, over forty years ago. Many times since then, I’ve made some forays into a second tour, but none of these attempts has completely succeeded.

It’s not so much the length (I’m no stranger to long books and have recently read Pynchon’s Against the Day) that I have found daunting, nor it is the French (though I’ll admit these days to looking up quite a few things). I think what slows me and makes a complete journey difficult is the depth of the prose, the semantic sea that one beings to drown in, the syntactical labyrinth that one finds oneself wandering in. I’ve never been a particularly fast reader — I enjoy savoring the words too much — but with Proust I often slow to a crawl while I call up images from my own past and figuratively spread them out on the floor next to his.

But this time, I’m going to make it, though it will take me a long time (as the first time did). I’m presently about 400 pages into the Côté de Guermantes, that is to say, maybe a third of the way through the second volume of the three volume Pléiade edition. Marcel is working himself up about an assignation in the Bois de Boulogne with Mme. de Stermaria, after having been quite underwhelmed by an invitation to call on the Duchesse de Guermantes.

For the last two months I’ve let this particular reading project slide over to the back burner, but no more. I’m changing focus and bringing it to the front, to mix those old metaphors thoroughly. And my reasons for the whole project may have more to do with escaping the idiotic mewing of the media and the bloggers than I’m willing to admit. Whatever. En avant!

I really have no intention of turning this into a political blog. I really don’t. Two sparrows don’t make a spring. So, if the political has gotten you down, skip this one.

The reason why I can’t stay away from the topic is that I’m pretty upset at the way things are going, and writing makes me feel better, makes me feel that I’m responding in some way to the outrages that are heating up my temper. I would like to respond directly to Hillary Clinton about this, but I doubt that she’d ever read it. So I’ll do it here and maybe calm down afterwards.

I have never been a particular fan of Hillary. Frankly, I had some trouble understanding why she stayed with Bill during the Monica days. I’m pretty sure that my marriage would have been over if I had behaved like that. Damn sure. Certain, in fact. But now I think I understand. Hillary hung in there because of political expediency. Bill was her ticket to a political future, and she knew it, so vile betrayal didn’t matter. She had ambitions.

I understand this now, I think, because I have finally come to realize how driven and politically motivated she is. I’m a little slow. Though I’ve been a supporter of Barack since his Illinois Senate campaign, I never really had an animosity towards Hillary. In fact when the thought of an Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama ticket surfaced at one of the debates, one where Hillary was generally making nice to Barack, I was intrigued by the idea. No more. It may happen, but I won’t like it. I’ll probably even vote for it. But I won’t like it.

The moment of truth for me happened when I read a statement she made today in which she still invoked the accusation that Obama “winked” at Canada about his stand on NAFTA. Still. Even though several news sources and the Canadian government have documented the fact that Obama did no such thing. In fact, a story emerged that indicates that Clinton’s own staff may have been guilty of this very ploy. This, Hillary, is lying. It’s not just “going negative.” It’s willfully misleading the listeners. It’s lying.

I’m tired of politicians who lie. We’ve had enough of that. And the more I think of the things that Hillary says, the more I realize that she has no problem with lying. Thirty-five years of experience? Experience doing what, exactly? We’ve now learned that her contribution to peace in Northern Ireland was a meeting with women. A good thing to do, but hardly pivotal, under the circumstances. At other times, she was “present.” Her heroic defense of human rights in China was a speech. On a trip. To say that this “experience” prepares and qualifies her more for the presidency than Obama’s years as an organizer, a civil rights attorney, a constitutional law professor, and a state and federal legislator, well, that’s just plain old lying.

From what I have read and heard, she’s been a good Senator. She has represented her state well and worked, at times, with people across the aisle. That’s perfectly honorable, and many candidates would simply have let that record be enough. But she claims to be ready on Day One (another lie — nobody is ready on Day One except a second term President), tossing us the implication (talk about ‘wink-wink’) that she was a Co-President with Bill.

Enough. I have no idea how this will end, but it will. I hope that honesty, and hope, and judgment prevail, but we do not have a good record when it comes to supporting those things.

The recent flap over Michelle Obama’s affirmation of pride for her country has caused me some distress, heightened the old blood pressure a bit, and taken the edge off my euphoria at her husband’s string of victories. Not that I see anything at all wrong with what she said (or with her subsequent statements of clarification). Just for the record, here’s what she said, “”For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.” She went on to explain that the reason for this pride was the new involvement of her country’s citizens with the political process. After her statement hit the media, we had this reaction from Cindy McCain: “I have, and always will be, proud of my country.” To which I would reply, “That’s because you’re an idiot who can’t tell the difference between pride and patriotism.”

I am not a person of color (unless pink is included), nor have I been poor, nor am I a woman. I haven’t grown up as the member of a group that was oppressed, ignored, and excluded. Yet, it’s pretty clear to me that my country has a long way to go before it might rightfully inspire unrestrained pride. I’m proud, it’s true, of certain things about the U.S. of A. Compared to many other nations, we have done slightly better in many areas. But Great Britain outlawed slavery before we did. New Zealand gave women the vote before we did. So, pleased, maybe, but not necessarily proud.

And recent history is much clearer. I am far from proud of my country’s behavior during the last 8 years. I am ashamed of our reaction to 9/11, appalled at our invasion of Iraq, saddened at our loss of the respect of people in other countries, frightened at the widening gap between rich and poor, horrified at the status of educational and healthcare systems, and furious at the failure and mendacity of our politicians. Proud, no. I’m mad as hell.

And I can understand Michelle Obama’s pride, while not being quite ready to go that far yet. What we have seen so far in this campaign has been amazing, a black man winning state after state, attracting voters from all kinds of segments of the population, energizing young people, rallying the disaffected.

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield — it seems so long ago — I was almost afraid to hope. Now I am amazed that I do hope.

Well, I was having some trouble making the wonderful video, “Yes We Can,” behave on my site, so I’ve had to take it down. Don’t fret, though — you can still see it at: www.dipdive.com

Enjoy and hope.

As I write this it’s 11 degrees F back home and 70 degrees F here, and I have no guilt feelings about this at all. “Here” is an Atlantic beach in central Florida, and my wife and I have spent a number of lovely, warm days, separating ourselves from what has been, so far, a particularly harsh winter in Chicago. It started with the proverbial bang on the first day of December with snow, ice, and sub zero wind-chills, and it has continued with rare moments of balminess that only served to make the return of the cold seem more cruel. So, several weeks ago, we decided to escape.

I’m usually not averse to cold weather, but age is probable driving my increasing discomfort with the thermometer drops. I went to college in Maine, and it wasn’t the cold that bothered me about that experience. Frequently, the inside of my nose would freeze as I headed from the dorm to the fraternity house where I could get breakfast.

(Parenthetically, fraternity membership was nearly universal at that place because there were no other dining halls. Though I once actually was the Secretary of the house and lived there for one year, I was never comfortable with it. My senior year I managed to break the bond and live in an off campus apartment. With three guys from the same fraternity. Go figure.)

But the Maine cold invigorated me in those days. I remember, with some delight, a couple of ice storms that enabled us to skate to class. And I loved the roaring fire at the frat house and at the student union, the pleasure of arriving in the warm dorm room and unwrapping the scarf and the coat, shedding the gloves.

But I suppose I’ve spent too many Wrigley opening days freezing, too many Chicago mornings digging out the car and trying to figure out where to park it to avoid the wrath of the Parking Detail, too many treks to the grocery store over walks that some idiot refused to clear.

This year we’ve pretty much had the whole enchilada: snow, bone chilling cold, freezing rain, slush, high winds, sleet, ice. Enough, already. I know I have to go back, but I don’t have to like it.

I had a dream last night, and I’ve been thinking about it frequently today. Particularly during the period of silent meditation (or prayer for them that prays) in church this morning I thought about it. In the dream, as far as I can remember, my wife and I were in a taxi in Paris. The dream was in quite dazzling color, and it was apparently a very sunny day. We were heading, I think, from De Gaulle airport into the city, and the taxi driver was making a lot of alarming turns, heading off in directions that didn’t feel right. I began talking with him, in French, and he began responding in English. Then the tables turned, and I was speaking English while he was speaking French. We couldn’t seem to get on the same page. At some point, we stopped and went into a café. The cabbie and I weren’t exactly arguing. In fact, he said that he didn’t want to charge us if we didn’t feel that he was taking us in the right direction. Back in the cab, I watched a striking and unfamiliar cityscape go by, huge construction sites with steel beams, modern buildings, glass towers. Nothing, that is, particularly Parisian. I woke up in an odd state.

Where did this dream come from? It was, I feel, an anxiety dream about a trip that we’ve planned for June. We’re going to Paris for a week, and this will be the first time that my wife and I have been in the city together. The anxiety probably arises from my fear that my French will be less than adequate. My wife doesn’t speak it all, so I’ll be the translator, the interpreter. I have an advanced degree in French literature, once lived in Paris for a year, and taught the language for about seven years. But that was all nearly forty years ago. Since that time I’ve tried to keep some vestige of the language rolling around in my head by reading and listening to Internet broadcasts. But I haven’t done much speaking. I haven’t been the type to toddle over to the Alliance Française and chat with folks in conversation classes. I don’t like to talk very much in English, actually, so it’s not very surprising that I’m reluctant to natter away in French. That I’m a bit anxious about navigating my favorite city in a couple of months is not very surprising either.

But the dream was more than that. I’ve realized during the day today that the dream was using images of my last trip to Paris, in 1997. The view from the window of the cab may not have included the stock images of the city that spring to mind when one hears its name (the corner tabac, the little bistro, the market, and on), but it was actual footage, photographed impeccably by my optical nerves and stored somewhere in that gray matter. The fact is that most of what one sees (or saw, perhaps, in 1997) on the way from Orly to the Place de la Bastille is not very romantic. I remember an odd pang of disapproval when I saw the new quarters of the Bibliothèque Nationale, a feeling that so pedestrian a building should not be so near this beautiful city.

Now, there are depths in this dream that I’m certainly not going explore publicly, but there are some elements that I can share. The 1997 trip, also a week spent seeing museums and simply absorbing the feel of the city, was a lovely time. Since my French had been in a similar state then (maybe worse, given that the Internet resources were not quite as good ten years ago), I floundered around a bit with the language during the first few days. But things came back to me, as I’m sure they will this time. The dream left a residue of pleasure as well as anxiety, a very real sense of being in that city, the anti-romantic landscape simply underlining the reality of the place, the feeling that, yes, we’re going to turn a corner and there will be the Panthéon, or the Collège de France, or the sixth-floor walk-up where I lived in 1967, just north of what is now the Centre Pompidou.

It will be good to be back.