Author: Biblioklept

Mass culture reflects the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in | James Baldwin

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What the mass culture really reflects…is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in. We do not seem to want to know that we are in the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys, and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages. And this has everything to do, of course, with what was expected of America: which expectation, so generally disappointed, reveals something we do not want to know about sad human nature, reveals something we do not want to know about the intricacies and inequities of any social structure, reveals, in sum, something we do not want to know about ourselves. The American way of life has failed—to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected); that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants; that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.

This is a job for the creative artist—who does not really have much to do with mass culture, no matter how many of us may be interviewed on TV. Perhaps life is not the black, unutterably beautiful, mysterious, and lonely thing the creative artist tends to think of it as being; but it is certainly not the sunlit playpen in which so many Americans lose first their identities and then their minds.

I feel very strongly, though, that this amorphous people are in desperate search for something which will help them to re-establish their connection with themselves, and with one another. This can only begin to happen as the truth begins to be told. We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life—and a great transforming energy.

From James Baldwin’s 1959 essay “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes,” collected in The Cross of Redemption.

[Ed. note–the elision in the first sentence of this excerpt is mine; I chose to remove a parenthetical aside that Baldwin makes to Archibald MacLeish’s 1958 play J.B. Here is the first line in full: “What the mass culture really reflects (as is the case with a “serious” play like J.B.) is the American bewilderment in the face of the world we live in.”]

Portrait of James Baldwin — Beauford Delaney

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Portrait of James Baldwin, 1965 by Beauford Delaney (1901-79)

Patient with the French | From Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Family Lexicon

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In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”

My mother said, “How French he’s become!”

In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soup served at dinner.

“How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”

And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

 

All inextricably linked to those words and phrases | From Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

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 My parents had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don’t write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign,” or “Sulfuric acid stinks of fart,” and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, “Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: “Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

I love this book so far, and this passage may come as close as anything to an early thesis for what Ginzburg is doing. I suppose, too, I deeply identify with this idea, this notion of phrases, saying, quips, in jokes, etc., as the psychological basis of familial identification.

Cortazar/Crowley/Ford (Books acquired, 27 July 2023)

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I went to the bookstore today looking for a copy of Katherine Burdekin’s dystopian 1937 novel Swastika Night. I was unsuccessful there, but while browsing the scifi and fantasy section, I came across three books that I couldn’t resist.

The first was an unread hardcover first edition of John M. Ford’s 1983 novel The Dragon Waiting. This book was only on my radar because Slate republished a 2019 article on Ford by Isaac Butler and a friend sent me the link (his message was simply “?”). From Butler’s article:

The Dragon Waiting is an unfolding cabinet of wonders. Over a decade before George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, Ford created an alternate-history retelling of the Wars of the Roses, filled with palace intrigue, dark magic, and more Shakespeare references than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The Dragon Waiting provokes that rare thrill that one gets from the work of Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Ursula Le Guin. A dazzling intellect ensorcells the reader, entertaining with one hand, opening new doors with another.

Wolfe blurbed the back cover of the copy I bought, by the way.

Maybe Crowley was in my subconscious too; while searching for Swastika Night under the Cs (it was first published under the pseudonym “Murray Constantine”), I came across a cheap hardcover copy of Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts. I’d read Little, Big years ago, enjoyed it, but gone no further. (There were no copies of Little, Big in Crowley’s placarded section, all though I did find three copies in the “General Fiction” section, away from the beautiful weird scifi fantasy ghetto.)

I’ve long been a sucker for the mass market Avon Bard Latin American writers series, so I couldn’t pass up the copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (translated by Gregory Rabassa). It sat upon a miscellaneous, dusty stack of outcasts in the middle of the “D” aisle in the scifi fantasy ghetto, waiting for me.

 

Reclining Nude Reading — Felice Casorati

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Reclining Nude Reading, 1943 by Felice Casorati (1883–1963)

“Nervous,” a very short story by Robert Walser

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“Nervous”

by

Robert Walser

translated by Christopher Middleton

I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That’s what it does to you. That’s life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen any more either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That’s what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That’s life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn’t make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn’t matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It’s natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn’t matter. I am not very nervous, to be sure, I just have a few grouches. Sometimes I am a bit weird and grouchy, but that doesn’t mean I am altogether lost, I hope. I don’t propose to hope that I am lost, for I repeat, I am uncommonly hard and tough. I am holding out and holding on. I am fairly fearless. But nervous I am, a little, undoubtedly I am, very probably I am, possibly I am a little nervous. I hope that I am a little nervous. No, I don’t hope so, one doesn’t hope for such things, but I am afraid so, yes, afraid so. Fear is more appropriate here than hope, no doubt about it. But I certainly am not fear-stricken, that I might be nervous, quite definitely not. I have grouches, but I am not afraid of the grouches. They inspire me with no fear at all. “You are nervous,” someone might tell me, and I would reply cold-bloodedly, “My dear sir, I know that quite well, I know that I am a little worn out and nervous.” And I would smile, very nobly and coolly, while saying this, which would perhaps annoy the other person a little. A person who refrains from getting annoyed is not yet lost. If I do not get annoyed about my nerves, then undoubtedly I still have good nerves, it’s clear as daylight, and illuminating. It dawns on me that I have grouches, that I am a little nervous, but it dawns on me in equal measure that I am cold-blooded, which makes me uncommonly glad, and that I am blithe in spirit, although I am aging a little, crumbling and fading, which is quite natural and something I therefore understand very well. “You are nervous,” someone might come up to me and say. “Yes, I am uncommonly nervous,” would be my reply, and secretly I would laugh at the big lie. “We are all a little nervous,” I would perhaps say, and laugh at the big truth. If a person can still laugh, he is not yet entirely nervous; if a person can accept a truth, he is not yet entirely nervous; anyone who can keep calm when he hears of some distress is not yet entirely nervous. Or if someone came up to me and said: “Oh, you are totally nervous,” then quite simply I would reply in nice polite terms: “Oh, I am totally nervous, I know I am.” And the matter would be closed. Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness. Fear is altogether foolish. “You are very nervous!” “Yes, come by all means and calmly tell me so! Thank you!”

That, or something like it, is what I’d say, having my gentle and courteous bit of fun. Let man be courteous, warm, and kind, and if someone tells him he’s totally nervous, still there’s no need at all for him to believe it.

The Cinema — James Boswell

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The Cinema, 1939 by James Boswell (1906-1971)

“Double Escape” — Moebius

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“Blown Away” — Tom Clark

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Double Door — Lois Dodd

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Double Door, 1976 by Lois Dodd (b. 1927)

Moby-Dick, but just the punctuation

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Impossible Body 2 — Adrian Ghenie

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Impossible Body 2, 2022 by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977)

“Space” — Mark Strand

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“Space”

by

Mark Strand

A beautiful woman stood at the roof-edge of one of New York’s tall midtown apartment houses. She was on the verge of jumping when a man, coming out on the roof to sunbathe, saw her. Surprised, the woman stepped back from the ledge. The man was about thirty or thirty-five and blond. He was lean, with a long upper body and short, thin legs. His black bathing suit shone like satin in the sun. He was no more than ten steps from the woman. She stared at him. The wind blew strands of her long dark hair across her face. She pulled them back and held them in place with one hand. Her white blouse and pale blue skirt kept billowing, but she paid no attention. He saw that she was barefoot and that two high-heeled shoes were placed side by side on the gravel near where she stood. She had turned away from him. The wind flattened her skirt against the front of her long thighs. He wished he could reach out and pull her toward him. The air shifted and drew her skirt tightly across her small, round buttocks; the lines of her bikini underpants showed. “I’ll take you to dinner,” he yelled. The woman turned to look at him again. Her gaze was point-blank. Her teeth were clenched. The man looked at her hands which were now crossed in front of her, holding her skirt in place. She wore no wedding band. “Let’s go someplace and talk,” he said. She took a deep breath and turned away. She lifted her arms as if she were preparing to dive. “Look,” he said, “if it’s me you’re worried about, you have nothing to fear.” He took the towel he was carrying over his shoulders and made it into a sarong. “I know it’s depressing,” he said. He was not sure what he had meant. He wondered if the woman felt anything. He liked the way her back curved into her buttocks. It struck him as simple and expressive; it suggested an appetite or potential for sex. He wished he could touch her. As if to give him some hope, the woman lowered her arms to her sides and shifted her weight. “I’ll tell you what,” the man said, “I’ll marry you.” The wind once again pulled the woman’s skirt tightly across her buttocks. “We’ll do it immediately,” he said, “and then go to Italy. We’ll go to Bologna, we’ll eat great food. We’ll walk around all day and drink grappa at night. We’ll observe the world and we’ll read the books we never had time for.” The woman had not turned around or backed off from the ledge. Beyond her lay the industrial buildings of Long Island City, the endless row houses of Queens. A few clouds moved in the distance. The man shut his eyes and tried to think of how else to change her mind. When he opened them, he saw that between her feet and the ledge was a space, a space that would always exist now between herself and the world. In the long moment when she existed before him for the last time, he thought, How lovely. Then she was gone.

Kafka diary entry, 19 July 1910

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Sunday, 19 July, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

From Diaries, Franz Kafka; trans. by Joseph Kresh.

Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)

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Picked up two on Friday—

I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me:

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

I read NYRB’s collected Moderan a few years ago, but I couldn’t pass up this Avon Bard mass market paperback.

Opening track:

“THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)”

by

David R. Bunch

FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.

And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . . Continue reading “Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)” →