On Literature

June 8, 2007

Grace Under Pressure

There is a copy of a black and white photo stuck to my wall, just to the left of this desk. It’s of an old man with white hair and a white beard sitting on a bed reading from a sheet of paper. The rule of thirds has been observed—the old man and the bed absorb the bottom horizontal third, and above him is a stark wall, notable only for a small crucifix hung to the right.

The old man is Hemingway, and he is occupying a room in Málaga, Spain in 1959. He had witnessed the country’s civil war, and had written some good stuff about it, but he would end it two years later in rural America.

Above the photo I have written six words. They are his words: “Write the truest thing you know”. I scribbled those words on the photo some years back, but I have done very little to observe them. Devoutly felt truths tend to be empirical if you lack confidence or a God, and as for me, I’m unsure about either. Others said the same about the older, sick Hemingway, the self-plagiariser who could no longer see “the world clear, and as a whole”.

But the younger Hemingway apparently could see the world clear, and as a whole, and if he did feel this way it was courtesy of a wonderful con he played on himself. But you need cons to write well. The trick worked for the younger Hemingway, as so he could write truly about the small worlds that exist in cafes and army hospitals and on rivers and open spaces.

Some have written that the world after the Second World War was too complex for Hemingway to maintain the con. But this is bunk. It wasn’t the world’s change that was significant—it was Hemingway’s. He was growing tired, bloated with booze, and had suffered from countless near-fatal injuries. If the world was once whole for Hemingway, it was because—in boxing, fishing, game hunting, fucking and writing—he could maintain the illusion that he was dominating it. With age and physical and mental breakdown the illusion broke down, too. It was all, and only could have been, an illusion. Hemingway’s activities—and they were only that—did not change the innately ambiguous state of nature. They did not change the cold, strange game of international diplomacy. They could not make static the increasingly radical politics of his home country. But the illusion was important, because he wrote with it, and, for a while, he wrote beautifully well with it, as so his short stories have the quality of being felt.

And for those who have no illusion? Well, there is Franz Kafka, a strange, tormented individual who gave us half-complete novels about men incapable of imposing their will on the world. His characters were men who struggled, and failed, against forces—psychological, logical, political, biological—that swept them towards nothingness. “I sometimes believe I understand the Fall of Man as no one else,” he said. He died in 1924 at the age of 41 of tuberculosis. That same year Hitler celebrated his 35th birthday in prison, then still a relatively unknown agitator. 21 years later and Europe had changed forever and the world knew of another Fall.

It’s pointless to ponder what Kafka would have said—he said it all when he was still here—but for Hemingway, for the survival of his own work and inner life, the war found its best side in small stories about grace under pressure. It was Hemingway’s war, because he wrote it, and so the war became something different, both true and false. Hemingway once wrote “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for” which may well be the finest illusion of all. It is certainly preferable to having none.

Posted by Marty at 3:56 PM

April 26, 2006

Kurt Vonnegut's Last Days: A Review of A Man Without a Country

Sometime in 1974 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 for Harper’s magazine. It is a neat and concise affair, notable for its sympathetic observation of Thompson’s damaged nervous-system. Vonnegut writes of Thompson’s condition:

The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honour. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease.

The disease eventually caught up with Thompson. Last year, his health deteriorating, Thompson violently polemicised Bush’s second term, considering the President’s electoral success a final, humiliating blow. In February 2005, Thompson’s disease proved fatal.

Vonnegut now shares much in common with the dead man he reviewed all those years ago. Vonnegut is vehemently anti-Bush, increasingly manic in his public commentary and gleans meaning from the writings of Mark Twain. But more than this, like the suicided father of gonzo, Vonnegut has had more than his fair share of blood and politics. Like Hunter, Vonnegut has had enough. He is not just tired anymore; it is beyond that. He is an unmediated misanthrope. We know this because of Vonnegut’s latest book, A Man Without a Country, a collection of rueful bits and pieces.

It is alarming to contemplate the sharpening of Vonnegut’s pessimism, which was always famously pointy. In the 1974 review of Thompson’s book, Vonnegut responds to Thompson’s fear and loathing of American politics with this:

I hasten to testify that the American atmosphere isn’t really that terrifying. I am only saying that we have in our midst some people, like Hunter Thompson, who are super-sensitive. Practically everyone else feels fine, just fine.

Vonnegut would not say so anymore. Vonnegut now compares Bush to Hitler, and tells us that men with psychotic personalities inhabit the White House. Vonnegut tells us that his last words should be: “Life is no way to treat an animal”.

I would like to adopt Vonnegut’s own advice here. In his review of Campaign Trail ‘72, Vonnegut says that Thompson writes the way he does—violently and grotesquely, using words as carnival mirrors—not as a reflection of objective truth, but as a reflection of his own sensitivity. Well, Vonnegut’s latest writings reflect his sensitivities. They are the sensitivities of a walking suicide, a misanthrope, and yes there is much sadness in this world, but Bush cannot be compared to Hitler. More from A Man Without a Country:

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen the First World War…
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

Vonnegut’s view of our mortal coil has always been grim and whimsical. Understandably. His has been a strange and sad life. When Churchill gave the green-light to “area bomb” Dresden on Valentine’s Day, 1945, Vonnegut was deep in the city’s bowels. One of thousands of Allied POWs, Vonnegut emerged from his bunker to survey a city ravaged by fire-storm—25,000 civilians dead and the destruction of a city globally admired for its baroque splendour. Vonnegut famously wrote about the experience in Slaughterhouse-Five:

Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been consumed, and their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.
“It was like the moon,” said Billy Pilgrim.

On Mothers’ Day the year before, Vonnegut was granted a temporary leave of the military and returned home. There was news for him: his mother had committed suicide the evening before. From then on his books would receive the theme of suicide like priests receive strangers into confession booths.
Vonnegut began a life of chain-smoking filter-less Pall Malls, describing the habit as “a classy way to commit suicide”. But by the early ’80s it seems that that way was taking too long, and Vonnegut attempted to shuffle off with an overdose of booze and pills. It didn’t work. Vonnegut went back to the Pall Malls. At age 83 he is still smoking fiendishly high levels.

So with this latest book, what’s changed? Vonnegut’s pessimism has deepened considerably, and his sense of humour seems to have suffered. Humour had always gracefully tempered his earlier, better works, allowing for tones of fortitude and openness and charm. Further, Vonnegut believed in children, in students, in youth. In a speech Vonnegut gave the graduating class of Bennington College in 1970, he said:

Do not take the entire world on your shoulders. Do a certain amount of skylarking, as befits people your age. ‘Skylarking’, incidentally, used to be a minor offence under Naval Regulations. What a charming crime. It means an intolerable lack of seriousness. I would love to have had a dishonourable discharge from the United States Navy—for skylarking not just once, but again, and again and again.

The sad thing is that Vonnegut has taken the entire world on his shoulders. He can’t help it. He is too sensitive. Vonnegut once mentioned that the role of the artist was much like that of the canaries sent into early coal mines—the canaries would keel over if there was a poisonous gas in there. The importance of the canary—and the artist—was their super-sensitivity. Poor Vonnegut. The great legacy of a great many things haunt him, and his sensitivity has rendered his nervous-system a spaghetti-junction of sparks and sadness.

A great many artists keel over still, often to little attention, and sadly sometimes at their peak. Not with Vonnegut, who sadly is no longer inspired or inspiring. In A Man Without a Country he describes the life of one of his “heroes” Ignaz Immelweis, a doctor who, according to Wikipedia, “demonstrated that puerperal fever… was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand washing behaviour by medical care-givers”. Immelweis’ advice was scorned by his peers, and he later killed himself.
Vonnegut’s hero is a man who, unlistened to, ends it.

Reading A Man Without a Country I got the most horrible feeling. That Vonnegut regretted terribly not doing the job with the booze and the pills back in ‘84, and considered his failure to redress the attempt in the ensuing 20+ years as great cowardice. It is never overt. Rather, Vonnegut’s suicidal wrenches, his self-loathing, his general disgust, is like a smoke—a thick, acrid, nihilistic stench that stretches wide over the pages:

Do you realise that all great literature—Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”—are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

I don’t blame Vonnegut for giving up on people. He’s seen too much. As for this book, I thank him for evoking Abe Lincoln, and, in a brief clearing of calamity and smoke, for giving me this wonderful piece of advice:

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple-tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable banter to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”.
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”.

I took his advice. Last week, lying next to my girlfriend, on a good bed, with opened windows and a gentle breeze and kisses and books, I interrupted our agreeable banter and said: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”.

But I must leave Vonnegut now. He has given up on most things, and I’m not yet ready to do that. I haven’t seen as much, and maybe never will. I’m not as good a writer, and may not be as sensitive. But I haven’t given up on all that much, except, as I look upon Vonnegut’s beaten brow, his ability to inform and inspire me anymore. His canary’s heart is weak and flickering now. He has taken a helluva beating.

Posted by Marty at 4:58 PM | Comments (5)

March 24, 2006

The Jones Salvage Yard, or, How I Discovered Reading

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.
—Emily Dickinson

Recently my memory has been bent on re-treading the days of my ninth year… I recall my classroom—warm—with green carpet. There’s a small bookshelf and rain outside, and because it is after lunch it is Quiet Reading Time, a time I had always spent reading magazines or doodling secretly. But on this day I look hard at the ‘shelf—the contents now mostly fuzzied with time—and pick up a copy of Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, a long-running kids’ detective series about three young and exceptionally resourceful Californians. I’m holding book number two in the series, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, first published in 1964, and it is still raining outside, hard now, the sound of water falling from a broken gutter obvious. I open up Parrot, and find “Alfred Hitchcock’s” introduction. I sit down. As I read more and more of the series, the reading of the warm introductions took on the benevolent glow of custom, and I learned to savor the lightly reverential tone, transforming it into the generous twitches and curls of anticipation.
And now again with that green carpet. Old and warm, and I take my first copy of The Three Investigators and curl up on the floor at the base of the ‘shelf. I finish the intro and begin to meet the gang for the first time. I say “hello” to the group’s natural leader, Jupiter Jones, a precociously bright young man with a glutton’s taste for fat-food, but an eye like Sherlock’s; I extend my young hand to Pete Crenshaw, serious, loyal and athletic; a bright and happy illustration of America’s potential. Finally, I am greeted by Robert Andrews, the Three Investigators’ collator of data, a position invaluably assisted by his job at the local library, and his own deep-seated fastidiousness.
A good group.
Their headquarters are ingeniously implanted beneath the large and sprawling mass of junk which comprises Jupiter’s auntie’s salvage yard. The seemingly impregnable clutter secretly houses the boys’ HQ—complete with telephone, filing system, darkroom and workshop, and made accessible only through the use of cleverly concealed entrances.
The Three Investigators’ mobility is provided by their bicycles and the helpful assistance of adult sympathizers, and their individual talents, and their impressive sum, invariably lend themselves to the cracking of seemingly impenetrably bizarre phenomenon. But I won’t here spoil the mystery of the stuttering parrot.

As I write this, many, many years on from that classroom and that discovery, Neil Young jangles out an extended solo and Edmund White’s essay “On Reading: An Exaltation of Dreams” sits next to my laptop. I glance down at it, and immediately feel silly.
In his essay, White recounts a book he read at the age of 10 resurfacing in his life: “…there was Disenchanted by Pierre Loti, the tale of women’s liberation in turn-of-the-century Turkey that had so engrossed me when I was ten. It was the same book I remembered, with the gold letters on the raincoat-coloured cover…”
Not for White the juvenile pleasures of the Three Investigators then, but that’s okay. Reaching over the ledge of my mind’s eye I can see, wafting upwards in a curious formation, chatters of scents and excitements encouraged by my falling in love with the young group of private eyes. For the first time in my life I appreciated the Emily Dickinson quote given above, and I was only nine. Trips to the library became great harvesting operations, and, if for whatever reason, my parents could not take me on the decided fortnightly run, then I would scream and throw things and become so generally unpleasant and unreasonable that a belated trip would be made.
I needed my fix.
True, for the remaining years of lower-school I read nothing but teen-detective pulp—Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, The Hardy Boys. A much limited literary diet, it’s true, but far richer than my high-school diet, which was non-existent. How I came to avoid reading for half a decade is another story—this little spot is for Jupiter, Pete and Bob.

Thank-you.

Posted by Marty at 2:29 PM | Comments (4)

March 10, 2006

Reviewing the Reviewer, or, Smelling the Armpits of Lester Bangs & Realising I Don't Mind the Smell

I must admit I had sat down at this here kitchen table with the intention of saying the unspeakable: that rock critic Lester Bangs just wasn’t that good. And I must also confess this: that I had impure motives, o lord!, that the casual dismissal of received wisdom gladdened me, but I can see clearly now…

I had picked up Bangs’ anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic last Christmas—an exquisite example of selfishness—and would thumb casually through it when the weight of Gore Vidal got too heavy. Last night the weight of Gore Vidal got too heavy, and so I read a number of articles which, in turn, exasperated, illuminated, excited and bored me.

For one, Bangs’ Mailer-machismo got to me. Page after page of that hum-buzz-spittle-spat! language of the larger-than-life pop-intellectual-hedonist cramming aphorism and life-force into as small a space as possible. Mailer tried to do it all the time—grandiose insights (inspired by the Greeks, tempered by Muhammad Ali’s lefts and rights) weren’t enough of a show for him; Mailer wanted to concentrate these wisdoms, aphorise them; make them the literary equivalent of a black-hole—dense and throbbing illuminations of a unique intellect:

Henry Miller, however, exists in the same relation to legend that anti-matter shows to matter.

Mailer often failed, but it was fun to watch him try.

Hemingway was the best in showing so much in so little, and before he began plagiarising himself, he gave us some of the best sentences of the last century:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could no longer fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Bangs was not Hemingway, and didn’t want to be. He was too impatient. He shares the energy and snarl and machismo of Mailer, and his exhaustive, manic search for the vague, ugly-beautiful life-force, performed, or divined, by the best rock bands:

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whiz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

But perhaps more so, Bangs shared similarities with Hunter S. Thompson. Bangs’ rambling, ranting, invective-ridden prose (often coloured by drugs) resembled Thompson’s gonzo exercises, and they both shared a cultivated iconoclasm, confident in their writing, their drugs, their drink, their Search….

I must say that I tired of Bangs’ style—all spit and scream and cavernous, delirious insight. I also tired of Lou Reed featuring in every second fucking article, and (like Thompson) the continual self-reference and the drugs and the drugs and the drugs… but then I would come across something like this:

You always wonder how you will react to these things, but I can’t say that I was surprised when NBC broke into the “Tonight Show” to say that John Lennon was dead. I always thought that he would be the first of the Beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees-first into left-wing adventurism or by just shutting up for five years when he decided he really didn’t have anything much to say; but I had always figured it would be by his own hand. That he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probable psychotic only underscores the banality surrounding his death.
Look: I don’t think I’m insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It’s just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock ‘n’ roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams and aspirations.

Clear and quick like a cool stream, and smart to boot. When I discovered Bangs’ review of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks any thought that Bangs was a gibbering anarchist with no heart and amphetamine-charged antennae shifted: Bangs’ was a talented, gibbering anarchist, with a great heart and amphetamine-charged antennae:

Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was released ten years, almost to the day, before this was written. It was particularly important to me because the fall of 1968 was such a terrible time: I was a physical and mental wreck, nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming and squatting across the mind. My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had.
Astral Weeks would be the subject of this piece—i.e., the rock record with the most significance in my life so far—no matter how I’d been feeling when it came out. But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what’s more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction.

Here Bangs is at his best—it sounds like he’s breathing. He’s also reassuringly instructive: “…it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction”.

Bangs was a guy that wrote rock reviews. He was talented, intelligent, and when the ego and the drugs and the spleen didn’t crack the fabric, he was a superb writer. His machismo and obsession with Lou annoys me, sure, but the antennae never stopped searching—I can see him swaggering around the streets of Detroit with his earphones blaring (Metal Machine Music), taking it all in: the dirt, the hypocrisy, the shadow, but also, when he was very, very good, the light.

Posted by Marty at 12:46 PM | Comments (1)

March 1, 2006

Hunter S. Thompson: One Year On

I was thinking of Hunter again the other day as I re-read the text messages received from friends and family when news of his suicide came through—one-year ago—and I brooded on the strange sentimentality required for this preservation. My brooding yielded nothing other than evidence for a soft and simple heart, but I was forced to reassess Hunter’s legacy, more out of consideration of my completed thesis on the man, than the bogus obligation an anniversary might suggest…
I had begun my Honours on the day Thompson killed himself, and the shock was, surprisingly to me, severe. It was Thompson’s iconoclasm, more than his words, that inspired me; I took a moral consistency, an abhorrence for received wisdom, and a love for literature to be its inspiring hallmarks. Lofty and naïve, perhaps, but we all need standards…
I wrote on this blog a year ago that Thompson’s relevance and quality began fading quickly after Nixon flashed those peace signs and hopped on the ‘copter… I would re-assert that here, but perhaps colour the re-assertion with something like… disappointment? Where Thompson’s writing was at once inflammatory and instructive, it became hijacked by drugs, and the colours became blotchy and dull. It is disappointing because Thompson was once a great traveller and a strong and lucid reporter—on the road with the Hell’s Angels, or roaming South America observing despotism in its rawest forms. And he reported back—pre-gonzo days—with vigour and an intention of righting the wrongs of insular, or uninspired, journalism. Thompson took his journalistic cues from Twain, Crane and, of course, Hemingway, and this reader is grateful.
But Thompson stopped travelling—in the ages of Bush and Clinton and Bush, Thompson took ever-increasing amounts of drugs and barely left his compound out in deepest Colorado. He wasn’t out there, the roaming Mencken/Papa/kinked cartoon super-freak that documented the violent ’70s. No, Hunter fired guns and screamed in isolation, his words losing relevance and coherency, as he lost sense of himself—the myth and the man blurring out in the wilderness…
Not even the national shock of S-11 could inspire a return for the man, and this, for me, was the greatest disappointment. While Thompson’s reportage from the ’60s and ‘70 is both entertaining and stylistically curious to me, it can not possibly be as relevant as it was back then—times when abstracted debates on freedom were taken from the classroom and literally fought in the streets, and written about by Thompson. So where was Thompson in the new millennia? In our age of Bush and theocratic fascism? Seemingly suffering a massive crisis of conviction, brought on by myth and drugs and drink and the varying banal forms of madness that affect us all, sooner or later.

Posted by Marty at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

February 28, 2006

The Perth Writer's Festival: Or, Listening to the Sound of One Hand Clapping

I attended a Perth Writer’s Festival lecture on Saturday morning. Reluctantly. I hadn’t slept so well, it was real fucking hot, and I had a media pass to Cronenberg’s latest: A History of Violence. I’d heard good things. But, no—the heat could be suffered, the film caught up on later, and sleep reclaimed that evening. No biggie. There were war correspondents to listen and pose questions to, followed by “Australia’s leading public intellectual” Robert Manne, and, later still, novelist Frank Moorhouse speaking on anti-terror laws.
Let’s do it. Let’s dialogue. Let’s share ideas. Okay?
I got edgy when I scoped the crowd—75% women, the average age about 65, give or take. Where were the motherfuckers reading Bukowski and Maupassant? Pitchfork and Rousseau? Eh? Their hair was consistently grey, short, washed and conditioned. Which is fine—hygiene’s important.
Their jewellery was… respectable, eschewing tawdry, and the talcum powder delicately applied that morning ensured ‘pits as dry as a bone. I felt my sweat-stained ‘pits and asked Paddy if my eyes were blood-shot.
They were.

The lecture got off to a bad start. Billed as two war correspondents shooting the shit, one cancelled and was replaced by an affable curiosity from Perth—an aid worker who had spent extensive time in Afghanistan. Not a war correspondent, then.
And so, it was on… each guest mouthed platitudes and anecdotes, received, to my horror, as wisdom. Worse, as ideas. When the journalist—or was it the aid worker?—began offering this pearl: “I don’t believe in the dichotomy of good and evil. I think there are shades…” the crowd began nodding knowingly, apparently appreciative of a great illuminative glow. If you squinted you could see its wings…
Yawn.
So let’s hear the audience’s questions: “How did you feel…” Ahhh, shit. Question after question designed to yield the personal minutiae experienced when either of them were writing their book, or questions designed to reinforce their deeply held belief that nobody should ever be killed, ever, and that the US is evil (they’re the exception to that whole good/evil dichotomy rule thing).
Yawn.
The journalist had spent time in Indonesia, experiencing first hand the violent convulsions inspired by despotic rule. The aid worker had spent time in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban. But get this: no-one thought to ask him anything about the Taliban (were we right to go in? I say yes to Afghanistan, no to Iraq, and say that both wars were prosecuted terribly); commensurately, no-one thought to question the journalist about despotic regimes, and the legitimacy of deposing them. As we turn to Iran, I would have thought a more rigorous discussion about the interference of a nation’s sovereignty, theocratic fascism, and the hypocrisy of our own often opaque turns of democracy would have been… pertinent?
There were no ideas. There were no bruised paradigms. There were no open minds (a strict anti-war—“No Imperialism!”—Bush bad—middle-class-couched rhetoric is not open-mindedness). But there was coloured water—or was it cordial?—and a free copy of The Monthly, a very good publication.
And so, Paddy and I did the only thing we could. We left, bitched, ate ‘burgers, bitched some more, and then began talking about just what the fuck to do here. We decided to begin our own magazine. Then we went home and watched old episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
That motherfucker is funny.

P.S. & yes, I had a question, but I wasn’t picked. So it goes…

Afterword
I have just discovered a quote from Pauline Kael (a critic introduced to me by Paddy) which tidily sums up the lecture:
“I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood ‘product,’ finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and liberalism”

Indeed.

Posted by Marty at 4:02 PM | Comments (6)

January 20, 2006

On Reading (again)

I got up early this morning. It had been the same the morning before, and the morning before that. Why? I have stopped drinking (largely) and so the body has adjusted to nights spent reading, and writing, and thinking. Reading. That’s what this piece is really about.
I had bought Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking last Saturday—a lazy day, first spent watching gay cowboys and then spent pontificating about the silliness of it all (the culture wars, that is, not the gay cowboys). When that was done I returned home and it was dark and I took up the reading habit again.
Took it up again.
I had lost the ability to read. I still read around books—I still read Harper’s reviews, or studied the NYRB online. I would still talk about books, and I would still purchase them—each practice made with enthusiasm. But I had stopped reading. It had something to do with writing a 20,000 word thesis—and the attendant texts that weighed heavy and thick. It was something in the having to read them. I was subject to an ugly didacticism that I unfairly and unhappily ascribed to all reading.
When I submitted the thesis I thought the curse would lift. I would have the time, the freedom, to read. I made lists of what I would start first, second, third: Joachim Fest’s Hitler; John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration; Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. They sat there and they sat there. I bought more books; I flicked through others. Nothing. It went this way for months, until I picked up Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. I read it in a day. It felt good. Real good. Then… nothing.
Until last Saturday. I had read Good Words about Didion’s latest, and of course her reputation is one of the brightest and firmest in American journalism. I paid $27 dollars and brought it home. I pulled up a chair on the porch and swatted away some mosquitos. I poured a small Bailey’s.
And I read.
I read and I read and I read. I read about Didion writing about her husband’s death, and her daugher’s collapse and eventual coma. Her pain/mourning/grief (she makes clear and smart distinctions between them all) moved me as so I breathed differently.
I read about her reading—in her grief her instinct was to “go to the literature”. She does. She reads Freud, Shakespeare, and a neurologist from California. Also, Cummings, Milton and psychiatry journals. She becomes both an intellectual and visceral expert/victim of grief, and she tells doctors what she thinks about extubation.
What emerges is a text so honest, so brave, that grief emerges as the worst possible demon, and Didion as the strongest and strangest and most beautiful voice of it. Her logic is strangled by grief, but her courage and good instinct never leave her.
Zadie Smith says Didion “is essential” on the subject of death. I have never read Smith, but I want to hug her for saying this. I also want to eat crème caramel with Didion.

I am reading again.

Posted by Marty at 7:51 PM | Comments (5)

December 12, 2005

Rereading Bukowski's Ham on Rye

I have just finished rereading Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, and damn it’s good. I began rereading it for mostly trite reasons I won’t list, but also in the secret hope that his work would happily inform my own. I think it helped.
Ham on Rye is surely Buk’s best novel: his saddest, funniest, most insightful and sophisticated exploration of his life and mythology. It seems to me that the life and mythology of Charles Bukowski are largely inseparable, a fact owed to his famous lack of compromise. We can see in the Baron Von Himmlen shorts (Bukowski wrote them as a 12-year-old) the great Chinaski legend already forming. Himmlen was young Buk’s fictitious WWI Fokker pilot—the greatest fighter pilot in the world—who commanded respect and inspired intimidation with his preternatural gifts for flying, fighting and fucking. Within these stories lies Bukowski’s own seed—a compelling, often ugly exercise of the Hemingway-code: a volatile mix of loose misogyny, explosive machismo and daring, physical deeds. In Himmlen there is also the older Buk’s drastic desire for isolation and drink, and a brooding, educated misanthropy.
In fact the parallels are uncanny between Himmlen and the later Bukowski—it is incredible to think that Bukowski had anticipated the life and legend of himself as a bed-ridden 12-year-old.
And so there is a great psychological depth to this book—a street-wise dissertation of the lonely, the ugly and the mad. We can really see Bukowski here, an insight birthed by an educated absence of pretension and indefatigable honesty.

Reading Ham on Rye I was again reminded of that always-important advice for writers: write what you know. I thought back to my own early writings: horribly earnest pieces written about people I didn’t know—characters unhappily but unavoidably painted with, yes, teen angst. Rereading Ham on Rye I know exactly what I have to do—forget about Leavis, Trilling and Bloom and get down to writing honestly and lucidly. I think back some more and I recall a Ginsberg quote an old housemate and friend had placed on her bedroom wall: “No tricks”—you better believe it.
And so, right now, all I have to do is find the courage…

Posted by Marty at 3:15 PM | Comments (6)

November 30, 2005

Prisoner of God

…It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and—more or less unconsciously—give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent…

Deprived of its context, this quote can well be read as contemporary—the glum but instructional musing of a liberal dissenter. But, as it goes, the quote was written by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943, penned from Nazi-enforced imprisonment. And it got me to thinking—what moral and intellectual lessons may be learnt by atheists from past and present church leaders and theologians? After re-reading Bonhoeffer, I happened on Archbishop Chris Jensen’s essay “Jesus, Religious Genius or Failed Prophet?” read that night on Radio National. And I found an answer to my question: we can learn plenty…

There was much soul-searching amongst German theologians after Hitler’s fall, especially from the Protestants. Germany was largely a Protestant country, whose people had embraced Nazism. How could this be avoided in the future? What was Christianity’s position at the great ideological table that was established in fascism’s shadow?
Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book, Prisoner of God: Letters and Papers from Prison, was released posthumously in 1951, and offered much to this debate…
Many years earlier Bonhoeffer was operating underground—he had to as mainstream churches accepted Nazi-appointed bishops and worked Nazism into their liturgies. Nazism had crept over and consumed all of Germany’s institutions.
In response, Bonhoeffer established the secret, breakaway Confessing Church, a sect whose members answered only to heavenly authority—many members smuggled Jews out of the country, anticipating the Holocaust. In 1943 Nazis jailed Bonhoeffer on sedition charges, but later discovered his links in a sophisticated plot to kill Hitler. On April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was hanged in Flössenberg concentration camp. Days later Allied forces liberated the area…
Bonhoeffer’s writings share much with existentialism—after following Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s theories, Bonhoeffer began championing a theology which emphasized Jesus’ deeds, rather than clerical dogma. But, unlike Barth, who sought to amend church doctrine, Bonhoeffer sought the establishment of a “religionless Christianity”—that is, a form of Christianity based solely on the emulation of Christ as the suffering “man for others”. The nut of Bonhoeffer’s belief was this: in a morally ambiguous world, we can only derive our ethics from actions aimed at helping one’s fellows. Less than a year before his death, Bonhoeffer was still writing furiously about his theory: “How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I’m thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility”.

60 years later Sydney Archbishop Chris Jensen read his essay “Jesus, Religious Genius or Failed Prophet?” and it provided the same instruction as Bonhoeffer’s. Jesus may exist as a metaphorical authority—a presenter of parables, of moral choices. For me, and Bonhoeffer, the moral authority of Jesus is destroyed once religion—dogma—is introduced. I like to see Bonhoeffer as Jesus himself—a lucid and vigorous intellect but, more importantly, a man defined by his actions—brave deeds that cost him his life, but granted much to others. A man who put his money where his mouth is.

Jensen’s fascinating essay attempts to answer this question: “Jesus creates a problem. He announced that the kingdom of God was imminent. It did not arrive. Is it best to think of him as a religious and moral genius, or a failed prophet? If we think that he is a genius, we save his teaching but lose our integrity. If we think of him as a failed prophet, we keep our integrity, but it is difficult to explain why he has been so significant in the history of the world.”
As mentioned, Jensen views Jesus’ power as a moral authority—as opposed to his gifts of prophecy—as important, but, for this atheist, Jensen’s greater contribution is an intelligent, honest and critical examination of Jesus, and an understanding of the existential significance of his figure. It is true that we may be ethical figures whose moral stature is defined by deeds not inspired by Jesus, but Jensen convinces me that he provides a little guidance.

Posted by Marty at 2:49 PM

September 21, 2005

Thinking About Richard Brautigan

Sometime in September 1984 writer Richard Brautigan adopted Hemingway’s end-strategy and blew his brains out in his home. I say “sometime” because the writer had heavily bunkered down in his outback post in California—friends hadn’t seen him in ages, and police could only say, when they did discover his body, that the corpse had been there “for weeks”. Before his death though, the few friends he did have noted Richard’s taste for liquor and guns, and when his body was found, so too were hundreds of bullet holes in doors, walls and the ceiling. These were indeed strange times.
At the time of his suicide (he was 49-years-old) Brautigan was very far away from many things—after the success of his first novel, Trout Fishing in America (it sold 2 million copies), his later novels attracted little to no public or critical attention, and the last book published whilst he was alive, And So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away, sold just 15, 000 copies. Brautigan was also very far away from the hippie-milieu he was said to have led, at least literarily—he chastised the hippie-movement, and probably critics’ habit of including him as their chief.
His Beat badge also seemed redundant—the echoes he shared with Ginsberg and co. were light and superficial—a raffish life and rhapsodic prose, but he was very far from the experiments with acid and jazz and self and seemed content drinking strong liquor and living in the country. He was a romantic solipsist shooting at the moon, and he and his writing never appeared to grow up.

What Brautigan was is difficult to pin down, but very certainly he was an odd cousin to Kafka’s torture—the narrator/writer thwarted by the violent caprices of an absurd and unsympathetic world. In response, Brautigan attempted to anchor in childhood, populating his stories with the lush vibrancy of innocence, though his books are granted a menace by the understanding that the innocence is forever under threat.
Brautigan was always under threat from himself—from his gun-play, his depression, his alcoholism; traits that were constantly in battle with the whimsical word-play and obsessions with childhood that defined his books.
Poet and literary critic Lawrence Ferlinghetti said once that Brautigan could never be an important writer because he was naïf, naïve and had never grown up. This is true, but it is doubtful if Brautigan ever wanted to be anything but. He knew too much about his own demons, and seemed content, yet doomed, to live within his own worlds where innocence can be lost, but the worlds in which they exist are magical and precious.
For Brautigan, memory and imagination were important ladders out of his Kafkaesque gloom—but to keep writing he had to keep mining his own past, and it seemed that eventually the rent got too high.
No, Brautigan will never be an important writer, but we should read him for a few reasons—his skillful metaphor, his easy fusion of history and imagined memory, and as documentation of the strange experiment of trying to live within your own books.

Posted by Marty at 1:59 PM | Comments (4)

April 21, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson: The Dead Outlaw

It was a Monday when I heard news of Hunter Thompson’s suicide. He had ended it, like his hero Hemingway, with a shotgun blast, and so both writers died violently in their isolated mountain retreats. Both made the logical final step in their self-mythologising.
Hunter, like Hemingway, was a life pugilist — an aggressive iconoclast driven to conquer physical and mental rings. And he succeeded, for a while. His self-styled ‘gonzo’ journalism hurtled him to the front of the counter-cultural zeitgeist, from where he manned an unlikely career as renegade journalist. He was obsessed with the smoky world of Washington; it was an obsession that drove Hunter to explosive expressions of loathing, the tones coloured by drugs.
And the writing was genuinely funny, but some saw the Dorian Grey facade for what it was — a dynamic cartoon obscuring agonising levels of anxiety and mistrust, common symptoms of an encouraged misanthropy. Kurt Vonnegut noticed, and in his review of Thompson’s book, Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, wrote: ”… the disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease. I don’t have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don’t have Hunter Thompson’s disease”.
Devastatingly portentous, Vonnegut anticipated Thompson’s succumbing to his own disease 33-years-later.
Ashamedly, in being spectator to Thompson’s tireless levels of self-myth making, I was distracted from the poison in his veins — Thompson, the man, became inseparable from his grotesque and fantastical sketches of the American Condition. He was a super-freak, half-man, half-myth, a famous teller of tall tales about the Death of the American Dream. Now we suspect that the primal screams were real, of course they were real; we discover the humorous mimicry of insanity wasn’t playacting and his famous gun-play, like Hemingway’s, is now appallingly significant.

In 1964, then writing for the National Observer, a young Thompson set out for Ketchum, Idaho, to see for himself the death place of Hemingway. He wrote: ‘Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him - even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun’.
Thompson also wrote: ‘“Well,” said Hemingway, “there’s just one thing I live by and that’s having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out.” He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show his power of conviction survived the war.’
Thompson wrote his own epithet in this article, with its stresses on the power of conviction, and the trouble with losing it. Hunter had fed his myth well in the Sixties, and was symbiotically supported afterwards by a curious press. But it was also during this early period that Hunter was at his peak — writing intelligent reportage on unprecedented cultural marks such as the Black Panthers, the Hells Angels and Haight-Ashbury. Hunter had the correct ratio of photographic-eye/intelligence/wit and drug-laced adventurism that produced culturally instructive writing. When he was good, he was very, very good, but with a man like Hunter, this delicate ratio was unlikely to last. There’s good evidence that this ratio was ruined by growing levels of anxiety and undiminished drug use. Hunter’s writing faltered and arguably hasn’t asserted any relevance for two decades. His last published piece was a hyper-frenetic and unfunny dialogue with Bill Murray and his column writing for ESPN’s web-site were ghastly examples of unintentional self-parody.

I almost cried when I read Vonnegut’s review; for me it revealed my taking for granted of Hunter — my gullibility in swallowing his myth, which, for me anyhow, contained some vague sense that he was bullet proof. Of course, nobody is, especially someone as sensitive as Hunter, and so, for what he must have thought were the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

Posted by Marty at 10:49 AM