Month: May 2023

When the Victorians read Dickens they read for plot and confirmation–they could see their world. When we read Dickens we still read for plot but less for confirmation as we think we are superior to his characters. This is a great mistake. Dickensian sins are fully our own though we’ve one extra: post-modern irony.

I’m thinking of pastiche as Frederic Jameson would say: irony that references itself. Most often it’s mediated consciousness draped with the status conferred by consumer fetishism. Dickens characters were vain or greedy but never so self absorbed they fell into anhedonia.

Most days I read like a Victorian who wants plot and confirmation but also a bit of compassion. I’m also an admirer of Cardinal Newman’s dictum: “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

I’m old fashioned that way.

Of Newman I also like: “Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.”

**

Dear Charles: you pushed your wife into the asylum when you were done with her. You rooted for the American Confederacy. You were silly. You thought Anton Mesmer was on to something.

Dear Kuusisto: and who are you? (Reader, does he get to answer? Does anyone get to answer?)

He tries: “I was half destroyed by war movies. They tried to brain wash me into thinking the good guys always won. I’d no idea that beneath Roy Rogers’ horse was the blood of indigenous people. Man was I tricked. And you can’t get your money back!”

OK. You’ve said who you aren’t but nothing more.

He tries: “I’m a human consciousness growth project lacking some essential vitamins.”

That’s better.

I seldom write about pop culture. I’m a real snob. I think Verdi’s greatest opera is “Don Carlo” and not “La Traviata.” But sometimes I have to stagger out of my Cave of Making and wave a flaming broom.

I think “Succession” is the worst television program in history. The writing is sub-Cartesian—“I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist.” If you have any self respect you should listen to “Don Carlo.”

In fact HBO hasn’t made a good series since “Boardwalk Empire.”

Why should you care what I think? Because I’m a blind writer who has no patience for lousy writing and stage settings that are nothing more than visual porn—which is why I think everything Julian Fellows does is junk. If you don a blindfold and listen to “Downton Abby” you’ll know.

“Succession” is just an explosion in an adderall factory. So why is it so popular? Well for one thing it dramatizes a chief tenet of Christopher Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”—

“For all his inner suffering, the narcissist has many traits that make for success in bureaucratic institutions, which put premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments, and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

That’s the best summary of “Succession” you’ll find.

A good poet said “the age of the great symphonies is over now” and he imagined the once played notes coming down as rain. It was a good line, written after the second world war. Despair can convince us of things that are wholly wrong. But what if we say “the age of the great symphonies is just beginning now”? What happens when we not only embrace the future but invite it into our souls? I heard all kinds of music this morning walking in my John Cage bird filled neighborhood. What happens now? What happens? This is more than a fanciful question. It’s a moral imperative in disguise.

Deep in the night and half awake I hear apple branches sway in a light breeze. What a good life. I think of Shakespeare toasting his actors in the Anchor pub where I too have toasted others. What a good life. I get up early and walk in a gentle rain. Laugh. Think of Hegel. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.” A good life. And how good my shoes feel. Hegel: “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.” These blank page sneakers. A good life. Water in a cup.

So I’ve now broken a cheap thing,
A plastic corkscrew—nothing to fret about—
But I’m sorry for it, like Paracelsus
Who apologized to lead.
The morning spreads out like a cloak.
My friend “M” has been dead one year.
I’m finding no book can amuse me.
I don’t like the telephone.

What is this? I want to cry
Like a child at the movies.
I don’t know my neighbors names.
I haven’t visited my parents graves
For a decade and like a boy
I wonder if they know.
They must, if god flows
Through the small things
Though I’m close to seventy
And suspect I’ve grown simple.
See my eyes welling up
At cracked plastic
As the windows darken.

Back in the day I put my face against the radio and it was warm. My eyes felt good there, pressed to the Bakelite cabinet. Tchaikovsky, “Swan Lake” and my aching face were relieved by tubes and magnets. Adults thought I had a small life, being a cripple, hugging the Philco. True life is a private business like dowsing for water. I had hot birds in my eyes.