Thank You Amherst Live and The Valley Advocate

Thanks to Oliver Broudy and Karen Skolfield of Amherst Live, producer/director Lucinda Kidder, and my wife Jenny, my poem received a dramatic recitation in front of an audience of about 300 and appears on the Amherst Live website. Thanks to James Heflin, winner of the Amherst Live poetry contest and managing editor of The Valley Advocate, my poem appears alongside his in the January 29th issue of The Advocate.

Einstein's Dreams

Alan Leitman writes Einstein’s Dreams as a series dreamed from mid-April to the end of June 1905. In each dream time works in some mysterious way in and around the neighborhoods of Berne and Fribourg. On June 2, the dream is of a world in which time moves backwards. We see the body of an old woman gradually come alive and gain vitality. She slowly forms relationships and grows younger. One day the body of her husband is brought in and they live together and everything is proceeding apace until the reader stumbles upon the following: “She sees her husband for the first time in the library of the university.”

   It seems to me she is seeing her husband for the last time. She sees him for the first time when his near-dead body is brought in from the hospital. Similarly Leitman shows an old man throwing dirt into a friend’s grave, looking forward to their many happy days of friendship ahead. I think I understand what Leitman is doing: showing people living life backward, but still experiencing life in ways people (readers) living in normal time can relate to.

   I know there’s no way of avoiding absurdities when doing this sort of thing, and Lietman walks a fine line, keeping it wistful and evocative. But he makes me want to conduct my own little thought experiment with this one.

   If time runs backwards people spontaneously gather at a graveside to witness an exhumation. Religious rites are conducted, the body is taken to a mortuary and given transfusions of body fluids. Eventually the corpse comes to life. Depending upon its initial conditions, in a matter of days, weeks, months or years the person attains a degree of health and intelligence. People grow “younger,” forget their knowledge, shrink, are one day forced into the womb of a young woman, and are never seen again.

Augusten Burroughs' "This Is How"

I didn't feel like I needed a self-help book, but I loved other books I read or listened to by Burroughs: Running with Scissors, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, and even A Wolf at the Table. I could see how experiences written about in those earlier books could lend themselves to this sort of project, and I expected it might lack the humor I especially enjoyed in Possible Side Effects and Magical Thinking, unless he found a way to work it in. I was curious enough to want to find out, so I gave it a shot --and I'm glad I did. The part about ending your live as opposed to committing suicide is riveting, as is the part about caring for a loved-one coping with disease. I find that he and I share similar beliefs about the difference between actual suffering and imagined or anticipated suffering. His discussion of alcoholism and how he dealt with it is also well worth looking into.

Long Live Gertrude Berg

Growing up in the 60's and 70's I never heard of Gertrude Berg. Her show was probably off the air before I was born. But thanks to JLTV and a CPTV documentary she and her stories live on.

Thoughts on Flem and Uriah after Reading Klosterman and Hearing Ward

An idea for an Essay:

I saw Jesmyn Ward on Book TV reading from Men We Reaped.  She was reading toward the end of the book, about the temptation to slash her wrists and the fear of doing it. Then she conceived a preventive measure: She tattooed her brother’s signature on each wrist because she’d never be able to cut through her brother’s writing. I didn’t think I ever heard of her before and thought I should have, so I Googled her up and read the New York Times review of her memoir.

There was a paragraph in it to the effect that her stories make clear how and why young black men in the South turn to drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and suicide, abusing their women because young black men are powerless everywhere but in the home –and I don’t like this kind of generalization, but the situation probably wasn’t much different for many of the young white men I grew up with: a sense of powerlessness, an inability to imagine a positive future. Hasn’t that always been the young man’s plight, to feel powerless? Maybe it’s the need to feel empowered at any cost before it’s time that’s the root of certain social ills. And that got me to thinking about some of the unhappy young men I’ve encountered in literature and the way their authors treat them, and the way I as a reader, and presumably other readers, have come to regard them.

I can almost understand why Uriah Heep does what he does in David Copperfield, why he feels powerless: He looks like some hideous alien life form. At least most young men, black or white, have friends. All Heep has is his mother. He’s in a situation that time isn’t likely to heal unless he resigns himself to the company of others like himself. But he’s in love with the boss’s daughter. Not a very promising mindset. He could numb his pain with drugs, alcohol or self-abuse, but he chooses theft instead. He feigns humility, inveigles his way into the trust of his alcoholic boss, and proceeds to embezzle the old man dry. From what I can see, Dickens has no more regard for Heep’s dreams of love, friendship and respectability than the cast of characters who find him out and bring him to bay. Copperfield himself repeatedly refers to Heep’s love for Agnes in terms that reveal it as something disgusting and inappropriate. Maybe it’s because Scrooge and Fagan are old sexless villains that we’re afforded at least a modicum of sympathy, but even Bill Sykes is allowed to help put out a fire and so earn a sliver of sympathy before falling to his death.

By the middle of the 20^th Century, things have not changed all that much. I wrote a paper in grad school arguing that Faulkner quietly subverts the reader into feeling sympathetic toward Flem Snopes in The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. I argued that Faulkner does this by showing Flem through everybody’s eyes but his own.  All the good citizens of Frenchman’s Bend, Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County have nothing but contempt for anything Snopes. And even Snopeses, the lowest of the low, are disdainful of their cousin Flem. Much of it might be jealousy. Flem achieves a level of financial success they can only dream about. Uriah Heep would be writhing in envy.

To the extent that I stand by my thesis with respect to Flem, I do so based on Faulkner’s presenting the Snopeses as part of a post-Civil War phenomena whereby white trash sharecroppers see the erstwhile superior middle class and Southern aristocracy brought down to a level where they can economically and socially rub elbows with them.  And isn’t it just too bad that Flem Snopes turns out to be a better businessman than any of them, shrewdly selling the loquacious Ratliff and all the yeoman yokels –who should certainly know better, horses they can’t even catch, let alone tame. And wouldn’t you know it, weep Uriah Heep, Flem actually marries the boss’s daughter, the Helen of Troy of the South.

I can just hear Dickens rolling over in his grave. Flem doesn’t love her, she's pregnant with someone else's kid, and Flem is nothing to Eula. He’s not revoltingly ugly like Uriah, but a plain-looking loner with zero libido, while she’s this doomed tragic goddess. At any rate it isn’t long before Flem’s running the county. Heep’s dream come true. But guess what: Flem’s as isolated as ever. Asocial and asexual, he sits alone in his mansion waiting for his crazy cousin to come end the monotony.

 So how different are Flem and Uriah? Phlegmatic Flem is never fawning.  He has no need of humbling himself before his betters; to him the only thing that makes them better is money. Bloodline and social grace are irrelevant, like the old plantation system.  But this doesn’t give him an advantage. The only advantage he has is that he does it all himself. Heep’s big mistake is thinking he can hire someone to do his dirty work: the luckless Micawber, who turns him in. I recollect no such hireling in the Snopes trilogy. And yet one comes away from these novels with the distinct sense that one reason Snopes succeeds is that Faulkner wants him to. This is the story Faulkner wants to tell. And while he may not be interested in garnering sympathy for this devil, he does grant him a certain amount of personal dignity. He leaves the door open for readers who are so inclined to see Flem as universally maligned, not for being criminal, but for being socially isolated, inept and indifferent, for playing by the regulations of free market capital and nothing else. There may not be much going on in Flem’s mind beyond financial calculation, but he’s harmless as a villain. His victims are mostly victims of their own greed.  

So what does this have to do with social ills fostered by the socio-economic impotence of youth? Maybe this is something Chuck Klosterman can sort out in some future edition of I Wear the Black Hat. He does an interesting job in that book exploring how and why we see some malefactors as evil and others as folk heroes. Neither Flem nor Uriah drinks or beats women and children. Still, suck-ups and loners make us uncomfortable. We might say we understand what motivates them, but not as much as we understand what drives young people to abuse themselves and their spouses, because these latter behaviors are the crimes and bad habits of passion, driven by frustrated blood and emotion, the sort of behaviors so many of us, though we may be happy to forget it, engaged in back in the good old days when we ourselves were young. 

On the Road

I remember feeling impatient and disappointed reading the book many years ago. It didn't seem to live up to its reputation. Last week I rented the recent film version, which played in our local art-movie house for about a week. It seemed a bit slow in spots, but the acting, cinematography and music were excellent. A great story about crazy friendship and being young. Made me want to revisit the book.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

A collection of essays of uncompromising intellectual clarity and honesty. I listened to the audio, then bought myself a hard copy --it was so good I couldn't believe my ears.