Sherry Chandler

Yesterday’s news

Sometimes when I am emotionally drained or intellectually exhausted from tedious work, I’ll pick up a random copy from my stack of old New Yorkers, leaf through them back to front, reading the cartoons and the poems and sometimes a few pages of an article that catches my eye. Sometimes the whole article.

These back issues are supplied me by a kindly friend. I have tried subscribing to The New Yorker but I feel too guilty when the issues pile up unread. All that great writing, going to waste. I have the same problem with Poetry. I guess I’m just not a magazine reader.

But there’s something soothing about reading yesterday’s news. It’s gone and it no longer has to cost us any anxiety (well, most of the time). Sometimes it’s even silly.

Like for example, this piece by Adam Gopnik in the issue for August 28, 2006, Read It and Weep. Do you remember when the White House used to issue George W. Bush’s reading lists to convince us that he was, in fact, a man of gravitas and not just wasting his summers fishing and skiving off? Sort of like all that brush cutting on his beloved ranch and trying to look Reaganesque. I don’t think he cut much brush this last summer.

Anyway, the reading lists were the silly part. The article was actually quite serious and engaging. It discusses Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which showed up on Bush’s reading list in the summer of 2006, and what Mr. Bush might have learned from it.

I read it just before going to sleep last night. Said Gopnik:

Camus, the President should be reminded, did not come by this wisdom cheaply or at a distance; he came by it from the center of modern history. As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking. The way out of Meursaultism [central character in The Stranger] is to think about particular people, proximate causes, and obtainable objectives—not an easy thing to do in any circumstance and nearly impossible in the face of those ideologies, left and right, for which, Camus writes, “fear is a method.”

And upon awakening this morning, I encountered this poem in my reading:

For the Unknown Enemy

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

— William Stafford, The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Greywolf, 1999)

When stuff comes together like this, I think I should maybe pay close attention.

George W. Bush is no longer in the White House, but there are still those who want to retain control and power over us through our fear of the other, that abstract enemy, that ideological apostate.

This has been my constant drumbeat here on this blog: if you let them make you afraid, you let them control you.

__________

Unfortunately, our government is still sending us the message that, if your crime is egregious enough and your power great enough, you never have to be held accountable.

As I was going up the stair –

Somewhere, somehow, in my wanderings around the web, I followed a link to this New Yorker News Desk post from Jane Mayer.

There is also a less famous observation by [Hannah] Arendt, made in The New York Review of Books in the wake of the protests of 1968 and shared with me by Georgetown Law professor David Luban, that captures the problem faced by the Obama Administration in its attempt to hold the right officials accountable. She calls it the “rule by Nobody.” Attorney General Eric Holder is stuck trying to investigate an entire bureaucracy. Those on the top can claim to have clean hands, while those on the bottom can claim they were following ostensibly legal orders. What’s left, Arendt suggests, is an all-powerful government that is beyond accountability.

The Arendt article in question, Reflections on Violence, was published in the New York Review of Books in 1968, and the quotation Mayer had in mind was this:

These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. It is this state of affairs which is among the most potent causes for the current world-wide rebellious unrest.

Intrigued, I went to read the whole article and discovered further disturbing thoughts on bureaucracy:

Finally, the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant. . . . Huge party machines have succeeded everywhere to overrule the voice of the citizens, even in countries where freedom of speech and association is still intact.

What it seems to me we have in this country this summer, with our town “hell” meetings and our tea party demonstrations, is a great frustration at government where nobody is, finally, responsible. What we have is institutions too big to fail, but faceless, so that no one can be held accountable to the ordinary citizen who loses his/her job or home. We have a healthcare system so complicated nobody understands it and plans to fix it that are so amorphous and ill-defined that tales of death-panels can thrive. We have a shadowy external enemy nobody can find, let alone fight, and a national security apparatus that, when it is not looking like a pack of Keystone Cops, has committed atrocities for which they claim there are no perpetrators. The buck stops nowhere.

For more on the out-of-control security apparatus, see Garry Wills “Entangled Giant.”

To continue Arendt:

What makes man a political being is his faculty to act. It enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises which would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift—to embark upon something new. All the properties of creativity ascribed to life in manifestations of violence and power actually belong to the faculty of action. And I think it can be shown that no other human ability has suffered to such an extent by the Progress of the modern age.

For progress, as we have come to understand it, means growth, the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger. The bigger a country becomes in population, in objects, and in possessions, the greater will be the need for administration and with it, the anonymous power of the administrators.

Sounds a lot like where we are now.

John Updike

John Updike would have been 77 today. I was never a fan. Updike wrote what I consider the essential New Yorker story from their William Shawn years and I sort of preferred some one like Truman Capote. Anyway, I thought Rabbit should just get over himself.

Of Updike the poet, The Poetry Foundation says:

An acclaimed and award-winning writer of fiction, essays, and reviews, John Updike has also been writing poetry for most of his life. . . . In an interview Updike stated, �I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form.� In his teens, he was already publishing poems in magazines.

In many ways, I think he may always have been a writer of light verse.

You’ll find a selection of Updike poetry, including a podcast or two, at the Poetry Foundation.

Shakespeare — Portraits

The Shakespeare portrait newly unveiled by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows us a man with a twinkle in his eye and a Mona Lisa smile just beginning to curve on his lips.

Methinks he would have been a jolly man with whom to quaff a glass of ale.

Certainly he looks lively and intelligent enough to have written his own works and he is handsome enough to have charmed a virgin queen.

Shakespeare has been showing up in my reading lately. Adam Gopnik — yes, I’ve been back at my stack of old New Yorkers — says

There�s another rhetorical style that runs like the Mississippi right down the middle of the mid-nineteenth-century American mind, shaping phrases and supervising thoughts, flowing as strong as the classical, the Biblical, and the lawyerly, and that is the Shakespearean. Lincoln�s love of Shakespeare is familiar, but is usually treated as a delightful character trait, like his fondness for ice cream or the comedy of Artemus Ward. But Lincoln�s taste in Shakespeare was narrow, significant, and almost obsessive. He didn�t love �A Midsummer Night�s Dream� and �As You Like It�; it was the histories and three of the tragedies that held him. In 1863, he repeatedly went to see �Henry IV� when James H. Hackett was playing Falstaff, with all the Falstaffian black comedy against conscription and the cult of honor. He took volumes of Shakespeare out of the Library of Congress; went to a Washington theatre to see the famous E. L. Davenport in �Hamlet�; attended private recitations of Shakespeare; sought out a production of �Othello�; watched Edwin Booth, John Wilkes�s brother, in �Richard III,� and the greatest American Shakespearean, Edwin Forrest, in �King Lear,� at Ford�s. Just five days before the assassination, on April 9, 1865, steaming up the Potomac in the Presidential yacht, he spent �several hours� reading aloud from Shakespeare to those on board. Reciting from his favorite plays was a weakness of his; on August 22, 1863, [his secretary] Hay records in his diary that he fell asleep at the Soldiers� Home while listening to Lincoln recite Shakespeare.

The idea of Abraham Lincoln boring the help with recitations of Shakespeare pleases me. But it was not Shakespeare of the Giaconda smile that Lincoln loved. Gopnik continues:

But even stranger and more striking is Lincoln�s identification or, at the very least, fascination with the figure of Claudius. In that same letter to Hackett, Lincoln insisted that Claudius�s soliloquy beginning �O, my offense is rank� was superior to any of Hamlet�s, and we know that he committed it to memory, and would recite it at length even to acquaintances�an artist who had come to paint his portrait, for instance. Lincoln�s evaluation was as unorthodox then as it is now. And what is the burden of Claudius�s speech? It is about guilt and ambition, and about the fraternal blood-dealing that that produces. As Kenneth Tynan has pointed out, Claudius�s tragedy is that he is clearly the most able man in Denmark, but he has got his throne through blood and cannot be free of the taint.

As it happens, we have just been watching the 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, in which Derek Jacobi plays the antic cherub and rolls his barrel basso provocatively over some of Shakespeare’s most delightful lines. Jacobi’s Hamlet is truly mad, and his scene-chewing rather overpowers Patrick Stewart’s quieter Claudius. A member of my household was also moved to giggles by the wig Stewart is wearing for the production. It does tend to reduce that great dome of skull to silliness.

Still, Claudius cannot be completely denied his moments. And Stewart is a masterful actor.

Just as an aside, before I go on to more serious matter, Lalla Ward, onetime Romana (the only woman Time Lord) to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, made an aggressive and affecting performance as Ophelia.

But here’s the speech in question, from Hamlet Act 3, Scene 3:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will.
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

On the road with The New Yorker

Every couple of years a dear friend sends me a box of old New Yorkers. I tend to pick one up when I’m feeling too blue to engage much with life. I browse through them from back to front. It’s the way I read most magazines, though I am not left handed. It may have something to do with the fact that most magazines put the arty stuff—book and movie reviews for example—near the back of the issue.

Sometimes I read a whole article, sometimes I start an article and lose interest maybe half the way through. I gave up, for example, on Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Jefferson Bottles” in the September 1, 2007 issue. I quit, not because the article was dull or badly written (of course it wasn’t) but because I found myself more and more thinking that anybody who paid more than $150,000 for any bottle of wine probably deserved what he got.

Conspicuous consumption doesn’t impress me too much.

In fact, I was a little disappointed to learn that Thomas Jefferson himself spent the modern day equivalent of $120,000 on wine while he was in France.

But at least he laid in a cellar for that amount.

I know, by the way, that a lot of this stuff is available on line, and I’ve provided links, but I do like holding the magazines in my hand and looking at the quirky little line drawings and pausing to read a cartoon or one of the poems.

Last night The New Yorker for October 1, 2007 was on top of the pile. I read Anthony Lane’s review of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” He didn’t like it much:

It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.

There’s a New Yorker sentence if ever I read one.

Then I read James Wood on Robert Alter’s translation of “The Book of Psalms.” Alas, even God bored me after a bit.

I said I was blue.

About halfway through Louis Menand on Jack Kerouac, I came across this passage:

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of �On the Road� today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It�s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When �On the Road� came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac�s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads �Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,� few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn�t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

Though I was only three years old when Kerouac took his famous road trip, I was a young woman before the first four-lane interstate highway (I-75) became a central factor in my life and I well remember a time when a trip to Lexington or Cincinnati involved fighting pretty much bumper to bumper traffic on old U.S. 25. A slow-mover could back cars up for miles and passing was sometimes a matter of taking your life in your hands.

This danger was not reduced by the fact that U.S. 25 was lined with road houses that, on a Saturday night, drew working class folk in from the dry counties for miles around.

On a perhaps more wholesome level, my columnist buddy Georgia Green Stamper recently wrote a piece about the major undertaking that was a childhood road trip from her Owen County home to the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. (If she’ll provide a link??).

I myself remember a trip from Owenton, Kentucky to Hollywood, Florida in a 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck with a homemade camper on the back made of a welded steel frame fitted with tent canvas. I remember seeing Chattanooga at night from the back door of the pickup and me and my Mom singing “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy.” I was eight.

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country��ramblin� round,� in the Guthrie song�following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank�s photographs in �The Americans,� taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac�s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders�the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father�is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man�s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost�beat. �There ain�t no flowers there,� says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. �I want to go to New York. I�m sick and tired of this. Ain�t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain�t nothin in Cheyenne.� �Ain�t nothin in New York,� Sal says. �Hell there ain�t,� she says. She wants to get in the car, too.

Was it like that? I don’t know. I partook but I was a bit too young to understand what was going on around me. I know that when we went to Florida, it was because my father had heard there was good work in the building boom down there and, though he got a good job as a crew foreman, I wasn’t allowed to enroll in school because I was a transient.

I didn’t feel the lack and I managed to pass second grade anyway. A classmate taught me how to carry when I got back to my home school.

I know that men came and lived with us and worked for my father for a time and then moved on.

So maybe I witnessed the tail-end of something.

Am I going to finish the article? I don’t know that either. Maybe. But maybe I don’t want to see my world reduced to something hip or beat. I read On the Road years ago. I wasn’t too impressed with it either.