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| Not a Chinook! | caption |
100 Marines have been deployed to Baghdad, to the U.S. embassy there, transported in Chinook* helicopters, not the safest mode of transportation on the planet. I don't know what this troop movement portends anymore than what this new year will bring. I wonder if I am more preoccupied with death this New Year's Eve, or not. I suppose I am. Saturday was my 77th Birthday. I didn't use it as a time to look back on my life, since I do that all the time. In fact I could say, I almost must say, that my life is about being pre-occupied with the ridiculous paralysis concerning my attempt to write about those last few years of the 1960s, when I was 25, 26, 27 years old. It is a shameful preoccupation I know, but I'm just one old man among billions, waiting for the end, as someone once said. Who was it? Was it Morris Dickstein? Can't remember. Should I stop here and Google it? Yeah, why not. This is just between you and me after all.
There it is. Dickstein's book, the one I'm referring to here, was The Gates of Eden, which was about the sixties, not just Lit. but the culture. Fiedler's was Waiting for the End, about the fifties. I read both books, during the appropriate decades, but insufficiently armed with the appropriate literary erudition.
Nevertheless, I soldier on. I get a certain libidinal satisfaction in knowing that the population in which I tread water is made up of mostly human beings who seem to have somehow either missed, or blocked, or have not ever been exposed to The Twentieth Century. The Dominant Culture has deemed it so. Ole Twenty C. was just too bloody, too racist, too Jim Crow, too capitalistic, too sexist. That is why Michelle Obama is so popular. She is the Queen of Historical Revisionism.
Somewhere in the above I will trust you to figure out how I have sublimated the aforesaid problem into a happy life of brow-beating who ever will listen to the glory of looking back on that 100 year period, which incorporated the beautuful rumble of the V-8 Ford, the Wright Brothers, The Saturday Evening Post, (which, granted, was already old in 1900,) Look Magazine, Radio, (Amos and Andy, Gabriel Heater), Television, (The Hit Parade, American Bandstand, Omnibus), Communism, Fascism, Stalin, Mao, Two World Wars, and most important of all, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss!
How I approach December: Back in my drinking days, I considered the week between Christmas and The New Year, with my birthday in the middle, December 28th, to be a time when I could drink more or less guilt free. I treasured getting a "Birthday Drink", a free bottle of beer, at Sam's in East Hampton.
Although those days are long gone, this past having been my 46th sober birthday, I still consider it kind of vacation week. This end-of-December I finished up reading Carl Rollyson's bio of Rebecca West, and, at Carl's suggestion, read her The Birds Fall Down. I read Birds obsessively, all the while thinking of Tom Wolfe's famous war with America's deep-think novelists. I wish I had had a chance to talk to Wolfe about that. To me I always think he is pulling our leg; that he isn't really that conservative. I'm conservative, but I don't throw the baby out, I just add criticism to the various sub-sects of the Left. Ya know what-I-mean?
Needless to say, Tom was important to me, but so is Rebecca. And everything she wrote, except for some of her shorter newspaper columns, was Think Piece. Birds is a re-worked novel, a version of it is part of her Trilogy....., and in some ways it is a distillation of her philosophy of Western Man, (not Western Woman), which permeates Black Lamb Grey Falcon. The Rollyson book is purely a literary biography, as he makes clear in his bio, so I was able to reference his discussion of Birds while reading it. This is how I spent December, up and through my illustrious birthday, almost four days ago.
*This was a mistake but it was a mistake in the press, wherever I read it, so I'm just noting it. Pictures appear to show that they were transported by Ospreys. Hope they've gotten the kinks out of those suckers after all the years of trouble they had with them.
Nevertheless, I soldier on. I get a certain libidinal satisfaction in knowing that the population in which I tread water is made up of mostly human beings who seem to have somehow either missed, or blocked, or have not ever been exposed to The Twentieth Century. The Dominant Culture has deemed it so. Ole Twenty C. was just too bloody, too racist, too Jim Crow, too capitalistic, too sexist. That is why Michelle Obama is so popular. She is the Queen of Historical Revisionism.
Somewhere in the above I will trust you to figure out how I have sublimated the aforesaid problem into a happy life of brow-beating who ever will listen to the glory of looking back on that 100 year period, which incorporated the beautuful rumble of the V-8 Ford, the Wright Brothers, The Saturday Evening Post, (which, granted, was already old in 1900,) Look Magazine, Radio, (Amos and Andy, Gabriel Heater), Television, (The Hit Parade, American Bandstand, Omnibus), Communism, Fascism, Stalin, Mao, Two World Wars, and most important of all, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss!
How I approach December: Back in my drinking days, I considered the week between Christmas and The New Year, with my birthday in the middle, December 28th, to be a time when I could drink more or less guilt free. I treasured getting a "Birthday Drink", a free bottle of beer, at Sam's in East Hampton.
Although those days are long gone, this past having been my 46th sober birthday, I still consider it kind of vacation week. This end-of-December I finished up reading Carl Rollyson's bio of Rebecca West, and, at Carl's suggestion, read her The Birds Fall Down. I read Birds obsessively, all the while thinking of Tom Wolfe's famous war with America's deep-think novelists. I wish I had had a chance to talk to Wolfe about that. To me I always think he is pulling our leg; that he isn't really that conservative. I'm conservative, but I don't throw the baby out, I just add criticism to the various sub-sects of the Left. Ya know what-I-mean?
Needless to say, Tom was important to me, but so is Rebecca. And everything she wrote, except for some of her shorter newspaper columns, was Think Piece. Birds is a re-worked novel, a version of it is part of her Trilogy....., and in some ways it is a distillation of her philosophy of Western Man, (not Western Woman), which permeates Black Lamb Grey Falcon. The Rollyson book is purely a literary biography, as he makes clear in his bio, so I was able to reference his discussion of Birds while reading it. This is how I spent December, up and through my illustrious birthday, almost four days ago.
*This was a mistake but it was a mistake in the press, wherever I read it, so I'm just noting it. Pictures appear to show that they were transported by Ospreys. Hope they've gotten the kinks out of those suckers after all the years of trouble they had with them.
