A Theory of Distribution

The relationship of clumps* to the reality of probabilities was the subject on a car trip from Florida to Kentucky. Clumps are a significant part of reality, and a clump is contained in a probability. As in, “Based on a study of 500 college students, it was found that 23.4 percent preferred real cigarettes to Vaping..”  Now that is just a fictitious example, but I’m sure we can all agree that probabilities are everywhere, from dietary recommendations, to politics.  Which candidate is the good guy for those of us who fear Global Warning, or Mercury in our fish? But here’s the clump angle. Suppose your statistical sample just happened to have a clump in it. A clump of smokers or fish eaters or Democrats who hate fat people. You see what I mean. A statistical sample is most likely a limited grouping of a much larger grouping. 
  Suppose for instance that I wanted to find out what percentage of Second Graders, on average, had been victims of child abuse. I could narrow the statistical grouping down to, between 1980 and 1985.  And I could narrow it down to public schools in the state of Wisconsin.  But how do I know that 1980 didn’t produce a clump of kids in Wisconsin who were abused for no other reason then that probabilities are a crap game? What is the law of probabilities after all other than the Universe’s version of a Random Number Generating Machine?

Clump. A clump of dirt. A bunch of stuff all bunched up. Well, a clump is tighter than a bunch. And it would have to be Bunched-up-ness because I’m looking for a thing. A Noun. 
I may have to invent my own new term.  Hmm.  A T.S.G.?  A tightly structured grouping? I’ll think on it. But, in the meantime. Here’s how I got to worrying this labeling to death. 

My wife and I were driving along the highway. We were going from New York to Kentucky, and she was driving because she likes to be in control, and she began musing about how the cars and trucks seem to gather in clumps, which slows down her speed-controlled cruising at 85mph. 
  Which led me to start thinking about clumps. So many things can be clumps. Galactic star forming regions are clumps… An iceberg can be a clump, and so can something that’s less a tightly structured grouping such as vegetable soup. With the soup it’s more contextual. I mean it’s loosely structured so in order to be a clump it would have to have containment. Therefore a soup is a loose clump. 
   Also, people; say, cops on the order of Officer Finnegan; (Catholic, Democrat, beer drinker, type O blood); or, belief systems, (which could break down into a clump of sub-systems), as in Marxist, Unitarian, Vegetarian, Astrologer, together or apart; pick one or reassemble.   
   To keep it simple though; lets assume that a tree is not a clump. It’s a bunch of cells that are interwoven, re-enforced, stuck, contained, could be a clump but that’s stretching it.  A tree is an organism.  Like a cell.  

To jump from vegetable to animal, a flock of ducks, by any other name, could be, I suppose, roughly considered a clump. Maybe more-so if they are not flying, but bobbing up and down in the water in close proximity of each other; but there are other better terms for those, such as brace, flock, raft, or you name it. Or how about lying inert, in a pile, having been shot by a hunter. A pile is a clump.  

Am I thinking more of a clot?  Like a blood clot? A blood clot is a very complicated thing. It involves something called the clotting cascade, which entails a knowledge of Organic Chemistry, a field way above most of our pay grades, I am assuming. 
  There is though, as you might expect, a place you can go to in cyberspace called Clotting For Dummies, which explains it thusly, and I’m not quoting directly;

Blood lives in a circulatory system, and clever stuff that it is, when there is a leak in said system, said system and surrounding systems put into affect a series of events designed for this emergency.  First, there is a conscious freakout, then a constriction of the blood vessels happens, which prompts our little platelets, whatever they are, to stick to the collagen fibers that are part of the walls of the vessels. Eventually they form a platelet plug, similar to what happens when you put oatmeal in the radiator of your old jalopy, assuming you’re old enough to remember what those are. The plug is just the beginning. When it accomplishes its mission, it triggers a chain of events that cause a clot. All these activities are catalyzed by enzymes called clotting factors, of which there are twelve. Twelve is a lot, and that’s why it’s called a cascade, and why there is a mnemonic to help medical students to remember all those chemicals; something similar to Every Good Boy Does Fine, which is for piano lessons, but that’s another story. Basically, as those of us who weren’t pre-med put it, the coagulation phase involves a series of enzyme activations that lead to the conversion of prothrombin to thrombin. Calcium is required for this reaction, which is why you must eat your cheeseburger; or at least some chicken bones. 
  Thrombin then “acts as an enzyme and causes fibrinogen, one of the two major plasma proteins, to form long fibrin threads." Fibrin threads entwine the platelet plug forming a mesh-like framework for a clot. Here I should quote; 
 

“The framework traps red blood cells that flow toward it, forming a clot. Because red blood cells are tangled in the mesh-work, clots appear to be red. As the red blood cells trapped on the outside dry out, the color turns a brownish red, and a scab forms.”*  So there you have it. Scabs. 

Which leads us to heap. “Heap much trouble, Kimo-sabe", as the Lone Ranger's trusty companion Tonto once said. (I bring up heap just to show that there is a reality after clumps.) A heap can be something that can easily be disseminated, or scattered, as in a heap of straw, or a heap of dust, or it can be a heap of mud or even something more noxious, any of various forms of sludge. 

 

An old heap is a car that is stuck together, but is it a clump?  Perhaps it is too complex for a clump, to many organized parts?  I would say that if you add diversified to those parts you could separate it from the complex organic thing called wholism; mud-flaps and fuzzy dice aren't necessarily part of any known whole. 

 
So I’ve established that clumps are accidental, but not accidental, which leads to paradox. They are random in a probability sense, but not without meanings and causes. Causes like stickiness, morphic resonance, environmental pressures such as weather, and a host influences of,  I might suggest, an infinite number. So let me proceed to the important question, which is how do clumps affect the subject at hand? (Our selfish selves.)
 

Here’s how. From the time we are born, [make that conceived], we are subject to clumping. Our parents belong to a social clump.  Sometimes they reproduce enough, six children say, or eight, ten or twelve, more common to be sure in the olden days, but it still happens, and when we go to school, if we are three close-in-age children from one family, we are a family clump in a larger clump known as a grade, which more often than not is the same one that we follow through time for the next eight to twelve years, after which we may go on to another set of clumpings, called College.

 

Which brings us to the late Prof. Williams:

 

“When one accepts the idea of biochemical individuality, he sees how this can be.  [In this case the diversity of clumpiness.] Getting a clear picture of the clotting mechanism in man would be like getting a clear picture of the branching of arteries from the aortic arch in man. It cannot be done. It should be possible to get a clear picture of the mechanism and the various factors that enter into the coagulation of my blood and of yours, but when one tries to include all human bloods, the picture gets confused. The blood chemistries of individuals vary - not just in trifling ways - enough  to make a picture which is accurate for one individual inaccurate for another.   

 

"The clotting of blood is, of course, intimately concerned with coronary heart attacks and also with “'strokes'” because in each case unwanted clotting causes stoppage of blood vessels. What Dr. T.P. Bond of the Medical School at Galveston found and published recently [sic.] is that exercise affects the clotting mechanisms of individuals un-uniformly. In some individuals exercise may cause the release into the blood of factors which make the blood clot less readily, whereas in others, exercise causes the release of clot-promoting factors. If these observations hold up, exercise should be discouraged in those whose blood clots more readily as a result of it, whereas exercise should be encouraged in those whose blood clots less readily as a result of the exertion. So doctors on both sides of the fence may be right - in appropriate cases. 
  "My intuition tells me that the situation will not prove quite this simple, but it also tells me most emphatically that the relationships between exercise and blood clotting will never clear up as long as the scientists who investigate the problem adhere tenaciously to the uniformity idea.” *

*  You Are Extraordinary; by Roger J. Williams, Random House, N.Y., 1967. 

*  Previously published in Dispatches,  

c.  Tonyprohaska@comcast.net 
                                         




 

Dancing with Greenberg

It was my reaction to a mixture of that wine of the country, booze, with sex, drugs and rock and roll, that put an end to my participation in the Popular Culture. In my post-pop life I was reborn into something along the lines of a hermit, so I have become over the years more and more dependent on what writers have had to say. Let me start off by quoting Griel Marcus; the opening sentence of his book Lipstick Traces; (concerning where we are),  "The question is too big to tackle now - it has to be put aside, left to find its own shape." That being said, let us now root among the debris field:

I started out in life with a very clear idea of what culture was. It was something my parents intended to leave behind when they had me, which coincided to their moving from the city to the country. Those same parents didn't hide their disdain for those members of the human race that they saw as inferior; they even had their own slang term, "magimper", which they threw around quite a bit. I was told not to be magimper, which meant in those days things like long greasy hair, taps on your shoes, watching Milton Berle and a number of other somewhat taboo associations. I recognized it, I'm pretty sure, as just a form of upwardly mobile snobbery that had it's own unique spin in my nuclear family.

It was the 1950s, and my father did illustrations for the fiction writing in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and other rags. (Rag was a somewhat affectionate term that magazine people used to describe the places in which they worked.) He also, on his own dime, painted "easel paintings", which were semi-abstract leaning toward abstract. I've discussed this situation in that oft mentioned book of mine, which I will hereafter refer to as T.W.F.  [ Not to be confused with WTF. ]
  The "situation", which I discussed in the book, had to do with the fact that "the country", after the tragic death of an artist, Jackson Pollock, had morphed into a cultural hot-spot. That was nearly three quarters of a century ago, and it hasn't stopped being a hot spot since, though the term culture has done some evolving, not to say twists and turns.  

Culture, it turns out, is real. It has many definitions, [more every day], but it had a more specific and definable usage mid-twentieth century than it does now. I suppose, (when push comes to shove), that part of the reason for the diffusion of meaning has had to do with Deconstruction, which for purposes of getting my point across I'll try to avoid in this post, for not the least of which reasons being, lack of credentials. Now, lack of credentials would have disqualified me from even having this blog I'm sure, sixty years ago, but we are now at a critical place in history; we are about to have the first Presidential Election to decide whether or not to elect the Boshevik Revolution. 

Let me take us back half-a-century to a time and place where the culture of its time was stretching its limbs. It was the early sixties, 1961 in fact; I was just old enough to drink in New York State, and I was banging down the Rum and Cokes at a, well, the proletariat in those days referred to it as a "colored place", The Cottage Inn, in East Hampton, NY. It was also what my parents called A Fried Chicken Joint, where elegant black waitresses served beautifully prepared and delicious fried chicken-in-a-basket to blacks, whites, locals and preppy summer people.  And it had the best Juke Box on Eastern Long Island.  

  The house band was The Kingsmen, led by Skip Boone, former guitar player for cross-over country star Johnny Tillotson, with a rhythm guitar, a drummer, a base, a well known black saxophone player named King Charles and a couple of competitive male "lead" singers both of whom wanted to be stars. 

  A bunch of wanna-be hip local kids including myself were regulars, along with the regular black customers and a handful of the arty crowd, including the deKooning entourage, art critic Clement Greenberg, a few others, (Cinematographer Joe Coffey and his wife); some whose names I've forgotten, and a few art-world hangers on.

I was learning how to "get my gauge on", something for which I'd taken the council of an old black man with whom I had peeled potatoes during a part-time job in the kitchen of a local restaurant. What that entails is drinking enough to get a good buzz on and then working to prolong the buzz indefinitely through controlling the alcohol intake, moderate exercise, (dancing), stimulants, (in this case the caffeine in the Rum and Coke), a toke of pot outside during the band's break, and as the months and years went by, the increased use of other chemicals. Once you got your gauge on that's all you ever needed.      

  On the night in question, almost any night really, I was working my gauge, and Greenberg* was working his, we both dancing by ourselves, as were a few cool looking black men and women, and on occasion I would find myself close to "Clem", as I now deign to call him, never having really known him, but having developed a nodding acquaintance, and we would both adopt the dancing-by-yourself-in-a-shuffle cool look.  

      

It was many years later that I read Art Czar, The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, by Alice Goldfarb Marquis, feeling that I had to get to know this guy who by now had become a critical part of the cultural history of the U.S. in mid-Twentieth Century, and was lately, now that he was dead, being batted around by friend and foe. 


Born in 1909 in The Bronx, to Lithuanian Jewish parents who as young adults had immigrated to the U.S. from Northern Poland, at the beginning of WW1 his father moved the family to Norfolk Va., where he joined an older brother in a growing women's wear business. In that thriving military town, the business grew rapidly into a chain of five stores called The O.K. Brother's Outfitters.  After The War they moved back to NYC where the father diversified into Real Estate and metal products.

As a boy, Greenberg's parents considered him an artistic prodigy. He drew well. Before he was sixteen he was taking classes at The Art Student's League. When his mother died in 1925 his father pulled him out of Erasmus Hall High School and sent him to Marquand School for Boys, a new YMCA school in Downtown Brooklyn. A tough school, he did well and was well prepared when he went to Syracuse University where he majored and excelled in English. In summers he worked in entry level jobs in one or another of his father's businesses. He Graduated from Syracuse in 1930, cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He had made few friends at Syracuse, but one, Harold Lazarus, would become his life-long letter writing correspondent.  

The summer he graduated he luxuriated at his father's new home on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. During this lazy after college break he was in fact broadening his education by studying Latin, Italian, and French, and dreaming big dreams. He began to hunger for writing fame. In Marquis's book she quotes the following from one of his letters to Harold, "I want fame, then I'll have money, then I'll take my father out to a swell dinner and introduce him to swell blondes, then I'll sleep till three o'clock instead of noon, till next January even."

After a lazy summer spent reading he took a writing job at the Brooklyn Eagle writing "piece news", which meant being paid by the column inch. He was lucky to make $12.00 a week. He milked his stay on Ocean Parkway for a couple of years before his father sent him off to St. Louis to work selling neckties at one of his stores. Though he worked conscientiously managing the store, and wasn't suffering, in his letters to Harold he complained like a frustrated writer. After a few months his father shifted him to Cleveland and then to San Francisco. In San Francisco, he began to drink, "out of loneliness", he told Harold.

Then he met his first wife, Toady. She was gentile, a Stanford Graduate, pretty, five foot two, blond, divorced, sexually experienced, and he fell in love and became jealous and possessive and conflicted. He felt tied down. He was in love, though. So they got married, spent a short honeymoon at Yosemite park, and moved into an apartment in a nice neighborhood on Taylor St.
   But within weeks the bloom was off the rose. He'd had enough of her shallowness and her Wasp friends and their shallowness. He didn't like them, and he didn't like the film industry Jews, so he hated L.A. (They'd moved in with her mother.) Toady was pregnant when he bailed. From what we know through his letters to Harold though, he knew he was immature and that he wasn't ready to settle down, he took love seriously and considered the child as conceived out of love. The boy was named Daniel and called Buster and as far as we know both parents remained committed to the child.       

Back in New York, again ensconced in the Ocean Parkway house, he began to explore Greenwich Village, and, not wanting to mooch off his father too much, and therefore feeling the financial pinch, he eventually took a series of government jobs. He also began riding horseback in Prospect Park, something he continued for many years, and which he told Harold cleared his mind and relaxed him. The first Government job was processing simple papers for $30. a week. (He also began doing some translating, including a German Novel for which he got $220.)

By 1937, moving into intellectual circles through his forays into The Village, he had met Harold Rosenberg, who introduced him to the Partisan Review staff. He became aware of the new growing Trotskyite faction, influenced by the break between the Review and the Communist Party. In 1938, he finally moved out of Ocean Parkway, first to a room on 18th St, and then to Minetta Lane in the heart of The Village.
 
Concerning Rosenberg, this quote from Marquis:  

 
"In January 1933, Rosenberg and a partner, H.R. Hays, published the New Act, a little magazine that lasted for three sporadic issues before expiring in April 1934. The first contained an article by Rosenberg on class-consciousness and literature, as well as several poems and book reviews, most significant was an essay attacking the esteemed American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks* for his decades-long crusade to establish a literature redolent of American values, writings more Emersonian, more Whitmanesque, than what he termed the decadence of Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. The essay in the New Act foreshadowed many blows that would topple Brooks from the cultural summit to irrelevance." 

 

 

Brooks was one of the more "square" authors who wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, with which my father was identified because of his frequent illustrations, from the late 1930s on. The Post, eventually was branded Kitsch, about which more later. Both Rosenberg and Hays lived in East Hampton and were friends with my parents; especially Hays* and his wife Julie, with whom my parents were close. Through Julie, who supplemented her husband's writing income by selling and renting real estate, my parents were kept abreast of both small town and art world gossip.  

Before leaving for D.C. in 1938 to begin a job at the W.P.A., Rosenberg had introduced Greenberg to Lionel Abel, who, according to Marquis had already,  "...found some success as a playwright and theater critic, and who could have been Greenberg's early guide to the intricacies of dialectical materialism. Greenberg lingered on the fringes of this group.....less in search of ideology than a few drinks, a good time, and if lucky, a willing sexual partner."  Before long, a young Mary McCarthy was one of his frequent dates.

For "date", read cocktail party, for which the Partisan Review crowd were famous. David Laskin, in his book Partisans does a great job of depicting just how important those parties were to the intellectual ferment. (Until The Britannica Encyclopedia on World Alcoholism comes out, Laskin's take will be Numero Uno on my list under the category, Intellectuals, Twentieth Century U.S.A.).  Here is Laskin on the group's drinking and it's favorite sport. 

 

"In solitude they wielded such power as they possessed by writing; in company, especially at their never-ending cocktail parties, they brandished their power by gossiping. All close-knit, self-aware communities gossip - but this crowd raised it to an art form, "'a sub-literary genre,'" as Philip Rahv, [ who Mary McCarthy referred to as a Grand Master], ...of which fancy is only a small ingredient garnishing a piece of truth."

 
 

Laskin goes on to quote Jean Stafford in her story Children are Bored on Sunday, saying that Stafford anatomizes the P.R. cocktail party gossip ritual with almost anthropological detachment; 

 

"These cocktail parties were a modus vivendi in themselves for which a new philosophy, a new ethic, and a new etiquette had had to be devised. They were neither work nor play, and yet they were not at all beside the point but were, on the contrary, quite indispensable to the spiritual life of the artists who went to them.  ....The gossip was different, for one thing, because it was stylized, creative (integrating the whole of the garrotted, absent friend), and all its details were precise and all its conceits were Jamesian, and all its practitioners sorrowfully saw themselves in the roll of Pontius Pilate, that hero of  the untoward conscience."

 

 

Laskin's look at P.R. boozing goes on for another page which is in the introduction to his book, p. 29, 30, and is well worth perusing. I read this book some years back and am not going to go through it start to finish again right now, but perhaps soon. This is a group that is so much fun to spy on.

 

 If I can go afield here for a moment...to connect some dots, or, to be more precise, chains of relationship, while becoming more comfortable around this group of well educated writer intellectuals, Greenberg also hadn't given up his artistic interest and was taking a life drawing class with the artist Igor Pantukhov, where he met Lee Krasner, through whose encouragement he attended Hans Hoffman's lectures. I was disappointed that Marquis doesn't have much to say about Greenberg's meeting of Krasner because I've always considered her one of the smartest and sexiest women, [read; people], in the art world. If I could have been an angel sitting on his shoulder during that meeting I would have told him to take a deep breath and thank God. Perhaps he did.  

While he had been aiming in the direction of literary criticism, for which he felt qualified even among this high powered bunch, he began to think more about painting, and the broader spectrum of aesthetic criticism.

As Marquis makes clear, NYC in the mid-1930s was a Communist-friendly place. There were two Communists on the City Council and Communists were packing the Labor Unions. But the Moscow Trials were a wet blanket on that enthusiasm and many New Yorkers had lately switched their allegiance from Moscow to Trotsky, who was by then in hiding in Mexico City.*  The new team at PR were pretty much on the bus with Trotsky.


The Partisan Review had been started in 1934 by the Communist party, and  edited by Phillip Rahv and William Phillips. The two suspended publication in 1936 due to dissatisfaction toward the party on the part of the two editors and the Review's readership in general. When they started up again in 1937 they had added Dwight Macdonald and F.W. Dupee as editors, and soon after, Clem Greenberg. 
   A 1928 graduate, Dwight Macdonald had gone directly from Yale to Time Magazine where he began to work on the planning of Luce's new magazine Fortune. At first he thrived at Fortune though it challanged his growing leftist sensibility. On the side, with his Yale friends G.L.K. Morris and Fred Dupee, he started a little magazine, Miscellany.  Henry Luce didn't like it. Before too long, Dwight and Henry parted company.  

As "the MacDonald's", (he married Nancy in 1934) they had migrated leftward, and were befriended by the P.R. crowd, who were impressed by Dwight's career at Fortune and his contribution to Miscellany and the possibility that his being gentile might help P.R. to break into that faction of the left, as well as the fact that Nancy appeared to have some money, and they had some rich friends. One of those friends was Dwight's Miscellany partner George Morris. 
  Morris, who eventually became known as both a painter and a writer, was wealthy. His paternal grandparents were Augustus Newbold Morris and Eleanor Colford Jones, His Grandmother Jones's parents were General James I. Jones, and Elizabeth, (nee Schermerhorn)* Jones, the older sister of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, also known as "The Mrs. Astor."
  Morris had founded Abstract American Artists in 1936 after seeing that MOMA* had taken an interest in European artists such as Mondrian. The Newspaper of Record though, (The NY Times), in the voice of it's art critic Edward Alden Jewell, seemed to give the American abstract artists short shrift, that is until some serious money began to back it, in the name of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who, in 1937, announced the creation of a foundation to promote modern painting. 

  According to Marquis, Guggenheim had acquired a mistress, Baroness Hilla Rebay, (b. 1890), who was a German aristocrat and a serious modern painter who had studied at the Cologne Kunstegewerbeschule in 1908-9 and at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1909 to 1910. By the time she immigrated to the United States in 1927 and settled in NYC, she had become known and respected among the modernist and non-objective artists in France and Germany.  In New York she became known as an art collector and met and became an advisor to Guggenheim.  Wikipedia says that, "In particular she encouraged him to purchase non-objective art by Rudolf Bauer and Kandinsky." She had expatriated to the U.S. with some paintings and had encouraged "Guggi" to collect more, including some by her former if not present lover, her fellow German Rudolph Bauer. In June of 1937 Guggenheim exhibited his growing collection to the press at his luxury apartment in The Plaza Hotel.  Included were works by Chagall, Seurat, Picasso, Fienenger and Kandinsky.           

 

According to Marquis;
 

"While developing a friendship with Madonald, Greenberg had been assiduously studying the works of this Leon Trotsky that the magazine's editors esteemed so highly. In their fall 1938 issue, they had published yet another of his essays; the byline read Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, but it was an open secret that the real author of Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art was Leon Trotsky, with substantial contributions by Breton. As again translated by the Macdonalds, the manifesto asserted that the artist was 'the natural ally of revolution,' that  '..all avenues of communication... [were]....choked with the debris of capitalist collapse,' and that  'independent revolutionary art must now...struggle against reactionary persecution.'  To that end, the manifesto called for an 'International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art.'"

 

 

 That was the piece that lit the fire under a well prepped Greenberg. Some call it a Manifesto. I would agree with that. In an article in the Partisan Review, in 1939, titled Avant-Garde and Kitsch, he puts his definition of Kitsch in an important place, as one of two main aesthetic products produced by the bourgeoisie in the Industrial Age, the other being the avant-garde. He implies, heavily, that The Saturday Evening Post cover is an indelible object of Kitsch. He means, we are sure, to tar that whole magazine, and all it's sister magazines, with the same brush. And the content of such now stigmatized rags, like the poems of "Eddy" Guest, are similarly tarred and feathered. (I kind of wondered whether he knew Edgar Guest personally.). Allow me to say right here, with Greenberg long gone, that as I was growing up and hearing him talked about and quoted, and hearing my parents, and some of their friends talk about the avant-garde and about stuff that was kitsch, I still think he nailed it. The essay has stood the test of time, written in 1938 and published in 1939. The thing is that while he certainly exaggerates and simplifies and may be off on his history in some places, which I leave to art historians to hash out, he's right about the conjoined development of an avant-garde appreciative population with its makers of abstract, non-objective art. And he's right about their need for money! But if I may, I'd like to say I think he might be guilty of a bit of over-simplification regarding The Post, that magazine that fed my family while I was growing up. O.K., my bias is showing, but I'm not denying it's true complicity in the marketing of Kitsch. I'm just saying that the need to make a buck has caused artists of varying talents to venture off the avant garde reservation at times. A fair look at the history of The Post would have to, I proclaim, I demand, give it more credibility than just as a purveyor of Kitsch. Actually, you might be surprised, and I'll leave it at that. See how I stuck that personal stuff in here so nicely?

But I have to go back and further explicate that I thought he was cool for other, and in some cases really degenerate reasons. He liked to dance. He liked to drink. He wasn't above punching someone in the nose. He got into sex for sex's sake and was enthusiastic about it, at least in his letters to Harold. Here let me get slightly almost a bit self-referential...[I once had a similar experience]  ...he had an affair with a woman who was married to the writer Cyril Connolly, Jean Bakewell Connolly, and he had a quite impressive run with her, at least from the point of view of a fellow male pig, telling Harold that she left him, "most thoroughly fucked-out and emptied - she takes her sex like a man."  And then he elaborated, which I'll leave you to discover for yourself.  Jeannie broke it off with him a year or so later when she fell in love and married the former husband of Peggy Guggenheim, about whom I've written somewhere, one of my favorite failed artists, Laurence Vail.
  And as time went on, not sure when it started, he developed a liking and maybe a habit for barbiturates, a drug that seems to have lost its luster for no accountable reason, since it is still probably the best all around narcotic there is.

                                                  *

The purpose of the above look at Greenberg and associates and The Partisan Review is not to cover the whole lives of my main two subjects, Clem and Dwight, but to explore how their most loaded pronouncements reverberated from the late Thirties up into the present century. Those loaded pronouncements being Kitsch, (as a phenomenon), and, what I hope to delve into further down the line, the High-Brow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow connotation, which Macdonald made his own. Today we live in a culture that has spent megatons of energy eviscerating, chopping, churning and homogenizing those now seemingly dated classifications, but they live on, in the air we breath, sometimes as ghosts in the machine and sometimes re-surfacing and producing clarity where it's needed.
Are the Elites Highbrow? (Here I'm talking about the Liberal Elites who have ownership of the communicative arts at least in the U.S. and Europe.) Well, no, not necessarily absolutely for sure in every case; but we can assume certain societal bias and approval or disapproval, (some amorphous group generally fills the leadership vacuum here) with some degree of accuracy, depending on who we are aiming at; is it Leonard Bernstein we're talking about? Or Paul McCartney. (Excuse me for picking a dead person in Lenny but I was having a hard time coming up with a live contemporary Bernstein.)  
   Am I a middlebrow?  I think I qualify there. I don't have a second language; didn't finish college; have a middling above average I.Q.;* pull into MacDonald's whenever I feel like it; have interests and biases only some of which would be approved of by any contemporary self-declared educated liberal.

Greenberg would have considered himself Highbrow I'm sure, and I would have agreed with him, if we ever had a sit-down. He took his childhood Yiddish and used it as a basis for a thorough autodidactic study of German, up to and including Goethe and the German Philosophers, probably up to and including the Frankfort School as it came into being, during his time. He also embraced a formalism which he made his own, and which I can't talk about with any degree of knowledge whatsoever except to say that I think it is a term that has been used since Plato's time, and which at one time developed out of a small school of rebellious writers and artists in Russia who started out with something they called Futurism, which they had borrowed from some Italians sometime before WWl.  I've already said too much about Formalism.

Here I'm leaving a note in a bottle. The note says, "I promise to read up on formalism, (and the various levels of brows), and try to make some sense out of it all in the future, if I live long enough. I'd like to give myself a few years, just for that project alone. I might do a blog post on why I think it's a worthwhile project. Think; Linguistics.

I'll also have more to say about Clement Greenberg.  

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*In the Army, circa 1965, at Headquarters Company, US Army Alaska, the Company Commander posted our Army G. scores, which at that time were very close to the same numerically as the Stanford Binet scoring. My score was 139. I was third highest in the two companies included, Headquarters and the M.P.s.  The other two were something like 145 and 150, both M.P.s. Years later, I decided that I could give myself a 140 to compensate for the slight difference between G. and S. & B.

 *For the sake of posterity and that of my late departed mother, my great grandfather married a Decker, a woman of NY Dutch heritage, who's mother was a Schermerhorn.   

*re: Mexico, see Rebecca West, Survivors in Mexico, Yale University Press, 2003

*The White Fence, by Anton Prohaska, Amazon Books. 

*Magimper; origin probably cockney for pimp, from rhyming slang; used by my father's early 20th c. crowd in San Francisco to mean uncool.                       

*Clement Greenberg; b. 1909, d. 1994. 

*MOMA was conceived by three women, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, aka The Ladies, or "The Adamantine Ladies":, meaning resembling the diamond in hardness.