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.  

                                            ___

*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.  

   

The Evil Eye

I am hyper-vigilant. I believe in the existence of evil. If that makes me paranoid, well, I'll handle it. My long range reading plan is driven by a hunger for a more fertile and abundant reality but not one without a good road map. For that reason I have intended for some time to re-read a great little book which clarifies somewhat the problem of the evil eye, something that hadn't disappeared from the culture during my formative years; it resonated in our village's nearby Italian neighborhood, and in my father's introjects of his dear illiterate Montenegrin Serb Mother.  It was for instance why he blessed himself when he went by our little Catholic Church, even though he never attended it. Someone was watching. The book is titled Mal Occhio, [evil eye], The Underside of Vision, the author is Lawrence Di Stasi, and I am re-reading it as we speak. 

Very quickly, in his short but profound book, Mr. DiStasi  makes the connection from the evil eye to envy*. Now, personally I've always thought that envy is one of the most under-rated of the seven deadly sins. A mother and her baby on a walk run in to a woman who gushes over the baby's beauty. The baby comes down with a fever and the old aunt is called in to enact the process of Mal Ochio, which involves olive oil in a bowl of water, (which the author explains in detail.) It is a process which works to counter the disease brought about by the evil eye. DiStasi also delves into the causes of the evil, as perceived by it's believers, in the history of the unwitting gazer.  One common cause is believed to be the result of a child being allowed to go back to nursing after having been weaned. This of course is primitive stuff, probably, we think, going back to the Paleolithic. 

 He then brilliantly relates the peasant superstition and/or mythology on the evil eye to the progression of theological concepts from recent Christianity back through the transition from the Goddess of the Mammoth hunters to the gradual changing of the guard from female led pantheon to Male led which he traces, with help from Joseph Campbell et. al., to the beginnings of the Bronze age.

What appeals to me though is that I tend to give the mythology credence in my own life, possibly owing to a mixture of existential influences from the culture in which I grew up, small town multi-cultural America, multi-culturally raised, somewhat superstitious father, and certain life particulars, such as; that I was a child model, a life situation I go into in some depth in my oft mentioned book, The White Fence. My father used photographs of my sister and me, as well as other people in town, local citizens who'd volunteer as models, and occasionally professional models from an agency in New York City, as part of his process of painting illustrations for fiction and advertising in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Red Book, and the like.  Modelling was not an easy job. Film was not as fast 70 years ago as it is today. (When Tri-X film came out it was a blessing). And huge powerful lights were required, which burned the eyes. There was a kind of feeling of being coerced almost to the point of torture by the big brute of a father, who would also charm and bribe. I received money whenever I modeled, money according to a perceived going rate; something like five dollars when I was five, and ten when I was ten, and yes, I was still at it at twenty, when twenty bucks was a lot of beer money. 

The job itself was referred to as Posing for Dad, though when others did it it was called modelling. What was harder than the job itself, for me, was that it put undo attention on me in the eyes of the small town population.  As in, "I saw you in your Dad's illustration. You're so cute!" That from adults. My contemporaries among the children never mentioned it, but I sensed a certain resentment. I never thought about envy in those days, mostly I'm referring here to the 1950s, but, with the magazine exposure and the flamboyant family, the former model mother, and all;  in retrospect I feel I was "at the affect", of a heightened envy environment.   

The Saturday Evening Post, in particular, was important in mid 20th century America, as it had been since the days of the Declaration of Independence. I invite you to check out the following well done website..... https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/history-saturday evening-post.

To follow this thinking about envy a little further, let's remember that what "catches the eye", is usually something of value, with value and attraction semantically closely tied. We value a beautiful child, gold, food, real estate, baubles, and many things; but with children the sense of value seems instinctive. All mammals seem particularly drawn to the babies of their species, and sometimes to other species.  We love puppies and kittens. Dogs seem to love and be extra gentle with baby humans. (See youtube.)  It even has a name;  Neoteny:  

 
From an article in the Scientific American, July 1, 2009, by Charles Q. Choi, titled; Being more infantile may have led to bigger Brains. The author is so concise that I can't see paraphrasing the whole article, so, ...quoting the author;

"For decades scientists have noted that mature humans physically resemble immature chimps—we, too, have small jaws, flat faces and sparse body hair. The retention of juvenile features, called Neoteny in Evolutionary Biology, is especially apparent in domesticated animals—thanks to human preferences, many dog breeds have puppy features such as floppy ears, short snouts and large eyes. Now genetic evidence suggests that neoteny could help explain why humans are so radically different from chimpanzees, even though both species share most of the same genes and split apart only about six million years ago, a short time in evolutionary terms.

In animals, Neoteny comes about because of delays in development, points out molecular biologist Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For instance, humans sexually mature roughly five years after chimps do, and our teeth erupt later. “Changes in the timing of development are some of the most powerful mechanisms evolution can use to remodel organisms, with very few molecular events required,” he explains.

To look for genetic evidence that neoteny played a role in the evolution of Homo sapiens, Khaitovich and his colleagues compared the expression of 7,958 genes in the brains of 39 humans, 14 chimpanzees and nine rhesus monkeys. They collected samples from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—a region linked with memory that is relatively easy to identify in the primate brain. These tissues came from deceased individuals at several stages of life, from infancy to middle age, enabling the researchers to see how genetic activity changed over time in each species.

In both humans and chimps, about the same percentage of genes changed in activity over time. But roughly half these age-linked genes in humans differed from chimps in terms of when they were active during development. Analysis of the 299 genes whose timings had shifted in all three species revealed that almost 40 percent were expressed later in life in humans, with some genetic activity delayed well into adolescence.

Although the specific function of many of these neotenic genes remains uncertain, they are especially active in the gray matter of the human brain, where higher thought occurs, the researchers note in the April 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. [year?] They are now probing other parts of the brain in humans, chimps and macaques to see where neoteny might play a role.

Actually proving that neoteny helped to drive human evolution and brain size is difficult. Khaitovich suggests analyzing genetic activity in cases of faster-than-normal development in people, “which past research already shows can lead to a reduction in cognitive abilities,” he says.

Other experts certainly think that neoteny’s role is reasonable. The ability of the brain to learn is apparently greatest before full maturity sets in, “and since neoteny means an extended childhood, you have this greater chance for the brain to develop,” says molecular phylogeneticist Morris Goodman of Wayne State University, who did not participate in this study. In other words, human evolution might have been advanced by the possibilities brimming in youth.

Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "Juvenile Thoughts."

[Neoteny is a characteristic of domesticated animals, dogs, foxes, horses, cows, and etc. and may account for improved learning ability.]

And. Babies are cute, and they continue to be cute over a long period, in spite of being very messy. And young women, some more than others, are judged cute by many men of all ages. Women's magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Town and Country, print advertisements for expensive women's clothes, supposedly for women of marrying age, using fourteen year old models, many of whom look disturbingly like  Jon-Benet Ramsey.  


*I may have been primed for this book by another book which came into my life many years ago; and in an odd way. The book, titled Envy, A Theory of Social Behavior, by Helmut Schoeck;  ( b. 3 July 1922; d. 2 Feb 1993 ); was sitting on a friend's shelf for several years and my eye kept being drawn to the title on it's spine. I eventually peeked into it, and then, over time, I asked if I could borrow it, and my friend said, "Take it, it came with the house."  It is a scholarly tome, but fascinating. It is a survey of the forces of envy in primitive cultures throughout the world. His research illustrates clearly how envy shapes cultures, down to the ubiquitous feeling that anyone's eye can be envious and that envy inspires sorcery. Love thy neighbor? More like watch your neighbor very carefully. When I finally finished it I was convinced that envy is the engine that runs the world. The book has glowing blurbs from Karl Popper and Thomas Szasz. The author was a professor of Sociology, born in Austria, educated in Germany and the United States, post doctoral fellowship at Yale, and etc.

The Prehensile Gesture

 

 

Two books came in the mail a couple of weeks ago as I began my participation in the Covid Virus Quarantine. One was Garry Apgar's Quotes for Conservatives, and the other was a book by an associate professor of English at the University of Maine, Laura Cowan, titled Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres. (The book to your left is not related to this post except obliquely.)  
I gave Garry's book a short rave review on Amazon, because I think it is a wonderful book. O.K., Garry is a friend, but, take my word for it, it's terrific.  

These two books came before April 1, so I'm using that date for a new book ban. No more buying books until May 1st. So far, so good.  

I was very much looking forward to the Cowan book because I have read enough of West's writing to know that I am a serious fan, and have decided to become a West expert, at least in my own little world. I have no-one to impress but myself, and yet that will by no means stop me. 

   That having been established, I dove into the Cowan book a couple of days ago, I'm now a few chapters in, and am up to where Cowan is talking about West's novel, The Return of The Soldier, a book which is built around a case of Amnesia.

In a sense, the novel is about reaching out for something that is not there. It is a certain kind of gesture, one filled with longing, frustration, sorrow, but those are my words. Prehensile is a case in point for the way that West uses metaphor. It might help a little to quote this short West paragraph taken from Cowan's book; the narrator, a female cousin of the absent soldier is speaking;

"That day its beauty was an affront to me, because like most Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my cousin Christoper from the wars."
  
It so happens that I have had the topic of Amnesia stuck in my craw for some time, for the following reason. My own life history, which I've been mining as a resource for my writing, (about which I must refrain from apologizing at some point), is peppered with cases of alcoholic amnesia. Which is to say, because so many people seem to misrepresent this symtom of alcoholism, the loss of memory associated with the imbibing of an amount of alcohol that one's brain could not tolerate at a given time, which loss of memory seems to be absolute and unrecoverable for that specified time. For me those "black-outs" were frequent, usually occurring at least several times a year. 

For a long time I've wanted to write about a blackout experience that occurred while I was in the Army in Alaska, in the mid-1960s. Briefly, I was in a bar downtown, and lost a period of time beginning while I was dancing with myself in that bar, The Crossroads, in downtown Anchorage. I came-to snuggled up to an unknown woman who was in the driver's seat of what I assume was her car.  Her right leg, her gas peddle leg, was in a cast from toe to hip. She was a handsome woman, with shoulder length brunette hair, earings I think, and a nice smelling perfume which I began to inhale. She was asleep. She woke up when someone, a Military Policeman, began wiping the snow off the windshield. The car was blanketed in snow. The woman woke up just in time to hear the Policeman tell me to get out of the car and then tell me to get into the barracks fast. I didn't have time to say goodbye or "Who are you?"
   It was a week-end, so I was able to get back to my own living space, my bunk, and sleep off the rest of my still drunkeness.  The after-affect was mostly a feeling of disappointment that I had probably found the love of my life and would never know who she was. In fact I went back to the Crossroads several times and never saw her. I began to wonder if the whole thing had been a hallucination.

Another black-out experience, though, is the one that really bothers me. I want to be able to write about that time, or at least, mine it, for a possible story, but there is too much blur, too much lost time.  
  It was still the sixties, I'd been out of the Army for a couple of years, (1968?) ...I was living in a run-down apartment on the lower East Side of Manhattan, with a friend and his seventeen year old wife, hanging on to a job doing past-ups and mechanicals, a simple form of commercial art, at a mid-town ad agency, when I was invited to a wedding. 

The Groom to be was my Godmother's nephew, Julian. My Godmother was the ex-wife of a friend of my father's. She had been part of Dad's heavy drinking party crowd during his and my mother's glory days as illustrator and model couple in glamorous Beekman Place. Everyone was glamorous, successful, and heavy drinking. A world I was forever locked out of by fate.

Julian was going to marry his girlfriend Mandy, and they were going to live in France. Mandy was Catholic, and they needed to both be Catholic in order to live in France and receive some sort of tax benefit. He was on a skimpy trust fund, and Mandy I assume had some money. He and I didn't know each other that well, but we had somehow discovered a bond, which was binge drinking. We'd been on several binges over the past six or eight years, when Julian was visiting Aunt Kitty, or, in one case, when I was living in London.  Our only real tie was that we had somehow begun to think of ourselves as relatives, cousins perhaps, because we expected Aunt Kitty to die someday and leave us a bunch of money. We assumed she was loaded. She was, but that's another story. 

   He had been born and raised in England, (though his mother was an American, aunt Kitty's sister), gone to Eton and Cambridge, been in lots of prankish trouble, been kicked out of Cambridge, and since then had worked sporadically as an editor. He was staying in Manhattan with an Eton buddy, Peter Davies, who had a unique claim to fame.      
   

Peter Theodore Davies was the son of Peter Llewelyn Davies. If you Goggle the father you will find a wiki called Peter Llewelyn Davies - Neverpedia, the Peter Pan wiki; It's three pages but I'll just quote from the first paragraph, then you can decide if you want to read on:

"Peter Llewelyn Davies, (February 25, 1897 - April 5, 1960) was the middle of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, one of the Llewelyn Davies boys befriended and later informally adopted by J.M. Barrie. Barrie publicly identified him as the source of the name for the title character in his famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. This public identification as "the original Peter Pan" plagued Davies throughout his life, which ended in suicide."

Peter T.'s father had killed himself in 1960 by throwing himself under a train at the Sloane Square Underground Station in London. The father was an alcoholic and probably drunk at the time. Peter T. was married and living in Manhattan, somewhere below 14th St. 

I remember meeting Julian at a bar, it might have been 1 Fifth Avenue, having a drink or two and then going to Peter's apartment, to meet Peter, his wife Frances, and Mandy. The idea was that at Aunt Kitty's suggestion, since she was under the impression that I was a good church goer, that I was to be Julian's Godfather and assist at his baptism, which would follow immediately. A little about Peter T. and his siblings, again from Neverpedia: 

"Peter's [Llewelyn], wife died not long after his suicide. His sons all chose not to have children, to prevent passing Huntington's* to another generation. Ruthven (Rivvy") developed Huntington's (and his wife Mary Bridget Pearce suffered from Multiple Sclerosis), and became depressed and bitter about what he perceived as Barrie's negative impact on his father's life before he died in 1995. George did not marry, leaving the UK for New York, traveling extensively in South America, and returning to Brooklyn where he died. Peter Junior, [Theodore], married Frances Jane Carson in 1965, but had no children. He committed suicide in 1990, at the age of 47."


We had a few drinks at Chez Davies and took a cab to the church. The church was run by Dominicans. The priest to be involved met us at the door and gave us a short speech. (He was by the way a handsome guy, possibly Italian, with black hair, wearing a brown wool robe with a hood, which was down, and he had on a cool pair of brown winged-tipped cordovan shoes. He said something to the affect, (probably noticing that we were drunk), that we shouldn't worry about the religious or spiritual part of the ceremony, that that would all be taken care of by him. I found that re-assuring. We, he or I, I don't remember, poured water over Julian's head as he leaned into some sort of fount, and I think I said something like I baptize you in the name of The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Then we went on to the marriage ceremony which must have been blessedly fast so that I don't remember it, and then we went back to the Davies and drank some more. The blackout must have started during the wedding. The next thing I remember is that it was morning, Monday morning, and I had just arrived back at my atrociously low-class apartment.  It was time to go to work and I decided that now was the time to quite my job. There was no other choice. I was quite incompetent at the paste-up trade, and they would probably fire me soon, and anyway, my friend Einar thought I could make more money working with him at the Village Moving and Firewood Company. And therefore, as Einar and his Wife and I concluded, I might as well have a medicinal dose of LSD before I leave for work. I took the acid, had a light breakfast somewhere on the way to the subway, and at the 42 st. Station, with the acid beginning to kick in, I bought myself an Orange Day-Glo necktie. I was still wearing my lightweight herringbone suit jacket, which was rumbled from 24 hours of carousing. I appeared at work, went up to one of the partners and informed him I was quiting, to which he said, "Good, I was just going to fire you anyway." I said goodby to my fellow bull-pen employees and went off to the next stage of my life.
    My hesitation to write about the wedding, which included members of such a noteworthy family, is I expect obvious from the lost time that started during the very wedding of which I have spoken. I felt though, that I should give it a try.

*Huntington's -  Huntington's Corea was an important part of the Oral History of East Hampton which Martha and I produced circa 2000; the disease was found in one of the prominent local families. 

A Piece from My Take on Communism; from The White Fence

[ From my book The White Fence]

"Aside from an occasional mention of the time that the FBI came to visit Dad in his studio to ask him if he knew any Communist sympathizers, and the occasional references to certain people possibly being (not in a bad way) “Commies” or “Red,” I didn’t give much thought to the possibility of leftists in our local art and intellectual scene being involved in any international intrigue. My only real concern was that I, personally, and my parents, not be labeled anything too threatening or dangerous by the local populace. 

"I didn’t know, for instance (and neither did any American who wasn’t an insider), that the CIA had originally intended to set Clement Greenberg up with a Paris literary journal, but decided to back Peter Matthiessen and The Paris Review instead. I didn’t know that while Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of Aga Khan III, was thought to be publisher of The Paris Review, that the money really was funneled through Saddrudin from the CIA.

"In 1967 The Saturday Evening Post, as well as the magazine Ramparts, reported on the CIA’s funding of “a number” of anti-Stalinist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of Soviet sympathizing liberals world-wide. These were articles written by people within the intelligence system itself. 

" “A number” doesn’t quite cover it. The Congress for Cultural Freedom subsequently re-named The International Association for Cultural Freedom had its genesis in the minds of the heads of the CIA, going back as far as the Frankfort School, originally spawned to promote an American conceived de-Nazification agenda. The Congress was founded in 1950 at a conference in Berlin. Though it was an anti-Communist advocacy group, virtually all of its members were politically left wing. Its reach went well beyond anything the “man in the street” could ever have been led to believe, with branch offices and sister organizations all over the world. Many members, including its top guys, were Marxists or somewhat reformed Marxists. Malcolm Muggeridge was a member, as were George Orwell, Max Eastman, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. So were at least several of the Abstract Expressionist scene, including Pollock. So were many of the stars of the poetry scene. The CCF’s stable of magazines included Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Partisan Review, The Paris Review and Daedalus. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were two of many instruments through which CIA money was laundered and funneled to the CCF. 

"Eventually, The Congress had offices in 35 countries where it functioned both as a cultural arm for the U.S. and as a back-channel to the CIA. The Congress’s British sister, the British Society for Cultural Freedom, whose founding members included Isaiah Berlin and T.S. Eliot, also received help in its forming and funding from the CIA. "

Where Does it Come From?

Where does it come from, this Orange Man hate? Let me give you the map and we'll see if it can help you find your way out of the woods. (Unless of course, as far as you're concerned, you aren't in the woods or at least don't need to follow my directions, thanks anyway). I'm calling my map The Hatred of Capitalism Map, and the woods are the Twentieth Century.

   
We'll start with the First World War, which happened to more or less occur in tandem with the Russian Revolution, (The Bolshevik Revolution), and which soon began paying for revolution to spread around the globe. 

On my personal odyssey I started with Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station, which gave me, and I hope will do the same for you, a primer for a crash course in 20th Century misery.   

Next, I ask you to rent the movie Reds, produced and directed by the sexiest man in the world, that inveterate red diaper baby Warren Beatty. Beatty learned everything he knows about politics, we are told, from that favorite of the original Hollywood Old Left, Lillian Hellman. Just Google Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, and you'll get the rundown, albeit from Google's editorially leftist slant. The movie, as biased as it is, will give you as good a picture of the period between the two World Wars as any random pile of associated novels. The key to understanding the movie though, and not through Warren's baby blues, is in the intermission part of the movie where some of the real personae from the period make cameo appearances. Focus on Henry Miller. Miller's short speech identifies a major shortcoming of 20th century American intellectuals. For some reason, H.M. never seemed to suffer from social anxiety, so he was able to sit there in the middle of this multi-million dollar Hollywood spectacular, probably coming from his shack on the Big Sur, and call a spade a spade, saving us willing and open minded souls who sprung for the movie ticket years of pointless and unnecessary exposure to toxicity. See the movie and see if Miller's thinking jumps out at you.  

Now, since we didn't live through that between-the-wars period, if we did we would be pushing 100, and we remember trying to get people to tell us what it was like, what with all the muddled near- religious piety of our liberal elders toward the superhero of that period, FDR;  let us thank the God that made us for Amity Shlaes's brilliant history of the period, The Forgotten Man. This book is indispensable. It even comes in a graphic edition, which is beautiful, but for me, since I wasn't alive then and was not a student of the period, I needed to read the print version first, slowly, looking up stuff as I went along. I'm so glad I did.    


The New York Intellectuals were the quarterbacks for the Mid-Century Left in The U.S., and I've done a bit of reading about them. I find them fascinating, both from having been raised by parents who took them very seriously, and also because we lived in a part of the country where these writers, poets and critics tended to congregate.  I can enjoy reading about people who are far to the left of where I am today, probably because I would, most likely, as an intelligent human being, have been with them, if I were there contemporaries. (We are affected by our times.)   
I've mentioned some of these books. Let me say that Truants, by William Barrett, is a favorite. (I think you gain a great deal if you take advantage of exposing yourself to the better writers first before you continue into the weeds). Another one that I enjoyed is Lionel Abel's Intellectual Follies.  

But, before I would force on anyone a trip down memory lane with a dozen or more Commies, Fellow Travelers, and former Reds from the thirties, forties and fifties, I will save you a lot of time and dare you to wade into a long and meaty biography of one of the most important people over the  great spread of the history about which I speak. And that is A Rebel In Defense of Tradition; The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, by Michael Wreszin. 


Growing up in East Hampton, NY, in the Fifties I heard my parents and their friends talk about the writers and artists that they knew. I knew who they were talking about when they referred to Bill, Jackson, Harold, Clem, and and many others, but I was older, probable early teens, when I started to notice the name Dwight, which I thought was a cool name. (Dwight Yokum probably wasn't born yet), I can't tell you when I put a face to the name, it was years after I first heard it.  I remember my mother pointing out to me the house that he either owned or rented during the summer. It was near a regular route that I took on horseback. (From twelve to seventeen I owned a nice backyard horse that I rode all over town in those much less populated times in that now overcrowded beehive of striving activity). I remember that on quite a few occasions I rode through his property as part of a short cut to a large section of woods owned by my equestrian mentor, Roy.  

Many years later, I was still living in my home town, and dating a woman who was an editor in NYC.  Through her I met a couple who were visiting from Europe. They had come here primarily to meet with Dwight. They were Americans but had lived in Italy for years and were involved with the Italian Communist Party.  I never got to cross-examine them, wasn't inclined to, but they made me aware of the intellectual canon of European Communism. 
Twenty years before I met that couple, who I won't name, I had learned from a couple of magazine articles about the CIA's* participation in the American Left, mostly through something called The Congress on Cultural Freedom, and that information had been festering in my mind, and causing me to re-hash my ideas about the culture I was raised in.  I wrote about those articles in my book The White Fence, and have posted it to this blog, right next door, under the title A Piece of my Take on Communism. All the information comes from the assigned magazines and nothing of it comes off the top of my head.   

In his bio of Macdonald, Michael Wreszin says that Macdonald claimed not to know that the Congress was a front for the CIA, until he read it in the papers in 1967. There isn't any reason to doubt him about that, as far as I can tell. Dwight and his first wife Nancy had heard rumors that the CCF was "sponsored by the State Department", but Dwight gave no indication that he accepted the validity of that information. Wreszin goes on to say, "In any event, he had no fundamental disagreement with the politics of the CCF."

At any rate, as a result of meeting the aforementioned couple, I began delving into the whole Communism for Western Civilization thing. I also learned why, when I was drafted into the Army, in 1964, I was questioned by in intelligence officer as to the why and wherefore of my brief attendance at The New School for Social Research, in NYC.  I had no idea then or for years later about the Genesis of The New School. As it turned out, The New School was the new home of the Frankfurt School in 1935, when its scholars were forced to vacate after Hitler came into power.   


The following is from a contemporary website put out by The New School:

The New School for Social Research (NSSR) is a graduate institution in the heart of New York City. It generates progressive scholarship and historically grounded education in the social sciences and philosophy. With more than 75 full-time faculty members, its ten departments and programs offer masters and doctoral degrees to 800 graduate students from 70 countries. Interdisciplinary centers and institutes housed at The New School for Social Research provide further opportunities for deep inquiry and innovative collaborations, particularly at the intersection of social theory, policy, and design.

Social Theory is the key term.

 
The following is out of Wikipedia: 

The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt School — the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences — is associated with the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).

My personal point of view, which I intend to delve into in further blog posts, is that as time went on, broadly speaking, the Anti-Stalinist Left and the Stalinist Left, and the Mao-ist Left, and other permutations have co-mingled and co-mingled again and continued to gain traction with what became the Obama-Clinton American Democratic Party. 

 

(I will have more to say about Dwight Macdonald in the future.) 

 

 

*For great insight into the CIA, read The Mighty Wurlitzer; How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford.  Harvard University Press, 2008. 

The Book Ban Crisis

It's so easy to buy books on Kindle.  Too easy.  I'm going to make a new concerted effort to put a hold on it. I can name drop if I want to, as I did last post with Greil Marcus. But I've really got to get a handle on this contemporary Dispepsia. Which is in fact a Neurasthenia, brought on by dissipation in the form of spending, not of seed, but of cold hard cash. It gives a nice little rush, followed by a feeling of guilt and a feeling of having failed ones-self, again. Concerning which dissipation, just now finished reading a nice little novel which is tucked away in a big anthology of banned books which I bought some time ago, on the rationalization that dipping into it is not a "slip". Poppycock. It's a slip.  I have this electronic stack of books I'm supposed to be working on. So, we begin again.  

The dirty book by the way was The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. No dirty book by any means, by our standards, but quite charming and I suppose one could say titillating if one's libido were thermostatically that of  someone in his or her thirties. I found it just sweet. And, I loved the little asides concerning horse drawn transportation; the "cabs", the "cars", (horse drawn trolleys), the cabriolets, and the whatnots....tktk , some of which I have driven, having been employed as a driver of horse drawn vehicles as a teenager. 

I'm finishing up now Prentice Mulford's The God in You, with the intention of going right on to Your Forces and How to Use Them, which I'm looking forward to, but I'm going to put that aside until I read at least two from my unread list. That way, at least someday, I might get caught up. It would be good for my psychological health, such as it is.     

I think I should get back to that book about Holism, Holism and Evolution 1927, by Jan Christian Smuts, which I felt so smug about discovering a year ago. (Who did I feel smug TO? I know the answer to that! My audience of invisible friends!) It's true and I'm not embarrassed about it, in fact I'm kind of proud. Smuts seems to have been a great thinker and an important contributor to 19th century life who was swept under the rug by revisionism. I'll continue to pick away at The Saroyan Reader, try to finish Sinclair's Mental Radio, which is in fact kind of a bore, but I'm doing research I guess. Also, I bought The Cliff's Notes for Middlemarch, and that's a bought commitment which I intend to get to, but without buying the novel itself until the aforementioned new rule is enacted.  

I'm in the middle of Remote Viewing Secrets, by Joseph McMoneagle, which I must finish..., research again..., and The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, (My intention there is to read his book about the occult, but that also will have to wait until I've Enacted the New Rule.  

There are a bunch of others, some on my Goodreads list, but none seem to me to be crying out to be finished right now...for instance, The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri, which I bought when I was having an enthusiasm for Stuart Davis....Russian History, A Captivating Guide to the History of Russia, by Captivating History...that must be an editorial mistake, I mean who is named Captivating? or History?  ...anyway...I wrote this Post for my own personal erudition as it were.  As in, Memo to Self.  

P.S. The buying urge wants me to pick up West's The Thinking Reed, but, uhnt uh. Not till a space opens.  
P.P.S. I'm sure you've figured out that part of the reason for the catch-up is that I'm not able to actually contribute any of my own thoughts when I get this stretched out. I promise to remedy that, for what it's worth.  
P.P.S.  I wish I had written Walter Benjamin at The Dairy Queen.    

Semi-Annual Report 2/19/20

Reading as usual is out of hand, but I suppose that's what I planned for this part of my life, so I should just grin and bare it. My Goodreads list contains 24 unfinished or unstarted books. On my kindle maybe ten or so. Usually, as I'm doing now, I let others lie while reading mainly two and dipping into two others occasionally, and promoting one when one of the top two are finished. Then, I'm supposed to go back to the others, in some kind of order, but what almost always happens is that I buy another, and upset the apple cart. This problem, of course, is not serious. Making a living, falling in or out of love, being sick; those are problems. 

 

I just finished reading Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, a biography by Philip Gefter, about Sam Wagstaff, an art collector.  It covers territory that I lived through, and probably would have been more observant of if I hadn't been so preoccupied with getting sober. I was and still am interested in what happened to the world of art, and the business of art in the seventies and after. As a kid and up to about 30 I was interested in what was happening in the art world although not too comfortable with being on the sidelines, and somewhat self-critical because of that. If I ever get back to work on my project referred to previously under the title Hold Still, I hope to explore that murk.  

As for the murk itself; a for instance; I've always wondered who exactly was, or is, Patty Smith. I suppose she is someone I would have known about if I hadn't stopped reading The Village Voice. 

It's not exactly as if I lost all interest in Bohemia at some point say around 1970 or so, but more that I was just lost in my own weeds. By which I mean that I was smoking too much pot, and allowing myself to be overly entertained by projects that my other pot-head friends were involved in, like young female hippies, old wooden boats, dancing to disco music while stoned on acid, and fraternizing with exceptionally cool people. I do remember that I began to read somewhere about Punk music. [Note to self; why capitalize Punk and not disco?]  But for some reason I didn't think it applied to me. I suppose that's partly because my 'urban period', which only lasted a total of about four years; two years, then a break and a couple more years, not counting San Fran; which happened in my other, sober life; was not particularly rewarding. I did, at some point, want to read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, but felt unqualified due to my dearth of Punk knowledge. I had read his earlier Rock and Roll book, Mystery Train, which I liked a whole bunch. 

Anyway, as of this moment, I still haven't listened to any of Patty's music, but at least I know she was involved with Mapplethorpe, who I know made a big impression on the art world, and that she has recently written a memoir, which is supposed to be good, though, again, I am not as yet prepared for it.   

Right now I'm reading, The Prentice Mulford Story, Life by Land and Sea, and another book by Mulford, Thoughts are Things. I'm also reading Joseph McMoneagle's Remote Viewing Secrets, and The William Saroyan Reader. And as I've said, there are several other books I've started and put aside and will get back to, part of the ten, rather than the 24, those ones are counting on my longevity.  

Mulford, I stumbled across recently while reading somewhere about New Thought, something I've been dabbling in for half a century. Turns out he was born in my hometown, and is from a family who's current generation I grew up with. Fact is, the Mulford Farm is one of the better historical points of interest available to visitors of that same hometown.  

As for remote viewing, I guess that's sort of part of an info-binge that started with Ingo Swann, about whom I have already written, and who's talent, while still not universally acknowledged, has me fascinated. The mystery of it, remote viewing, I came to with the idea, planted in my head by many over many years, that this thing called non-locality is somehow tied in with consciousness, through universal consciousness, and that if one can navigate that, the world's your oyster, as Prentice Mulford might have put it. [or, perhaps, "Bob's yer uncle!"]*  

 

*Hawkins; circa; 1979

Camp Hero Montauk, Mid-20th c.

My father was among a group of surf casters who had permits to fish the surf inside the gated area known as Camp Hero, an Army Post in Montauk, NY., during a time-frame roughly 1947 till sometime in the early 1950s. This isn't a research project, this post, just a comment, and perhaps a shot across somebody's bow, I'm not sure exactly who or why. Among the other guys were a Real Estate broker from East Hampton, and the president of a roofing company, who drove all the way from Riverhead, several times a week, to fish. They were gentleman fishermen, not rowdy, not heavy drinkers. 

To get right to the point, on many occasions they saw what they began to call flying saucers. As I remember them talking about it at our home, they were saucer shaped glowing things, about the size of a small car, that came in and out of the ocean, flew up, flew back down and under the water, and sometimes skipped along the water like a stone. There was no doubt about it from the point of the three men that I heard talking about it, (I was just a child), that these things were not flares, and not any kind of vehicle known to man. 

After talking to an officer at the camp and getting a "Don't know anything about it.", the guys decided my father, being a nationally known illustrator, should get in touch with some higher up in the government. Ray said he would, but held off, not wanting to get in trouble. Then, while at his club in the city, The Society of Illustrators, he heard from one of his friends about a writer who wrote for True Magazine; Air Force Major Donald Kehoe. Kehoe had written non-fiction and some Science Fiction for Men's magazines and such, and had recently written a book called Flying Saucers are Real which was just then about to become a break-out best seller.  

Ray wrote to Kehoe and they began to write back and forth, and eventually met, and Ray became a true believer in Flying Saucers. That went on for about a year or so, and then.....nothing. He stopped talking about it, and everyone seemed to forget.

A few years later, when I began riding horses on a neighbor's farm, the farmer's wife reported that on numerous occasions she had seen a flying saucer land in her yard and that little green men got out and walked around. The unanimous opinion was that she was sweetly, if female-hysterically, crazy. She went on with these sightings until a psychiatrist got her to begin doing ceramics, making porcelain horses, at which time she ceased seeing things. Perhaps it was the lithium in the clay.  

I have not discussed this topic, now referred to as UFO sightings, since the topic is still subject to derision, and since I am not, exactly, a true believer. I'm a doubting Thomas. 

Even though I've seen one. (Oh, Jesus, there, now I've really blown it.)  What I mean is, once, some years ago, perhaps it was around 1990, (this isn't a research paper so I'm not looking things up, if I decide to do so I'll do some editing), I saw one. 
Anyway; I was single, not seeing anyone in particular, but I had met a willing participant at a party who seemed willing to do what we called in those days Watching the Submarine Races. So we were driving towards the beach from the residence of some literary type who was renting a bungalow between East Hampton Village and Amagansett, which beach happened to be the one called Wyborgs. Information about said beach may appear at some future date in an as yet non-existent index to this blog. As we came toward the corner, called the Kazickas corner, about which same as above, we saw a string of lights low on the horizon over Hook Pond, as we faced West. 

I pulled over on the grass and we both quickly got out of the car and stood watching. It was impressive. Some of the lights were stronger than others. For a minute I thought it was an oddly lit Jumbo Jet coming in for a crash landing on the Maidstone Club Golf Course. But within a split second it started to rise up almost vertically, and took on the shape of an oval, lit all around, and then appeared to be completely circular as it reached directly over us. It was rising at it's constant speed, which didn't seem too fast because it was so big. I would have said that it was at least a couple hundred feet in diameter. Then, the interior of it began to present a light show, different colored lights flashing in abstract pattern like the northern lights. This was the part that made me think it was some sort of gadget. I wondered if it was a giant holograph being put on by a Broadway producer. One happened to live behind the hedges just over there on the other side of the road.  

The thing got smaller, the light show stopped, and the craft, or hologram, or secret weapon, now the size of a quarter, turned Southeast and cruised down along the shoreline, from it's great height, until, after about twenty minutes, it disappeared. 

My date and I were suitably freaked out, but calmed down enough to visit and shmooze with some folks at the beach who had also seen this thing. We accepted a cold drink, and decided that we were all sort of blood brothers now, having seen a UFO.  I never saw her or any of the other people again. 

                

My father, Louis, and some thoughts on spys.

My father was born the fifth of April, 1901. I was born on the 28th of December, 1942. Not being a numbers person, having been born at the very end of the year became confusing. For about 99 percent of my birth year I didn't exist.  It would have been simpler to say I was born just a little bit before 1943. And my father, well, he was "almost", the same age as the century. So, when I was five, the Old Man was almost but not quite 46.

That having been cleared up, let me explain what I'm getting at. Let's suppose we go back to when I was five. I was beginning to get glimpses of the biographies of my parents.They made the 1920s and thirties seem exciting and glamorous. (A five year old can record an amazing amount of colorized context.) Much later, I would read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and feel I was on familiar territory.  

Louis was a big part of my father's story of himself in those days and he retold his being "influenced" by Louis on numerous occasions. Louis Adamic was well known as the author of the best selling book Dynamite, a story about violence between labor and management in the U.S. from the 1890s up to the 1930s. But for my father the Adamic book he referred to most often was The Native's Return.

 

In my book The White Fence, I mention that when my father and mother first met, Ray excitedly told his future bride that he was a peasant, and that, inspired by that great Adamic book, he was going back to his birthplace,Yugoslavia, to reclaim his roots. Within the year, he in fact did that, meeting up with Adamic in Ray's home village, Muo, in the town of Kotor in the the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where a great feast was put on for the two American success stories.That feast became part of my father's myth of himself. He was an artist, after all.
I have come to believe, after having worked for years doing oral history, that everyone has a story, and that we need our stories. Life is stories. 

Louis wrote many books, but toward the end of his life he was blacklisted when he was sued for slander by Winston Churchill. He had written a book about Tito, I'm not sure it was the same one in which he mentioned Churchill, but while most people seem to have thought it was a positive, Pro-Tito book, the Dictator did not.  (It's not good to upset the Dictator.)
I was probably about ten when my father got a phone call and later announced to my mother that Louis was dead. Was it suicide? Or a political assassination? That is still not clear to this day. Also still not clear is whether Louis was a spy, [most likely yes], and if so, who's side was he on?

                                            Louis office - photo courtesy Veronika Vogler

 

 

Now we were in the 1950s and spies were big. Spies and Communists were all over the newspapers and that new media outlet, television. I was as tuned in to the whole Cold War environment as any kid, at least any kid that cared about the news. Without veering off into a historical timeline though, let me just say this about those times. Along with probably a large percentage of the population, I never expected to be alive after  the Cold War!  

There have been many unexpected turns of events that have rocked my world, but, before 9/11, the two most important were probably the evacuation of Saigon, and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. History is different today. But it is far from over. And it is important, no doubt, for the future of humanity, that the 20th century be taken very, very seriously.  

Which leads me to this. I'd like to recommend to my readers a short list of books that I've read and felt were of particular interest over the past decade or two, which concern Spies and Communists and The American Left:

First, two books with the same title; Partisans, by David Laskin, (non-fiction), and Partisans, by Peter Mathiessen, (fiction); ....The Secret History of The CIA, by Joseph Trento; ...Early Cold War Spies, by Hanes & Klehr; The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev; The Amerasia Spy Case, Klehr and Radosh...The Mighty Wurlitzer, How the CIA played America,  by Hugh Wilford;   and The Sword and The Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.

 

Although there have been droves of 20th century spy books, the above I found particularly helpful in understanding the workings of modern intelligence. However, there are a couple of other standouts I want to mention. One is not a book, or not Just a book, and that is Reilly Ace of Spies. I've yet to have a chance to sit down and chat with someone who is as much a fan of this story, the television series version of it, as I am. Sam Neill is great as Sidney Reilly. (You can Google a summary of the story of Reilly, and save me paraphrasing the same.) Here's a for-instance, from a Washington Post review. [His Russian Military family were anti-Semitic] "He was 16, at school in Vienna, when his mother died and he couldn't get back in time for the funeral. His uncle remarked, 'What can you expect from a Jewish bastard?' And that's how he discovered he was illegitimate; and Jewish. ..."He faked a suicide, ran away to South America and never saw his family again."
Reilly is believed to have been the source for the fictional story of James Bond. The series is directed by Martin Campbell and Jim Goddard.

The theme music is the romance movement from The Gadfly Suite, by Dmitri Shostakovich. For fifty years, from 1929 till he died in 1970, Shostakovich was the most prolific writer of movie soundtracks in The Soviet Union. The Suite was originally written for a Soviet film titled Gadfly. Stalin liked Shostakovich so much that he refrained from killing him!
The theme is my favorite meditation. I assume for the duration the being of Sam Neill, as Sidney Reilly, seducing one beautiful Russian woman after another, meanwhile conducting layered levels of negotiations between countries and world industrial powers. (Alright, I suppose that's not exactly meditating, but it works for me.) I did something similar in the early 1960s when I thought I was Marcello Maestroiani. I have a certain taste in music. It's mine. That's all I can say, except, that I think it is similar to love. It's in the ear of the beholder.


Then there's a book that really knocked my socks off. Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers; titled simply Whittaker Chambers; by Random House; NY 1997. I read about it in the NY Times Book Review and planned to read it but then one morning while watching the Imus show on TV, a radio show that was also broadcast over The Fox Network, I heard Imus raving about the book. So I went out and bought it and read it, and then read Chamber's book Witness. Imus continued to rave on and on about it for weeks on-end to the point where his sidekick, Charles McCord, went ballistic. If it was an act it was a good one. Seemed like he was having a stroke. He was sick of hearing about Whittaker Chambers. I got the joke. Imus was OCD.
And, so was I. I did the same thing to my own audience, which consists for the most part of only one person, Martha, my Significant Other, and she was driven to read the book. All in all it was a lovely time had by all, except for poor McCord.
Now I know that Imus died recently; I also know that he wasn't to everyone's taste. I apologize for liking him. I'll try to be more tactful in the future. But after sharing Tannenhaus's book with The I-Man, I feel like we were close.   

 

 

Out-takes, thoughts, and The Outsider.

The nice thing about our apartment is that it has a nice big window that looks out on a nice flat stretch of lawn, a typical square Florida reservoir pond, a typical South Florida canal, and a rather upscale horse farm, just on the other side of the canal, not one hundred feet from our two television-watching recliners; at which farm until recently I rode a little, until I felt I was getting too old and could get hurt. From this window I watch the horses and riders, some practicing Dressage, and some of whom, both horses and riders, I know personally, and also, the birds. (Whom I like to think I know well.)

The most permanent residents are the Muscovy ducks, birds that many think are common and vulgar, but not me, I like them. [see; contrarian] 

But also, there are Ospreys, Cattle Egrets, Ibises, Black Ducks, an occasional Pin-tail, Marsh Hens, and Shore Birds including Lemkins, [sp.], (I call them Lipkins, after a former landlady), Storks, (I forget which kind), and everybody's favorite, the Roseate Spoonbill.* There's another one, a red bellied something, a small duck, I've forgotten his name. The hardest part of this blogging is remembering names. Oh, and one of my favorites, the Kingfisher. 

One day, not long after my friend Einar had died, I was telling my riding coach about old Ein, and along came a Red Headed Woodpecker who landed right in front of me not twenty feet away. [Einar had red hair before it turned white], I felt it was a visit from Ein, perhaps to tell me he had made it to the Akashic Reading Room.  

I started out with this post wanting to carve out a place to put random thoughts, thinking I had a serious need for such a place, but now I've misplaced all those thoughts. I've been visited lately by another old friend, someone who gifted me, right around the time when I found out that when a Sasquatch wants to make a friendly gesture towards a Sapien Sapien, they leave hawk feathers by their nest.  I've been Hawk-feathered. 

When I talked to my sister before my birthday she wanted to know what I wanted. I've already made it clear, for over the last seventy years or so, that I "Don't Want Nothin", my way of saying I'm not going to get you anything, but being her, she's a stubborn Virgo, (are Virgos stubborn?) By the way, actually I wish my sign was Mule, which animal by the way is not stubborn, just extremely intelligent. (Analyze That!) 

Anyway, that very day, I'd restrained myself from buying another Rebecca West book, The Court and The Castle, and so I told her she could buy me that, used, from Amazon, and it showed up a few days later. I needed it because in another post as I mentioned, that great biographer Carl Rolyson had said it was one of her best, so I'm reading that now. 

How's my book ban coming?  Well, O.K. I guess...,  this week.  So now I'm reading the West book just mentioned; and a tiny book by Sara Churchill, Tapestry something; still sort of slowly hacking away at The Haunted Wood; Ingo Swann's Secrets of Power, Vol. 1; Holism and Evolution, (hacking away at that too), by Jan Christian Smuts, still hacking away at something by Luce Irigaray, maybe I'll focus more on her later, and also, you'd think this might confuse me, but not so far, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, something I've had on the shelf for too many years.