Semi-Annual Report, 10/17/20

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Presidential campaign is almost over.  I'm sure my lately developed Psoriasis is a result of the political warfare in the fractured public discourse. There is nothing to do but wait it out. It's low-grade PTSD. My bride has it too. (The anxiety, not the skin problem. I've discussed the marriage, somewhere, I think, or will soon write a treatise on it.)

A few months ago I decided it was absolutely necessary that I read Korzybski's book Science and Sanity. I've been reading ten pages a day, early morning before my Zoom meeting. This morning on page 578 I came to a dead halt. Can go no further. Too much math. Calculus!  Didn't I know this would happen? What now? Do I jump into a fit of self anger, or talk myself off the ledge?  .....Off the ledge of course.  

My mother always said about me, that I bite off more than I can chew. That my reach exceeds my grasp. She used to say, "Pity the poor Pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can!"  Dear old mom.  ...But then again she probably planted the Korzybski seed. She had the book. Don't think she read it, but I think she read some Hayakawa.  You remember him.., the Senator.  Anywayz, as they say in Canada, there is a theme developing here that shouldn't be overlooked. Note to self: Take note!  

 

Having done some Zooming with some nice folks up in Prince Edward Island, I decided to read its most famous novel, Ann of Green Gables.  Having read it, I'm beginning to feel an attachment to the people of PEI as it's called. I noticed there's a Kindle book that has all or almost everything she wrote, Lucy Mongomery, Green Gable's author, so I snatched that up and started reading a second of her books. There are at least 100, so we'll have to see....she's no James Joyce, he said looking down his nose.  

Also, re-reading Ashley Montegue's book, Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, which I read back in the seventies. Re-reading it to assuage, if possible, my politically encouraged psycho-somatic Psoriasis. Also re-reading a couple of books about consciousness that are laying around, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of a meta-language with which I could converse with the universe. Have I said that the Politics are getting me down? I mean, if someone were to tell me that the Liberal Media is not a propaganda organ for the Hard Left, I might act out. Let's leave it at that.   

     

Politics, 2.O

Whatever my beliefs are, or my system of beliefs, if that applies, or my preferences, likes, dislikes and ad. infinitum, I'm ego involved. I live and die according to my thoughts.  Thoughts are things, as my friends in New Thought would say. Why do I care about the coming Presidential election?  Being that I'm 77 years old and am destined for a future life in the Forth Dimension; some place in the high frequency world of the non-physical?   

I care because of love. Because all those I love seem so much younger than me. In many cases, so naive. So childlike. Expecting a perfect world. Not allowing for evil, sin, stupidity;  including those who think that I.Q. tests are unfair. .....O.K.  Lets have an I.Q. test that's fair. Everyone do the test. We will judge it according to what each participant thinks is fair. Everyone gets an A. Everyone has an I.Q. of 140. There. Now the test is politically correct, and useless.   

Let's give everyone a free home and a paycheck geared to the cost of living. The cost of living will rise. Those more clever will capitalize on their property and on their mental and physical efforts, while the less clever will flounder and the least clever will need special care. 

How is it that someone who voted for Jimmy Carter has gotten so wise in his old age? Not without a struggle, believe me. (I discuss the aforementioned in my book Hold On, sequel to Hold Still, [renamed The White Fence] so I needn't get into it here. It will be available for posterity, all that really counts when you come down to it.)     

 

I feel there is an awful lot of business in running a country; trade is business; negotiation is business, territorial expansion is business.  And, cut to the chase, a Communist isn't likely to be good at business. In fact, being bad at it probably would be good. And, what is progressivism except moving in a particular direction "progressively".  What's left, after the above, is to decide whether one wants Communism. If not, you are stuck with Capitalism.  In fact, even Communism needs capital, but you can only use it once, because it's not being re-produced!  Now, I know there is a school that says all you need to do to get money is to print it, but I think that dead horse has been flayed.  

The election is about seventeen days away and I'm voting for the Capitalist. He's brought jobs back from China.  He's closed the Mexico wall. That's all I need.  My concerns are for the people who live in pre-fabricated homes, own a pick-up truck and a Harley, (or maybe a backyard horse), and somehow get by, while raising two point five kids. There is no reason these people should be sacrificed to some elitist fantasy.    

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was a Sephardic Jew, born to German-speaking parents in Bulgaria, and raised in Vienna. He was part of the community of exiles taken in by the British in the 1930s during the build-up to World War ll.  

He is best known for his non-fiction book, Crowds and Power, published in German in 1960 and translated into English in 1962, and Die Blendung, a novel written in 1935 and translated to English in 1946, under the title Auto da Fe, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1981. (Auto da Fe does not mean anything similar to Die Blendung, but I don't suppose that matters.)    

I've just finished reading Party in The Blitz, supposed to be the last part of his memoirs, but published after his death. I've been looking forward to reading it for some time, and had a feeling I was going to like the book, (it seemed to be calling me), and so, wanted to get some other reading out of the way and give it my full attention. Possibly, part of it's attraction came from the fact that Iris Murdoch valued him so highly.  Rumor had it she was in love with him.   

Canetti took a long time in getting his words out there. He was an exile to the depth of his non-religious soul: extremely sensitive about being an outsider. He was an atheist but though the Political Left was his faith, he didn't write much about it or refer to it, at least in this part of his memoirs. He was concerned with the environment in which he had lived, feeling that he was at the center of the intellectual ferment. His memoirs are a personal history of his life from Bulgaria where he was born, to Vienna, where he was raised in a Jewish intellectual environment, to London and finally to Zurich.  

If I say that I find Elias endearing, just on account of this one reading that is; I should add that this is the only book of his I've read to date. Mostly I've known him through his fictionalization at the hands of Iris, who has written more than one book in which some part of Canetti is in an important character. (Perhaps I would have liked some woman to write about me in such a way. That is not a question.) His fictional being comes across as powerful, mesmerizing, and usually right about everything. Who would want anything less?   (ie; What's not to like?)   

 

Party in The Blitz is meant to be part of a series but comes out much later and posthumously...perhaps edited too much or not enough to the writer's specs. Is he sadistic to women? Probably. And do I forgive him too much by giving him credit for being self-abasing in his exhibitionism? Probably.  

Though most of the people he writes about were not familiar to me so that the book is an exposure to a wider milieu, I have long been interested in the topic of artists in their social world. The cocktail party is essential to the book, but the British designation leaves out the word "cocktail", unlike the parties I mentioned in another post referring to those occurring among the Partisan Review crowd during a similar historical time frame in New York City.  

Each character is given a short chapter, finely tuned and "off the nose", as someone said; taking you somewhere you didn't expect. There's Herbert Read, Enoch Powell, Veronica Wedgewood, Franz Steiner, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, people who he often claims not to like but seems quite fascinated with. A street sweeper is one he liked.  

Kathleen Raine was a poet, and not from the aristocracy or even the upper classes. She was raised by a schoolmaster descended from coal miners, in the countryside in Northumberland.  

She had earned her place in the literary world, for which Canetti gave her credit, though he is sure that she didn't like his work, and that he didn't give her's the time of day. He doesn't say if they were lovers but he is fascinated in turn by her fascination with two brothers, themselves aristocrats. He met her at "one of her parties in Chelsea." At the time she was giving lots of parties. He went with one of his mistresses, Friedl.  (His wife was completely tolerant of his mistresses and in fact often befriended them.) But his relationship with Raine failed to deepen until he became friends with the Maxwell brothers, about whom Kathleen seemed to have a serious fixation, at least as Canetti saw it. (He too was, I think, impressed by the history of the two boys, and probably projects some of his thoughts onto the poetess.) 

Blitz; p. 63;

"When they were out walking once, Kathleen's mother pointed out to her a couple of golden, shining-haired boys who were standing together on a small bridge. Their mother was speaking to them in elevated tones, the language was like poetry. This was lady Mary, the daughter of the Duke, with her boys, who if not the sons of a Duke were at least grandsons...   ...The vision of the two golden-haired boys was to accompany Kathleen all her life. Thirty years later, when I knew her, she still spoke about it in visionary terms. ..."

 

Canetti spent years patiently listening to Kathleen pour out her heart concerning her failure to get one of the boys, Aymer, the older one, that had inherited the great estate, to fall in love with her. She seems not to have understood that he, in fact both Aymer and his brother Gavin, were gay. Both were, at least on the surface, manly swashbuckling types. They were also both very bright but unambitious intellectually, and were good listeners, which was Canetti's most important qualification in a companion. In the book, he gives the two boys by far the most generous treatment, which I'm not sure any of the critics has put down to their lack of threat to him in his pursuit of total adoration from women.  Gavin did, eventually, become a writer, though, not a terribly good one we are to understand, but was a monumental success with his book about his pet Otter,  Ring of Bright Water.  

Like the two or three critics I investigated in light of this reading, I was most interested in what he had to say about Iris. I can empathize with Canetti's hatefulness toward her, I've been there, that is to say in terms of women with whom I have been in love. It seems to me like a natural reaction, after the love has gone. (Not going for any high moral ground, of course..) I'd rather see him wallow in meanness, after giving her the props of being a real and true and competent artist, someone of standing that he didn't possess, at that time or probably ever; if that is what being her lover made him feel. He grew up in a glamorous Vienna, with no doubt an adolescence full of idyllic visions of tall thin Klimptian womanhood. 

   

After finishing reading "Blitz", I read a criticism of it by the well- known though recently deceased contemporary English critic Clive James which is a fairly savage review. James didn't find much good to say about Canetti either as a writer or as a man. The review is snide, clever and unsympathetic. Though James is Australian, he's more of an Englishman then I am and I suppose he took offense to the not always positive view that Canetti had of his hosts. James is offended by Canetti's seeming lack of interest in The War. But let me just quote a piece from this James review, which I believe was first published in The Guardian and then in The New York Times;  

"...he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority.  Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the Battle of Britain taking place above him -- the completeness with which he fails to evoke the scene is breathtaking -- Canetti, unlike many another German-speaking refugee, managed to take no part whatever in the war against Hitler, then or subsequently. He had his own war to fight, against, among others, T.S.Eliot.  Canetti's loathing of Eliot is practically the book's leitmotif: you have to imagine a version of Die Meistersinger: in which Beckmesser keeps coming back on stage a few minutes after he goes off. "I was living in England as its intellect decayed," Canetti recalls. "I was witness to the fame of a T.S.Eliot... A libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante ... thin-lipped, coldhearted, prematurely old ... armed with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife ... tormented to such a degree that my "Auto-da-fe" would have shriveled up if he had gone near it." "  

  

Then there's this quote, from Carol Angier, in a review of "Blitz", in The Independent, July, 2005; 

"It can only be love-hate, because for Canetti and his kind the best things in England are also intolerable. He is hot in everything, especially his opinions, while the English are cool and moderate. He admires their moderation immoderately, and knows it is the reason why Britain alone in Europe is non-Fascist and free. But nothing could be more alien to him. He craves attention and praise, while in England praise is embarrassing, and attention-seeking the ultimate sin. His leitmotif is arrogance, but the English are more arrogant than him. He can enslave some of their women; but Englishmen, and Englishness, mock and defeat him as nothing else will ever do but death itself."

 

In the process of finding the James review I became aware of just what a big-shot Canetti was, or is, judging by the space he takes up on Google. It appears that he has been written about by half the Western World.  So, when I say to myself that he must be a big-shot, let me be seen as gesticulating in the manner of Mel Brooks.  "I mean, whoa, such a big shot!" Of course he made his name pre-Mel Brooks, pre-Borscht Belt, but there must have been a little Jewish humor in his persona available to him, to his fellow refugees, and to the local Britishers. He had friends. You could say he was somewhat popular. There were those that loved him and those that didn't but he seems to have been well respected as an intellectual, and managed to get close to some and close enough to others.  

There is something attractive about the exile narrative or it wouldn't be such a big part of literature. It is almost all of Joyce. Homer. Some of Mark Twain. and etc. and of course some of us'ns.  I'll have more to say about Canetti.  

# A note on the illustration.  It is only vaguely related to Canetti in that he considered himself a Balkan, and that his name is most likely a derivative of Elijah. ( But I think it's nice. )     

 

 

The Czech is in The Montenegren

 

 

I've given myself a time out. I'm being treated for Gout and for Psoriasis. The Gout is now somewhat under control with a standard medication; name of which I'll have to get up from my chair here to get the spelling of....Colchicine, not that you care. The Psoriasis is only the last in a series of diagnoses by a series of doctors for a rash on my back that's about five years old. Haven't you had enough of this? 

Yes. Now for the Czech. When I visited the town in Montenegro where my father was born about twenty years ago, I found a cousin, Ivan, with whom I had trouble conversing because I wasn't able to find an available translator and I don't speak what is now called Montenegrin but was then called Serbo-Croatian. But with a small group of people who each knew a few words of English we struggled along, and my cousin, Ivan, who has since passed away, showed me numerous photos of his family.  

From what I could discern, it seemed, from a picture of his mother and his description of her, that she was my father's aunt and Godmother, Baba Jana. Another picture was of an Austro-Hungarian Army Officer, and I've come to the conclusion that he was my father's father's father. My great grandfather. I've forgotten his name now. (That's part of the problem of waiting until you're old to get interested in you genealogy.)  This officer, everyone agreed, looked just like me. 

I don't know for sure, but I think he was born in Czech Bohemia. I believe the Empire's Army sent him to Montenegro, where he married, I'm assuming a Croat, which would have been considered in the family, of the same tribe and race as it were, (Roman Catholic), which allowed him to settle in and become part of the landscape. His son Sima, though, (Simon in Americanese, and my Gramps, who I never met,) married a Montenegren Serb, and was therefore disowned and so had to flee to the U.S., in much the same manner as my mother's maternal grandmother and grandfather, who were Catholic and Protestant and lived in Northern Ireland and came here for the same reason. (This is a story I've told before, so I must think it's interesting.) My Czech part is in the male. My Irish, Scots-Irish part is in the female, with the Catholic being the Grandmother and the Protestant being the male. 

I suppose there is a good case for mine being a bastardized as well as balkanized genealogy, all of which could make a lesser man slide toward an identity crisis.  I, however, for those of you who are along for the ride, must tell you that I am well beyond that. I've been transformed, (I did EST), I've become transcendant, (I did T.M.), I'm sober, (I did that thing), and I've delved into General Semantics, by which I mean I'm on page 206 reading Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. And on that page, or near it, I've come across some interesting information about infinity, which, and I'll end with this, is formulated symbolically as an eight, on its side, which I thought to myself, perhaps channeling my late brother-in-law Burt Glinn, famous photographer, and compulsive punster, can be written as ate lying down.  Badump bump.    

 

 

 

Obituary for a Lost Blog Post

 

 

May it rest in peace!  And may I find peace, about IT.  I lost a blog post in the electronic maze and it won't stop annoying me.  I don't feel I can entirely blame myself. It seems to me that some devil had first off messed with the post.  I was looking through the various posts and noticed this one that seemed to have had several, in fact many sentences removed, including some that were cut with seemingly no selectivity.  I tried to find an original copy and then I noticed that the post was in draft form. Anyway, in the process of trying to retrieve the original, I erased the draft form and all was lost. Of course, I could say it's no big deal. I mean it's only me, mine, and who the F. am I?  But I refuse to think that way.  First off, it was important to me; and second of all it's probably of some interest to someone, I have that much faith in myself.  

 

The post, as usual with me, was about a couple of books I'd read recently, one being a biography of Wilhelm Reich, Fury on Earth, by Myron Sharaf, and the other being the well known book about the Merry Pranksters; Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  The tie-in between the two books, for me was that one of the primary characters in the story of the Merry Pranksters was a woman who's house was the gathering place for the people, the social crowd, which evolved into the Pranksters.  Her name was Chloe Scott, and she had some relationship to Stanford University, which I've forgotten now, and she lived in Palo Alto. She had studied Buddhism and Dance, she was a dance instructor, and she was attractive and kind of a hipster.  She had also, in her earlier days, lived in my hometown, East Hampton, NY, and had been part of the artist's and writer's community there, which included my own parents.  At that time she was married to a guy named Pete Scott, who's best friend was a young writer who would later become famous, by the name of Peter Mathiessen. The two guys had been part of the summer social set as kids, and as adults, after WWll, had come back and gone native.  Mathiessen wrote a great book about that part of his and Pete Scott's life, Men's Lives, a book that describes the world of off-the- beach haulseining fishermen, with whom they worked for some years. I also wrote about the two in relation to another part of their social life at that time which centered around the dynamic, cyclonic life of the artist Jackson Pollock who became world famous almost moments before he killed himself and another person and injured a third in a drunken driving accident.  

The tie-in, if there is one, is based on a rumor that existed at that time, that one of the two couples, Scott and his wife Chloe, or Peter and his wife Patsy, had a Reichian Orgone Box. The rumor was never substantiated though years later Chloe did admit to having "Basted" herself in one such contraption. The reason for the lack of candor no doubt had to do with the fact that all Reichian devices were illegal, owing to the fact that the powers that be had convicted Reich as a fraud, and he had died in prison. Reich, though, had in death retained a loyal following which grew slowly during the fifties, and was greatly helped by his inclusion in The Whole Earth Catalogue, arguably the Holy Bible of the Hippy movement, which was conceived and edited by another of Chloe's friends and part of that same social set, Stewart Brand. There it is, a re-hash, a memory of a lost blog; feel better, me.  

 

 

 

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.  

                                            ___

*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.