Stanley Elkin
“…We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime."
Franz Kafka, from Conversations With Kafka
This one of course is incomprehensible on steroids, as are the likely consequences. (And what suggests itself as comprehensible is almost too ugly to contemplate.)
But the consequences are yet to come, and the task now is to tamp down the adrenal panic, and proceed prudently. Part of the panic is not knowing how to protect ourselves. There doesn't seem to be much we can do, especially at our age. Flight means different sets of difficulties, for few places on Earth are going to be untouched. We're vulnerable, but so are many, many others, including those far more vulnerable than we.
So now it's just occupying ourselves, attending to the moment at home while at same time living for awhile in other worlds in books etc. When I've been out this week--walking, at the nearest grocery, a hike up Trinidad Head--people have been unfailingly gentle, polite and kind. It may be the last calm before the onslaught of storms, and since we suspect it is, it has a sense of unreality that goes with life going on as before.
There are maybe two things different about it this time. The first is about the country and therefore the world, which is that this is a more thorough catastrophe. Maybe the nation will be so fucked up that in four years the Democrats take power again, but...they'll have to reinvent themselves first. Everything about politics and elections--political operatives and campaign theorists, pollsters and media--are all utterly discredited. That's even just assuming that what just happened is political in that sense. It feels more societal, and that doesn't bode well for change. In fact, given the pressures on our system that nature will provide, as well as wily dictators, it bodes well for chaos. From what little news I've allowed myself to see, that's already begun. But it may take some time to reach critical mass.
The second, since I'm taking a personal perspective here, is age. The aging life is likely to make its own demands on my time and attention, forcing its priorities. What's going on in the outside world probably won't help, may materially hurt, but eventually it all becomes part of the same thing: living in time.
So if I'm fortunate I can find the inner and outer resources to complete the work I want to do, the final acts of witness to the world I've experienced, a world now almost totally gone. And live partly in those alternate worlds of story, of memory, of my remaining capabilities.
But for now it's one day at a time. Or one hour, as I deal with sleep and other physical issues, the day is seldom predictable. I'm also finding that shorting out the anxiety during the day seems to simply move it to when I'm asleep. I can feel it strongly then, making sleep lighter and more broken at best.
As I cast about for things to occupy me away from all this, I was provided with the sight of a book on a shelf I didn't remember putting there, in plain sight of where I walk by several times a day. It was an account of Paul Newman directing a film version of The Glass Menagerie in the early 1980s. I'd not read it before. And also, when looking for something I didn't find, I saw that I had a film version of this play on VHS I'd never watched, a library discard. It's the same Paul Newman directed film. So I'm now reading the book, and then I'll watch the film.
Margaret suggested I also look at film comedies I have that I like (and mostly that she doesn't); the Marx Brothers and so on. So far I've reveled in some Rocky and Bullwinkle (the administration of Whatsamatta University is meeting because the school is going broke. "Why don't we give Daddy Warbucks an honorary degree?" "Daddy Warbucks is a fictional character," the president scoffs. The guy who suggested it looks stricken. "You mean we're real?")
I've also got DVDs of a great unheralded Italian comedy, "Big Deal on Madonna Street," and a package of 1980s comedies including "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun." And the Marx Brothers, of course.
Margaret also learned a joke going around now, likely in European circles:
Q. What borders on Stupidity?
A. Canada and Mexico.
“Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, have their actions as their refuge.”
Majjima Nikaya,
Buddhist teaching
There is nothing about this election I understand, except its very dire consequences.
I guess I'm not alone in this. Half the country seems to be having a nervous breakdown today.
For me, I realize that this hasn't been the world I've known for some time, but now it is a truly alien country.
America is in disgrace today. Our system has failed, beginning with the judiciary, that sent hundreds to jail for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, but failed to bring its leader to justice. The result is we have a man who was impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, who is guilty of 34 felonies and charged with what amounts to multiple treasonous acts, handed fateful power again. Now everyone is endangered (except perhaps a few billionaires), including the selfish saps who voted for Chaos.
2025 was always shaping up to be a fateful year. For the international effort to address the climate crisis through the Paris Agreements, 2025 is a benchmark year. Several targets for that year are almost certainly going to be missed. Needless to say, the new US government will officially not care. Meanwhile the emission of the main greenhouse gases reached record levels in 2023, after one of the highest one year increases from 2022 despite international commitments to lower emissions.
In all the campaign fuss, a few relevant news items were obscured, such as the latest UN climate conference which called for "no more hot air" instead of action, and a "quantum leap in ambition" if the goals of limiting greenhouse gases sufficiently is to be attained.
And the story that half a million people around the world were killed since 2004 in natural disasters made worse by climate distortion--more deaths than caused by wars, terrorism and malnutrition combined. The predicted expansion of formerly tropical diseases has also begun, with outbreaks of malaria, cholera and dengue in new regions.
Now of course we've elected to have multiple other very dangerous crises and soon. Perhaps even before the US commits economic suicide with global consequences, we've learned that Russia is enlisting North Korean troops to fight Ukraine, coupled with the kowtowing to Putin by Musk and of course Chaos himself, threatening Ukraine's existence, the western alliance and eventually the sovereignty of the United States.
I could go on but who's listening? I haven't slept since Monday night. Every time I started to fall asleep, another terrible consequence would attack me.
On November 6 the sun came up on the beginning of a very different world, for everyone. And really really really, not in a good way.
The numbers people, the data people, parse what they continue to call an extremely close race. Ace NYT numbers guy Nate Cohn worries aloud that the polls may underestimate Chaos again, and ace NYT numbers guy Nate Silver sees the Chaos shadow everywhere. No momentum for Kamala, a dour razor thin election.
But out there on the campaign trail for the past week or more the contrast has been almost mythic. The Harris campaign is exuberant, expansive, joyful. She sounds like a winning candidate talking to the electorate that will soon be her constituency. Chaos sounded broken, dazed and depressed. She sounds like a winner. He sounded like a loser.
The Harris campaign, fusing Democrats, Republicans and the unaffiliated, is unified. The federal and state Republican organizations are detached, the Chaos campaign itself is riven with public infighting.
The momentum has been visible, palpable. Kamala Harris drew ever-increasing crowds. Huge crowds everywhere--20,000 was not unusual. 75,000 in Washington. The sprawling crowd for her last event in Philadelphia may have been upwards of 30,000. The last Chaos rallies showed empty seats, people leaving.
The numbers people say it's a tossup. The vibe says that America is finally done with him.
To be sure, there's plenty of good news in the numbers for Harris. The final Marist poll puts her national numbers at 51% to Chaos 47%, which has been the number that has sounded right to me this week. (Reading between the lines, I think the Harris campaign is figuring on a 50/48% split.) The NYT & some other big polls are tied nationally, and the swing states very close. But even in the NYT poll, Harris is ahead in more of those states. The same in other polls, though it's not always the same states. Then there's that surprising Iowa poll with Harris ahead there, which may suggest layers and movement that other polls aren't picking up.
And there are the other numbers: the number of Harris staff and volunteers, the number of calls they're making and doors they're knocking on, vs. the conspicuous absence of Chaos workers. A superior get out the vote effort is worth at least half a percentage point, they say. Once again, these numbers suggest the vibe--the enthusiasm that is motivating, that could create the bandwagon effect of an obviously winning campaign.
And it seems that nobody but maybe Nate Siler and Nate Cohn believe Chaos will win. Observers as different as Michael Moore and Bill Kristol not only foresee a Harris victory, but one that will be clear by midnight tonight, though a lot of votes will likely still be uncounted.
What to expect? The first crucial results will probably be Georgia and North Carolina, either or both of which are expected to have definitive results by say 9 or 10 p. EST. If Harris wins one, the most direct path to victory for Chaos has been severed, and it's time to put the champagne in the fridge. If she wins them both, then something big is happening.
Michigan and Wisconsin may also report enough votes by say 11 p. to show the shape of votes to come. If she wins those as well as Georgia and North Carolina, it's time to to pop the cork. If she has won one, then it may take awhile for her to officially get the two votes she needs.
If results are mixed, then the wait for Pennsylvania returns, which could be late Wednesday or Thursday. Nevada and Arizona could take a week or even two to complete their count. Any or all of them could be projected by the networks before the night is out. But if margins are truly razor thin, the suspense will continue past the weekend.
But the vibe says no. It says that women--including a healthy minority of Republican women, a plurality of unaffiliated women, have not forgotten the abortion bans. It says that young voters are excited, Black and Latino voters are motivated, older voters are disgusted with and alarmed by Chaos, so they will turn out to vote for Harris. It says that many former Chaos voters may be like Chaos campaign staffers who would be glad if he just goes away. They may stay home. At his last events, it was clear that if Chaos was trying to appeal to anyone, it was right wing conspiracy fringe.
The vibe says Texas and Florida may not be out of reach. And yes, Iowa. It says that the Dems may squeak out a Senate and House majority.
Even some of the numbers people suggest that the polls aren't picking up late registrants, their models might not work anymore anyway, and in an election with a coalition of Ds and Rs (and a Generation Z that prefers to register unaffiliated), how people will actually vote based on registration is even more unpredictable than usual. The vibe says that even if the numbers are even, there are enough ways to "overperform" them to win.
The vibes were all on display on Monday night. They say President Harris.
If you haven't voted, vote. Be grateful you experienced the Harris campaign. Soon we learn our fate. Let's hope the vibes are right. Because what's at stake is the future. Possibly all of it.
If Chaos was not threatening to trash the Constitution and fully become Homemade Hitler, it would easily qualify as the issue of paramount importance. Even with this, it's right up there. Because it is about so much more than a woman's right to choose. It's about a woman's right to live.
This was revealed earlier in the campaign with the report confirming that two women had died in Georgia because they were not given medical care by doctors terrified of arrest and incarceration under one set of the extreme laws passed by a number of states that criminalize medical care. It was further emphasized in the days following these speeches with the confirmation of a similar--and similarly heartbreaking--case in Texas in which an otherwise health young woman in distress was left by doctors to suffer and die. This woman did not enter the hospital to have an abortion; she was there to give birth. But there were tragic complications that required procedures that had essentially been outlawed.
That this is happening in America should shock every American, and every American should demand that these cruel laws be abolished. Reproductive rights for all women is at the center of this, but because of these laws, the danger goes far beyond restricting abortion. Women who get pregnant with the intention of bearing the child can suffer from miscarriages. That is tragic enough, but add to it the denial of care that has been routinely offered for as long as it has existed, because of these laws. It has led to young women bleeding to death, alone and afraid.
Michelle Obama was eloquent also on the ripple effects of the Chaos abortion bans. They are driving women's health facilities out of business, and so denying routine care to millions of women, including preventive care and early diagnosis of cancers and other life-threatening ailments. They are discouraging doctors from specializing in women's care, and medical students from learning it.
As both women emphasized, this is an issue not just for women but for men who have women in their lives--including their mothers and sisters and daughters. It is in fact a human rights issue. This is an abrogation of human dignity in America that is morally on the level of slavery.
The solution is the return of reproductive rights as guaranteed under the Roe decision, but this time written into federal law so that no corrupt court or repulsive legislature can deny them. That can be accomplished by electing Kamala Harris to the presidency, and Democrats to both houses of Congress.
Among the avalanche of revealing statements that Chaos is making in the last week or so of this campaign was his assertion that he would be the protector of women "whether the women like it or not." Spoken like a true sexual predator and supreme misogynist. There are signs that this issue as well as others are driving women to the polls in record numbers. That includes Republican women and the many primarily younger women who register to vote as unaffiliated to any party. There are so many issues of such great importance that this one has slipped to the background in media coverage and analysis. On November 5, that may really change, big time.
I have the advantage--if you can call it that--of this blog, which was very active during the 2016 campaign. My 199 posts speak of shock and outrage and disgust at the lying and vitriol of the Republican candidate's campaign--a figure who I soon began to call Homegrown Hitler, a dictator wannabe.
But Hillary Clinton remained comfortably ahead in the polls, and it seemed inconceivable that she would lose against a so clearly unqualified, unfit and utterly vile opponent. And there's plenty of other resemblances to this year's campaign. There were warnings of the dangers he posed. Towards the end of the campaign, amid big rally appearances by Barack and Michelle Obama and, yes, Bruce Springsteen, Hillary told voters, "I'm all that stands between you and the apocalypse."
Pollsters and their ilk began to offer percentages of probability on the outcome. Hillary was touted as having a 90% chance of winning. One site--was it the Huffington Post?--gave her a 100% probability.
I was so disgusted and disheartened by the tawdriness of the campaign and the media coverage of it that I began to post videos of various versions of the song, "On the Sunny Side of the Street,": everybody from Gale Storm to Willie Nelson with Tony Bennett, and Esperanda Spalding's performance of it at the Obama White House.
So I sang that song to myself as I walked to my polling place, encouraged by the actual sunny day, and I voted (as it turned out, for the last time in person on Election Day as I had for every election before it since 1972.)
To call that night and the subsequent weeks traumatic is to suggest why I am still haunted (and as I mentioned in my Halloween origins post, haunted means to be inhabited by. These days we say "lives rent free in my head", which does not quite evoke the same emotional weight. Haunted says it better.)
So much is different in 2024, and yet so much is repeated. The candidate I now refer to as Chaos is even more openly running for tyrant, even more obviously unhinged and vile, with no limit to the ugly pernicious lies. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is saying, though in different words, that this time she really is all that stands between us and the apocalypse, and with overwhelming evidence that this time it may be literally true.
Commentators may say that we're in the classic campaign mode of Republicans being overconfident and Democrats dizzy with worry. Maybe so, but once traumatized, twice shy. Haunted by 2016, we anxiously examine any evidence that we're for an even worse shock this time.
In conventional political terms, by every measure, there has never been a worse candidate than Chaos. But the conventional wisdom is that the election is still up for grabs, and at the moment, I detect the sense of the New York Times, for instance, and other mainstream media outlets that Chaos is more likely to win. It may be that after stories about the women's vote and abortion, the youth vote, the absolutely unprecedented flood of Republican former officeholders and even current officeholders continuing to come out for Kamala, their reporters have rediscovered working class discontent, now (perhaps) moving beyond white men. Or they think they know something.
That impression is bolstered by the utter cowardice exhibited by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times--and especially their billionaire owners--in preventing planned endorsements of Kamala Harris and suddenly deciding not to endorse for President (despite endorsing for other offices.)
Think about the ignominy of this. Who in this world risks less in speaking their minds than multi-billionaires? There are Republican politicians who have seriously risked their careers by endorsing Harris. There are women who have risked retribution by telling their stories of the deadly effects of abortion bans, and publicly endorsed Harris. Yet these billionaires who fear that regulation, taxes, investigations might cut into their profits when they already have obscene amounts of money, don't want to offend Chaos more than they have. They dishonor the traditionally great newspapers they own in the bargain. But their cowardice also looks like an indicator that they believe Chaos has a good chance of winning.
There are more conventional issues that could go against Harris. I've written before that in my lifetime the one economic phenomenon that most upsets voters has always been higher prices. Grocery prices, housing, fast food prices-- there are going to be voters for whom this is paramount in voting against somebody that is associated with somebody they think is responsible. Such issues link up with latent misogyny and overall resentment. And it's true that a society that continues to operate with the very rich getter immeasurably richer and everyone else sliding down is going to face a reckoning sooner or later. That this is precisely the wrong way to express it--that it will only make matters worse and further empower the very rich--is a true thought, but not a feeling.
At the Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues a variation on this: he writes that some of this resentment is so strong that anything that Chaos says that outrages those perceived as better off pleases them, and makes Chaos more attractive. It's the old "owning the libs" refrain, but extended. He loves Hitler? He says he'll send armed soldiers after television personalities who criticize him? That's taking it to them. The more chaos that Chaos creates the better--that is, until prices go up 20% and recession hits, Social Security goes broke with a 30% cut in current benefits, all results of announced Chaos policies economists predict.
Chaos pushes his extremist lies about immigrants, but Democrats only ignore these statements and their effects. They talk about Chaos as a fascist. But judging from his huge Madison Square Garden rally, right out of the Hitler playbook, there is a market for fascism.
They don't even need to be a majority. We're forced to accept the reality that this election is going to be determined in a few swing states, and therefore by a minority. The last Republican candidate for President to win the popular vote was GW Bush in 2004 (and he didn't win it in 2000.) Hillary won the most total votes for President. But it didn't matter. (I should add that this year, there is some possibility that another state or two beyond the designated swing states could turn out to be surprising and decisive.)
He's a numbers guy and veteran of nearly 40 years of Democratic campaigns. He warns against the flood of specious Republican sponsored polls that are again trying to screw with expectations. He says that a real pollster for the Republican party recently told him he sees the race shifting back to Harris. Some analysts see evidence in recent polls of a late break towards Harris. Rosenberg also notes that Chaos got fewer votes than his opinion polls suggested he would in nearly all of his primaries--which means that this flood of Republican support for Harris has some political basis among Republican voters.
Rosenberg touts the Democratic ground game, money for ads, Harris being seen as more likeable than Chaos, her drawing even on the economy, and the massive enthusiasm for the Harris campaign that has the potential of bringing in new voters and motivate them to vote. That's in addition to the expected power of women voting especially on the abortion issue, as evidenced in virtually every actual election that's been held since the deep-sixing of Roe v. Wade freedoms. He praises the Harris campaign as the most skillful and savvy in modern history (as do others.) Harris held the largest Arizona rally in that state's history, and the latest in Atlanta was 23,000.
To me Rosenberg is a little less persuasive in talking of the Harris campaign money advantage, especially for ads, because Hillary had a similar advantage, and there's a huge amount of dark money being spent on Chaos. But undoubtedly the bulge of official contributions to Harris financed hiring staff for sophisticated voter outreach, organizing events in swing states that go way beyond the big rallies and so on. Getting out the vote is not necessarily going to show up in polls (although the latest national poll, by ABC, shows a Harris surge.) But closing strong is the key to the Harris campaign strategy.
Rosenberg is a persuasive and articulate voice--he even advises on how to survive the negative noise, and maybe even the haunting of 2016. (Like don't dwell on it, as I've just done.) "Worry less, do more" is his closing mantra. In addition to his videos he has a campaign news site called the Hopium Chronicles, which I'm certainly going to be checking.
I've voted by mail, and my vote has been confirmed and is on the books here in California. I've contributed to the campaign. All of my eligible family members in western PA are voting Kamala. I'm getting "President Harris" on repeat in my head. Despite my 2016 haunting, I'm daring to once again direct my feet to the sunny side of the street.
Halloween is weird because, among other things, it's about death and dead people. That is indeed part of its origins, but it was also mixed up with harvest celebration, masking and mischief-making, the coming of winter, and treats. These days it seems also to be about sex and death. Weird.
Many cultures have designated days to commemorate the dead. By tradition, they tend to be in late autumn, as winter approaches--the season of cold when plants are dormant, and food can be scarce. Today's Halloween on October 31 appears to be a very ancient tradition of Celtic Ireland and Scotland, dating to the fifth century B.C. That day was the official end of summer and the harvest season, with November 1 marking their New Year. It was believed that this was a kind of liminal day in which the dead could visit the Earth.
There are different accounts of what this day actually entailed. The tamer version suggests a festival, in which villagers appeased the departed with gifts of food left outside their homes, or places set at their tables for their honored dead. Bonfires were lit to purify, as well as to ward off evil spirits.
The darker version suggests the belief was that those who'd died the previous year could return to choose the body of a person or animal to inhabit for the following year, before they passed over permanently into the afterlife. This is the literal meaning of "haunting": not to scare someone, but to inhabit them (as we speak of our old haunts.)
To prevent this haunting, people dressed up as demons and witches to frighten the dead away. They had extinguished their hearth fires so they wouldn't attract the dead to their homes, and paraded wildly to a big bonfire outside of town, where some unfortunate (and probably mentally ill) individual whose behavior might suggest possession by spirits would be sacrificed in the fire, to warn the dead that possessing one of them wasn't going to work. As these traditions spread in Europe over the centuries, the human sacrifice transformed to the burning of effigies. Halloween these days dilutes this a little more, with effigies but not much burning.
Whatever the mix was, it probably reflected the perennial twinned attitudes towards the dead: an empathetic desire to honor and help them on the one hand, and fear of them on the other, with malevolence towards the living projected on them.
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| A Celtic carved turnip--or space alien? |
It's said that these traditions accompanied the Irish and Scots to America. Lacking the right kind of turnips, however, they turned to pumpkins.
By then, the Catholic Church had long established its own ownership of this time of year for remembrance of the dead, stipulating October 31 as All Hallow's Eve (from which the name Halloween probably comes): like Christmas Eve, it was a vigil of an actual holiday, which in this case was All Saints Day on November 1, a holy day when Catholics are obliged to attend Mass. And for good measure, All Souls Day was designated for November 2.
Various countries and cultures have incorporated their folk traditions in ritual observances around these days to honor the dead. But the biggest observance by far is Halloween, shorn completely of conscious intentions or comprehended ritual. America has never figured out how to honor the dead beyond funerals (though that practice is itself waning), with the possible exception of those killed in wars.
But even in the guise of fun, Halloween reveals a lot of complicated if unconscious feelings about the dead and death. Elaborate costumes and trick or treating (from which the tricks have largely disappeared) function as many other festivals did and do--they create a time and space outside the normal, a permitted indulgence in whimsy, allowing for expressing different identities and generally loosening the normal constraints: unrestrained life as the answer to death, perhaps.
The dance with death is complicated. I once participated in an annual event in Pittsburgh, the "Night of the Living Dead" (Pittsburgh being where that iconic movie was made) in which various dead rock stars performed. I was Buddy Holly. I refused, however, to don the pale death makeup. I wasn't going to make fun of one of my musical heroes: I wanted to honor him and the life of his music. I could do the voice. It was great fun.
That may have been more a comment on their jobs, but it does seem that in sexy costumes and make-up, particularly in variations on the traditional horror figures of witches, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies etc., there is again an uneasy convergence of sex and death. The thrill of the transgressive must be part of it, maybe even the mocking of death, but beyond bravado it's not clear there's much consciousness of the reality behind the techniques.
I've never fully understood the entertainment value of being scared, or especially of scaring people. I get it that children (and others) learn to deal with their fears through experimentation, and that the rush comes not from the scare but from the moment afterwards, when it's clear there was no threat. But haunted houses for kids, or bloody horror movies for adults--both now apparently part of Halloween--aren't anywhere near the top of my list for ways to have fun. What I'd be afraid of is traumatizing a child--or myself. Like many holidays, it is very far from its origins, while still raising profound issues but mostly without clear or meaningful rituals to explore them. So Halloween as a holiday itself scares me a little.
With big rallies designed to both demonstrate and create enthusiasm while signing up new volunteers, candidate Kamala Harris has also been introducing herself to swing state voters through local media coverage. She's made several speeches on her approach to economic issues to business and labor audiences, and a speech at the southern border on immigration issues. These have been excellent events.
Now that early voting and mail voting is beginning, she's said to be honing in on describing the dangers of electing Chaos to a second (non-consecutive) term. He and his VP candidate are providing examples daily. Their baseless charges have upended lives in a small Ohio town, and are complicating relief efforts in areas hard hit by hurricane Helene. Relief to these people should be non-partisan, but in this election it provides a positive example of what the federal government can do for people--regardless of party--need this kind and scale of help. If Harris is not elected, Chaos will rule in these situations as well as everything else.
The polls continue to show prospects for very close results. How can this possibly be? One answer is that it isn't really going to be that close, and there's a sense of that, even among those darkly citing the polls. But assuming it is very close, it has to be because (in addition to those who vote out of racism, sexism and utter ignorance) a substantial number of people believe the country is worse off than it demonstrably is. They believe the lies. And Chaos and Vance are doing nothing but lying and lying and lying.
Why are they believed? Playing to prejudices is an ancient and still successful strategy, sometimes. But the answer to how they can boldly tell obvious lies, easily disproven lies, is that people are used to being boldly lied to, many times a day, by commercials. The same broadcasts that carry the lies of politicians, carry the absurd exaggerations and outright lies of commercials. This is even worse on the Internet, especially on You Tube.
The second element in commercials is relentless repetition, and Chaos quite consciously employs this technique, often upping the ante slightly to make the repetition "news" so it is again reported. News media fall for this every time.
The lies that Chaos tells support the notion that--as the poll question puts it--America is on the wrong track. The number of those who say it is continues to be high, and this is disquieting. Harris addresses this by positioning herself as a change candidate, a New Way Forward--and so a positive change. Chaos promises stark solutions that clearly invite chaos and disaster. And the problems he says he will solve mostly don't exist, at least not in the way he speaks about them.
I continue to believe that at bottom what Americans fear so much they can't talk about it is climate distortion. So far the Harris campaign is strategically avoiding this issue. It is imperative that she wins, so as a short term strategy I hope it works, and doesn't lock her into policies that make climate prospects worse. But this is likely to be the last election in which this strategy will be possible.
As if the prospects of Chaos being elected aren't terrifying enough, there is J.D. Vance. Chaos is looking like a soon to be spent force. Some in the psychiatric profession say that he is showing classic early signs of dementia. Can a President Vance be too far behind?
Voting ends in about a month, and Chaos is seeing his best chance in creating weeks and months of chaos beginning that day. So enjoy the enthusiasm and the hope of the Harris campaign, vote and encourage others to vote, and hope for the best.
So the reporters, the commentators and pundits were nearly unanimous in providing the wish-fulfillment headline: Harris Destroyed Trump in their debate. Some said it was the greatest performance in presidential debate history. The instant polls said Kamala Harris won by a lot, and the first audience figures said a lot of people watched.
So the next day, whose picture do we see on front pages above the fold? In the NY Times it was Trump. In the Washington Post it was...J.D. Vance. No politican made it atop the San Francisco Chronicle. Whose picture did we not see? The unanimous winner of the debate the night before, Kamala Harris. She earned the moment to let people see her with new eyes, to get used to the idea that this might be the next President. Just not on the front page, apparently. (These are the online front pages, late in the day, the only ones I can access.)
It's more than the predictable bait and switch of the new media. On her post-debate podcast, WPost columnist Jennifer Rubin nailed it: after pumping up the significance of the debate for a week, the story the next day would be that it may not matter all that much. That conclusion may be prudent--but the contrast with the preceding hype is stark and totally predictable.
And it's not even the usual ego first. Like Thomas Friedman writing that there are 23 words that Harris has to say to be assured of winning. And by writing them, making it impossible for her to say them.
No, what I see is the continuing knee-jerk addiction to pictures of Trump. Between the Harris triumph at the Democratic Convention and the debate, it was Trump's face on the front page way more often than hers. ("way more often" being a technical term in statistics.) These outlets are so used to using Trump to sell papers and attract clicks that it's become mindless second nature, and an addiction that's hard to kick.
And much of the time, the story highlights something awful that Trump has said or done. Even the leftish Guardian does it regularly. The day after the debate they did have a photo of people watching the debate with a split-screen of the two candidates. But the only solo photo above the fold was...Trump. And that's pretty typical of the Guardian.
Why is this potentially important? Because after his thoroughly discrediting debate, Trump and his campaign are going to go on the attack with new and more scurrilous lies, probably about Kamala Harris personally. The question is: will the news media give them prominence, or are they finished pretending that Trump's outrageous lies--so clearly untrue and vicious from the start--need to be aired and evaluated, like the charges by a normal candidate? They've always done it. Will they keep doing it?
The few instances of fact-checking during the ABC debate were a heartening precedent. The general refusal so far to repeat some of the ugliest assertions Trump is making at his rallies is also hopeful. But Trump's Big Lies attract eyes, they sell papers, they get clicks. It's the media version of a high.
Apart from reviving latent racism and sexism we'd hoped wasn't there anymore, Trump won in 2016 by successfully making Hillary Clinton the issue. (The director of the FBI helped alot with his late campaign announcement of a re-investigation of Clinton that quickly exonerated her, again, but too late.) His only chance now, other than suppressing votes and causing chaos at the polls and afterwards, is to make Harris the issue.
Nobody knows what's going to happen; they don't even know what's happening now. The polls are so full of different methods and political skewing that even an average is not reliable. The "undecided" voters interviewed on TV are professionally undecided--it's the only way they can get anyone to pay attention to them. So they don't represent anyone. We can be pretty sure that there's a core of voters who could watch Trump eat a dog and a cat on television and still vote for him. On the other hand, I don't think Harris loses a swing state where there's a choice amendment on the ballot. Apart from Taylor Swift, I think Harris is going to have to talk about climate distortion to win the youth vote big. In general she's making it easier for people to take a chance on her.
The Democrats look focused, and the campaign is well-funded. There's enthusiasm on the ground. Trump will be aided by Putin's army of trolls, which is why Trump won't publicly support Ukraine. He wants Putin to be sure that supporting him is the easiest way to win that war.
But things happen in a campaign, and exactly what they will be is always unknown until they happen. The news media has said before that they've learned from their mistakes (Willy Horton, the Swift Boat, etc.) but then they do it again. If this election is as close as everyone says it is (which may be as reliable as the 90% chance that H. Clinton would win in 2016) even the news media could make the difference.
“Everything in the mind is in rat’s country. It doesn’t die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up and dropped again…You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself.”
Loren Eiseley
" Most people most of the time in the history of civilization have lived under tyrants and demagogues, cued to despair and hopelessness. Today we are subject to progress, centralized power, entertainment, growthmania and technophilia that produce their own variety of "quiet desperation." This desperation arises not only from lack of attachment to place, but also lack of kinship with the larger community of all life on earth. History is not a neutral documentation of things that happened but an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past. It is a kind of intellectual cannibalism which creates from those different from us a target group that becomes the enemy, upon whom we project our unacknowledged fears and insecurities."
Paul Shepard in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998) pp.14-15
Projection of our fears about ourselves onto whatever Other is currently available is familiar to us even from our politics and even from history. The mistake of history, especially when applied to the deep past of humanity, is to project a sense of "human nature" that in large part reflects the "nature"--or behavior-- of people as molded in the period we call civilization of the last 12,000 years. But our species properly began some 300,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Pleistocene. What we call civilization--marked by the beginning of a farming economy and fast population growth--is a small fraction of the intervening time. For most of those hundreds of thousands of years, humans were what is commonly called hunter-gatherers. And in that time, we were very different, partly because our relationship to where and how we lived was very different.
We were not ruthless savages--that is one of many prejudices of history that sees only the ruthlessness and savagery of civilization. In The Wandering God, a mostly unacknowleded but valuably different riff on Shepard's books, Morris Berman urges great skepticism about such culture-bound definitions of human nature, as well as much of what was written (and later disproven) or is still standard though the evidence is contradictory, that has formed ordinary views of what we were like over the hundreds of thousands of years that physically formed our current minds and bodies.
Shepard's work--poetically summarized in this, his last book--seeks to provide a different view. In doing so, he shows how human life and society can be better, in a world which we deeply share with other life, rather than mostly just use it and systematically destroy it. We who are alive now will never have direct access to this way of life, except perhaps partially and fleetingly through an informed imagination. So let's inform it. And see that we may be a tragic species, but not a completely or inately evil or psychotic one, as the history of civilization up to this moment might suggest.
It was a political miracle the likes of which I've never seen, that Democrats even arrived in Chicago for their convention absolutely united on a nominee, different from the one they had a month before. Perhaps it was a necessary miracle, if there was to be any chance that the dictator in waiting could be stopped.
But the convention itself, with one amazing speech and speaker after another, with the joy and enthusiasm in the hall, was itself a miracle. It redefined the Democratic party and marginalized the Trump cult. Those were happy warriors who returned to their states, ready to fight and win.
The final miracle was Kamala Harris meeting the moment at exactly the right time. Her acceptance speech was all but flawless in its content and delivery. She was every inch a President.
Among much that was remarkable were the Republicans who stood on that stage in her behalf, and what they said to their fellow Republicans: "You're not voting for a Democrat--you're voting for democracy. You're not betraying our party, you're standing up for our country."
There were two themes that were in fact one theme. "We're moving forward"--that's a familiar political theme, aspirational but hard to prove. The flip side is less common, and this year is certainly potent: "We're not going back."
I was troubled by a few things: that everyone continues to act as if Covid doesn't exist anymore, and that there was not a full sentence out of anyone's mouth I heard about the greatest threat to the planetary and human future, the climate crisis. Once again, other seemingly more proximate threats took precedence.
But even that can partially be accounted for by all the time absorbed in stating truths and values that have so lately been lost. This was the "You'd do the same for me" convention, reaffirming basic human compacts. It was beautiful, but so sad that it was so necessary.
That and the general tenor of this miracle convention made me realize just how demoralized we've become. The idea that someone like Trump could take over the government, and together with this Supreme Court could rule us into an inhuman theocratic autocracy for the very wealthy, had us in the grip of such discouragement that we could hardly even notice how depressed we were.
That part is over. The threat must still be stopped, but now we know we aren't alone, and we know what our committments are. That has value in itself. Now the campaign begins. It could not have begun better.
There's likely to be tough days ahead. Voter suppression tactics are already in place in key states. There's a lot to be overcome. But go ahead and say it: we shall overcome.
I offer a bit of political analysis you're not going to see anywhere else. As highlighted by Paul Shepard, primatologist Michael R.A. Chance suggested that one of two mental modes in primate brain structures govern social relations: in the rhesus monkey, its structure favored aggression and submission. High tension, the importance of rank and sex symbolizing power are characteristics. He calls this the Agonic mode.
The other, which he called the Hedonic, is typical of chimpanzee society. It favors mutual dependence and problem solving without real violence. There is more equality. Disputes can end in "reconciliation and reunion." "The group has a strong general sense of unity," Shepard writes, "even though it may appear in disarray to an outsider."
Humans are among those primates who have the potential for both the Agonic and Hedonic modes. This bimodality is part of our basic nature. Which one predominates in normal times depends on "the social system that cues us and to which we apply its logic."
It is striking how our politics is now so clearly divided between the Agonic cult surrounding Trump, and the Hedonic Democrats, who now are clearly trying to represent everyone else. Over four days, the miracle convention articulated in words and faces, in individuals and families and groups, the conscious committment to this Hedonic mode. It is the kind of society we want, the ideal America--the true American dream, not of striving and succeeding, but of empathy, justice, generosity, compassion, love. In practical terms, the America of "You'd do the same for me."
“Russians” was a song on Sting’s first album after he disbanded the Police, and was released as a single in November 1985. The early to mid 1980s were rife with expressions of concern and alarm over new accelerations to the nuclear arms race. These were the years of the Nuclear Freeze movement (to freeze the growth of nuclear weapons) and concern over Nuclear Winter, which Carl Sagan and other scientists theorized could result from even a limited nuclear exchange, creating enough dust high in the atmosphere to block out the sun for a considerable period, endangering all life on Earth.
There was a 1983 exhibition in New York by 90 artists depicting the effects of nuclear war, and a collection of 44 such works that traveled to other cities. A large group of poets held a reading in 1982 called “Poets against the End of the World,” and at least five anthologies of nuclear-themed work appeared in those years.
But most influential were the first television movies to graphically present scenarios of nuclear attacks and aftermaths: in the UK, the movie was Threads, which re-ran paired with the first such film to be made (in 1967) but never seen on TV, Peter Watkins’ War Games. In the US the films were Testament and the one most remembered, The Day After, the only one made and shown on a major commercial network, and seen by more Americans on its first broadcast than any other program before or since.
Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and a series of arms reduction agreements, and the public was eager to believe the threat was over. A RAND study begged to differ, though: suggesting the chances of accidental nuclear war to be greater. By the early 2000s, in movies and in Washington and Moscow, nuclear weapons were defanged, not so bad, just ordinary bombs but maybe a little bigger.
Without great scrutiny or alarm, nuclear arsenals have grown, more sophisticated weapons developed, one new nuclear power added (North Korea) and the treaty to prevent another one (Iran) wantonly and childishly destroyed.
As Japan, mostly alone, marks another anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear threat is yesterday’s news. And yet it is still today's possibility, and in some ways the dangers are increasing. The Russians make nuclear noise, showcase new weapons systems and drop out of arms treaties. There are always new flashpoints, and they get more volatile and dangerous. One has reached into this year's Nagasaki memorial, which decided to not invite Israel to participate for fear of demonstrations and trouble at a solemn event for peace. The US Ambassador to Japan responded by declining to attend.
The basics have not changed since the 1980s or even 1945: nuclear war is madness, and could happen at any moment. Nor has the basis for addressing this issue, stated most succinctly in Sting's lyrics: "We share the same biology, regardless of ideology." These words are reminicent of President Kennedy's summation in 1963: “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Douwe Draaisma, professor of psychology in the Netherlands, is my go-to guy on the subject of memory. I tend to trust him because as a European he can access centuries of thought and experiment, beyond the limitations of the kind of dependence on dubious statistical experiments, let alone neuroscience, that form the dogmatic procedures of many American psychologists and brain scientists. He also writes clearly.
Neuroscience for example can tell us very little about memory, because memory is subjective; memory is an experience. So what brain neurons fire where is of highly limited value, except of course for the treatment of conditions involving the brain's role in memory loss or distortion. Properly conducted and interpreted behavioral experiments can be suggestive, and can support or contradict subjective insights. But these don't often require much computational power, so some of the best and most elegant of these experiments were designed and performed generations before computers.
In one of his books of essays, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, he applies to that particular question the insights of psychologists (including William James), a philosopher or two, and novelists including Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. This question is a gateway to the paradoxes of memory and time. Memory is important because that's one way we measure the experience of time. The answer to this question, at least to my mind, is not settled. We experience time according to a lot of individual factors. Some elements may ring true (a week's vacation flies by, but when you return home and to work, it seems you've been gone much longer, or that periods of anxiety, anticipation, illness and even boredom seem endless while they happen, though they seem shorter in retrospect) but others, I find, don't match my experience.
But one application of that question seems pretty universal among the people around my age that I know: that certainly after age 70, the weeks, the months and the years seem to fly by. They seem so short. The other feature of this feeling is that the past 20 or 30 years or more seem to have been much shorter in memory than the years that preceded them, when we were young. Those more recent years don't seem to have even happened.
Perhaps another approach to the question is to ask, why does time slow down when you're younger? One answer to this is the same as the answer to why people tend to remember events and people from their younger lives, and remember the experience more fully, but in later years don't remember much from more recent decades. It's because we are built to remember the new.
Remembering a new observation or experience--and the surrounding circumstances--is a survival skill, when those circumstances are encountered again. So of course we remember the first times, especially if it was an impressive, inately important event or experience. There's still a lot of mystery and individual difference in some of our early memories, but surely this is a big factor in many.
Then as life begins to repeat itself, there is less need to remember the details. We may remember our first car. But we probably aren't going to remember where we parked at the supermarket on an uneventful day three years ago.
But some memories do adhere because we continue to be new people, well into adulthood, not only because we experience new things, but because we are new people. Obviously we aren't the same at 10 as we were at 2, but we also aren't the same at 15 as we were at ten, or at 20 vs. 15, etc. for decades to come. Maybe the gaps are longer, and the differences may be more subtle, but we aren't the same at 40 as we were at 30.
And we really aren't the same at 70 or certainly 78 as we were at 50. We are brand new, in some ways. Our bodies are different, our physically processes including the glandular--all contributing to how we see the world, experience it, experience ourselves, and experience time.
After reviewing the theories and experiments, Draaisma admits that there is no convincing single answer to the question. Some speculate that our memory of time is related somehow to how long we've experienced time--that is, been alive. Which would help to explain how a month is endless at ten years old, when 12 of them add up to a tenth of your life (and you've only had any idea of what a month is for a few years.) The experience of time may similarly be related to the speed of biological processes, which tend to be faster the younger you are.
But I'd add another possibility. We've probably all noticed that we lost track of time while totally engrossed in some activity that required or evoked near total concentration, or perhaps engaged many of our senses and emotions. It isn't a rule of being old, but I am not alone in experiencing the moment more fully--that is, I'm not worried about where else I should be, or what I need to do next. I'm here, now--even if that means I'm totally present with a book, a movie, a song I'm singing or listening to, or a memory. It is present, and then it isn't, and something else is. I think part of this is a tendency towards entropy--I tend to keep doing something I've started, though it is harder to get started--that has noticeably increased in recent years.
It may even be that what we do remember, especially from youth, seems more full of time because we experienced it more fully, while later, the anticipation, the worry, the multitasking, obliterated a sense of being present in the time. So in a sense there is actually less to remember.
In many ways I remember my early past--the 20s are the statistical peak in some areas, like the popular music we recall--better than more recent decades. But, adding to the newness or firstness factor is that I've thought about those times more, I've told myself more stories about them. How much I really remember about more recent decades, once I put my mind to remembering and given myself the same kind of supporting cues, I have yet to discover.
Consciously or unconsciously, many older people compensate for the sense of time speeding up by increasing the newness in an outward way: by travel and new skills and adventures. Perhaps it is my introversion, but I find little appeal in that (though not having the means to do much of it does color my judgment.) I find my adventures in following curiosity about patterns of the past, as well as patterns in the world. And not just patterns, and not just intellectual understanding--maybe more the many fruits of perspective. So the past becomes new.
The process of revisiting artifacts of my own past in this protracted "History of My Reading" series for example, has been very involving on many levels, very absorbing. (It's certainly taking long enough.) Just living in the daily present while experiencing the evoked and fragmentary memories, finding myself in dialogue with them, takes up a lot of time. Though not much is accomplished compared to the past, the day is full. And it's over so fast.
But even though most of the orange groves in southern California are long gone (Kim Stanley Robinson played among them as a child, and as a teenager watched them destroyed to make way for more and more suburbia), there are still navel oranges grown there.
Navel oranges are seedless, and the first tree to grow them was apparently a mutation, an accidental hybrid, a sport of nature. This was in Brazil. Because they are seedless, new trees come only from cuttings from the old. So at first all navel orange trees derived from that one tree.
Disease wiped out the navels of Brazil in the 1930s. By then fortunately California had its own variety, begun in the 1870s by a recent California settler, a woman who was an abolitionist and a Suffragette. Nobody was then certain where the navel orange would best grow in America, but when she requested and was sent two cuttings from the Department of Agriculture in Washington (hence they are still called Washington navel oranges), she planted them in her front yard in Riverside. From those two flourishing trees, the navel orange became a leader in the California citrus industry, which by the 1920 was the second largest income generator in the state, next to oil. Now every navel orange tree in the world is a descendant of those two trees in Riverside. One of the two trees survived to this day, an officially designated Historical Landmark.
Though I kept buying those bags at the Farmer's Market once in awhile, I wasn't over my suspicions of oranges. Most of the oranges back in PA came from Florida, and they were frequently too tart and even sour, and always very acidic. Enjoying the fruit of the orange after peeling it was hit and miss. If it's a miss, you're left with a peeled orange nobody wants.
But for at least the past ten years and probably longer, I have gloried in the navel orange. I bought them at the supermarket--they are typically large (sometimes very large, not much smaller than a grapefruit.) Their skin is thick but easy to peel--it's not entirely unusual to peel them in one piece. Inside they are almost invariably sweet, and never acidic. They have a unique texture. On most days a navel orange and a cup of coffee still are my entire breakfast.
In more recent years they seem to have become more scarse, and available less often during the year. They are a winter fruit but for years they disappeared only in August for maybe a couple of months. In recent years they've come and gone, and sometimes they are much smaller. So when I get the big ones I tend to eat half at a time, and that's good enough.
I don't know how climate distortion is affecting them, though they are said to be hardy, but climate is very quietly affecting the quality, availability and prices of a lot of fruits and vegetables. The Florida orange crop has been severely depleted. Though I consider the navel orange to be the closest to perfection, other varieties of oranges have gone through fashionable periods, so some growers are tempted to stop growing the navels.
But this year, after months with fairly small, and thin-skinned varieties, the classic large thick-skinned sweet navel began appearing. I've had a good supply for several months now, though the last trip to the supermarket suggested that they may be diminishing. But for as long as they last, I'm going to be grateful that such a wonderful thing is still around.
“And the roses of electricity still open
In the garden of my memory.”
Apollonaire
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| photo by Paula Rhodes 1974 or 5 |
On the first inside page I wrote: “Write of other worlds, not this one.” I didn’t attribute it, but it was (as only I knew) one of the last things my mother said to me, in the midst of a stream of consciousness goodnight.
I recorded my state of mind and the state of my affairs as April began. Though I had many acquaintances beyond my apartment’s walls, I was more alone within it than ever. My last housemate was moving out, to live with a new group of friends. My time was untethered by any particular responsibilities other than the flexible mealtimes of my cats. Various tensions from those weeks at the hospital and then the funeral (the slow motion loss, the guilty tedium, the sense of unreality in the midst of as real as it gets) were releasing, accompanied by unpredictable physical ups and (mostly) downs. Plenty of tensions remained. Yet I was not unhappy, I wrote--though too much was lost and was otherwise missing for happiness either.
I was still collecting unemployment checks for a few more months, and had some savings left, so I resolved to work hard on my college novel. I had worked out a plan and written about 80 pages the previous year, and now I would write to that plan—25 pages a week was my goal: 300 pages by my birthday at the end of June. Though that still would be a fraction of the plan.
I had plenty of doubts. Could I? Should I? Was I crazy to try, especially without support or encouragement of any kind? Could I find the necessary temperament, the energy combined with the stillness? What could I draw on, in this Cambridge of ambition and acquisition, of drive haunted by compromise, of ego and insecurity and the reflexes of angst, of feckless frenzy and rolling confusion?
These doubts were never really resolved and haunted me from time to time. At other times I was entirely absorbed in what I was doing.
Among the characteristics Watt named as distinguishing the novel from other forms was especially relevant to my project: “…the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience… which is always unique and therefore new.” I was also encouraged to learn that Daniel Defoe had begun as a journalist, essentially writing his own periodical, including reporting on crimes, something else that was relatively new in his time.
Another characteristic of these early novels, Watt writes, is embedding the characters in a particular time and place. Fielding seems to have regularly consulted an almanac to keep tracks of days and dates, as well as external events such as the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. This is something I learned from James Joyce, and it was especially important for my college novel, given that 1965 was so different from 1967 as to be almost another planet.
Also important to me, perhaps indirectly but very strongly,
were the books about early to mid 20th century art in Europe,
primarily in Paris. I had art books
from Phoenix days and a few before that (mostly to do with Picasso.) Now in the many Cambridge bookstores I
searched for books of text as well as reproductions. I often got them used or from bargain bins and hurt books
tables. I was especially alert to
volumes in the paperback series Documents of 20th Century Art: Dore
Ashton’s book on Picasso, the memoir of a major modern art deader in Paris,
dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Apollonaire on Art and a volume on Italian
Futurism. Dada and Futurism led me to French Surrealism, which had its literary
expressions and tradition.
My identification with this place and period was both
vindicated and greatly strengthened when I came upon the name of Gino Severini,
as a painter and theorist of Italian Futurism.
When I mentioned him to my grandmother, she immediately recalled a
conversation she’d overheard many years before, among her husband’s Severini
relatives, about the black sheep of the family who had run away to Paris to
become a bum. The time fit pretty exactly,
and a penniless painter, even with famous friends (including Picasso and
Apollonaire) and future fame himself, would fit the bill as a bum.
Now it seemed I had blood in the game. I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (on a press pass) every time I was in New York. Besides buying one of the few books on Futurism then (derived from one of their exhibitions) I could see several Severini paintings, including the largest and most famous: Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin.
It was about this time that I added Severini to my byline name (though at first only to my “literary” efforts), mostly to honor my mother and her family—for that had always been more the family than my father’s—but I was also linking myself to Gino. When years later I read his autobiographical books, I felt even stronger resonance.
But I also pursued opportunities in the areas I had established some credits, a kind of journalism. I knew little of career-building, though I was soon to see how it could work as I watched friends and former colleagues swiftly ascend to the heights, but I did intuit (rightly or wrongly) one path I might follow: from writing for city weekly periodicals to national magazines, and then to book contracts.
By this time I was mostly trying to write for magazines. I had written for Creem (I have an undated letter from the legendary Lester Bangs, probably from the previous year, encouraging me to re-start my relationship there. “I think you’re one of the best writers who has appeared in this magazine,” he wrote. I don’t think anything came of this, though I’m not sure why.)
After I left the Phoenix in 1973, I learned from Dave Marsh that Lombardi had moved to Oui Magazine, a new glossy from Playboy, and they were assigning. I proposed a story on a singles cruise that advertised itself as employing computer matching, a hot trend of the time. He assigned it, and off I went that December.
It turned out to be mostly bogus: the computer matching was a fraud (so much so that the guy doing mine offered to “hand select” anyone who’d caught my eye) and the singles theme hadn’t filled the boat, so there were families as well. But by the time I realized this, we were on the water and I was trapped for the week. We hit rough seas in a relatively small ship and this absurd floating imprisonment became a sickening one as well. Still, I did get paid to visit Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-- for an hour each, but a memorable hour. I wrote the story but in early 1974 the magazine had wisely passed on publishing it.
In addition to my excesses in response to the Phoenix and other separations in 1973, I was walking a lot more and lost weight I’d acquired from hurried restaurant meals, helped no doubt by the fact that for the first time I was dependent on my own cooking. I also quit smoking, which set off a series of revelations.
I discovered I was less addicted than habituated, so I was able to wean myself off cigarettes by concentrating on my primary smoking circumstances. So instead of a cigarette next to the typewriter when I wrote, I kept a bowl of popcorn. To accompany drinking, I chewed gum, or on Twizzler-type licorice. That these were awkward substitutes was part of the plan. I could soon do without them, though I kept the popcorn for awhile.
In social situations I especially noticed the way smoking cigarettes became part of people’s conversational style—the pauses for inhaling, the cigarette itself “as a baton at the end of our gestures.”
So while I was in Greensburg those eight weeks, I wrote an article about quitting smoking and these observations, and sent it out. By spring it had been rejected everywhere. The dependence of magazines then on the revenue from cigarette advertising I’m sure had nothing to do with it. But this attempt did start something in my professional life: the impetus for an article was my own experience.
My most promising new contact probably came through Janet Maslin, friend and former colleague at the Phoenix, who had been spreading her wings beyond that paper when I was editing there. Now she was the regular music columnist at a new magazine in New York called New Times (unaffiliated in any way with publications of that name since.) She was pals with the film reviewer who also was an editor at the magazine, Frank Rich. She suggested I get in touch with him—perhaps to review books. I did, and in February I had heard back. They had more book reviewers than books to review, he said, but he encouraged me to send article ideas. I did but with no success yet that spring.
So while I continued to write pieces for the Real Paper locally for a little income (and go through hell to get paid) I had little excuse not to organize my life around writing those 300 pages of fiction.
And so I did—with days of lethargy and nights of elation, 18 hour binges of work and sleep, with stretches of numb despair and high anxiety. But as the clock struck midnight on June 30, 1978—my 28th birthday—I had produced those 300 pages, or near enough.
I recorded this in that blue notebook while sitting in the place that had become the center of my life outside my apartment: the Orson Welles Complex, specifically this time, the Orson Welles Cinema lobby.
I could say that the three overlapping, interacting, competitive, conflicting and symbiotic parts of my life were creative, professional and personal. I’m not going into much detail about the particularly personal here, but it’s fair to say that significant aspects of all three did their dance at the Orson Welles Complex, especially in these years.
My devotion was guaranteed in that spring of 1970 when as part of a Godard retrospective, I saw Pierrot Le Fou three times, including the last screening in a mostly empty theatre with only hardcore fantatics, accompanied by the aroma of Gaulloises.
A few years later—certainly by 1973—the Welles Cinema expanded to three screens, descending in auditorium size but not in quality of viewing. This was also still the era of the double feature, except for some first run theatres. So on any given day, there were six movies playing at the Welles. At its height, on Saturdays with morning screenings and midnight shows, there might be ten.
Black Orpheus, The Blue Angel, Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games, Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, De Sica’s Umberto D. Wuthering Heights, The African Queen, Borsalino, Bicycle Thief, Savage Messiah, Straw Dogs.
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| Gena Rowlands in Faces |
Stan Vanderbeek was one of the experimental filmmakers who came to show and talk about their work. Robert Altman was hot in the 70s—I saw The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs. Miller there. I remember documentaries on and starring Henry Miller (The Henry Miller Odyssey) and Anais Nin (Anais Nin Observed.) And I’ll never forget seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time there, and hearing for the first time in any theatre the screams of adults watching it.
As part of my cinema enthusiasm, and especially under the influence of Truffaut and Godard, who always showed books and characters reading in their films, I started collecting film books, in the same way as the art books. I was drawn mostly to books on the French New Waves and its directors, but there was a lot of other writing on film at the time.
Though we had the privilege of seeing these films on the big screen, we could only see them when the cinemas exhibited them—there was no video of any kind, and foreign films were rarely on TV, almost never with subtitles instead of dubbing. So these script books were all I could keep. Now with so much dependence on streaming and the disappearance of art film cinemas and video stores, when once again most of these movies aren’t readily available, these books are again all I have of them, unless I have the DVD or they are on YouTube.
I was writing and editing at the Phoenix when I met Larry Jackson, manager of the Cinema and the one who selected the movies shown. Later he was the manager of the entire Complex, but still programmed the films. (Martha Pinson succeeded him as manager before she, too, moved to the administrative offices upstairs, and Mary Galloway took over.)
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| me at the typewriter some years later in that t-shirt. Photo by Elizabeth Offner. |
By the time I left the Phoenix we’d become friends, and he continued to include me in Welles film activities. For instance, in 1974 I got to hang around “backstage” with Peter Bogdonavich and Cybil Shepherd when they introduced their film version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and accepted some semi-silly award from Harvard students. I saw fame from a different perspective: both of them were near-sighted, so the crowds around them were mostly noise and a blur. I thought it was admirable how they could keep their composure.
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| Orson Welles and Larry Jackson, 1976? |
Another of these forays however gave me one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life: a 1974 screening, probably at Boston University on a portable screen, of the as-yet unreleased new Cassavettes film A Woman Under the Influence, starring Gena Rowlands in a transcendent, bravura performance (which eventually led to an Oscar nomination.)
The lights came up after this very powerful film to show Rowlands and Cassavettes standing in front of the screen. For a mind-bending moment it seemed she had just stepped out of the movie. I asked a question from the crowd, struggling with emotion, and I saw the empathy in Rowlands’ eyes. Afterwards, on the sidewalk outside, I met them both.
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| Martha Pinson at the snacks counter |
Most often I was just drinking coffee and starring off into space or scribbling in my notebook, as I was at the clock struck twelve, inaugurating my 28th birthday.
I was there so often that Mary or Manny would enlist me to help take tickets when several movies were starting at the same time. My conversations upstairs with Larry included my suggestions for films to program (my greatest triumph: the double bill of Morgan! and Charlie Bubbles, two of my idiosyncratic favorites of the 1960s British New Wave) and eventually led to becoming the co-editor of the program book for the 1974 Boston Film Festival there.
By late fall in 1970, the Orson Welles Restaurant opened. It seems to me the bar on the level above it didn’t open until some time later. In any case, when I wasn’t at the Cinema, I was opening the thick wooden doors to the bar, which wrapped around and looked down on the restaurant below street level. I ate at the Restaurant a few times—almost always the duck with orange sauce—but that was for special occasions. If I ate there it was in the bar, where they served from the lunch and dessert menus. Together the cinemas, the restaurant and the bar comprised the Orson Welles Complex.
The social life of film and the Welles continued there. In addition to Larry Jackson and Terry Corey, who also worked upstairs, I met other film buffs, some of whom were engaged in filmmaking. I even ran into David Axlerod, who started me on my cinematic journey with the Cinema Club at Knox College; he was in Boston for day or two, so naturally he stopped by the Welles.
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| David Helpern, Jr. Photo by Paula Rhodes |
David had just finished a one hour documentary film on director Nicholas Ray, whose most famous films included Rebel Without A Cause, Johnny Guitar and two Bogart films, In A Lonely Place and Knock On Any Door. It was called I’m A Stranger Here Myself, which the documentary noted was what Ray said was the working title of all of his films, and appears as a line in Johnny Guitar.
Nicholas Ray had a tumultuous and colorful career, often at odds with Hollywood, but his movies were admired by film buffs, particularly the critics and directors of the French New Wave (a short interview with Francois Truffaut appears in David’s film.)
To introduce his film, he got Nicolas Ray himself to spend a few days in Boston. At the time Ray had been teaching at what was then Harpur College (where my ex-prof William Spanos taught), and is now the State College of New York at Binghamton. Much of the documentary follows Ray as he works with students on making an actual film, part of which was later shown at Cannes.
David invited me to tag along with him and Nick Ray, so I was present for all his public events, his radio interview, and shared a couple of meals with him. (One evening he and I were the last to leave the table. At the time, the price of sugar at the grocery store was very high, so as we left I pocketed a few of the small bags of sugar at the table. He was amused by this, and pocketed some himself.)
I scribbled down one line: “Wherever you go in the world, the principal concern is ‘Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?’ We need to find ways to say hello to each other and look one another in the eye. To dream and try things.”
He was 63 but seemed older, very weathered, but with a corona of white hair and the remnants of a noble face. (He’d started as an actor, and would soon appear in Wim Wender’s film, The American Friend.) He smoked incessantly, but what I didn’t know is that he was struggling with, or in the grips of alcoholism and drug dependence. A few years later he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He died five years after his days in Cambridge.
But the Orson Welles bar was more than a hangout for film buffs and those engaged somehow in movies, with ambitions for some sort of film career. It was presided over by a cadre of waitresses, the most beautiful young women I’d ever seen in one place, and they were there every night. I got to know some of them to some extent, so Buffy, Celine, Emily, Emily, Kathy, Laurie, Lori, Marie, Martha, Teri and others were my ambiguous Muses.
Cambridge was deep in the throes of absorbing new mores and conditions brought on by the early 1970s women’s movement, known then as women’s lib. I had many conversations with other young men there—some of them complete strangers—about the confusions and ironies arising from that new consciousness, which had become for some men a nearly paralyzing self-consciousness. We noted for example that while we were supposed to be getting in touch with our feminine side, we were watching some of the women of the Welles going off with men on motorcycles.
Meanwhile my professional life was reviving somewhat. In August I got a letter from Frank Rich responding favorably to an article idea for New Times, and book review assignments from Suzanne Mantell at the new Harper’s Bookletter, a publication of Harper’s Magazine.
My New Times idea resulted from a report I must have stumbled on, of research that found a biological basis for why some people like to stay up late, as I did, and it was a revelation. The majority of people are born Larks, who are energetic early and then fade; a minority are Owls, whose body temperature rises slowly, so full energy doesn’t arrive until later. I fit the Owl profile exactly—so it wasn’t a character defect but a matter of biorhythms.
It got me thinking about other elements of the built environment that affect people but aren’t recognized as having effects, like lighting and temperature. I might well have been thinking of my response to the awful lighting in the hospital where I spent so much time, and how my father kept the house heated too high for my comfort that winter. Relating all this to people’s behavior and self-image, especially in the workplace, could be the basis for an article. I don’t recall if I had to write a formal proposal but I eventually got the assignment.
I did maybe a half dozen reviews for Harper’s Bookletter, the most notable being a plea to get Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape back in print. I complained—as I often did, and would again--that the editing had taken out my writing voice.
I don’t think the Bookletter lasted very long, but I have kept one with Lewis Lapham’s cover essay on “The Pleasures of Reading.” He was then the editor of Harper's. “On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice,” it begins. "Most books don’t have it, but there are still so many that do." It’s a long and lovely essay; I read Lapham every month in Harper’s as well as some of his books. I met him briefly in his Harper’s office in the 1980s, and he was a friendly generous and open man as well as a writer always worth reading.
Books I was reading other than those I was paid to read evidently (from notes) included: Don DeLillo’s first novel Americana; a selection of Kafka short stories, and Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch; a novel I loved entitled Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino, which I picked up off the remainder table at Reading International. I wrote Sorrentino to express my admiration. He wrote a gracious letter in return, urging me to keep writing despite the difficulties.
But they carried the conventional wisdom, and today it’s known mostly for the concert footage, especially from Buffalo Springfield, but there are sequences with Hollywood actors and one very visual scene that came directly from one of the director’s dreams.
During the screening I sat in the aisle seat of the third row, and I could see Carrie Snodgress, Young’s partner at the time, and their two year old son Zeke standing near the side curtain by the stage and the screen. I was absorbed in watching the movie when I felt a tug on the fringe of my jacket. I looked down to see Zeke, with Carrie close behind him, taking him away.
I was wearing my suede jacket with the fringe—I’d always wanted a fringe jacket like those I’d admired on The Range Rider and other childhood TV heroes, though this one had the added advantage of thick fleece lining against the Massachusetts cold. Neil Young wore a more classic fringe jacket in some album photos. That’s what I immediately thought of at the time—that Zeke had seen the fringe jacket and headed straight for it.
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| Neil Young, Larry Jackson and Manny Duran in the OW lobby |
“The Loner,” he said, considering it. He soon did release another live album, and “The Loner” was on it.
After dinner, I was among the party that piled in a car or two and headed up the coast to a roadhouse bar where a local band was playing. Again we sat around a long table, now drinking beer. I somehow wound up playing pool with Neil Young, a game I know nothing about except that, in my experience, a certain reckless confidence works wonders. So it was this time, and I won (though really, only because he scratched.)
We were still there when the band ended their final set, and one of Neil’s guys told them that Neil would like to jam. They refused. The guy put a $50 bill on the drumhead as they were packing up, but the answer was still no. For some reason they gave up the chance to jam with Neil Young (maybe they were pissed that we made noise during their sets), and we lost the opportunity to hear him so close up.
We headed for the car and the long drive back in the dark. On the way, Neil spotted a lighted cross on a hill or atop a church and said that kind of thing freaked him out. Crosses were evident in his movie, too, especially as carried by the Klan. Back in Cambridge the Welles people and I were dropped off in front of the Cinema. I tried saying goodbye to Young but he was glowering straight ahead, somewhere else entirely.
I did have another rock and roll moment, though it was more in the nature of a non-encounter. Janet Maslin invited me to grab a sandwich with her and then go to the Bonnie Raitt concert at the Harvard Square Theatre. We ate somewhere in Harvard Square, and she explained that her husband Jon Landau was meeting with the opening act, a band starting to make some noise fronted by a guy named Bruce Springsteen. He was frustrated because he felt their first couple of albums, which didn't sell well, had been badly produced, and Jon had helped make Jackson Browne a star by producing his breakout album. But my conversation with Janet was so irritating and exhausting that I decided to just go home. I'd seen Bonnie Raitt several times so I thought it was no big loss.
A few days later the Real Paper published Jon Landau's column that began with the most famous words in rock critic history: "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it is Bruce Springsteen." Some of the column was personal and heartfelt, but it was that sentence--bannered on ads--that has lived on. Landau's prophesy was a bit self-fulfilling, in that he did produce Springsteen's breakout album, Born to Run, and later became his manager. It would be several years before I saw Springsteen live, at a theatre in Pittsburgh, and it was amazing. But I missed my chance to be present for the concert that made rock history.
I returned to Greensburg in August for the wedding of my sister Debbie and Jerry Boice. Their reception happened to be on the evening of my high school’s 10th anniversary class reunion. So with two of my Central Catholic friends, Clayton and his wife Joyce, who were also at the reception, I headed a short distance down the highway to check out the free gathering in the bar of the restaurant where the reunion dinner would occur. Since I had dated Joyce in high school, she reveled in the idea that people would be wondering which of us she was married to.
I saw that the cheerleaders etc. of our class were now sleek married women, and most of the guys were already overweight. I spotted one former friend who’d been timid and socially backward who was now a prestigious professor with that ageless middle-aged bearded look of the academic, standing aloof in the shadows, long drink in hand. We didn’t stay long.
When I got back to Cambridge I found that my apartment had been broken into. Among the stolen items were various stereo components and, adding insult to injury, my typewriter.
I continued to be absorbed working on the novel, completing another two or three hundred pages of first draft by the end of the year. But money was getting tight. So I tried to concentrate on paying work.
In late fall I was researching the Larks and Owls article for New Times, finding relevant research and professional sources to talk to. Except for the ensuing phone interviews, I worked in the Widener Library at Harvard, with breaks at Harvard Square cafes. Once at my favorite Patisserie (as I recorded in a notebook), I could overhear two conversations at nearby tables—a couple was talking about places they’d lived, while two women were discussing scientific research articles. One person at each table said “Berkeley” at exactly the same time.
I drafted a letter about a possible job to a friend who’d recently been hired at Rolling Stone—possibly the most pathetic job-hunting letter ever written, although I've had a few nearly its equal. “I need money, but I’m not up for another long-term suicide mission like the Phoenix.” I revised it a few times but to no avail.
In November, I looked out “into the blue twilight of Columbia Street on Thanksgiving afternoon. Little traffic, a few people in the street. Bare branches, old houses; it is, in repose, a European street.” In fact even more international—along its lengths were new residents like the Portuguese speakers, holdover Irish, Jamaicans, educated young whites still experimenting and living on the margins.
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| me and my shadow. Photo by Paula Rhodes |
On the mantle photos of my mother and sisters, a Gino Severini card, a program from my college play. In the study, two photos of me—one as a small boy, one in college, both with the same gesture; a Marx Brother poster with an Einstein photo interposed as the fourth brother, photos of Catherine Deneuve, Truffaut, Vanessa Redgrave. “Books, colors, music, some furry animals, some food in the kitchen and a tub for hot baths. My home.”
“I understand what I have to do,” I wrote. “Pay my bills to keep my blue rooms, the nice heat, the nice hot water, the electricity for the music, the nice food. I will be commercial. I will be journalistic. I will be a cross of myself and a fox.”
