Are You Strong Enough?

Are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?

— Ernest Hemingway

Braveheart, move over.

Kids in Scotland today are Chickenhearts.

Or so a Scottish university thinks.

The University of the Highlands has slapped an ominous "trigger warning" on Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea: 

Warning: Contains Graphic Scenes

History and Literature students at the school are now on official notice that Hemingway's novel contains "graphic fishing scenes."

The university said trigger warnings allow students to make "informed choices."

One Hemingway biographer told The Daily Mail, "It blows my mind to think students might be encouraged to steer clear of the book."

A British history professor told the newspaper that all great literature depicts inherently violent pursuits.

"Many great works of literature have included references to farming, fishing, whaling, or hunting. Is the university seriously suggesting all this literature is ringed with warnings?"

Among many classics, the school has also flagged Beowulf, Frankenstein and Hamlet for excessive and graphic violence.

If size matters, Moby Dick will be banned by the school altogether.

Critics have bemoaned the concept of triggers for years, insisting its application advances a dangerous liberal orthodoxy.

What's goose for the gander, triggers are now in favor among far-right Super Moms, who cite them when banning books by Black and gay authors.

From my standpoint, trigger warnings are ridiculous because they retard teenagers' development into adults.

We have enough problems with cultural illiteracy.

We don't need rampant faintheartedness, too.

Then He Goes Stage Right

There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.

— Ricky Roma in "Glengarry Glen Ross"

Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life selling and working with salesmen, I've long thought that David Mamet's 1984 play "Glengarry Glen Ross" is one of the the greatest American plays of the 20th century, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

"Glengarry Glen Ross" depicts the dark side of capitalism, where scrappy salesmen use wile and cunning and ride the backs of hapless suckers.

Though in the minority, I've seen salespeople who are like that. They earn the profession a bad name.

For its realism, “Glengarry Glen Ross" is a masterpiece.

 

But what's up with Mamet?

As reported by The New York Times, the playwright has gone loco, becoming an ardent backer of the conman extraordinaire: Donald Trump.

Now, a playwright backing libertarian causes is questionable enough.

But backing the conman Trump?

It's loathsome.

America's greatest 20th-century playwrights—O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were all unequivocally liberal.

Mamet is the odd man out.

And odd he is—or has become.

Appearing on Fox News and HBO recently, Mamet has been mouthing absurd, right-wing theories, the kind you'd expect from an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He claims, for example, that all schoolteachers are pedophiles, keen to "groom" young children for sex; that ruthless Democrats "staged" the outbreak of Covid-19; that the media is "statist" and was planning to foment an armed rebellion had Biden had lost the election; and that Broadway has "canceled" him—even though a revival of Mamet's 1975 play "American Buffalo" opened on Broadway a week ago.

Mamet also claims Trump did a "great job" in the White House, and only lost a second term because the election was "questionable."

Mamet first mouthed many of these theories in magazine essays which he's collected under the title Recessional, a book The Wall Street Journal called an exercise in "paranoid didacticism."

The once-liberal Mamet's volte-face isn't new. 

It dates to 2008, when he announced in The Village Voice that he was "no longer a brain-dead liberal." 

In that essay, Mamet defined liberals as "idealists;" conservatives as "tragedians."

Liberals, he said, are "perfectionists" who want to achieve absolute morality; conservatives are realists who just want to "get along with others."

We live in a divided America, Mamet said: "one where everything is magically wrong and must be immediately corrected; and the other made up of people reasonably trying to maximize their comfort."

"I realized," Mamet concluded, "that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."

Fair enough. Some of us thrive in a marketplace. And none of us likes fussy moralists—unless we're ourselves fussy moralists.

I myself don't prize equitability or diversity over justice and liberty. 

But Mamet's recent rants tell me he has gone off the rails. 

Totally.

And that's a shame.

He's given America many literary gifts.

But in the third act he's ruining his reputation.

April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here. 

Carry a Sharp Blade

The world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

— William Shakespeare

When in The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare's scalawag Falstaff refuses to lend money to his trash-talking henchman Pistol, Pistol replies, "Why then, the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open."

Knowing Pistol is a blowhard, Falstaff doesn't take the veiled threat seriously. 

But the English-speaking world has.

"The world's your oyster" we are prompt to say to anyone who's unsure about her next avenue.

It is advice I'd freely offer kids, teens, and twenty-somethings fresh out of college.

It's also advice I'd offer retirees. 

Especially retirees.

So often I hear retirees say that they can't decide how to spend their time productively—that the opportunities to accomplish good things are few and that they lack the know-how needed.

It's a shame our language has forgotten the second half of Pistol's threat, or else we'd say: The world's your oyster if you carry a sharp blade.

In other words, countless pearls are within your grasp provided you can pry them out; so carry a decent knife.

Sound like strange advice?

You should realize that Shakespeare's audience would not have found it so.

Being voracious consumers of oysters, they would have grasped it—as they did Pistol's words—instantly.

That's because large rivers like the Thames teemed with oysters in their day, supplying London with cartloads of the cheap and savory snack.

Playgoers in particular liked to chomp on oysters during performances at the Globe, as archeological evidence shows.

They knew full well oysters demanded a sharp blade. 

So when Pistol called the world his oyster "which I with sword will open," they caught his drift immediately: Oysters are everywhere; they're tasty—and some even have pearls; all you need do is open them.

The gift of a long life expectancy has created countless opportunities for today's retirees to make social, cultural and economic contributions previous generations never dreamed possible.

What a crime it would be to waste them for lack of a sharp instrument.

Call it what you will—retraining, reskilling, upskilling, or lifetime learning—keeping your blade sharp is a prerequisite to fulfillment in your final years on Earth.

So get off your ass and get busy acquiring a few new skills.

The world's your oyster.

Still.

Elizabethan pocketknife, circa 1600
Courtesy Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

Learning to Walk

You don't learn to walk by following rules. 

You learn by doing, and by falling over. 

— Richard Branson

I'm halfway through three months of physical therapy after shattering an ankle. I'm learning to walk again.

The therapists pester me constantly to walk, walk, walk, in order to speed my recovery. Willpower and workouts alone won't cut it, they insist. I have to "learn by doing."

Meantime, I'm tutoring an eighth grader in writing and asking the same of him.

Applying William Faulkner's advice to would-be writers—read, read, read—I've assigned him a small mountain of prose: pieces by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche, E.B. White, Hunter S. Thompson, John D. MacDonald, George Plimpton, Martin Luther King, and a pack of lesser-knowns. I've also introduced him to speed reading and have asked him to write chapter summaries of How to Read a Book every week through July.

All this for a boy who, before we met, only read an occasional gaming magazine and hardly wrote anything at all (his public school really let him down). But I want to make the most of our tutoring sessions. If he falls over once in a while, so be it; at least he won't shatter an ankle.

POSTSCRIPT: Want to help a good cause? Go to Mighty Writers to learn more.

Lean Expression

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

— Cicero

The Kansas City Star taught 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway "the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

When Hemingway began as a copywriter at the paper in 1917, The Star's rules demanded brevity: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Eliminate every superfluous word."

With few exceptions, writers before him were masters of verbalism; but with a boost from The Star, Hemingway forged a new, vigorous and modern style of expression.

Lean expression.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about," Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Hemingway helped his reader not only by omitting superfluous words, but by chaining sensations to emotions, as in this passage from A Moveable Feast illustrates:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That's the "Hemingway style." Frill-free storytelling, uplifted by the compounding of repetition, rhyme, alliteration, stream of consciousness, Biblical and Bachian cadences, and strict avoidance of the flowery, routine and trite—no Latinate words, for example, like "mollusk;" no adjectives like "slippery;" no adverbs like "eagerly;" no clichés like "the world is your oyster;" and no mention of oysters' effect on the libido.

Eloquent, keen and lean.

POSTSCRIPT: Go here for more assessment. And treat yourself to A Moveable Feast. It's free.

The Late Hunter S. Thompson Answers My Question

NOTE: I awoke today to find this mysterious note on my bathroom sink.

Bob,

You addled bastard, you approached me in your fetid dream last night and asked my advice. 

At least, I think you did—I had the Cowboys game on at the time, and Washington was stomping them, like they were a gang of sick junkies.

My attention wasn't fully yours. 

If I grasped your question, you asked what America should do with 45, now that the maddened crowds—like Bond in the grand finale—have dispatched his fat diapered ass.

The Ephedrine supply is practically nonexistent here, so I must keep my answer brief.

America doesn't have to do anything about 45. 

Come mid-December—too chilly for tubby to golf in Virginia—45 will depart DC permanently for his rat-hole in Florida, announcing by Tweet a "hard-earned" Christmas vacation. 

From there, Snowden-like, 45 will flee to Moscow, requesting permanent asylum.

Putin will grant the asylum, glad for yet another thing to lord over fatso. 

But when Putin learns 45 is broke and knows no Top Secrets the Kremlin doesn't, he'll graciously deliver one of his infamous gifts.

The only question for America: where to dispose of the remains?

I suggest the ruins of Reactor 4 in Chernobyl.

— Hunter

We Want You, Big Brother

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

— George Orwell

Incredibly, the Kremlin has targeted LinkedIn users, with the result that Microsoft (LinkedIn’s owner) is punishing liberals and rewarding right-wingers.

After receiving a half-dozen emails from Microsoft in the course of two days, each advising me the company had censored one of my comments in response to a Kremlin post, I have now been “disappeared” from LinkedIn—as have several of my contacts on the platform, both here and in Europe—for posting “harassing comments.”

In other words, opposing viewpoints.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin—with the aid of thousands of hapless Americans, eager to amplify its stock messages—continues to push out hackneyed pro-Trump statements, all blatantly racist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, jingoist and nativist. 

Weary of the Trumpian twaddle, I tried to “unfollow” the Kremlin’s account before I was “disappeared,” but learned that you simply cannot do so. 

Like the telescreens in 1984 (monitored, of course, by the Thought Police) the Kremlin’s account is ubiquitous.

We want you, Big Brother.

UPDATE: Microsoft this morning has asked me to prove I am an American and asked me to warrant in writing that I will "adhere to LinkedIn policies from this day forward." I guess after that, I can kiss the bride.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 8, 2020: It appears LinkedIn has "disappeared" the Kremlin-backed user this morning. But for how long?

Beatnik Babies

 

We'll get you through your children!

― Allen Ginsberg

In April 1996, I dragged my three then-school-age kids to "Rebel Voices Speak Again," a 12-hour poetry slam hosted by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Poetry slams were all the rage at the time, and this one promised to be a whopper: a day-long marathon of readings and reminiscences starring slam poetry's originals, the bards of the Beat Generation (the living ones, anyway).

My kids—by far, the youngest listeners in the auditorium—seemed reasonably attentive and were, thank goodness, exceptionally well behaved throughout. 

It probably helped that we went for lunch to the museum cafeteria, where they could eat hot dogs and potato chips.

I sometimes wonder whether that countercultural cavalcade of cool cats and hot chicks—Corso, Creeley, Elmslie, Ginsberg, Jones, Koch, Lauterbach, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Padgett and a half-dozen others—converted my kids from would-be conformists into the three strong, wildly independent, free-thinking adults they are today.

Did the Beats "get me" through my children?

Maybe it's true: poetry is dangerous.

Suite Nothings

At the conventions, fella, everything goes.

— John D. MacDonald

I have been whiling away the lockdown reading John D. MacDonald's "standalone" thrillers, paperback potboilers from the late 50's and early 60's. 

It's no wonder Ian Fleming and French mystery readers loved John D. His prose is pungent and punchy, and his take on Americans' habits raises his work to the level of the "literary" writers of his day (think of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal).

A Key to the Suite, which earned John D the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, “examines the ferment of a big-time convention," according to the cover of the original 1962 paperback.

Corporate hatchet man Floyd Hubbard has been sent by the home office to a trade show. His mission: to dig up dirt on a has-been sales manager, Jesse Mulaney. Management wants Mulaney gone and knows his obsolescence is on full display when he attends trade shows.

But Mulaney's ally, Fred Frick, knows Hubbard has it in for his buddy, and plans to turn to the tables.

Frick hires Cory Barlund, a classy prostitute, to woo the family man Hubbard. He instructs Cory to bed Hubbard, then “make some horribly slutty embarrassing scene" in front of his coworkers—a scene guaranteed to send Hubbard running back to headquarters.

The gorgeous Cory rather quickly seduces Hubbard, but then feels sorry for him and tells him about Frick’s scheme. 

And that's when the fireworks start.

As a veteran of the industry, I'm captivated by John D's taut descriptions of trade shows and the goings-on behind the curtain—both the innocent and the vile.

You find yourself so on edge following the fates of the husbands, wives, whores and hoteliers who populate the pages of A Key to the Suite, you can hardly put it down.

It's gritty realism at its best.

These are Days

In late July 1606—part way through a season that would soon premiere King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra—William Shakespeare was ordered by London's Privy Council to shut down his theater. 

The plague was in town.

The Privy Council was worried that audiences would be “pestered together in small romes" where "infeccion with the plague may rise and growe, to the great hynderaunce of the common wealth of this citty.”

Rather than lay off the troupe, Shakespeare urged his actors to flee hot-spot London for a tour of the provinces, where they could strut the stage while staying safe from the dreadful disease.

But country villages were sleepy places; and many of the days and weeks the actors spent in them were spent idly.

Shakespeare, however, chose to capitalize on the downtime, using it to write three new plays, as recounted by historian James Shapiro in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

Thanks to the plague, 1606 was a very good year for the bard. 

Indeed, no other of his remaining life would be as fruitful a year.

And how about you?

What are you doing with your time?

These are days you'll remember. 

When May is rushing over you with desire
To be part of the miracles you see in every hour.

You'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky. 

It's true that you are touched by something
That will grow and bloom in you.

— Natalie Merchant

Land of the Living

The basest of all things is to be afraid.

― William Faulkner

When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature―the same year Russia exploded its first atom bomb―William Faulkner asked writers to put aside physical fear and choose life over death.

"There are no longer problems of the spirit," Faulkner said. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about."

Until the writer rediscovers "the old verities and truths of the heart," Faulkner said, he "will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man."

Last week―while terror reigned in London, Paris, Melbourne, Kabul and Tehran―Bob Dylan delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a biblio-memoir seven times longer than Faulkner's address.

Where Faulkner was brief, Dylan rambles, Kerouac-style.

But one chord sounds the same.

Midway through, Dylan describes reading All Quiet on the Western Front as a schoolboy:

"This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You're stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You're defending yourself from elimination. You're being wiped off the face of the map."

Dylan found the novel's depiction of war exhausting. "I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did."

He discovered the "old verities and truths of the heart" instead in an adventure tale, The Odyssey, where the hero determinedly chooses life over death.

Dylan describes Odysseus' visit with Achilles in the underworld. Odysseus is shocked to hear the condemned warrior say, "I traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory. I just died, that's all. There was no honor. No immortality."

Were he able, Achilles says, he'd return to the world, even if that meant he'd be some farmer's slave. "Whatever his struggles of life were," Dylan says, "they were preferable to being here in this dead place. That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living."

Songs may not be literature in the same sense novels are, Dylan says, but they come from the same neck of the woods, a country where physical fear is so base it's forgotten.

Or as the evangelist John said, "There is no fear in love."