You can't go home again ...



"I was the ghost".

“What I am about to tell must be the experience of very many in this nation where so many wander and come back. I called on old and valued friends. I thought their hair had receded a little more than mine. The greetings were enthusiastic. The memories flooded up. Old crimes and old triumphs were brought out and dusted. And suddenly my attention wandered, and looking at my ancient friend, I saw that his wandered also. And it was true what I had said to Johny Garcia -- I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of rememberance -- and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory”. 

... John Steinbeck (1902-68), American writer. Excerpt from ‘Travels with Charley: In Search of America’.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be ...

"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked".



.... Peter De Vries (1910-93), American editor (The New Yorker), satirist  and novelist.

American "exceptionalism" defined

wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives

"Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe,

developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidently crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.

blood and ideas

As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of the race -- thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man".

... General Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912) justifying to the U.S. Senate the invasion and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century when he was serving as military govenor of the Philippines, overseeing the wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives. He was the father of General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) of WW2 fame.

Unknown love

"To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses -- that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things".

           .... Pablo Neruda (1904-73) Chilean poet, diplomat and politician

Facelift anyone? ...

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character”.

... Clarence Day (1874-1935), American writer.

Farewell, my friends -- farewell and hail!

I'm off to seek the Holy Grail.

I cannot tell you why.

Remember, please, when I am gone,

'Twas Aspiration led me on.

Tiddlely-widdley tootle-oo,

All I want is to stay with you,

But here I go. Good-bye.

The unselfish giant ...

"This wallpaper is atrocious either it or I have to go."

"You came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful ... the meaning of sorrow and its beauty"

... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), author and wit

Atavistic piety ...

inflation feeds upon inflation

 "... from time to time, capitalist economies exhibit inflations and debt deflations which seem to have the potential to spin out of control. In such processes, the economic system's reactions to a movement of the economy amplify the movement – inflation feeds upon inflation and debt-deflation feeds upon debt deflation."

  

    ... Hyman Minsky (1919-96) American economist  

A very funny man ...

                                                                                             

"The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are"

... S. J. Perelman (1904-79), American humorist, author, and screenwriter

Eccentricity plus ...

tall, exotically dressed and invariably turbanned eccentric ... a familiar feature of London literary life.

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."






 Edith Sitwell  (1887-1964) British poet and critic.

Motherly intuition

My mother never wrote me a letter, ever. Father had on occasion. Both were not much into letter writing. When I did receive a letter from her, it was a complete surprise. It simply stated my father had some minor physical ailment, the nature of which she was not precise nor did she, so I thought, understand. But she sensed it was a death knell without really saying so. It was a quality which she had that hinted at folksy wisdom which I respected, one of the few qualities she had I did respect. It was a “heads up” letter that proved out.

Ulysses ... easily the epic of the age!

Joyce  posing in the doorway of a bookstore on Paris's Left Bank 

"The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce’s genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccupation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it – this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equaled in the literature of our time."

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), 

American writer and literary and social critic

and noted man of letters.

                     

Where facts end, fiction begins ...

"What is, if not easy, almost always possible to do is for members of the private detective school of literary criticism to prove that the writer of fiction written in the first person could not possibly have done everything that the narrator did or, perhaps, not even any of it.

"This is not easy to do"

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and his experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do."    

      ... Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), "A Moveable Feast (the restored edition)" 

Suicide, Gonzo style

'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

... Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005), American journalist and author, in a note left for his wife four days before he shot himself in the head.

... the Earth is full

“The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave inpediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”

   

        ... Zhou Shengxian (born 1949), China’s environment minister

... on the face of it

"Look at these eyes. I'm dead - behind these eyes. I'm dead."

           
                ... Laurence Olivier (1907-89) from the the John Osbourne (1924-94) play "The Entertainer"

The Lost Generation

Interviewer: Do you mind if we ask you about Gertrude Stein's (1874-1846) remark, “You are all a lost generation”?

Cowley: Oh, it's simple as all get-out. Gertrude Stein was having her Model-T Ford repaired at a garage in the south of France. The mechanics weren't very good; they weren't on the job—in fact, I think they were on strike. The proprietor said to Miss Stein, “These young men are no good—they are all a lost generation”—une génération perdue. So an unknown French garageman should get credit for that remark. Of course, Miss Stein deserves credit for picking up on the phrase.

... Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989), Noted American writer and critic.

"Fart" etymology

... emitting an explosive bout of flatulence!

You know how it is when you love somebody terribly but you can’t describe why?

"Suddenly I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw that Monty’s car was coming much too close to my car. I got the idea he was going to play one of his practical jokes – he was going to give my car a little nudge. He never did bump my car, but I had the feeling he might, so I put my foot on the gas and went a little faster. Monty’s car seemed to be almost on top of me. I wondered if he was having a blackout. I got frightened and spurted ahead so he wouldn’t bump me. We both made the first turn but the next one was treacherous. We were careening now, swerving, and screeching through the darkness. Behind me I saw Monty’s carlights weave from one side of the road to the other and then I heard a terrible crash.

A cloud of dust appeared in my rearview mirror. I stopped and ran back. Monty’s car was crumpled like an accordion against a telephone pole. The motor was running like hell. I could smell gas. I managed to reach in the window and turn off the ignition, but it was so dark I couldn’t see inside the car. I didn’t know where Monty was. He seemed to have disappeared.

I ran and drove my car back and shone the headlights into Monty’s car. Then I saw him curled under the dahsboard. He’d been pushed there by the force of the crash. His face was torn away – a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.

I drove back to Elizabeth’s shaking like a leaf and pounded on the door. “There’s been a terrible accident!” I yelled, “I don’t know whether Monty’s dead or alive – get an ambulance quick!” Mike Wilding (1912-79) and I both tried to keep Elizabeth from coming down to the car with us but she fought us off like a tiger. “No! No! I’m going to Monty!” she screamed, and she raced down the hill.

She was like Mother Courage. Monty’s car was so crushed you couldn’t open the front door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Then she crouched down and cradled Monty’s head in her lap. He gave a little moan. Then he started to choke. He pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. I’ll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled those teeth. Otherwise he would have choked to death".

... excerpt from Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift: A Biography. Kevin McCarthy (1914-2010) describes the tragic car accident that almost killed Montgomery Clift (1920-66) and ruined his face. 

The face that launched a lonely ship ...

The young woman photographed here in an unassuming but strikingly sublime pose, in her early 20‘s at the time, would hardly bear any notice today being dead now some 125 years, except that she was the love interest of an extraordinary man who clearly made his mark in history as an inveterate adventurer  in the heyday of wind-powered "Tall Ships" and "Clippers" before they were overwhelmed by steam and eventually oil powered ocean transport.

The little we do know about her is that Joshua Slocum (1844-1909) a Canadian-American seaman and venturesome entrepreneur (and noted writer), the first man to sail single-handedly around the world, met her in Australia (1871), courted, married and carried her off all within a month’s time. Born Virginia Albertina Walker (the result of an interracial paring of a Scotsman and an American native Indian), her family had migrated from America to settle in Australia. She sailed away with Slocum never to return home.

Joshua Slocum

Like her husband, she loved adventure, nature and the outdoors. As a girl in Australia, she was trained to ride horses and on weekends would ride into the Blue Mountains region outside of Sydney. She would take long horseback expeditions in the Mountains, exploring and sleeping on the ground much as the natives did. She was spectacularly well suited to the strenuous life she had chosen.

Slocum commanded many "Tall Ships" with Virginia at his side and she would give birth to 4 children on various ships. His largest command was a 200 foot clipper ship, the "Northern Light". He was destined to become famous later for his feat in a thirty-six foot Sloop/Yawl, the “Spray”, making the first single-handed voyage around the world. He wrote a book about it, "Sailing Around the World", now a classic of nautical literature, and still in print.

The children, who were raised and educated in a devoted, responsible manner on the high seas, remembered that their mother played the harp, guitar, and a piano which was anchored to the floor in the main cabin, and that she was also an excellent dancer. Virginia was a dead shot with a pistol too. When mutiny flared on the ''Northern Light ", and the first mate mortally stabbed by the ring­leader, she sprang to the aid of her husband, covering the crew with a revolver in each hand.

On a trip aboard the "Aquidneck" to Buenos Aires, Virginia became seriously ill. She was in bed, seemingly recovering when the ship reached the Plata River and anchored in the outer roads. Slocum went ashore to organize prospective shippers of freight for a trip to Sydney. Before he left they agreed on a signal for his return if needed. The signal was the blue and white flag letter "J" to be hoisted. Early one morning, while Virginia was up busy salting butter for the voyage which she hoped would take her home to Sydney, she suddenly told her son to hoist the letter "J" at once.

Slocum returned and was at her bedside as she breathed her last. Virginia not yet 35, was dead from heart failure. He arranged to have her buried in the English Cemetery in Buenos Aires with a stone memorial monument [pictured right in 1884]. In 1892 the cemetery was made into a plaza, so today her remains lie somewhere under the stone slabs of a public square, unmarked, forgotten.

It took Slocum a long time to get over Virginia's premature sudden death, if ever. One of his sons wrote that “Father’s days were done with the passing of mother. They were pals…”. Another son said that “When she died, father never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.” However, some years later, aged 52, he was suddenly inspired to set off on the three-year solo circumnavigation of the globe which was to earn him fame and a modest fortune. It's not hard to imagine that Virginia's spirit accompanied him in some form on this and other lonely sojourns on the high seas. He ultimately disappeared in 1909, last seen sailing his beloved Spray in the West Indies, alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVw8axe10QI

Existentialism defined ...

Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries --
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise --
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.


 And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.


And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,


On that green evening when our death
begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.


... Philip Larkin (1922-85), English poet

An environmentalist's lament

“I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.”


       ... Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British politician and statesman.