Saturday Sippican Mashup Deluxe
February 23, 2008
5 Comments
I’m A Failure
February 22, 2008
1 Comment
If a man has talent, and cannot use it, he has failed. -Thomas Wolfe
I never read anything by Thomas Wolfe, that I can recall. I know who he is and recognize his work. He gets jumbled up in the Intertube’s hopper with our current writer, Tom Wolfe, who is a fine writer also. Although I’ve never read anything he ever wrote, either. I read a few paragraphs here and there and got the gist. He assembles the words well, and has a lively mind. He just doesn’t talk about anything I’m interested in. There’s a lot of people like that. There’s a titanic load of people after that, that can’t write, but do, that I ignore, too. I don’t lump them all in together.
A classic is a book people praise but don’t read, Mark Twain famously remarked. I do neither, generally. I just read Mark Twain. Saves time.
I stumbled across the quote by Wolfe and it got me to thinking. I say something similar, but less to the point, fairly often: Adversity discovers underlying weakness.
Most writers have one idea. No one will ever admit that, so don’t bother looking around for corroboration. It’s like a fiddle they saw away at over and over until the bow loses its last hair. There is no such thing as writer’s block. The writer just wakes up one day and has the terrible realization that his one idea might not be very good. Since no one has more than one, he just sits there until he goes back to his one idea, or drinks himself to death waiting for another that never comes.
It’s a kind of dumb fun figgering out a Dymo label for the intellectual mailslot in your mind for authors.
Hemingway: Adjective-less bull pestering
Kerouac: Lost and afraid to ask for directions
Mailer: Impresses other NYC apartment dwellers
Tom Wolfe: Astronauts paid my mortgage
Mencken: Everybody’s a jerk but me
Bierce: I can call you a jerk better than you can call me one
Churchill: In the olden time
Vonnegut: Starts nowhere. Goes nowhere
Thomas Wolfe: Understands Sippican Cottage, in advance, apparently
Ambition is an interesting thing. Tiger to ride? God to shake a fist at? Mob to stare down? I don’t really know. What it manifestly is not, however, is anything to do with talking about it with other people. It is a promise, in the form of a gigantic howling curse, that you hurl into the ether when no one’s around. Anything you announce to others is either posturing or complaining. Never complain and never explain, as Disraeli said.
I’ve said ambitious things to nobody a bunch of times before. They always boil down to this: If you will not have me as a colleague, you will have me as a master.
I’m Not In Awe Of Any Man
February 21, 2008
4 Comments
But Thomas Edison took a movie of Mark Twain. Awesome.
Infinite Calculus
February 20, 2008
1 Comment
There was a process for everything.
I remember the long languid early summer afternoons in mathematics class. The teacher would drone and the cicadas would chirrup outside the window. The equation would be chalked on the board and the intricate steps of the logic would be parsed out of it. I’d look out the window and remember her. Her equations were no less perfect.
The chair was placed just so. The toy was brought. The neighbors waved, and got their wave in return. The sun was in the right place to warm the side yard. When the button lost its moorings, there was a moment of recognition, and as ineluctable as anything Newtonian, the tray was produced; the color of the thread adduced and deduced; the problem solved. She’d always hum while she did anything; not musical, exactly –like a machine that is running just right. It was mesmerizing.
Her hand was delicate, but strong and practiced. Her whole life was like a roller at the summer beach. Quietly moving forward. The power was in it, but not made evident by any crash or foam. It was the residue of a million unseen forces distilled to an inevitability. You sensed very young that it would be very difficult to swim against its force, and pointless; so you turned your face to the sun and rode it instead.
I never understood why she introduced such a variable as me into her life’s equation. But after a while I realized that such a mind as hers could not be satisfied with simple arithmetic.
Das Internet Boot (Sails On)
February 19, 2008
3 Comments
[Editor’s Note: The bookshelf thing got me wondering about Paul Johnson and William Manchester books. I hazily recalled they’d both been mentioned here, hazily, a couple of years ago.]{Author’s Note: I can’t wait until the new Internet paradigm allows me to get rid of the editor, and the enormous support staff I have to carry to publish these items.}
My mind is a cobwebbed thing. When I was young, I was like a human filing cabinet. You could ask me almost any obscure worthless thing and I’d trot it out rat-a-tat. The Lusitania’s sister ship. The manufacturer of Richtofen’s plane. Churchill’s mother’s name. Who played Agarn on F Troop. The chemical name for silicone.
I’m not like that anymore, and I don’t want to be. It’s tiresome for everyone involved to be a Jeopardy contestant out on the street. No one knows very much, really; most people don’t know much of anything.
I now know the joy of “Not Going.” By that I mean, I am not willing to subject myself to the exertions of chasing the trivial I’m not interested in. I have no interest in many things others commonly do, and I’ve lost the desire to manufacture that interest or feign the concomittant enthusiasm. It’s certainly not any form of elitism. I have the most profound disdain for the supposedly highfalutin’. I still watch football on television. If you think I’m going to sit still and have Katie Couric read me a bad newspaper every evening, you’re nuts. And I’ll read Twain ten times before I’ll read ten sentences of Norman Mailer. And I’ll only read the ten sentences as a sort of chore, to allow me to mention he’s a lousy writer and a defective thinker over dinner, if called upon.
I’d rather watch SpongeBob -again- than Sixty Minutes, anytime. SpongeBob is rooted in reality, after all; there are sponges at the bottom of the sea. Mike Wallace is unmoored from reality, and what reality he has is of his own invention. He wants to give me an impression — and he does –just not the one he’s aiming at. They both make me laugh, but only one pleasantly.
The internet is a most dangerous and magical sea for us to navigate. I swim through it, and let its atoms wash over me, and get a kind of impression from it, like the ocean. Warm. Cold. Tepid. Dangerous. Limpid. Every sort of thing.
It is said that most people have their minds made up, and simply cast about for information that gibes with their static worldview. The internet is perfect for them, as there is no thing too lame or outrageous that you can not find it by the metric tonne, footnoted. And defended to the death elsewhere in the primordial soup, to the very horizon and beyond, if need be.
I am not a utilitarian. I have no ends, so I seek no means. I swim through the vast thing — the muck, the weeds, the pale green still water, the rush of the waves and the pounding of the hurricane — and it washes all around me and gives me an impression. Or more accurately –an ongoing impression.
There is a kind of bloodsport being played in the internet world, and I think people are getting way ahead of themselves in their assessment of how important they are in the scheme of things. They are like sailors in a leaking tin tube creaking with the pressure, sweating and whiffing stale air and listening to pings on the hull, all the while thinking they’ve got it all figured out. The game is played so ferociously because the stakes are so small. Me? I can’t help but notice that Neither Ned Lamont nor Joe Lieberman is Julius Caesar.
My cobwebby mind betrays me again. A tidbit comes to mind. Is it Paul Johnson? William Manchester? Paul Johnson writing about William Manchester? Manchester writing about Churchill? I think it’s Paul Johnson writing about Manchester writing about Churchill, but to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I could find it on my shelf, but not on the internet, and so it does not exist, according to many.
Anyway, one of them went into the heart of northern India after the British decided to skedaddle and let Gandhi do it. A million persons lost their lives then, give or take, as that simmering pot was unlidded. The vestiges of the Mughul Empire showed right through the modern fabric. The assignment was to go to remote parts of India, and ask the man in the unpaved street if it was a good or a bad thing that the British Empire had left India.
They did not even know that the British had come.
Month: February 2008
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Find Stuff:
Recent Comments