The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Feminine Mind,” by H.L. Mencken

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Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Mencken spent the entirety of his life in Baltimore. He lived in the same house. He worked certain jobs for decades. He founded magazines, edited them, and worked as a reporter/columnist for major newspapers. There is a sense of great stability in his life (which certainly sets him apart from most writers, especially in those years of crazy worldwide upheaval). I have not read Terry Teachout’s biography of Mencken (and it has always been on my list, I like Teachout sometimes). Everything I know about Mencken I know from the Chrestomathy, which means I know what he thinks about things. It’s actually kind of fun that way. You piece together a man merely from what he left behind in his words. So you know what he thinks of God, of government, of literature, of social ills like prostitution (which he didn’t think was a social ill at all), of evolution. He reported on the “Monkey Trial”, but we’ll get to that. He was not always on the “right” side of history, but in those years very few people were. If you hated the Germans, then you missed the menace of Stalin. Or vice versa. Seeing the whole picture as the entire WORLD explodes is a rare thing indeed. What I am trying to say is that H.L. Mencken lived the widest life possible, in his mind. He was not a world-traveler. He did not travel through Europe with Allied soldiers, reporting from bunkers. He didn’t spend time in Paris, London. He hunkered down in his childhood home and wrote and wrote and wrote. I find that fascinating. What I also find fascinating is that he was a confirmed old bachelor (see his opinion of such creatures as himself here), and his columns on marriage and monogamy are scathing! Scathing, I tell you! He makes fun of the entire thing. He understands that people need the institution – both men and women – but he seems to think that that situation could change if certain underlying circumstances changed. Men are enslaved by marriage, and yet they need it more than women do. Women need it but only because men have put them in such a bad position. He looks at his married friends and sees misery and absurdity. He was open about that fact. So when he – H.L. Mencken – married, at the age of 50, it made national headlines. What?? So the institution got him at last? Mencken married a fascinating woman much younger than himself who was a Professor of English, as well as a writer. She was from Alabama, which was even more shocking, because Mencken was brutal about the American South in his writing (but we’ll get to that). But she was a heavy-hitting thinker and activist, an ambitious woman, head of the National Woman’s Party in Alabama, and it was through her work with them that the 19th Amendment was ratified in Alabama. So Mencken married well. And he married a suffragette, even though he made fun of suffragettes. So for Mencken to marry

1. at all and
2. a suffragette from the Deep South

… was a Through-the-Looking-Glass kind of event.

Unfortunately, she died 5 years after they got married from TB, and Mencken was devastated. Poor guy. It took a lot for him to submit to marriage. You know he meant it.

The next couple of excerpts will be from his essays on women, which are outrageous, obnoxious, and hilarious. Here, he takes on “the feminine mind”. It comes from a larger piece called “In Defense of Women”, written in 1918, when women were in the news all over the damn place. This piece is interesting because what he is actually describing is what we now would call “male privilege” (or I would). He clocks it. He is inside that perception, for sure, he’s a part of it – but he can sense that it is there and that women have had to operate within that construct. Hence, the sorry state of affairs.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “The Feminine Mind,” by H.L. Mencken

In brief, women rebel – often unconsciously, sometimes even submitting all the while – against the dull, mechanical tricks of the trade that the present organization of society compels so many of them to practice for a living, and that rebellion testifies to their intelligence. If they enjoyed and took pride in these tricks, and showed it by diligence and skill, they would be on all fours with such men as are head waiters, accountants, schoolmasters or carpetbeaters, and proud of it. The inherent tendency of any woman above the most stupid is to evade the whole obligation, and, if she cannot actually evade it, to reduce its demands to the minimum. And when some accident purges her, either temporarily or permanently, of the inclination to marriage, and she enters into competition with men in the general business of the world, the sort of career that she commonly carves out offers additional evidence of her mental superiority. In whatever calls for no more than an invariable technique and a feeble chicanery she usually fails; in whatever calls for independent thought and resourcefulness she usually succeeds. Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. But she is usually a success as a sick-nurse, for that profession requires ingenuity, quick comprehension, courage in the face of novel and disconcerting situations, and above all, a capacity for penetrating and dominating characters and whenever she comes into competition with men in the arts, particularly on those secondary planes where simple nimbleness of mind is unaided by the master strokes of genius, she holds her own invariably. In the demimonde one will find enough acumen and daring, and enough resilience in the face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average brothel-keeper, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation.

Men, as everyone knows, are disposed to question this superior intelligence of women; their egoism demands the denial, and they are seldom reflective enough to dispose of it by logical and evidential analysis. Moreover, there is a certain specious appearance of soundness in their position; they have forced upon women an artificial character which well conceals their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct.

The true nature of this alleged instinct, however, is revealed by an examination of the situations which inspire a man to call it to his aid. These situations do not arise out of the purely technical problems that are his daily concern, but out of the rarer and more fundamental, and hence enormously more difficult problems which beset him only at long and irregular intervals, and so offer a test, not of his mere capacity for being skilled, but of his capacity for genuine ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit to some paltry custom, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or about marrying off their daughter. Such things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of well-being; they call for the best thought that the man confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even the clamors of vanity. It is in such situations that the superior mental grasp of women is of obvious utility, and has to be admitted. It is here that they rise above the insignificant sentimentalities, superstitions and formulae of men, and apply to the business their singular talent for separating the appearance from the substance, and so exercise what is called their intuition.

Intuition? Bosh! Women, in fact, are the supreme realists of the race. Apparently illogical, they are the possessors of a rare and subtle super-logic. Apparently whimsical, they hang to the truth with a tenacity which carries them through every phase of its incessant, jelly-like shifting of form. Apparently unobservant and easily deceived, they see with bright and horrible eyes…. In men, too, the same merciless perspicacity sometimes shows itself – men recognized to be more aloof and uninflammable than the general – men of special talent for the logical – sardonic men, cynics. Men, too, sometimes have brains. But that is a rare, rare man, I venture, who is as steadily intelligent, as constantly sound in judgment, as little put off by appearances, as the average multipara of forty-eight.

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The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Types of Men,” by H.L. Mencken

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Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Now that I got some initial thoughts about Mencken out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. His writing! If you choose to write from a place of contempt, you really need to know what you are doing. The greatest satirists can do it. Mencken had contempt for most of mankind. That’s obvious. But his writing is so entertaining that you find yourself looped in, as a comrade, as a fellow traveler. (Or, at least, that’s how I feel. Even when he is making fun of me, essentially). If you approach editorial writing defensively, ready at any moment to fight back/defend/argue, you’ll find Mencken tough going. That is perhaps the point. Mencken did not shy away from a fight, and he would prefer that you get your shit together and fight back, rather than complacently ignore whatever it was that he was saying. But Mencken is such an intimidating opponent that you really do need to get your shit together to “take him on”. There’s a Hitchens-brand of brilliance here. These are Men of the Mind. These are Men of Letters, in the strictly old-fashioned sense. There are very few of these left, very few that are worth a damn.

In the Chrestomathy (which, again, was edited by Mencken himself), he breaks down the topics into different sub-headings. Some of the pieces included here are only a paragraph long, excerpted from longer pieces published elsewhere. It gives the collection a collage effect, perfect for dipping into, reading a bit, putting the book down, picking it up again. He’s one of those writers – like Joseph Heller, or Rebecca West – who is incapable of writing a boring sentence. It’s daunting. It’s hard to take in in one sitting.

There’s one whole section called “Types of Men”, and I’ll excerpt just a small bit of it. He breaks down all of men into different types, and he gives them names. The King, The Toiler, the Bachelor, the Good Man, etc. And he goes back destroying every single one of them. He destroys by ripping apart their illusions about themselves. Men who pride themselves on being “Good Men” will feel defensive reading Mencken’s description of what is really going on with such individuals, but Mencken is so skilled at decimation that you would be left spluttering in outrage, rather than actually able to counter-argue with the man. “But … but … how DARE he … ” Hmm, maybe your outrage comes from a place of recognition? Maybe you realize that the jig is up? Mencken sees through you and so does everybody else? Hmm?

Just as Yeats wrote of Jonathan Swift, “Imitate him if you dare”, I’d say the same thing of Mencken.

Here are just a few of the “Types” that Mencken covers.

And I’ll say it again, because I think it bears repeating: Agreement/disagreement is, of course, part of life. But maybe I’m more of a formalist than anything else. I don’t mean to suggest that content is irrelevant. Of course that’s not true. Mencken was a man of ideas. He puts forth his ideas, strongly, unforgettably. We are to engage with those ideas. I do. I love the level of engagement he requires. But it’s the STYLE that is the main attraction. Mencken is one of the greatest stylists to ever pick up a pen.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Types of Men,” by H.L. Mencken

The Skeptic

No man quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt – a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve. This doubt, it must be obvious, is always more than justified, for no man is worthy of unlimited reliance – his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation. The trouble with the world is not that men are too suspicious in this direction, but that they tend to be too confiding – that they still trust themselves too far to other men, even after bitter experience. Women, I believe, are measurably less sentimental, in this as in other things. No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

The Believer

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: “Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled us in the past.

The Toiler

All democratic theories, whether Socialist or bourgeois, necessarily take in some concept of the dignity of labor. If the have-not went deprived of this delusion that his sufferings on the assembly-line are somehow laudable and agreeable to God, there would be little left in his ego save a belly-ache. Nevertheless, a delusion is a delusion, and this is one of the worst. It arises out of confusing the pride of workmanship of the artist with the dogged painful docility of the machine. The difference is important and enormous. If he got no reward whatever, the artist would go on working just the same; his actual reward, in fact, is often so little that he almost starves. But suppose a garment-worker got nothing for his labor: would he go on working just the same? Can one imagine his submitting voluntarily to hardship and sore want that he might express his soul in 200 more pairs of ladies’ pants?

The Average Man

It is often urged against the Marxian brethren, with their materialistic conception of history, that they overlook certain spiritual qualities that are independent of wage scale and metabolism. These qualities, it is argued, color the aspirations and activities of civilized man quite as much as they are colored by his material condition, and so make it impossible to consider him simply as an economic machine. As examples, the anti-Marxians cite patriotism, pity, the esthetic sense and the yearning to know God. Unluckily, the examples are ill-chosen. Millions of men are quite devoid of patriotism, pity, and the esthetic sense, and have no very active desire to know God. Why don’t the anti-Marxians cite a spiritual quality that is genuinely universal? There is one readily at hand. I allude to cowardice. It is, in one form or another, visible in every human being; it almost serves to mark off the human race from all the other higher animals. Cowardice, I believe, is at the bottom of the whole caste system, the foundation of every organized society, including the most democratic. In order to escape going to war himself, the peasant was willing to give the warrior certain privileges – and out of those privileges has grown the whole structure of civilization. Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than whole hordes of cowardly men, and, what is more, to retain them after accumulating them.

The Bachelor

Around every bachelor of more than thirty-five legends tend to congregate, chiefly about the causes of his celibacy. If it is not whispered that he is damaged goods, and hence debarred from marriage by a lofty concept of Service to the unborn, it is told under the breath that he was insanely in love at the age of twenty-six with a beautiful creature who jilted him for an insurance underwriter and so broke his heart beyond repair. Such tales are nearly always moonshine. The reason why the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is really very simple. It is, in brief, that no ordinarily attractive and intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided effort to marry him.

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Peeping Tom (1960); Directed by Michael Powell

Peeping Tom

The opening sequence is horrifying: taken from the point of view of a serial killer’s camera, ogling at a prostitute’s ass, following her up the stairs and then closing in on her to kill her, lingering on her screaming face.

Carl Boehm (real spelling Karlheinz Böhm) plays Max, a creepy isolated guy who takes movies of women right at the moment of their deaths. He sits in his projection room in his apartment and watches the footage over and over again. Max is soft spoken, submissive in nature, shy, and obviously tormented. The women who come into his circle (all with blazing red hair) are drawn to his shyness, he seems quite harmless (to them – to us it is obvious that he is way way off). He works as a focus puller at a nearby studio. He seems sexless, except for his menacing behavior in the final moments with his victims.

Peeping Tom was reviled upon its opening. Hated and loathed. It effectively ended Michael Powell’s career. Seeing it now you can see where the revulsion came from. People don’t like to be shown themselves, people don’t like to be implicated in their own dream-worlds. The film is a critique of the act of watching. There would be more where that came from as the 60s went on, as the 70s went on. The fantasy element of film-making was giving way to something more realistic, and Peeping Tom (while not realistic at all) was starting to poke away at the magic bubble of Movie-making, and asking pointed questions of its audience. Why do you like watching? What do you get out of it? Do you like violence? Why? Do you ever consider the implications of your own propensity for watching?

The film isn’t a finger-wagging scold, however. It’s an immersion into the damaged psychology of a guy so messed up by being filmed throughout his childhood by his bullying terrifying father (who wanted to see what Fear looked like on the face of his own child, wanted to study it) that he can never JOIN life, he is forever on the outside. The only way he can engage with life and other people is 1. by filming them and 2. by killing them. This gets into one of my favorite topics, psychopathy. Studies have been done on people who rate high on the Psychopath Scale (most of these people are in prison). Normal people have adrenaline surges when they view something violent or dangerous (on television, in the movies, in a photograph). Even a photograph of a dead body covered in a white cloth can elicit a charge of adrenaline (which, in this case, means empathy). Those who rate as Psychopaths have the opposite reaction to dangerous/violent images: they flat-line. It is as though the images calm them down, soothe them, they find such images RESTful. Peeping Tom has as its lead character a guy like that. And Max is so strangely sympathetic too (kudos to Boehm), because he is shy and fearful and damaged. But any time a woman is in his presence, you fear for her.

Now. The main reason to revel in Peeping Tom is the color. And WHAT colors. I wouldn’t know how to even begin to light the scene in Max’s dark-room/projection room to get the effects that Powell gets. The scene is mostly darkness and shadows, but there is a sickly red glow pulsing underneath that black. But then, where the dim lights shine, table tops and chair tops gleam in an underwater green. So we have a red glow and an underwater green surrounded by pitch-black, and rising up out of it is the blazing red hair of one of Max’s victims. Lighting such a scene so it’s not all a wash, so that the colors are highlighted with the intensity needed, requires such skill, such feel for the way light works, the way it changes the surfaces of things it touches … Each scene, each shot, is a masterpiece. No surprise. Michael Powell is Mr. Color and his The Red Shoes is one of the best uses of color ever put on film. Even though Peeping Tom‘s topic is still disturbing, still repulsive, its beauty is undeniable. The beauty adds to the destabilizing effect of the film.

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Back By Popular Demand: The Phys. Wrecks!

When I was a senior in high school, the girls’ basketball team (many of the players were good friends of mine) started kicking some SERIOUS ASS. There were sisters on the team – unbelievable athletes – and they became Rhode Island stars for a couple of seasons. They were referred to as “the twin towers”.

I went to a big sports school. We had massive pep rallies for the football team, we had a fierce and ugly rivalry with the team from the neighboring town … our school was all about football, although the basketball teams and soccer teams were also hot tickets.

But girls sports? Not so much. There were no school-wide pep rallies for the girls basketball team, even though they were, during my senior year, the most successful sports team in our school. (If you really think how obvious and blatant that bias is, it’s really shocking.) Our girls team was going to the state championships, probably. And yet … no glory. The school didn’t get behind them, at least not in the way the school typically did for football.

Our girl champions were having a great season, unnoticed by the school at large.

What I love about this story is that my friends and I recognized the injustice in the situation, but we didn’t write letters to the school newspaper bemoaning the lack of support for girls. We didn’t write letters to the Principal, pointing out how unfair it was that BOYS teams got pep rallies before a big game, but GIRLS teams did not, and demanding he rectify the situation. We did not ask anyone in authority to fix the situation. It didn’t even occur to us to do so. It was all very riot grrrl, come to think of it, even though this was pre-riot-grrrl. If the problem is with the system, then don’t ask the system to adjust itself. Make your own system. Don’t ask for a seat at the table. Walk in and sit the fuck DOWN.

We seethed for a month or so about the injustice, because we wanted everyone to be as excited about the girls’ basketball team as we were. Finally, we had had it. It was time for drastic measures.

We formed a cheerleading squad for the girls basketball team. We didn’t clear it with anyone. We didn’t ask permission. We just went ahead and did it.

My friend Anne was the brains behind the idea. Now please understand: None of us were cheerleaders. We were not gymnasts or dancers. We did not KNOW ANY CHEERS.

We conceived of ourselves as a dark goofy version of a cheerleader. Enthusiastic, extroverted, thrilled for our team, like all good cheerleaders, but we would be our own thing. We didn’t talk about gender, but we knew that what we were doing was poking fun at unexamined gender rules, and so we ran with it. Our routines (there should probably be quotation marks around the word “routines”) were about making fun (subtle fun – not mean fun) of the instituion of cheerleading, in general, but more importantly, our routines would mostly be making a point: through our mere presence on the basketball court as cheerleaders, we wanted people to question their preconceived notions, and maybe think twice about the absurdity of the situation. Why is it “weird” for girls to be cheerleaders for girls? We forced people to confront WHY it seemed “odd.” Just by showing up.

This was not about lampooning sports, obviously, or making fun of those who love sports. We all loved sports. A couple of us were also star athletes (not me, just FYI), in track and field and soccer. We took our pursuit seriously. We had cheerleading practice. We made up our own versions of traditional cheerleader-cheers. We had no valid skills. We did messy somersaults, but then we leapt to our feet, and took a cheerleader pose to finish off the “cheer”. Some of our cheers involved things like “wheelbarrows” or random jumps with legs splayed out. Because we so obviously were not real cheerleaders, and we weren’t even trying to be like real cheerleaders, people would howl with laughter when they saw us. Sometimes that laughter would be mean. People don’t like to be confronted with their own prejudices, and that’s what we did. Yes, we were funny, but we were in on the joke. And we also loved our team. Again, our subtext was: “We want you to ask yourselves why it’s FUNNY to you and WEIRD that a girls’ team has girl cheerleaders. But after you ask yourself these questions, CHEER as loud as you can. Focus on what’s REALLY important.” We took our act on the road, traveling with the team to games at other schools, who didn’t know what hit them when we jogged out onto the court. Some people were seriously pissed off at us. They thought we were making fun of them. Which of course we weren’t. They were right up against the weirdness of the cheerleading-institution, if they would just look a little bit deeper. More often than not, though, people got the joke, and got into the spirit of what we were trying to do.

Our attitude influenced our uniform. Since our very presence as cheerleaders for girls brought up all these weird vibes of “what the hell are gender norms anyway and why do we think it’s weird that there’s a cheerleading team for a girls’ team” … we wanted our uniform to be boy-boy-boy-coded all the way.

We wore:

1. Baggy grey sweatshirts
2. Men’s boxer shorts
3. Hi-top sneakers

And our name?

The Phys. Wrecks.

Which was … accurate, if you saw our somersaults.

Within a couple of weeks of us cheering, the crowds at games started to grow. This is the high school accomplishment of which I am most proud. We had pumped people up! We had raised awareness of their winning streak! People didn’t want to miss out. We did cheers in the cafeteria during school lunches (we cleared this with no one, we just got up and commandeered the space), we threw an impromptu pep rally since the school wasn’t hosting an official one and we got people to come to the game. Soon – the bleachers were full to overflow at every game.

One of our greatest triumphs was that the boys from other sports teams – football players, basketball players, soccer players … started coming to the girls’ games. They took an interest. They came en masse – huge groups of rowdy jock high school boys – screaming like maniacs for the girls from their school. Unprecedented!

We did all of this without scolding the boys. Or scolding anyone, really. I don’t know too many people who respond well to scolding. We wanted people to change their behavior, sure, but more than that, we wanted them to change their ATTITUDE, and scolding just makes people resentful. We wanted nothing less than a shift in consciousness! We didn’t DISCUSS all of this, we just sort of landed on the right approach by instinct. There may have been a “scold” implicit in what we were doing, a kind of “okay, fine, nobody’s doing the right thing here, but WE are, so follow our lead” but we kept our energy enthusiastic and excited. The focus was on the team’s accomplishments.

It was hilarious, too, and unexpected how much the boys sports teams LOVED US. (I feel like they were almost jealous that we weren’t THEIR cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are kind of taken for granted, they’re ubiquitous. But not us. When we ran out onto the court, all hell broke loose, because of the novelty of it, and also maybe – in looking back – because we were “rebels” – our school mascot, by the way – we were the ultimate representation of our particular school’s spirit. And there’s something freeing about people who don’t give a shit, who buck norms, who are like “Yes, I will run around wearing men’s underwear at away-games and I do not feel embarrassed.” This kind of thing made people excited: it was catching. And so the vibe at these games was MORE excited than the vibe for the boys’ games.) The boys seemed relatively indifferent to “their” cheerleaders. “Their” cheerleaders were supposed to be there, “their” cheerleaders were a given. With us it was different. The boys LOVED us. This is one of those unintended consequences you can’t plan for. It never occurred to us that the boy-jocks would love us like they did. That they would get SO INTO what we were doing, totally understanding the spirit of it. (We had friends who were also legit cheerleaders, who had – understandably – not-so-thrilled reactions to the reality of our “squad”. One said to us, “I understand what you’re doing. It still makes me feel a little bit bad. I get it. But still …” We understood and we appreciated her honesty. We were all in the Drama Club together. There was a basis of friendship there. But progress won’t be stopped. We gotta move forward, sister. (Also, not for nothin’, but we are basically STEALING all of your cheers – which you – as a gymnast – worked hard on and perform amazingly well. And you can ACTUALLY do a split. And a cartwheel. Hats off.)

After each one of our cheers, the rows of jock-boys sitting together in the bleachers would all hold up huge flashcards with numbers on them, as though they were Olympic judges. (The image of them MAKING those flash cards is truly heart-cracking). We’d finish some goofball cheer, where we did a fake pyramid, or we would all do somersaults in a row – you could hear the waves of laughter erupting across the gym – and we’d finish our cheer – and glance up in the stands at all the jock boys to see what score they gave us. If it was a bad score, we’d shout at them, “OH COME ON”, and they’d razz us, “IS THAT THE BEST YOU GOT?”

It created such camaraderie.

That was what the Phys. Wrecks made possible. In a weird way, the Phys. Wrecks brought the school together. Because the girls teams are, after all, PART of the school, and we forced everybody to deal with that, and we did it in a way that was enthusiastic, comedic, and inclusive.

It was a blast, one of my great high school moments.

We did stunts that took people’s breath away because of the sheer virtuosity and courageous gymnastic skill we displayed.

We clapped and cheered and rabble-roused.

And … of course … When our team won … as they so often did that spectacular year…

There really was no other appropriate way for me to express myself than this pose (which, I have to say, in all modesty – I executed with perfection):

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King of Herrings (2013)

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Four guys hang out in a diner in New Orleans. They meet up there every day. They have been doing so for years. Maybe even decades. These guys feel like childhood friends. They hang out without even remembering why they started hanging out in the first place. Maybe that’s the point. Who else would tolerate some of their shenanigans? They argue. They strut for each other, boasting, bragging. They talk a big game about what they want for themselves, and the women in their lives (“cunts”, for the most part), they dress a bit flashy, in bowling shirts and spats. But what do they have going for them? They are middle-aged fantasists, they still think that big things are coming for them, that some breakthrough in understanding/opportunity is imminent. They’re slightly pathetic, yet in a way that is always recognizably human. They are “Ditch”, “Gat,” “The Professor,” and “Leon”, the lead characters of King of Herrings, co-directed by Sean Richardson and Eddie Jemison (who also plays “Ditch”). Jemison also wrote the script.

Filmed on a shoestring (or even less), King of Herrings, in black-and-white, has the look and feel of a gritty art film from the late 1950s, early 1960s (and I mean that as a compliment). Sean Richardson, the co-director and producer, was also the cinematographer and he has a superb eye. Shots are framed with elegance and thought, adding emotional heft to a simple scene of a wife cooking eggs for her husband, or a guy washing his hands in the restroom. The shots are startling, sometimes beautiful. They are not merely attention-getting; they crack open the event of the individual scenes, showing us the emotional underbelly, the deeper subtext. The camera angles and interesting framing elevates King of Herrings from realism into something loaded with symbolism and surrealism. Everything seems slightly “off”.

Most scenes are underlined with a strange and haunting score (by Chris Walden), almost jazz, sometimes blues, with a hillbilly twang. The film takes place in New Orleans, after all. Like the camera angles and the look of the film, the score helps you orient yourself: This does not take place in a realistic world. This is not “kitchen-sink realism”. It is also not the New Orleans the tourists see. It’s the rough and well-used waterfront, the weed-infested cobblestones, the dreary streets on the outskirts of town.

All of the actors involved in this film have deep roots in New Orleans (and many of their careers have taken them far from that original landscape). These guys have all been friends for years in real life, and that rapport shows. You feel like you’re eavesdropping, even as the script is slightly elevated in language, again giving the feeling that something is “off”. All of this makes for hypnotic viewing. It’s compelling visually. It sucks you in through its framing and its cinematic devices: overhead shots, lens flares, closeups … Nothing feels arbitrary. Knowing that they shot it in two weeks just adds to the hypnotic factor. They had rehearsed the script for a couple of weeks so that when it came time to shoot they could move with the velocity of a well-oiled ensemble.

“Ditch” (Jemison) is married to “Mary” (Laura Lamson, in an unforgettable performance). Ditch is a bully and a misogynist. Mary is a shut-in, living in fear of her husband, rushing around to get him a drink when he comes home. She is supposedly a dressmaker, but even that is challenging for someone like Mary. “Gat” (David Jensen) is also married (we never see his wife), but is engaged in some kind of crazy flirtation with a redhead who says suggestive things to him. He wears flashy shirts to attract her attention. “The Professor” (Joe Chrest) sells magazine subscriptions for a living, and is drawn to Mary. He concocts a reason to go visit her, and try to sell her a subscription to “Reader’s Digest”. She, shy and almost pre-verbal, serves him Saltines on a little white china plate. The subscription-selling scene is a mini-masterpiece of surreal script-writing and character development. It’s a romantic scene, but with a strange edge of uneasy static underneath it all. We’ve seen “Ditch”. We know his ugly volatility. He applauds infidelity in the other men (perhaps it validates his own behavior), but he would not countenance anyone getting close to his property. Then there is “Leon” (Wayne Pére), a guy who speaks with an electrolarynx due to throat cancer. Over the course of the film, Ditch’s teasing about said throat-microphone gets more and more brutal, until finally he does, indeed, go too far.

These four guys play poker until they are thrown out of dive bars. They get drunk. They throw up. They wander around the city. They seem to have nowhere to go. My favorite section of the film was a long montage sequence, overlaid by music, where Ditch and Gat hang out, walk around, on sidewalks, past graffiti, sit on docks, go out on a rickety boat, all the time laughing, talking, smoking cigarettes, stopping to make their points … The montage has a great sense of energy, visual engagement, landscape (the majority of the film takes place either in the diner or in Ditch and Mary’s apartment, an obvious result of the budgetary constraints).

One of the great strengths of King of Herrings (in the script, the direction, and the performances) is that while it does not sentimentalize these characters, it doesn’t condemn them, either. It presents them, warts and all. They are guys with limited options in life. While that does not excuse their brutality, it does explain some of it. These are guys who see women as frighteningly “Other”. Women are weak, and therefore to be held in contempt … and yet also … they have power over men, because men desire them … It’s a double-bind, and the two women in the film, Mary and “Evie” (Ditch’s sister, played by Andrea Frankle) are both trapped. It’s a man’s world and they’re just living in it.

The four guys circle the two women, closing in. Only Leon appears to have the necessary distance to understand what is happening, and also understand that maybe … maybe … there are other options available. Maybe he has that distance because he has already faced the worst thing, his own mortality. No racing around in flashy shirts for Leon. Leon knows that we all are going to die. He understands the most difficult truth of all. Maybe that’s why Ditch zeroes in on Leon as his most hated adversary. Ditch thinks that by controlling his woman and controlling his friends … he will stave off death.

I love a script that is bold enough to merely suggest this dynamic, that resists banging me over the head with it in an explicit way. Ditch is repulsive, and Jemison is a good actor. He is ugly enough to his wife that his behavior is inexcusable. He is appallingly cruel to his friends. He crosses the line, repeatedly. Jemison (and the script) does not try to excuse him, elevate him, or romanticize him. We are not asked to pity him, not explicitly, but I found myself pitying him anyway. What a trapped and little-minded man.

King of Herrings is currently making the festival rounds. It’s an ensemble picture, where the characters cannot connect, and yet also cannot break free. It doesn’t put too much on its topic. It doesn’t try to do too much, a wise choice. King of Herrings sits in the room, long after the final frame. I found myself thinking of some of the shots afterwards, pondering the deeper meaning of them, the implication of them, and also … their sheer beauty.

Funny to find beauty in such an ugly world.

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The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Meditation on Meditation,” by H.L. Mencken

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Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

I haven’t written much on H.L. Mencken. This is the only piece I could find and I can tell I had fun writing it. Mencken is fun. One of the common things that occurs on the Internet (something that actually surprised me once I started my blog and started having comments, etc.) is that people seem to believe that mentioning something or bringing up a topic for discussion is seen as endorsement. I have gotten those responses when I want to talk about Stalin, or the Manson murders, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, and on and on and on. I am not “condemning” enough, or something. I don’t know. The people who had problems with me wanted me to be clearer: “I think Stalin was a bad guy”. Like: that needs to be said? How boring. They were uncomfortable with the level of discourse. They saw me wanting to talk about certain things as an endorsement of said things (which just goes to show you that many many people lack the critical facility to even engage in conversation on the most banal level.) I do not operate like that, and so it was kind of a shock to see how, like clockwork, I’d put up a link to something I found interesting, and 9 out of 10 people would respond with either, “I DO NOT AGREE WITH THE OPINIONS IN THAT LINK” or “I SO AGREE WITH THE OPINIONS IN THAT LINK.” Who cares if you agree or disagree? Who the hell are YOU? Anything else to say? Anything more interesting to add? Even agreement/disagreement can be interesting if you put some thought into it, if you engage with the opponents’ ideas on a deeper level than a knee-jerk rejection.

I think that sometimes people feel that they must defend themselves against opinions that they find dangerous/bad/misguided/whatever. That defensive quality, though, brings up red flags in me. What’s wrong with discussing it? Even just DISCUSSING it is dangerous? And if you do discuss it, then you had better make it damn clear that you “condemn” whatever it is.

What the hell does all of this have to do with H.L. Mencken, the “sage of Baltimore”, and one of the greatest writers (and most influential) of the 20th century? Well, people have a hard time discussing him without shouting beforehand: “I DO NOT AGREE WITH HIS ASSUMPTIONS” or “I TOTES AGREE WITH WHAT HE SAYS HERE”. And it’s tiresome, frankly. Because what interests me in Mencken is his writing. The quality of his writing. And, in a way, Mencken IS dangerous. Because he is such a good writer that you find yourself engaging with his ideas, however offensive, however obnoxious, and boy, we can’t have THAT, can we? Mencken isn’t even a persuasive guy. He’s not writing to persuade you. He doesn’t give a shit. If you already believe such-and-such a thing, then he has already written you off as a boob and a moron, not worth engaging with anyway (he has contempt for groupthink of all kinds, political, religious, social, etc.). But to those who still CAN reason, and think for themselves, Mencken present his ideas, on men, women, sex, politics, history, literature, and every other single damn topic under the sun.

What I love about Mencken (and I love him) is that I get the sense, unlike most other writers, of being in the presence of his actual brain. I can FEEL him thinking. He has contempt for most sacred cows, and so sentimental people will find him horrifying. Even worse (or better), they will take him personally. (Good, I think. You SHOULD take him personally.) I think that’s where a lot of the negative reaction to Mencken comes from – not from his opinions, but from how much his writing decimates sentimentality, earnestness, idealism. He is such a highly skilled adversary. I can see how you would want him to just go away, if you were a certain type of person: He’s bad, he’s wrong, he’s sexist, he’s out-of-date, he got this-and-that wrong about history, let’s toss him on the ash heap, let’s just ignore him, because he’s bad bad bad.

But it’s not just the opinions – it’s the SKILL with which he expresses them.

Even when I find him obnoxious, he still makes me laugh out loud in sheer delight at his wordsmithy brilliance. I also have a love for cranky people, especially those who can write. Plenty of cranky people can NOT write (witness most political blogs), but those who know how to put what they are cranky about into writing … hats off.

Also. I think Mencken is right about a lot of things. I appreciate his dash of cold water realism. He can write circles around everyone. He satisfies my white-hot elitist streak, but he also satisfies my liberal sensibilities (he wasn’t a prude about sex, he could be sexist for sure but at heart he thought women were the realists of our species and men the romantic dangerous Fools, he cared deeply about art). He engages with art. (But the way he expresses it would be a turnoff to some: for example, in one essay he says he wouldn’t trade the book Lord Jim for ten kids – or “brats” as he calls them. Basically, he has never met a child more valuable than Lord Jim. Got it? Turned off? Unwilling to read further? Ha.) Mencken is a political orphan at the moment. Nobody wants to inherit him. Which, to my mind, is just more evidence of his worth. He loves literature, he engages with it, he wanted Americans to engage more in the things that HE thinks are important, which is: intellectual rigor, skepticism, critical thinking, artistic appreciation, and living primarily in the gladiator-fight of IDEAS.

This volume, the “Mencken Chrestomathy”, was put together by H.L. Mencken himself, a selection of his writings over the years in The Smart Set and other places, on various topics. He groups his pieces together, sometimes written years apart, under headings like: “Democracy”, “Religion”, “Women”, etc. Some of the pieces are only a paragraph long. Others a couple of pages. The prose is rollicking. Again, I have a feeling that those who only respond to content (what the essays SAY) are the ones who resist him. I don’t respond to content as much as I do to style (HOW the essay says what it says). Mencken’s style hits the sweet spot for me, the sweet spot hit by very few writers. Mencken and Joseph Heller sit at the top of that list. P.J. O’Rourke is on that list (on occasion). There’s a delicious sense of the absurdity of most human endeavor that these writers understand. For example the first sentence of the excerpt below. Mencken sets us up in the first part of the sentence, flattering our vanity and our ideals about ourselves – and then DECIMATES said vanity/ideals in the second half of the sentence. Heller’s entire Catch-22, in sentence after sentence, does the same thing. Both writers satisfy my suspicion that the world is an insane and capricious place, that Man is not noble or good, and they do so in writing that often makes me HOWL with laughter. Not for amateurs!

So I’ll be doing a bunch of excerpts from the Chrestomathy. This should be fun.

Here’s an excerpt from “Meditation on Meditation”, first published in The Smart Set in 1920.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Meditation on Meditation,” by H.L. Mencken

Man’s capacity for abstract thought, which most other mammals seem to lack, has undoubtedly given him his present mastery of the land surface of the earth – a mastery disputed only by several hundred thousand species of insects and microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his feeling of superiority, and under that feeling that is undoubtedly a certain measure of reality, at least within narrow limits. But what is too often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means synonymous with its salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most of man’s thinking is stupid, pointless and injurious to him. Of all animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriving at accurate judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare. Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving at a notion as violently in contempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation, or that of mental telepathy. Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statements at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.

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Review: Man of Tai Chi (2013); Directed by Keanu Reeves

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Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, opens today.

In 1987, the year Reeves first started hitting his stride, the year following “River’s Edge”, he was profiled in “Interview” magazine, as one of many rising stars (along with Johnny Depp, Robin Wright, and others). The profiles consisted of brief quotes from each person, and Reeves’ reads as follows:

“You know my favorite role? Mercutio – you know, in Romeo and Juliet – ’cause he’s so full of passion and wisdom and anger. I don’t know. I just live out here in L.A., man. Been out here two years from Toronto. L.A.’s a twisted place. It’s a varied animal. I guess it’s like free ways. Get it? Two words. I don’t know. Nothing’s for free, huh?”

There it is, the Reeves thing, that stilted earnest quality, that odd grace, on display everywhere throughout his career, and on display in spades in “Man of Tai Chi”. I loved it.

My review is now up at Roger Ebert.

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Review: Big Sur (2013)

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Another film adaptation of one of Jack Kerouac’s books. It opens today.

My review is now up at Roger Ebert.

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The Books: At Large and At Small, “Coffee,” by Anne Fadiman

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Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman opens this essay remembering her sophomore year in college, when, on a nightly basis, she would meet up with two boys who also lived in her dorm, and they would brew a pot of coffee, drink it, and talk. They would talk about literature and history and their classes, and the coffee was a huge part of the whole thing. She remembers the pot, the cups. Anne and her friends were 19, 20 years old, but the coffee ritual made her feel like a grownup. THIS was what it meant to be an adult. And so as a lifelong coffee drinker, she delves into the history of coffee (and its relationship to writing, in particular). Most of the essays have this micro- to macro structure, which elevates them from the purely personal. The personal is only the launching pad to a deeper investigation.

So Fadiman researches coffee. Where did it come from? Who figured it out? She talks about a guy in Yemen who chewed the beans and felt the speed rushing through his body – Fadiman refers to him as “the hopped-up imam”, a perfect example of what I find so funny about her writing. Fadiman researches the spread of coffee as a popular drink, and the explosion of “coffee houses” in the 18th and 19th century. These coffee houses were also related to politics and philosophy: it was a place people could gather to talk about things, argue about things, debate. A meeting-house. A democratic space. (Naturally, this is only applicable to MALES in the 18th and 19th century.) Paintings were done of these coffee houses. Fadiman looks at some of them and mentions how everyone is TALKING in said photos. Of course they’re talking. They just had their 20th cup of coffee.

My favorite part of this essay is when she talks about writers known for their coffee-drinking. Here’s an excerpt.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “Coffee,” by Anne Fadiman

Caffeine was first isolated in 1819, when the elderly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance handed a box of Arabian mocha coffee beans to a chemist named Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge and enjoined him to analyze their contents. Runge extracted an alkaloid that, as Jacob put it, “presents itself in the form of shining, white, needle-shaped crystals, reminding us of swansdown and still more of snow.” Caffeine is so toxic that laboratory technicians who handle it in its purified state wear masks and gloves. In The World of Caffeine, by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, there is a photograph of the label from a jar of pharmaceutical grade crystals. It reads in part:

WARNING! MAY BE HARMFUL IF INHALED OR SWALLOWED. HAS CAUSED MUTAGENIC AND REPRODUCTIVE EFFECTS IN LABORATORY ANIMALS. INHALATION CAUSES RAPID HEART RATE, EXCITEMENT, DIZZINESS, PAIN, COLLAPSE, HYPOTENSION, FEVER, SHORTNESS OF BREATH. MAY CAUSE HEADACHE, INSOMNIA, NAUSEA, VOMITING, STOMACH PAIN, COLLAPSE AND CONVULSIONS.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence. Many of the books on coffee that currently crowd my desk share a certain … velocity, as if their authors, all terrifically buzzed at 3:00 a.m., couldn’t get their words out fast enough and had to resort to italics, hyperbole, and sentences so long that by the time you get to the end you can’t remember the beginning. (But that’s only if you’re uncaffeinated when you read them; if you’ve knocked back a couple of cafe noirs yourself, keeping pace is no sweat.) Heinrich Eduard Jacob boasts that his narrative was “given soul by a coffee-driven euphoria.” Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger claim that while they were writing The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop, they

sucked down 85 double Americanos, 12 double espressos, 4 perfect riserettos, 812 regular cups (from 242 French press loads, plus 87 cups of drip coffee), 47 Turkish coffees, a half-dozen regrettable cups of flavored coffee, 10 pounds of organic coffee, 7 pounds of fair trade coffee, a quarter pound of chicory and a handful of hemp seeds as occasional adjuncts, 1 can of ground supermarket coffee (drunk mostly iced), 6 canned or bottled coffee drinks, 2 pints of coffee beer, a handful of mochas, 1 pint of coffee concentrate, a couple of cappuccinos, 1 espresso soda, and, just to see, a lone double tall low-fat soy orange decaf latte.

Their book contains only 196 pages and doesn’t look as if it took very long to write; that decaf latte aside, the authors’ caffeine quota per day must have been prodigious. (But note their exactitude: coffee makes you peppy, but it doesn’t make you sloppy.)

The contemporary master of the genre is Stewart Lee Allen, known as “the Hunter S. Thompson of coffee journalism,” whose gonzo masterwork, The Devil’s Cup, entailed the consumption of “2,920 liters of percolated, drip, espresso, latte, cappuccino, macchiato, con panna, instant and americana.” (It isn’t very long either. By the time Allen finished, his blood must have been largely composed of 1,3,7-trimethylzanthine.) Following the historical routes by which coffee spread around the globe, Allen gets wired in Harrar, San’a, Istanbul, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and various points across the United States, attempting to finance his travels and his coffee habit with complicated transactions involving forged passports and smuggled art. He ends up on Route 66, in search of the worst cup of coffee in America, in a Honda Accord driveway filled with every form of caffeine he can think of: Stimu-Chew, Water Joe, Krank, hi-caf candy, and a vial of caffeine crystals (scored from an Internet site that features images of twitching eyeballs) whose resemblance to cocaine occasions some exciting psychopharmacological plot twists when a state trooper pulls him over in Athens, Tennessee.

But in the realm of twitching eyeballs, even Stewart Lee Allen can’t hold a candle to Honoré de Balzac, the model for every espresso-swilling writer who has followed in his jittery footsteps. What hashish was to Baudelaire, opium to Coleridge, cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson, nitrous oxide to Robert Southey, mescaline to Aldous Hu xley, and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac, caffeine was to Balzac. The habit started early. Like a preppie with an expensive connection, he ran up alarming debts with a concierge who, for a price, was willing to sneak contraband coffee beans into Balzac’s boarding school. As an adult, grinding out novels eighteen hours a day while listening for the rap of creditors at the door, Balzac observed the addict’s classic regimen, boosting his doses as his tolerance mounted. First he drank one cup a day, then a few cups, then many cups, then forty cups. Finally, by using less and less water, he increased the concentration of each fix until he was eating dry coffee grounds: “a horrible, rather brutal method,” he wrote, “that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins.” Although the recipe was hell on the stomach, it dispatched caffeine to the brain with exquisite efficiency.

From that moment on, everything became agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink.

Could that passage have been written on decaf?

Balzac’s coffeepot is displayed at 57 rue Raynouard in Paris, where he lived for much of his miserable last decade, writing La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, losing his health, and escaping bill collectors through a secret door. My friend Adam (who likes his espresso strong but with sugar) visited the house a few years ago. “The coffeepot is red and white china,” he wrote me, “and bears Balzac’s monogram. It’s an elegant, neat little thing, almost nautical in appearance. I can imagine it reigning serenely over the otherwise-general squalor of his later life, a small pharos of caffeine amid the gloom.”

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The Books: At Large and At Small, “A Piece of Cotton,” by Anne Fadiman

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Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

A powerful little essay about the American flag. Anne Fadiman and her husband had moved out of Manhattan after living there for many many years, and moved to Western Massachusetts. It was a big adjustment to these two urbanites (something she addresses in another essay in the collection called “Moving”). But they had two kids now, they wanted a yard, some space. So they uprooted themselves. A couple of years later came the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It was disorienting and terrible to NOT be in their chosen city, their home for so many years (once you’ve lived in New York that long, it never lets you go), in its time of trial. I have friends who happened to be out of town that day and described a similar sense of urgent desperation. Despite the chaos and death, my friends wanted to get back home immediately. This happened to OUR city, dammit it. Fadiman writes about the emotional sight of the flag during the World Series that year (boy, who can forget it). Fadiman writes about hanging a flag in the flagpole outside their new home, and how strange it felt, since she was not raised by a typically “flag-waving” type of family. So it made her think about the flag, and what it symbolized, and how that symbol has changed over the years. She researches the flag-burning controversy, a very good “way in” to a conversation about symbols, and what symbols mean. The danger of worshiping symbols brings to mind Lenin’s embalmed body being on display for 70 years like some fungi-sprouting Christ figure. And yet you cannot say that the symbol has no meaning. Fadiman is interested in what that meaning is.

There were many who were disgusted by the “flag-waving” after 9/11. I wasn’t. But then, I was raised in a pretty patriotic family, and we always had an American flag hanging outside our house (alongside the Irish flag, naturally). The Star-Spangled Banner is a song about a symbol, really. “Our flag was still there” is relatively meaningless in and of itself: I am sure trees survived that battle, and ships, and docks, and all other kinds of objects. But nobody cares about those because they are not symbols of something else. The flag still being there means the country is still there, the nation is still there.

And yet we will protect the flag burners. It is very important that we protect them. I would never burn a flag myself, and was irritated when I saw this one day in my neighborhood. Losers. But when you get into a situation where the symbol is more important than things like how you treat people/the Golden Rule/kindness/empathy … well, look out. It’s one of the signs of tyranny, and you are submitting yourself to it before you even recognize its proper nature. (Nobody has broken this down better than Joseph Heller in the famous “loyalty oath crusade” scene in Catch-22.) Heller’s scene is a perfect example of raising the symbol above common-sense reality, until it doesn’t matter whether or not the symbol has meaning anymore: As a matter of fact, strict devotion to the symbol has caused everything to go haywire. NOTHING has meaning in that madhouse. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not a huge fan of the Pledge of Allegiance, but that’s another topic entirely.

Fadiman seems to be writing about her grief about 9/11 and the way she does so is researching the history of the American flag. Here’s an excerpt, with a powerful ending. Brought a lump to my throat.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “A Piece of Cotton,” by Anne Fadiman

In March of 1918, a year after the United States entered World War I, a mob surrounded a Montana man named E.V. Starr and tried to force him to kiss an American flag. Starr refused, saying, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.”

The previous month, Montana had enacted a flag-desecration statute that became the model for the 1918 federal Sedition Act, outlawing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government or its flag. Starr was charged with sedition, fined $500, and sent to the state penitentiary for ten to twenty years of hard labor. Ruling on Starr’s appeal, the federal district court judge who heard the appeal wrote:

In the matter of his offense and sentence, obviously petitioner was more sinned against than sinning…. [The mob’s] unlawful and disorderly conduct, not his just resistance, nor the trivial and innocuous retort into which they goaded him, was calculated to degrade the sacred banner and to bring it into contempt. Its members, not he, should have been punished.

Although he called the court that had sentenced Starr “stark, staring, raving mad” – no penalty that severe had ever been meted out, or would ever be meted out again, in a United States flag desecration case – the judge ruled that the state law was nonetheless constitutional and that he had no other choice than to uphold the conviction.

The unfortunate Starr’s only bit of luck was that the Montana mob did not assault him, unlike the automobile workers in Lansing, Michigan, who, the same winter, after a fellow employee wiped his hands on a flag, had chopped a hole in the ice that covered the Grand River, tied a clothesline to the man’s foot and submerged him until he apologized; or the saloon patrons in Thermapolis, Wyoming, who, the previous year, had lynched a man for shouting “Hoch lebe der Kaiser.” (In the latter case, the victim was cut down in the nick of time by the city marshal. The Chicago Tribune reported: “Revived with cold water, he was forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. He then was warned to get out of town. He did.”

I read about these cases – they are collected in a fascinating and disturbing book called Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995, edited by Robert Justin Goldstein – while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, the omphalos of Americana. It felt strange to underline E.V. Starr’s question in a hotel room crammed with hooked rugs and embroidered samplers. What is this thing anyway? I thought. Is it just a piece of cotton? Is it, as Katha Pollitt put it, explaining why she had refused her daughter’s request to hang a flag in their window, a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war”? Or is it, as a group of New York women wrote in the dedication of the silk flag they had sewn for Union soldiers in 1861, “the emblem of all you have sworn to defend: / Of freedom and progress, with order combined, / The cause of the Nation, of God, and Mankind“?

In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag – along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations – is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of dissolved hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from our home, meant We will not rape or murder you. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing. The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper – on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?” – meant I am morally superior. The flags brandished by two cowboy-hatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards. The Old Glory bandanna around the neck of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something. The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before.

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