two umbrellas

I’ve been quite busy lately with freelance work that I am slacking a bit on original posts/content. So here’s more from around town…

• A “crisis of belief”: The WSJ wonders “Will this crisis produce a ‘Gatsby’?” and discusses literature, the Depression, and Sherwood Anderson:
  

  In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the “American theory of life” — a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. “We Americans have all been taught from childhood,” Anderson wrote, “that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world.” In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called “a crisis of belief.”

  (via ALD.)

• DFW in The New Yorker with more and more (via kottke.) I am now sorely missing The New Yorker.
• Guernica interviews Bernard Henri-Levy (from 2008-Nov), who was recently on a roundtable discussion on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, which is one of the few shows that attempts to discuss issues and not politics.

As more bailouts are being distributed and the stimulus package is reluctantly being passed, I worry about the economy of course, but I also worry about the American Way-of-Life. For far too long we have isolated ourselves with our ability to purchase, which has made us very comfortable. There is a false sense of security in that ability. We become patriotic about our purchasing power and that consumerism will save our economy, or rather our Way-of-Life.

But our current Way-of-Life is unsustainable because, in many accounts, it is useless. It has become more important to our economy and our culture to consume – even if we are consuming what we can’t afford or is completely unnecessary. Jim Kunstler writes about the “Poverty of Imagination” when confronting not only our economy but also our Way-of-Life.

The argument about “change” during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn’t, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team — but basically life in the USA would continue being about all those trips to the mall, and the cubicle jobs to support that, and the family safaris to visit Grandma in Lansing, and the vacations at Sea World, and Skipper’s $20,000 college loan, and Dad’s yearly junket to Las Vegas, and refinancing the house, and rolling over this loan and that loan… and that has all led to a very dead end in a dark place.

If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there’s a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don’t focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don’t get started on this right away, we’re screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It’s a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We’ll see a striking illustration of “phase change” as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were, but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains of our capital resources down a rat hole.

Since President Obama was elected I have been waiting for him to resound a JFKesque call to the American people that we need to make sacrifices. We know that times are going to be tough and that many people are going to lose their jobs and not be able to pay their bills and because of that things will change. However, we can’t continue to assure the American people that everything will go back to the way it was, that our Way-of-Life will be restored. What has made the US a great country is our ability and freedom to change and adapt to the world and our nation’s needs. Unfortunately, that can also lead to too much freedom where we ignore the needs of the country as a whole and focus on the wants of the individual. Our national pride has changed from having the best to having the most. We are finding out the hard way that without a strong vision of what our country/government/citizens can do, we are left with nothing but bad debt.

In the midst of NaNoWriMo, I’m still (barely) trying to keep up my reading, which – of course – is one of the reasons I write.

I fell in love with Wayne Koestenbaum’s direct style in Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and could not wait for Hotel Theory. I’ll admit it was a bit heady for me since I have been concentrating mostly on other things as of late; but, there were so many phrases that pulled me back and forced me into this book.

…and why I write: the ritual of composition kills consciousness at the same time as it revives a bleak, faithful attentiveness. Concentrating on my own sentences, converting intuition into phrases – this process feels like staring directly at time…every thought must be apotheosis…

Reading The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion has taught me once again how to write a paragraph.

I started Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique many, many months ago. I am still only half way through this classic. I have to put it on hold. It is very hard to read. I do not find Friedan’s style engaging or interesting – only the subject matter has kept my attention for over 300 pages. Unfortunately, as I read I am also finding that culture hasn’t quite progressed as far is it probably should have when this first published. I must say it is demoralizing to continue reading at this point but I may continue later. Of course I said that about The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and I still have not returned to that.

On a train ride to and from the suburbs today to visit a friend, I read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”:

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.

…The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp — Dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

These notes listed (there are 58 in all), to me, represent statements that have not dated as easily as some of Sontag’s other points. I fear that there is a growing sensibility for points 2 and 38: an apolitical lack of content. However, I am struggling to decide what is the present day equivalent to camp.