December 29, 2010

Religion & Literature


"Every winter Fox News, seeking to stir up anger through the land, uncovers evidence of a war on Christmas. Secular humanists ignorant of religion and hostile to its traditions, someone in the studio will declare, want us to say “Happy Holiday” or give Kwanzaa equal standing. But Christmas, as its name suggests, is about Christ. These enemies of Christianity will stop at nothing to get their way. Not even Santa Claus is sacred to them.

Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.

Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue."

-- From Alan Wolfe's review of Oliver Roy's "Holy Ignorance"

"Broadly speaking, Western literature — the poems, plays and stories told from Moscow to Buenos Aires, from the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” to “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” with postcolonial contributions from India and South Africa and even more far-flung parts of the conquered globe — can be divided into two traditions. The first, what we might call the canonical or public or, more generously, the democratic tradition, finds its roots in ancient Greece, and traces a fairly straightforward line through Rome and the Renaissance and the European colonization of the Americas and other parts of the world. This is a literature that measures itself in successive aesthetic innovations, in language that, however manipulated, finds its idiom in the vernacular rather than the orthodox, and in an increasingly representative cast of characters and behaviors, from early ecumenical existentialism (the acts of the gods and their consequences for kings and heroes) to the domestic dramas of Tolstoy and García Márquez and Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. In other words, it encompasses about 99 percent of all books.

In contrast to this is a tradition that begins more or less with the novel itself, i.e., “Don Quixote” (although the case can be made that it also starts with Homer, albeit with the brooding Achilles, whose actions are motivated by nothing beyond the immediate satisfaction or alleviation of some need, rather than the equally selfish Odys­seus, whose every deed is calculated to secure fame after death), and wends its way through various misfits, misanthropes and criminals constitutionally incapable of resigning themselves to the social contract: Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Knut Hamsun’s self-starving doppelgänger in “Hunger.” In lieu of ­offering a rational critique of the world they inhabit, the antiheroes of the second tradition simply hate or reject it, just as their creators, far from seeing literature as a tool for cultural or even individual salvation, write only to give voice to a sense of alienation from oneself, one’s peers and one’s place in history.

On the one hand, the writers of the alienating tradition can be said to keep the writers of the democratic tradition honest, deflating the hyperbolic claims to which writers and critics have grown increasingly prone in the absence of a teleological basis for literature; but, more concretely, these writers are also responsible for articulating the ennui/anxiety/weltschmerz that we now regard as the core of postmodern existential identity. From Hamsun we get Kafka, from Kafka we get Beckett, from Beckett we get Bern­hard; as yet there is no worthy successor to the line — Roberto Bolaño maybe, or maybe Dennis Cooper, although Bolaño might have died too soon and Cooper lived too long to secure that place.

It was Cooper, in his introduction to Brad Gooch’s fine 1984 collection, “Jailbait,” who talked about a “widespread disbelief in a future and refusal to learn from the past,” a sensibility that he called Punk and that produced “luminous texts” filled with “inordinately real (as opposed to literary) experience.” This, as neatly as anything else, sums up the difference between the traditions I’ve just outlined, and the need for both. If the democratic tradition continually updates the individual’s relationship to society, enabling the peaceful coexistence of private psyches with public consciousness, the alienating tradition reminds us that such constructs and relationships are necessary conveniences, and that no amount of clothing or culture can enable us to escape man’s nature — and man’s fate — as just another animal subject to the gross processes of lust and hunger, micturition and egestion, the permanent nothing of death. If the first tradition is ego and superego, the second is pure id; or, to borrow another Freudian metaphor, if the first is civilization, the second is its discontents. Freud taught us that the consequence of ignoring our “cultural uneasiness” is, on the individual level, neurosis, and, on the social, world war. Freud’s world war was the first, but Bern­hard’s was the second, which is to say, Freud was writing to explain what had happened in the hopes of forestalling another such conflagration, whereas Bern­hard, having seen the unthinkable happen again, could only lament."

-- From "The Alienator" Dale Peck's review of Thomas Bernhard's work


December 17, 2010

Me and Timmy Mcgee

“Life is a great surprise. I do not

see why death should not be an even greater one.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977: “Pale Fire” (1962)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I first met Tim Mcgee around 1960. Our family, the Tessiers, had moved from what was then French Morocco in North Africa to Marquette, Michigan. We lived in the Elizabeth Apartments on 123 West Ridge Street (that space is now the parking lot just west of the Peter White Public Library). Right below and behind our house was St. John’s elementary school, where my brothers, sister, Nancy, and I, attended grades 1 – 8.

One of my first friends, Gary Martin, lived right next to SJS on Bluff Street. And so it was the Martin and Tessier boys would play guns together in the woods behind the Northland Hotel, and Gary and myself, Randy, became fast friends. At the time, I thought Hoot Martin, Gary’s dad, was just about the biggest, strongest, hardest working guy (he delivered coal) in the world. He was like a real life “Big Bad John.” Never drank or swore, although he did have a stash of “Argosy,” “True,” and “Stag” magazines hidden away above his workshop.

Both of us being Catholics, you might think Gary also attended St. John’s, after all the school was right next door to his house. Not so, for you see, Gary went to St. Peter’s, which, while not far away, landed him with an entirely different cohort of pals, one of which was Timothy Mcgee.

It was at the Bishop Baraga Roller Rink that Gary introduced Tim and I, and that began a life long friendship that saw us move from our boyhood days of peanut butter/mustard sandwiches and Suicides (a Coke, 7 Up, and Orange pop mix); to our 20s and 30s, those headier times of entrepreneurial schemes, sports, and music, bachelor basketball and golf; into our 40s and beyond, a time of family and watching our children grow up; and finally to this.

From the beginning, Tim and I had a special, but simple, unspoken bond: we were always each other’s biggest fans. Whenever I lost confidence in the world, or myself, Mcgee was there with support and encouragement. Our mutual admiration society never faltered, and it served us well. While I have always had a passion for music, it has taken many years to achieve even moderate skills at playing and singing. I say this because in those early days, Mcgee was always supportive and genuinely interested in what I was doing, no matter how bad it sucked. But it wasn’t just about me. It was about our group, “Walrus,” as well. I remember one time we had a gig at “Uncle Otto’s Ballroom” in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Mcgee volunteered to chauffer some of us in his Corvair. Right after leaving Marquette the gas line sprung a leak. No problem, Tim took a piece of chewing gum and plugged the hole. That patch job got us all the way there and back. When we moved to Ann Arbor in 1972, Tim came along. He was part roadie, songwriter (Rosie Palm Blues), and overall group mentor.

I always marveled at Tim’s athleticism, innovative ideas, and devotion to his friends. His skill at cards, magic, pool, and working with his hands in general, never failed to fascinate and intrigue me and whoever else was around. One time we walked into the pool hall in the Michigan Union and staged a scene right out of “The Hustler.” He was Fast Eddie and I was his money-man. I pulled out a wad of ones wrapped in a $50 bill and challenged all comers to play some 9 Ball with my man. We won. In fact, turns out he beat a dude that - unbeknownst to us at the time - was a highly ranked amateur in Michigan. Like many who crossed the Bridge before him -- but lasting longer than most -- he finally succumbed to the call of the north and returned to the Queen City.

For a time he had a store in the old Monkey Wards on Washington Street, where he offered up beautifully crafted original pieces. Whether it involved wax, wood, or glass, Tim was always making things. The Birdseye maple pool cues, driftwood sand candles, and Redwood tables he made at various stages of his life stand as physical symbols of the unique person he was. His capacity to adapt to whatever circumstance confronted him; his commitment to family and friends; his willingness to help a stranger; his upbeat attitude in the face of the worst; these qualities are emblematic of the indefatigable spirit he’s engendered in all of us who knew him.

Had I the skills to write a poem like Auden’s, I wouldn’t have to fumble with such a wholly inadequate prose narrative as above to convey my deep, and now anguished, affection for Mcgee.

Love & Peace, Mcgee -- Randy