December 20th, 2011
Kleist Almighty

It’s the 200th anniversary of the notorious death of the great story writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), precursor of Kafka and assorted absurdists.

Like Kafka, Kleist (who early in life sat down on the shore of Wannsee Lake, shot a suicidal friend, and then shot himself) has this weird combination of clear, calm, confident, very expository-feeling prose, and brutally meaningless content. The stories are typically told from an extremely detached, affectlessly rational point of view – the narrator is simply a set of lucid eyes setting down what they see. Indeed sometimes the Kleist narrator, with his long paragraphs of diligent, painstaking description, is tiresome… Yet what these eyes see, as in Kleist’s greatest short story (if you ask me), “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” is pointless sadistic hatred, sudden communal psychosis, obsessive demented ritual unto death…

Four viciously anti-Catholic brothers, outfitted with weapons to destroy a church, hear, as they prepare to attack, the music of its mass – music so beautiful that it bears the congregants’ “souls, as if upon wings, through all the heaven of harmony” – and instantly the brothers throw down their weapons and become hysterical religious fanatics for life.

[T]he young men had led [a] ghost-like life [in the local insane aslyum] for six years… [T]hey slept little and tasted little, …no sound usually passed their lips, and …it was only at the hour of midnight that they rose from their seats, when, with voices loud enough to shatter the windows of the house, [in the most hideous and horrible voice] they sang the Gloria in excelsis.

Their mother finds them years later in the madhouse, where, overwhelmed by despair and confusion, she examines the score of the music played and sung that day:

She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground, when she found the “Gloria in excelsis” open. It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.

Inside of a story whose authoritative narrator renders the world as a setting of utterly known signs sits a woman collapsing under a whirling, utterly unknown language. Her disharmonic sons’ first encounter with harmony (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”) has undone them…

See, I think writers like Kleist and Kafka want to evoke what happens when our quotidian efforts to make sense of earthly meaninglessness and suffering are interrupted by epiphany — by entries into a fully meaningful world. Only our epiphanies aren’t beautiful and transcendent; they’re nightmarish. Like all epiphanies, they suddenly disclose to us what is really there; we see that there is a hand creating and directing our lives. But it is a hand whose absolute power is matched by its absolute, and seemingly malign, mystery. We can only agree to subjugate ourselves to that crushing enigma.

Or not. We can go on living the way we always have, suspecting now, however, that life is a crushing, sick joke. This is a guy option, as Christopher Hitchens makes clear in his essay about why women aren’t funny:

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough… Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

I mean, what’s all that Bach doing on the soundtrack of Shame, a film about sexual addiction? Aren’t Bach’s surpassing clarities, his you-could-weep harmonies, there as a counterpoint to the main character’s embroilment in ugliness, arbitrariness, and futility?

Always, Kleist and Kafka seem to say, we are at play between these two forces – the force of ugly visceral embroilment in a world that hurts and confuses us, and the counterforce of heavenly harmony whose voice is the voice of music, beauty. Their brilliance as writers is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.

The absolutely contrary principle to the work and philosophy of Kleist, Kafka, and Hitchens is that of absolute confidence that the world has meaning, and transcendent meaning at that:

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.

December 19th, 2011
Amid the big deaths of the last few days…

… the sudden, quiet exit of a Kenyon freshman.

Kathryn Currier, eighteen, “died unexpectedly … after falling ill in her room.”

She loved literature, passionately. But she wanted to study everything. She “was very frustrated she could only take four classes. There was just so much she wanted to experience and learn and do.”

She wrote this about herself.

I can be a bit shy in class at the outset, but this is something I am working on; I should get better as the class progresses and I (hopefully!) gain confidence. I am looking forward to four years of learning in one of the best English departments in the country.

She also wrote

[T]he beauty of literature and poetry [is] that it can be experienced by anyone. Indeed, sometimes reading, sometimes words, are the only thing a person has; reading can be the most wonderful means of escape from this world, and reading can also be the most wonderful means of connecting to this world.

December 19th, 2011
“I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking…”

…. writes Katha Pollitt in an essay today about Christopher Hitchens.

And yet I’ll take Hitchens’ seriousness about women’s persecution over Pollitt’s thoughtless nonchalance any day. In an essay attacking a number of European countries for banning the burqa, Pollitt writes “religion is what people make of it.”

Uh, no. As Hitchens points out, “Mormons may not have polygamous marriage, female circumcision is a federal crime in this country, and in some states Christian Scientists face prosecution if they neglect their children by denying them medical care.” Turns out there’s a state involved here too; religion (as the haredim of Israel are beginning to notice) is not only what you make of it, but what you and the state make of it.

Had Pollitt bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, she’d perhaps have concluded something like this:

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities.

December 19th, 2011
Forget everything you thought you knew about student council elections.

In Venezuela, where the universities are significant sources of anti-Chavez sentiment, election day at the Central University in Caracas means a well-coordinated attack on the polling site by masked men with tear gas and guns.

The university’s concert hall is a rare enclave of architectural loveliness in Caracas: Alexander Calder designed a tremendous sculpture for its ceiling, and murals decorate the surrounding plaza. That prized plaza was damaged last Friday, when armed assailants attacked the university in an outburst of the peculiar violence that has come to define the Venezuelan capital.

The gunmen lit fires just outside the concert hall, attempted to force open its doors and cloaked the entryway in tear gas. Their intent, it appears, was to interrupt the tallying of votes from that day’s student-body government elections; the group destroyed machines used for counting and prevented students from delivering ballot boxes to the election committee. The academic departments in which votes were lost scheduled new elections for Wednesday, only to be stopped again with a second volley of tear gas.

The ant-Chavez candidates won anyway.

December 18th, 2011
Things that make UD laugh out loud.

At the University of Bari in the southern region of Puglia, Lanfranco Massari, a professor of economics, has three sons and five grandchildren who are colleagues in the same department.

The Italian university system.

December 18th, 2011
‘Who could possibly view the term “breast cancer” as sexually arousing?’

Israel: The madness metastasizes.

December 18th, 2011
You got THAT right.

[Northern Kentucky University] professor Al Lipping, president of the Faculty Senate, said some faculty opposed the move to Division I, convinced that it would compromise academics.

“I’m not vehemently opposed or rah-rah for it, but I do know that in terms of American society, athletics is an integral part of society,” he said. “If you look at the majority of institutions in the country today, they usually got their notoriety and exposure through athletics.”

December 18th, 2011
Should trustees be on the faculty of the universities on whose boards they sit?

I dunno… The trustees, most of them, are on the board of trustees because the university wants large cash gifts from them. In short, they’ve been chosen because they are rich and because the university has reason to believe (the trustee graduated from the university, say; or the trustee’s kid is a student at the university) that for sentimental reasons the trustee may choose to give some of his or her billions or millions to the university.

Hence the relationship between the university and the trustee involves the university doing anything it can to make the trustee happy.

This being the case, handing out professorships to trustees could be seen as one more happy-making gesture extended to the trustee by the university; and therefore one could argue that this compromises the intellectual integrity of the school.

But, as I say, I dunno. It’s easy to imagine a situation in which a trustee, beyond being good at generating enormous personal compensation in a business setting, also has actual academic heft, and it would be silly to deprive students of such a person…

But let’s add some complexity to the question: Should a trustee whose personal compensation has been outrageously high ($38 million over five years) (despite having run his enterprise into the ground, with hideous consequences for all tax-paying Americans) teach courses at a Jesuit university?

Okay, let’s mix things up even more. Should a Boston College trustee against whom the SEC has just filed civil fraud charges for having been a significant player in the country’s financial crisis be teaching a course at BC on the financial crisis?

“Who better?” said Mr UD just now, across the breakfast table.

“Yes,” said UD. “A kind of How I Did It.”

December 18th, 2011
Largo Desolato

Vaclav Havel has died.

“His essays, lectures, and prison letters from the last quarter century are, taken altogether, among the most vivid, sustained, and searching explorations of the moral and political responsibility of the intellectual produced anywhere in Europe,” wrote Timothy Garton Ash, the foremost chronicler of revolutionary Central Europe, in his 1999 collection History of the Present. “Indeed, it is difficult to think of any figure in the contemporary world who has more cumulative authority to speak on this issue than Vaclav Havel.”

*********************************

[Havel] took from rock-influenced ’60s culture “a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretched and humiliated…”

**********************************

Havel is a short and rumpled man, even in a sharp presidential suit. He’s a disaster at press conferences, wiggling his tube-socked feet under the table and making chewing sounds into the microphone before each response. He nearly died three times in the last eight years from various illnesses, and he reportedly headed to Portugal for a long cure soon after stepping down as president. He describes himself as perpetually nervous, afraid someone’s going to wake him from the dream and put him back in jail, where he probably belongs. He may have been the life of the party a time or two, but overall the impression he gives is that of an unspectacular man who probably would rather be drunk.

*********************************

Matt Welch, in reason, wrote an excellent 2003 essay about Havel from which the excerpts above are taken.

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“[We are] anchored in the earth and the universe,
the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man’s understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.

… This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.”

December 17th, 2011
Specializing in the Diseases of the Rich

Lee Hausner, a California-based psychologist who works with the ultrarich, has one client she calls “The Phoenix,” a real-estate developer and investor who borrowed and spent heavily. He has surged and crashed twice over the past decade, reaching a net worth of $400 million, losing it, then hitting $200 million and losing it again.

“He’s an impulsive risk-taker,” she says. “He always lays everything on the line.”

For risk-takers who want to get rich and stay rich, Ms. Hausner advises taking a step back every so often and evaluating important decisions rather than leaving them to impulse.

“Some of these people roll the dice and they get rich,” she says. “But they have to realize that if they roll it again, the result may not come out as well. They need to stop themselves before they roll again, and deliberate.”

December 17th, 2011
“… Clemson and West Virginia University could each have to pay $2 million for unsold tickets if no more tickets are sold.”

Hey, where is everybody? We’ve got these hotshit teams, going to the big bowl and all, and … nada! Not only do our universities take a big ol’ hit, but we’re gonna have to scramble to find people to give these tickets away to if we want to avoid looking a bit… meagre… fanwise… on tv.

“Obviously we had hoped that we would sell more with it being a prestigious bowl, a BCS game,” [the West Virginia University sports marketing guy] said.

Yeah WTF. Human enterprises don’t come any more prestigious than the Bowl Championship Series; and – dang! – football’s the front porch of the American university! I challenge you to say one word against big-time university football! So WHAT the hell’s going on.

December 17th, 2011
Campion’s “Never Weather-Beaten Sail”….

… (here’s a somewhat eccentric version – there are many versions of this beautiful song on YouTube) is better known than his poem Now Winter Nights Enlarge.

But thinking as I am – as so many are – on Christopher Hitchens, it seems a good poem to dedicate to his memory.

As always I’ll interrupt its lines with my comments. Go to the link on its title to see (and hear) the poem without my messing about.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

[The title’s a little poem in itself. Is it in the imperative? Is it a command to us to draw out or in some way enrich long dark winter nights — and by extension, to make the most of life’s pleasures even when things get dark and cold? Or is it a simple observation – the perception of a person in the midst of the most intense earthly darkness (both winter and night) that winter nights are long?]

Now winter nights enlarge
This number of their hours;

[The hours of darkness increase during the winter. And yet the word is enlarge, not increase, suggesting not a receding from richness, but possibly a gain in it… And of course the word numb echoes inside of number and has us shivering with thoughts of the very coldest hours of the night. ]

And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.

[Here the poetic word, the enlarge, is airy. Oh, and towers. Because are the towers rooftops that we can barely see (airy) amid the night and the stormy clouds? Or are the towers non-stormy clouds, suffering a blanketing by darker clouds? In any case, at this early point in the poem things are looking pretty dark. We’re getting a conventional reading of wintry nights as a figure for our numbered days, the darkening of our lives.]

Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.

[Whoa. Talk about switching the lights on. The natural world’s deathly, but that only intensifies our human countercurrents, our defiant impulse to electrify a world on the blink. Light the fires, break out the wine – use the uninhabitability of the natural world to elaborate a joyous, internal, human habitation whose most essential, most joyous component is language.]

Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

[Excited by the flame’s brilliance, the wine’s fire, and fiery eloquence, we now have only to anticipate candle-lit lovemaking.]

This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.

[It’s just as well that the nights are too cold for extensive verbal foreplay; let’s get to it and warm ourselves at the simple visceral beauty of each other’s body.]

All do not all things well:
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
They shorten tedious nights.

[Not everyone’s good at everything – talents seems parceled out, with some able to dance, some to tell stories, some to recite poems… Yet the beauty of winter (the poem perhaps suggests) is the way it perforce throws us together around the warming fire, where our human capacities are communally, richly, displayed and shared. Winter is when we pleasure each other in an unusual display of generosity and disinhibition (think of the last scene of Babette’s Feast); this is its delight. At these concluding lines of the poem, we circle around to the original use of the word enlarge and explain it: winter’s hours enlarge by prompting us to shorten (nice poetic paradox there) for one another the tedium of a dull life.]

December 16th, 2011
As we speak…

La Kid‘s warbling on TNT. She’s just sung with Jennifer Hudson (the link is to a YouTube of the performance; La Kid‘s in the chorus; she’s got long blond hair and glasses), and will, in a few minutes, sing the concluding carol with Barack Obama.

December 16th, 2011
Death of a Writer

Ian McEwan on the last days of Christopher Hitchens:

[We] set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Chronic pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism, and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, his head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn’t have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it’s available, read the review.

His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame”. Right to the end.

December 16th, 2011
Hitchens

My friend cloudminder tells me that Christopher Hitchens has died (here’s one of hundreds of appreciations that have already appeared).

I suppose, in line with the post just below this one, one could call Christopher Hitchens the anti-Gingrich. His was perhaps the most human soul of our time. His humanity was so soulful that – like Blake, and Lawrence, and Hitchens’ hero Orwell – he became positively prophetic about it, about rooting into your flesh and mind and heart and being a human being and no other thing.

He liked human beings. He even liked disliking them. He was intensely social.

His spiritual practice was the reading of Auden and Larkin; he sought in them the intensest praise of our beauty and the beauty of the world. He never said, like the woman in Stevens’ Sunday Morning, But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. He sought bliss, and imperishability be damned.

His bliss, above all, was writing. Writing, as Seamus Heaney says in his most famous poem, creates beauty by digging deeply into the meaning of human life: Through living roots awaken in my head. The writer lives intensely, kicks up the deep-lying truths of who we are, and then reaches down and hauls the truths up into prose.

And all of this is blissful: life, mental fight, writing.

Blissful even when your boot suddenly turns over the dirt of the grave.

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