ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MOLLITUDE

Yes, it’s a word. An old, rare word for sure — from the Latin for “soft” — but mollitude is still out there, still kicking. 

Also still kicking is the only novel great enough to have its own annual, global celebration – James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose centennial we mark this year.  It’s a book full of invigorating wordplay, as in the wordplay of my title, which not only takes off on another great novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), but puns on the name of one of Joyce’s most important characters, Molly Bloom. 

Bloomsday, today, gathers Ulysses lovers from all over the world to reread portions of the book while nursing a Guinness and singing along to songs like, well, My Irish Molly.  Molly Malone.

Molly’s famous stream of consciousness closes out Joyce’s book on a note of life-loving human resilience.  Her monologue always makes me think of yet another Molly – the real-life Unsinkable Molly Brown, famous for helping save passengers on the Titanic, and for rallying her terrified fellow survivors in the lifeboats.

Its inventive use of language, its theme of unsinkability despite the sorrows and perils of life – this only begins to get at the ultimately unaccountable power of Joyce’s novel.   Read with an open heart and an open mind, the book clearly transports many of us to a place of exhilarating aesthetic freedom, where we ourselves, our language, and even our world can somehow be renewed. 

It’s true that Joyce’s two main characters – Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus – seem stuck in a depressive paralysis; but even they, once their paths cross and they find fellowship with one another, demonstrate a capacity for regeneration. 

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Everything in Ulysses draws us away from deadly, mendacious people and language, and toward the pulsing authentic generous words and personalities of particular, vulnerable, human beings.  The novelist/hero of Don De Lillo’s novel Mao II says of such language that

it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.

Ulysses conveys – with deep conviction and persuasion – its belief in the recuperability of a kind and even beautiful world, founded on our recognition of one another’s complexity and uniqueness.   And how else to convey this humanity but through our words, our songs, our sympathetic encounters with one another?

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One can also convey authentic humanity through its negation, through language whose paranoid mechanical quality (as in the novel 1984) makes us aware, as we mark authenticity’s appalling absence, of our instinctual human connection. 

This Bloomsday, if you want to know how far we have fallen from Joyce’s vision of empowering human mutuality, read our last president’s twelve-page response to the January 6 committee.  See how far you can get with his dead bleats of dead cliches until you can’t take it anymore.   And then laugh at it.  Laugh at it with all the strength that a conviction of the greatness of humanity can give.

I don’t want to seem critical, but how well-developed, really?

From our walk today at Patapsco State Park.

How far can the rich and talentless go to stage their own art? Recall legendary, tone deaf Florence Foster Jenkins, who paid to fill up concert venues for her hapless performances.

And now consider Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld, benefactor of CSULB’s Kleefeld Museum, and its Kleefeld Gallery, and – most recently – the Kleefeld Exhibit in the Kleefeld Gallery at the Kleefeld Museum. The LA Times art critic, having paid a visit to her show, does not hold back. Why is a public university featuring the worthless montages of its moneybags?

[T]he art is frankly terrible — by far the worst I’ve seen on display in a serious exhibition venue, public or private, for profit or nonprofit, in years… A CSULB professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said of the exhibition, “If that was a student applicant’s portfolio, they wouldn’t get admitted to the program.” … A gift deal that includes permanent maintenance of a big collection and an archive of the donor’s bad art, plus a gallery dedicated to its display, all in exchange for millions of dollars, makes it impossible not to think “pay to play.” … A permanent chunk of a public university’s tax-subsidized museum facility and artistic program has been effectively privatized to advance the personal interests of a wealthy patron.

Ahem. What now? As Lenin asked: What is to be done?

Oh, I think we can anticipate an entire tarring and feathering for the snobby sexist judgmental LA Times critic. We can anticipate some slave-scribe at the school writing an angry point by point rebuttal of this haughty disdainful pig whose blatant envy of a person who can actually create art poisons his pen. How dare he call this painting bad art?

Sing it.

Have you heard about the data dump?
It comes from the land of Trump 
Have you heard about mortality gap?
Red states have really got zapped

'You can take all the Medicaid you sent
From the evil folk inside the government
And shove it all up Soros's ass
Same place you shove Fauci's mask'

That is your leader, D. Trump (what's he got?)
A country full of dead and dying chumps (big chumps!)
He killed a million cowboys in the west;
He knows no rest

… the insane clown posse. Update here.

Especially when the school’s a mere five miles from UD‘s house.

I mean of course UD knows that this is just one loaded gun that this one school happened to find; schools all over her neighborhood (elementary, junior high, high school) are she assumes bristling with weaponized babies who will eventually not only get through security but kill everybody and then kill themselves blahblahblah, and indeed UD rather doubts the measured, well-intentioned letter that the latest shocked principal sent out to parents asking them not to send weaponized babies to school will have much impact.

I mean dear mom and dad you might not know this but you shouldn’t send your troubled twelve year old to school with a loaded Glock… What I mean is did you know this? Did you know you’re supposed to secure your guns, especially when your kid has fucked up badly enough to be removed from the regular school system and placed (as in this latest case) in a special school? Just how did your troubled fourteen year old get a loaded handgun?

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And why oh why are the innocent children of America supposed to sit around while the vile parents of vile offspring fail to notice that their tyke is locked and loaded and ready to blow everyone’s head off?

Just sit there at your desk, little one, and wait, while some maggot bursts in and kills you with his daddy’s gun.

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UD feels absolutely certain that when details of this latest baby shooter come out he will be notoriously frightening, notoriously violent, at his school, well known to the well-meaning principal who remains in denial about the homicidal nature of some of his weaponized charges. Just a tyke! Our job at our compassionate and enlightened school, after all, is to turn such people around.

Actually, these days your primary function is to fucking notice which of your students is likely to be a killer, and to remove those students for the safety of all. (There’s the possibility of legislation that might help you, but we’ll see.) Letters to parents asking them to put their guns away will do two things:

1. Scare the shit out of most of the parents, since they’re unlikely to own any guns at all.
2. Have no impact at all on the people raising a kid with loaded guns lying all over the house. Your job isn’t to persuade crazy motherfuckers to act responsibly. Your job is to get the future mass killer unlucky enough to call these people his parents the hell out of your school.

“[Mary] Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.

It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.

We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in…

The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.”

If it bleeds, it leads.

[O]fficial organs of the Republican Party [see] their job as covering for Trump, even as evidence [has] emerged that he literally suggested that a Republican vice president should be lynched. The lessons of the interwar period, and indeed the long history of mainstream conservative parties’ dalliances with radicals, seem entirely lost on the Republican leadership.

And this, in the end, is why using fascism as a framework for understanding January 6 is worthwhile. This explicit alliance of political violence to an effort to seize power through force is shocking — so shocking that it deserves comparisons to what’s universally seen as the darkest moment in the history of Western democracy.

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The more details emerge, the more ashamed I am as an American. At some point, faced with our nation having made DT president, evasion, irony, and humor all fail, and what one feels – what I feel – is shame.

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The sheer scale of Donald Trump’s’ depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican party made it possible.

Pence’s attempt to salvage the Republican Party won’t succeed. It will fail not because of any intrinsic problem with the party itself—political parties are merely vessels for the will of the people—but because the problem with the Republican Party is Republican voters. They’re the ones who wanted Trump. They’re the ones who approve of January 6. They’re the ones who insist that Trump actually won in 2020. They’re the ones who are clamoring to nominate him again in 2024.

Republican voters view all of the terrible outcomes from the first Trump administration—the political violence, the white nationalism, the fiscal irresponsibility, the COVID death tolls—not as bugs but as features.This is what they want.

Yet have I left a daughter:
Tifferil, fruit of a brief affair.
Then get thee hence, vile Ivankan!
O Proud Boys, take me there.

Tifferil will love the father
That all his kingdom sings
And I will have my vengeance
Yes I shall do such things...

… is withdrawn from contention for a literary prize.

STAR FINDER

The evening birds quieten, and now it’s the owl,

And fireflies.  And stars.  And fireflies that somehow,

With their buglight, compete on an even playing

Field with the stars.  These stars are, somehow,

Constellated, and I hear my mother’s ghost saying

I left you my old field guide.  The quiet dark allows

All of her to come inside. She’s clearly conveying

The ease and importance of learning the constellations.

Sing it, sister.

UD is agog at the names of the real estate agents representing a new beach resort community. Tiffany, Misty, and Whitney? Did the development hire on a first-name only basis?