On bewailing the "public intellectual" shortage

Most days it is hard to flip open the laptop, even to merely slap together a tweet.
    Age. Cynicism. The daily drudgery of existence. The futility of launching another fart into the sulfurous hurricane of the internet.
    But fetching the morning papers today, presto!--here we have the National Post with "Culture Wars: Where have all the public intellectuals gone?" p.1 on the mast-bottom. An arrow to my heart!--although not exactly an untackled question. Moreover, don't we already have a few public intellectuals in Canada? Jonathan Kay, Colby Cosh and Dan Gardner spring immediately to mind, and there are others, although you may object that most are too tainted with journalism and reality to qualify as genuine beard-stroking thunkers. Worse, you could argue that despite their mediapodia, they don't have a great deal of of traction in the Canadian mind. And whatever happened to Mark Kingwell? Did our ivory-tower eminence get tired of mud-wrestling in the journals of lower learning? How grubby is this public-intellectual thing anyway? What exactly is involved in the mainstream-media cleanup after our crappy educational system has dumped its load?
    As it turns out the Post article is Yankee-sourced, concerning a new documentary film Best of Enemies, centred on the televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley on ABC during the August 1968 Republican Convention (heavy topic the Vietnam war of course). Total buzz-kill for this blogger, instantly suggesting two hotheads: Vidal calling Buckley a Nazi, Buckley snapping back "you faggot" at Vidal amid otherwise over-familiar and inconclusive platitudes.
    Or is this just a media-distortion now filtered through my lousy memory? (Fact-check: it was actually "crypto-Nazi" and "goddamn queer"--an exchange now captured online like pretty much every other sorry fragment of intellectual history).
    But the National Post story, Calum Marsh's "When the culture wars were worth fighting" mentions this hot exchange not at all, perhaps as being unseemly for Public Intellectuals of the Golden Age--his theme and the film's appearing to be our society's supposed loss of high-level punditry nowadays. He does note that "the network (ABC) didn't anticipate the vigour of their chosen conversationalists," alleging that "millions were held rapt by Vidal and Buckley's nearly half-dozen debates."
    Actually, I suspect that if Nielsen had been monitoring the audience closely, it would have found hundreds of thousands were actually reaching for beer and/or snacks during the more tedious parts, and significant numbers missed the minute-long Nazi/queer exchange during a bathroom break. Certainly it is notable, perhaps astonishing that in an article on Big Thunkers wading through five debates, Mr. Marsh fails to dredge up a single witty quip (or any other kind) by either Vidal or Buckley, nor does he even give much of a summary of the duo's ideas (dully left-right, i.e. painfully ideological, truth be known).
    If you check back to the YouTube clip, you will find, embedded in the name-calling, Vidal positing Europe's sympathy to the legitimate aspirations of the Viet Cong for national unity, and Buckley tut-tutting the temerity of the Cong in daring to shoot at U.S. Marines, but whether these two banalities are better, worse or typical of the general debate is left for us to guess (I'll conjecture no better). Or perhaps Marsh just wants to avoid any spoilers for the HotDoc a-coming.
   In any case, it is hard to muster any enthusiasm for Marsh's and the film's manufactured discrepancy between today's cheap pundits and the "literary pedigree" bred into the "iconic" Buckleyesque-Vidaloid intellectuals of yesteryear. Buckley I managed to plow through in depth eons ago, yielding a deep-seated dislike for the man. Like Vidal he oozes that erudite mid-Atlantic accent, but his ideas are a threadworn patchwork of mean-spirited sophistry. Vidal I know less well, but on the basis of his introduction to The Impossible Mencken I'd venture that while he might be a seven-foot intellectual giant, he falls well short of America's ten-foot colossus. The Sage of Baltimore is a fine measuring-stick for public intellectuals of any era, and both heirs to his artillery would have benefited from reading his essay "On Controversy."
    Finally, keep in mind that the Buckley vs Vidal confrontation was television, mere impromptu cut-and-thrust. I close my eyes and imagine two bespectacled junior-high achievers, suddenly facing off in the schoolyard while surprised students gather round, shouting, "Nerd fight! Nerd fight!"
    Durable works of the intellect are produced by more leisurely contemplation, and committed to the printed page. Buckley and Vidal may seem like ancient history now, but 1968's two perishable eggheads have also been left in the dust-up, quite remote from the Socrates and Aristotle of The School of Athens.
    As the Bible says: "Ask not why it is that former days were better than these--for it is not from wisdom that you ask this."

It's really about... Mencken? Utah???

Got a dozen writing projects at CRUNCH TIME (or past) so what do I do? Answer the National Post's call for 100-word or less suggestions to solve the problem of Iran's nukes.
    Hey, I'm a professional thunker, a professional digressor and a professional oddball too. So really, why isn't Obama dragooning me to be Secretary of State? Eh?
    Note that the following version comprises the FULL letter--the Post trimmed a few items from it when they printed it today, like "funky farmer-ambience" and "Sunni Arabia"--possibly to make me look like a normal human being. Nice try, guys!

In 1938, immediately after Kristallnacht the notorious American anti-semite H. L. Mencken demanded that the U.S. government quickly accept German-Jewish refugees (it didn't) and suggested western Canada could take thousands too, where they'd improve the funky farmer-ambience. The solution to Iran's nuclear schemes today is the same: evacuate Israel (incl. any gay/straight Arabs who wish to tag along) and transplant them in Utah, partitioning it to create a 51st state. Then blow Iran a goodbye-kiss with two or three tactical nukes into their facilities, lest they get Plan B ideas about Sunni Arabia. Problem solved. Easy as borscht.

      *       *       *That's it. Lets slip this one into my writing dossier and see if anyone will now hire the Western Wacko...

"Is he crazy?"--a covert answer, and close but no cigar

    Clawing through the high stack of current newspapers, I randomly pull a September 14 Edmonton Sun--and accidentally stumble on a feature by Michael Platt of the Calgary Sun, headlined:

UNBEARABLE TRUTH COST FRANKLIN
PIONEER PROPER RECOGNITION

The editor in me cringes at the awkwardness of the double-stack (especially the split "Franklin pioneer" which is somewhat vague to begin with), but the story it tells (yes, online too) is a fascinating tale of dullards thinking inside the rut, until after a century and a half a sharp mind o'erleaps the mucky track and rolls to proper conclusions. I would headline it:

BRITAIN FINALLY RECOGNIZES RAE,
MALIGNED ARCTIC EXPLORER

John Rae in fact was the seaman who in 1854 discovered some remains of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, including evidence of cannibalism among the desperate Franklin crew before they perished; and also the final link of the Northwest Passage, the Rae Channel, which Amundsen used (with full credit to Rae) in his pioneering voyage through the Passage in 1903-4.
    All of which is interesting in itself, as are the literary heroics of Ken McGoogan in telling the whole tangled tale in a number of books (he also spoke at the laying of a ledger-stone to Rae in Westminster Abbey).
   But for me the punchline is the 150-year delay in recognition--a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. Because Rae had concluded and reported cannibalism, he was rendered persona non grata and shunned. No one likes to hear horrific things (unless the horror is safely contained in Hollywood claptrap).
    This verity strikes close to home, as it may help explain a curious puzzle in my Bob Dylan research. If, as I concluded in my investigation into Dylan's wholesale expropriation of Shakespeare for the Basement Tapes, Dylan has effectively solved the "Hamlet problem" which has dogged scholars for centuries, why did he plant the solution with extreme obscurity in his song "Crash on the Levee"? (aka "Down in the Flood"). Couldn't he just have, um, written a letter to the editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly or something?
    In theory, he could have. Except that would be obtuse and boring. And Dylan is dealing with (and is probably fully aware that he is dealing with) a double-horror: first, the appalling news that Prince Hamlet is not a tragic hero but a vicious schmuck, a prince who is not just "melancholy mad" (with the emphasis on the melancholy, please) but actually crazy. It is a helluva jolt when one discovers this, and it is notable that almost all the scholars pussy-footing around the fact--and there have been quite a few--tend to avoid the conclusion or gloss over the evidence supporting it--wherein the second horror, that our critic-psychologists "who prophesize with the pen" have been routinely diagnosing Lord Lunatic as merely... stressed-out? For 400+ years. Has our western brain-trust really been so dense and derelict for all these centuries??
    With the exception of a handful of critics, yes. And even these few approach and circle the question most gingerly, never quite uttering the unthinkable. Perhaps the most notable of these hesitants is T. S. Eliot, who wrote a famous-in-academe essay on Hamlet (my most recent rediscovery of it came in a criticism textbook) wherein he lists the numerous ways in which the play Just. Doesn't. Add. Up.
    Included is the perennial question of "what's bugging the Prince of Denmark?" (if you have the time and a weird sense of humor, check every scholarly explanation of why Hamlet kills Polonius, sight unseen). At the end of the essay Eliot tosses up his hands, supposing it is just Shakespeare being his usual sui generis self, breaking all the rules for tragedy, God knows why. But still basically composing a tragedy. Go figure.
    To give a modicum of credit, Eliot clearly had good intuitive suspicions, even if they never found footing. My own literary lion, H. L. Mencken also had a few stray remarks about Hamlet, if not an entire essay; in one of them he flatly calls Prince Hamlet a "sophomore" which may be the lowest estimation of Hammie's character I've ever encountered. Clearly he had suspicions too. Maybe the two had even read Voltaire, who entertained some of the earliest and most extensive hunches about Hamlet not being quite on the level. (In his memoir My Life As Author and Editor, Mencken describes a casual meeting with Eliot where the two discussed the technicalities of their respective magazines; we can only speculate what they might have accomplished if they had butted heads about Hamlet instead).
    In any case it is easy to imagine Bob Dylan sitting dismayed at his ugly discovery and mulling how to handle it (he mentions the Hamlet-problem glancingly in his book Tarantula) until finally deciding to deflect the rotten Dane into another of his opaque cryptogram-songs.
    Yep, who needs the headache of sorting out the details of Shakespeare's closet-satire, and answering the yowls of the dull academics?-- leave THAT noise to posterity. Most astute.
    And in another century or so Will and Bob, those two sly speakers of the unspeakable, may get rehabilitated enough to get ledger-stones in Westminster Abbey too.

    PS: The title of this post comes from an very sharp English professor, who asked "Is he crazy?" as the very first comment on teaching the play to us. She asked the question as intently as if it really mattered, and it does.

Bob Dylan, Mencken and the old love train

One of the side-effects of researching Bob Dylan's roots in Shakespeare is a burgeoning grok that Dylan borrows liberally from anywhere and everywhere. Another Dylanologist, for instance, has uncovered a vast trove of Hemingway (and everything else from Chaucer to Joe Eszterhas) lurking between the lines of his songs as well as throughout his Chronicles memoir, and again there is the 2011 hullabaloo over Dylan's use of photos for some of his paintings. Yet again, as noted in a previous post, "Absolutely Sweet Marie" seems to be a tarted-up Emily Dickinson, and the song itself a remarkable sort of poetic critique, with references back to her verse.
    Because of all this, as well as Dylan's listing of a truckload of influences in Chronicles, not to mention the Shakespeare-heap in the Basement Tapes that I'm STILL trying to size up (it's BIG, folks) my brain has been conditioned to look on just about every word he utters as a potential allusion. Moreover, since Dylan lists Sinclair Lewis reverently on the last page of Chronicles (and also on Blonde on Blonde--can anybody else spot the sly Lewis reference on that album?? Hint: go Mobile) last spring the suspicion popped into my head that eventually I'd trip over an allusion to H. L. Mencken somewhere in my Dylan wanderings. Didn't Sinclair Lewis, after all, dedicate Elmer Gantry to Mencken "with profound admiration"? Wasn't Dylan steeped in Fitzgerald, Hemingway and those other 20s literati with whom Mencken consorted? And the clincher for my paranoiac percolation: Dylan's translation of Shakespeare into surreal hillbilly strophes perhaps resembles Mencken's semi-comic translation of the Declaration of Independence into colloquial American.
    But that was half a year ago and despite my anticipation... nothing. Then three weeks ago I was idly plowing through my typhoon-stricken office when I happened upon the three-volumes-in-one edition of memoirs, The Days of H. L. Mencken. This combined edition of 1947 has a short new introduction which I've long loved but not recently revisited, so I dug in. Ah yes, here was his nod to the ladies:

...many letters have come from women, and... most of them, especially those relating to Happy Days, have said in substance, "I had precisely the same experience." It never occurred to me in my youth, or to any other normal American boy of the time, that creatures in skirts and pigtails saw the world as we did. Yet it seems to have been the case, and I am glad of it, for it means that many grandmothers of today, like their husbands and brothers, cherish memories of an era when the world was a great deal more comfortable and amusing than it is today. We were lucky to have been born so soon. As the shadows close in we can at least recall that there was a time when people could spend weeks, months and even years without being badgered, bilked or alarmed...

And on he satirically goes, through the range of human folly, to the punchline and conclusion:

I enjoyed myself immensely, and all I try to do here is to convey some of my joy to the nobility and gentry of this once great and happy Republic, now only a dismal burlesque of its former self.

A typically good-natured bit of misanthropy, but the jolt here for a Dylan student would be the "burlesque" Republic, which must automatically suggest Dylan's Empire Burlesque. But alas, not quite a smoking pistol to be tagged and presented as evidence in court.
    A few days later, however, a random quip by Mencken goes traipsing through my brain, as his many witticisms are wont to do: "Love is a season-pass on the shuttle between heaven and hell." (or something like that--punching "Mencken love season pass shuttle heaven hell" into Google's cyber-snouter fails to yield the exact quote). Then within seconds, the mysterious workings of my decrepit neurons upon the Mencken quip also rouse to mind, in some para-Google way, these Dylan lines from one of his classic love songs:

The train leaves at half-past ten
But it'll be back tomorrow at the same time again,
The conductor, he's weary,
He's still stuck on the line,

(Chorus)
But if I can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I'll keep it with mine.
                  (song: "I'll Keep It with Mine")

If this is a Mencken-extrapolation (I'd say it's a little short of a smoking pistol again) it's a damn good one, especially that "stuck on the line" shuttle-bit, for if Dylan knows his Mencken ($20 Canadian says he does) he'd know "stuck on the line" yields an elegant double-meaning (Dylan is very prolific in double-meanings) namely that Mencken, although his first published book was a poetic Ventures into Verse, in his later critic-incarnation he became very iffy and somewhat disparaging of poetry, which he considered a lesser art. Stuck on the "line" indeed.
    But whatever Dylan's meaning(s), the overall idea of a love shuttle corresponds perfectly with Mencken, so that now I'm almost thinking Dylan's song wasn't really a love-tribute to Nico, as I originally heard (or Judy Collins as Wikipedia has it) but a sly paean to Mencken himself. Maybe?
    If so, it certainly wouldn't be the first or last time Dylan wrote ardent verse to a member of the woody gender.

PS: I was also thinking that a reference to heaven and/or hell would really CLINCH the shuttle allusion, but nope, nothing. Then the pun hit me. I tweeted it about Dec. 9-10 @frameofmind if you can't spot it in the lyrics yourself...

PPS: The gobsmacker on Wikipedia is that the song was originally titled "Bank Account Blues" (!!!) Weird as Dylan, eh? Maybe it's me channeling that wacko Weberman (or vice versa) but I detect a few ppm of old "Tory" Mencken in that title too...

Why high culture is always counterculture, but not vice versa

Tucked inconspicuously in the back of The Mencken Chrestomathy, in a section titled...

Are essays dead?--or just a billion zombies?

The Grand Ponderits of academe frequently stroke their beards over whether the novel-form is dead, although the topic is abstruse and boring enough that it rarely hits mainstream media, and is thus easily avoided. Not given the beard-stroking treatment, however, is the question of...


...usual cliff-hanger...

Hey, hey, it's Noam Chomsky! (and perkier stuff)

The illusion persists that intellectuals are able to choose their own paths of thought, and select their own fields of battle, but this is no more true for us professional thunkers than it is for other cops. At least 90% of our time is spent dealing with other thunkers and/or perceived malefactors who pounce upon the polity. And circumscribing their thunking is, with brutal and often tedious inevitability, what constitutes our never-ending patrol work.
    Cruising through Edmonton's Fringe Festival last week (the second-largest in the world after Edinburgh!) a gang of us over-educated folks stopped by the Wee Book Inn to browse...

Choose sides! Choose sides! (Iraq 2003)

Another oldie-essay, written in 2003 about the time the U.S. military was reaching Baghdad. The Globe and Mail Book section at the time had a regular feature called "Three for Thought" wherein freelance writers would recommend three books on a subject. Margaret Atwood had already done a war-related piece, but I found it a bit tepid, and her three books academic and uninspiring, so I set myself the task of cobbling together something a bit more galvanic. Something to commemorate great war-literature. Something to get my moribund writing career restarted.

The following was what I (typically) wasted too much time composing. I mailed in and waited. Nada. Not even a "sorry but it doesn't meet our needs" letter. Well, what the hell. One for the alumni of Hard Knocks College. But it may still have some residual relevance as an Iran conflict looms, so here it is:

         *         *         *
(Once again, gotta find the lamentable thing. Hey, I'm beyond embarrassment...)

So far ahead of his time he's lurking in ours

It's a pretty rare day I don't think about H. L. Mencken at least ten times.

And here is Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, Sept 3, starting a column on presidential aspirant Mr. Romney by citing the "dour" satirist of yore. Dour??
   And yet, I've heard Mencken called "bilious" too, an even more tone-deaf assessment. Is this the same Mencken who publicly regretted not calling his second and third volumes of memoirs Happy Days II and Happy Days III to match the first title? (yes, LONG before the TV show, you ahistoric moron). Is this the 67-year-old summing up his life at an age when bitterness is almost automatic, who states:

(Chrestomathy quote: "I have little call to join the race of viewers-with-alarm" etc./approx.... damn but I hate research... and of course my copy of the Mencken Chrestomathy  has disappeared into the office uber-mess...)

(Yep, another teaser for an item for sale. Sorry! Stay tuned!)  =]

Back in the saddle...

Funny how these things start: just waking a bit early, feeling the normal crappiness of 57 years, the mind bouncing aimlessly around to old memories--a friend of my dad, also Danish-born (both now deceased) who was a cabinet-maker and made a very nice kitchen-table for us that still survives, and things that happened about the same time while living in Calgary, e.g. John F. Kennedy being assassinated. Then I mechanically rouse myself, have the usual banana before walking the dog, and somehow within a minute or two I am really MOTIVATED to write, a rare and happy impetus that should not be squandered, especially since I have a spare half-hour.

But about what? That crappy Conrad Black column in the National Post about whether the GOP can make America great again? But that would take at least an hour or two which I don't have. Still, as nearly always happens, a Mencken quote pops into the brain: "I regret that I have but one rectum to give to my country." Yeah.

Aaaaand, after all the rigamarole of firing up the ancient coal-powered computer, retrieving forgotten passwords etc., THAT will have to do. The dog and taxi await. Maybe tomorrow I'll post the "Facebook Segway" I've had assembled and ready for over a year. Let's get this creaky old blog restarted!