THE COMMONWEALTH
“There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”
Ralph Waldo (this pic always makes me think of Harry Shearer)
My gosh is there anything Ralph Waldo
didn’t seem to know I mean seriously he was such a khokhem, a lamden
amerikaner overly impressed with himself at times but a man devoutly
engaged with his thoughts and besides I have a soft spot for a person
who can abandon his church, literally, (or maybe he never should have
opened that coffin) and discover God or the Idea of the Divine Soul and
so was always open for connections to be made while he just kind of sat
around his home in Concord or went out for a stroll perhaps planning
his next lecture- he actually made a pretty good living just giving
lectures either around his hometown or out on the “lecture circuit”
which I guess was very mid-19th century Amercian; a prodigious reader to
be sure and even had a noted intellectual publication named after one
of his lectures which is still being published and occasionally read
today, The American Scholar, which I have recently
checked out as I came upon a couple of seemingly unrelated “postings”
while lazily browsing through the etherworld of the internet along the
googlehighway. Emerson would have been appalled I’m sure to watch such
as I, a low- ranking member of the mythic 47 percent of the
government-dependent schnorrers that Mitt has written off, casually
clicking away my days while not pursuing more remunerative activities.
To make matters worse I had, too, come upon an article by the estimable Simon Schama
– I have actually read two of his books-honest-and enjoyed them
immensely- deploring the world of bad blog writing and admonishing
index-peckers about the “swampy suck of self-indulgence” and to beware
the “thoughtless recycling of experience” to which I was and am ready to
wave to the Saturday night audience and shout ”Goodnight Everybody!”
as the band plays my exit music. But a-blogging I go and
of
course the joke’s on me because no one will ever read this -including
my beautiful wife
(I once was a social-reporter of sorts for a small
L.I. throwaway and would use earl wilson as a verb, as in “I
earlwilsoned it to the next table”. The gig didn’t last too long.) so,
in a sense, I can continue without worrying about the swampy suck.
To Emerson who derived great pleasure from
books – and I can just hear Ricky Santorum now – the idea was to bring
the same conviction; passion to the reading itself as the writer did to
the writing – at least for the good stuff. There is a whole bunch of
good stuff to be read today detailing both passionately and
dispassionately the state of our present Amercia just as unfortunately
there is a whole bunch of what I can only call dreck claiming to do the
same. How best to choose? Well to be honest with you if you haven’t
really figured who and what does the most harm to Amercia and the world
read everything – EVERYTHING- and send word every 10 years or so to let
us know you’re still breathing. Me? Well I browse as I say and if
something catches my eye I stop and take a closer look, which is how I
came by a recently published book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by the great Chris Hedges and way too talented Joe Sacco
– I’m on the waiting list of my local library for this which may speak
volumes as I live in a small and fairly conservative town so hope does
spring eternal- and they’re telling a story about what happens to
working class people who fall prey to the criminal rapaciousness and
murderous greed of unchecked corporate power ( I am almost tempted to
say the same old story but it is one of the great ironies – don’t worry
I’ve got plenty of cliches left- of the Amercian Dream narrative that
among the finest Literature produced in Amercia is that which tells the
story of poverty in this country; the struggles of working people to
make better lives; any number of “immigrant” tales and certainly the
slave narratives, the early work 0f Upton Sinclair, say, or Jacob Riis
or Lincoln Steffens or later books like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s The Other America or Barbara Ehrenreich‘s
work- I’m leaving out so much…but)
BUT my immediate response had
nothing to do with the subject of the Hedges/Sacco book- as important as
it is- it had to do with the damn Title and herein lies my sometimes
limited (paranoid?) vision of history and I’m back at Ralph Waldo again,
for it appears that someone, an editor at Nation Books perhaps, was not
paying enough attention to the selection of the title for so important a
book as this as it has already been used in an even darker context; it was used as the title of Zivia Lubetkin’s autobiography and story of the courageous Jewish Resistance fighters during the Nazi war of extermination. Ms. Lubetkin was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s Jewish Fighting Organization and was a founder of Ghetto Fighter’s House in Israel. Her book was published – in English translation- over thirty years ago.
Or Joseph Epstein for that matter( just
kidding). He is the one time editor of that publication named after one
of Ralph Waldo’s famous Lectures, The American Scholar, a magazine by
the way that I have spent no time reading over the past 40 years or so
being as tainted as it was by certain associations I had and continue to
have little use for let alone wish to read, busy as I am. First
impressions are lasting especially for impressionable young minds- why
just look at Paul Ryan – and in the matter of Mr. Epstein I have always
remembered him as a writer of a particular piece of what my old
correspondent, Gore Vidal, would say was “fag-baiting”; a
very nasty bit of writing it was. It appeared in Harper’s magazine over
40 years ago and in it he wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would
wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I
think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are
forced to live with it.” (The editor at the time was Midge Decter who
is married to Norman Podhoretz, father of John whom we have cited in
previous posts) I don’t think he has ever apologized or thought the need
to and anyway he went on to what most would think of as a distinguished
career as a lecturer (not a professor?) like Ralph Waldo, a long-time
editor of The American Scholar, and an author of several well-reviewed
books, a contributor to any number of neo-con outlets and a recipient of
the National Humanities Medal awarded by the National Endowment for the
Arts. I don’t know
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| He didn't have a tie so they made him wear this |
Joseph Epstein
Executed April, 1944
Executed April, 1944
knowledgeable venues the name Joseph
Epstein would stand fine by itself with no need of airy noms de plume.
There was another Joseph Epstein, however, who fought for the French Communist resistance against
the nazis and was arrested during a meeting with other Resistance
leaders, including the French-Armenian poet and Resistance leader, Missak Manouchian;
over 20 of these French patriots who were arrested then were tortured
and executed and, recently, photographs and documentation came to light
thanks to a present-day French hero named Serge Klarsfeld
( you should really check out these names too, kids- and if you happen
to be fortunate enough to visit Paris you may want to take a solemn
moment to visit the memorial to these brave people, just outside
Executions at Mont Valerien, 1944
the city at a place called Mont Valerien).
Anyway I couldn’t help making this seemingly indiscriminate connection
if only it hadn’t had another anti-nazi fighter who happened to be
Jewish with the same name as “our” Joseph Epstein who admits to being a
reactionary and has a problem with “lefty” writers, one of whom was
undoubtably Mr. Vidal who had responded to Mr. Epstein’s fag-baiting
remark as follows:” No Jew ought ever to mention the removal of any
minority “from the face of the earth”. It is unkind. It is also unwise
in a ‘Christer’-dominated society where a pogrom is never not a
possibility.”, which is probably why I serendipitiously came across
a recent piece of his in the lamentable Weekly Standard (I have been
doing a lot of bottom feeding lately). The piece is called “Who Killed
the Liberal Arts”-that’s what caught my eye initially- I didn’t realize
where or who had written it at first- and as in all NEOCON exegesis it
is a somewhat long bildungsroman – how- I- was- a- listless,- lazy-
uninterested- student- who- didn’t- take- my- father’s- advice- of-
becoming- a- salesman like- him- and- soon- found- the- light- thanks-
to- the- University of Chicago (need we say more?) and
became the Yossele of by-line fame. I guess it appeared in The Weekly
Standard because Commentary had probably featured its yearly quota on
articles decrying how Amercian Liberals have slain Amercia’s High
Culture. Not exactly the sharpest pencil Mr. Epstein readily admits that at the sound of a classmate reciting French poetry in French he was all set to apply for a career at Jiffy Lube, which in our current
climate of corporate malefaction would have fit very nicely to the
zeitgeist as it was Jiffy Lube who was investigated a few years back for
charging customers for services they never rendered which is how a
certain candidate has conducted his life which seems ok for the neocon
colleagues of Mr. Epstein and of course that crowd never lets facts get
in the way of their cockamamie theories it is obvious that Mr. E didn’t
care much for history either as Jiffy Lube was founded twenty years
after he left his beloved University of Chicago. So over a half century
of striding the heady world of intellectual debate and tumult he
publishes in as specious a rag as there ever was his valedictory
(probably not but what the hey) review “Who Killed The Liberal Arts?”
and his unsurprising conclusion – because he had already answered this
question years ago and in one interview ( in 1999) in particular where
basically says the same thing- that its the teachers who insists on
including such 2nd and 3rd rate contemporary, read: Living writers in
the curriculum for they “have not done much for literature. Its a
mistake to spend a lot of the four years reading living writers”. Its
the older writers that have the quality so don’t waste your time with
the second raters like Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Adrienne Rich, who else?, oh yeah, Jack Kerouac of course.
The Commentary crowd hated him and so Joseph Epstein whose “discovery
of Commentary was the great intellectual event in his life” had to
include ol’ sentimental Jack in with the “second rate” Nobel Prize
recipients and such. I suppose he never asked his students – he lectured
(never taught) for a long time- to read Kerouac which is a shame; its
like treating your students like Jiffy Lube treated their customers,
especially since if they didn’t read him for themselves they missed out
on some of best prose ever written by an Amercian writer. I’m a bit
surprised that the neocon gang didn’t take to Jack, I mean his politics
were just as conservative in a way and his patriotism as fervent and
more and he loved his mother ( and he did speak French, sort of). And
what is even more Mr. Epstein has a great deal in common with saint Jack
than even he realized:
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| Eight members of the French communist urban guerilla resistance unit 'The Missak Manouchian Group,' including their Armenian-born leader Missak Manouchian (1906 - 1944) (third from left in line, second from left in photo), stand before a wall as they await execution a few days after their capture by German occupation forces, Fort Mont Valerian, Paris, February 21, 1944. All were members of the Franc Tireurs Partisans-Main d'Oeuvre Immigr?e (Irregular Partisan Riflemen - Immigrant Workers). They became the subject of a notorious Nazi propaganda poster, l'Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), which attempted to show the resistance as foreign terrorists. Visible in the photo are (left to right) French-born Robert Witchitz, Manouchian, Romanian-born Joseph Boczov, Polish-born Wolf Wajsbrot (1925 - 1944) (spelled 'Wasjbrot' on the poster), Polish-born Szlama Grzywacz (1918 - 1944), Polish-born Maurice Fingercwajg (spelled 'Fingerweig' on poster) (1922 - 1944), Hungarian-born Thomas Elek (1925 - 1944). (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images) |
Joseph Epstein: 2012
Jack Kerouac: 1951
“In America, the idea of going to college
is just like the idea of prosperity is just around the corner, it was
supposed to solve something or everything or something because all you
had to do was larn what they taught and then everything else was going
to be handled; instead of that, and just like prosperity that was never
around the corner but a couple
miles at least (and false prosperity -)
going to college by acquainting
me with all the mad elements of life, such as the sensibilities, books,
arts, histories of madness, and fashions has not only made it
impossible for me to learn simple tricks of how to earn a living but has
deprived me of my one-time innocent belief in my own thoughts that used
to make me handle my own destiny. So now I sit and stew in a
sophistication which has taken hold of me just exactly like a disease
and makes me lie around like a bum all day long and stay up all night
goofing with myself. I had thought, in, and before college, that to be a
writer was like being, of course, the Emile Zola of the film they made
about him with Paul Muni shouting angrily in the streets at the dumb and
stupid masses, as if he knew everything and they didn’t know a damn
thing; instead of that I wonder what working people think of me when
they hear my typewriter clacking in the middle of the night or what they
think I’m up to when I take walks at 2 A.M. in outlying suburban
neighborhoods – the truth is I haven’t a single thing to wr- feel
foolish …How I wish I could grow corn tomorrow morning!”
Joseph Epstein 2012
Jack Kerouac 1951
“…sat in a grave of his own in his overcoat
in an empty unheated Saturday classroom of West Denver High not a mile
across town, his brow in his hand as blackboard dust swam across October
fires in the corner where the window-opening pole was leaned, where it
was still written in chalk from yesterday’s class (in American Lit.) When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, sat
there in a pretense of thinking for the benefit of any teachers and
even kids passing in the hall with some of whom just before he’d in fact
been joking, sat now moveless in a pretense of remembering, with severe
precision, the exact date of something that was
bottlenecking his
entire day, left wrist raised for a quick look at how much time was
left, frown of accompaniment already formed, drawer pulled with
letterheaded memo paper ready to fly the instant he smacked the desk
deciding, but actually choking over loss, choking over loss, thinking of
the love, the love, the love he missed when his face was thin and
fresh, hopes were pure. O growing old!”
Joseph Epstein 2012
“The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious
subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the
population that has a proper standard with which to judge true
intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion
of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is
superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The
loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing
authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of
the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the
faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the
best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living
in the worst, and never notice.”
Jack Kerouac 1951
“In those days I must have been a regular student wandering in
thought among the shops and windows, like in Poe or Melville. In fact,
yes by God I was; I worked as a waiter in a basement Bohemian restaurant
with candles on oilcloths in Greenwich Village and got high with the
dishwasher in the kitchen on tea, talk and dancing, the dancing he did
himself, he was an African primitive dancer, his hands were long as
nails, he was a colored maniac (sic); I’d muse on him as I wended my way
snowward. Not soon after that, though, I’ll bet I began to look around.
The sins of America are precisely that the streets…are empty where
their houses are, there’s no sense of neighborhood anymore, a
neighborhood quarter or a neighborhood freeforall fight between two
streets of young husbands is no longer possible except I think in
Dagwood Bumstead and he ain’t for real..”
Joseph Epstein, 2012
“Then there is the business school, especially in its MBA
version. Business schools are not about education at all, but about
so-called networking and establishing, for future employers, a
credential demonstrating that one will do anything to work for them—even
give up two years of income and pay high tuition fees for an MBA to do
so. As with an American Express card, so with an MBA, one daren’t leave
home without one, at least if one is applying for work at certain
corporations. Some among these corporations, when it comes to recruiting
for jobs, only interview MBAs, and many restrict their candidate pools
to MBAs from only four or five select business schools. Pledging the
fraternity again.”
Jack Kerouac, 1951
“-__beyond this old honesty there can only be thieves.”
Of course as is often the case in matters
so frivolous as this there is a review of a book by an old girlfriend of
Jack’s in the current issue of The American Scholar . The
author of the memoir, Joyce Johnson, had written a lovely remembrance
about thirty years ago but this volume, according to the reviewer,
Deborah Baker, may have fallen a bit short on the merits as she states:
“But it is when Kerouac writes of his
tortured struggle to find a new “method”—he doesn’t use the word
voice—that the insufficiency of Johnson’s own method becomes apparent.
At such times, one imagines young Joyce in the back seat of a car
smiling grimly with Jack at the wheel, careening between moods and women
and abruptly abandoned manuscripts—as if she is still, in part, the
girlfriend trying to domesticate a story that keeps veering away from
her.”
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