bobgarlitz

I Love Paris

June 12th, 2007 I Love Paris, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Cow Fingers and Mosquito Pie

There’s really no place like Paris, especially in the spring, when people head out to the streets en masse and fill the bars and cafes with bubbling laughter and “Oh la las” and “Oui, oui, ouis” and “Oh, putains!” Not to mention progressively scantilier-clad women to found throughout the city, most of whom are très foxy (It is true, by the way, that women in Paris are better looking than women in New York. I’ve done a serious comparative study).

And in my opinion, no one expresses this sentiment more accurately than the late great Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. He taps right into the sensuality of the place, especially when it “sizzles” in summer. You know Screamin’ Jay isn’t talking about the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. He’s talking about that little strip club next to the used guitar shop on Rue Victor Massé, or the funky African markets in the nearby Goutte d’Or. He’s tapping into what I like to call the “seamy underbelly” of the place, where all the grime and sweat collects and never quite gets washed out.

And did I mention the chorale introduction? The juxtaposition of these barber-shop-style white guys (I picture them in plaid bow-ties with Brill Creem-ed hairdos) and Screamin’ Jay’s gritty, grunty baritone gives me chills every time. Sure, write him off as a novelty act, slinging one-liners from the pre-PC era (”I saw Mau-mau kissing Santa Claus!”), but Screamin’ Jay always managed pull it off the guts of Leadbelly and the class of Duke Ellington. And boy did he love Paris.

“And this enables me, what is more, to know when that unreal journey began, the second last but one of a form fading among fading forms, and which I here declare without further ado to have begun in the second or third week of June, at the moment that is to say most painful of all when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on our midnights.”  Beckett, Molloy: 17.

As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore’s preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents — telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he’s trying to manipulate.

Toronto’s National Post has been running a fascinating series by Lawrence Solomon on global warming dissidents, who don’t get much press in the U.S. My own philosophy about earth’s titanic, humanity-dwarfing operations is contained in a curious video I recently found on YouTube.com. Clips of volcanic eruptions and magma flows are set to the abstract “psychedelic” music of a California rock group, the Danbury Shakes. This eerie fusion of lurid natural images with a distorted, clashing soundscape is richly evocative of a 1960s vision that has been lost. The ’60s revolution, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was about much more than politics. Fanaticism about global warming reduces the eternal terrors of nature to a banal political melodrama.

Larry sent these from CA

To learn to write one must learn both a considerable portion of what has been written and how it was written.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 71

The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 69

Teaching cannot do well under the cult of innovation. Devotion to the new enforces a devaluation and dismissal of the old, which is necessarily the subject of teaching…. And here we meet a strange and difficult question that may be uniquely modern: Can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it?

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 65

The goal of education-as-job-training, which is now the dominant pedagogical idea, is a high professional salary. Young people are being told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not everything. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 58

How can an idea, which is not material, have a material origin? “Average” for example, is an idea which partakes of none of the physical properties of the things that are averaged. Materialism itself is an idea, just as immaterial as any other.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 50

our correspondent in Moscow gives us glimpses only a traveler can give—

Dear Bob,

 

This weekend I went to attend a training programme we were running for loan officers. It was held at a sanatorium, owned by the state railway company, outside Moscow.

 

It was a building suspended in time, though the fabric had been partly refurbished the attitudes remained Soviet. The bartender the previous evening had wanted to fine us for putting two tables together! A chambermaid complained at one participant for putting the shower mat on the floor as it would get dirty! A sign at the grocery store proclaimed that staff (of the sanatorium) would be served before guests! There would be no queuing for the workers and no customer service either (and, of course, most of the guests were workers for the very same company as the staff)!

 

The canteen, I think, served the same menu it always had, except the begrudging addition of a packaged yoghurt at breakfast and a forlorn kiwi fruit at lunch. The food was universally unappetising – except the tea, though there is little you can do to ruin tea.

 

But then last night, we had a banquet (in the bar) and the cuisine was transformed – thoroughly Russian but utterly edible – the Russian hospitality ‘gene’ so evident in private finally cut in – and delivered – and a warm evening of eating and drinking and dancing ensued (replete with elaborate toasts and an impromptu poetry competition…

 

It was a pity about the beds you retired to, so narrow that one turn threatened to have you on the floor – though firm. The first such place I stayed at (in 1993), the springs were so shot that you lay down, sank to the floor, with the thin mattress curling to embrace you!

 

But it was lovely to get out into country air – and slipping through the encircling sanatoria fence, I was able to walk amongst the trees; and, recognised how long it had been since I had been ‘in nature’!

 

Reading Kundera’s Immortality – and I fear the book feels like it. It is so clever, and with each display of cleverness becomes heavier and heavier, I am afraid.

————
“We have a bad culture, let’s face it. It starts with the public school system, which is a disaster for people who do not come from well-to-do families. Students don’t learn American history, they don’t learn much about the world, they don’t learn languages. They’re kind of out of it.”
Gore Vidal Bookforum Dec/Jan 2007: 45.
——

“Look at Kenneth Burke, for example; a theorist if ever there was one, but now a forgotten theorist, virtually.”
–Frank Kermode, “Value After Theory,” Life.After.Theory. ed. Michael Payne and John Schad New York: Continuum, 2003: 60.

——–

“Steadman was certain that doctors brought healthy people down by uttering dire warnings and attaching the most grotesque meaning to the commonest and least harmful symptoms.”

–Paul Theroux, Blinding Light NY: 187

“Yesterday in Boston, at Pinky’s, he had been reflective, for nakedness was like defiance. The dancers had been girlish and coy, playful, teasing, protected by their nudity. Even the barest woman in the place looked peeled and raw, just feeble startled limbs, going through the motions, and others seemed more like pork to him now. Becasue he saw too much, something important was missing. The essential woman was hidden inside all that naked flesh.”

–Theroux, Blinding Light, 195.

- —

“Words are like us, they’re born with one face and what can you do about it.”
Hopscotch 252

Phil sent a book recommendation–I’ll look for a copy tomorrow–

Have you read any of Nick Hornby’s books? I’ve avoided them up to now, but bought one last week because it was on sale for four bucks (hardbound). This one is entitled “A Long Way Down” and I can’t recall enjoying a book so much. I almost never laugh at things I read anymore, but I’m laughing out loud on this one. I’ve only read a hundred pages and I keep expecting it to go downhill, but it hasn’t so far. If you need some laughs, I heartily recommend this one.

It’s about four very different people who have decided to kill themselves. They go to the same rooftop in London on New Year’s eve where they proceed to annoy the hell out of each other. And it takes off from there. Hornby is a master at getting the voices of the individual characters down perfectly. Below is the young American:

“The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something: we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk and can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh?….The life I was leading didn’t let me be, I don’t know, who I thought I was.”

Here is Oliveira in Buenos Aires/Paris musing to himself in Hopscotch (241) –

“To get the idea that you are the center . . . . But it’s incalculably stupid. A center as illusory as it would be to try to find ubiquity. There is no center, there’s a kind of continuous confluence, an undulation of matter.”

Cortázar published the book in Spanish in 1963. By 1960 Burke had published his Logology pieces. Dubuffet had painted his Cabinet Logologic. Derrida doesn’t get his oar in until early 1970s.

June 7 my birthday 63 We’re settling in to watch the third disc of the BBC production of Bleak House. 150 minutes Complicated plot. Virginia is in thrall to it. I am a little less so, but here we go. Earlier today we went walking on the lakefront in Meredith. Weather still gorgeous but cool. Clouding over gradually all day. We drove fifty miles west to Hanover. Lunch at the Co-Op where we ran into Don and Carol Wharton. He served as president of the university for the past thirteen years, retired last summer. They live up in a tiny town forty minutes from us, Landaff. Don says they’ve found out they are equidistant between Concord and Burlington. Littleton has only one supermarket now, so they go to Hanover for groceries—or even Plymouth for the Wal-Mart. Carol is from Canada, that famous town named Chicoutime (Quebec). After our sandwich, we went to Hitchcock where Virginia had a rehab session. A cinnamon scone and latte before driving back. No interesting mail except for Netflix. I’ve got three or four books going—still in Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Now we have left Paris and are back in Buenos Aires. I guess I will say that the book sat on my shelf unread for so many years so I could read it only after I had been able to see both cities for myself. Now the book resonates even more. It is a wonderful book. Even before I’ve finished I think I might read it once more after I finish. That could be the enthusiasm of the moment and part of the illusion always at this time of the summer of unlimited time. I just finished a small book by William Burroughs called The Yage Letters. Theroux mentioned it at the start of Blinding Light. Burroughs went to the Amazon in 1953 intent on trying a native hallucinogenic herbal drink. Ayahuasca, now pretty well-known. Ginsberg went to Peru about ten years later for the same purpose. I’m mid-way into Terry Eagleton’s new little book called The Meaning of Life. Eagleton has written good books on literary theory over the past twenty years, he now knows PostModernism is over, including the Marxism he used to be devoted to, so this treatise, learned and witty and searching, has a fine sense of “where-are-we-now-sort-of?” to it. The news in these realms seems to be that philosophers and literary critics have turned from deconstruction etc to paying more attention to what is going on in cognitive science—what research on the brain seems to be telling us about language, thought and culture. I’m almost finished another wonderful little book, Conversations with Bram Van Velde and Samuel Beckett by Charles Juliet. Van Velde was a poor painter in Paris, 1895-1981. (K Burke was 1897-1993) I’ve also started Maugham’s The Painted Veil and have returned to Melville to finish the last half of Clarel. Took a long walk yesterday “in the wilderness” while having a pair of tires put on the car. Walked from Wal-Mart down the hill to Highway 25 and east as far as Dunkin Donuts and back. Thighs a little sore today. Yesterday also talked with Dad, told him about Dave’s coming marriage. Actually when I told him we had news from Paris, he guessed it at once: “Is he getting married?” Had some emails from former students earlier this week. Nate and Vaness Alander are expecting their first child; Russell Carr is going for a master’s in social work at UNH. Carter Peck will start on a master’s in teaching at Amherst in the fall. Jon Kessler got his last week, hopes to teach in Boston. He helped start an 826 social program in Jamaica Plain this spring. This is part of a network of after school writing programs in poor neighborhoods started by Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s crew. We were in Boston last Sunday to see the ballroom dancing stage show from Australia called Burn the Floor. Great dancing, terrific showbiz kitsch. Our seats were just close enough and on the aisle so we caught the action when the dancers were shimmying in the aisles. Jessica is coming over for a visit this weekend. Barb and Ed emailed that they are finally in their new house over in Portland, Gorham, so we’re going over there end of this month to see them and to introduce them to Greg and Gerri. Time for Donald to telephone this weekend before he goes to Europe for the summer. The iris, azaleas, impatiens and petunias blazing all around the neighbohood. Pinks, violets, blues. The lupen are out up north, a trip up there Sunday to see them. Franconia, Sugar Hill, and around. Matisse would have loved lupen, Monet too.  But then they did have oceans of lavender.