Arts & Letters

Howl & Reality

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After reading the comments on Shannon’s piece, I went into class. Today we talked of Ginsberg & Howl. I could teach the power of his incantatory lines, his use of repetition, ways he took what Whitman had discovered & made it his own; but, then, I found myself unable to speak. Shannon’s piece, the comments, Cho, so many memories – I just didn’t feel like letting these words lie on the page. I talked for a moment about America in those years and about this romanticism, this belief society was fallen but man wasn’t. These beliefs were not always true, not even useful. Sometimes we’re not noble savages thwarted by a society that sacrifices us to Moloch – sometimes we’re just nuts and need help. And then we turned to Bishop, whose life, too, had plenty of tragedies and whose inclinations, too, were not conventional; still she created a world that better helps us understand and even appreciate our own.

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The Rough Zones of the Ten Commandments

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Lex’s link to Robert Fogel reinforces much that is said and said often on this blog. It doesn’t seem to me particularly good if we have a wide divergence in wealth and some is back scratching. Nonetheless, I’d worry more if all incomes were the same for all the reasons mentioned here so often. It isn’t just, or even mainly, productivity that is gauged by differing wages. Our desires are different; so are our priorities. Someone who spends twenty hours a week reading to and playing with her child may not expect to be as compensated in money as if she were working a 60-hour executive week; she is, however, richly rewarded in other ways. As Fogel observes, the differences between the way we can live is not all that dramatic and many differences are driven by choice. As the comments indicate, discussions of poverty are often snapshots in time. My children should not be making the wage that their parents, after forty years of work experience and three degrees do; my husband’s mother deserves comfort but is not, at 88, a wage earner nor is she building capital but rather spending it.

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“Then we shall fight in the shade.”

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I watched the much anticipated 300 at a sold out local IMAX theater. While some critics are, to put it mildly, less than enthused about this latest Frank Miller film that portrays the Battle of Thermopylae, the positive reaction of the audience was unqualified. Of course, this may be an example of self-selection bias or it could also be that Miller has succeeded in tapping a touchstone narrative and executed it well enough that 300 attracts or repels on a visceral level.

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In Our Small Worlds: We Are, Thus, We Choose

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George Eliot’s Middlemarch & Jane Austen’s Emma seen through the prism of Himmelfarb:

Lydgate fails in his moral ambition to do “good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world,” because he is inadequate to the small world in which he finds himself, whereas Dorothea is fulfilled as a moral being precisely because she is content to do good work in her small world, thus for the world as a whole. (33) (bold added)

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Pan’s Labyrinth — Nominee for 2007 Oscar – Best Foreign Film

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Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno: 2006)

Foreign-language fantasies, after due diligence at IMDB.com, usually end up having their premiere on my DVD player but a friend was so enthusiastic and persistent about seeing this Oscar-nominated film (Art Direction, Cinematography, Makeup, Foreign Language Film, Music [Score], Original Screenplay) while it was still in the theatres that I was convinced to watch it on the big screen. Mexican writer/director Guillermo del Toro has created a work that is beautifully filmed, with great computer-generated images (CGI), and excellent acting. Surprisingly, however, within moments of the film’s start, I found myself thinking more of Claudio Veliz’s comments on Anglo and Hispanic culture in The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America.

(see this Google Video for Dr. Veliz’s talk on “The Optional Descent of the English-Speaking World” at the Anglosphere Institute last October.)

In the English-speaking world, fairy tales are more often thought of as children’s stories … filled with drama that appeals to child and parent alike, granted … but not meant to relentlessly catalogue the horrors of life. Pan’s Labyrinth, as far as I can tell, is more an adult fairy tale of a Hispanosphere variety. Redemption, in this world, comes in denying your enemies their deepest needs. Satisfaction comes in another world entirely. As noted, my exposure to the intellectual underpinnings of this approach to life comes from Veliz and his comments about the Caliban/Ariel contrast between Anglo and Hispanic culture. To a lesser extent, my exposure to the realities of Hispanosphere life come from reading from Lawrence Harrison and Hernando De Soto. I may be off-base in seeing the origins of Pan’s Labyrinth in Latin American surrealist literary culture but I don’t think I’m mistaken in seeing it coming from a very different place than Anglosphere fantasies.

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