Arts & Letters

Really Trivial Trivia

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In answer to Chel, I tend to watch whatever the hell is on. But, frankly, I’ve never seen any of the three that you mention. I guess I just leave on other junk. Yes, I’m sure Lex is right, I’m wasting my life away.

Speaking of which, in a previous post about the sixties, I mentioned that those were also the years of the Dean Martin Show – though I doubt many of you guys in your forties think of that when you’re thinking of the sixties. Tim Blair linked to this thread; sure it’s obsessive but sometimes its fun to see something through someone else’s more appreciative eyes, it gave me a new & rather pleasant horizon.

Everybody Has a 60’s

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This blog is sometimes critical of boomer culture. But Lex puts up a video of Jackie DeShannon & we all watch, pleased by the aesthetic & energy, the charm of a singer quite representative – to some – of the sixties. Those years went through cultural changes that, looking back, were breathtaking. But those of us who were teens moved through them as fish in water; we were obsessed with ourselves, of course, but we had no perspective; we’d never been young before.

In 1963 Jackie Kennedy balanced her little pill box atop masses of hair. A freshman in college, I’d encase myself in garter belts & nylons for class or stretch pants designed for ski slopes nowhere close to Nebraska. We ratted our hair. By 67 or 68, we were wearing see-through blouses and no bras, our dresses were so short my daughters finding one of my old dresses assume it’s a tunic, our hair hung below our shoulders, often below our waists. Sometimes changes come from the pragmatic – the pill & pantyhose. Now, dresses are about any length we want. For decades, they inched up and down, but in the sixties, they moved from the knees very high & then down quite low. The movement was so fast and extreme, styles merged & women in pants, in minis, with dresses trailing the ground appear at the same workplace, the same party.

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Buzzati — The Tartar Steppe

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Buzzati, Dino. The Tartar Steppe, translated from the Italian by Stuart C. Hood, and available in many inexpensive editions from 1952 to late 2005.

Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe is the story of a young man who completes his training as a military officer and is transferred as a young lieutenant to a border fortress where nothing seems to happen. Isolated from life in the city amidst mountains and set before a vast forbidding plain, the soldiers and officers of the fort live in a routine, familiar and often boring, secretly hoping that their commitment and discipline will be rewarded by some kind of engagement with an enemy over the northern horizon … across the expanses of an empty steppe.

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A Mild & Messy Rant, inspired by John Jay

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Thank you, John Jay, for the post below. I started a comment & kept ranting, so made it into a messy post. It remains more a thrown out comment than coherent response. And, of course, mostly I think you are quite right.

Nonetheless, I think Mencken got it really wrong and is an irritating forefather of some of the worst about our culture today – especially his emphasis upon cynicism and his lack of gratitude for the rich tradition we have been given. His belief we need aristocrats is characteristic of his misanthropy which seemed to come from a narrow & bitchy soul. I remember picking up his essays to read on break & feeling physically ill – the pages seened strewn with spittle & venom. You have shown, however, that he did have both a sense of humor and common sense.

Sure post modernism is impenetrable because it is idiotic�being impenetrable is a power play for one thing. This is the same device that the theorists want to be called philosophers & contend they are discussing philosophy. Well, they are writing impenetrable prose about quite abstract, counterintuitive, and often just weird ideas. That doesn�t make it deep.

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The 20-something Solution

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You all have talked much lately of the generation divisions, but today I saw one that is not, I suspect, what most of you were thinking about. In the midst of one of our endless workshops on grading freshman English papers, we were divided into groups to compare grading techniques. This was generally meant to encourage us to grade in a more similar manner – given that some of the sample papers we were given were graded with 40 point differences, probably we do need some standardization.

Well, I complained in passing that years ago, at my first go-around of college teaching, students were constantly telling me that “one does this” and “one does that.” A fellow teacher of approximately my age groaned about the “pompous one.” They don’t do that so much, now – McWhorter & countless others have noted the informalizing of American writing. Getting rid of the “one” is a small silver lining in that particular cloud.

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