Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon

What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn't give odds either way.

 Inherent Vice is a pleasant read, and probably one of Pynchon's more accessible books. For a person born almost thirty years after the sixties came to a close, Inherent Vice is about as close as one can come to understanding Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In America

Susan Sontag

Leaving the cabin, after dutifully cleaning up after Julian, he regained the sun and wind and his own perch of scornful acuity. Like most writers who are intelligent, Ryszard had long since accustomed himself to being actually two people. One was a warmhearted, anxious man, rather boyish for his twenty-five years, while the other one...in the other one, detached, reckless, manipulative, flourished the temperament of someone much older. The first self was forever being surprised by the evidence of his own intelligence; it never ceased to astonish him, thrill him, when words, eloquence, ideas, observations just came, like birds flying out of his mouth. The second was condemned to finding nobody clever enough--and everything he saw a challenge to his skills as an observer and describer, because so blindly, thickly steeped in itself ("the world" is not a writer).

You men have it much easier. You are commended for recklessness, for boldness, for striking out, for being adventurous. A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave prudently, amiably, timorously. And there is much to be afraid of, I know that. Don't assume, dear friend, that I have lost all sense of reality. Each time I am brave, I am acting. But that is all that's needed to be brave, don't you agree? The appearance of bravery. The performance of it. Since I know I am not brave, not brave at all, this spurs me on to act as if I were.

Every marriage, every community is a failed utopia. Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else. Is there an instinct, a very ancient instinct, for breathing in unison? The ultimate utopia, that. At the root of the desire for sexual union is the desire to breathe more deeply, deeper still, faster...but always together.

No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.

You're asking me, and you have every right to ask me, if I really do love you. And I want to say--oh, dearest Ryszard, you know what I want to say. And that wanting is love, too, though not the kind you mean. But the truth is, I never know exactly what I feel when I'm not on stage. No, that's not true. I feel intense interest, curiosity, pity, anxiety, desire to please--all that. But love, what you mean by love, what you want from me...I'm not sure. I know I don't feel love the way I represent it before an audience. Maybe I don't feel much of anything at all.

December 9. I thought you liked happy endings, I say. I think this is a happy ending. M. says. You can't see why she wants to leave? All too well, I say. Everyone dreams of bursting the chains of marriage and starting over. Yes, M. says, but I don't now. And you, Bogdan? Do you want me to answer that? I reply. I thought we were discussing how to end this play. Husband, husband, M. says, we're always talking about ourselves when we talk of anything else. Yes, answer. Then why can't the ending be changed, I asked. I'm not leaving, I said.

Americans are incapable of emigration. The best we can do is become ex-patriots somewhere--Americans living abroad. Is this because we are an immigrant nation? You would think that would predispose us to ever more movement, ever more migration. But migration beyond our national borders is a thing Americans are simply incapable of. Perhaps this is because we have so many 'sovereign' states within these United States to which we may emigrate. But this sort of emigration seems more like drinking Sierra Mist because you don't want to support Mountain Dew (guess who owns both?) or eating Chex because you don't like Cheerios (again). If you're a US Citizen, where would you emigrate to (if you were going to emigrate)?

Wanting

Richard Flanagan

His ambitions, like his body, were collapsing. He found balance difficult. He hoped for a brass plaque to be attached to his house after his death. He was no longer sure how best to lobby for, or even obliquely suggest, such an honour on the ever-rare occasions he met the few who paraded themselves as powerful in the old Regency spa town. What was he commemorating? His thoughts were mist. He heard strange chanting. Saw a naked man dancing between the stars and the earth. Remembered rivers, a dark child at his door, fingers greasy with sawing. He awoke early on the eighteenth of October, 1866 and, rolling his head to one side in his warm bed, he looked at an autumnal light, red and diffuse, softly falling through a window. He felt a great serenity wash over him, his body peacefully stretched out, and, secure in the knowledge he had been a good man who had helped many others, he died. 

It was noted with approval how Sir John was finally decisive with his wife on the matter of the black child, who, he now said, would not be taken with them to England. He declared medical opinion against it: experience showed savages' bodies were constitutionally incapable of surviving a robust climate; it was as proven and undeniable as were the advantages she had enjoyed which would ensure her future was bright indeed. He did not involve his wife in the matter of the memorandum ordering that the child be taken away to St John's Orphanage. He would not hear her protests, but observed that it was as fine an institution as had ever been erected, and that the child would there be able to finish her education to the satisfaction of all. He would not enter into an argument with Lady Jane about the experiment being not yet ended.
'It was unscientific yearnings from the beginning,' Sir John said, and though the word they both knew he intended was mad, there was about his statement the tone of undeniable conviction. When Lady Jane said that she must prepare the child, and went to assure her that her destiny was still promising, it was already too late. They had taken Mathinna the morning before, without warning or explanation, but with the precaution of giving her a special breakfast of toasted cheese. Whether this was to calm the fear she might have or to assuage the guilt he possessed, he was unsure: he simply felt it an act born of necessity, rather than nostalgia.

Mathinna lay down, curled into the rug, closed her eyes and let her frail shell of a body ride the bumps and jolts. She told herself she was warm and safe and, consoled by such necessary untruths and with the comforting fullness of toasted cheese in her belly to further the illusion, she somehow fell asleep and dreamt of running through wallaby grass.

The Warden believed in God's love and pity. A terrible love. A most terrifying pity. And against all that belief and all that love and all that pity, against all the questions already answered, even a spirit as indomitable as Lady Jane's faltered.

She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, holder her close, feed her warm soup and bread. She wished to be the mother she had tried so hard never to appear, to put her nose in Mathinna's wild hair and comfort and protect her, and revel in her difference and not seek to destroy it, because in that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below, and the white coffins below that.

Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirees, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn't Government House but Ira Bye's sly grog shop--an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay--that it wasn't a soiree and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro's bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.

We spend our time in life wanting. Wanting, we need; wanting, we desire; wanting, we hope; wanting, we build and build. All of life is a wanting. And everyone has their theories about wanting and how to address the thing. But when it comes down to it, everyone still wants and they cannot escape the wanting. Even in wanting to not want, we want. So much wanting, that the word begins to twist in our minds and our ears and on our lips. Can you say want want want want want want without the word warping?

Put a list together of all the things you've ever wanted. How many times does this wrap you in want and trail about your feet and trip you up, like some clothing made for a person many times larger than you. Indeed the human appetite for wanting is larger, much larger than the human capacity for attaining or realizing or accepting or handling. How could we want so much more than we can have?

I don't know what to tell you about the wanting. Cross your fingers and hope to die, you won't ever get all that you want. And what you want can be what you need, no matter how good the Rolling Stones are. So sing and sing, but remember that a bird does sometimes sing for what it wants, though sometimes it may only want to sing.

Wanting is the baseline of our lives, wanting is the thing that we have in common, wanting is our humanity. Can you say you haven't wanted? Who can?

Ragtime

E L Doctorow

An interesting note is that this poor fellow, Charles Victor Faust, was actually called upon to pitch one inning in a game toward the end of this same season when the Giants had already won the pennant and were in a carefree mood. For a moment his delusion that he was a big-leaguer fused with reality. Soon thereafter the players became bored with him and he was no longer regarded as a good luck charm by Manager McGraw. His uniform was confiscated and he was unceremoniously sent on his way. He was remanded to an insane asylum and some months later died there.

The Great Railroad Strike - 1877
July 14, 1877 Governor of Maryland directs the National Guard to put down strikers in Baltimore, firing on an attacking crowd and killing 10 and injuring 25. Several National Guardsmen were injured by the crowd. July 21, 1877 Militiamen in Pittsburgh bayonet and fire on strikers, killing 20 and wounding 29 others. Local law enforcement officers had refused to fire on strikers. July 22, 1877 Militiamen in Pittsburgh fire on and kill 20 more strikers. July 25, 1877 Chicago mayor asks for 5,000 militiamen to restore order, 20 strikers are killed. July 25, 1877 Shamokin Uprising: 1000 coal miners march on railroad depot in Shamokin; mayor forms vigilante group that kills 2 strikers and wounds 14.


Homestead Strike - 1882
July 6, 1982 Three hundred Pinkerton agents are given Winchester rifles in order to help break Steelworkers' strike. Fighting erupts, a striker and a Pinkerton are both injured. Pinkertons fire on the crowd, killing 2 and wounding 11; the crowd fires back, killing 2 and wounding 12. The strikers, now more than 5,000 people (including women and children), set up a brass cannon. Pinkertons fire on them again, killing 4. Pinkertons end up surrendering but state militia arrive and quell the strike.
 

Haymarket Affair - 1886
May 3, 1886 Striking workers in Chicago are fired on by police at a rally, two men are killed. At a rally the next day, a man throws a pipe bomb at the police, who return fire. At least eight policemen and four workers are killed. Over 60 policemen were injured and at least as many more workers. 

Pullman Strike - 1894
June 29, 1894 President Grover Cleveland orders 12,000 Federal troops and U S Marshals to break up the strike because it prevented the delivery of the mail. 13 strikers are killed and 57 are injured.

The Bread and Roses Strike - 1912
February 24, 1912 Strikers try to send children via train to refuge in other cities. Lawrence city authorities attempt to prevent strikers from sending the children to Philadelphia. Police begin clubbing mothers and children, causing one pregnant woman to miscarry.

The Southern Colorado Coal Strike - 1914
April 20, 1914 Two companies of Colorado National Guardsmen install machine guns on a ridge overlooking the camp of striking mine workers. Miners, resenting machine guns aimed at their families, try to flank the militia and a firefight breaks out. Fighting lasts for most of the day. 19 strikers are killed, four of these are women, and eleven are children. Three company guards and one militiaman were killed.

Columbine Mine Massacre - 1927
November 21, 1927 Colorado police and guards working for the mine fire on unarmed coal mine strikers, allegedly with machine guns, killing 6 and wounding dozens. 

How many owners, managers, politicians, and CEOs have been killed in labor disputes? How many times have police fired on wealthy crowds? How many people who were comfortable have been shot to death by National Guardsmen? Any look at our history shows that people with money tend to be safe. But the history of abuse that has fallen on the shoulders of people who haven't money is as long as history itself.

Now
1,954 people died crossing the US-Mexican border between 1998 and 2004. In 2005, more than 500 immigrants died crossing the border, according to the United States Border Patrol.

Vertigo

W G Sebald

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance, he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Muller's engraving after it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never set eyes on a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them. 

Sebald's consciousness of image and memory, as demonstrated in the quote above, is worth keeping in mind in this age of remade memory, as sponsored by Facebook and the general digital record of life. That a picture can replace our memory is something we were already getting used to--you have known that some of your earliest childhood memories are actually memories influenced by pictures of that era, or even worse, the memories of pictures themselves. But now, as pictures become the purpose rather than the record, as people do things in order to take a picture, we have to worry, what will our memory be like fifty years from now?

Although such online functions as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and YouTube have become known as Social Networking, what they truly are is Social Remembering. Social networking is a tool for the public editing of individual memories. We have always edited our memories in a public realm; the familial or friendly act of remembering, telling over the experiences everyone already knows, recreating the feelings of the time of memory, storytelling, have always been our most conscious means of making changes to our memory. Though memories can be changed on our own, though we can find our memories of past events changed by the feelings and acts of life as they weigh down on our memories, the method of changing memory over which we have the most control is by exposing our memories socially, curing them like wet paint in the open air. Through the gift of belief, society can give us a power over our memories that we could never escape with in the solitude of our lonesomeness. As with so many things, there is safety in numbers when it comes to remembering.


Memory has always been somewhat social in its function: the most conscious means by which we edit our memories is the telling of them as stories to others. The elements of the social environment became the components with  which our stories reacted. Relating a memory to a certain group of people, we are mindful of what we think the group wants to hear and using that information to produce effects. But as we export our memories to a Facebook existence, we are relinquishing much of this little control we once had over the structure of our own stories. Social networking websites exert a much stronger influence on the memories we hand over to them.  Like a person writing a journal for a specific audience--a persuasive journal--these are false records or the reality of our past. More false even than our own memories. And, dangerously, they are more powerful than our own memories.

All these pompous words are to say to my generation: when you are sixty, you won't have memories, you'll have Facebook albums, profiles, MySpace pages, and YouTube channels and these will be your memories.

A Death in the Family

James Agee

There were nearly two hours of helpless anguish and fright before the doctor arrived. During that time it is possible that Ralph suffered more acutely than anyone else. For besides suffering, or believing that he suffered, all the pains that his father must be experiencing, and all of his mother's grief and anxiety, and all of the smaller emotions of all the smaller people who were present, he suffered deep humiliation. When he rushed in and swept his mother into his arms he felt that his voice and his whole manner were all that they ought to be; that he showed himself to be a man who, despite his own boundless grief, was capable also of boundless strength to sustain others in their fried, and to take complete charge of all that needed to be done. But even in that first embrace he could see that his mother was only by an effort concealing her desire to draw away from him. He came near her over and over again, hugging her, sobbing over her, fondling her, telling her that she must be brave, telling her she must not try to be brave, to lean on him, and cry her heart out, for naturally at such a time she would want to feel her sons close around her; but every time, he felt that same patient stiffening and her voice perplexed him. Everyone in the room, even Ralph in the long run, knew that he was only making things harder for her; only his mother realized that he was beseeching comfort rather than bringing it. She was not in the least angry with him, she was sorry for him and wished that she could be of more help to him, but her mind was not on him, her heart was not with him, and his sobs and the stench of his breath made her a little sick to her stomach. What perplexed him in her voice was its remoteness. He began to realize that he was bringing her no comfort, that she was not leaning on him, that just as he had always feared, she did not really love him. He redoubled his efforts to soothe her and to be strong for her. The harder he tried, the more remote her voice became. At the end of a half hour her face was no less desperate than it had been when he first saw her. And he began to feel that everyone else was watching him, and knew he was no use, and that his mother did not love him. The women watched him one way, the men watched him another. He felt that his wife was thinking ill of him, that she was not even sorry for him; he felt slobbering and fat, the way she looked at him and suddenly with terrible hatred was sure that she would prefer to sleep with flat-bellied men--what man? Any man, so long as his belly don't get in the way. As for Jessie, he knew she had always hated him, as much as he hated her. And George Bailey just sitting there looking serious and barrel-chested and always being careful to look away when their eyes met: George thought he was twice the man that Ralph was and twice as good right at this time, better with his in-laws than Ralph could be with his own flesh and blood; and they all knew that George was twice the man and were just trying not to say it or think it even, or let Ralph know they thought it. And even Thomas Oaks, an ignorant hand who couldn't even read or write, just setting there with his ropy hands hung between his knees, staring down at a knot in the floor with those washed-out blue eyes, even Tom was more of a man and more good use too. When Tom got up and said if there wasn't nothing he could do he reckoned he would get on up to the loft, but if there was anything, they would just let him know, Ralph understood it. He knew Tom might be ignorant but he wasn't so ignorant but he knew when it was best to leave a family to itself; and when Ralph's mother said, 'All right,, Tom,' Ralph heard more life and kindness, and more gratefulness in her voice, than in every word she'd said to him, the whole night; and as he watched Tom climb the ladder, heavily and quietly, rung by rung, he thought: there goes more of a man than I am, he knows how to take himself out of the way, and he thought: he's doing a power more good by going than I can by staying, and he thought: every soul in this room wishes it was me that as going, instead of him, and he called, in a voice which sounded unfriendly, though he had meant to make it sound friendly to everyone except Tom, 'That's right, Tom get ye some sleep'; and Tom pulled his head back through the ceiling and looked down at him with those empty blue eyes and said, 'That's all right, Mr Ralph,' and suddenly Ralph realized that he had no intention of sleeping and would be there alone, not sleeping a wink, just ready in case he was needed; and that Tom had seen his malice, his desire to belittle him, and had belittled him instead, before his mother and his wife and his dying father. 'That's all right, Mr Ralph.' What's all right? What's all right? He wanted to yell it at him, 'What's all right, you poor-white-trash son-of-a-bitch?' but he restrained himself.
Every time he felt their eyes on him especially strongly he went over to his mother again and hugged her, and held her head tightly against him, and tried to say things that would make her cry, and every time, her voice was a little bit further away from him and her face looked a little older and dryer, and every time, he was still more acutely aware of their eyes on him and of the thoughts behind their eyes, and every time, he would swing away from his mother as if he could bear to leave her uncomforted for a moment only because there were still more important things to do, matters of life and death, which he and only he, the son, the man of the family, now that poor Paw lay there so near to death, could handle. And every time, there was nothing whatever to do except wait for the doctor. They had already given the medicine the doctor had given them to give, and they had already given him so much of the ginseng tea the doctor had said wouldn't anyhow do any harm, that Ralph's mother decided they shouldn't give any more of it. His head was low; his feet were braced against hot stones wrapped in flannel, and Mother kept everyone except herself at the far, lighted end of the room, except for short visits. There was nothing to do, nothing to take charge of, and every time Ralph swung about from his mother with an air of heroic authority and rediscovered this fact, he felt as if a chair had been pulled out from under him, in front of everybody, and he began to think that he would burn up and die if he didn't have another drink. He said, 'Scuse me,' once in the choked and modest tone which should signify to the women that he had to empty his bladder, and he got a good, hard swig that time, and found when he came back in that he didn't care whether they were looking at him or not, or guessed what he really went out for; for two cents he'd take out the bottle and wave it at them. Sooner than it was possible to use that excuse again, eh became even more thirsty than before. At the same time he first realized that he was drunk. He was bitterly ashamed of himself, drunk at this time, at his father's very deathbed, when his mother needed him so bad as never before and when he knew, for he had learned by now to take people's word for it, that he was really good for nothing when he was drunk. And then to feel so thirsty on top of that. He braced himself with all the sternness and strength he was capable of. By God, he told himself, you'll pull yourself together. By God, or...By God, you will. You will. And he got up abruptly and walked straight through them into the  dark and splashed his face and neck with water. He realized than that he could take another, now. Just a little one. To brace him. He cursed himself and splashed his face again, and dried carefully with his handkerchief before he came back in. He realized that to everyone else int eh room, those two silences meant two more drinks. He made a cynical grimace. By God, he knew better! He felt as if he had great physical strength, and in his feeling of strength his thirst was merely like the bite under a punch bar, a pleasure to feel and to brace against. But within a short while the thirst returned even more fiercely as irresistible pain. No, by God, he said again to himself. But he began to wonder. If they thought he'd had one anyhow--two in fact--why in a way he owed himself a couple. Three, for that matter: a third, because he knew they mistook that cynical face he had made for a drunken shamelessness. After all, it wasn't he who didn't want to be drunk. he was being careful for their sake. And by God, if he was going to get blamed for it anyhow, what was the good of that. Besides, when he really took care he knew he could hold his liquor good as the next man. He'd show them. But it wasn't so easy, figuring how to get out. Can't go out to pee so soon. Nor dipper of water. He felt a sudden terrible excess of shame. No, by God, he wouldn't sit there scheming himself a shot over his own dying father, and his mother looking on at him, knowing his mind, not saying a word. By God, he wouldn't! He set himself to put everything out of his mind except his father, not as he had ever feared him, or wished he approved of him, or wished he was dead, but as he lay there now, old and broken, cast aside near the end of the trail, yes sir, the embers fading; and within a short while he was sobbing, and talking of his father through his sobs, and within a short while more he began to realize that he had found his way out. His struggles against this temptation, his iterations of 'I'm no good,' and, 'I'm the son he set least store by, but I'm the one that cares for him the most,' and the voices of the women, soothing him, trying to quiet him, only added to his tears, the richness of his emotions, and his verbosity, and before long he had realized that this too was useful, and was using it. Toward the end all genuine emotion left him and he had to scrape, tickle and torture himself into sufficient feeling and sufficient evidence of an impending breakdown he would inflict on nobody, but at length he felt he had achieved the proper moment, and rushed headlong from the room, all but upsetting his wife in her rocking chair. The instant he was outside he felt nothing in the world except the ferocity of his thirst. He leaned against the cabin wall, uncorked the bottle, wrapped his mouth over its mouth as ravenously as a famished baby takes the nipple, and tilted straight up.

Agee records emotions with a precision I have rarely come across. Sometimes he lays out emotions so strongly, you feel they are more your own emotions than his characters. As he tells the thoughts and feelings of children and men and women, you can't help feeling that the reason you are shivering, the reason your eyes are blurring up to overflowing, is that his characters are truly living the things you remember with the memories that go beyond words. Did you ever feel as a small child the awful emptiness of being alone? Agee's characters experience the world with such awful roots that you wonder if they aren't you.

Few authors have made me feel the presence of a ghost; Agee achieves even this in A Death in the Family.

The truth of emotions in A Death in the Family creates a structure that cannot be denied. For every moment you recognize yourself in every character, you know that this life is okay, that the weakness and shabbiness of our feelings, especially when we are trying to feel honorable and worthy, is a thing that signifies the truth of our condition.

In the long quote above, Agee captures the soul of a weak man, of a true coward. Without doubt, you can know that you are alive if you can feel this and feel the twinge of this and feel that you have done that, as despicable as Ralph is, as disgustingly weak as he is, you know that it isn't Ralph that makes this passage strong, nor even Agee, but yourself and the mirror-recognition you have or your own cowardice. Agee let's you know you are you. This is enough.