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LOATHING GATSBY

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LOATHING GATSBY

At the official end of summer and the social season on Long Island, it is time to review the literature of that Island paradise. CAVAET: Drain your swimming pools. Pages, below, refer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

 

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read, Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, Following the Equator, p.241.

 

What Twain did not anticipate is some “classics” are unreadable because they are overblown nonsense, pointless, empty romance, poorly written tripe and a loose amalgamation of words so conglomerated that no idea can be discerned. The Great Gatsby is such a book.

The Gatsby story is scarce and deplorable. Daisy and Tom are married from 1918. They live on Long Island in East Egg in Summer 1922. Tom has an affair with mistress, the wife of an operator of a local garage/gas station. Daisy’s second cousin, Nick the Narrator, lives across the bay in West Egg, a less high-fluting Long Island community. Through Daisy he knows a female tennis/golf pro Jordan Baker.

Gatsby moves into the big house next to Narrator’s to be close to and to improve his chance to remeet Daisy. In 1917 while in the Army Gatsby met and kissed Daisy, and they corresponded a few times. How often the story never tells. He was very impressed by her parents’ house in Louisville, Kentucky.(148) After the War Gatsby (Oxford man for five months) made a fortune. How is a big secret – bootlegger, related to Kaiser Wilheim, inherited money, murdered someone or is a plumber. This mystery is unimportant because Gatsby is a successful businessman who got ahead with wit, charm and ability, supposedly.

On Long Island Gatsby throws big parties – free food, live music, open bar. Guests come uninvited. Gatsby hopes that Daisy will come one evening. Gatsby says of his life and his house, “I keep it full of interesting people night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”(91) But a chapter later Gatsby is more honest describing himself as Trimalchio.(113)

Daisy never comes. Gatsby learns Narrator is her cousin and through him meets her. Daisy is detached from a loveless Tom and welcomes the advance. A chapter or two later Tom becomes possessive of Daisy. He investigates Gatsby’s mysterious business past. In a big argument about who Daisy loves, Tom dissuades her from seeing the lover. The remainder will be come later because a new voice completes the story.

 

Gatsby can be told efficiently and effectively in 10-20,000 words, but F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fitzy) adds loads of filler, expanding it beyond 50,000 words. It is easier and more precise to label Nick, Narrator to remind the reader of his role in the book. A narrator has great latitude: give information explaining time, place and background and tell what is happening. A narrator can also clarify confusions the reader may have and should not appear disoriented himself, befuddling the reader more. Finally, a narrator himself should not indicate that he is loaded on drugs.

Over and over, and over Narrator is stupid, imprecise, incapable, heedless and impressionable. He lost a dog (3) but passes that off like he had flushed a gold fish into the New York sewer system. He imposes a limitation on himself, advice given by his father: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t have the advantages that you’ve had.”(1) Narrator freely describes and criticizes people that Fitzy does not like but gives peers, the upper class and snobs a pass. Thereby all the characters in the novel, including the primary players, are shallow, superficial and supercilious. In short almost every person in Gatsby is a crushing bore.

 

The person of everyone’s affection and admiration is Daisy. No one calls Daisy beautiful. She is pretty and presentable; her most noticeable quality is her voice, a quality observed late in the story: Daisy didn’t drink, yet, “Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all – and yet there’s something in that voice of hers…”(78-79) The Narrator notices the voice inaccurately, “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone [fortunately not his tongue], before any words came though. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her head was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.”(86) The Narrator tries to describe again, “…the voice, held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it wouldn’t be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song.”(97) When Daisy sings, Narrator tries a third time, “Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out the meaning in each word that it never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up[climbed?] sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.” (109)

More accurately Gatsby says about Daisy, “Her voice is full of money,”(120) but the Narrator with misunderstands onomatopoeicly: “That was it. I’d never understood before. [A good admission from a narrator.] It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’s song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…” (120)

I know no one whose voice jingles or cymbals.I try to avoid those people and those annoying verbal sounds.

But Daisy’s voice is not reliable and early on not noticeable: “Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat,”(105) Her conversation was forgettable and incomprehensible, “..unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter…”(12)

Is Daisy worth hearing? No, she is vapid and vacuous, although she claims to be sophisticated.(18) About her three year old daughter Daisy says, “…the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool…”(17) When taking the tour of Gatsby’s house and seeing Gatsby’s crass materiality including his wardrobe, Daisy says, “They’re such beautiful shirts”(93) ”It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before.”(94) Sad!

Daisy gives mixed signals. Married to Tom and courted by Gatsby, she says to Narrator at Gatsby’s party: Just sign the kissing list, and I’ll make time: “These things excite me so…If you want to kiss me any time during the evening…, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”(105)

Daisy is the woman-girl who has to be the center of attention, and wants everyone else to perform for her. On a very hot day Daisy: “Oh, let’s have fun…It’s too hot to fuss.” In short Daisy is the model found in an impressionist painting, art to be admired but an individual to be avoided: “She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together – it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.”(78) By the hour! And because of her shortcomings Daisy uses her primary[only] weapon: She cries. (132-133)

 

I saw a TV movie where two young women were beauty queens. They never took off the crowns, on heads in the kitchen, at interviews, waterskiing and when the boyfriend came over for a chat. Each beauty queen was superficial, supercilious, shallow and silly. I think the same way about Daisy. For Fitzy Daisy is a free spirit, but she is more likely mentally ill, a wandering spirit, a spoiled little brat with no character or personality, unintelligent but believing moronically that forever she will be the most beautiful little girl on Earth.

Husband-Tom may be a detestable jerk, but he is the best defined character. He is very wealthy; he hates the world and most of its people while being an absolute snob, pretentious, proud and arrogant, many traits the Narrator displays and Gatsby unconsciously exhibits. But he has an accurate opinion of his wife: “…sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what’s she’s doing.”(132) To avoid her foibles, he has a mistress(Chapter 2) who is a good hostess(30-31), despite being “fairly stout, carr[ying] her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can,”(25) and possessing “rather wide hips.”(26)

Tom has a perceptive perspective of Gatsby’s party guests: “I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here,”(106) and he is social: He excuses himself from the dull table where Daisy sits in order to sit at a table where, “A fellows getting off some funny stuff.”(107) But he “feels… the hot whips of panic,” upon learning his mistress is going West with her husband(125). And a few hours and five pages later, Tom is overly possessive of Daisy.

Tom’s hypocritical fickleness and Daisy’s imbecility make this couple the most detestable, detached and dullest throughout literature, in commercial fiction and everywhere in mass market publications.

OBVIOUSLY, Fitzy had an outline and character wheels – hots for the mistress, love from Gatsby, possession by Tom, but Fitzy had written his story so poorly and was lost. He couldn’t leave the outline and wheels, his only road ahead. He chose inconsistency: Tom knows his wife (“doesn’t know what she is doing,” 132), yet the next page he believes there are things that Daisy “won’t forget.”(133) And Fitzy’s disdain for Tom is obvious: “Tom appears from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper…” Of all the characters in the book, Tom is on-key. He is a low-grade schemer who knows his limitations, and he takes opportunities – telling the garage man that Gatsby was driving, etc. Tom seems oblivious to narrator because he doesn’t go in for the unconscious meanderings of narrator, Daisy, Gatsby and Jordan. For Tom and the reader the key word is unconscious.

The tennis/golf player, Jordan Baker is an add-on. She appears when an extra female is needed lending nothing to the other characters and giving nothing to the story. At times her presence generates confusion, which is Fitzy’s fault: “…But there was Jordan…who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.”(136) Point One: For the women [or any human being] in their twenties, it is not unusual to carry thoughts, hopes and dreams from teenage years, but it is not “age to age.” Point Two: Daisy is a first-class twit who’s dreams and thoughts come spontaneously and are instantly forgotten, whereas Jordan Baker might have a memory so could forget. So that sentence is completely non-descriptive, confusing and inaccurate. Yet Jordan’s presence allows Fitzy to draw this phony, inaccurate comparison.

Jordan’s presence affords flashbacks into Daisy’s life from Louisville, nonsensical/ journalistic pieces presenting scattered facts and impressions many of which are impossible for Jordan to know. For this passage the headline reads, MESSENGER GIRL TO BRIDESMAID:

Jordan Baker: “I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way.”(75)

[Daisy calls to Jordan while she passes the house]:

“I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls, I admired her the most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? The officer [sitting on Daisy’s porch] looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since…

“That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd – when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her…

“By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.”(76)

What’s wrong with this passage? Why the “tut-tuts?” Because the wind caught her skirt and she wasn’t wearing whale bone underwear to stiffen it. Jordan remembers an afternoon and an apparent romance in someone else’s life, but has absolutely no romance in her own life. Jordan did not see Daisy often but suggests Daisy is anti-social. From this one message-girl and accidental meetings, Jordan became Daisy’s bridesmaid. Perhaps Jordan says it accurately in the last sentence: “By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.” Perhaps that is why Jordan admired her. I don’t criticize Fitzy for making Daisy gay, but when he’s outing someone he ought to be clear and transparent: Daisy liked to talk with men, but that’s as far as they got.

 

Although he is not, Gatsby should be the main character. He is introduced late, “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.”(50) “A man about my[Narrator’s] age, young, rough head, a year or two over thirty whose formality of speech just missed being absurd,”(47-48) especially when “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.”(66)

I’ve never figured out how “tanned skin…drawn attractively tight on” the face made a “roughhead.” The reader can also appreciate that similes are not Fitzy’s forte. Can any reader decipher the sentence from page 66? No one has ever seen anyone or anything including a tree leaking sawdust.

Fitzy believes the romance story is about Gatsby, so he gives an exemption to the Narrator’s paternal advice, page 2: “Only Gatsby…was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successive gestures, then there is something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness…was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”(2) If the narrator is to be scornful, watch out when he’s complimentary.

Despite his business experience and acumen, Gatsby is awkward, slow and robotic. Showing Daisy and Narrator around his house, “He nearly toppled down a flight of steps,” (92) and out doors Daisy and Gatsby looked at the Bay:

‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay… You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’”

“Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that

had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on the dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”(94)

What thoughts to have when girl touches boy especially by a narrator who guesses, surmises and brain farts! Any other author would have the players do what comes naturally. When Daisy touches Gatsby, there should be fireworks not hesitation, discourse or oblivion.

Likewise, when Tom confronts Gatsby with Daisy present(Chapter 7), Tom says he had Gatsby investigated and recites embarrassing facts including Gatsby’s bootlegger past. Why being a bootlegger is embarrassing is beyond the reader. There is more liquor in The Great Gatsby than in “The Thin Man” movies. Indeed, Fitzy writes the characters as though each is an alcoholic living in Europe. Furthermore, Gatsby had Daisy investigated; he shows her the clippings(95). Yet he failed to investigate the competition, Tom, an obvious step to win Daisy’s heart. Conveniently, Gatsby forgets his business background. He is lame. He is vulnerable. He knows nothing. He is stupid. He is not worthy of Daisy’s attentions. Obviously, Fitzy didn’t put reactions to touching or a counter-investigation into his outline or on his character wheels. Fitzy missed the plain retaliation – Tom’s mistress, so salient in the plot. Hence, there is no basis, except delusion, to consider Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself.” “He was the song of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about his Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”(99)

 

Next comes the Narrator who Fitzy confuses with himself and then obliterates Narrator and simply takes over the story. It is impossible to sort everything out, but it’s a good way to add filler. The Narrator is ga-ga about Gatsby’s parties: “Preserved a dignified homogenity, and assume to itself the function representing the staid nobility of the countryside appeal to East Egg.”(45) He goes on for pages describing Gatsby’s guests and visitors, (61-63, 102-104), “three girls” “have forgotten their names.” Yet Narrator lists, “Jaqueline, Consuela, Gloria, Judy or June.” “…their last names were either the melodious names of flowers or months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”(63) That pretty much covers the field. None of these guests, visitors, characters are mentioned in the book again so they are surplus, added on – the surfeit of superficiality.

At this point the reader must wonder about style. Narrator/Fitzy introduces couples, a paragraph a piece, yet he cannot give the essentials for Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, or Jordan, so efficiently and intelligibly. His main characters are presented in drivel, tripe and drool.

About a supposed love interest, Jordan Baker (tennis/golf pro), the Narrator fails to recognize her during a foursome dinner party (no one introduces them), but once he hears the name, Narrator recollects “a critical, unpleasant story ‘forgotten long ago…’” So what ever happened, it was unimportant on page 19. HOWEVER by page 57, narrator remembers the scandalous story about Jordan Baker: “…she had moved her [golf] ball from a bad lie in the semi- final round…The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.” Obviously, fact checking wasn’t a big part of proof-reading this novel. And after that Jordan becomes totally a throw-away character, apparently for golf-mischief. Nobody else in Gatsby plays golf so this incident in this novel is a bad lie.

Next from the Narrator comes many absurdities arising from his use of mind altering drugs, “I had never seen [Gatsby] dance before.”(106-107) It is also likely the narrator never saw Gatsby do a backflip before, either. It was so hot for the narrator one day, “My underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs.”(126) It is really awkward when underwear won’t do what is expected, like roll into a predictable, somewhat comfortable, melvin. But anything might happen when the narrator is on mind-altering substances.

This last suggests the narrator cannot perceive and evaluate, as well as provide a decent simile. At the end of a Gatsby party in the early morning hours, an argument ensues. The Narrator notes the “deplorably sober men.”(52) Sober! At a Gatsby party written by Fitzy! A few minutes later he looked up to see, “A wafer of a moon was shinning over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still growing garden.”(56) I hate it when the growing garden outside keeps me awake at night, the clanging of plants growing into the atmosphere and the shaking from rumbling when roots expand into the Earth. And notice the narrator is frequently confused about the time of day: After a Gatsby party, it’s early morning. “I stayed late that night.”(110) It is obvious that Narrator’s mind is addled by an unprescribed substance.

When Gatsby is parked on Narrator’s circular drive, the host goes out and witnesses something that cannot be imagined even in a F. Scott Fitzgerald book: ”He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with the resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of the nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere…(64) It seems impossible to comment about this paragraph, a nervous, jittery guy balancing himself on the dashboard of a car made in the 1920s. The next observation is also pretty rough. From his own garden narrator sees arriving at Gatsby’s house: “raw materials” for the servants’ dinner.(89) Making dinner is so time consuming when milking the cow precedes butchering it, followed by grinding the wheat into flour and churning the milk for butter and drink.

There is the “sparkling odor of jonquils,”(92) just after the gleaming brass buttons on Daisy’s dress(91) but before the “pure dull gold” in Gatsby’s bathroom. As a reader I know jonquils have no fragrance, gold never tarnishes and brass never shines. But these are small oversights considering other passages of mind-altered nonsense coming from the Narrator. He once excused himself, drunk for the second time in life. The afternoon had “a dim, haze cast over it”(29), yet he describes what is obvious but very few details about the mistress’s party over the next ten pages. So Fitzy uses the Narrator’s dilapidated condition to excuse real writing – it was not part of the outline. Fitzy need not conceive lines attributed to any character within the wheel for that party scene..

From that party comes the Narrator’s mind-altered omnipresence in one paragraph: “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city [narrator is outside now] our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too[who?], looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”(36) It is possible to say everything factual and possible in this paragraph is 10 words or less, and the remainder is malarky.

At this point does any reader trust narrator’s assessment – “some wild strident argument” when neither narrator nor Fitzy are capable of conveying the arguments and points of view of the characters?

At this point any woman encountering a man of Narrator’s ilk, should stay as far from him as possible. And apparently women of narrator’s day perceived and knew to stay away.

New York City provokes many thoughts for a young man, but mostly two overriding urges: I’m lonely. I’m horny! Fitzy used many more words: “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and image that…I was going to enter their lives, and no one would every know or disapprove. Sometimes in my mind…At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others…” (57)

There are more muddles: “I took dinner at the Yale Club…and then I went upstairs to the library…There were generally few rioters around, but they never came into the library.”(57) Rioters in the Yale Club? I might believe roisterers.

Sometimes a thought is neither masculine nor literary: “He [Gatsby] came to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.”79) Narrator is living on Long Island, or he is blushing? Tell which is which and what is impossible: “My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn’t muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.”(87) Narrator should confess which mind-altering drug he is using; it may make the purported literary devices in the book more understandable.

 

I read about this party (105-111) and while the action is inadequately described and the people are poorly observed when they are shitfaced, I saw no quality of oppressiveness:

“Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness – … There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before.”(105) Perhaps the Narrator had bad indigestion because this was the party where Tom asked to be excused to sit at a table where people were having a decent conversation.(107)

Oppression may have arisen because neither Fitzy nor the Narrator can find the antecedent for “the girl” anywhere in the book. Daisy says, “‘…and if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil’…She looked around after a moment and told me the girl was ‘common but pretty,’ and I knew that except for the half-hour she’d had been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t having a good time.”(107) It is possible from this sentence to infer that the Narrator is using body drugs. Readers can tell because Narrator’s world is really slowing down.

Public transportation was confusing for Fitzy to write and baffling for Narrator. On a hot day the conductor returned Narrator’s ticket. “My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his [conductor’s] hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!”(115) [I did not make this up! And Cliff Notes were useless to interpret it.] This sentence on page 115 is the clearest indication yet that the Narrator is walking around buzzed and demented.

 

Why be consistent? Why be limited to the physical world? Why not use mind altering drugs and make the story and characters fit an ill-conceived outline and character wheels where pronouns get traits, by describing inaccurately one character’s observations and another’s actions. The mistress is concealed in her garage apartment “in one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed [mostly behind the curtains she was an open book], and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. [Creep, wrong verb.] Her expression was curiously familiar – it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.” (125)

When loaded, it is a better experience to be in two places at once, at the car in the gas station and with the mistress upstairs.

It is transparent Fitzy used an outline and followed it because he ignored the obvious: Nowhere does the Narrator who supposedly witnesses Myrtle, mistress in the window, tell or alert anyone, including Jordan Baker: There’s a crazy woman who jealously detests you. She’s liable to go off! If he did, Fitzy would have to write something real, develop it apart this flummery and tell a story beyond giving this impression or that sensation and flitting to the next bunch of word hunches. For instance, Narrator could easily dispel the mistress’s misimpressions by going to Jordan and putting a hand on her shoulder, getting her attention and smile. That’s

what a normal, competent narrator would do, especially for another character, he purportedly liked. Narrator couldn’t do that! It was not in Fitzy’s outline!

THE FINAL THIRD of The Great Gatsby fumbles to tell a straight story: Daisy is conflicted. Tom is between women. Gatsby is in love but can’t protect love or himself. Jordan Baker shows up now and again. Drunk or sober, the Narrator is inept.

On that hot day all drive to New York City. Why? To have the big argument about who Daisy loves. For her part, Daisy “can’t stand this [the argument] anymore.” Gatsby and Daisy return to Long Island in his car where Daisy runs down the mistress. Daisy doesn’t know she is Tom’s mistress and that she, Daisy, has grievances against her. She just flattens the heavyset woman.

Next comes pages of filler, unrelated activities – Gatsby’s father appears, more of Gatsby’s history with Daisy including competition from other men “increased Daisy’s value” in Louisville all repeating what was written earlier.(148) Finally, the garage man shoots Gatsby and himself (end of Chapter 8), signaling an end to the words.

After the mistress is mowed down, Fitzy decides the Narrator needs help. He enters the story which becomes more newspaper and essay like, explaining and giving insights to what happened. By this means Fitzy rounds the players to full cartoon characters. Sadly, no one including Fitzy can ever explain Daisy, Jordan Baker, Gatsby or the Narrator and their incapacities.

Yet the narrator is suddenly smart, telling and analytical. He tells Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd…You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”(154) And after Gatsby is killed, the narrator sums up, Gatsby, “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”(162) Bits of Fitzy and from the narrator’s mix. Gatsby’s father says, “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man…He’d of helped build up the country.” “‘That’s true,’ I [Narrator] said uncomfortably.” (169) I am unsure why the narrator is uncomfortable, unless he doesn’t believe it, but more likely he was trying to figure it out. For Fitzy “uncomfortably” is an extra word, the wrong long word, to reach a larger word count.

Fitzy comes to the fore when he writes an essay analyzing all the characters, and blaming their shortcomings on their Mid-West origins (177-178). It is easy for a drunk in Europe to criticize the Mid-West. The book is East Coast friendly, but it creates a literary black hole. The setting in any novel is the most determinative element in any story with characters. This novel is set in New York City and Long Island. Fitzy fails to tell how Mid-West roots set off these people, whereas New Yorkers would never do any of these things: bootlegging, mistresses, mental cruelty for spouses, avoiding personal responsibility, breach of the public trust, never knowing oneself. Instead, the East Coast, high-brow show is avoided, misperceived and preposterously unwritten, with half-conceived, scantily described party scenes of pretentious people. Fitzy preaches these are not East Coast traits. He easily excuses the East Coast malignancy manifested in Mid-west people: “They [Tom, Daisy] were careless people…- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept(180) them together and get other people clean up the mess they had made…”(181)

 

From the passages it is reasonable to conclude Fitzy is enamored with New York City and its environment, conveying the poetry of city cement, glass, steel and noise. (Page 36 Narrator two places at once, “enchanted,” “inexhaustible variety of life.” Page 57, “enchanted [again!] metropolitan twilight…” Yet what of the Long Island environment – other than the man-made features? Nada, nyet, nothing, zip. Why life on Long Island? To meet vacationing New York Citiers, sophisticates of the world, people who just blew into town from the Mid-West. It is obvious that Fitzy dislikes nature and can’t describe it to support any part of his novel. He didn’t care about losing a dog(3). He gives Gatsby’s garden city attributes.(56) There is the metaphor/ simile/disconnected-run-on sentence, “leaking sawdust” from page 66. It is fair to say Fitzy is an anti-environmentalist, in favor of dead flowers and killing trees.

Fitzy is also anti-Semitic which actually weakens the story and sullies the narrator. Gatsby introduces narrator to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jew whose conversation is in standard American for a page until Fitzy uses his tin-ear by writing in dialect: Gatsby is an “Oggsford” man, not an Oxford man. It is imprecise because Jews would not make the mistake of confusing an “g” for a “x.” The “x” sound like “s” or “tz” is widely pronounced in German. Its presence in any word is an anchor to swing between vowels and diphthongs.

At the end of narrator/Gatsby/Wolfsheim meeting, the Jew leaves and Gatsby identifies Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Narrator’s is dumbfounded:

“The idea staggered me. I remembered…that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him…He’s a smart man.”

That’s it! The narrator has no curiosity although it takes talent to play with the faith of fifty million people. For the narrator there is nothing, except to shun and to belittle. Criminal or half-criminal, there is something to learn from Wolfsheim, but in this passage narrator was dense and bigoted, like the girl at the mistress’s party who avoided marrying “a little kike” “below her”.(34) During that lunch narrator uses a term Fitzy liked, to describe Wolfsheim’s speech: “somnabulatory abstraction.” But nothing about Wolfsheim approaches the meaning of that term. However, those words perfectly describe the narrator, Daisy, Gatsby, Jordan and Tom.

At the end of the book Fitzy brings Wolfsheim back. Narrator wants him to come to Gatsby’s funeral. He doesn’t. Fitzy tries to be cute and reveals his extracurricular reading. Gatsby was written while in and out of Europe and published in 1925. Fitzy had a chance to read and warmly embrace Mein Kampf (1924). Fitzy’s joke in Gatsby is naming Wolfsheim’s business, The Swastika Holding Company.(171)

Overlooking these deplorable sentiments embraced in the book, one finds a redounding ridicule. From his photo F. Scott Fitzgerald had a beak nose and a pointy chin. Apparently Fitzy had a thing about noses. First is Tom and Daisy’s butler: “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?” “That’s why I came over tonight.”(14) Second comes Daisy’s chauffeur: “Does the gasoline affect his [chauffeur’s] nose?” “I don’t think so,” she said innocently. ‘Why?’” (86)

Third is Wolfsheim’s proboscis not supported by a mustache: “…small, flat nosed…regarded me with two fine growths which luxuriated in either nostril…”(69-70) At the table “His [Wolfsheim’s] nostrils turned to me in an interested way.”(71) Has any reader ever seen nostrils with or without hair detach from a face and turn “in an interested way?” Undoubtedly Fitzy was in an alcoholic stupor because he wrote it; or may be the Narrator dropped acid. From here on out, I’ll be straight and sober when I look for this facial feat, whether noses be big, small or Semitic, hairy or waxed.

 

Other than the notations above, elements of a pre-writing outline and the use of character wheels are extant in The Great Gatsby:

1. The characters do something or something happens, and there is no further development of that circumstance, otherwise certain to take the characters in a different direction.

2. Something does not happen when the few facts and incidences suggest it should. For instance all the rich Long Island people in the book have chauffeurs, and presumably the chauffeurs use the garage/ gasoline station. Thereupon the garage man knows which rich person owns which car – this is

not a 30 page learning curve to discover who killed wife/mistress. Out of loyalty to his employer Gatsby’s chauffeur would tell the garageman, My man wasn’t driving when your wife was killed in the hit and run accident. Daisy was. And if you didn’t know, Tom, not Gatsby, was porking your wife. Those few facts alone would make it a much more interesting novel.

3. The dialogue suggests something should happen (more dialogue) and it does not.

4. Not all dialogue and description follow from what immediately proceeded it.

5. Gatsby’s dream (fantasy) – have parties, Daisy will come, I’ll be in love – might look good in an outline, but in real life it never works out.

6. In Chapter 9 Fitzy tries to tie everything together by taking over the narrator’s role completely and analyzing and making story points in an essay.

Apart from the stories and characters diverging from the pre-writing outline and character wheels, there is A GREAT PROBLEM. Each character acts and talks with the utmost seriousness, with no humor, no self effacement or deprecation. no laughing, no joy. There is nothing American about this novel. Does any of them have a sense of humor, a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of fun? Does any character have loves – art, poetry, music? This book presents an ill-disciplined fancy Fitzy found impossible to write within the narrow outline/character wheel confines he constructed for himself. His means and abilities are so inadequate (there are no misspellings), that the reader cannot trust any character, any element of the story or the author.

Could The Great Gatsby be a satire? I detected no overarching themes or reference points leading to other works or concepts.It is too poorly written with no construction and no structure. A satire should be written straight. Gatsby is a series of mediocre sketches and misimpressions conveying no driving force. No author can write a satire with scores of malapropos and misused words. Fitzy tries to show he is a serious writer with the essays in Chapter 9 – Mid-west origins, Swatiska Holding Company, etc., but the writing in the previous eight chapters is juvenile and undisciplined to make the book unreadable. Furthermore, an author cannot write about stupid characters by writing stupidly himself.

Gatsby is a volume that should never be read for any purpose, whatsoever, except as an example: How not to write a novel. Edit severely any writing before submitting it. And never use an outline. I believe it was Robert Penn Warren who warned, I had an outline once and it took me two years to write myself out of it. And avoid use of character wheels, a device taught in Middle School.

But like his characters Fitzy got a pass. One can easily believe the ploy of the powers that be. The publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, had a marketing plan: F. Scott Fitzgerald was related to Francis Scott Key, writer of the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Few Americans know the words to the song, yet they like it. A classic is a book people praise and don’t read. Don’t worry about editing, writing, consistency. The book can be an atrocity, just advertise and promote. Rely on the forefather, Francis. Make the song the National Anthem (1931), and forever the book will be cherished(after 1945). Get the author on a postage stamp (1996). It will bring us loads of money.

The American public can only hope that no one in that family publishes anything else.

 

NEW YORK CITIERS

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NEW YORK CITIERS

Citizens of New York state are New Yorkers, but an odd breed of beings are New York Citiers. This has always been the case, noted during the American Revolution and through the Constitutional period. Three examples provide this distinction – the separation of New York Citiers from other Americans – and tell that New York Citiers are selfish, irrational, duplicitous, depraved and unreformable.

In 1775 New York Citiers were conflicted about the Britain and King or Americans and freedom. No one wanted to stand in one camp or the other: “…it had to receive the rebel generals on the same day that it must welcome back from a visit to England its royal governor…Fortunately, they landed there several hours apart, so that “the volunteer companies raised for the express purpose of rebellion,” as the loyalist judge, Thomas Jones, put it, “the members of the Provincial Congress….the parsons of the dissenting meetinghouses, with all the leaders and partisans of faction and rebellion,” would meet the generals at four in the afternoon, and conduct them to Leonard Lispenard’s house, “amidst repeated shouts and huzzas,” and, at nine o’clock, “the members of his Majesty’s Council, the Judges of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General…the Clergymen of the Church of England,” and so on, all the dignified, respectable, highly placed officials, “with a numerous train of his Majesty’s loyal and well affected subjects,” could meet the Governor and conduct him, “with universal shouts of applause,” to the residence of Hugh Wallace, Esq. “But strange to relate… those very people who attended the rebel Generals in the morning… and now, one and all, joined in the Governor’s train and with the loudest acclamations… welcomed him back to the colony…What a farce! What cursed hypocrisy!”

Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, NY, MacMillan, p. 102.

New York City was the last place on the original 13 states that the British occupied. The British liked the place and left their mark, concealing the abhorrent, sinful and arrogant attitudes and moods of the people existing in that place. I often wonder whether the negotiators of the 1783 Treaty of Paris did not make a mistake: Leave the British in possession of New York City in exchange for giving the United States of America Canada.

Of course, no one would trade New York City for twenty-five cents, so neither the Canadians nor the British would go for it today. New York City has one major drawback, its people:

“With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. We have been treated with an assiduous respect. But I have not seen one real gentlemen, one well-bred man, since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable.

There is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again, and talk again.

Page Smith, John Adams, NY, Doubleday, 1962, vol. 1, p. 166.

As stated, the primary economic activity of New York Citiers is talk, from any man or woman from that place. Americans get to experience New York City on TV every minute of every day. Almost every New York City journalist asks a very imperfect question and the interviewee guesses at the desired answer. The journalist, in New York Citier fashion just like John Adams reported, interrupts and sometimes answers his own question while arguing with the interviewee and asking another imperfect question. In that process a few dozen cliches, slogans and homilies, are spit out in an attempt to direct the interviewee onto the politically correct answer. New York Citiers are obviously eager to tell their individual stories to captive audiences and interviewees, silent and not heard. Any interviewee who doesn’t comply with these broadcast rules is never interviewed again.

But talk is cheap, especially today when mouths are disconnected from brains frequently addled by chemicals or sheer ignorance. Excessive jabbering on TV comes from great insecurity, much like rulers of a totalitarian society: “…no matter how enlightened, [they] will never surrender – a constantly exercise – their power to hector, warn, and admonish, in brief to pester and bore their helpless subjects.” (Adam Ulam, The Fall of the American University, N.Y., The Library Press, 1972, p. 170.)

Other than what New York Citiers chatter about incessantly today, like each of them is living in a Woody Allen movie, they were obsessively nonsensical in the 1780s. James Madison wrote George Washington a letter discussing the suitability of New York City as the capital of the United States, but he kept referring to the people of that place:

It seems to be particularly essential that an eye should be had in all our public arrangements to the accommodation of the Western Country, which perhaps cannot be sufficiently gratified at any rate, but which might be furnished with new fuel to its jealousy by being summoned to the sea-shore & almost at one end of the Continent. There are reasons, but of too confidential a nature for any other than verbal communication which make it of crucial importance…

The extreme eccentricity of [New York City] will certainly in my opinion being on a premature and consequently an improper choice. This policy [Capital of New York City] is avowed by some of the sticklers for this place, and is known to prevail with the bulk of them. People from the interior…will never patiently repeat their trips to this remote situation…

Papers of James Madison, vol 12, p. 343, August 24, 1788.

Madison is not the sort of person to come out and complain in a letter. He’s willing to voice reasons and reactions to New York City in a personal meeting, but he couldn’t avoid noting the extreme eccentricity present in 1788. It’s more true today. It is a place that derives all the benefits of having 33,000 police officers on its force. How have those cops done? Street crime is down, but in New York City white collar crime is unknown. Did Wall Street executives always comply with all laws, from 2005-2010?

If New York City is the center of journalism, what did journalists do over the last ten years to uncover and report the greatest financial crimes committed since the 1920s? Have any articles examined or explained high speed trading strategies, and how those programs are analogous to “pooling” arrangements made by Wall Street traders 90 years ago? Has anyone ever noticed that in his book on the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith has a chapter entitled, “In Goldman Sachs We Trust,” and why is anyone trusting that institution and those people these days? New York City may be the center of advertising, but does anyone want to watch ads today? Larry and Darin did a lot better than the guys on “Madmen.”

In the early 1970s Richard Nixon brought the country to its knees by depleting trust and confidence in government. In the last ten years through Wall Street New York Citiers have attacked America and Americans, and afterward seeking protection in security laws, in privilege and immunity, in trade secrets and confidence as well as a financial mafia pledged to silence. Trust and confidence nationwide remain uneasy. Any investor would have been better off investing with the mob, than with most institutions on Wall Street. New York Citiers turned their private exposure into public obligations through the obscenely wild expansion of debt and using the Federal Reserve balance sheet. This is the status of New York Citiers, nothing to applaud and everything to detest – pride and arrogance in their insularity. It has been a problem for this country since the founding.

 

WEEDS & SLEEPING

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These subjects, seemingly unrelated, have one commonality as sore spots for human beings.

WEEDS

Once before in Hawksex I mentioned I was a weeder. Weed the ground completely by removing as much of the weed and root as possible. Revisit the ground with a weed killer – Roundup is good because sprayed on new growth, the chemical is absorbed into the plant’s roots killing them. Repeat the spraying until the unwanted plant is dead and must be removed or it disappears.

We had a gardener who showed up with his machines and noisily blew the hell out of the garden. Earlier this year we let the blow and go guy go. The air is now less polluted; there is no noise. AND THERE ARE MANY FEWER WEEDS. I calculate how many weeds there are by the areas that had weeds and each area was weeded completely, every year. Throughout the year, the weeds grew back, and more weeding needed doing. This year there are no weeds in many areas of the garden; total weeds are down 95 percent. I attribute the lack of weeds to removing the gardener’s blower – there is no windstorm hitting the ground every week and introducing whichever seeds, spores or cuttings from one area to another.

Hence, to reduce weeds: 

Weed an area completely. Use chemical sprays on unwanted new growth in that area specifically and judiciously. Use those sprays quickly on tenacious plants like poison oak.

Do not use a blower of any type in the garden.

Use a broom, dust pan and rake, which is better exercise without much noise.

SLEEPING

I was in a profession once, and I had trouble sleeping. Alcohol was good and an accepted supplement of that profession to handle the stress and to help sleep. But booze began interrupting sleep. I had that habit, addiction, complex long after the need for it disappeared. I drank and wasn’t sleeping well. I was growing old, fat, ugly and stupid. One night before Thanksgiving, I got very sick to my stomach, and I stopped drinking.

What virtue! I’m such a good boy.

But sleep remained a problem, and I refused to take drugs or aids. Not sleeping makes me prone to long colds. Healthwise, it is necessary that I sleep.

First, it is necessary to each human being to learn to relax. Each person will do it differently, but nobody is praying, mediating or moving when relaxing. At the end of the 10 or 15 minute session in a chair, on a bed or on the floor, your mind, your state of being, is different. 

Second, I try to structure my day so I can get ready for bed and sleep, at the same time. I’m a lark – early to bed, early to rise. My sleeping patterns over the years have not been consistent. Once, I never had trouble getting to sleep; I do now, but I’m not awake at 1:00 a.m. Still, I need more than six hours. I try to avoid arguments in person or on the phone. I try to avoid people who push obnoxious behaviors, or tell their stupidities or who are otherwise grating.

Third, since sleep is not automatic and troubling, I have to play games with myself. The games are a very individual activity, and for this article none come to mind. But the fact that I know I have to play games and change to rules is not troubling. I just do it, and live on.

Four, the bedroom and sleep are two things over which most human beings have complete control. Tell yourself you are in command. I set the environment to my liking. What sort of person are you? I’m a words person. When young, I liked to be read to and fall asleep. There’s no parent to read to me, but there are substitutes with a change of the medium: TV and film. I need films where seeing is not necessary. I want a story conveyed by recognizable characters.

“Murder She Wrote” once put me to sleep. The hocus-pocus of “Perry Mason” was good, but is now irritating. Currently, “The Untouchables” (1958-1961) zone me out. And the movies. Mostly from the 1930s and 1940s. I know the movies, but rather than watch the change of scenes, I attempt to play out the scenes in my imagination, while hearing the dialogue. It is exhausting, but I am sleeping without chemicals – just a little electricity at non-peak hours.

Hearing and not seeing sometimes brings new awareness of a movie. William Powell in “The Thin Man” opens the door and greets,

POWELL: McCaulley, how are you? Come in. Have a seat.

Powell closes door, walks to bar. McCaulley greets Powell.

POWELL: What are you drinking?

McCAULLEY: Nothing for me, thanks.

POWELL: That’s a mistake…

Summing Up

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SUMMING UP

The Summing Up, Somerset Maugham, was written when the author was in his sixties before World War Two. It is a book of interest by a capable writer who can develop a point without being realistic or accurate in his assessments. Consider his analysis of being old:

“For the complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of a morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth. The philosophers have always told us that we are the slaves of our passions, and is it so small a thing to be liberated from their sway? The fool’s old age will be foolish, but so was his youth… It is true that the old man will no longer be able to climb an Alp or tumble a pretty girl on a bed; it is true that he can no longer arouse the concupiscence of others. It is something to be free from the pangs of unrequited love and the torment of jealously. It is something that envy, which so often poisons youth, should be assuaged by the extinction of desire. But these are negative compensations; the old age has positive compensations also. Paradoxical as it may sound it has more time. …Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. In old age the taste improves, and it is possible to enjoy art and literature without the personal bias that in youth warps the judgment. It has the satisfaction of its own fulfillment. It is liberated from the trammels of human egoism; free at last, the soul delights in the passing moment, but does not bid it away. It has completed the pattern.

(Penguin Books, NY, 1963, p. 190-191)

Maugham is very hopeful about what lies ahead (lived into his nineties), but fears and forces of age are to be observed. Loss of energy, loss of ability, loss of senses are major deficits in any human being, whether young and old. They are common with age. There may seem to be more time, but remember each act takes longer. Secondary symptoms accompany these deficiencies: loss of confidence, reduced sense of fitting in, being inflexible and frequently misunderstanding.

Maugham writes about a small percentage of people when he assumes as a person ages responsibilities, hatreds, prejudices and states of mind can change more easily. Age frequently ossifies points of view, sets biases, and gives obligations an anchor while limiting choices, augmenting burdens and submitting to predilection. The long and short of Maugham’s aging theory is, success in fulfilling it for all people happens long before they reach old age. If persons have no ability or inclination to change or learn from life and its experiences at 20 years or at 40 years, it can be assumed that people will not change at 60 years or at 80 years. Will people “undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long?” Are persons with no sense of passion and no desire capable of mastering new learning, seeing new perspectives on life, and taking new efforts to reach satisfaction?

It is more likely that most elderly will disappear quietly, except they vote. They get the most benefits from the government; they claim they have contributed and they are owed. That is true if they remain active. If they are passive and do nothing for themselves, for Americans and the country, that is the worst result. The old can participate and become elders – have a satisfactory life in old age, but that is a role to be earned.

Today is a situation that the Boomer and more recent generations must face, and it might be considered a joke like an earlier incident. Miley Cyrus did a skit. Apparently everyone was offended, but what is disgusting about it? I’ve not seen but heard about it. [My eyes are too sensitive. Having written a long novel about the Nixon years in Berkeley, I’ve seen more than I can imagine, about anatomy, bodies and activities arising from each.] About the skit Mothers and Fathers, throughout America deplore that it was broadcast without any rating: INAPPROPRIATE FOR TEENAGERS AND CHILDREN WHO WILL SEE IT ON THE INTERNET. Someone asked why the MTV producers allowed it on the air?

Is this the first time parents have talked to their kids about sex, love, life, drugs and the commercialism about all those topics? If it happened this morning and this week, it is too late. The idea that Miley Cyrus has presented a defining moment in American history is nonsense. As part of raising children, parents have the responsibility to be parents, just like all other animals do, and teach the young what is important, how to act, what to do, and how to get and use protection against culture and society. The skit is not Pearl Harbor, 9-1-1, or The Free Speech Movement.

Did Cyrus do this out of the blue? NO, she grew up with it. Remember Bill and Monica, a couple that will live in celebrity, in notoriety, in infamy. There were cigars, the acts and gyrations, no “sex-with-that-woman” and the other lies, the blue dress. Front page news for a few years, and Bill Clinton was a punch line while arguing that he had prerogatives, privileges and immunities to lie in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a third woman he victimized. The women were right; Bill was wrong, as is reflected in the large settlement he paid. However, the third woman was referred to generously by Clinton supporters as trailer trash. Apparently any woman bringing a sexual harassment charge against Bill was trailer trash, and no one defended those women; no one complained about the belittling, mocking, deriding “the third woman” or “that woman,” either. Just throw those women and all other like women under the bus. I wonder if the women who were subjected to Bob Filner’s (San Diego mayor) advances, affections and moves should be so labeled. Filner complained he was targeted in Republican San Diego because he is a Democrat.

There was some hope after Bill and Monica. Apparently Al Gore had indiscretions, and his wife, Tipper, divorced the asshole. I voted for Al, but in one way, I’m happy he lost: Any politician who can’t keep his indiscretions confidential should not be president. It is said that the French nation laughs at American shock and dismay that our politicians have affairs. That is incorrect. The French laugh because American politicians are indiscrete and like to be found with their pants down.

So what of the skit that Cyrus acted. First, there are no lies and no lawsuit; anything she did is less serious. Second, it is probably bad entertainment just like it was bad news 15 years ago. Third, if the content was all right for America in 1997, what is the difference in 2013? PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC, cable news and (All the news that is fit to print) The New York Times versus MTV, today? It is sour grapes that MTV did it first. Fourth, if the perpetrators and the acts themselves were not condemned in 1997, why are people spouting off, hypocritically, today?

What does this have to do with age? Reason, judgment, logic, thinking don’t improve with age unless each human being reflects, thinks and knows. A twenty year old can know as much as a sixty year old. Memories and memory don’t always play well in human beings, young, middle aged or old. Why cringe at sex today and yet when younger, not be startled or alarmed by lies, lawsuits, sex and abuse of power in 1997? I don’t condone Miley Cyrus, but I’m not shocked or surprised anyone would overlook the chance to do her skit. Anything to keep the name before the public benefits her. However, gaining a name by being a-serial-killer-want-to-be-musician appears to be the limit.

Charles Manson didn’t have the charisma, the savoir faire or grace to use older words. He didn’t talk well; he was a poor singer; he danced badly, he sneered when he smiled. He lacked the cherished traits to pass and get the attention and love from other human beings. Anyone who can do those needs no talent, no training, no ability and no mind. Just show the audience you’re willing to do anything to get the face and name into lights, on TV, before the public, on the Internet – chatter, sing, smile and dance senselessly.

Being old only allows people to forget what happened 15, 33, 50 years ago; there is no virtue or benefit in a poor memory or an inability to communicate accurately or with wisdom. Some people were causal 15 years ago, and are shocked today, and Americans may only say, we have learned nothing over the course of our lives. We should know our reactions to the Cyrus skit should not now be astonishment and horror. That should have happened in 1997 and 1998. Today we be ashamed.

 

MY OUTLOOK

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I watch the world daily, and sometimes doubt whether the sun will rise tomorrow. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be so bad. Each day world wide seems a catastrophe. The reasons are primarily – too many people live on Earth – with much better communications so we learn everything immediately – we see indicators of disaster in our own society.

About 200 years ago in 1815 Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupted, and in 1816 the United States had a year without summer. It snowed in New England in July; no one knew why. Today that eruption would be on the news and INSTANT CONCERN! Prices for agricultural prices would rise; other commodities would rise or fall. Vacation plans would change – no surf, no sun, no sand. Humans would lose a season of bikini fashions. More fabric would be used go ward off the cold.

Academians, journalists and analysts, chattering away, would make projections, forecasts and predications. Some might blame man for the geological disaster, like the actor who blamed the Haitian earthquake on global warming. Other people would say it’s God’s punishment. Many would say or imply this is a new situation – it has never happened before. All those people are WRONG – talk is frequently WRONG. Those people make livings from WRONGNESS.

Disasters have happened before, whatever the force or the cause: God, gravity, geology or Gaia. This planet is not stable; the weather is not predictable, for five days let alone temperatures in 100 years. Human beings cannot survive without struggle. Some disasters in the past killed only a few human beings: 1857 quake along the San Andres Fault; the 1809 New Madrid earthquake; the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. Change the time or the location (a little) and Los Angeles could be devastated by the southern San Andres Fault moving; the Mississippi River Valley would be greatly altered by a 9.0 earthquake. If Mt. Raneir, 150 miles north of Helens, goes, wipe Seattle from the map.

The disaster themselves seem horrible, but worse today everyone in the world would see it and the aftermath on TV or the Internet. We saw the aftermath of the Indonesians 2004 earthquake/tsunami and the 2011 Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. Seeing it in real time is significant, but doesn’t make the reporting better: There are still the questions: “How do you feel?” “What were you thinking?” “Were you scared?”

A neighbor was holding a video camera during a 1994 earthquake, and he yelled, “Holy Shit!” I believe that is a legitimate response to any disaster and as an answer to any of those questions. But the TV stations didn’t want to report it. Newspapers tried to make the news fit.

Man made disasters could have been avoided without misses. No way. There has been the easy reporting of global warming and scores of incidences and thousands of theories coming from scientists seeking government research money. It’s a disaster, theoretically in 100 years, provided the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse don’t show up. I notice there is little research to prevent that appearance.

Since 1994, Rwanda, Clinton didn’t see it, sorry. Didn’t see Darfur/Sudan, sorry; missed the USS Cole, sorry. Bush 9-11, who’s calling, huh? Why fight in Afghanistan, Duh? WMD, Iraq war, Huh? The corrupt narco state of Afghanistan is no worse than Chicago, Obama, 2009.

I Will Bear Witness – Criticism

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I WILL BEAR WITNESS

     Victor Klemperer

This Diary (1933-1945) was written by a Protestant who had converted from Judaism. Victor married a Protestant and was a professor of literature teaching at a University in Dresden until 1935. He was thoroughly a liberal German; he admits he would not be Jewish except that he was compelled to be one by the Nazis. If Klemperer is a familiar name, it is due to Otto Klemperer, the great Twentieth Century conductor and Victor’s cousin. Victor, thereby, was an uncle to Otto Klemperer’s son, Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink of “Hogan’s Heroes.” 

Although somewhat uneven, the Diary of 1000 pages, is compelling. The first impression of the Nazis was their obscurantism. Anything Nazi morons could not understand (Einstein’s physics) they labeled Jewish and non-Germanic. They sought a Teutonic/Aryan paradise among descendants of Poles and Slavs, populations which moved west after the Germanic tribes (Lombards, Franks and Goths) who had fought the Romans and moved south and west. Based upon this mogrel genetic heritage, the Nazis wished for a people of one biological substance of Gothic purity. The premises of the Nazi system were fairytales and nonsense. A remnant of reason and fact was the spark that kept Klemperer, his wife, Jews, non-believers and others not deluded by cuckoo-cloud deliriums. None of the Nazi opponents realized what Hugh Trevor-Roper knew: “facts don’t trouble the bigot and the crank.”

If there had been no War and if the Nazis had remained in power, Germany would have become a second-rate power for its hard nose myths and failures to invest in basic research and to support academic and educational excellence. While being shunned, confined in a world of limited activity and losing library privileges,  Klemperer researched and wrote in his field. During impromptu searches and raids of his homes, Nazi goons would steal the obvious (food) and destroy the useful, cigarette wrapping papers, but leave Klemperer’s writings in tact. The reader suspects that Nazis could not read.

During those times he was forbidden to possess and read Nazi books like Mein Kampf, and biographies of Goering and Himmler. Yet he obtained and read each. He noted Hitler was an excellent orator – while speaking adding emotion but no substance, repeating himself and stating the most obvious by dramatic means. About Mein Kampf Klemperer reported what others like Heinrich Boll have observed. It is poorly written, a dictation put on paper by Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s prison mate.

The Diary gives insights about fighting boredom. Klemperer and his wife lived and as time went by,  there were many fewer opportunities to see friends, to keep their cat, drive until 1941, to enjoy peace and quiet, to reflect and to contemplate. Safety, food and health were primary concerns. Boredom was a psychological force telling them to die, go away, make a mistake so the Gestapo would arrest and dispose of them. During the War all Germans suffered from these deprivations, but Jews and individuals from mixed marriages endured them 12 years. Klemperer arrives at no conclusion to overcome boredom, except to survive. It is left to readers of the Diary to understand and make accommodations with existence to make their own lives worth while.

There are omissions and drawbacks in the Diary. Klemperer was mostly restricted in his movements. Background is missing. He tells little about the times in Dresden beyond his own observations. He includes very few jokes, ironies and humor, e.g. It is the Fourth Reich, and every German must answer in a questionnaire: “Were you arrested during the previous regime? If not, why?”

Klemperer also never loses his voice and position of status, professor and privilege. He should be treated especially. He notes benefiting from his standing. Many non-Jewish, non-compromised Germans give him preferences and perks. The reader can only guess about the man inside the status, privilege and exalted standing. It is difficult to determine if he survives because of ingrained wit, native intelligence and luck, or how non-Nazi Germans treat him or how Nazi society pegs him and he abides the rules.

Consequently when Klemperer writes, he rarely questions himself, how he has acted within his scope of Dresden society and among individuals he sees. This lack of perspective and withdrawal affects the writing. One notable exception is when Klemperer admits to stealing food from his housemates. In many ways, after reading the Diary of 12 years, Klemperer should be known to the reader beyond some of what he did to survive. He is not. One suspects details are unobserved and unwritten, but include trivialities which Klemperer longs for, going to the barber (wife, hair stylist). Why didn’t he cut his wife’s hair, and she his? No answer.

Early in the Diary Klemperer often raises a subject arising from circumstances, and doesn’t develop it. He either does not want to explain much or he pompously notes it to show off his intelligence. Later his analyses becomes more complete. He introduces hundreds of people. It is difficult to keep all of them straight or to follow tidbits of their stories as they happen, even when so and so is taken to Theresienstadt and to Auschwitz. Klemperer does not know what happens in Auschwitz except that going there [and to any Concentration Camp] means death. The Nazis maintained the pretense of normalcy and the façade of legality by issuing death certificates for some deportees. In the end the reader is left wondering what happened to people in the Diary, this person or that one in Dresden after the February 1945 bombing. The editor of the Diary should have cleared up some mysteries.

These weaknesses should not support any conclusion that this Diary should not be read. Klemperer wrote them and they were transported and preserved at great risk to everyone (Germans and mixed-marriage couples). They were written under conditions of physical hardship, sickness, lack of medical care, mental and physical distress and stress brought on by Nazi cruelty, being ordered to kill the pet cat, compelled to forced labor while in ill-health and always confronted with slow death by starvation, if not a quicker means by deportation. In the end any reader must conclude Klemperer did about as well as anyone could in surviving and in writing.

A sensation of reading the two volumes should be noted. The paperback is smaller, less weight and of smaller print. For ease of reading the hardbound books should be used, but the suffering and struggle on the pages can be physically reinforced by reading the paperbacks.

Finally, there is a tragic irony about the Diary. Several times Klemperer writes he will make so and so famous by writing the name down. If the Diary survived, each person would be known. The Diary was secured mostly by Anne-Marie. After the February 1945 bombing Klemperer and wife left and went to Bavaria on forged papers. The war ended with them in the American zone. Klemperer returned to Dresden in the Russian Zone, East Germany, retaking a University job until death in 1960. He published some academic works. The Preface to the Diary observes Klemperer’s reaction to a Russian Commissar after a 1945 interview, “just like a Gestapo agent.” The Diary was collected but remained unpublished because the Communists didn’t like it. It was published after German reunification in 1995. The persons in the Diary are thereby unfamous, and perhaps not likely to be known, ever. Readers do not know what happened to Anne-Marie, savior of the Diary: After the War Victor Klemperer make the mistake of living in the East under a system akin to Nazism.

 

 

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FORWARD. Most Americans recognize FORWARD as the promotional, advertising slogan of MSNBC.

But they do not know what most Europeans know. FORWARD was the primary order of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s Army, when German soldiers were killing women, children and the elderly. For instance, “Think forward, look forward, ride forward,” was the order of the day given to the German 1st Cavalry Division crossing into the Netherlands on May 10, 1940.

Forward was also on orders given to the Wehrmacht invading Russia on June 22, 1941.

See Yeide, Harry, FIGHTING PATTON, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, 2011, p. 60, 104.

The Nazis used FORWARD beyond military orders. On German Memorial Day, March 10, 1940, a newspaper headline read, OVER THE GRAVES FORWARD. see William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary, NY, Knopf, 1941, p. 296.

MSNBC should end its Wehrmacht slogan and apologize to the human race and specifically those who suffered under and who fought the Nazis.