Sin before suffering

Wrapping up the Jarrett. I've never read a book like it and the further I get into it the more bizarre it becomes. I don't know where its academic utility would be exactly - perhaps not for history; more, I think, for training people in how to be literary critics or commentators or psychoanalysts, which I think was his idea too, to some extent. I do know that I would love to write books in this one's style, but I don't have the general knowledge, or the in-depth understanding of a given era.

A history of the imagination, it calls itself, from Victoria's accession to World War One; a history of the more changeable bits of collective thinking that seem so immutable when you're the one thinking them. A self-confessedly Jungian history, with an unexpectedly dramatic tone - almost something serialized about they way he organizes it, the way Conan Doyle and Victoria and Gladstone and Disraeli pop in and out of focus . . .

The other night I was struck by an account from the "Watchers upon the high towers" chapter, which is full of apocalypse. Many people before 1881 thought the world would end that year, and many people after 1881 thought the world had ended - that they were now in post-Rapture chaos or the reign of Christ on earth (I can never keep all those Christian stories straight). Jarrett mentions one extremely popular lecturer and author, Josiah Strong, who I'd never heard of before, who believed that the Christians of the United States had it in their power:

". . . during the next ten or fifteen years to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years." But first they must stop letting members of inferior races into America, since only the Anglo-Saxons were "exponents of a pure spiritual Christianity". Then they must steer clear of idleness, atheism, popery, alcohol and above all socialism, "which attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin". . . the Librarian of Congress later said the book had an impct second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Looking into this sort of thing strikes me as incredibly important, and incredibly underdone in terms of how history is presented to dilettantes like myself at least. . . the beginnings of ideas, the emotional bases of what we're convinced is our rationalism, seem to me like one of the most important things you could know about history. Socialism isn't just a problem because the rich have to sacrifice some of their wealth, it's an emotional problem because you don't know that the people it benefits have done anything to deserve that we attempt to relieve their suffering - there's a moral angle to the history of the massive resistance to socialism in the United States that needs to be understood, if not admired . . .

World's cutest degenerates

There are lots of benefits to having an Australian boyfriend. One of them is the unfailing funniness of the way he says words like "beer" and "groin" and "shit" - despite his years and years of living abroad and modulating his accent to be comprehensible to Europeans and Canadians, some words, like the three just listed, are said with multiple syllables and vowel sounds that just don't exist in any other mouths I've ever experienced, and it's hilarious. "Beeeeeiiiyaah." Marvellous. (He laughs at the way I say "gazebo", "granola" and "coffee" so it's allowed.)

Another is that being excessively fond of him has made me more interested in the country he comes from, which is interesting in its own right due the bizarre flora and fauna. Take koalas. They're fucking adorable, right? Look at this fucking adorable koala:

Until the F-word started dominating my consciousness I was content to leave it at that - "aw, koalas, adorable" and move my brain along to the next task at hand. But do you know what else about koalas? They're the fucking dregs of society in the classic Daily Mail sense. They spend all day sleeping, getting stoned out of their minds on psychotropic leaves, once in awhile managing to lazily fuck each other without either protection or discretion, and spreading the clap across their population like wildfire. Lazy, venereal disease-ridden junkies. Marvellous. Except it's killing them. And the government isn't going to take it anymore. No special treatment for those nasty little things. Just because everyone adores them doesn't mean they can be filthy decadent hophead sluts and expect the rest of us to clean up after them.

Poor koalas. I still love them.

Well. A nasty little entry about the world's cutest animals dying of the clap was my attempt at an fluffy escape from blogging about how fucked up everything is. Some of you have been sweet enough to worry about me. I'm actually okay, I think - not to worry, at least. We're getting counselling at the office, I have fantastic support from my koala-loving partner, I've been super-touched to have your sweet messages, and this is Belgium, not North America; I can go on stress leave if I need to, and I will if I need to, but right now I don't.

I don't know if it's as morbid as all hell or not, but I worked out that around the time my colleague disappeared, I had this song in my head, and listening to it once every morning, as I'm blogging and getting ready for work, is somehow a massive comfort:



Soon I'll be ready to start thinking about things like the long-term philosophical view about souls over bodies, which gentle Rodelinda, with great emotional delicacy, suggested suggesting. Not yet though. Right now I'll just keep listening to the Final Fantasy song that was stuck in my head when he disappeared, morbid as hell or not.

Four escape routes

Speaking of escaping into books during a time of fuckery: the bookshop across from my favourite grocery store where I picked up Decline and Fall as soon as finishing Brideshead Revisited is fucking ace. This weekend I got quite a haul besides the Waugh:

Goodbye to All That - sqeeeeeee! Robert Graves is awesome on a stick. No wonder Ava Gardner hit that when it was already old enough to break. And there's so much more of him to read as I've only had the awesomeness of I, Claudius/Claudius the God and his Greek Myths. Both are really really worth reading no matter what sort of relationship you think you have with classical studies, and the Greek Myths is earth-shaking, as far as I'm concerned anyways. Each chapter tells the myth in a way directly drawn and referenced from a range of source texts, and, following the references, gets re-interpreted Gravesianly - through the lense of murderous fertility cults, matriarchies, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. And he is just the silkiest, friendliest writer - a real sort of formality to his phrasing which is nonetheless inviting, engaging - a nice big wingback easy chair; imposing, but upholstered with comfy velvet instead of patrician oxblood leather.

Mummy won it as a school prize some decades ago and it was sitting on my grandparent's bookshelves when I was a bored 13-year-old; one thing led to another, and, well, I don't think there's a single work that's had more of an influence on my symbolic or metaphorical thinking than that one, for better or worse. I didn't buy into it but I swallowed it whole, if you can see the difference. Part of my brain forever.

Grapes of Wrath - for the F-word. He hasn't read it yet. Enough said.

Far From the Madding Crowd - someone told me that this was the least depressing of Thomas Hardy's books and that it was even more or less funny. Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Personally I didn't think the Mayor of Casterbridge was depressing, I thought it was just awesome. Okay, the will at the end from the guy as read by his !!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! pseudo-daughter was tragic - it was a tragic book - but depressing? Anyways. I'm nonetheless curious about Far From the Madding Crowd. And I'm running out of Hardys that I'm willing to read. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I gave up on that one halfway when I fully realized what a downer that was going to be - and Jude the Obscure - uhm, no. I've heard too much about it.

Murder on the Orient Express - it's a Poirot novel so I was hoping it'd help with my perceptions of Belgian retardation. It didn't. But I enjoy the language - already archaic - it happens so fast! Pukka sahib indeed.

Some histories need to end

Brideshead Revisited, ugh, a nasty little book about horribly nasty people, but such a good read that almost immediately upon finishing I bought Decline and Fall from a lovely new used bookshop that just opened across from my favourite grocery store.

Waugh provides a ghastly cure for anybody who fears that they're finding Graham Greene's bleak and gruelling vision of British Catholic duty has anything convincingly heroic to it outside of the Graham Greeniverse. Mind you I liked it very much, if not as much as the Graham Greeniverse, upon accepting the world of the novel for what it was . . . a place populated by the sort of people Monty Python made fun of, the End of Old Money History.

BTW, the End of History is such an interesting idea, isn't it? You'd think Fukuyama et al would have hestitated a bit more before proclaiming it considering the consistency to which it's been proclaimed over a history of our race and planet which, whatever else you'd like to say about it, certainly hasn't ended yet. As a matter of fact, offhand I have to say they way people Keep! Reporting! The END!!!!!! Of History!!!!! is one of the best advertisements I can think of offhand for postmodern historiography.

People are attached to their world view, to their own lifespan, to the extent that generation after generation can proclaim the End of History with amazing regularity, and re-arrange history to argue that it has led up inexorably to that End Point. I think it's probably a fairly natural instinct, as far as anything we've had an instinct to do since we started wearing clothes is 'natural', but I also think that inclination is a damn good reason to bend yourself into pretzels in the effort to take an objective, distrustful view of history. And people who say otherwise smell bad. But I digress.

Brideshead Revisited, grim, awfully grim. Not utterly without humour though. It is so nice to escape into books these days. Everything continues fucked, as you can imagine.