The Debatable Land

Notebook

A provocative blast:

Mr Bowers's book is a long one and in parts it is painfully dull; nevertheless... it is a magnificent antidote to the whole rumble-bumble of Law Enforcement, with side swipes at all the other varieties of pious nonsense which now delude the American people. It deals with a period when "idealism" was loose upon the land as never before or since, and the tale it has to tell is one of almost unmitigated oppression, corruption and false pretenses. Then, as now, politicians, theologians and stock-jobbers combined to bring in the Millenium, and then, as now, the fruits were only extortion and excess. It is difficult, reading the record, to believe it. It seems a sheer impossibility that such things could have happened in a country pretending to be civilized. Yet happen they did, and not all the scouring and polishing of prostitute historians can ever erase the damning facts...

Mr Bowers unearths some curious and sardonic details... the learned jurists of the Federal judiciary... were always ready with decisions justifying the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the confiscation of private property, the stealing of elections, the waste of the public funds. History repeats itself in our own day...

HL  Mencken reviewing the Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln by Claude G Bowers. The American Mercury, November 1929. Mencken, of course, is referring to the Grant administration and post-war reconstruction in the South.

Notebook

A sober thought from Chairman Oscar:

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread"

So said Oscar Wilde. Of course, one might also say these days that journalism is increasingly unread and literature increasingly unreadable.

Notebook

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."

Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

Notebook at the Movies

Anthony Lane (who else?) on Barbara Stanwyck in this week's New Yorker:

Tucked into her résumé are a number of movies in which the old, high-stepping talents were dusted off: “Ten Cents a Dance” (1931) and “Lady of Burlesque” (1943), which boasts not only my favorite screen credit of all time (“Based on the novel ‘G-String Murders’ by Gypsy Rose Lee”) but a snappy speech in which Stanwyck, playing a dancer, explains her froideur to a vaudeville comic who has the hots for her, and in so doing glances back at the rearing of Ruby Stevens [Stanwyck's real name]:

I went into show business when I was seven years old. Two days later the first comic I ever met stole my piggy bank at a railroad station in Portland. When I was eleven, the comics were looking at my ankles. When I was fourteen, they were . . . just lookin’. 
 
During that brief pause, Stanwyck works in a shrug and the raise of an eyebrow. Film theory has dwelled, with justice, on what is called the objectifying male gaze—that is, the power of the camera to ogle and depersonalize, and to encourage the viewer to follow suit—without always remembering that, at Hollywood’s height, there were plenty of people who could take that gaze like a punch and throw it right back.

Notebook: Boswell style

"SUNDAY JULY 7TH, 1776: Thought I would go and see Mr David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just a-dying. I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure he used to present. He had before him Dr. Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. I think these were his words. I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced. He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke. I asked him if he was not religious when he was young. He said he was, and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them. This, he said, was strange work; for instance, to try if, notwithstanding his excelling his schoolfellows, he had no pride or vanity. He smiled in ridicule of this as absurd and contrary to fixed principles and necessary consequences, not adverting that religious discipline does not mean to extinguish, but to moderate, the passions; and certainly an excess of pride or vanity is dangerous and generally hurtful. He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious. This was just an extravagant reverse of the common remark as to infidels.

I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever. That immorality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities; that a great proportion dies in infancy before being possessed of reason; yet all these must be immortal; that a porter who gets drunk by ten o'clock with gin must be immortal; that the trash of every age must be preserved, and that new universes must be created to contain such infinite numbers."

From James Boswell's account of his last visit to David Hume.