Romance of Death, Sublimity, My Email · 15 June 2008
Political-culture journalism at the turn of the 70s was like a polite bloody fistfight of the Dead Poet’s Society. Highflown but edited crisp, seething but restrained, snottily fratricidal with a huge goddam vocabulary and no compunctions about Shakespeare-based explanations. I’m too bad-mannered and prone to comma splices to capture its perfection in just a sentence. Alex Cockburn, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Calvin Trillin and of course WF Buckley: so addictive they made the year I spent obsessed with Contra War history a bit obscenely gratifying. It’s surprising I didn’t turn in to a historian of all this snot-nosed refinement, disappearing back into the era of my childhood as a way to stay competent and avoid the polyglot, deregulated chaos of the present.
And maybe I will go back eventually, and settle as an historian of 1976-84 or so. Although then I would write this way all the time, and you would leave only to be replaced by sag-faced, chalky professors and students who only listen for the test questions.
Nevertheless I have to excerpt the Lewis Lapham aria that Matthew K sent me. Apropo of neo-Camelot, Edward Kennedy, hero worship, and maybe the placebo effect but nothing else really. It’s from Harper’s, December 1979. “Romance of Death.”
By the way, I have letters to a few people sitting here in a backlog in my head, but I am not sure when they will get written. I’m trying to follow an order of operations that places the dissertation first. No fun; but also, no guilt. Soon. Meanwhile here is Lapham, tracing a myth right out of his hot little typewriter. My idea of aesthetic pleasure.
To the extent that Senator Kennedy remains invisible, he can be defined as a gravitational field, drawing to himself devotees who imagine that their own lives acquire meaning only insofar as they fall within the sphere of a magical object. The same kind of adulation attaches itself to rock stars and celebrated criminals. On the few occasions when I have come across Senator Kennedy in a private circumstance I have found him, as in his public persona, besieged by flatterers and hangers-on, by the Bacchantes who would devour him and yet, at the same time, who protect him as it he were the reflection of a god….
This kind of adoration has an unhappy effect on the people subjected to it, and I can imagine that Senator Kennedy must be sick of being admired for reasons that have nothing to do with himself—because of his name, because people look to him for miracles, preferment, or relief from boredom…. But if the adulation of the mob has a dissolving effect on its victims, it has an equally dissolving effect on the people so eager to negate themselves in the fires of self-immolation. The expression on the face of [devotees of Senator Kennedy] I have seen in the faces of the disciples of Hare Krishna…. I noticed it most recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, among the leading citizens who had come to listen to Senator Kennedy’s views on foreign policy. As is his custom, he said nothing of substance, choosing instead to propound a series of platitudes. But the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who composed the Senator’s audience had come to be taken out of themselves, to be transformed in the presence of power, and so they listened to a banal speech as if it were a song sung by Mick Jagger.
Over the past twenty years the mere willingness to campaign for the office of the American Presidency has come to be understood as a self-destructive act…. The American electorate apparently seeks to elect constitutional deities on whom it confers absolute power for a brief period of time and then, discovering itself betrayed, it tears the god to pieces. If the king must die, then only a man as detached from life as Senator Kennedy, cast in the image of every man but himself, could be persuaded to set forth on so perilous a journey.
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The Dionysian element—“tearing the god to pieces”—seems to have changed a bit with the Reagan mythology that’s cropped up. In a fashion rather like that of Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Reagan’s mythologizers have very much chosen to “print the legend.” More than that, even.
The seventies really were a marvelous decade for print. Oddly, there’s something continuous, something that echoes, in texts as perhaps disparate as H. S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Combine all of this with “New Hollywood” (Spielberg, Coppola, et. al.) and “family” pictures that are not by any stretch “family values” pictures (Kramer vs. Kramer?), and it’s quite a trip, to say nothing of Studio 54, R. Crumb, the continuing work of Stan Brakhage, etc etc etc.
Posted by: patrick · Jun 16, 05:32 AM · #
Strunk and White weren’t well known in the ’70s?
Posted by: Carl · Jun 16, 02:27 PM · #
Thanks for posting. In response to 1979 “Romance of Death” my brain says: Joy Division. And that’s about it- I don’t know much about the time I was born except that I love some of the music. So it’s nice to feel slightly edified and make reading lists, even if I don’t do the reading.
Posted by: natalie · Jun 17, 11:08 AM · #
Patrick is good for reading lists.
Joy Division is good for everything. Add to your list: Control, the recent biopic. Loved it.
Would it be sick and wrong to suggest Play It As It Lays to my hipster/ entertainment industry/ yogi book group? I’ve never actually read it. Previous titles are Netherland and Love in the Ruins. (This ain’t no Eat, Pray, Love reading group.)
Strunk and White: I would be interested to know the rises and falls in its popularity the past 90 years. Of course I love it, though some of the writers I end up enjoying most are rulebreakers. In theory, I hate florid prose. But I tend to fall for it anyway, if it’s done well.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 17, 11:19 AM · #
BTW, who are the most artful journalists now, just on the level of craft?
I love Rebecca Solnit and Walter Kirn.
Worst journalism: the genre of Village Voice, LA Weekly, Believer hipster snark (n+1, ok). And Maureen Dowd. Bleh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 17, 11:25 AM · #
Play it, as reading group fodder: the hipsters, I think, will like it. The entertainment industry probably knows it, but might not, and I think they’ll find it hit and miss. I don’t see how the yogis will like it (it’s not a far pitch from overt nihilism on many levels), but hey, it’s worth a read anyway.
There is, apparently, a film adaptation of the book (which is short and easy to read, btw), but I could not lay hands upon it. Worth a look, according to critics.
Haha: I’m good for reading lists. As it was put to me a minute ago, “hey, we’re academics, we’re trained to talk in bibliography.”
Posted by: patrick · Jun 17, 11:34 AM · #
Endnote or Procite?
Endnote is the future.
Bibliographies are a whole ‘nother level of exhibitionism. I have a certain suspicion of them….
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 17, 11:41 AM · #
I’m much more proud of my bibliographies than of the articles that preface them.
Posted by: R · Jun 17, 01:44 PM · #
Endnote, for sure, not least of which for its wonderful ability to organize entire personal libraries of articles and books according to your own arcane methods (not merely for the purposes of citation).
And yeah: just last week I read the entire back catalogue of Lapham and Wolfe as published in Harper’s pages. A worthwhile endeavor, for all with subscriptions. Makes bullshit out of the NYer’s expensively archived cd-roms, when the H-bomb lets you go back and read original PDFs of Hawthorne and Melville using nothing more advanced nor expensive than a Wi-Fi card. Three cheers for nonprofit magazines.
As for critics/commentators: I like Walter Kirn sometimes, it’s true, and Stephen Burt is an absolute bear when it comes to public appraisals of writing, as is obviously Alex ross on classical music and David Thomson on film. David Foster Wallace gave up brilliant commentary on McCain back in the day—for which I wish I had a link—but he ain’t a journalist. Charles D’Ambrosio’s journalistic/belletristic essays for The Stranger (collected as “Orphans” on clear cut press), are brilliantly tuned in as well.
Whew.
Posted by: dailymiltonian · Jun 17, 04:18 PM · #