Leftists Give Grateful Dead Props, But Not This Leftist

Jordy Cummings in Red Wedge Magazine:

"What can be said about the Grateful Dead that has not been said before? They are on one hand somewhere below Coldplay and Nickelback on the list of hatred-objects for Leftists of who came of age between the late 80s and late 90s [...] As the Marxist scholar and Deadhead Carol Brightman points out, the intelligentsia never understood the Grateful Dead [...] Actually looking at their concrete musical achievements, they are in more ways a west coast counterpart to their contemporaries in the Velvet Underground, who had the luxury of a relative lack of success keeping their historical reputation unsullied[...]"

1) I like Coldplay. I came of age in the 1970's, and for all I know my opinion of Coldplay might be much different if I had any idea what their lyrics mean or what they do besides the music.

2) Has any member of the Velvet Underground ever said anything about the Dead being their counterparts or comrades or that they liked their music or anything else about them even a tiny bit positive? I think Marxist Deadhead Carol Brightman may be going a teeny ways out on a limb here.

3) As I've said before on this blog, anyone who thinks success is a burden or that failure is a luxury doesn't know a damn thing about failure or about how fortunate they are. I would suggest working with the homeless for several years or more in the hope of developing some depth as a yuman being.

4) I almost forgot: in case it wasn't already obvious: I've never liked the Grateful Dead. Like Timothy Leary, they had the dumb luck in the mid-60's to be in the same place at the same time with some people who were relatively deep, and rode that commercially for decades. The Dead are the quintessence of "grinning-hippie capitalism," whether Hunter S Thompson was thinking of them when he coined that phrase, or not. The Velvet Underground, on the other hand: made of 100% authentic awesome.

I'm Imagining Ken Burns And Artie Shaw,

finishing up an interview for Burn's documentary TV series "Jazz," an interview which has gone on a bit into the evening, so Burns invites Shaw over to the Tavern on the Green for a drink, and although normally it would be just a short walk from Shaw's apartment, it's raining, so they take a limo instead.

There's a line of taxis dropping people off at the entrance to Tavern on the Green, so they get out and walk a few car lengths in the dark, and Artie almost trips and falls over a homeless person who's passed out in the rain from hunger and exhaustion -- who, if this was the mid-90's, could have been me! -- and they mistakenly assume the person is drunk or high and mumble a little bit about Why doesn't someone get a handle on that problem, and the doorman knows them and zips them right in past a line of people standing, and they sit at the bar sipping 30-year-old unblended Scotch and gradually getting very sad as they agree with each other how no-one understands what a horrible burden their success is.

Oh, I hope so much that some day really soon I am allowed to experience for myself the way that tremendous success is so much harder to bear than being homeless and hungry and so tired that you pass out on some pavement and are half-awakened by some rich guy almost stumbling over you in the dark on his way to someplace warm and snug where he will sip 30-year-old unblended Scotch and complain about how no-one understands that success is so much harder to bear than failure!

Artie Shaw Said Success Was Harder Than Failure

What a shame that so much success was wasted on someone so ignorant. Imagine how shockingly little someone would have to know about failure in order to say something that dumb.

Shaw was making a living as a musician at age 16 and sold tens of millions of records before age 30. That's how little he knew about failure.

He made that boneheaded remark on Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, speaking of someone insufficiently acquainted with failure. I've gotta think that many documentarians --- documentarians. Try to imagine, if you can, the gulf between how familiar the average documentarian is with failure, and how much Ken Freakin Burns could possibly know about it -- Ah say Ah say, I have to think that many documentarians would have kindly cut that remark out of the documentary, because they would have had quite a good idea how much it made Shaw sound like a horse's ass.

You don't know what I'm talking about? Good for you! And Shaw, and Burns!

As far as I can tell, Artie Shaw and Arnold Shaw weren't related. Artie was by far the better musician. On the other hand, Arnold said and wrote things which weren't ridiculous.

By The Time Nietzsche Was My Age He Had Been Completely Crazy For 10 Years

And I'm feeling a bit frustrated myself, frustrated by the whole not-being-rich-and-famous thing. But I'm not completely crazed by the frustration, not yet. (Although I realize, of course, that anyone who ever says "I'm not crazy" must add, in order to be logical: " -- at least I don't THINK I'm crazy. But if I WAS crazy, how would I KNOW?")

Before he went completely insane all at once early in 1889, Nietzsche had reconciled himself, or so he claimed, with his lack of popular success. Some writers, he said, were destined to be recognized only posthumously, and he counted himself among those. He was wrong about that. He became very famous before he died -- but, unfortunately, not until he had been completely insane for several years. Which kinda spoils it in a way.

Some of you may be asking, "What th' Heck, Steve -- are you actually comparing yourself to Nietzsche now?!"

Yes, I actually am. I finally got tired of just sitting back and waiting for others to start comparing me to people like Nietzsche -- not because of the tragedy of his biography but for the brilliance of his writing. Yeah, I actually am comparing myself to the greatest writers who ever lived. In part because I want to be rich and famous. But also in part because I actually think I'm one of the greatest writers who ever lived, there, I said it. I DESERVE to be rich and famous, there, I said that too.

I deserve huge success BEFORE I die or go completely insane from waiting. (Assuming that I haven't actually already gone completely insane because if I had how would I know?)

When I read Nietzsche saying that when he reads Spinoza he knows that they are kindred spirits, I know what that's like. I feel exactly the same way about Nietzsche. (Although not in every single detail: I don't share Nietzsche's sexism, and I'm a socialist and he was an ivory-tower guy who claimed to be "above" politics. I got over the ivory-tower kind of silliness many years ago.) I feel less so about Spinoza because I'm not nearly as fluent in Latin as I am in German.

Oh well, here I go, pushing "Publish" again and hoping that this post will be The One --

I'm Having An Extremely Difficult Time Finding Information About Classical Scholarship In Peru

Yes, I'm sure that this would be much easier if my Spanish were better, thanks for asking.

Why Peru? Because the University of San Marcos in Lima has been in continuous operation since 1551. (Sorry, Harvard.)

No results found for "classical scholarship in peru".

No results found for "erudición clásica en Perú".

Ah, but soon after that, we find that "erudición clásica" in Spanish does not mean the same thing as "Classical education" in English: the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature.

Okay, I guess next we'll try filología.

"filología en peru" yields 2 hits.

Hm, it would seem that filología, in Spanish, like philology in English, does not always mean the study of ancient Greek and Latin.

The search filología peru, without quotation marks, makes me think that filología might indicate the study of Classics in Spanish even less often than does philology in English.

"classical scholarship in spain" yields many links containing references to a book with exactly that title by a certain D Rubio.

Aaaaaand, hard work made me quit -- for today! I shall return, Peru!

Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Myself and Other Superstars

Hemingwaywrote "d--n" instead of "damn." In some of his works, at least. In The Naked and the Dead,Norman Mailer may have spelled out all of the other dirty words, but instead of "fuck" he wrote "fug."

And it was published and it was a huge success, and the reason, Mailer said, that in all of his later works he spelled out all of the naughty words is that when he was first introduced to Dorothy Parker, she said, "Ah, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'"

This would have been the late 40's. Hemmingway was still alive then, he lived until after 1960. I don't know whether he and Mailer ever met. It seems strange to me that I don't know that. I also don't know whether by the late 40's Hemmingway had begun to spell out the naughty words.

Clive Owen plays Hemmingway in a new HBO movie. He wears spectacles and a big moustache and a goofy expression, but still it's very flattering physically to Hemmingway.

Okay, okay. I'm not complaining about how much better-looking Cate Blanchett is than Elizabeth I was, or that Owen played Walter Raleigh opposite Blanchett.

And if we get right down to it (Mailer was a shrimp!), it's possible that if I had had more success as a writer, and as a young writer like Hemmingway and Mailer, I might have spent less of my life sneering at Hemmingway and Mailer.

That's either all the way right down to it, or painfully close.