Some Writers I Haven't Understood, and Some I Have

It goes without saying that when I think I've understood a writer, I could be completely mistaken.

To begin with, writers I know I haven't understood:

-- In the past few days I gave up on my most recent, and only, serious attempt to understand Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. There was one moment when I was prematurely optimistic: I opened Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte at random and saw that he had a chapter dedicated to the Crusades. Some further skimming revealed statements about the Crusades which actually seemed fact-based, down to Earth and accurate. But when I settled down to read the entire chapter, I discovered that there were only a few lines' worth of this sort of narrative in the entire chapter, embedded in a murky sea of the objective teaching of Christianity and the immense idea of coupling the finite to the infinite and so forth, and I really just can't.

-- Speaking of Kant --

yeah, I don't understand him either. I apologize for having occasionally pretended that I did.

-- Heidegger: whoosh! he goes over my head.

-- Any theologians whatsoever. I still seem to share the New Atheists' problem with theology: theologian says, "God[...]," I respond, "[...]," theologian says, "That's not what I mean when I say 'God," and I've already lost interest. I don't even have the energy to angrily ask, "Well why don't you try saying what you mean when you say 'God'?!" because I despair of getting an answer which isn't even worse.

Writers whom I think I've understood:

-- William Gaddis. The only writer of realistic dialogue known to me. Because apart from literature, most people don't speak in complete sentences which resemble those written in books. And each one of Gaddis' characters is speech-impaired in his or her specific way, which again is realistic, and allows the reader to tell them apart even in a book like JR which is about 98% unattributed dialogue. Even the few characters who are able to speak quite elegantly while sober lose their verbal form, in a quite realistic way, as they get drunk.

Jean-Paul Sartre: I believe I understand: the world, the universe, is devoid of inherent meaning, and so therefore each of our lives is as meaningful as we are able to make it. Communism, with its goal of everyone working for the common good, is more noble than capitalism with its goal of he who dies with the most toys wins.

William H Gass: His prose is pure music, prose poetry. I never found it difficult.

Gertrude Stein: Hers either. Her joy in her experience with language is as pure and beautiful as the joy of a toddler, except that where a toddler toddles around a backyard and is astounded by a pebble, Stein traveled quite a bit, and took joy in her own wide knowledge, experience and vocabulary. Emulating her, writing as well as she did? Excruciatingly difficult, maybe impossible. Reading her? Never anything but joy as pure as a toddler's smile.

Grand Street, 1981-2004

Are there still a bazillion brilliant little journals rising and sinking in the sea of mediocrity the way there were before the Internet distracted me from them and my blog became one of a bazillion blogs, a few of them brilliant?

For a short while before I sobered up in the mid-90's my favorite bar was on Grand Street in lower Manhattan, close by the one I went to first because it was in the tourist guide. But the bar in the guide was packed with angry yuppies -- angry because the rush of business caused by the mention in the tourist guide had destroyed the qualities which had gotten it into the tourist guide? angry because it was plain to see that I didn't belong among them? angry because they were yuppies and had no souls? -- and very quickly I found the other one right next door, much less crowded, much more friendly, much more diverse in the ages and ethnicities and sartorial styles of its clientele.

I never saw the offices of the literary and visual-arts journal Grand Street while I was down there. I don't know whether Grand Street's offices were ever actually on Grand Street. And apparently there's at least one more Grand Street in NYC, in Brooklyn.

Grand Street was founded in 1981, published stuff which was usually somewhere between good and astonishingly good, and it folded in 2004. Where did it come from? Why did it go? Why it and not USA Today?

Grand Street, Vol 3, No 4, Summer 1984, before it became a visual-arts journal in addition to a literary journal. Astonishingly good: excerpts from William H Gass' monster novel-in-progress The Tunnel and Elinor Langer's soon-to-be-published biography of Josephine Herbst, American Leftist, victim of untrue denunciations by the notoriously confused-or-much-worse Katherine Ann Porter. Proof that nobody, not even Grand Street, is perfect: a corny short story by Leonard Michaels and a piece by Gary Giddins which has aged spectacularly poorly: "Young Jazz Musicians." Out of all of the people in the world who were young and jazz musicians in the summer of 1984, which 2 did Giddins single out for our special attention? Bobby McFerrin and Wynton Marsalis. Thanks a lot, Gary, not!

In the astonishingly-good Grand Street 38, 1991, all in one issue, writing by, in addition to the journal's founder Ben Sonnenberg, Julio Cortazar, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kenzaburo Oe, Andre Gorz, Richard Powers and Michael McClure and others, and original pictures by Robert Rauschenberg on the cover and some more inside, and also pictures by others.

But that's just how Grand Street was. I'm not saying 38 was the best issue of them all, I'm not saying it was in the top 10, I have no idea whether it was, the point I'm trying to make is that there was so much brilliance published by Grand Street between 1981 and 2004 that I can't begin to comprehend or assess it all. 38, great as it is, may actually be below average for all I know. Grand Street was the astonishing shiznit. For the most part. Everybody's human. So was, for example, Partisan Review, 1934-2003. So were a lot of periodicals which rose and sank in the sea of written dreck. And now we're left with Stephen King and John Grisham and USA Today.

Existentialism and University Philosophy

"the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time"

It's uncommon among philosophers of our time, and it was uncommon among philosophers of their own time. And it's certainly missing from this long, tedious description of existentialism. Obviously, different people take different things from existentialist philosophers. I take from existentialism that there's no reason to be as boring as Steven Crowell, who wrote this very nearly pointless description of it.

I really don't know why there should be this incompatibility between universities and philosophy. Plato founded what was more or less the first university, the Academy, and Aristotle made the second one out of the Lyceum. Both institutions thrived for centuries. But a little while before the man generally counted as the the first existentialist philosopher, Kierkegaard, published his dissertation, Schopenhauer was insisting that real philosophy only existed outside of universities, that universities killed it and that what they called philosophy was no more than a grubby, prosaic jostling for jobs as philosophy professors, which laid much more emphasis on reading and discrediting one's competitors' writings, than on studying the canon of Western philosophy.



After receiving his Doctorate, Schopenhauer made a less than half-hearted attempt to teach philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then spent the rest of his life concentrating on being an author. As for the aforementioned "major existential philosophers," Kierkegaard got his Doctorate and then made no such attempt; and if he had continued in academia it would have been as a theologian and not as a philosopher. Dostoyevsky was a novelist. Nietzsche was awarded an extraordinary Doctorate at the age of 24, and then spent several years teaching at the University of Basel -- but he was teaching Philologie -- Classics, that is. Ancient Greek literature in his case -- and not philosophy. And Sartre and Camus made their livings writing rather than teaching. Heidegger was a professor, but he rejected the label of existentialist. I don't think we need to accept that rejection, but we should note that among the major existentialists, he's the only philosophy professor.

Steven Crowell, who wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on existentialism linked near the beginning of this post, has taught philosophy at the university level for over 30 years and currently chairs the Philosophy department at Rice University. Walter Kaufmann, whom Crowell cites in his article as if he were an authority on existentialism (and indeed he is thought of as such by some, although not by me), taught philosophy at Princeton for over half his life, from 1947 until 1980. Besides what they did and do for a living, what's the difference between Crowell and Kaufmann on the one hand and Kierkegaard, Dostoyesvsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus on the other? For one, the major existentialists were all brilliant writers. Crowell isn't. Kaufmann wasn't. Crowell and Kaufmann are prosaic. Nietzsche cannot have been thinking of people like these two when he said that one must have chaos inside oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star, although academics in other fields seem to fit the bill much better. Einstein and Heidegger come immediately to mind. (Even outside of the philosophy departments, Einstein didn't have a conventional academic career, going from clerk to honorary PhD to professor.) It's difficult, to say the least, to think of Crowell and Kaufmann embodying Nietzsche's dictum about man being a rope stretched across an abyss.

The major existentialists had huge fires in them which burned whole forests of convention to crisps. Crowell and Kaufmann and most philosophy professors are convention itself. Does it matter whether they're consciously conventional and determined to undermine the chaos of the geniuses whose texts they have their students read, or whether they're simply much too dull to understand what I or Camus is talking about? Either way the result is diametrically opposed to the major existentialists.

Heidegger is an exception, a philosophy professor and at the same time a real no foolin' existentialist philosopher. Heidegger is exceptional in several ways, and mysterious and spooky, and that's about all I have to say about him for now.

William H Gass was a professor of philosophy for a very long time, although he's rarely described as a philosopher, although why not, actually? But in his classes given under the auspices of a philosophy department his students read mostly fiction and poetry. Gass has written mostly fiction and literary criticism (although it's unlike any other literary criticism), and then there's his book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, a book I was thinking is in a category all by itself, but then I thought of the 3-volume work on spheres by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk -- who is the chancellor of a university of art & design. The one of them explores human life via a color, the other via a shape. And neither of them fit into any conventional career categories. Just like the major existentialists.

Just like any major artist. A true artist or philosopher or physicist cannot be fit into any categories which exist when they're working, because their work is original. No one else has imagined something like their work, and so no one has yet made a category for it.

William H Gass

It irks me that William H Gass still has not been awarded the Nobel Prize. They blew it with Gass' pal William Gaddis, who died Nobel-less in 1997, and in the meantime Gass has become 88 years old. What are they waiting for?

Gass is a critic who is more than a critic, he also writes fiction and hard-to-classify essays, and those of his works which can be classified as criticism are also completely distinctive. This is not your father's New York Times book reviewer. Some time ago I almost completely stopped caring about the opinions of critics who haven't produced impressive work in the genre they criticize: people who review novels who are not novelists, music reviewers who are not musicians, etc. That leaves Gass who besides the unclassifiable essays has written novels and short stories, and T S Eliot who I believe wrote some poems, and who else? Yeah, Matthew Arnold, but do we really still care what Arnold said? (Really?) And let's be frank, Eliot's appeal, too, has faded sharply with the perspective of time. Gass writes rings around him and a few other Nobel laureates, and has the added appeal, unlike Eliot, of not being a bigot.

It's strange that of all the American novelists who served in the military in WWII, Gass is still alive. Strange because he has always looked so sickly. Okay, these days he actually doesn't look half bad for an 88-year-old -- and he's still writing. His brand-new novel Middle C is scheduled to be published next week -- but half a century ago his appearance was alarming, and it would have seemed strange if someone had predicted that he would outlive Gaddis and Heller and Stone and Jones and Mailer and Brossard and Hawkes and Vidal and Baldwin and Dickey and Bellow and Cheever and Vonnegut and all of the rest of them -- never mind all of them: half a century ago it might have seemed you were going out on a limb if you'd pointed to the little fat guy who always looked as if he'd just been poisoned, always with a look of a bitter taste in his mouth on his face, and predicted that he would outlast any a them studs. And yet here he still is being absolutely wonderful.

What virtual shoe can I throw in your direction to sufficiently get your attention about Gass, how can I reach through cyberspace to grab your lapels and shake you, because this is important, because you will thank me if you've never read Gass and you start because of me, because he will change your life, because, to paraphrase what he (correctly) said about his pal Gaddis, his writing is so good it will make you stand up and shout Yes! Yes! Something is good in this crappy sad world! Because against the mediocrity of what usually passes for good writing Gass' writing stands out like lightning against muddy grey clouds.

Okay, I guess I've done what I can and you will do what yr gonna do.

Things I Thought of to Say Too Late

It seems most people are very familiar with such things. After the fact, seconds or years later, when the opportunity has passed, you think of the perfect thing to say.

I have some pockmarks on my face, neck, chest and back, scars left over from severe acne, and occasionally I've been very self-conscious about them. I read a short story by John Updike once, about an actor who'd been successful in leading-man roles despite a similar problem. Then, later, Updike published a volume of non-fiction, Self-Consciousness,which contained an essay in which he discusses his psoriasis. I had stopped reading Updike by this time, but just by chance I read a review of Self-Consciousness. It and the short story about the actor combined to make me sort of almost like Updike. I could write a whole long essay about my problems with Updike, but why? It's been done exhaustively and competently by others already, and if I were to do it right I would need to re-read at least several volumes of his work and read several more for the first time. I think he was a mean-spirited, narrow-hearted a-hole. For more detail on the matter, I would refer the reader to William H. Gass, who, in an essay in his first non-fiction collection, Fiction and the Figures of Life,tore Updike a suitably thorough new one.

I have to say, though, that Updike's style, his evocation of the sensual world through words, is brilliant. But in my praise as in my condemnation of Updike I've hardly got a thing to say which hasn't been said and said and said, and this essay is supposed to be about things left unsaid. I was talking about my acne scars. To picture me, think of F. Murray Abraham, Ray Liotta, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Trejo, Edward James Olmos -- and yes, John Updike belonged to my club, too. One of us! One of us! In 1990, I was sitting around getting high with some people in Germany, and this German who was a big admirer of Nietzsche, and whose hair and huge moustache were -- it seems clear to me in retrospect -- deliberately copied from Nietzsche's look -- it was a very popular style in the late 19th century, but it didn't really work in 1990, just as this guy's crude and overbearing personality weren't good advertising for Nietzsche's philosophy, any more than was Kevin Kline's Otto in A Fish Called Wanda-- this guy said to me: "You know, Shteefen, Iff I vas a voman, you know vat I vould like most about you? Your face. Your sveet scah face."

The reply to that which occurred to me too late should be fairly obvious: "And how would you feel if you were a man?" I'm not a fan of James Cameron, but it may well be that the obvious reply never occurred to me until after I a watched an actress say something very similar in Aliens.She was playing one of a squad of US Marines sent to deal with the Aliens, she had some big beautiful arm muscles, and while she was doing a set of pull-ups a male Marine asked her if she'd ever been mistaken for a man, and she replied, "No, have you?"

Sometimes the thing you should have said is short and pithy like that, sometimes it's more involved. In 1996 a man who several months before had offered me a couch for the night when I was homeless, then changed his mind as we were walking toward his place, came up and gave me a deep and searching look and offered me his hand to shake. He didn't have to say anything: he was forgiving me for the particularly hurtful things I had said after I'd suddenly found I didn't have a place to stay that night after all. Of course, he also wanted to feel like a good guy, like he and I were friends, even though he'd turned me out into the cold NYC night. It's not at all clear if this second part was conscious in his mind. But I shook his hand, might even have accepted his hug. (We ran with a very huggy crowd.)

Ever since, I've regretted making up with him. I want so bad to take back that handshake, and to say something like, "No, we're not cool. We're not friends, are you fucking kidding me? Don't worry about it, though. I was not your responsibility, any more than all the thousands of other homeless in this city are my responsibility now that I have a place of my own. I realize you feel very awkward seeing me now, and you want me to shake your hand, maybe hug you, too, and make you feel better. Well, go fuck yourself, life is awkward. If you really want to be cool and deep, you might want to start by trying to grasp that basic little fact. Twerp. We're not friends, I meant all those terrible things I said, each and every one of them, and more. Maybe you are a really good guy. I'll never know, will I? What the Hell do I know about you? You and I will never get close enough for me to tell. You've got absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. Like you said that night, you had to worry about your own well-being first. Absolutely correct. That's what you had to keep in mind. Each and every one of us should take that attitude, or else we'll never be much good to ourselves or anyone else. I really, sincerely do not blame you for a thing -- except, that night and right now, you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Turning a homeless person out into the night is not a crime. No single one of us can bear the weight of the world. But have the fucking tact not to turn them out and ask for their blessing at the same time. Don't explain your problems to them right at the same moment you decide there's no room at the inn after all. Not at that moment. It's just not the time, don't you get that? That's what pissed me off, and what is pissing me off again now -- not that you didn't help me. That's nothing, that much you have in common with almost the entire rest of the world."

There's no end to that answer, to what I should have said when he came up to me with that I'm-such-a-good-dude sincere deep expression on his face and held out his hand. Some replies you didn't think of are short and sweet, some are endless, you could never even begin them properly.