Redbeard McDonough

Hero Worship and a Book Suggestion

As counter cultural as I may want to be sometimes, I often find that I can tell what things (movies and such) men of my age group will like based on what I like (I cannot explain the success of the Transformer films).  That being said, with a little self-reflection, I find that I sympathize very much with the hero-worship that’s taken hold of the popular culture while not really understanding it on the intellectual-gut level (very different than the gut level).

Basically, I’m getting swept up in the worship of fictional heros like the Doctor and Sherlock Holmes and even on the non-fictional level with people like Jack Churchill, Winston with the same last name, Teddy Roosevelt, many saints (by right the most heroic (though not all of them are non-fictional)), and most of all, authors who I want to emulate.

I’m going to quickly say (with all respect to my religion) before I move on to my idol, that I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that this hero-worship is a sort of replacement for people like me who don’t put God first in their life enough.

One of the aspects of this somewhat-silly hero-worship (too much with the conjoined-words?) is the tendency to join multiple heroes together (not even Joseph Campbell saw this coming).  In the comics culture it’s called a crossover, the rest of the world doesn’t really have a word for it as far as I know (and I hope it stays that way).  People aren’t quite as interested in the story as much as in the hero, and if you can come out with some weird plot, twisted out of shape so as to bring two of these deities (too far?  I think that’s too far.  I’m still not erasing it though) together, they enjoy it, and enjoy it in what might be called, a wrong way (this is not a moral judgement, only an aesthetic one).  That is, they like the story because they like that the characters are there, not for the story (wait, did I just explain why people like Transformers?).  The story becomes an excuse, and rarely a fun one (note: this does not mean that you shouldn’t like a story because of the character development, just that it’s a little weird (and ultimately unfulfilling) to like a story just because Batman is in it even when its not good (like if you enjoyed Batman & Robin with Schwarzenegger and all of those horrible puns (“cool off”, “chill out”, “ice to see you”, “allow me to break the ice”, ect.,)).

My idol, as my good-friend Ben always points out (more as a serious joke than in a preachy way (I absolutely hate being preached at)), is literature.  It’s almost like prayer, only not a quarter so fulfilling, and a fifth as difficult.  It’s always like that, vices are addicting, virtues are difficult to continue (it’s almost a way to tell the difference).  That’s not to say that having a passion for literature is a vice, only the over-emphasis of it (not a problem for anyone who actually has a life).  Anyway, were I to pick my four favorite authors of fiction, I am sure that H. P. Lovecraft and P. G. Wodehouse would be among them (note to self: publish under a name that begins with two initials and ends with a last name).

Each of these authors writes amazing short stories, mostly narrated in the first person by aristocrats.  That’s where the similarities end (well, their pen names have similar forms).  Lovecraft is a Poe-reminiscent horror author, and Wodehouse is the funniest writer to ever live.

The reason I’m writing this is because I have found a book called ‘Scream for Jeeves’, which is Lovecraft short stories as told by Wodehouse’s most famous character, Bertie Wooster.

The hope is that the book that joins their writing styles will be a thing of beauty in its own right, not the in the way the a nerd gets excited when the Enterprise meets the Deathstar in a youtube video, and I think the hope is justified.  I can’t say that it works, the writing is over the top, but it’s hard to blame someone because they can’t write as well as P. G. Wodehouse.  It’s a noble attempt and a fun read.

I’m sorry for anything overly-weird or poorly-written in this blog (I’m not exactly P. G. Wodehouse), but this was written between 2 and 3:30 AM (slowly, while I watch Better Off Ted and dream of sleep).

Huysmans, Durtal, and the Catholic Reaction to Satanism

That’s right, you read my misleading title right: Huysmans, Durtal, and the Catholic Reaction to Satanism.  This article has, I must admit, little to do with the Catholic reaction to Satanism.  Just keep reading.

In Oscar Wilde’s only novel (why?!), there’s a little yellow book (did I make up that it was little?) that corrupts Dorian.  This possibly-small, yellow book is said to be based on A rebours (said by who?), translated from the French as ‘Against Nature’ and ‘Against the Grain’ by Joris-Karl Huysmans.  It’s a book about a man who escapes society to devote himself to overcoming ennui (a French word for an extreme spiritual and emotional boredom).  The character spends the whole book seeking pleasure.  It’s an aesthetic thing.  The only scene I know from it is one in which he crushes a turtle to death by putting too many jewels on its back (he must have been really bored).

I’ve not yet read a whole book by him (I’ll get to why that is soon), but here’s what people famous enough to have supposedly-not-self-written Wikipedia articles about them think:

Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is - especially in regard to things seen - extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter’s palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans’ work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature. (Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”)

…Continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax. (Léon Bloy, quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans)

It is difficult to find a writer whose vocabulary is so extensive, so constantly surprising, so sharp and yet so exquisitely gamey in flavour, so constantly lucky in its chance finds and in its very inventiveness. (Julien Gracq)

You could have just read Huysmans’ Wikipedia article and known that, but I’d like to get some credit for introducing you to the him (you could hit the ‘random article’ link all day and not learn about him).

He has a character named Durtal, who Wikipedia assures me is a thinly veiled self-portrait (why would I check the source?).  The first Durtal book is all about Huysmans’ experiences with Satanism (cue shudder (you know, those are miniseizures?  I didn’t.)).  It’s an aesthetic thing.

When Huysmans wrote A rebours (Wikipedia doesn’t capitalize the second word, so neither do I), Barby d’Aurevilly (another guy with an article) told him that now he’d have to choose, “the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.”  The ennui must really get to these people.  Eventually, he did become Catholic, and, naturally, so did Durtal in the three sequels.  The last Durtal book, ‘The Oblate’, has the character entering a Benedictine Monastery.  He’s sort of a reverse-Stephen Dedalus.

There’s a popular desire for epics.  Little poems and things aren’t as sought-after as longer, more involved artistic endeavors.  I think it may have to do with some sort of sociological need for a mythos, but that should be for another article (probably wont happen unless one of my imaginary readers asks for it (they float above my bed and speak to be from across the internet)).  Anyway, desiring to know the whole Durtal Canon, I decided to read all of the Durtal books, beginning, of course, with the one about Satanism.  I didn’t get very far.

Being Catholic, it was difficult to read about Eucharistic desecration, and I finally decided that just because someone can experience something, doesn’t mean they should.  The novel, I’ve heard (certainly not read), ends with a long description of the character’s experience of a black mass.  It’s like the book of Revelation in reverse (it’s a big, Heavenly Mass).

Anyway, I may read the other Durtal books, but I’d prefer to learn French first.  Then I could read Proust in the original language and wear an even more pretentious hat (upgrade from flatcap to fedora, or even beret (sounds too pretentious even for me)).

I wish I liked the way Spanish sounds, I hear it so much more often than French.  As it says in ‘My Fair Lady’, “the French don’t care what you say, as long as you say it right.”  The point I’m trying to reach now is that I’m tired, and please don’t act like Frenchmen, don’t ridicule for the errors that I’m sure riddle my article.

Articles by Me!

I know I haven’t been blogging much.  That’s because I’ve been writing something a little more substantial and my mind doesn’t need to release weird posts into cyberspace.  Alas, here I am again, to dazzle you all (both?) with my genius (average intelligence).

It finally happened, I spoke to the right woman in a bar (*ooh*).  She was listening to music in an Irish pub, and approached one of the guitar players and I after the show was over.  Her purpose was to grab the musician and go home (she wasn’t the right girl in the way you probably previously expected).  While speaking, she asked if my coat was made of mole skin.  Having the horrific image of a million little moles lying skinless on a concrete floor, I asked “what?”

“It’s a real thing.”  She assured me.

“No,” I said, “this is a mole skin,” and here I pulled out the moleskin (one little mole laying skinless on the floor) that I usually use to jot down notes (usually at the most inconvenient times).

“Are you a writer?”  She asked.  I answered that I was aspiring toward that end and then, to my surprise and wonderment (that is, I wondered what she meant (please stop rolling your eyes before you continue reading)) she responded that she was always looking for good writers.

Apparently (proof is in the link at the bottom of the article), she works for a music magazine.  Then she asked what I was doing the following night.  I answered, now unsure of myself, that I thought I was coming back to that same pub (I’m that cool).  She answered that I was not, that I was going to see Pokey Lafarge and the South City Three.

The next night, I hurried to Harvard Square from work, where I was able to buy the last ticket to Pokey’s show (only because someone had just given a spare ticket back to the booth to resell).  It was great.  After the show, Amber gave me my first assignment (it wasn’t Pokey Lafarge), the Pixies, and here it is.

I’m still very excited, though perhaps I’m counting my eggs before they hatch, they’ve yet to send me to another concert (though I think they will).

Dragging my Feet in a Surrealist Landscape

The truth is, that as cool as pictures depicting dream things (things like unseen stalkers (my followers), falling, sinking, tripping, and melting clocks (who actually dreams those…besides Salvador Dali?)) can be, I (and, I believe, many other people) find that a surrealist painting or piece of prose is never quite satisfying.  Their stories are always incomplete, there are never any answers to what you want to know.  Dreams, on the other hand, are full of answers, maybe not as to why the clocks are melting, but that’s only because the clocks melting doesn’t seem strange in the dream (not to Dali, at least).  Dreams are much closer to fairy tales than surrealist work.  When you wonder in a dream ‘why is this happening’, which you rarely do, you immediately get what seems to be a perfectly satisfying answer, if unreasonable (as in, you can’t reason to it).  You might wonder, in a dream, ‘why am I wearing grey socks?’, and the perfectly unimpressive answer will come to you, something like ‘because my cat pulled them on me’ (if there are any psychologists reading this…).  The exception is that unseeable stalker, but he’s central to the plot of your deams, so you should leave him be.

The dream world may seem strange right now to us who are conscious (you who my blog hasn’t put you to sleep), but it’s not at all strange to the dreamer, only mystical.  It is sensible, though the dreamer doesn’t see why it is so.  The same sort of thing happens in fairy tales (and myths) all the time: ‘don’t turn around, or she’ll be lost forever’ (either with Orpheus and Agriope or Lot and his wife (or Charlie and Rachel), or ‘don’t eat the fruit, or the thing will put it’s eyes in it’s hands and eat your fairies’ (scariest scene in a movie, I’ve ever seen).  There are lots and lots of people, rushing home before midnight (they never make it) or eating things they shouldn’t (getting stuck in the underworld or getting their helper-fairy things torn to bits) or flying too high (actually, I can only think of one example—my legendary pitch at the office to get a better computer).

Yeats, great as his poetry is, seemed to think fairyland to be a place without rules, but actually, it’s some sort of hyper-consequential authoritarian place where you get in trouble not only for stealing, but for eating, not only for killing, but for laughing, and when you curse, usually somebody dies.

This does not mean that I don’t like surrealism, it’s just somehow incomplete.  Right now, I’m dragging my feet, adding yet another part to my novel, the most stream-of-conscious-esque thing I’ve ever written (thus related to surrealism…maybe?  It’s still in the mind.) (These parenthesis have stopped making any sense).  I have no idea if it’s any good, but until I get an opinion I respect, I should probably keep plodding on.  The prose is thick, and not the most understandable thing I’ve ever read, but my goal isn’t to be easily understandable.  My aim with the prose is different in every part, and this part is supposed to be almost hyper poetical.  It’s getting very annoying to write—at least I have this place, to scribble (type) without even trying to make any sense!

Please note: my observations of psychology are purely based on one test subject, and could be inconsistent with the general population.

To be frank, all I really know about surrealism comes from Little Nemo (if you only click one link, make it this one), Dali,  Wikipedia, and The Sandman.

Verbal Jou…, um, whatevering

Please note: Do not read the following note(« this will make sense below) if you are squeamish and cannot take slight potty humor.

Please excuse the following potty humor, I’m only trying to emulate Chaucer.

This evening I sat in my room, in the comfy chair the landlord stole from somewhere to entice me to stay (along with an air conditioner I have yet to put in the window) and worked on my novel.  After cooking food and failing to find a comfy spot to sit and smoke my pipe, I braced the doors and took to the typewriter, furiously scrubbing my two braincells feverishly together, and came out, at the end of the night, with two pages.  Ugh!  Writing used to be so fast, but the better I get the more I think about what I say (I’m assuming improvement).  I’m always trying to get that sentence to flow or that one to self-reference, or that one to contain a symbol, or sit, or stay and it’s still fun, but it’s so slow.  I’m beginning to think that the first part (the largest, of course) needs a lot of rewriting.  I tend to infuse humor where it doesn’t fit naturally (I’m sure you’ve never noticed that) or write in a voice other than my own (the book has many different narrators).  Every time I think that I’m finished I decide to add another part, or further edit something or perfect something else.  When I first began writing, it just came, most of it was crap, but I was full of it (see, wit, yes?) and it just poured.  Trying to find different ways of doing things I’ve pored (« notice the use of ‘poured’ then ‘pored’, you know what?  Nobody but me and a Joycean care!) over lots and lots of books, studying different voices, enjoying the work (sometimes I forget that part) and learning to write with more skill, but still, writing is quite a difficult endeavor.

Well, anyway, I’m glad to be further along, and at least I know here’s one place I can just vomit words on people.

Trinity College Oxford and Beauty

I’ve always known beauty was important, or, at least, good, but sometimes I think that I forget why.  I think, in my Catholic mind, that all good is a reflection of God whose substance is goodness, but when thought of in that way, it still almost seems like just one of many goods which you can take or leave.

A year ago, I studied abroad at Trinity College in Oxford.  It was beautiful.  When I arrived back here, I couldn’t get over having lived in such a place.  A priest I know commented, six months after I got home, that I looked unusually happy.  When asked what he meant by a friend, he responded “I don’t know, it just seems like ever since he went to Oxford, he’s just wanted to go back.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I follow too many blogs (and read too many books, so that I read more than I live), and one of them is all about the writer Evelyn Waugh (who married a woman named Evelyn (it was He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn), making for an awkward (and short (almost 2 years (they only met once again after divorcing (aw! (parenthesis (within parenthesis (which are (you guessed it) in parenthesis! (I’ve missed this ever since I finished my Math degree))))))) relationship.   I happened, in the Waugh blog, to see that this Evelyn fanatic (an He-Evelyn fanatic) reposted something by somebody doing exactly what I did last year.  She’s probably with Ethan and Brittany (who went back to ‘work’ as junior deans) right now!  I’m pretty sure I know where her room is based on the pictures!  It’s a little bit like torture, especially as I’ve just moved to a place nicknamed ‘slumerville’.

The point is that I, and I think all people, are, in a general way, happier in more beautiful settings, even when they don’t take the time to observe them (not that I’m suggesting you don’t observe your surroundings (that’s how bicycles kill people)).

Granted, beauty is not the only difference between my disposition then and now.  I was with very cool people in Oxford and was taking some very good classes (and not spending most of every weekday in a freaking cubicle!).

Anyway, Chesterton (of London) said ‘Rome was not loved because it was great, it was great because it was loved.’  I have to learn to love my new surroundings and work to make this place beautiful, otherwise I’m just part of the problem (like those freaking shop keepers who don’t seem to care that their stores are covered in grime).

Cuchulain and the Sea

There are benefits of living in a slummy coastal city—and that is the coastal part.  I’m sure that there are other advantages out there somewhere, but those are for future experiences/posts (why do I think those are the same?).  I visited a friend the other day out on Hampton Beach.  His sisters’ idea of ‘hitting’ a wave seemed to be to swim with it.  Ben and my own seemed to be more akin to throwing our chests into it as it breaks (sometimes sending us tumbling).  Naturally, all this aggression toward the ocean turned my thoughts upon Cuchulain’s great fight with the sea.  Yeats wrote both a poem and a play about how when Cuchulain unwittingly killed his son (who he had to overpower the great Aífe to conceive) at a wedding (perfect place for a fight), Conchubar become worried that he might slay all there and so had the druids come up with a chant to make him mad (not the best of plans) and attack the sea.

He lost.

He was resurrected later (a woman gave her life for him) and then after a little while died permanently at a still very young age.  During my own fight with the sea, lines kept coming into my head, so I’ll soon see if I can scrape them together into a coherent poem (I know I’ve not kept these sort of promises in the past), though it probably wont be about Cuchulain (as cool as that would be).

During my fight at the sea side, the sun took the sea’s side and so now it’s time to rest and recover from my greatest wound: the pealing pink all down my unshielded areas.

Boston

Since my last post I graduated from UMass Amherst, took a job in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have moved to Somerville (just North of Boston).  Living so close to Davis Square sort of makes me a honorary hipster (this blog makes it not honorary).  I was going to say: ‘I now live in the city of Poe and the-author-so-and-so and that-person-who-was-an-artist and…”, but I couldn’t really think of who to say.  The Kennedy’s were/are terrible, John Adams was sort of cool (in an I-need-ritalin sort of way), and Kerouac, though I’ve not yet given him a chance, was a beatnik (ew!).  Robert Frost is on the Wikipedia ‘list of people from Boston’ page, but he was famous for living where I just came from (Amherst).  Sylvia Plath I actually mean to read—but she was also in Amherst!  There’s Thoreau, who I hate to admit I’ve not read, and Gretchen Osgood Warren, who also went to Oxford (where I studied abroad), and though she wasn’t really talked about (as far as I could tell) in Oxford (there are a lot of authors who studied there), I’d not heard of her until I came across the Wikipedia page (Wikipedia—advertisement for the unprofitable!).

In any case, here I am.  I’m sick for lack of rural land and rereading ‘The Hobbit’ is only making that worse.  The longer I’m here, the more I wonder why anyone ever lives in a city, though that may change when I have friends (hm…).  I really don’t want this blog to be about me, but about interesting things (like…Boston), but I’m sure that you’ll forgive me this post as you will my absence these weeks (I still pretend you’re out there, whoever you are who’s reading this), and I think it’s time to walk out and get a beer to ponder life over—I’ll take my hipster tweed suit coat and see if I can’t strike up a conversation.  Either that or I’ll sit here watching ‘B’ (‘C’) horror movies and wishing I wouldn’t be tired at work tomorrow (the people need their programs!).

If your reading this Mom, the last bit was a joke, I’m getting plenty of sleep!

Romance and Language

Esperanto, if you didn’t click the link, is a language that was made in the late nineteenth century (think, think…1800’s because the first century was the zeros).  It was supposed to be a sort of binding language for all countries, like Latin had been in Medieval Europe, only Zamenhof, the creator, thought that Latin was too complex for a revival.  Unfortunately, were he to make an appearance today, he might be dismayed to find Elvish and Klingon much more popular.  The reason for this is pretty simple, Elvish and Klingon are built on a romantic base, Esperanto a practical one.  Unfortunately for Zamenhof, people only really memorize what interests them, and what interests people is  not practicality.  Those who try to devise perfect heroes run into this problem all the time, a perfectly practical hero is extremely uninteresting.  Romance, which, in my humble experience, is too often coupled with bad decisions, is what people love.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any romance in Esperanto.  In Mein Kampf Hitler gives Esperanto as an example of what might be spoken by any given group of Jews bent on world domination.  If I were Jewish, that might be enough to get me learning it.  Unfortunately, for this reason, Esperantists were singled out for persecution in Nazi Germany with Zamenhof’s family being especially singled out of murder (sorry to bring down the mood).

Then there are writers who work in Esperanto with William Auld being the first Esperanto word-craft (trying not to repeat words (doh!), I have to keep up a pretense of being a good, um, inker) to be nominated for a Nobel (peace prize—no wait, literature, definitely literature, which, in recent years, has come to mean much more than the peace prize).

I can’t imagine scribbling away in any language that didn’t develop organically.  I have to imagine (there I go doing what I say I can’t) that the piece would lose so much potential.  In the languages we’ve made and transformed over the years there are nuances and puns and roots to play with.  Though I must admit, it would be nice to write in a language with a gender unspecific third person singular (‘they’ just doesn’t sound right).

Still, unless someone comes along and makes a popular, epic, science fiction canon involving Esperanto (a group of Jews dominating the world?), it’s not going to catch on like the creations of Prof. Tolkien or the nerds in their parents’ basements.  It’s like the reasons I always suspected people (myself included at one time) became engineers:

USA - To boldly go where no man has gone before.

UK - To be more like the Doctor.

Korea - To defend against the Zerg.

Math and the Deep

There is more to Math than equations as there is more to History than dates.

To really understand mathematics is a beautiful thing, I defy anyone to disagree (I don’t know what I’d to to a disagree-er, but it wouldn’t be pleasant—it’d probably involve milk).  Elegant (mathematicians love that word) and complex systems are always beautiful.  If you approach them the correct way (from the right), it can be like when you were a child with a flashlight under the covers, learning about another world—I do not mean Mars or some other barren rock, but Middle Earth or Narnia.  Your mother comes in and tells you to go be bed, but you need to know what happens next!

Sleeplessness actually is a side-effect of mathematics before bed.  Once your neurons are rubbing, it’s hard to stop them without a blunt object.

The more you learn the more you realize that you don’t know, the deeper the mystery.  Were math just a complex system, one might be tempted to think that, though beautiful, it were not deep.  Poe, in one of his short stories, differentiates between complex and deep, and he was right to.  Chess is elegant and complex, but not deep (according to my somewhat arbitrary definition of ‘deep’ which I have no intention of putting into words—though a synonym might be meaningful, meaningful being more that just ‘something that has meaning’, but meaning of some objective value).

Yes, I do know that last sentence ran off and was not elegant at all.

The study of the human soul is deep (if approached from the right), it is riddled with paradox and questions of infinity and nil.  If used properly (that is ‘interestingly’), the study of math should change the way you think about everything else.

I need to think this way, I’m suffering from a bad case of (super-) senioritis.  There’s a test in Complex Variables tomorrow and a lot of studying to do.  It’s time to drown myself (in math—which is deep).