Thanks to the Internet I can spend 3 or 4 hours a week and keep up on the current musical trends.  Well, trend in popular music, that is.  And I consider the "indie" industry popular music.  Bon Iver is up for a Grammy.  Whoop-dee-doo.  But, still thanks to the Internet I know that The Cults are boring - as is St. Vincent's much acclaimed new album - James Blake is fairly overrated and tedious, Radiohead is more or less over as a band that makes interesting music and has become the dull, uncharitable, anarchist U2.  I recently heard Foster the People and thought they were Sigur Ros singing in English - which is a poor reflection on them, not me and I'm sure the 30 seconds I heard is quite enough to sum up their work as musicians, like Amy Winehouse, who make their name sounding like other people.  Lady Gaga is atrocious.  She has no redeeming qualities.  Her voice is grating and uninspired, her lyrics are barbaric and childish and her persona is an affectation so obvious it almost goes without saying that she will be forgotten in - wait, who was I talking about? 

Today I began reading John Lewis Gaddis's brand new biography of George F. Kennan - diplomat, historian, intellectual, memoirist.  It is a satisfyingly long biography whose subject is of great interest to me.  I've long had a fascination with men like Kennan - gifted and privileged, yet somehow remote; outsiders who should by all accounts be insiders.  Men like Henry Adams (and T.E. Lawrence for that matter but, being British he’s another creature altogether), a descendant of American presidents who never quite succeeded in politics himself.  He wrote one of the best books of the 20th century and a brilliant, insightful, ironic history of the United States during the Jefferson and Madison administrations.  Kennan reminds me of him.  Their subtle, expansive minds that seemed to understand all within their reach and managed to employ this knowledge to what was occuring around them.  For Adams it served him as a historian, novelist and cultural critic; for Kennan, as a diplomat surveying the state of Russian/American relations.  The story has been told many times.  They also shared a somewhat jaundiced, pessimistic view of American society - best related in their profoundly literary memoirs.  This is, admittedly, a premature and possibly wrong-headed analysis on my part but so far, I think the comparison holds up.    

A far more interesting comparison, though, immediately presents itself in Gaddis’s account - the coincidental correlation of the life of George F. Kennan with that of his name sake, his great-uncle, George Kennan:

“Both of us devoted large portions of our adult life to Russia and her problems.  We were both expelled from Russia by the Russian governments of our day, at comparable periods in our careers.  Both of us founded organizations to assist refugees from Russian despotism.  Both wrote and lectured profusely.  Both played the guitar.  Both owned and loved particular sailboats of similar construction.  Both had occasion to plead at one time or another for greater understanding in America for Japan and her geopolitical problems vis-à-vis the Asian mainland.”

-quoted on page 11 of George F. Kennan: An American Life

Chesterton’s comment about coincidences seems especially appropriate here.  How much of this was a result of George F. Kennan’s self-conscious decision is hard to determine.  But I - a convinced Christian - am convinced that whom God foreknows he predestines to certain roles in life.  Many will insist on coincidence.  But sometimes the most reasonable approach is an unreasonable belief in a transcendent intrusion into human affairs.  

Men like Lawrence, Adams and Kennan were in the wrong century.  And how out place they were!  Their ability to combine the historian and the artist, yet apply this subtlety of thought to the matters of human government is scandalously absent from our soulless technocratic regime of experts and statisticians.  But then, I’ve only read 76 pages so far.    

While many of the great writers of two or three hundred years ago hoped to achieve universality, the few great writers of the twentieth century have been increasingly obsessed with their own languages.  That is, they have been more national than nationalistic, because of their respect for the tradition of language, because of their patriotic affection for the Old Language.  (Note this among the Bloomsburyites, twentieth-century English intellectuals with all their weaknesses - and some of those weaknesses were fatal - but when it came to language, a Virginia Woolf or a Harold Nicolson had so much more knowledge of and affection for the traditions of the English language than the anti-liberal Wyndham Lewis or the “conservative” Kingsley Amis.  In the United States, too: a champion of traditional language was the self-proclaimed anarchist Dwight Macdonald, not the self-proclaimed “conservative” and nationalist Tom Wolfe). 

- John Lukacs

 

I do not see this changing any time soon, given the conservative obsession with culture over tradition - implying that a popular acceptance of a political and economic agenda is somehow more important than simply and beautifully proclaiming timeless Truth.  While conservative "watchdog" groups stamp their feet and insist on adequate representation of conservatives on TV, the more progressive elements of society produce writers like Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer.  Granted, two of those writers are vastly overrated and all three write mainly about frivolities, but their skill with language is genuine.  Where are their traditionalist colleagues?  I'm sure they exist but they’re either out of fashion or ignored; sadly, among conservatives as well.  We need another T. S. Eliot. 
      

"European" is both newer and older than we think.  That was expressed by Ortega y Gasset when he wrote that "European man" has not only been "democratic" and "liberal" but also "absolutist" and "feudal" (and we may add "Christian") - which he no longer is.  "This does not mean that he does not in some way continue being all these things; he does so in the 'form of having been them.'"  Hence the condition that the United State was born in the middle of the Modern Age in not an idubitable asset, as so many people (including Europeans) think.  At the end of the Modern Age Americans may be less immune to certain dangers than is much of Europe, since they may be exposed to dangerous consequences of the decay of their established institutions and even of some of their accustomed ways of thought.

                                                                                             -John Lukacs

 

I think he is probably right.  Given our lack of national experience we may not have the same sort of resiliance as Europeans.  Could the country survive another economic or political crises?  I'm not confident we can considering the popularity of Herman Cain and the moral confusion of the Occupy Wall Street crowds.                       

 

I’m reading two books on Europe, Tony Judt’s Postwar and John Lukacs’s The End of The Twentieth Century And The End Of The Modern Age. Both were inspired by the dismantling of the Berlin wall and the subsequent fall of the USSR.  Lukacs’s wrote his from 1989 - 1992 while Postwar took 16 years to complete.  But then, Lukacs’s is more a philosophical and historical essay while Judt’s is a massive, 933 page history covering Europe from 1945 to the present.  Whenever I get bogged down in the detail of Judt’s account I turn to Lukacs to peek my curiosity again and give me a sense of the importance of the topic.  I love the way Lukacs mingles personal vignettes with commentary - a technique more or less copied in Geert Mak’s marvelous In Europe.  Judt’s is a book that future historians and thinkers will be referring to and discussing.  Lukacs’s, while sadly out of print, is timeless in quality, approaching literature.       

The two writer’s styles could not be more dissimilar.  Judt’s is careful and analytical -it takes vast amounts of data into account and presents a picture of Europe from above.  Lukacs’s is passionate, tendentious, idiosyncratic, philosophical, deeply personal and yet very relevant even to the current situation: “Sometime in the twenty-first century a new recognition of what Europe is, or ought to be - of what being European is, or ought to be- will arise.”  Is that moment approaching now, I wonder?  After this Greek crises will the EU decide that mere economic unification is not sufficient and that a more politically sovereign government is necessary?  This is so beyond my scope of knowledge it would be silly for me to attempt to answer.  The quest itself may be too risky.  Which is why I’m reading these books. 

Lester Young's brilliant small group Verve recordings from the fifties, featuring Pres in groups with pianists Teddy Wilson and Oscar Peterson. The 1952 and 1956 sessions, realeased complete for the first time.

 

 

Not really.  Though I imagine one could take that close a look at almost anything.  With patience and an obsessive attention to detail one can write whole books on two lines.  Randall Jarrell’s essays come to mind.  My favorite being “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry” - an essay as beautifully constructed as its subject.  Jarrell finds something insightful to say about Auden’s grammar, diction and rhythmic variations, and he manages to keep it interesting, entertaining even.  This great attention to detail reminds me of Alan Tate, a teacher of Jarrell’s, whose criticism also bears the burden of specifics.  

From one perspective one could see it as a kind of idolatry, a worship of literature that would baffle most readers.  But reading their other essays, poetry and fiction it becomes clear that they do not worship literature so much as they understand the morality of language.  Words may be bad.  Sentences may corrupt.  Literature may tell lies.  So, a duty of the critic and the writer is to pay attention to words, to their meanings, connotations and affects.

I don’t have this patience.  Perhaps it’s a product of my generation, but I much prefer books about generalities - say, histories of philosophy, rather than the philosophy itself.  If specifics come into play it is to support an interpretation of events or ideas.  When I read I pay closer attention to the world behind the words rather than the words themselves.  Beauty is secondary.  This may be a bad thing.  In reading like this I put my trust in the hands of the author.  How do I know her selection of specifics is honest?  On the other hand, I don’t want to read every book through eyes narrowed in suspicion.  I must find a balance.  It is my duty to decide when to pay close attention to the specifics and when to the broad narrative.  And any time a book leads to action one had better be aware of the details.   

Enjambment in Van Morrison lyrics may come to be more important than I originally thought.  What action does music lead to?  What emotions result?  How is my understanding of the world altered?  And why?

Why?  Because there are moments in Van Morrison songs when one line bleeds into another and it makes me very happy.  This is so difficult to understand or to explain that one day I may have to write a book about it.  Or several.