LPPM MMV "After that Night It Was All Downhill"

Tue Aug 17 19:44:10 CDT 2004

"In the two semesters he spent at Harvard Siegel had
witnessed the gradual degeneration of his roommate
Grossmann, a proud and stubborn native of Chicago who
denied the presence of any civilization outside of
Cook County and for whom Boston was worse even than
Oak Park, was in fact, a sort of apotheosis of the
effete and the puritan. Grossmann had remained
unmarred, majestically sneering, happy-go-lucky, until
one Christmas eve he and Siegel and some friends and a
group of Radcliffe girls had gone carolling on Beacon
hill. 
   "Whether it was the booze they had brought along or
the fact that Grossmann had just finished reading not
only Santayana's The Last Puritan but also a
considerable amount of T. S. Eliot--and so might have
been a little more susceptible to tradition in general
and to Christmas eve on Beacon hill in particular --or
merely the bothersome tendency Grossman had to get
sentimental in the company of Radcliffe girls, he had
still been touched enough to inform Siegel later on
that night that maybe there were a few human beings in
Boston after all. And this had been the first tiny
rent in that Midwestern hauteur which he had carried
up to now as a torero carries his cape; after that
night it was all downhill."

Cook County

http://www.co.cook.il.us/

Oak Park

Oak Park is located on Chicago's western border seven
miles from the city's center. It is four and one half
square miles in size and has a population of
approximately fifty thousand residents. Oak Park is a
residential town. It has no major industries. Most of
its residents earn their living in other towns or in
the city of Chicago.

Oak Park has never viewed itself as an anonymous
bedroom community however. From the beginning it took
great pride in things that set it apart from other
communities, especially the city of Chicago. "When the
saloons stop and the church steeples begin" is the way
one book describes entering Oak Park. Early Oak Park
residents believed that theirs was a model community,
a city on a hill, that served as a shining example for
other communities to follow....

http://www.oppl.org/reference/oakparkhistory.htm

And see as well ...

http://oprf.com/history/excellence.html

http://oprf.com/history/index.html

http://oprf.com/

"one Christmas eve"

Cf. ...

"'Dada exhibit in Paris on Christmas eve, 1919'" (MMV,
p. 3)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0408&msg=92422

"Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black
levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat,
happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia." (V., Ch.
1, p. 1)

http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/excerpt_xml.asp?isbn=0060930217

"Christmas.  Bwweeeaaaagghh, clutching to his
stomach." (GR, Pt. I, p. 125)

"'Eeh ... it's been Christmas, hasn't it ...?'" (M&D,
p. 302)

"... all this whole Rioting, Baby-snatching, litigious
Time, it has been Christmastide. Has Christmas come
and gone and he's miss'd it in all the Commotion?"
(M&D, p. 581)

Radcliffe

1879--Visionary women and men, led by Elizabeth Cary
Agassiz, create the "Harvard Annex" for women's
instruction by the Harvard faculty.

1894--The Annex is chartered as Radcliffe College by
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

1943--During World War II, Harvard and Radcliffe sign
an agreement allowing women students into Harvard
classrooms for the first time.

http://www.radcliffe.edu/about/dates.php?PHPSESSID=6eb55e9beeb787973daab0d69d93de05

On October 1, 1999, Radcliffe College and Harvard
University were officially merged, and the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study was created as one of ten
Harvard schools....

http://www.radcliffe.edu/about/today/today.php

http://www.radcliffe.edu/index.php

Beacon Hill

http://www.beaconhillonline.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?cid=5

http://www.beaconhillonline.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi

The Last Puritan

Santayana, George.  The Last Puritan: A Memoir
   in the Form of a Novel.  NY: Ingram, 1935.

Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan
was the American philosopher's only novel and it
became an instant best- seller, immediately linked in
its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education
of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas
expressed in the birth, life, and early death of
Oliver Alden. In Oliver's case the puritanical
self-destruction that prevented him from realizing his
own spirituality is transcended by his attainment of
the type of self-knowledge that Santayana recommends
throughout his moral philosophy.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=329CF052-BB7F-4587-8B54-2531CABC9CFD&ttype=2&tid=6788

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=6869&ttype=2

Santayana’s philosophic stance has been given the
apparently opposite descriptions of materialism and
Platonism. The contradiction is partly understandable
as resulting from his view of the mind as being firmly
placed in and responsive to a physical, biological
context, and his simultaneous emphasis on and high
evaluation of the mind’s rational and imaginative
vision of physical reality.... he enunciated a
qualified hedonism that placed high value on aesthetic
pleasure; it was a pleasure that was understood to be
an irrational expression of vital interests but was
distinguished from direct, sensual pleasures.

... he saw the relationship of thought and reality as
one of ideal correspondence. Santayana’s earlier work
is marked by a psychological approach to the life of
the mind.... he adopted a more classical philosophic
approach, making ontological distinctions between the
objects of mental activity. Against Cartesian
skepticism and idealism he advanced the notion of
“animal faith” as the basis of the life of reason.

Religion he viewed as an imaginative creation of real
value but without absolute significance. Although he
continued to value imaginative and rational
consciousness he warned against the mind’s tendency to
confer substantial reality and causal efficacy on its
own creations. His personal withdrawal from active
life was paralleled in his philosophy by a decided
moral detachment. The whole of Santayana’s philosophic
writing displays a characteristic richness of style
.... His only novel, The Last Puritan (1935), had
great popular success....

http://www.bartleby.com/65/sn/Sntyan.html

"susceptible to tradition"

Eliot, T.S.  "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
   The Sacred Wood.  London: Methuen, 1920.

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/eliot.html

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/tradition.htm

"Midwestern hauteur"

??--help me out on this one, Tim ...

torero

Main Entry: to·re·ro 
Pronunciation: t&-'rer-(")O
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ros
Etymology: Spanish, from Latin taurarius bullfighter,
from Latin taurus bull
: a matador or a member of the attending cuadrilla

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=torero

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