The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[Markekohut]

Lionel Trilling famously believed that those, all?,  writers were only the geniuses we know when they were writing non-drunk........but someone else once said many writers feel so deep a---and feeling contains pain ( as well as joy) but maybe more pain in understanding our dark sides....

And, perhaps we have all known drunks who tap their anger and get quite verbal when drinking.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 29, 2012, at 10:19 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

> On 9/29/2012 7:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> The big three of the 30s and 40s, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were
>>> all heavy alcohol users.  Was this mainly to fight inner demons, or was it
>>> integral to their creative powers?  Their writing was so different. What
>>> were the common elements? Where was the "family resemblance"?
>>> (Wittgenstein)
>> Looking back, from Wittgenstein, we might say that the idea, a family
>> resemblance, is one that, if only when we look back, peep in the
>> public record, open the old photo albums, watch those old home movies,
>>  generates memories and defeated desires, so Nihilism...
>> 
>> and, like the phrase about family resemblance, American Nihilism,
>> while not fathered by Nietzsche, looks a lot like the mustached
>> European madman.
>> 
>> We might also photoshop into the portrait, Mr Eliot, who is, after
>> all, as much a part of this American generation of nihilists as the
>> others, though he does find a dead tradition to bury his individual
>> talents in.
>> 
>> And there are lotz of others, though not as famous as these members of
>> the family.
>> 
>> But what kind of nihilism? There are so many in American fiction.
>> 
>> And, we might say that  Pynchon, with his early works, V., and Lot49,
>> is much in the family; no conclusion or final illumination, no Joycean
>> epiphany. The heart is darkness, the bomb is pushed from its precipice
>> by the boys, the island burns, the beasty is in us and we are
>> metaphysically and aesthetically lost; sometimes in the pun house,
>> sometimes in the labyrinth, sometimes in the mundane stranger's
>> murdering meaninglessness under the indifferent sun , sometimes in the
>> grip of Them.
>> 
>> Does Booze make this nihilism more intense, release the aesthetic from
>> the metaphysical sickness unto death? Camus talked of suicide and
>> rolling a stone; perhaps this is what the booze soaked nihilism
>> afforded?
> 
> I kind of think it might.  For example Proust and Joyce weren't big drinkers, and both  In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses ended quite affirmatively.
> 
> I wonder if Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) and Samuel Richardson (Clarissa) might not have taken a drop or two to get them into a darker view of things.  They were quite the exceptions to their respective eras.
> 
> On a personal note I've observed that watching the  PBS nightly news in a semi alcoholic haze makes the very serious discussions  appear slightly  absurd.
> 
> P
> 
> 
>> 
>