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

[Ian Livingston]

"Whiskey don't make liars, it just makes fools
So I didn't mean to say it, but I meant what I said" --James McMurtry


On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 7:19 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
>
>
>
>>
>


-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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