SLPAD 9 - wandering scholars

[Ian Livingston]

I just think there may have been a lot more at work in American society
than a resurgence in forgotten literature and an emergence of a more
self-critical pose in American thought. Postwar America had a lot to
process. There were those who had to reconcile their moral identity with
the fact that they had sided outspokenly with Hitler until Pearl Harbor and
the carnage of the Pacific war shocked their confidence in their imagined
superiority. Then there were all those soldiers who came home "shell
shocked" with trauma symptoms including depression, anxiety, nightmares,
flashbacks, intrusions, etc. There were the influxes of ideas from distant
places, and the discovery that distant places were much less distant, given
the advances in telephony, air travel, postal services, etc. "And so on,"
as Vonnegut always says.

Everything about life changed radically with the world wars. So thinking
people were disaffected? Yeah, shocking. It seems to me there was plenty of
evidence that intellectual culture had failed to manage society's passions.
The Beat movement devolved to the beatnik movement. The beatniks cut the
turf for the hippies and the pervasive drug addled cult of our contemporary
America.

Somewhere in there a lot of us hit the road. I didn't wait for the
opportunity to drop out of college. Eleven years in school was too much for
me and I was 5 years or so into my travels and self-education before I
encountered Kerouac and the Beats, and another ten or twelve years from
dropping out of college a few years after finding one I could get into.
Most of the folks I met out on the road were looking for work, some
opportunity to call something home. They weren't at home in America, but
they swore by the myth of it. Freedom in the Kristofersonian mode. All
these developments were handed down through the descent of European
idealism into unstable homes, domestic violence, child abuse of every sort:
the foundations of modernism and postmodernism. Any cynic's paradise. But I
did make it back to college and got a couple of degrees that provide the
foundation for a small contribution toward guiding a few lost souls toward
something like life in the real lane.

Why did people "tune in, turn on, and drop out"? Because awareness sucked.
School was a way to earn an easier living, without the traumas of
industrial life, and a lot of folks just couldn't afford to not be working.
And a lot of those folks followed Twain's advice to not let school
interfere with their education.

I suppose I should read Waddell. Sounds like she was studying the early
insidiots, from whom my sort of thinking and living descended. Anyway, I
like Medieval lit. Read a lot of them there mystics and so on.


On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 2:07 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> More narcissism: Why do I have this book on my shelf and have STILL not
> read it?
> a) because I think TRP gave me enough since
> b) I have little interest in the middle ages
> e) going on the road.....
> f) thinking about when I used to hitchhike between Toronto and Pittsburgh.
>
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 4:29 AM Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > “A collateral effect, for me anyway, was that of Helen Waddell’s The
> > Wandering Scholars, reprinted in the early ’50’s, an account of the young
> > poets of the Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers and
> took
> > to the roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to be
> > found outside their academic walls.”
> >
> > Helen Waddell was an Irish poet, playwright, & translator who
> accompanied a
> > volume of translations of medieval Latin lyric poetry with another book
> > containing an account of its wandering scholarly authors, the “goliards.”
> >
> >
> > The full paragraph devoted to the wandering scholars & their spiritual
> > heirs in the 1950s & ‘60s seems to be the capstone of Pynchon’s list of
> >
> > “alternative lowlife data that kept filtering insidiously* through the
> ivy”
> > & drawing intelligent & creative young people away from academia.
> >
> > A strange attractor, if you will?
> >
> > “Some of us couldn’t resist the temptation to go out and see what was
> > happening. Enough of us then came back inside with firsthand news to
> > encourage
> > others to try it too—a preview of the mass college dropouts of the
> ’60’s.”
> >
> >
> > He then turns his attention to the Beats.
> >
> >
> > * “insidiously” - is this used facetiously, or is there a touch of regret
> > for the costs of such an exodus from the Groves of Academe? (Hitchhikers
> > getting beaten up, degrees abandoned with concomitant reduction of
> lifetime
> > earning potential, drug abuse, so forth)
> >
> > https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insidious
> >
> > Insidious comes from a Latin word for “ambush” (insidiae), which is
> > fitting, as this word often carries the meanings “deceitful,” “stealthy,”
> > or “harmful in an imperceptible fashion.” The first two meanings may be
> > applied to people or things (“an insidious enemy,” “an insidious plot”),
> > while the last is usually applied to things (“insidious problems,”
> > “insidious sexism”), in particular to the gradual progress of a disease
> > (“an insidious malignancy”).
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>