WHO CARES

My malaise continues. With Bush’s victory, I’ve sunk into complete disinterest with the daily paper. I’m going nearly dormant until four years from now when I’ll reawaken. I really doubt my own words because I’m sure the things Bush is going to try during the next four years will alarm me to no end. But, for now, I’ve got a relative peace of mind.


PARTY FIRE UP

I did notice that the parties at the conventions responded differently. The Republicans seemed more fired up than us Democrats. Maybe it was just me, and I wasn’t there; I was only observing through the medium of TV. When I was young and naive, I got fired up too. Nowadays you couldn’t fire me up with dynamite under my butt. Not that I voted any differently; I was just beyond being inspired. Was it really Kerry’s failure to fire me up? I don’t think so.

I’m just too old to let speeches turn me on. Which, I think, does show that the Republicans had a lot more first time voters and new people involved in the process than the Democrats. They’d be more likely to show naive partisanship at the empty words of politicians. In speechmaking, it’s great to promise more than can be delivered. And people all fired up with youthful enthusiasm are bound to be grabbing at any opportunity to roar. I was fired up too when I was young and new to the process. The tendency for enthusiasm to wear thin after a few decades of effort may be one of the chief reasons that the fortunes of political parties rise and fall with the decades.


SPEAKING OF YOUTH

Sophomore year or junior year, early Sixties, at the University of Dayton, I was taking a course in the novel from Larry Ruff, a very sophisticated and knowledgeable professor. I recall him saying that literature was dead and dying and that by this current century, the 21st, readers of serious literature would be considered a quaint lot, antiquarians. I do think we’re approaching that state now. I doubt that the average American knows the work of many serious contemporary novelists. I know I don’t. I’m reading in the sciences now as any reader of this Blog would know. I may even have mentioned this before in an earlier post.

Anyhow, just thought I’d also enter Alvin Kernan’s comment on this very issue while I’m at it:

“The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal perfection of the literary text, and the belief that literature was a central pillar of culture—these foundations of literature were all crumbling.” (IN PLATO’S CAVE, p. 224)

And speaking of his own favorite undergraduate course in Shakespeare which for years had sustained him, Kernan came to say, “As I tried to talk about... Shakespeare... a terrible hopelessness would come over me, making it almost impossible to go on as I realized that the students were not in the slightest interested.” (p. 276)

I feel a lot better now, myself, now that I’ve given up on literature and the high falutin’ concept that to know literature was to be one of the cognoscenti of history.
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“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.” —James Joyce