In other trollage. I don't think I've re-read Goodbye Columbus since . . . Oh, I'd guess 1964? As I said, my moldy old copy is lost somewhere in the book boxes. All of those things in the story were directly taken from my memory. It's rather odd that the only person's name I can remember is his girlfriends'. I do recall thinking the idea of her brother hanging his jockstrap on, if I recall, the shower handle was crude but it didn't shock me. No one in my family would have ever done such a thing. As I recall the narrator (whose name I don't remember at all) thought it was crude. Remember, at the time the Broadcasters' Code and The Code were in full force. I think, generally, the product of Hollywood and TV was better for that. But they didn't have to be that much better to be better.
I tried some Tom Lehrer from that era last night, I think some of Tom Paxton holds up better. Things don't get older faster than topical material. It's funny how The Masochism Tango that seemed so funny then as an exercise in make believe looks a lot less funny when you see the promotion of that for real online. Or, maybe, it's still a hoot when you belong to the straight, white male class that expects to be manning the whip and blade. Online porn ruined Tom Lehrer's sex humor for me.
And, yes, I added that bit to get the expected Pavlovian response. They're so predictable in their conventional outrages.
Update: Dopey, I've seen the gay BDSM stuff, almost inevitably when that is presented it presents gay sex in terms that assign the sadistic role to someone clearly modeled on the rough trade, macho, jock, uniformed, etc. STRAIGHT male role as found in straight porn and, really, all through popular and not so popular straight culture. And it has long been that way. Tom of Finland's putrid icons of fascism and gangsterism are saturated with it. Much of it is presented in the feminization of the victim of their control and violence. It's also one of the foremost venues of race, ethnic and class elements of power, subjugation, domination, use and destruction into it. I don't think I ever encountered overt white-supremacy or neo-Nazism on a gay site which wasn't as I was researching violent gay porn which mimicked that gender division. And age-size difference plays a role in all of this too. It's no secret among gay men that a lot of "models assumed to be 18" is actually a ruse to introduce either real or simulated child rape into it. But, then, you're the guy who excused Gore Vidal's child rape on the basis of him being a "great artist" someone pointed out to me that even at Duncan's domain of enforced consensus some gave you push back over the idea that that makes it OK to rape children.
Update 2: I will suspend my resolution to never again post any of Stupy's stuff but he's denying that he defended Vidal from my point that he was, not only by report, not only by the record of his travel, but on the evidence his own admission a pedophile rapist. He was a crappy writer for other, though not unrelated reasons, as even his own official biographer noted, he's little read, today.
I have, actually documented what Stupy said as well as the response of Duncan's dolts who gave him some mild push-back as they proved that, as typical with the Rump of the commenting community responsible adults fled from years ago, they didn't bother to read what he claimed to have been commenting on. I wrote a post containing that link at the time entitled,
Vague memories of "Goodbye, Columbus." Never understood the interest. True, like Updike, it was about a particular sliver of life in the Northeast, and I was living in East Texas. For various reasons I always preferred Cheever. Finally saw some value in Updike. Never got Roth, though, or Bellow. Or Mailer, either.
ReplyDeleteStill don't. Live Joe Lansdale, though. Probably because he grew up in East Texas.
Wadreyagonnado, amirite?
Watching those giant reputations of writers of my youth almost immediately fall off a cliff with their deaths was interesting. Part of it is the general decline in reading, part of it was certainly their being over-rated to start with. I wonder how much of those reputations were a product of the insider politics of the publishing-industry and criticism racket with a big part of it also being wrapped up in the academic promotional racket. It's a very, very rare writer who writes more than, at most, four great novels with the best of them maybe a couple of good ones after those. And four might be the number for only the greatest.
DeleteI admit that piece was written mostly to piss off a couple of the atheist-TV trained minds who troll me. It's funny how Simps gets all in a lather when I diss the "great writers" he read about in some magazine or heard interviewed or mentioned by Dick Cavett in the distant past but who I'd bet my bottom dollar he never read just as he never reads anything. And he's hardly alone in that. I think for him there's a huge component of chauvinism involved as I believe there generally is in the critical racket. In music, which I'm most familiar with, the critical racket is, perhaps somewhat less driven by the regional and ethnic chauvinisms that govern the literary one but they are there. And political. I think it's possible that the awful writing of Gore Vidal got by on his being considered one of the members of a rather cynical, amoral guys club, though I think he got buy in a lot of it on his membership of that club he always claimed he was trying to get out of as he accused Truman Capote of desperately trying to get into. Snobbery is so much a part of it. But, as the case of Vidal's legacy and that of so many others praised in the New Yorker, the NYT and by critics who wished they could get jobs at such outlets, sic transit gloria mundi. I would suspect more people read Niebuhr and Heschel than read Saul Bellows without being assigned to read them. And I would bet that ever fewer people are assigned to read Bellows. Certainly more people read The Bible.
Oh, I'll have to try Joe Lansdale on your recommendation. It's funny how many of those writers diminished or dismissed as "regional" are better than the ones who write exclusively about and for that tiniest of regions, NYC but who are never diminished as "regional" I think Mari Sandoz is one of the most underappreciated authors of her generation. In my state, I think Ruth Moore was a much better writer than a lot of the writers who got better treatment by the criticism-promotional racket. I don't think she was a great, great writer but she remains quite readable, to me, at least.
DeleteI have a memory of reading Lansdale as sci-fi, but I can't swear to it. "Bubba Go-Rep," though, us great fun, as is "Hap and Leonard," a Sundance Channel series I get on Netflix. He's hardly the East Texas Faulkner, but I enjoy him.
ReplyDeleteAs For the "great writers" of my youth, yeah, they all fell off a cliff rapidly. And were clearly "great" because they were in NYC or Chicago, not Texas or Oklahoma or anywhere below the Mason Dixon.
So it goes. As I say, Cheever still shines, and largely because of the baseline Xianity running through his stories. Something a critic pointed out to me, but it's definitely there.