Sunday Afternoon Potpourri: Cresting the First Wave

… of Gradeapalooza, that is. I finished papers from my freshpeeps and upperclass this weekend. I have one more batch of papers coming on Wednesday, and then finals next week, which means that I can have a couple of days in the meantime to bayonet the wounded. In the meantime. . .

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The Spawn and her Intended (upgraded from Squeeze, but still including the title) did something last night that I haven’t done in just over forty years: they attended a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Their local repertory cinema had a showing last night, with most of the appurtenances, including the live actors performing in parallel to the film, that I remember from my high school days. As I told the Spawn, I haven’t seen the movie since I was old enough to see the movie, but in my high school years, it was a pretty regular part of my summer Saturday nights in Nashville (I spent chunks of every teenaged summer staying at my grandparents), and occasionally in Cincinnati. I know I saw it more than a dozen times, thanks to the combination of a friend’s fake ID and my own unusual size. I certainly saw it enough times to have the audience responses pretty well ingrained — I remember many of them to this day.

The last time I remember going to a screening was the weekend that I graduated from high school. Various fellow seniors and I went into Cincinnati — of that lot (including my then-girlfriend), I was the only one who had seen it before. There was a contingent of other oddballs and misfits from Boone County (I was sort of the intersection of the two sets) who were regulars and saw it more than I did — Hi, Tony! — but as I said, this night I was the veteran of my group. In fact, I was an ad hoc draftee into the live performers that night, playing the bit part of Ralph Hapschatt.

When I moved to Lexington for my undergrad, I’m sure there were occasional screenings at the local rep theater, but I didn’t have much money in those years, and so my midnight moviegoing was primarily limited to films like Dawn of the Dead and Eraserhead. But as I said, I still remember a remarkable amount of the components of the Rocky Horror experience, and I’m pleased that the Spawn has had the experience as well. “A toast. . . to absent friends.”

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On a much more serious note, I’ve taken a professional interest in the current campus unrest. Readers won’t be surprised to know that I’m supportive of a two-state solution, even though I have no hope that it will be achieved; after all, it takes all parties to make a peace. You can mourn the loss of innocent lives while acknowledging that that’s how wars work. If you aren’t willing to accept that, then don’t start a war. As one of Mr. Block’s characters has noticed, turning to violence is like initiating a romantic interlude with a gorilla. It doesn’t end when you decide it’s over — it ends when the gorilla decides it’s over.

It hasn’t been an issue here in Mondoville. A reason for that, I think, has to do with a conversation I had with my dad when I was a teenager. I had been reading about the 1960s, and about the campus and other protests of the era. My dad said, “While all that was going on, most people were just trying to live their lives. Your mom and I didn’t have time to do things like that — we were too busy raising you and making a living.” Likewise, our students aren’t generally the sort that you’ll find at elite schools. They’re trying to make lives for themselves — taking classes, working outside jobs, and taking care of family members. As was said of Atlanta in years past, Mondoville is “too busy to hate.”

But an aspect that particularly fills me with disdain when I look at the goings-on elsewhere is the shock and outrage expressed by “protesters” who face sanctions for their performances. I don’t think I need to prove my free-speech cred to anyone at this point, but I’m astonished by what appears to be a serious misunderstanding of civil disobedience. Breaking the law/rules/policies/outlines of common decency is a legitimate, and sometimes perhaps a necessary act. But pretending that some self-adjudged nobility of purpose obviates consequence is just foolish. Indeed, the moral force of such activity is in the idea that the disobedient individual is willing to suffer for the cause. “This expression of my belief warrants my imprisonment, dubious treatment, or other manifestation of Coventry.” Without that fear (or at least acceptance) of consequence, then the action is empty theater or a tantrum.

If you really think that what you’re doing is the right thing, then go ahead and risk something for it. The Freedom Riders and the folks who marched in the civil rights movement knew they would be facing dogs and fire hoses, that they would be spat upon and hated, and that there would be beatings and a genuine risk of death. As I noted recently, Salman Rushdie has come closer to death than anyone should, but he continues to speak, and live, and face risk — because he believes in his purpose. If you believe you’re doing the right thing, then accept that it might cost you the privilege of attending an elite university, and count it as cheap. Otherwise, you’re simply LARPing. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing enough to suffer for it, then quit before it gets to that point, and recognize that you’re surrendering because it isn’t worth what you’re risking. As I tell my students, “Take what you want and pay for it.” What we’re seeing here is people who think they should get it for free. And that’s contemptible.

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Last night I started reading the collection of Thomas Hardy shorts that I picked up last week. I’ll admit that I haven’t read Hardy’s fiction since. . . well, since I was going to Rocky Horror screenings. Jude the Obscure was one of the texts in my 12th-grade Brit Lit class, and I thought at the time that it was an over-the-top exercise in gratuitous misery. Even now, I have the same opinion of Little Father Time that Wilde had of Little Nell: Only someone with a heart of stone can read that without laughing. (Maybe it’s the sentimentality of “Little” in the names.)

However, I’ve always been keen on Hardy’s poems, with their combination of irony and grim fortitude, and when I happened across Life’s Little Ironies at the bookstore last week, I figured I’d give the fiction another shot. And it turns out, I like it. Make no mistake — none of the stories I’ve read thus far are the feel-good stories of the year. We’re definitely talking liver-flavored toothpaste here. In fact, what we have is, I think, a kind of social naturalism. Instead of a Jack London character’s battle with the Yukon wilderness, or Stephen Crane’s universe with no sense of obligation, our characters are snuffed out by the class system, or notions of respectability, or their own mistakes.

My colleague David Rachels has argued that what we think of as noir can be traced to books like McTeague and An American Tragedy. But these stories of Hardy’s pre-date both of these, and the stories they tell are as psychologically brutal as Jim Thompson, if more Latinate in diction. (In fact, insofar as Gay Brewer‘s description of Thompson as a satirist applies, I can see the same in these stories.) Characters aspire, try to achieve their dreams, and are squashed like bugs, either by their own flaws or more darkly, just through bad luck (as Hardy explores in one of his poems.) Maybe I should give Hardy’s novels another chance. But probably not until the semester is done.

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I’ll go ahead and cap things for the time being — and since it’s my blog, why not close it with a plug for a friend, even if only of the electronic variety?

Marco Rossi is originally from Glasgow, although now he’s based in Dorset. I got acquainted with him through his reviews of psych and prog rock in one of my favorite music magazines. Since then, we’ve built a bit of an e-correspondence, and he’s served as an electronic “guest lecturer” with me when I was guest lecturing a class on psychedelic rock in the music department. But Marco is also a musician himself, with a run as lead guitarist in the Kevin McDermott Orchestra back during my first trip through grad school.

Marco just completed a solo album, called Since Returning from the Moon, which is available digitally at the usual locations, and will be out on CD on Friday, 10 May. He writes about the album here, noting that a friend describes it as “Angry Prefab Sprout”, but I hear it as a less jittery XTC. “Lightweight” is his favorite of the lot, and I thought I’d share it with you.

See you soon!