The Reporter - Part 3: May 19, 1955

X

Several weeks have gone by the boards since my last post concerning the collection of vintage issues of The Reporter that came into my possession was presented here. And several years—nearly six—elapsed between that first issue of The Reporter in the collection and the one now coming to bat. There are no issues to fill the gap between 8/30/49 and the issue under discussion today, dated May 19, 1955. As we have no evidentiary explanation for this hiatus, we will attempt neither speculation on its causes, nor interpretations of its significance. What we can say, since we have it in writing, is that the common thread running through the collection, columnist Sidney Alexander, is no longer an American ex-pat wandering the streets of Florence, Italy interviewing alienated minority former G.I.’s. At this juncture, we learn, he is “teaching in the English Department at Fairleigh Dickinson College. So, out of Tuscany, into New Jersey: we can only hope that there was some kind of half-way house available along the way to help Prof. Alexander acclimate to the culture shock.

Gone from this issue is the urgency of the domestic Red Scare. Gone, too, is the interest we saw in 1949 in the Race Issue. There are no cartoons in this 1955 edition. Still, it is to be hoped that there was sufficient truth proclaimed in the pages of an edition 55 years old this month that some of it at least will have proven to be prophetic. I find that this is the case.

X

While Alexander was still writing very much in the wake of WWII in 1949, by 1955 we see him writing a standard book review of a critical biography of Walt Whitman. Along the way, Alexander has this to say:

The American psyche…is woven of these two extremes—the tartly asserted individual and the myth of the Common Man. We’re always shuttling between saving the world for democracy and scowling behind our ocean fronts, those overgrown Walden Ponds.

And a bit further on:

In our jittery age we shy away from figures like Whitman. We just can’t grasp that amoebic all-inclusiveness of his. His impulse to be a universe swallower strikes us as a circus trick; we marvel but we have no desire to do it ourselves. We want sharp boundaries, not inner suspensions; answers, not the coexistence of contradictions.

Well, Alexander doesn’t exactly predict the advent of the Age of Aquarius, LSD, and “In A Gadda Da Vida” there, does he? He concludes as follows:

More than ever we need the sound of Whitman’s voice. A great voice—a wind in the upper branches—not the whine of our poetlings and the ululation of our despair. Lesser writers snap and rot. But he continues to grow—a great live oak, ever utter for us joyous leaves.

“Lesser writers snap and rot.” Hmm. (Kerouac, perhaps? Kerouac, still at this point two years away from fame and avant-garde respectability; more than a decade from rusting out…?)

The focal point of this issue, coming as it does about ten years before this country had gotten itself seriously mired in a pointless and tragic war in southeast Asia, is a series of articles on “Red China.” The banner on the cover announces, Three Windows on Red China. These are: 1. Chou En-lai at the Asia-African Meeting; 2. Mao’s ‘Paradise’ as Seen from India; and 3. Are Religions the Opium of the People? The latter article concerns itself with the struggles of Buddhists (the “liberation” of Tibet comes into play there), Confucians, and Taoists to coexist with a Maoist regime. Strangely, the fate of Chinese Christians does not seem to be of interest here.

But, of interest to me is a mini-review in the “Editor-at-Large” column of the novel Something of Value by Robert Ruark. This is the fictionalized history of the Mau Mau insurgency in colonial Kenya. I read it as a high school student and was strongly affected by it. I recommend it still today.

In the end, I found the most prophetic item in this issue of The Reporter to be a snide little piece of doggerel composed by “Sec”—who I take to be the mag’s poet/humorist-in-residence:

Riviera Emperor

To destiny I will not bao,
xxxFor I would sooner dai
xxxThan leave my croupiers
xxxxxxhai and drai
And ngo to Vietnam nao.

Ha-ha-ha. Is this the attitude that forged the fate of my whole generation?

X

Quote du Jour: more Proust

X
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.
X XXX~ Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

If only.
X

Riffs: Blue, blue windows

X
A beautifully simple rendition of one of my all-time favorite tunes:
X

Quote du Jour: You're Having Me On!

X

And George Martin tells of an incident during the present series of recordings
when John wanted the saxophones to play a certain note. Martin told the
saxophonists what to play and John interrupted.
"Look," said John, "I'm playing G but you're asking them to play B flat."
"That's right," Martin told him. "If they play their B flat, it sounds the same
as your G"
"How's that?" asked a puzzled John Lennon. "Why doesn't it sound the same
if they play G?"
"Well," said Martin, "it's because the instruments are in different keys and
their B flat is the equivalent of your G."
"I don't know," said John, “sounds bloody silly to me."

~ Saturday Review, October 12, 1968
X

Reflections: Lost at the Last Link

X

Excerpted from a story by Yvor Winters:

“It was as if there were darkness evenly underlying the brightness of the air, underlying everything, as if I might slip suddenly into it at any instant, and as if I held myself where I was by an act of the will from moment to moment.”

I have been there -- in 1969 or 1970. It was as if a lens had clicked in place, or a skrim had suddenly been lifted, revealing in an eternal instant the authentic existence that underlay the world of illusion. The "real world" was seen to have possessed no more essential reality than a Disney cartoon of frolicking forest creatures. Existence was known as the ass-end of the Great Chain of Being: dead matter, imbued with that evil which is the utter absence of goodness. It was understood that once this horror had been realized there was no going back to the almost-happy dream, which was now known as a thin veneer covering an eternity of cold, dark, mineral death.

X

I think that I'm back there now.

X

Quote du Jour: Beatessence

X

Excerpted from Jack Kerouac’s short and rather late (he actually uses the word “beatnik” in it) novel, documenting the hopelessly unrequited love of the Kerouacian protagonist for the Mexican title junky (or junkette) Tristessa, the following quote captures the essence of “beat” sensibility across the spectrum of its nuances:

Because Tristessa needs my help but wont take it and I wont give—yet, supposing everybody in the world devoted himself to helping others all day long, because of a dream or a vision of the freedom of eternity, then wouldnt the world be a garden? A Garden of Arden, full of lovers and louts in clouds, young drinkers dreaming and boasting on clouds, gods—Still the god’s’d’a fought? Devote themselves to gods-don’t-fight and bang! Miss Goofball would ope her rosy lips and kiss in the World all day, and men would sleep—And there wouldnt be men or women, but just one sex, the original sex of the mind—But that day’s so close I could snap my finger and it would show, what does it care? … About this recent little event called the world.

Yeah. Let IT take up the Cross…

Rants: Take Me Out with the Frauds?

X

Any true fan of the game of baseball is a student of the game’s history. And being a student of the game’s history, he is ipso facto a collector, classifier, analyzer, and interpreter of statistics.

From the time I could read, I was poring over the backs of baseball cards, learning the stats. I was studying tables full of columns of numbers, the significance of which grew on me, and with me, as the years—and successive baseball seasons—rolled on.

I was also reading books for boys about the heroes and history of the Game—the Babe, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle—either borrowed from the public library, or received as gifts for Christmas and birthdays. I was an addict. I could tell you the name of the player holding the single-season or lifetime record for virtually any aspect of the game on which states were kept.

In addition to rooting for the home team (mine was the Detroit Tigers) to beat the hated Yankees and win the American League pennant (for these were pre-expansion, pre-ALCS days), one of the prime joys of each new season, and every single game, was the hope that this would be the year when some titan in spikes would break the Babe’s record, or pitch a perfect game, or fan 20 hitters in nine innings, or steal more bases in a season than Ty Cobb. And eventually, since God is good, somebody did; although I’m waiting yet for the man who will hit .400 in my lifetime.

But these days my enthusiasm for the America’s signature game has waned. It’s hard for me to get it up even to watch the Yankees—the team I adopted by default while living in the Bronx for more than a decade in the ‘70s and ‘80s—on television: the stats have been ruined; polluted and corrupted by steroids-fuelled and completely illegitimate numbers, achieved by frauds--by gigantic juicers with track-ravaged buttocks.

These sentiments are nothing new or original. Others have said all of this long before now. It’s just that I had hoped that I’d get over it—just as I got over the strike season. I really had hoped to get finally get back to my joy in the Game. But it hasn’t happened. Like a romance that’s died and fallen into an irretrievable past, it’s over.

That said, I want to go on record with the following. So far as I’m concerned, the single-season record for dingers is still held by this man:

And the record for career round-trippers belongs to Hammerin’ Hank:



Don’t even talk to me about asterisks and accommodations. I don’t want to hear it.

X