Better a happy simpleton than a tortured intellectual

My Aunt Ronnie once said to me, “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?”

It took me by surprise. I may have inherited my father’s air of intellectual loftiness but I never thought of myself as a snob.

The years have disabused me of the notion I’m smart.

I still don’t know what existentialism is.

I know, “Israel is in the midst of an existential crisis,” but, though I’ve read and digested Sartre and Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, which might have helped, I still have no idea what existentialism as a philosophy is. I took Existentialism at Columbia and was asked to read Husserl, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. Hieroglyphics. Even if I weren’t stoned and had plowed through that impossibility of words, I would have got the F that stained my GPA for life.

Writer Bob Gitlin in his office, where he pretends he’s smart.

I never use “existentialism” in writing, except here, to explain I don’t know what it means. I think it means there’s no God, we make our own meanings slogging through the absurdity of life. But I’m not sure.

It doesn’t matter. I spend too much time up in my head anyway.

I blogged about Zadie Smith. I wonder if anybody read it. Oh, I know people are busy with family this time of year. But still. Too esoteric, too eggheady? People seem to read the ones where I talk about my working class life. Maybe I need to go back to work at Safeway to have material.

But maybe not. I drove the deli manager crazy with my “Should I do it this way, or that?” hair-splittings when he gave me jobs to do. He would respond, through gritted teeth, “Do it one way or the other way. Just do it.” Good thing I ran my ass off the way I did, got good at making sandwiches, and curtailed that habit or he might have fired me straightaway for driving him bonkers.

I had learned somewhat of a lesson about overthinking, which does not make you smarter but rather dulls the learning mechanism.

Several years ago, my white-collar life having collapsed, I worked a brief, unhappy stint at Dillard’s. The lady who ran the dock crew got rid of me for driving her nuts with all my questions. She devised a ruse, saying I’d missed part of the procedure for cleaning rest rooms, though that was the one thing there I did right. But she needed a liability-proof document whereby she could let me know she didn’t want me around. She prayed I’d quit so she didn’t have to fire me and confront the possibility of her bosses mad at her because of having to pay me unemployment. I did the right thing and put in my two weeks.

Someone that worked for her, who’d been forced into helping her grease the skids for me, told me my last day, “I’m sorry. I thought you would have worked out.” But I don’t blame that crew boss. She’d tried everything, including giving me the job of sending packages out on Federal Express, something easy. I drove her nuts making her repeat directions.

I guess I wasn’t into it. I had thought myself a luftmensch, someone who’d make a living with his intellect, like my dad. When I soured on my writing career I became a teacher. When I soured on my teaching career I became a grunt. A grunt suffering a plague of cogitation. I have a history of this. I still drive my wife nuts overthinking things.

There’s much to wonder or even worry about, I suppose. Like what am I going to do in “retirement”? What are my hobbies and interests? I’m not too handy. Not gonna be buying old cars and putting in engines.

But I do what I can.

Contented with each other: wife and dog. A lesson in life.

A drawing class at the community college might revive an interest in art that saw me through five years of high school classes.

I never waffled on this decision. When I ran into a snag with the registration, unable to get up onto their site, having to run home for my Social Security card, Barb thought I’d say fuck it and give up. Nope. Class starts January.

An adventure. That’s what my retirement needs.

And, yes, I’m still blogging.

Nobody read about Zadie Smith, including another eye-rolling invocation of how I met Ken Kesey. Live with it. And let that poor man rest in peace, Bob. His fame won’t rub off on you. Seventy is a good age to learn this.

But that’s no reason to stop writing. You have to have the guts to put yourself out there and fail. You have to risk sucking.

My sister Lisa once licked one of my many wounds over the phone. I guess I was getting all angsty. Memorably, she told me, “Life is for learning.” I was agonizing about some stupid, shameful thing I’d done that people knew about. I dragged it around long after everybody else might have forgotten.

It all seems to be drifting away, the ego-driven mania for worrying. Maybe some of the self-involvement resulted from not having kids. I suppose caring for a wife and a dog redeem me somewhat.

OK, so the latest post was a little jumbled. So sue me. I contemplated cutting off my nose to spite my face, and not blogging anymore. I’ll show them. But that in itself were vanity, n’est-ce pas? I’ll just try again and try to do better, work more honestly, be simpler.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Scout and our neighbor’s dog Zeva sure know how to have fun.

The novel has a heart beat

Zadie Smith is remarkable, if for no other reason than her first name is how I used to address my Yiddische grandfather.

I remember but hazily her breakthrough, White Teeth. Not the plot, but the splashy canvas of different worlds living within one world. Multicultural London, supposedly so prim and straitlaced, in actuality bristling with truly crazy street people, people who are mad on a “Shakespearean” level. I have read her essays; they are delightful. And, driving to Cleveland from Arizona, listened to NW, a novel about northwest London, where Zadie, who grew up there, still lives. I remember those perfect staged accents enacting the testy dance of a middleclass liberal and a crackhead, an exchange that could have been set in the U.S., with its own idiom. That’s Smith. She translates. She straddles both countries. And delights in juxtaposed folkways.

Well worth reading. The one on the right has been chewed by dog.

I gave White Teeth to a gifted student in the “at-risk” high school where I tried to hold my ground as an ambassador of literature. One positive memory of Yavapai County High School was Emily’s nose stuck in that fat paperback. I tailored syllabi to students, which didn’t always work, but did with her. Nobody else among those miscreants and ne’er-do-wells could dig this book. I let Emily get credit for it by crafting an essay about it. It displayed an appreciation that probably transcended my own. After all, she and Ms. Smith, a sensation at 26, were much closer in age, thus shared values and experiences. It did my heart good to witness this trans-Atlantic appreciation.

I just finished two more Zadie Smith books and they’ve revived my belief in fiction as a life form.

The first was her latest, her first historical novel. The Fraud is based on a 19^th century trial in which a clear impostor claimed to be heir of a fortune, and was supported in that effort by a likable, dignified Negro former slave whose loyalty is never quite explained. Nor does any judgment issue, any wagging authorial finger. Smith writes largely in the pont of view of a starchy but hip Scottish housekeeper, who misses nothing, not even the mediocrity of the writer whose house she keeps, a real-life guy forced to play Solieri to Dickens’s Mozart. We can draw our own conclusions about the trial; telegraphing her feelings is not Smith’s agenda. She’s up to something more magical as she conjures the tempest of public life and makes us see ourselves. The Tichborne Trial, pitting working class against the toffs, recalls today’s lessons about echo chambers of support fed by sinister information silos. It seems she’s saying we didn’t need the internet and Trump to have experienced the disease.

I tend to consult reviews to see whether my own take coincides with theirs. One rave reviewer said her personal Smith favorite was another book, On Beauty, which had come out a few years after White Teeth. I had a copy lying around it which it turned out I’d never read. I opened it and was sucked down a rabbit hole of wry observation. It’s a story with an ambitiously large cast of characters, whose quirks and conflicts are treated with the same tingle of ultimate aloofness as pervades The Fraud. On Beauty made me feel nourished. So many novels make you feel like they’re not worth the time, the suspension of disbelief.

“The novel has lost its juice,” said Ken Kesey, decades after he’d got done competing for any brass rings in that world. I met him on his visit to Cleveland in 1997 for one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s flops, the 30-year celebration of the 1967 Summer of Love. The program got no corporate backing. Few came on that chilly March day to the lakefront. Poor Donovan stood like a circus attraction in the middle of the plaza chill, wondering why he’d said yes to this fucking thing. I was there to see Kesey, a lion of literature. Thus inspired, I may have betrayed a winning earnestness. The hero of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test took me in. If ever there was a guy who gave drugs a bad name, it was me. Here I was, sitting on top of the bus with Ken Kesey.

Why had he stopped at two great books? He could, as Robert Stone would say upon his death a few years later, have been “a writer for our times.” Was there credence to his disinterest in writing novels? At my incessant promptings relating to writing (no, not to LSD or the hippies), he sounded tired. He told me Roth and Updike were insignificant. He didn’t feel like he wasn’t missing much. After writing my little piece for FreeTimes, I read the above quote about the novel’s lost importance. Kesey also said that if Shakespeare were alive today he wouldn’t be writing novels but TV scripts. Hard to argue with the cultural impact of the likes of Vince Gilligan and David Chase.

But I felt as I finished On Beauty, a big, funny novel about England and America, about black and white, about classic education and hip-hop, about sex and love, about noble aims and tawdry politics, that Kesey may have blown “Taps” too early. Some talents, still called to the form, won’t let it die. Let’s even extrapolate. Long after Mick and Keith hang it up, Mick to write the inevitable salacious memoir, maybe rock ‘n’ roll won’t die either.

If something is good, people will always want it. Right?

I’m not sure we could even interest Scout in Old Yeller, though she did attempt to consume the front cover of a Zadie Smith novel.