Thinking about school
Being in school again has me reflecting on my previous bouts with academia. They were truly bouts; they felt at the time like moments characterized by opposition. Myself, poised against boring classwork; the expectations of my dad; my own fears of not fitting in; ennui stemming from a lack of knowledge of what I wanted to become and a lack of interest in finding out.
My current experience with school is… maybe not diametrically opposed to those things, but it does seem more fulfilling. I have a sense of purpose and focus that eluded me during the Years of Fucking Around. To be fair, I did experience these same feelings when I was taking the classes that led up to my math degree from UCI… you know, the one that I don’t really use. But to juxtapose that experience with those of high school or UC Riverside, where I just did the bare minimum in order to exist without actively failing out, shows how far I’ve come in being able to do more with educational facilities than merely occupy space within them.
Part of me wonders what I’d be like if I’d been the kind of person in high school (or earlier) to really engage with and make use of all the books and coursework and lessons I was supposed to be studying. Apropos of nothing, I thought of “The Swimmer” by John Cheever. I believe it was assigned to me junior year of high school. I did not read a single word of it–it seemed very far removed from what I was interested in (sci-fi, gloomy music). Now I could wish that the sum total of my responsibilities would be to read a short story and analyze it.
I did end up reading “The Swimmer” after writing the bulk of this post, because it felt weird to put effort into complaining about not having read something when it’s so easily available now. It is a very good story: spooky in an unexpected way, and insightful into the ways we hide within our own lives. Made me want to read more Cheever–or maybe some Rabbit Angstrom stuff?
But of course, there were a million things–in high school and afterward–that fall in the double-shaded Venn diagram region of “things I was not interested in” and “things that would be worth knowing about.” Why be upset about a particular one of those things, or fixate upon it? Just as I wasn’t the sort of person to get really into analyzing my English class assignments, then earn straight As so that I could do the same at some tiny liberal arts college, first as a student and then a professor, for the rest of my days; I also missed out on becoming a long-haul truck driver, or a bank robber, or a grindset type. The real distinction here is that the latter occupations are ones which I wouldn’t currently want to be doing.
Sometimes I think of missed opportunities, of chances given away for lack of convenience, and I almost find myself breathless at how much space all this nothingness can take up in a person. It’s like becoming aware of the vast void at the edges of your field of vision, and of the small area you can actually see, and of its paucity compared to everything behind you or even just off to the sides a bit.
Two old music trends I do not love
- 1980s LA punk bands using the n word and other slurs
- Post-punk bands (or any bands, really) including doo-wop songs on their LPs
Sunset Boulevard
Watched this today while watching the kid. I enjoyed it a lot. Sunset Boulevard had many interesting points to it:
- Gloria Swanson was great as Norma Desmond. I loved how the prop designers used her old photos and films as set decor.
- The movie is surprisingly dark and weird. Like how Joe Gillis calls Norma’s old acting peers “the waxworks.” Or how she buries her pet chimp in the backyard at midnight with the help of her butler. When Norma is doing her old routine for Joe (especially the Chaplin bit), it has such an odd vibe… like it’s pathetic, but also endearing.
- The surreality of the finale of Sunset Boulevard is really something. Something felt very meta about seeing the Paramount news division cameras rolling up to presumably shoot newsreel footage of the murder scene. And when the butler directs Norma’s descent down the stairs, and the news photographers and cops all freeze… chills.
- I did not realize that Cecil DeMille was a trained actor before he was in movies. His cameo was surprisingly well-done. Loved seeing Buster Keaton as well.
I feel like in general I have never given old movies enough credit. But Sunset Boulevard was highly entertaining, and I’d recommend watching it.
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun / But it’s sinking
Now more than ever I feel the lack of time in my life to do things. Recreate, read, watch movies, hang out with friends… even actual critical things I need to do, like study, maintain the home, or take care of and be with family. This must be what it’s like to be an over-achiever, or some sort of high-powered executive who needs a personal assistant to schedule their day. I find myself retreating to my old refuge: endless snacking. Not great for my health. Really feeling some “quiet desperation” that I hope I can overcome soon.
The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace, Paul Thomas Chamberlin
Finishing this book really solidified for me the impunity of the leadership of military and government regimes (I mentioned this yesterday). Whether it was Giap or Khomeini sending massed human wave attacks at fortified positions, Rhee or Saddam Hussein executing scores of political rivals, or Begin and Sharon or Nixon ordering invasions or bombing raids that were guaranteed to kill innocent civilians, the key thing one notes is that all of these people escaped accountability for their actions. (Saddam was eventually executed and to some extent it was for his crimes, but 15+ years of running around after the massacres of Kurds and others is not enough punishment, in my opinion.)
I think I’m going to move onto other topics soon enough. All of this war stuff is really getting me down. School starts next week though, and I’m really going to have to keep my head down in my books in order to get the straight As I’m aiming for. So maybe books will have to wait. Or maybe I’ll just break up my day with short stories? Maybe I’ll start some Raymond Chandler, people really like him and the spines of his novels seem tiny.
Meditating on grim things
Lately I’ve found myself reading and viewing a lot of material on conflict in the 20th century, which necessarily involves reading and viewing a lot of material on the immiseration of various human beings in the course thereof. Reading The Cold War’s Killing Fields, (which I’ll post more about later) led me down the rabbit hole of conflicts both famous (the Vietnam War, the Korean War) and little-known in the US (Operation Searchlight, the mid-1960s massacres of Indonesian communists and those affiliated with them).
Besides adding a huge list of books to my “to-read” pile, I also found a ton of interesting videos on YouTube. Besides some analyses of particular battles (I saw a really good one about the Battle of Ia Drang,) I’ve been watching archival and documentary footage. It’s really something, watching washed-out, grainy footage of civilians piecing through piles of shattered buildings, weeping over the bodies of their loved ones. You begin to realize how much of your life was assembled around you in its particular configuration by the whims of fate. I could have been a Bengali student executed by roving Pakistani soldiers in the opening maneuvers of Operation Searchlight, or a protester shot by police at the outset of the Iranian Revolution. Or I could have been a soldier or a cop myself. Or even a nameless farmer or craftsman or mother or father or child, immolated or gassed or annihilated by weaponry.
Two interesting documentaries I watched parts of were The Laughing Man and Pilots in Pajamas. The first is an interview with an ex-Wehrmacht soldier who had enlisted as a mercenary in Africa in the 1960s. He is quite ebullient about having committed the most grotesque crimes on the native African population. The other is a series of interviews with American pilots (the documentary refers to them as “air pirates”) who were shot down while bombing North Vietnam. What struck me about these men, again, was how not much separated me from them. These are guys ranging from their mid-20s to early 40s, most married with children, most with college degrees. They enlisted for various reasons, and they wound up attacking the civilian population of North Vietnam, and they were shot down and likely tortured and paraded in front of East German cameras for propaganda purposes, and then eventually some of them went home. Watching this last one in particular really showed me that anyone could rationalize themselves into committing acts of horror against their fellow man. How many children had these men blown to pieces in the course of their bombing runs? (One of the pilots had flown over 100 raids combined over North and South Vietnam.) You begin to see why the idea of Christ is so powerful. To think of one person who takes all of humanity’s sins upon their shoulders… but really it should be humanity’s suffering that they take on instead. It’s tough to think of the way in which humanity shatters its own lives, often without even realizing it or thinking about it that much.
Part of me wants to move onto lighter subject matter, but it almost seems like a betrayal of the stories of those who have suffered and died. I know that me gravitating on the immiseration and death of all these people doesn’t really do anything. But to live life blithely, without a care for what happened before I was born just because it’s not proximate to me: is that conscionable either?